Adrian Green's Poems from The Watchers

Selected Poems from "The Watchers" by Adrian Green,

Sol Publications,
ISBN 0 907376 11 8

Sailing Barges Off Southend
Walking on the Estuary Hill
Terminals
Model
Mirror

SAILING BARGES OFF SOUTHEND

Drifting on a tide from long ago
They swing at anchor silently
Wreathed in early morning mist
Like ghosts grown mellow with antiquity.

With names like Gladys, Will and Edith May
Heroic legends motionless on ancient bows
They are waiting for the breeze, patiently
Submissive to the whims of air and ebb.

Later with windlass rattling as anchors are raised
Sails set at the stirring of wind over tide
They bear away a pageant of remembered trade,
A flock of stately seabirds through the lanes.

			© Adrian Green

(Previously published in "In Praise of  Essex", Egon Publishers Ltd, 1979)

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WALKING ON THE ESTUARY HILL

The curlew and the heron call,
the hissing mud and whispering wings
beat eery through the idle air
until the moonlit midnight silence falls
and then the tide flows softly
through the gut and sluice of estuary sands
and dark against the dreamlit sky
the trees arise from hedgerows,
and the hills
alive with monstrous shapes
are menacing with soundless fear,
and still below the blundering man,
the beery and uncertain head,
the stubbled fields hold secrets now
and silence fills the river bed.


			© Adrian Green

Previously published in "Poet's England - Essex", 
Brentham Press

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TERMINALS

	1.
A series of departures and arrivals remembered 
not the in-between sitting down 
and staring out of the window silences, 
the real attrition, 
grinding down of love 
between terminals, space 
filled with paperback thrillers
and auto magazines

the first touching
	- uncertainty -
smell of an unfamiliar body

then, too soon, like waking
in the damp aftermath of dream,
a sense of something not recoverable.

	2.
Outside the window:
a landscape webbed with cables.

	I wake between deaths 
	in anticipation 
	of another beginning.

Only at the terminals 
or point of damage 
are the nerves exposed, 
made visible -
a blue spark burning, 
molecular re-arrangement 
the senses remember.

	At each birth
	a new rhythm, at death -
	silence.

Between concussions
there is nothing to remember.

		© Adrian Green

(Previously published in Iron magazine)

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MODEL

You didn't think of posing for a poem
or the hours pencilled into memory,
the unconscious camera
shuttering your image through my eye.

You were not draped as a statue
or seated like stone
for hours in a leg stiffening trance.

No studio set or pedestal staged
save the moments caught
and movement remembered -
a dance of unintentional desire,

and yet, no less than paint or photograph
your image forms itself across the page.

MIRROR

There are no lies
in the morning
no cheating of age

an illusion of eye
smoothing skin over bone.

No portrait hidden away
becoming skeletal
and demanding release.

Another day to face,
my confessor, so laugh
at this charting of years.