VN to Lois in the Godhead 0:00 Throat clearing 2:22 Reading your poems 11:00 throat clearing for the juicy stuff 12:00 the juicy stuff https://youtu.be/nM3fglmaRrA The Swimming Lesson Feeling the icy kick, the endless waves Reaching around my life, I moved my arms And coughed, and in the end saw land. Somebody, I suppose, Remembering the medieval maxim, Had tossed me in, Had wanted me to learn to swim, Not knowing that none of us, who ever came back From that long lonely fall and frenzied rising, Ever learned anything at all About swimming, but only How to put off, one by one, Dreams and pity, love and grace, – How to survive in any place. And one of mine.......I met a man on a date, who told me about how he was trying to honour his wife who died suddenly, young of a heart attack, by not erecting a shrine and instead, living his life to the full. It inspired this. Burial The place where it grows is silent, at first. Then, the birdsong pulls me in. Oh the music of it all, the whisper of leaf-fall, the trickle of moss drinking, the tree-bark slowly thickening. A colony of fungi threading its way through soil, a love sung quietly in the dark. These days, its a radical act; listening. To the quieter sounds. She’s a sapling now, birch, growing up out of herself, her own remains, cinder dust, and bone-black rust, are the food, the nourishing. How the sockets filled with spill and mulch, the souling earthing suck of down and down to a landfill for a heart, stopped. I’ll remind them, it was wonderful, divine, but never meant to last. Nothing can. No headstone; this is not a shrine, our lines are heard only in the breeze. I just needed to walk, today, step by step, down that old trodden path of loss and see, in this Autumn; her leaves turn. She’s out there somewhere; full force, foraging, gently sending me on my way.