David Trame

What We Are Left With

Crumbs, for example, just after. And kaleidoscopes of specks
stuck on the skin, or floating away, looming, thinning or bloating.
Crusts and rust, dust, sand and caliginous clouds in the air,
or filaments like feathers, like a debris of stares.
On the ground a scattering of the pips of things,
forgotten fragments following here
their own harmony of the spheres.
Following or forgetting us. Or staring.
With the laziness and absent-mindedness of a king,
with all the impassive persistence of the nonchalance of being.
On my dish I see crumbs and pips and, for a moment,
I don’t remember where they come from, they look like
props after some antics in a pantomime,
then I remember that I have just finished
munching my grapes and biscuits and drinking
my precious goblets of Chardonnay, I have been
spitting the pips straight onto the dish, pellets on target,
my reign the dish, which is always right here
this great gatherer of spheres, and friend,
because what welcomes any trash at the end,
preventing you from drowning in its trends,
is always a friend.
Anyway, most of the time life leaves us
a quietly quite scattered mess,
remains we have to deal with, reminding us
of the manifold remains we shall ourselves be.
After the end a body to dispose of and what it leaves:
a tossing loss, its skies and seas,
its not being alive any more 
that we can’t accept but we must,
spreading desolation 
like circles on still water
after a stone is thrown,
then the circles become larger
and slowly blur.
Or stay, like the fearful symmetry
of a heart’s vacancy,
or like a hole in the sea of your eye,
ineluctably present in the retina
and you can’t erase the transpiring light.
Like the train of this monologue running
to your ashes, which in your mind’s eye
must be bright and rise like a sky in the sky.
But what a fuss before we are back
in the blue, our native hue,
what we really are.

 
© 2014 David Trame

The Cold

It has come like a tale
whispered in
draughts' dreams
and chinks crashed
with air and stare,
the wind whooshing
all the way in.
The square is stark.
The space clean.
The land vast.
I, a sledge in the mind
and an ark in the heart,
freeze and slide.

 
© 2014 David Trame

Further Into the Blues

Most have left and now I say it’s right
to fully flow into an earlier twilight,
October light, so slow since the morning,
with its pensive grey, its veiled blue, its old new
workday implicit imperative even when you
have a random free day like today; the gauze of blue-grey
reflected in the cluttered kitchen, eloquent dirt
on the window panes, eloquent strain.

Whisper a long song, bless also the further still mess
of the fading photographs on the rich grease of the walls.
The full fat ticking of the clock on the massive cupboard
that thirty years ago was declared too heavy for the wall 
and was left like a perfunctory relic on the floor.
On the ochre wooden table the crowd of teapots,
with on one side the standing cutlery like an artillery,
the knives in a double row with their long handles,
alert sentinels with the attitude of candles.
In the kitchen’s air the lingering stare
telling that everybody is elsewhere,
the game going on in another hemisphere.

Kitchen of the many remains.
The hue and texture of what has earned a place..
What got here once has simply
settled  in it, travelling still through time,
in the breath of a mute transfixing rhyme.
Through and through like one two
notes sliding further into the blues.

The glass of the window panes
is thin like a leaf of time,
glass gathering waves from ships and planes,
buzzing and rattling, echoing memories
from forgone engines, gliding threads, trains
with shivers of stories, motley eyelids.
Sing to the view that grew
out of the window, sing to the shabby glory:

a first floor of a house they stopped building
almost one century ago, a first floor
that’s now a suspended waste square in the open air
where seagulls swoop and prey, trash pigeons about
like windfalls on the dirty grey in swishes of sky.

Sing, sing to the yard downstairs nearby,
it was the outer space of a bar lounge back in time
with lush banana trees that concentrated the heart of many a breeze,
but before leaving they cut them all. Now grass and weeds have grown
coated in a veil of rusty dust, the orange of October’s grasp.

But sing most of all to a tree in this waste yard,
a wild tree grown unassisted, unnoticed, disregarded,
a lean trunk swaying with arrows of leaves,
a quietly two-storey high tree.

Pointing further into the clutter of silence,
the digressive emptiness, the spread of nothingness
of the blue sky.

Sing then, keep humming the tune,
in the sky’s rune,
in the clock’s fat ticking,
in the slithering 
instants’ mood.


© 2014 David Trame

A Little Poetry

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