The Four Seasons

I

This heart is not hoary with held woes:

the hour is long, and lies apace
like cats acurl in the caught sunlight,
napping, with whiskers whiter than fur
upon their creamy-painted bibs
and paws. The moments pass in silent
passages of light, like lightened dust
that curls, and casts its caught way
up pillars of light lifted down
from reclining Summer suns, towards
the rooms of youth, and written patterns
of light against the gathered memories,
that tick with the stolen talk of clocks
that take the time that their taps measure,
a year that's gone, a yellow echo
away and remote. Like memories evoked.

II

This was the Spring of my spring-driven
youth, the ratchets rapidly teething
upon cogs of polished copper
that click and bite. The burnished clockwork
is hidden from eyes that have not seen
beyond a horizon eyelids describe
as a pierced blue, bleeding its brilliance
over escarpments scraping the sky
with pinprick trees, transformed to sullenness
as surety against the gathering night
that breaks streetlamps' brilliance, as seas
upon the riven rock platforms
of youth, and of youthful yearnings for summer
to never end, forever suspended.

III

Upon the cusp of calenture's Fall,
what creature stirs? No crazed mouth
nor mouse, it seems, the sea stirred
to bitter gusts and gales from the South
in the long passage to living winter
and fallen frost. How freezes the grass
before the dawn, the fogs that flow
upon the pallid peacefulness of valleys
amongst the mountains, that my mind dwells
upon these days. A destination seasons
gone, blithely gathered into
the past and placed like poems away
within the misted mind, that fallow
fellow that finds it fails at last:
come to the jetty, the cold wind
blows northwards, needling bone
with clasped claws of clutching coldness,
the seaspray driven sullen and white.

IV

The clock, its death, death with every
second spoken, seems as blue
as a proven Winter wind, against
the sea, escarpment, seasons turning
like ornamental lights that ordinarily lift
into brilliance, break suddenly
into darkness, but dim and drift
to sickness and dull, sullen failure,
the cat bone and buried dust--
the worms have won, they've worn to dirt
and died and gone to dust that drifts
upon some other pillar of sunlight
in another life. The night is all,
it looms ahead, heeding nothing,
and all is slipping sleepwards, entropywards.

Water Beetles

How faint the lives, yet bright
as light within the water's surface
flashing quiet, as whitely over
water weeds beneath.

Brown and black,
with silver baubles of air
held on their undersides,
they dive beneath.

And all is as it is
and as it should be,
in my world, the peace
of this contemplation,

and a feeling of kinship,
for, after all, is it not true
that, despite separate species,
we are animal both, breathing?

Phillip A. Ellis is an external student studying English Honours at the University of New England, over 2008 & 2009. A collection of his poetry influenced by that of Clark Ashton Smith will be published by Hippocampus Press, and has co-edited a book about the poetic circle of H. P. Lovecraft, due from Mythos Books later in 2008. He will have a chapbook published by Gothic Press in October 2008.

Email: Phillip A. Ellis

Return to Table of Contents