Poems by Jeffrey Side

WHEN THE AIR WAS STILL

We were together and she fell.
Her name I could never spell.

When morning came the trees then shaded
a sunlit spot in forest gladed.

I came upon a table polished.
God is love but who is nourished?

A single anchor hanging down.
A ritual without a sound.

The rivers of youth and death
are now awake where they once crept.

I tamed a serpent in my hand
and buried a woman in the sand.

Prester John has come again,
although he never left us then.

Animals now cough at night.
And clarity seems recondite.

The clouds made shadows on her chest
as she prepared for final rest.

I was born to forget my death.
I was born to count my breath.

A paper bag lived in the breeze
while my love died of a new disease.

I mourned her when the air was still,
and lay on her grave in the morning chill.


WHAT DO THE FRENCH QUOTE?

She loved to sit and listen
to me sing as she held me
against her rings while
the worm destroyed her.

The caves to the east can
be followed by the sun.

And she travelled there
among the strangers
from the sea.

Like the bubble-islands in
my bath she never stayed the
same. And when she
woke she saw no one.

She kept me warm with company.
And we would
whisper for hours about the
books she’d bought.

Then I would watch her
automatic hand land and turn
the pages of some thin volume
asking what the
French would quote.

She asked about the river,
and whether ’twas true
that glass never smashed there.

I said it was so when I left.


FOOLISHNESS ON A WINDY NIGHT

I would find a room and sit
looking at the back of my eyelids
for many hours.
But no blindness could be found there.
No corners could be turned.
And no chairs heard.

We went fleeing in the forest
between the trees that were dead
and the counted skeletons
that had turned red.

There was no one about to tell
us to go so we stayed
and smelt the smoke of wood-fire shade
and pre-Raphaelite heat.

The shade then began to get light
and I acted like a foolish man.

We married on a windy night when the
cathedral sign was still on.


ON HOT SUMMER NIGHTS

I declared my love to her
and she turned herself away.
But I will surely offer it
again to her someday.

She lived on her own
near to where I was born.
And though I never told her
to her I was sworn.

On hot summer nights
when trapped in my flat
I’d wander out to see her
wherever it was that she sat.

But she was with another
who went there for to hide.
And many distances he had travelled
to lay his baggage at her side.