Surfaces

Layered and level, 

landscape waits for sky…

            …to wash the angled trees with wind or light,
            …to wash the upturned leaves.

Cloud lowers;
pale-stroked cirrus turns to squalling rags;

            rain-slaked air drowns the earth.

Aligned and locked,
city grids map themselves

            where we, of flesh, walk.

Stark,
intersected planes, polished by touch…

            …reflect the spray of weather, the scatter of traffic,
            …reflect the quench of nature, the scum of engines.

Precipitation
fills the footprints of the world with sullen rainbows
horizons incline towards, rising verticals enclose

            and collateral lives…

    …persist like whispers,
    …persist on walls and doors,
            chairs and tables …

            …as if someone too close
            had spoken of secret love
            in an intimacy of sibilance,
            lips to an ear,
            not a kiss
            but a transmission,
            warm and moist,
            never to be returned.

Rain can never
wash beneath the skin; wind will not blow away
the spiral strands of organisms not even alive.

Inside these walls,
wind is rain-poisoned, a dew of pestilence settles
on every stone,
on every surface…

            …the residue of every touch we place upon each other.

© BH, 2020

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Something started in March and only near enough finished by the year-end. This poem, at least; the Covid smit goes on. This was only a thought about our juxtaposed lives - against landscape, against the environments we thought were made to protect us. Then the veneer becomes thing between ourselves and the world we separated ourselves from for so long.

We have left our traces on this planet and gave it little thought. we had dominion, supremacy and lordship. Until, one day, our traces came alive and began to seek us out. Disease, pollution, environmental degradation, all symptoms of tthe spoor of humanity as we oozed across the face of creation.