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Glen Cavaliero
1927 - 2019
Spoil
ROAD CLOSED is a road opening
. . . on a grey voracious sky.
. . . Cliff-faces crumble, plummeting
. . . . . . to engulf the relics
. . . of some old mistimed preceptory
. . . . . . now derelict and beached.
The wind's hallooing as it plunders sheds
. . . and fences, billboard posters.
. . . MISSING. The worst is feared.
. . . . . . An abandoned tricycle-
. . . was the wholesome village harbouring
. . . . . . a soul that's lost?
On the churchyard path you stooped to offer me
. . . a tiny budding rose
. . . like a shell of coral made:
. . . . . . we hearkened to the rattle
. . . of corrugated roofs when they resist
. . . . . . reversion of the tide.
Such gales erode all hope. At length
. . . that boy was found, uncovered
. . . in a wood. Across the water
. . . . . . goes the bell.
. . . Your rose, unscathed, confounds
. . . . . . obliquities of death.
From The Justice of the Night, Tartarus Press, 2007
Ancestral Haunt
Platt's Wood was down, the timber thrown to villas.
How the place had spread! The little hub
where the great-aunts kept their cuckoo clock
and the horses used to drink was crammed,
all motor cars and women in short frocks:
the crush was fearful. I do not think I'll dream
like that again if I can help it.
Bring in the trolley, Sarah.
Sarah is down, six feet under,
and the mistress followed two years later,
regretful to the last. The town has grown
as she predicted; like a view
her life is framed and hangs beside
the others still remembered. (Poor Ethel eventually
got married and the lawyer's son absconded.)
On Mondays the Museum is closed.
Now we're all windows and particular shrubs.
The twiddly turret of the Primitive Methodist
chapel whisks up, in a froth of catmint
and old rose, pomander dust
that counter-scents each moment. From the fields
where the by-pass must not go we see Platt's Wood
sprout through the tiles. This town inhabits us.
We call that being at home.
From Ancestral Haunt, Poetry Salzburg, 2002
Arrest
I would be quiet, in this privacy of snow
..crusted on a quagmire
. . . would walk delicately
. . . but without delight
haunting the quiet. A spectre fire
. . cossets the palms boulders
. . ..shrug off surfaces
. . . glassed by rain
drumming on the quiet. Dead light
. . lies low on the moor,
. . . ice cracks on peat.
. . . I stand to gather
my own quiet in case the dark
. . makes me a white thing
. . . frost-light as a spook
. . . in warm black
. . . . silence.
from Elegy for St Anne's, Warren House Press, 1982