A S J Tessimond Short Poems
Famous Short A S J Tessimond Poems. Short poetry by famous poet A S J Tessimond. A collection of the all-time best A S J Tessimond short poems
by
A S J Tessimond
If a man says half himself in the light, adroit
Way a tune shakes into equilibrium,
Or approximates to a note that never comes:
Says half himself in the way two pencil-lines
Flow to each other and softly separate,
In the resolute way plane lifts and leaps from plane:
Who knows what intimacies our eyes may shout,
What evident secrets daily foreheads flaunt,
What panes of glass conceal our beating hearts?
by
A S J Tessimond
Clothes: to compose
The furtive, lone
Pillar of bone
To some repose.
To let hands shirk
Utterance behind
A pocket's blind
Deceptive smirk.
To mask, belie
The undue haste
Of breast for breast
Or thigh for thigh.
To screen, conserve
The pose, when death
Half strips the sheath
And leaves the nerve.
To edit, glose
Lyric desire
And slake its fire
In polished prose.
by
A S J Tessimond
The clock disserts on punctuation, syntax.
The clock's voice, thin and dry, asserts, repeats.
The clock insists: a lecturer demonstrating,
Loudly, with finger raised, when the class has gone.
But time flows through the room, light flows through the room
Like someone picking flowers, like someone whistling
Without a tune, like talk in front of a fire,
Like a woman knitting or a child snipping at paper.
by
A S J Tessimond
Is it sounds
converging,
Sounds
nearing,
Infringement,
impingement,
Impact,
contact
With surfaces of the sounds
Or surfaces without the sounds:
Diagrams,
skeletal,
strange?
Is it winds
curling round invisible corners?
Polyphony of perfumes?
Antennae discovering an axis,
erecting the architecture of a world?
Is it
orchestration of the finger-tips,
graph of a fugue:
Scaffold for colours:
colour itself being god?
by
A S J Tessimond
"Why can't you say what you mean straight out in prose?"
Well, say it yourself: then say "It's that, but more,
Or less perhaps, or not that way, or not
That after all.
" The meaning of a song
Might be an undernote; this tree might mean
That leaf as much as trunk, branch, other leaves.
And does one know till one begins? And let's
Look over hedges far as eyesight lets us,
Since road's not, surely, road, but road and hedge
And feet and sky and smell of hawthorn, horse-dung.
by
A S J Tessimond
This shape without space,
This pattern without stuff,
This stream without dimension
Surrounds us, flows through us,
But leaves no mark.
This message without meaning,
These tears without eyes
This laughter without lips
Speaks to us but does not
Disclose its clue.
These waves without sea
Surge over us, smooth us.
These hands without fingers
Close-hold us, caress us.
These wings without birds
Strong-lift us, would carry us
If only the one thread broke.
by
A S J Tessimond
The birch tree in winter
Leaning over the secret pool
Is Narcissus in love
With the slight white branches,
The slim trunk,
In the dark glass;
But,
Spring coming on,
Is afraid,
And scarfs the white limbs
In green.
by
A S J Tessimond
Serrations of chimneys
Stone-black perforate
Velvet-black dark.
A tree coils in core of darkness.
My swinging
Hands
Incise the night.
A man slips into a doorway,
Black hole in blackness, and drowns there.
A second man passing traces
The diagram of his steps
On invisible pavement.
Rain
Draws black parallel threads
Through the hollow of air.
by
A S J Tessimond
Within the church
The solemn priests advance,
And the sunlight, stained by the heavy windows,
Dyes a yet richer red the scarlet banners
And the scarlet robes of the young boys that bear them,
And the thoughts of one of these are far away,
With carmined lips pouting an invitation,
Are with his love - his love, like a crimson poppy
Flaunting amid prim lupins;
And his ears hear nought of the words sung from the rubricked book,
And his heart is hot as the red sun.
by
A S J Tessimond
Green sea-tarnished copper
And sea-tarnished gold
Of cupolas.
Sea-runnelled streets
Channelled by salt air
That wears the white stone.
The sunlight-filled cistern
Of a dry-dock.
Square shadows.
Sun-slatted smoke above meticulous stooping of cranes.
Water pressed up by ships' prows
Going, coming.
City dust turned
Back by the sea-wind's
Wall.
by
A S J Tessimond
Acknowledge the drum's whisper.
Yield to its velvet
Nudge.
Cut a slow air-
Curve.
Then dip (hip to hip):
Sway, swing, pedantically
Poise.
Now recover,
Converting the coda
To prelude of sway-swing-
Recover.
Acknowledge
The drum-crack's alacrity -
Acrid exactitude -
Catch it, then slacken,
Then catch as cat catches
Rat.
Trace your graph:
Loop, ellipse.
Skirt an air-wall
To bend it and break it -
Thus - so -
As the drum speaks!
by
A S J Tessimond
Light drunkenly reels into shadow;
Blurs, slurs uneasily;
Slides off the eyeballs:
The segments shatter.
Tree-branches cut arc-light in ragged
Fluttering wet strips.
The cup of the sky-sign is filled too full;
It slushes wine over.
The street-lamps dance a tarentella
And zigzag down the street:
They lift and fly away
In a wind of lights.
by
A S J Tessimond
Music curls
In the stone shells
Of the arches, and rings
Their stone bells.
Music lips
Each cold groove
Of parabolas' laced
Warp and woof,
And lingers round nodes
Of the ribbed roof
Chords open
Their flowers among
The stone flowers; blossom;
Stalkless hang.
by
A S J Tessimond
Suddenly, desperately
I thought, "No, never
In millions of minutes
Can I for one second
Calm-leaving my own self
Like clothes on a chair-back
And quietly opening
The door of one house
(No, not one of all millions)
Of blood, flesh and brain,
Climb the nerve-stair and look
From the tower, from the windows
Of eyes not my own: .
.
.
No, never, no, never!"
by
A S J Tessimond
Under the lips and limbs, the embraces, faces,
Under the sharp circumference, the brightness,
Under the fence of shadows,
Is something I am seeking;
Under the faces a face,
Under the new an old or a not-yet-come-to;
Under the voices a peace.
Am I a darkness all your flames must light?
A mirror all your eyes must look into -
That dares not yet reflect the neutral sky,
The empty eye of the sky?
by
A S J Tessimond
The tube lift mounts,
sap in a stem,
And blossoms its load,
a black, untidy rose.
The fountain of the escalator
curls at the crest,
breaks and scatters
A winnow of men,
a sickle of dark spray.
by
A S J Tessimond
1
(Windless Summer)
Between the glass panes of the sea are pressed
Patterns of fronds, and the bronze tracks of fishes.
2
(Winter)
Foam-ropes lasso the seal-black shiny rocks,
Noosing, slipping and noosing again for ever.
3
(Windy Summer)
Over-sea going, under returning, meet
And make a wheel, a shell, to hold the sun.
by
A S J Tessimond
Bells overbrim with sound
And spread from cupolas
Out through the shaking air
Endless unbreaking circles
Cool and clear as water.
A stone dropped in the water
Opens the lips of the pool
And starts the unovertaking
Rings, till the pool is full
Of waves as the air of bells.
The deep-sea bell of sleep
Under the pool of the mind
Flowers in concentric circles
Of annihilation till
Both sight and sound die out,
Both pool and bells are quelled.
by
A S J Tessimond
The birds' shrill fluting
Beats on the pink blind,
Pierces the pink blind
At whose edge fumble the sun's
Fingers till one obtrudes
And stirs the thick motes.
The room is a close box of pink warmth.
The minutes click.
A man picks across the street
With a metal-pointed stick.
Three clocks drop each twelve pennies
On the drom of noon.
The birds end.
A child's cry pricks the hush.
The wind plucks at a leaf.
The birds rebegin.
by
A S J Tessimond
Blame us for these who were cradled and rocked in our chaos;
Watching our sidelong watching, fearing our fear;
Playing their blind-man's-bluff in our gutted mansions,
Their follow-my-leader on a stair that ended in air.