What wind blows out of a clear sky?
Love comes calling. Will I be wise?
Love never dies though forgotten or denied.
How many times will I fall?
My heart a red bird strives to fly between my ribs as from a cage.
Red bird, she beats a breeze. Strange balloons strain at their strings longing to fly through the wide sky into love.
Jazz syncopation shifts gear.
The dancers wheel to airy melodies.
Storeys high the night swimmer glides in blue water over Finders Lane.
Her wind-whipped hair, her shining eyes:
Cathy’s face in the lightning blown from the stony heath.
Lightning illumines the frost-hardened way.
By the herm a ghost child fossicks among the harebells.
His jugular pulse beats swiftly against my heart, the gravid flutter interphasing the soft shock: a butterfly lulled, kissed, flown.
The wind quickens the trees, twisting the gleam in little circles.
The trees shuffle their heads full of green friction of leaves.
The wind shifts all around the world in miraculous rings.
Here it shivers on summer chilled in the melting Antarctic.
The grass mutters, the guttering groans, bird whistles displaced from wall to gate.
The wind is discontented. It cannot stand in any one place for any length of time.
It stirs the pedestrians’ minds to flight, it whips up legends with twisted plots and impossible endings then begins again.
and then you’re gone, a memory – that’s all.
I recall the day, that hour, that light, when your voice first touched me, the imprint irrevocable.
Love, I discern the edge of you glowing and hazy. I might force the search for a definite line. I might make of you an image never dreamed. But love unfree is never love to me.
I hope I am not messily in love with him. Does he think of me?
Screaming bees besiege the tulips, gleaming satin sprung from two lips.
Petals splayed, the stems recoil slithering on the yellow wall.
On the ground a splodge of wet dirt dissolves and desiccates
leaving marbled clay and loam under the vases all the way down.
The fierce wind sweeps rain though the streets.
Dark in the afternoon the trees shed their dim leaves.
How the sound of the great wind rushes above the city!
We huddle in our houses, studios, rain-strafed crannies, clutching umbrellas blown inside-out scuttling for cover.
Computers and devices whisper weather warped to the fleeting air.
I see your face on the slim screen digitally encrypted in the shifting nimbus.
I think of you touching your distant keys.
Nestled in my shelter I know I won’t touch you tonight.
My breast bone grown hollow, my mouth full of the wind
wings sprout from my shoulders, blue flowers pollinate the night.
Call it a miracle to squeeze love from a stone.
We spliced the quick. Our thread untwists. (Blame the unlover.)
He twines his strand around another.
You who sought to be loved not to love, I loved in vain, a vanity, empty, a mere hollow where a heart was, a splinter of ice enraptured in a tintless lattice, single, obsolete andiron, you and your reflection: I am simply over you who prove love does not go both ways.
One night I visited your house and helped myself to chocolate cake. Your fridge light beamed on round brown loaves.
Mud cake, black forest, truffle and mousse: I scooped up fistfuls of sweet dark muck, sweet soil mummied in electric light.
If you'd been there I'd have called you delicious. But I couldn't find you in the wind that flew in at your door light as breath.
I hovered in your kitchen with your ghosts eating the food of the dead.
On the winter tree a pomegranate snickers, red beads on display.
She is full of laughter and a terrible grief for the gag ripped from the world's mouth, for the flesh stripped from the world's bones.
She keeps missing the chance to be understood. Alone she goes seeking in mirrors the colours of love.
I saw her wandering in tawny dusk, her shivering skin, her honey-dew eyes, grinning at the butterfly that blew between the billboard and the flowering weed.
I swear I saw that girl before clutching a towel in a freezing hall, her hair trussed up in tattered bands
with naked feet and a tear-stained dress, scrambling along the slender ridge, straining to reach a plastic spoon.
I swear I saw that girl again lying in clover by the olive grove. I knew her by her whispered song mimicking the bird call tone for tone.
A shadow girl left an empty dress under a sapling loosened like hair retted in a lily stem, hackled, heckled, twisted, a threadbare throw-away with flimsy seaming, a glass-pane, a freeze-frame diaphane.
She's gone a-begging tears for the dead: pooled in a funerary urn cooled proteins swim blooming knotted flowers.
In the weeds she swims, fallen for glassy pearls, fallen unformed to the cold floor, fallen apart like glass in a kaleidoscope, blown-away with her fish-skin sequins and her rainbow pelt into puff-dust ether.
She’s a revenante. She haunts your hard stones. She licks your blood. She encumbers you with sorry! sorry! say you are sorry!
You hung on me like a sore with your ice-cold claw. You infested me and now I slough you off.
Am I empty?
Does the wind blow through me? Am I a shell for a sea breeze or a hollow belly among bones?
The elf loves the pelt the light leaks from, his knee a ragged eye wishing for a film, his hip joint stitched with wilted scales to a tawdry boat a-glimmer on black water
amongst lost voices in ancient rooms. Locked in lodes of awe whisper the galas of glamour, the garlands, the gargantua.
My dress is a dazzle drawn from a gleam, my silk dishevelled among my sortilèges under an isinglass sky.
How fitfully I seek a dry reed. How listlessly I sift my light leaves.
Heart stopped, a broken clock. What’s love to me? A tickless tock.
A mirror smashed the hard shards fly. Gashed to bits I am not I.
Heart a powder in the wind. There it beats smithereened.
Powder settles in a dish. Pour on water, make a wish.
Heart shines new again in the sweetest morning rain.
When the skipping girl on the vinegar factory twirled her neon rope, the parabola arced like the whorls on my fingers up, down, up, down, up down.
In that minute on that morning the serenade playing on the kitchen radio lilted through the door across the lawn to where I sat under hydrangeas observing the pale fingernail crescent high in the sunny blue sky. Rainbows splayed from the sprinkler as from the spout hole of a whale under the grass surfacing to breathe.
Without you I’m a fountain greeting the blue sky with clear waters, your name forever remembered like a penny to wish on washed by the years.
Blue you wear your blue on the outside. The light of the sky is blue.
Red is for heat, a flame leaps in your fresh blood.
The dogs leap, yelp a fog of noise. They guzzle the meat left fallen.
Your blue besmirched, won't you change your veil?
Blue you wear you blue on the inside. The light of the soul is blue.
I look into the mirror in the blue bathroom. My mother's things arrayed on the grey Formica table face their doubles. Phalanxes of cotton-buds butt against the glass. Jars of make-up, hairpins, tweezers appear and disappear. Their after-image fades. Her amber perfume ebbs forever in its changeling bottle.
Water spouts from the blue lion’s mouth. The shower-head gushes in a blue cave. Hot, cold, hot, cold. When I was six I was afraid of burning and freezing and drowning before my young fingers found their frets.
My child's face looks back at me: dark brows, a small red mouth. I glimpse her eyes. They feed on little things that glitter and slither in fresh fields of knowing.
Coiled in the drawer my mother's hairpiece, round and soft as a mammal, nests at night fated to be pinned each morning in her beehive. Lipstick pops its head from little case to smear my cheeks and chin with sticky clay. My red hands jam the cap back on but red went on and on freezing my blood.
A splinter of moon severs itself from the sun. An orange arc set by a compass, precise, rides the dark cloud.
One, two, three aeroplanes circle like gnats, night lights twinkling. Tiny faces pressed to tiny panes cross the rim of the void.
Down by the sea the trees are tall and dark. Joggers limber on the bridge and water blue as the dusk slips from the banks of the canal.
I’ve come unwashed, barefoot, with tangled hair, at this moment of sinking-rising, to catch a vision. Eyes besmeared I see a slender line drawn across the world from cold satellite to intimate star.
Out on the bay the ships creep imperceptibly across the horizon.
Remarkable gulls perch on the breakwater.
The mermaids swim. The sunbathers glisten.
The deco apartments peel in the sun. The canary is still singing.
The holiday-makers swarm over Acland Street. Scheherazade is gone, souls sold on the slave trade.
The tyrants roar. The seasons spin. The tide will turn and dreamers dream.
The world will end where it began. A little fish is glimmering on the shallow sand.
What’s really going on under the light display?
The sparkles, the spindrift, the waterfall, the splashed rainbow?
Spangles fly in scattered winds all over the fresh blades.
Under the honeydew I hide shuffling slipshod in secret.
Terrible angels shake us. Sirens drown us.
They pierce the heart knot and undo us. We unravel and dissolve.
Everything and nothing I have become: a red thread thrumming on the blue horizon.
We've come to the still days strung in a garland at the end of summer. A mellow sun warms my wintry wool.
Flavours of old years rise and gather. Sweet apples melt like snow in our mouths as we lend our deep mind to windless silence.
I thought of you rising in an earlier dawn, a different season.
I travelled through time and saw you holding in your arms a little girl.
Through the cold, foreign winter came the scent of unborn blossom stirring in the frozen ground.
And the world breathed spring into your arms fragrant with the promise of heaven.
In years no longer here being nothing but memory, you lounged in this room and we chatted about meals we’d had and animals who made us giggle and people who rubbed us the wrong way. Now in this room you are invisible, impalpable. The years erased your footstep on the stair.
A plush stuffed heart hangs in my chest.
Glory, my glory box, whom will I wed?
Only my home and the wild wind raging.
These shall I love with all my heart.
A rent in my cloth, a snarl, my sting primed.
Sweeten me bitter sweet, blend my nectar in your flower.
Sweeten me bitter sweet, like barley sugar coiled in my grandmother’s fingers.
Sweeten me bitter sweet, a bee in the honey sap, amber electric.
Sweeten me bitter sweet, a suite of sixes, a necklace.
Sweeten me bitter sweet in your miraculous hive.
Sweeten me bitter sweet, take my sting and give me honey.
Have pity on me, said the cat when I went to hug him hard. Poor frail boy, please be gentle.
Have pity on the dog that howls mourning his master. Be kind to the traveller far from home.
Pity the darkened city in the electrical storm. Pity the young sailor drowned in an ancient sea.
Search for the lost soul caught in the photograph’s grain and the stitch lost from the beloved cardigan.
Remember the flowers in the failing light, the pimpernel and violet scattered in the grass.
Remember the daisy abandoned on the sill and the delicate ornament chiming in the wind.
Be gentle with frightened children in need of a safe bed. Be kind to hungry sparrows hopping among the crumbs.
Be gentle with a lady gone on a quest for wild flowers.
Lady, teach me tenderness and mercy. Let me never be unkind to your delicate creatures.
The sun shines gold like a Klimt painting sparkling everywhere in the bright air.
My mother, my golden one, I bid you goodbye. Fare well in the land between lands.
Love to you for that time you fed and bathed me over and over in the bright sun.
Sunshine mama, I remember you always in my bright gold heart.
Love to you always, golden mama, from your golden child.
That flame, where does it burn?
Atop a cenotaph?
An empty thing. A trick of the light.
Where does it float, that love that makes us all?
Atop a wave cresting froth and foam.
Heart’s treasure, you and I, where will we find eternity?
Our light shines bright within the quiet grain.
Here I am in the instant wondering past midnight alone in my mazed mind.
We love each other for our minds, for questions and answers and puzzles.
I am a puzzle puzzling life’s lessons.
Through the rhythm of my days from dark to light to twilight, in the small hours my small wishes flutter and breathe and are fulfilled.
I long for you, friends, for the sweetness of your minds when we greet each other after these long years.
We enrich each other’s sky with our wishes and riddles and wisdom garnered from the winds of ages.
I long for you, dear ones to make the air sweet with old stories.
Marian Webb is a poet living in Melbourne, Australia.
Seascape has appeared in 20 Artists - 20 literary pieces by 20 Port Phillip artists Handwritten Issue One December 2023
Intimation has appeared in Shoot The Breeze anthology Girls on Key Press 2022
Cover shows a detail from A Map of the Open Country of Woman's Heart, Exhibiting its internal communications, and the facilities and dangers to Travellers therein. By A Lady. Lith. of D.W. Kellogg & Co. Hartford, Conn.
© Marian Webb 2025
marianwebb@planetmail.com