Breaking the Ice

Breaking the Ice

To break through nature’s glass door was the one.
That first hit, as the cold embraced your skin
and made a warm cocoon, was like a sun

forged from the iciest glaciers. The river ran in
to drench your every inch, a cold caress
that flooded you with heat. As midnight tolls

Step Back Turn

Step Back Turn

The body’s grace is magnified on water.
To turn or pivot quickly yet with fluid
motion, keeping your dominion over
both board and waves, requires studied

Martini Sonnet

Martini Sonnet

Long dream of summer in short skirt of glass.
The glass as prism: multiplying all
colours that meet it, sunshine, a right eyeful,
rendering all beyond it meaningless

at least for now, for this moment, more or less.
The eye is blind to what the mouth will feel:

The Projection

The Projection

Tiresias models what he’s told.
What nostrum dramas then ensue
he neither sees nor seizes hold.
Someone else has the costs in view,

Daedalus

Daedalus

Here at Camicos, you can be free, at least.
Back on that island, we were prisoners
at the request of the King: no way out.
But amazingly we found our way out,
and flew as fast as our feet would carry us.
Wings? No, you misunderstand ‘flight’.
We were on the run, after all.

Underpass

Underpass

Endemic dark indemnifies the night.
Much madness undermines the roundabout:
directions redirect the recondite

from hypogean lower-level, out
in ways that liberate but lose the art.
Give way: there is no artery without

Sea Glass

Sea Glass

This weathered jewel began as normal shards
of shattered glass, but given enough time

and natural persistence from the seaboards,
that sharp, translucent, brittle crystalline

material, just so much composite sand, is ground
from broken bottles or even distant shipwrecks

until sharp edges become smoothed and round.
This cocktail of colour, found among the rocks,

Ariadne

Ariadne

It was amazing luck, to get that clue.
Threading between the darkened outer rooms
he sought escape, the bull’s head in his arms.

The bass was thumping as the blood within.
She, grateful for assistance, guided him
outwards, his half-drunk feet still holding true.

They bounced it past the guards. So they were free:
(not Crete but Mykonos) though the summer’s heat
and adrenalin made the whole street a haze.

The Rough Guide to Croatia

The Rough Guide to Croatia

There’s a black sphinx in the city of Split
from Diocletian’s time. Her granite face
has watched the world turn for more than three millennia
(her eleven siblings were all beheaded),
her Egyptian cradle now a thing of the past.

Key Phrases

Key Phrases

As one door opens, another closes. Bad things
come to those who wait. Time hales all wounds.

The world’s our oyster, sickly, most
of it unpalatable, waste.

He was the apple of her eye, rotten to the core;
she a peach, a stone for a heart. A real dead wire.