There really is a distinct shortage of good rhymes in English.
Aeolian Squid
Observant sailors sometimes say
that over Arctic seas
they see small blobs of silver-grey
floating on the breeze.With bodies full of helium,
they rise above the spray,
and trail ten dangling tentacles
in search of tiny prey.
As a dog returneth to his vomit:
You sometimes find, on Merseyside,
a tiny spider sitting
upon a web of red and white.
It makes it out of knitting.So if you hear, around the house,
faint and highly pitched,
a burst of irritated Scouse:
a spider’s dropped a stitch.
Greeku
An old man in a suit
gathers wild fennel from the verge.
A wryneck calling.
—
Fried Beauty
Glory be to cod for battered things,
for chips as golden-glisten as a suntanned thigh;
for fresh-made doughnuts, croutons, chicken wings.
All things that saute, sizzle, fry,
praise them.
—
A poem
Her breath is vine leaves, crushed in the hand,
and her sweat is green olives.
Under the plane tree three old men
watch the shadows creep across the square.
His hair is the wing of a swallow
his mouth a pebble wet from the stream.
Sitting in doorways headscarved women
slowly and precisely stitch.
In all the village the only sound
is the rustle of lizards.
—
Aphorism, shamelessly made into a poem via the addition of line breaks
A poem should be true;
not like an axiom,
but like a bell.
Looking down into the valley
and seeing them fly one after another
across the olive groves
like flakes of gold,
or sparks, or dandelion petals,
or some kind of elemental spirit,
eight golden orioles;
I find myself thinking
I do not deserve this.
The ball is round, the game lasts 90 minutes; everything else is just theory. Sepp Herberger.
Except that the ball is oval.
The bar has spent a lot of money
on a widescreen telly
and isn’t going to waste it.
Passes from end to end
are noticeably quicker
that the ones from side to side,
and when a player bends over
to rearrange his socks,
his head is warped disturbingly
from short and wide
to long and thin.
Football never seems right, anyway,
without the sound on.
It’s like some kind of solemn ritual theatre;
with Giggs as the Three Muses
and Rooney symbolising Discord.
They take their turns to mime
frustration, anger, outraged innocence
a stylised repertoire of gesture
before a silent crowd.
21:
The waiter asks “How was the food?
Was everything OK?”
But I don’t know the Greek for
“The cumin cured pork was so salty
that my tongue is puckered.”
So I said “yes.”
22:
As the waves break high
against the rocks,
a small boy throws the town into the sea
one rock at a time.