Paper Aeroplanes.

Mother breakfasting
lost in Mahler peach marmalade on toast
smile lighting this end of tunnel eyes.
Father's bitter coffee
grounds for divorce his daily quip
making notes
embyronic verse
on the paper tablecloth.

Once upon a time
he wrote on pristine A4
but we would filch fold launch his words
into the surrounding Bermuda triangles
now he writes on paper tablecloths
of the poem and the paper plane
a perfect marriage of art and science
capable of unpowered flight.

And how as a child
copying copperplate Keats nightingale
launch it from Hampstead Heath
watch it rising on its innate thermal...
And how
Thomas Stearns Eliot
would fold his own complicated words
send them skyward
singing
to lodge behind radiators, sofas and atop high wardrobes
that furnished his horizon.
Unreadable from here.

A poem for last years husband.

You cannot mend it with poetry
you cannot learn how to be a poet
as much as
you cannot learn how to be an artist.

All you can try
is
sadly
to learn techniques
which you hope will allow you
to present yourself
as less of a
less of a
as less of a failure in the first place

a failure for not understanding
that poetry is innate

and a poet ceases to be a poet
when he ceases to fail.