Untitled life

here as I am
on this stranger shore
noting the moments of the tides
I dance the rhythms
of my flotsam and jetsam life -

fluid bones flowing
with the ice-white stream,
chattering with the clattering pebbles
as the waves retreat,
tumbling through the chaos
of the raging storms
into the lyric song of the night

and the rhythm of stillness,
beautiful and wild,
heartsharp and sweet
with might-have beens
and skyblue smiles

Cold January morning

Leaving the house, I start to stamp my way up the hill. The cacophony of my thoughts begins to still as I become aware of the sounds around me... the shrubs are alive with the local garden birds, making the best of the daylight hours  - robins, sparrows, finches, tits... squabbling and chirruping. The stream is gurgling in the valley and making my way up the road, I become aware of the taller trees and the bigger birds among the susserance of the leaves and twigs - 'corvids' I'm learning to call them; if I name them - crows, rooks, ravens - someone will put me right...

I'm aware of my breathing, the rhythm of my warming joints and muscles, my place in the universe . We stop to greet the donkeys and goats in the field. As I reach the top of the hill, the inblowing wind catches me and a kite is overhead. Inland today the mountains are hidden, but turning the corner I can see down the bay and across the valley

The Hours

The tall clock
ticks away the seconds,
marks the minutes
and erratically
strikes the hours

up and down the stairs
even the radios refuse
to agree about the 'pips'

meanwhile

across the house
the ticktock-less timekeepers
contend
and make a mockery of time

we smile around each other
in the kitchen

Findings...

I have a history of finding long-lost items, from an earring in a gutter, which had been missing for six months or more to my hillwalking stick, which has been lost and found three times (so far) in the last year..
I lose gloves (mobile, glasses...) on a regular basis, so it was nothing unusual yesterday to be setting out with two left-hand gloves - a grey one on my left hand and a brown one,upsidedown, on my right.
Imagine my glee then when I spied a grey twin on the track over the hill 'Yay, must have dropped it a couple of weeks ago!'
But no, it turned out to be another left hand... Ho hum, someone out there -

Winter Dusk

Streets of silver
and headlights in the mist,
We, like the starlings,
flying in to roost

Morning walk above home

The bluest sea
and sky today
and slate washed silver-
clean by last night's
silken strands of rain

The mercurial Frank O'Hara...

-  this is how I understand the story -  loved his friends, loved to party, loved to eat, drink and smoke, loved to debate and discuss, score points and win the argument.

John Ashbery, his good friend and mentor, was older, more fragile I surmise, more easily hurt...
Wounded by Frank's sharp tongue and mistaking his friend's clever words for a cooling of their relationship, he withdrew a little, in self-protection.

Frank's response? To 'unfriend' or 'block' him (or the 1960s equivalent)? Far from it - O'Hara wrote what is to me one of the loveliest tributes, in his poem  'To John Ashbery':

"I can't believe there's not another world
where we will sit and read
new poems to each other,
high on a mountain in the wind.."

Frank O'Hara died ridiculously early in a freak accident at the beach. John Ashbery survived all the 'school' of poets and lives still with their memories