MIKE TODD
there's a familiarity to Mike Todd's work that might take a few moments to understand - and then the timelessness of his words sink in. meter has, for the most part, fallen out of public approval, but here we can find wonderful examples of how meter - when driven by sonics, rhythm, and deep insight - can be just as fresh and applicable today as at any other time. inspired largely by Frost, these works pay homage to great writers gone by, but refuse to denegrate them with simple imitation - Mike Todd moves in today's world but shows us the beauty that outlasts our own limited time-spans.
Late Autumn Beech
I've stood beneath a lot of trees in rain
and this I'll say: for shelter, beech is best.
It's the dense weave the diamond leaves maintain,
gathered like brooding fingers, crossed and pressed
before the face. Tonight, some boughs remain
to put my careless beech-love to the test.
A Seasonal Aquaintance
The way you flitted down to me
over the frost-hard field,
I took you for an aster swirl
the wind had wheeled -
a yellow dress, and filaments
of sun in everything -
almost enough to wake the flowers
were it spring.
Aiming For The Bottom
The penny dropped and vanished like a stone.
Did it touch down? I couldn't really say -
for all the stillness that the great unknown
gave back it may be falling still today.
Yet part of me's inclined to make-believe
it leans beside the other coins tossed in,
riding the mud, like raindrops on a sleeve,
from where it was to where it might have been.
Climate - Change
Across the street
a playful tumble of discarded leaves
runs after feet;
another day
of restless breezes tugging at our sleeves
gets under way.
Last night the rains
were bouncing down, cascading from the eaves.
All that remains
this dazzling morning
are puddles - dark and sleek, 'til the roof receives
another warning.
The Chestnut Hunters
This ache that grips my shoulder in the winter
is almost wholly due, in fact, to chestnuts;
and one old tree at that. I used to wander,
come late September, down the hoof-cut farm-roads
that hedges our village pastures -- after classes
the older boys and I would gather branches,
such bits of cast-off wood as we could manage,
and launch them at the chestnut trees together,
like deck-hands armed with dark harpoons, each chasing
his own white whale: a legendary conker.
Once, when the others had gone in for supper,
I stayed behind: they'd bagged their schoolyard trophies,
and went home glad, but I was after something
a little bigger still. With all my lances
in pieces, or else lodged upon some leaf shelp,
I scoured the meadow. What I really wanted
was a stout block, with weight enough to tumble
back earthard if a bough should try to steal it.
I trudged about the mud, inspecting flotsam,
upending boulders in a rush of spirit
as evening gathered. Scrambling round a hoary
oak bole, I tripped across an upturned root-tip.
Coiled at my feet, a blackened branch of apple
lay waiting; a sign. "This and then I'm finished."
I squared my feet beneath the tallest chestnut,
and needled it -- again, again -- but nothing.
My shoulder ached, worn out with wasted strength.
Time was against me too. I swung out grunting.
A spinning blur climbed heavenward. It whistled,
slicing the thick as if the tree were paper -
a puff of leaves leapt up like startled blackbirds -
and my last hope continued on and upwards,
in such an arc as only fit for story;
and then it disappeared, gone. I lost it.
I waited, breathless. Nothing came; no thudding
of battered stick on mud. I kept waiting.
"In outer space," I said at last -- I had no
schooling to hold it back from unmanned space flight.
Sometimes, now, when I come across a fragment
of burnt-iut star, exhausted in the pasture,
it pleases me to think some chestnut hunter
has brought it down by swinging out too wildly.
Perhaps my own outrageous swing will one day
connect and sting some sleeping stony mountain -
that conker ought to be a record-breaker
if this old ache is anything to go by.
A Slight Fall
The wind last night that scared the taller trees
and peeked beneath our roof tiles in the dark
has left our birches bare above the knees
bereft of leaf, and almost wanting bark.
Not that the birches mind. They nod and sway
as if oblivious; they seem to sleep
and no-doubt dream the winter whole away
in postcard landscapes fleeced in downy sweep.
That as may be -- their dreams will have to wait.
What snow there is is months away at best
and destined to be rain as sure as fate.
Let's hope the wind is done. I need some rest.
I ought to doze, and have the springtime come
to catch me with a fall of peach and plum.
A Little Less
Snow came on heavy late this afternoon
and turned the stubbled fields a faceless white.
Roads rose like dough and cottages grew thatch
'til everything was one untouched delight.
We went in. Looking out, beside the fire,
the smooth hills seemed as years and years ago -
when all you needed was a sledge to find
the one less thing you thought you didn't know.
A Shortfall Harmony
Behind a bent leaf hoarded by a birch
in winter wrap, a robin burst in song
as if to draw more robins to his perch,
or else to move a slow, dull day along.
He made such tune, yet kept the singer hidden
to ward reproach in case he woke the wooded.
I think you’re safe, I should have said, but didn’t –
it’s not as if he would have understood it.
A New Way
Whatever instincts I, in my contempt
for resolutions new and old, have brought
beyond The Bells, it seems my sires’ attempt
at rearing hunter genes has come to naught.
Out walking in the blackened New Year’s mud
my gut had barely rumbled when there crossed,
before my startled eyes, the thud-thud-thud
of cows in flight across a field of frost.
HOME
bravenet.com