Download PDF Here 13th Anniversary
Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Four December 2022.
Dance to the Music of Time, poems by Anton Floyd.
A Metaphysical Tango
(after John Donne)
for Piers and Segen on their wedding
Calling the unruly sun to heel, that poem
and the one about a returning lover
makes where we dance in this little room,
our everywhere. And those metaphors:
desire without sharp norths or declining wests,
those beckoning hemispheres,
the compass feet that glide on breath,
all these obliquely run into the spiral
and coiled rhythms of our tango steps.
I here inscribe myself within your sphere
and so entwined we rule our world
(forget the Indias of spice, the Argentine)
enough, your face and mine together pressed,
our bodies move, hearts braided, blessed.
Rumi
in memoriam GVS
His poems shock stiff-necked doubt –
This morning, the rain on the hills
is a watery film of cool transparencies.
He knew the river concealed a secret music
and he knew how to find it. Not just
in the quivering sounds of the riverbank
when reeds stirred like sympathetic strings
of a viola d’amore. But the music
hidden in the reed itself. He knew
the reed and the knife; the expert cuts –
each one a clean severing . He knew
the stops, the shock of sacrifice. And
the prize of the blown pith is freed breath
and a locked heart, mine, no less, prised open.
Poised or This Between the tick..tick…
There is just a little music, each other
and the urgency of what is at stake – Toni Morrison
The kitchen wall-clock ticks, tick…tick…
I glance at the moon face,
the familiar Arabic numerals,
those elegant, caligraphic symbols.
Tick… tick…my foot taps to the beat.
There’s no music in the metronomic
nagging of its single syllable…tick…tick…
Better by far how heartbeat and breath
tie together their syncopated rhythms,
catch thought off-guard and hallow
the stresses of an urgent life risking love.
Yet, however rare and prized, quick-tongued
and true the lover’s poem, tricking time
will come, regular as clockwork ticks,
to spell our fate in its implacable grammar.
So poised between these certainties – this poem,
this heartbeat, these breaths, this love.
© Anton Floyd
Anton Floyd born in Cairo, Egypt, a Levantine mix of Irish, Maltese, English and French Lebanese, now lives in West Cork, Ireland. Widely published in Ireland and overseas, a debut collection, Falling into Place was published by Revival Press in 2018. A new collection, Depositions from Doire Press launched in June 2022. Website: http://antonfloyd.ie/