Two Poems

All the while the windows wait for no one

 

While there were those who climbed,

It was only you who knew the spaces through the ladders.

The dent of shadows

Upon the tumbling walls.

 

When the door is too small to walk through

And the gate shifts at your hip.

All the while the windows wait for no one.

Like miniature hats.

 

Where idle hope feasts on the cavities of the rooms

As soaring beginnings roar.

Where the seamless thread that shapes your brow

Falls hollow into your skin.

As the walls of the dolls’ house

Can no longer keep you in.

 

*******

I am not…

 

I am not just around the corner,

Or held in the palm of your hand,

like a scent escaping the rose.

 

I am not fully heard in the howl of the gulls,

Or in a scattering of dandelions raw through the air,

like condensed smoke.

 

I am not in the taste of the salt of seawater,

Whose splash is seeped into your skin.

 

I am not to be touched through your feet on the grass,

Or in the chill of the heat of your summer’s loss.

 

I do not scream through the silence of the stars,

I am not hounded by your tears

Or held in the rubble of your fingertips.

 

I am not in the sworn word that returns to your mind,

As sword or scythe through the kind air.

If you see me in the shadows I am not there.

 

I am far closer than all of this.

 

Paul Downes’ poetry has been published in the Wallace Stevens Journal and EUR/OPEN. He has also published books and journal articles in areas of philosophy, psychology, education, law, anthropology and social policy and has given keynote lectures and invited presentations in 29 countries. His books include, The Primordial Dance: Concentric and Diametric Spaces in the Unconscious World (2012), Inclusion of the Other: Concentric Space as a Life Principle Beyond Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Ricoeur (Routledge, forthcoming 2019). He is Associate Professor of Psychology, School of Human Development, Dublin City University, Ireland.

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