Charles Wilkinson


from Earthly Strain & Mare’s Tails

below -40
 
wingtips
without
birds,
artifice
of white
cloud:
contrail
usurping
Zeus

   the wind shear: spreads out
   the droplets: points of sky ice:
   cold warming cold below

the jet,
flying on,
can punch
through
the cover,
though its
fallstreak
hole, round
as a UFO,
will not
take us to
a new world



forecast/head

 the bad weather was
  in the curls of hair: hooks
       for these stories of change
           breeding in the wind,
              teaching the approach
                     of frontal disturbance:
                     the depression could
                   flatten, cover continents, 
                 mirror the grey mind
                 or shape anvils to
                 strike white nails
                 into the self, though
                 now it waits 
                  to rise with
                  black ghosts
                    churning
                       remains of 
                          thunder 

Charles Wilkinson’s work includes The Snow Man and Other Poems (Iron Press) and The Pain Tree and Other Stories (London Magazine Editions). His recent poems have appeared in Poetry Wales, Poetry Salzburg (Austria), The SHOp (Eire), Gargoyle (USA), Futures Trading(U.S.A.), Off the Coast (USA), Shearsman, New Walk, Tears in the Fence, Envoi, Orbis and other journals. A pamphlet, Ag & Au, came out from Flarestack Poets.

Poems are forthcoming in Skidrow Penthouse (USA) and Under the Radar. He lives in Powys, Wales, where he is heavily outnumbered by members of the ovine community.
 
 
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