Cartography
Following the old maps, he arrived
just where he had planned to be.
The landscape conformed to interpretation:
that hill, those clumps of trees, the village gathered
around the bridge. He saw the things
he’d expected to see, given the forecasts,
the time of year: the lone fox and the raven falling.
He wasn’t prepared for the motorbike
coming screaming round where the road forked right
in a curving descent over spreading contours
to the valley floor. Nothing could indicate how to turn
avoiding oblivion, the uncharted plunge,
the way time stretched through the flick of an eye
to a sound and a light in a circling loop;
but he did.
©Angus D.H. Ogilvy
As Moon
A long sweep passing since
I saw the moon
as moon.
The flare of summer,
town horizons,
cloud-cast sky ways;
all the moot excuses
I assume.
I see it now
moon as moon
gravid with harvest
rising in the crisping
of a fading afternoon.
©Angus D.H. Ogilvy
Love Tea
Flavour
intensifies
through the second
and the third infusions:
don’t use boiling water; avoid
sweeteners.
©Angus D.H. Ogilvy
Edge
You never know where you might find your edge,
and, spun by vertigo, flail to grasp
the crumbling earth, snatching at sparse
scrub wedged by twisted roots for rootless legs,
jarring the panic wilding of the heart
to sudden stillness.
Then, how to move from
that tight, cold spot, exposed, alone, remote,
hemmed between yawning emptiness – the space
of the possible – and the tyranny of place?
For this is the test. It doesn’t matter
that it struck as you’d hardly begun to
feel those slopes beneath your feet, or after
turning from the top for the long descent;
it’s how you will open, what your intent.
©Angus D.H. Ogilvy
Angus D. H. Ogilvy
Angus was born in Glasgow, grew up in Galloway, and was educated in Edinburgh and Dundee. He has had a career in education which included 25 years as an international school teacher and administrator in Spain, China, Nepal, Indonesia and Zimbabwe. Since winning his school poetry prize in his youth, he has had an abiding interest in poetry and his poems have appeared in various publications. He returned to Edinburgh in 2008 and spends his time writing, doing voluntary work, and addressing conferences, seminars and symposiums about the patient experience of cancer using his poetry as an aid to communication. He has recently published a collection of poems, Lights in the Constellation of the Crab in aid of Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centres.
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