words & pictures
I cleat the soil A soft black earth Strewn with flecks The frozen skin of mica Long since gone to dust Leave a mark like a cross A promised, graven treasure We span a gentling curve The distant water blinding There is a stone like a ship Defiantly sinking I think No one I know is buried here
The hills hoist tilts In windmill indecision Hung by its own petard Which always sounded Quite uncomfortable to me As if the rust stained bag of pegs Slung like a smile below the crank Were some brash sporran Not just a place to keep your keys As Dr Freud would have said A tangling cat’s cradle Trailing kelp ends The wire hung In slack loops For cockatoos to swing In the asbestos afternoon The rain a loudening drum A cry, the bird is gone Shoulders wet The leaves and blades In eye twitch shuddering Turn the other way The trapeze as empty As Sylvia’s dead trees
I check to make sure You have knees and ankles Not like people on TV Who almost always don’t have either Not sure How they locomote Perhaps on wheels Perhaps they float But at least their waists Sometimes appear And their smiles are full of hope
At your party I will stand Compliant as a hat rack Carefully holding parasols and scarves (An iron kind of evening — neither cool nor bright) You will swan about the room Medusa bleak and breaking arms Smiling with an executioner’s grace Bodice laced With an hourglass desperation I am still angular as adolescence By the kitchen door Holding these strange and lurid canapés (Pierced through and with an iridescent shine like the mortised remains of blue admiral butterflies) Crying for your midnight emancipation (Your powdered mien begins to crack like glass) In the beveled edge of gilded mirrors Catching signs of extraordinary life For an exit, feint Collapsing in three miles of sequinned cloth As if you were the last enchanted avé On midsummer’s river Of course It is not yet daylight savings here My hands too full of walking sticks and woollen mittens I wear my face at 3 a.m. (or quarter past) And watch Letting you fall slowly to the floor
Lost my voice
Words dry as funerals
For those missed, but
Not particularly loved
The winch enjambed
Halfway down
The earth’s slate and crumbling
Throat, a shout in stone
Pyrrhic –I think they say
All those glazed white dancers
Carefully incised, but
Startled, paper eyed
I am simply
— Erased in evening
To a more consuming kind of light
— Now at a loss
I put a cigarette in my hair, forget Light another Until I’m pouring smoke Like Typhon Or some other creature With an overture’s burning eyes And a mouth like Hades That young Perseus, you know Wing-heeled and with A penchant for mirrors I would not so boldly Demand he look himself in the face With all that ire and confrontation Of time’s bronzed blemish Burnished sunsets come what may That Zeus, half bull, half swan Made of minotaurs a laughing stock For all his hubris and charm Cattle calling from the Parthenon Milk bar across the road He always complains About the poison smell It is just ammonia, foolish man To colour snakes like hair Ruby, gold, auburn, blonde A fired sunset Your face, when the winds change Almost turned to stone
I will Dismay you with dandelions Adrift around your face As if you were some woebegotten saint Surprised by torment as least as much as benediction Too far, you say A weed by any other name Will still defeat Your more refinéd Eden But How they gentling fall and cling To your hair and lips and brow As if angels in their sorrow Humbly kissed
The gouge is in the fibres
As if permanence were
dependant
Solely on the fury of the hand
Each syllable a bird
Chiselling the sky
Not a cloudbleak day
But
Lines challenging erasure
As if this were a palimpsest
For a greater world
Where all the fragments
I forgot
Cajoled
In the dance of thunder
A trailed whisper
The shock yet to come
I pour out the glass
Shake the aching in my wrist
Bone cracking like the onset hail
Are you listening
Through the detritus of time
Dig a little deeper
Strata weak as flesh
Fissile as a moment’s lost idea
Mostly illegible
The space between the lines
has more to say
We ache the way
The minotaur does
In our maze
Divided
The string is frayed
Ariadne, shorn of her display
Knits up time again
The hammer knock
Of the torn page
Throw it out a crumpled
Day
til lost
The house has eyes
A sunburned peel of paint
The silver underneath
Of unevening decay
Summer slaps me down
Pulls air from my lungs
Huffs it out with the ghosts
Of dandelions, each withered dance
Asbestos dry and sharp
As any dust-devil resistance
I hide within, the screen door scrape
Of your hinged words, a growling cringe
The air softly sieved
Into wormed cascades, rejoined again
As if, like poems
The old, familiar sounds
Were made anew
Pull-to the door
A haze of half-closed days
A fine meridian
Seems to say
Abandon hope
All who venture here
As you knead Your eyes distend like rivers Behind half reflecting glass Frames marked with the bird foot marks Of your anxious imposture Imprison half your face As if gulls had fled The knot between your teeth As if you could in misered focus Taste skittish thoughts In that hard bitten fibrillation The more piquant Rank sourness For a palsied freedom I do not know how you see Through that constant pouring A cattish nonchalance Scrape with the axe blade of your hand At some casual irritation The fissile texture Of flour on your skin As if inside, a statue were emerging Eggshell and porcelain –Bisque I think they say Like the soup Somehow in birthed paleness, lithe As if the outer self A thing of frowns and creases Of variegations more imposited than arranged Were the shell, the now ossified thing You have like any wiser being outgrown
