I have clean earth in my hands
You shake, a sea of trees
Humpty-dumpty falling
I am drunk on nectarines
Face half bellyache green
The obverse
The deep maroon
Of summer’s lost eclipse
Clouds thin as desperation
Where we once bent like ships
Buoyant but
Never quite losing
A carefully layered union
There is almost nothing
Left up here but sky
And your warm-honeyed faced
Swollen-cheeked
Jack-knife crooked
Strung on the limb
Turn aside
Far away
Water breaks, rejoins
Curves like swans, dissolving
The heat is a churl
The unctuousness
Of sickly pine
Arm in arm we go inside
Laugh-collapse
On the ricochet linoleum
Caught a blue day
On a sharp paper wing
Thin throat a-howl
Until the looped string
Broke with that strange
Updrawing weight
Of a new jealous wind’s
Stray trumpeting
Gone almost too high
Almost to glass
Almost as thin
As the last shard
In your blue orb’s
Sun struck glance
No longer you
No longer me
No longer see
Gone paper thin
A scrabble of ink
Through translucent skin
Slug trail skies
The day in x-ray hurts
Where I pull
At the blinds
To dismiss the shapes of frowning
Dust spills a mica race
Like promises in the air
Far above
Rorschach arcs
Where jet planes
Have cut between
We drift in parallelograms
Apart
But for this too complicated screed
That we laud in hailed contexts
What in more intimate reflections
We dismiss
A shell of broken porcelain
Once devoid
All meaning becomes
Tenuous as inconstant praise
Your mouth the sun
Behind hard clouds
slowly spoken
Makes the shape of doubt
slow forsaken
You say
morning people
aver the sun
spilt homilies from
hands bent to dismiss
for too long
I refuse to let things pass
jealousies, an arc weld heat
the bronze, once globulous and molten
rigid in that deceptive, ugly shape
of desert rivers
I will lay here
for a thousand years
inconsolate as sand
until I almost evaporate
still, that mica glint
when you pass and
almost catch my eye
Is
as bright as drowning
once again
The rumours have you, anger brilliant
At my peril, I of course misdoubt
Rain falls like wolves
Chasing lithe bare earth
In gouged ochre
Upraised in spirals
There is a smell of rags and cans
Of death and lightning
As if the carcass, ripe for burning, summoned storms
We cross in the weft, to a greased unconsciousness
Hollow where the water
Flows through mouths like fishes
A jar of reeds to catch
A kind of stillness
At last you come
Out of a yellow evening
Leeches bright on your skin
Offering in swollen fists
Broken pomegranates
Not for me, not, for me
A cattle stink
The dragonflies drone out
A passing train
i have come to watch you drown, not catch a fish
It seems so slight a thing
that you waved and smiled
as if departure were less finale
more seaside pantomime
you a painted backdrop
exeunt all except
the windscreen glass
obtuse and thick
as a dead cathode tv
the angular distortion
smalling
in that rough, jabbed elbow way
of laughing sundrowned rivers
bent and glistering
as the fading edges of a dream
don’t you wish
you were never born
you said
then you could stay, then you could stay
all that blood
and living
costs too much
no deal you can make
the road dust licking
at tightrope martyred wrists
in devils as the wheels
groan turning on the sand
a sound like the sea, and you
in this dry rememberance
not yet done with drowning
When you deafen
rain becomes
the walls of orchestra
tumbling in that
uncanny way
of bamboo and deforestation
brass and woodwind with
a thousand plectrum eyes
in the octopoid tangle
reaching for prayers with sparred
and upthrust arms
as if
in a lightning season
boats shed unwanted petal skins
bared, swayed sank or mired
but
between the secrets
of an eyelid’s flicker stillness
– an inadvertent claw
a few inviolate tears
never
exactly seeing
