Poems are hard
as atom bombs
e e cummings said
one day at the beach
wavelets laurels in your hair
when Lowell (et al)
decried his couth
unstrictured voice
your words are gulls and there
a whale, beached
promethean, slowly dying
watching its own death
with that naive, ancient eye
a heart so slow
it measures time
in intangibles like love songs
still, while you tear
at the monster’s side
tears like quills
hoping for the ambergris
of too studied convention
I will bend
my shoulder to a poem
in the returning tide
watch it
with an evening’s shadow grace
descend
From the chapel, a muttered kind
Of evensong
As if the day, chagrined
At prosaic hours
Divides
The door prows a wave
Holds still, splits
Along the keel
Where one boat capsized
Two resurface
A tilted line, in reflection
The horizon bisecting monuments and earth
A magpie, creaking out
Gives the evening silver
They are not the dead
But fly languidly from grave to grave
Perching on our arch and glib effacements
Graffiti thrown like sticks
On the gateway’s
Unprepossessing defences
Songs to silence, songs to wake
A boat so full of holes and binds
Of curled and flaked wrought iron
You could easily step through
To a more pitiable contradiction
Of discomfiting formal attire
In splashed pretty chiaroscuro
Head cocked, listening
A magpie reverence
Dreaming the quiet dreams
Of the dead
The sea eats glass
Til glass itself
In repose, reflection
Far in the swathe
Of polished rip
Arm upraised
Decrying buoyancy
I am fastly turning
There are thousands
Gulled in lines
Eating waffle cones
On the esplanade
Loudly squawking
Laved in oil
(Or made filthy by)
As if the fatted ungulate
In herb and festal truss
Prepared itself for sacrifice
The sea swallows them up
Returns most
Turns some
Into nubs of glass
Lost in gristling sands
Small and bright as jellyfish
Dying in the oil and ice-cream air
Now, far out to sea
I start dissolving
The war starts in the way
You pass by anchored ships
Nary a glance, at the rats on the ropes
Departing with that verminous intelligence
In swift, prehensile fingers
Eyes dawn red
Salt on your lips
Envied by gulls (unequally envious)
You discard the mess
They only for a moment
Fold an outstretched wing
A squall to bite
The morning a lament
The plane of the horizon
Tilting a few uncomfortable degrees
Dizziness is relative (you think)
To the sea in your inner ear
Slowly soughing
While from an unknown distance
(You are still with me?)
In the imagined interstice, stars fading in the bruise
The world tilts like a toy on its axis
Oh, thunder, you said
In that innocuous mid-distance
Where meaning both escapes and evokes
The lights in tall buildings
Play dominoes
Until almost everyone has left
Rain makes static
Too lacklustre for lightning scars
Just the nondescript
Evening noise
Of cutlery and creaking doors
Too late not to notice
In the paint-chipped plateau
Beyond wet-lipped, quick-torn fingernails
Half open is not the same
As half closed
Though the window jambed
Still
The grey gets through
The plaster has a star
where your fist
made a prayer
this town is as ugly
as a trucker’s gutful
forearms graffiti blue
with the thousand-mile stare
the surgeon stitched and excised
peacock feather sunsets
a dead fish
nailed to the wall
with the silent accusation
of failure’s mockful trophy
when you fast approach
deceleration frenziedly singing
as if freedom were just another word
all the houses
desperately homeless
dumped here in sixty-seven
in three parts, nail-gunned together
with that executioner’s
haphazard, abattoir inelegance
a monstrous angularity
in the canvas, struts and rails
of rank and empty perambulators
St Anthony’s bloody knuckles
when the bluster changes
pews filled soon enough
the roses by the crooked gate
with that
scowl and bloodshed hue
of the evening opencut
gleaming and abandoned
the shining, semi-precious stratification
of a half a century’s
still unhealing wounds
We are all old now
Or naively young
I turned the word
You gave
Like clay, separated
To nebulous parts
Not quite rejoined again
Stretched, affixed, addended
Made to serve the hollow shape
Of as yet undetermined meanings
Under the microscope
Tears of anger, tears of grief
Tears of your everyday failures
Are as unalike as snowflakes
Melting in the caveats of your face
The ice shelf calves
The beast on unsteady feet
Circumambulating a subpolar current
As if an isthmus masked
In cruciform Pierrot markings
A tedium’s dissolve
Slap away the proffered hand
Topsy-turvy islands
Far from reach
Image adapted from; Wilson Bentley and William Humphreys’ Snow Crystals (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1931).
A leaf-curl sneer
As if autumn fish-hooked petulance
From the wet corner of your mouth
Almost lemons
The laundry scent
Not quite a Sunday seaside
Still muggy with
The thick damp cloth
Of March wrung out
Until your paled hands
Annoyedly dripping
Slip on the too-tight, criss-cross tap
Overcast and
Creased as deserts
Speaking sideways
The cement sarcophagus deep
Strands of hair and muck
As grim as pharaoh’s echoing
Coriolis voice
Rictus lips and
In the darkly narrow drain, a glint
You are the radiance I saw
In the gangling height of poplars
Leaves bird-white and poised
Swaying with a skeleton laugh
The ghosts of Mao’s sparrows
Told me to flee south
Through the ordered pathways
Of a cultivated land
The harsh geometry
Of blunt roads bleeding into dirt
A hollow fist of silos
Travelling with the bare-faced negligence
Of wanton hope
They once baptised me in a tub
As if a bucket were a river
A river an eye opening
To a heightened realm, where
The bemused damp strands
Of thinned hair
Against my scalp
A mocking kind of laurel
As bright in the moment
As any glow a Byzantine would wear
Side pierced through with arrows
Heart splayed in cupped hands
Proffered like a bird
Or Sunday afternoon baklava
Embryonic, drowned in honey
The bee almost perfectly preserved
With that furied, alien look
Grown monstrous, under the glass bell
The thick slow taste
Of songbirds
In the golden day
Disproving Ferlinghetti’s theorem
We disappear like metaphors
In the jasmine arbour
Falling drunk and pierced through
We count stars like days
Breathe the breath of turning leaves
The winter bronze of evening windows
Pretty but, one day it will down this tree
Like cowboy Theseus sprawled on the back
Of the fleeing Minotaur
In
Excruciating slow motion
It eats children (I say)
At who’s behest?
A ring hard through the nose
Quite angry
Daedalus made the place, trapped me here
Chagrined at his son’s burnt wings
Offered nothing, for repast, but disobedient youth
Arrogantly immortal
The sea is soft
Later, in the mild afternoon
I pick it up, (why are my hands so cold?)
Artefacts of light
In my skin as if
Fish left ghosts
Sand undermined
In mute outrush, deflecting
Wavering against
The unsupporting air
From bird-wheeling hands
Cast it back
I watch from halfway up
the balustrade of your ribs
Wondering if, at the top
There is a rat’s maze
Or some other unimagined land
The bright day comes
When you turn the shape of dunes
We fall from the sea
A blue goddess of such auguries
Smoke, curling from her lip
Lolling as she inhales
Lithe beings of it
Into her mouth and nose again
In a pariah prayer of victory
The villa has terracotta stairs
Rising to the blemish of a cat
A black sepulchre underneath
The zigzag shadows sharp enough
For suicide, or misadventure
(The evidence always inconclusive)
A mouse approach
If you slip, a creature
Languidly swishing
A stain hesitantly creeps
Down the angles
Of this laughable geometry
Where we hide, a horned beast
Stamps its foot
