Gunmetal road
xylophone rails
breathe like that old
vapourlocked EH Holden
your dad had
strangulation blue and around
the goon-eyed, bifold fender
a three day growth of rust
an astronaut grin, the jawbone
from high orbit, crashing back to earth
more patrician than abrasive
the one with Venetian blinds and rainbows
in the curvature of the glass
as if a gondola raced down
Constable’s flooded streets, past the Doge
a fallen gumtree lurking
with a crocodile intent
beneath the red brick arches
of the Peel St viaduct
nothing is ever quite as close, as it seems
the rail bridge
built by invading Romans
of iron cast, from sheeting silver, curving away
in brute and manacle latticework
their mathematics lapsed, levied
to that noxious lead paint intoxication
highway frequencies
monoxide bright
time in that clumsy columnar link
grinds from first to second as it shifts
Somewhere it rains
Somewhere you go out
In the first shreds of rain
Wreathed in ice-cream breath
Not here
Here you stay in
Until
After the lash
After the capsize threat
After the rimfire cadence snare
After
The ground and branches ricochet
In that frenetic St Vitas dance
Of tremolo ingrained
In the timpanic surface
Shout, hail
The rivers coalesce
Become trees
Again
Everyone steps outside
In the bruise-belly afterglow
In the broken, fever-pale wax
Solemnly righting bins and barrows
As if these were the remains
Of reliquary saints, or fallen cricketers
Resurrected to defend the crease
Of warfare green limned in wounds
Of white-stained efflorescence
There in the seance
of pewter dark
and falling afternoon
I ran from the rain child’s father
snail shells eye empty
seismic, abrading, polished sutures grey
skulls in catacombs
tumbling, unmade
with that peculiar, watchful nonchalance
of sacrifice gone too far into neglect
the gods respond
with neither grace nor storms
but the dinosaur fragments
of fossil nacre, edges inviting
pressure against, the too soft mollusc
silent, salt and piercing
pedestal like a kiss
lightning fragile (immediacy erased)
in the afterimage inverse
of the slowly leeching beachcomber’s
lope long passing steps
The plane trees turn
Disillusioned leaves
Quite early this year
The Dutch elm bug is on his holidays
While we sneak out
To the dregs of seaside towns
A breeze, gull-hollow in the mouth
Of a tipped over flagon
The day has that wormed-through look
Of driftwood and premature age
The gulls flock
In that senescent, rough drawn game
Of wings unfolding
In hearts and crosses
Someone poured out petrol on the sea
Bursting when the sinking sun, dissolved
In match-flare quickness
Dragged down with waning hostility, a smoking sky
As if no-one, in the semi-dark, could still be inflamed
I know you know the stars are embers
There is a parenthesis somewhere here
Time will only take you so far
From the edge we see the remnant light
Why – I don’t know why
That died in self-effacement
A shoreline’s length ago
On the train you hold the waxed-paper cup
In two hands, careful, as if you caught
A butterfly
With seesaw determination, as the carriages shunt
At the points, where the rails diverge and intersect
In that clumsy, stagger back way
You always thought unnecessary
A summer cold is just past all sensible belief
(you say)
I think how you mantis, turn
The taut, wrung out cloth of your neck
Outside, the hard, enticing glint, as the river passes
When you return, careless this time
With another cup, held at a clumsy distance
Like the besmirched paw
Of a particularly embarrassing child
Shadows lifting from your back
I consider, the isthmus of your face
The changing half-moon light
Where the sea erodes
One day there will be
Nothing left (I think)
The way sometimes, in our peculiar distances
All details are effaced
But for today
When you tilt your head
To better catch the trip-trap of the rails
The silt of time
In the hawkish, estuarine rake
Marks out the familiar, negotiable terrain
If I only knew the legend
I would keep the map
But, instead, watch the run, of unevening colours
The roads becoming flood-torn
As the paper soaks
The spilt tea from the tray
The journey only ever takes us
This one way
Crumpling, with that mildly sneered distaste
We are lost
Galleon ladies in death masks go
Dreaming of lost Mexico
The dead have gathered on the strand
To listen to the echoing
The sea is rising and the sand
Encroach upon this widow’s peak
Soldiers red and soldiers blue
Abjure this slow pestilence
The brigantessas to and fro
Worry oar locks where follow
By my cull and clinker boat
Sailfish on the wing
Clean the ashes from your hands
Taste this salt to reminisce
Trucks pass, dirigible as convict ships
The bed sinks further to the earth
I confuse their seesaw complaints
With angels and with finials
The egg unscrews so you can hide
Notes obscure as phylacteries
To older
your self
From younger
Now I count sleep, the early evening
Brass is dragonesque
The kitchen, milk-white, littered
with that aftermath stillness
The butcher’s block
Has the Euclidean solidity
Of plane objects and right angles
Blemished, ingrained scars
Where the meat was
Gratuitously dissected
Focus attained, like wisdom
Blurs in and out
Until lines mesh
Inertia slows, the universe
In the illusory drawn out moment
Between deity and big bang
As if a waning summer afternoon
Was still too humid for our liking
Perhaps a Wednesday, close
As the outbuilding laundry, cement troughs
Sparkling with those frozen mica constellations
Make you think of murder
Cloths jugular and tightly wrung
Wrist bone dinosaurs
Roughly hewn in the grey slick overcast
Of madly chalked astrologies
Here the maiden, here the serpent poised
Unfamiliar and yet, in the slip and grasp
Of mild toxicity
Still, the coolest room, the drains reminding
In the Coriolanus of their death throes
Only eternity offers to reimburse returns
For your 5c obligatory deposit
I will give you back, like an obligation
Unwanted but
How in augury strangely accurate
You have that violin face
Cheeks held in and strident
A pizzicato
When you laugh
You imagine
Your mother lost her arms
In an undefined post-industrial accident
But it is just the way she sits
In the shadowed folds
Of voluminous robes
Romanesquely disappearing
Made of all those dead butterflies
The velvet hammer blows
Of half-drunk pyrethrum
Wears a beauty mask, most evenings
The grey mud of warfare
Steam rising from the endothermic heat
Like Botticelli’s Venus
From the mezzanine
Crowned in smoke
Where you harshly inhale and expel
In quiet disequilibrium, looking on
With a jackanapes grin
A hollow sound in your chest
Of trains slowly leaving
There is a stain, not quite like a face
On the Rorschach linoleum
Where your thoughts fell, almost
Blue and tinging red, the way ink thins
Efflorescing on the surface
To seesaw evening colours, the floor
A new, scattershot horizon
Worms and satellites passing
Before, indelibly, sinking in
From the other room
The cat squall of tv
As if drawn curtains
The invading green of northern lights
Could disarm a necessary distraction
They made an X-ray of my father’s jaw
To see if that’s where the anger lay
A snowy landscape, but in reverse
A summer blue gleam to the night’s
Precise and errant sophistry
Trees gone to half-mossed stumps
Knowing, therefore, that this way must be south
An owl’s hard hunting screech
Beyond mouse bones, on the horizon
In the harsh and overbearing light
The dome of St Peter’s
There is a window when we are close to Mars
Looming in the southern sky
With that machining aspect
Of our well known trajectories
While descending robots roar
At familiar landscapes
Made of a sudden, strange
Marked in red, precisely dotted lines
Image of Mare Erythraeum (adapted) courtesy of Google Mars.
A cat, with a Rorschach face
Sidles by, asking if I have any doubts
As to human superiority
Inventory is all around
Like god, neatly arrayed
Pewed and tagged in Sunday’s best and legion
Though, the shelves
For those essential
Civilising products
Are nevertheless
Half empty, quiet as apocalyptic streets
Except for those two, fighting
As the last roll of TP unspools and stops
Still at my feet
Foregoing any ill-considered doubt
I pick it up
Ensconce it surreptitiously
How did you get in, I ask
The cat says
Shhhhh, with that familiar grin
I’m not really here
