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
On the eaves it says
Fish caught daily
In waves of rope
There is a yoke
Sunburned in your shoulders and your back
Where through the ache bright day
You bore wings
I imagine the mottled taste
Of vanilla and salt strawberry
Light globes swim
Big eyed and with that
Lost but stalwart resignation
Of deep creatures unwillingly brought
To gasp the evening-coloured air
The door is screened
By the flat Neapolitan droop
Of tentacles, slap an insult
Above the threatening continental shelf, a monstrous
Toroid eye, eats insects in the hard
Whip-crack, a singe
Of rising oil and burning wings
Datura noxious in the chitter ricochet
From the loom and pedestal
Of a turning fan
The caged steel weight
Makes me think
Of Icarus falling
In burning oscillation
Just that one decisive moment
Our grievance at the sinking sun
At the fish-eyed mirror
Of our recalcitrant misdemeanours
While you melt
In eternal denial
On repeat
We return to childish homes
Stealing pieces of ourselves
Blocks where
Almost nothing left
Fits
Except the criss-cross shadows
The iron in that deep part of your nose
Spit on your thumb and rub
Indelible welts
From the formica table’s edge
Where cigarettes burned down
Left from fingers, hard as yellow
A slight tremor in the ribs
When passing cattle trucks
Slowing, brake, the hard, pneumatic wheeze and shriek
Jolting square, starvation eyes
The jigsaw door, half-smiling
Clouds of puffing smoke
From the stacks above the abattoir
Sold the dresser where
You daubed my face
For nights out, glittering
Too pretty, you said
Lashes like a girl
The bird’s eye maple
Lifting, on one edge
As if some creature
Of dune and heartwood
Half-slumbered still within
You eat with your elbows
I replied, the way a gull
Fossicks in the dirt
Ignoring gold and sea glass
For lesser morsels
The mirror with
The spreading stain
Of decaying silver
A blemish tiding from the edge
As if the dawn sea froze
Where you jammed
The stems of stolen roses
The wings reflecting three times
Caught the train
In the watchful desert evening
Ninety three dollars for my name
Leaving you behind
In a suddenly, echoing empty room
For a discontented world
The dresser on the rails
Following behind
The library makes the small mouse noises
Of a patient after defibrillation
I have eaten my way through several volumes
Of the intimate correspondence
Of poets and kings
Learning (almost) nothing
Except the peculiar bombast and reserve
Turned in that intimate, sinister way
To bemusing incriminations
Of those who know their private thoughts
After death will be widely dissected
A particularly servile aggrandisement
(The fireplace alive with sparks)
To providence and
The self-important moment
Knowing (almost) nothing
I gnaw on
While grandiloquent lives become
The substitute for everyday dissection
Limbs splayed and pinned
Entrails and misdemeanours
Humbly and shamefacedly arranged
The map (almost) illegible
With that turned half away
Scalpel bright
But strangely grief-struck grin
Have thoughts like a dog
Pat and scold them
Until they behave
With that desperate, Pavlovian drool
There is no news today
Just stray cats and poetry
And the crisp meringue
Of clouds
If I wilt in the disdain
Of your withering heights
Perhaps you will forgive
My awful pun, bleak and mad
As it is, with thwarted love
A bird will steal your voice
If you let it
Nevertheless, a hand full of crumbs
We mostly made buildings
of different kinds of light
stolen from trees, river bent
and man-eating concrete culverts
the silver of Ariadne’s thread
stretched from crypt to bald-faced
waiting mountains, mercury temper
gathered in two cupped, prayerful hands
disdain transparent but distorting
with the descendant ripples
of amphibians slipped
between numbed fingers
sloughing away
grey autumn mud, sheathing calves
as if wading rancid pools
beset by the warfare drone
of damsels and of dragonflies
made us legionaries
languid as invasion
with all its noxious gifts
matted reeds as if
a holy child, in some regretful sacrifice
was abandoned here
The morning has holes
Like a summer leaf
Withered by all those excesses
The swelling lymphatic process
Curtailed again, in that shirking act
That ebbs in sacrifice
Closes, a bent fist
Inside the marble of your eye
Thought you had turned the world
Inside out, the moon-thin meniscus
Serpentine and fluttering, in return from sleep
For that, the ocean dark below
All the pooling magma
Defying sunrise (you said the name
Of some lost shape)
Between wakefulness, and
The still suffused surface
There is no news today
Today, no news
How strangely
New today
Without the shouting
In the White House
The president hums
The Stars and Stripes forever
When making love
To his wife
Or almost anyone
With a dose of fluoxetine
Hair blown thin as gossamer
By his compassionate dreams
Of all out thermo-nuclear
War
An unfolding morning chrysanthemum
To atone for countless misdemeanours
In the quiet of apocalypse day
You can still dance with yourself
If you keep
An appropriate distance
The Holy Spirit in between
As you said, the Mercies used to say
Before they gave it up
For poetry and bingo
Seventy-seven
Gone to heaven
Seventy-eight
Heaven’s gate
With no one left to venerate
We all are martyred now
