words & pictures
A poet has no nation – excepting this Glory is not your word The petal shape Of a child’s anxious brow The adumbrate pane of self Sun warm against your arm Leant in that strangely desert face Of the sill’s soft craquelure Lead white and with the dirt Thick in seam and corner A mica fleck where one day (The window left half open) Something small may grow Once we are The long strides of morning Leaving curbs and fences In a shadow’s flicker wake
I whistle in rough kin To a camaraderie of magpies They return trilled warnings in reply As if to say you are no one That we know, a thief of songs Pied and clumsy As any bastard’s fledge We dispute the global south With that stalagmite part of speech You say it depends On which way you uphold the map I say words Are the same in any language Pulling flames like petals from the edge One for love, two for hate, and on Til bare husks are left Black and hard as any rasp Cracked, with a little salt Makes a beggarly repast You say these things are Almost the same I say, halfway home Smoke coiled between my lips They are almost different
The tv spills a cold, invasive blue I have an impression Of you walking on my spine As if I were an arc and cable bridge And you a monster movie freak Grown so large and petulant that None could help but fall The sea below hard and pliable as new discoloured bruises Tear it down, you say Crush them all beneath your unbound feet As if the stillness Before and after earthquakes Were merely punctuation Wrath is love, you write on the sky The moon moves farther away each year I still abide, calling in that silent way That I have always had She shrugs Cloud shadow, listens
You have the wary crackle Of radio in war time Uncertain of whom listens, and Whom exactly speaks In formal pronunciations Desperate and resigned As slowly burning ships What do you recommend For half-life —neither exactly Celebration, nor lament Mostly, perhaps At resolve’s inordinate delay A smirk, exasperated With brown sugar and cinnamon Baby’s breath, aspidistra, nectarines Gone overripe —soft As waning summer— For the intoxicating scent Arranged in a chimera Of cellophane as nauseating as breaking glass Well, we all have something to sell The static hard dismay Just perhaps not quite Drunk as wilted flowers Pretty but The stain indelible
Still the day, all lantern faced my name is carnival in alien respiration throat coiled and translucent my hollow, ringing accordion machines, and grace when the heart in moments repeats one note beauty in its revocations returns and is still
These are private words It is not for you to know But me to say You turned Under a ragged sun Only then I remembered How the world ends Not with a whimper (As Mr Eliot said) But a shrivelled leaf Almost an hour gone The chink of knives on cups Sour coffee breath In that aching clarity Between wakefulness and sleep I waited while You went on ahead I hate it here you said But we have nowhere left to go Except this curl of beach Tonguing the acid sting Of salt and vinegar on cracked lips That common benediction I will swim Til my ear aches With the conch deep voice Of your chasing echo Ribs a heaving predator Breathing in A swelling tide Breathing out A stitch in time Just like Jesus had No more walking Face a squall Towards the sunpath, wounding The shallow sea now gone Leaving brine and sulphur Wary, scuttling things The day again renews The shape of your shadow thins Over loose corrugations Slips beneath my feet When I turn head on To almost forever In blinding scintillations
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
