words & pictures
Did the birds tell you
In tremulous warning
We will build another sky in kinder hues
The air as thin and bright as diagrams
Of escaping oscillations
Held against a winding sun
Bury my hand
Time’s mortared skin
In earth as warm as sleep
Whistling hymns to magpies in return
A knife-hard split
At the corner of my mouth
Opens a sharp, metallic sting
Oxalis grows where you died
As if luck were grown a stranger shape
As if this voice of clay and air
Were another wanting prize
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
we squall
in the intimacy
of suddenly thrown rain
the fricate quieting, our humdrum metronome
where you watch (turned aside) an august ocean
spills in folly, the rampart swallowing seawall
thinking, perambulations, of the fools, deluged
silhouettes a regnant weight
calving waves with palsied lips
pared in the slingshot grin
between teeth girt, a swollen silence
past the nodding arcs
of grandiose reverberations
where you cast them
to the stone
in petulant pantomime
through a wild sea
the heliconias are flying
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
Dead awhile I wake, a windmill rust bittered creak hunted/hunting interminable, bright spilled between cloud shred and dinosaur frond fingers wrack side to side half morning gone the air too thin for summer’s leaf bent sighing
a nagging ache kind of acetylene blue that epoxy euphoria paint dissolved, and dirt ingrained like the dunes and calumnies of someone else’s skin I thought, cellophane and roses a wolf-wind howling through steepled hands afterwards, we eat the dead fish eyes watchful skin the shape of wind scaled sand wondering in the minor recompense of oft repeated phrases do they eat us Traffic shuffles on in its dog-end fury red almost to green a monoxide exhalation doorway reverbations the standard scat mirage that wormed, ouroboros need I tell you I am far below the hour of the sea No, you say – just no before you completely leave the Venn of coffee rings describe in vestiges of peace the fragments of reflection all that’s left to bind the remnants of vacated conversations
I cleat the soil A soft black earth Strewn with flecks The frozen skin of mica Long since gone to dust Leave a mark like a cross A promised, graven treasure We span a gentling curve The distant water blinding There is a stone like a ship Defiantly sinking I think No one I know is buried here
The hills hoist tilts In windmill indecision Hung by its own petard Which always sounded Quite uncomfortable to me As if the rust stained bag of pegs Slung like a smile below the crank Were some brash sporran Not just a place to keep your keys As Dr Freud would have said A tangling cat’s cradle Trailing kelp ends The wire hung In slack loops For cockatoos to swing In the asbestos afternoon The rain a loudening drum A cry, the bird is gone Shoulders wet The leaves and blades In eye twitch shuddering Turn the other way The trapeze as empty As Sylvia’s dead trees
I check to make sure You have knees and ankles Not like people on TV Who almost always don’t have either Not sure How they locomote Perhaps on wheels Perhaps they float But at least their waists Sometimes appear And their smiles are full of hope
