words & pictures
Start at the hard, policeman’s knock We share something of the privilege of madness At the door’s carefully narrowed gap Sun-bleached curtain drawn For an impromptu mask From sidelights across a long night’s roughened mouth To greet in weary remonstrance (A mule joy nevertheless) The carelessly dropped bounty Of the morning post
A poem lumbers, gathers grace A patch and piecemeal monster Listening To the threnody Of a blind man’s flute Feeling, in the air’s bird shape An evasion and escape From the demands of its creator Until, in the misunderstandings Of other people’s mouths In the arctic fury Torn apart
The streets are library quiet A clarity, hid in the serried facades Serrated trees and telegraph lines Crossing at that infinite point Where perspective fails I put my reading glasses on Finding in the shapes of words, clear and close The world – not so far, gone indistinct We abide in our houses, like rough, disordered books The leaves of other people’s dreams In that owling susurrus A white noise blur In my clumsied restlessness A few loose pages rent Gusting down the road In obdurate branches, catch Wondering if By a kind, entangling osmosis What stray words are crossing in between
If you eat these petals, before retiring Through properties as yet unbeknownst to modern science Sight will be restored Mrs A Clarke of Winnipeg saw meteors on A new horizon, she thought the chariots had arrived Short-sightedness completely cured Mr Robertson of Manitoba saw, the grain of skin Like an isthmus in his child’s hand Held firmly to cross highway 26, sick with salted ice From the woods near St François Xavier Home where the fire was the orange Of his mother’s tongue, strangely bright and black With summer’s laughing frozen fruit Spilled accidentally in the kitchen sink Dishes high as Babylon The far-sought malaise, gone in the panchromatic Wilderness of criss-crossing lines Sarah Clawson, aged fifty-four, of Mobile, Alabama Insomniac and half-prayered with macular degeneration Reversed the waterfall rush, the flowers broken Steeped, in a kind of tea, with sugar cubes She could still get, because the factory was old fashioned A bitter taste, but despite the door quite crooked Swinging freely in the sycamore breeze I guess, praise be, the frame’s bent too, she writes In her thank-you note, vision now restored The distortions in her peripheries Where the dead once talked Almost completely smooth, because With a firm but gentle hand, the jags of fractures spreading She crushed to sintered aromats These falling petals
The phone shrills, eternally Until it stops, beyond a threatening hiatus In storm clouds starts again An annoying reincarnation, when the machine kicks in Of a robot voice, the timbre thin And splintered, with the urgency of desperation Yet, pronouncing stumble stilted Admonishments and infractions Warnings ending with that spy film click Of an unseen listener, purpose all but unknown The intent, inexplicable Except perhaps to instil A vague anxiety As if somewhere, cloying in a desert land A machine lumbered ingracefully Towards us, having cut the line Nothing left But an ill-determined menace A cat’s breath In my mouth That strangely intimate purr As if I were a child feeding On some wild nectar In the cup of too wise savagery The insistent hunger When a voice in the white noise Of emptiness, says suddenly Is that you? And as then, I still don’t know Which one of us it was, or is That speaks
Almost half awake blanket warm That strange lopsided walk Of sterile corridors A smile in the side Threads of rotten teeth Holding desperately to silence Except the ventriloquist muttering That untowardly thinks; you left a bird inside Obtuse and andiron blunt Chest too cramped to so childishly fly Arms that half stretch out The sinews almost disconnecting Wishbone flexed To that hyoid shout That leaves me palely clinging Against the ribs a cowl A rose in my mouth The glass has two faces One folding in The other folding out Falling sideways Through the airy space That I halting breathed The miasmic shape That you left behind
Still quite young I have a map for sunday afternoons Going nowhere, just the roar of mountains The whisper of wet tyres leaves a wake On shining roads with a machine-like grace The first reluctant drops of rain Where it pools in my hand Still cupped to lave and scry Sets the mirror of the day to trembling Distant thunder wraps her cloth around my ears I imagine fierce and blinding A ragged sky all crumpled I wonder where those onward trains Where they go, where they leave These smeared signals black and white and red and green Broken tendrils on the pane I have a pocket full of earth To grow a dandelion for my ticket
At the beach we fall like Carthage Tasting salt In the dunes butterflies grace Small stars on the bramble bush Bright as copper burning There is no one here but dreams of wanderers Worn as sea glass In twisted nubs that fire never made Green and agate against your lips A taste like mermaid skin, you say I say, as if For curling winds We bow our heads Your face big as the sea-lorn moon Pocked with hollow frowns A garland temple on your brow Pollen on your breath All fell down Two mouths make butterflies, of course Flying away In utter blue To wind-torn speechlessness
January is the longest month After the cacophony Of the morning’s war We lost the world in chipped cups Bird demands and traffic ricochets Rope burn and gravel skies Dead teabags high as Babylon Cigarette ends crushed into the floor Stations on the map Of harsh, devoured moments Crooked and splayed and almost immediately forgotten There is no running water To keep the dead at bay The crisscross handle bites at your wrist The throes of something Desperately still alive As if you inadvertently held In a stigmate hand Knocking at the walls Lazarus emerging The day suddenly brazen Climbing hand on hand To the second floor A smudge on your chest From wounded lath dislodged When you scraped against the parapet The surface lunar dry But beneath, a rich wet earth That smelt of hungry winter Tugging at your coat and hair The building has no face We are in the socket of its eye The pages of Salverte’s Philosophy of Magic That you translated In blemishes of ink Blown on a rising wind Through the sunrise swelling blindness For the unfathomed dead to read
We are going on our holidays Never going back Through the apocalypse traffic The vaporous mirage A dissolving dragon’s breath Of steeples thin as falling glass Spilled tropicana cordial On the strangely serene damask And leatherette upholstery The boats all turtle-backed Marooned above the shingles Sea birds stalking on the keel Crusoe desperately waving From the shadowed underside Level crossings and cattle grids Iced-cream coloured songs Droning on the radio The static full of summer lightning Not quite knowing why We are dressed as cowboys When we prefer the Indians Nested in the back seat Breathing deep the plastic old car smell Smeared in grins Tears and sugar On squalled faces No, we are not there yet We have bows, and Colt 45s Caps and arrows For passing threats In Clint Eastwood voices We are gone Lost as lariats On our cowboy holidays We are never coming back
