I must, have painted the sky
Or if not me, someone else
In daubs of black, and moving lines
With that sidelong perspective
That goes
from a starred point, to almost forever
Travelled a thousand miles
(Because almost nothing poetic can be heard
in the brute and wearying sound
of hard kilometres
– except
that too savage tintinnabulation)
Only to find
The ground is more difficult here
Than all previous history’s
Inflorescences, gradually pressed
To the sandstone of
Inexplicable striations
Life is a coincidence
Like the face of god you thought you saw
In a snail shell’s jagged lines
Gone with a second glance
And, perhaps, not really there at all
Curl in
The sea shape
Of uncertain sleep
An agony of particular kinds of desperation
Stitches the ribs and thighs
Pulls tight the zigzag thread
Almost running, almost still
A fly in the honey
Drowning, bliss
Under an obdurate sun
You can, almost
See the stone-shear face
In the concatenation
Of precariously hinged boulders
The sun breaks
Stern weathered grace
Into a brief, consuming smile
A pint of colour, please
An away look in your sky
A fled kite’s isoscelean wound, diminishing
To a hard black vee
Storm cloud frown
Storm cloud glee
A string with bows, penanting
Small change, wet
On stain-blacked wood
Dull as eyes
As if it harboured a new dis-ease
Cigarette burns, sidelong glances
Wan as chartreuse evening
A worthless treasure found
Behind a temple’s shouldered offerings
In the glimpse, in the glass
Amber, salt, returning
In the fields, the foxes watch with yellow eyes
Autumn brings you back in the ache of burning leaves
I brought whispers for your skin and daisies for your hair
In knotted threads and twined, without end or crown or throne
But this bed of cautious roses and dully gleaming stones
In the fields the foxes watch with yellow eyes
Can I hold you for a moment in a mask of sepia?
Before it falls from my hand to a soughing wind
I brought whispers for your skin, and daisies for your hair
I think, perhaps, you were never really here
But hear again your soft-caught vixen cry
In the fields, the foxes watch with yellow eyes
How they approached, with equal parts temerity and care
To tremble at your outstretched hand
I brought whispers for your skin, and daisies for your hair
So strange, that they have come
Here again to say goodbye
In the fields, the foxes watch with yellow eyes
I brought whispers for your skin, and a crown of daisies
For your hair
Clothes are all wrong
Cut a thistle from my hair
Fed it to the morning fire
Took a ripple from a pond
In your hands it came alive
Startled, let it slip
In that starry colour, fled
The second morning after creation
All the shine wore off
You broke your perfect things
Broke them once again
Glued them back together
The excess extruding out
From mismatched jigsaw lines
A pout into the quirk
Of your smile
A wreath around you
As if I mistook
A sapling for a mountain
Teeth of glass
With that diseased opacity
Of expelled liquorice
An aeon’s season
Of scree and debris
The draggled hem
Of summer’s discarded dress
Red dust in your veins
In your eyes
Autumn’s evening amber
I didn’t cry
Til they played
that stupid song again
Kept spelling everything wrong
In the innocuous text message
With unwilling, clumsied fingers
Easter’s discounted chocolates
In cartoon disaffection
From serried array
Numbly watching
The lights in stars
A linoleum sheen
Wrote a few disconsolate lines
Found in them
Little consolation
Everything is strange
Keep calm
This is just the end of things
Remember the smell of stale bread
Toasted until almost burnt
This is our body
An extemporary sacrament
Subluminary in substantiation
Transient, but satisfactory
As another sip of tea
Out the window
Above the swamp
There is a blue sky fat with buttered scones
Around your heels
Stagnant water
And the drone of dragonfly wings
Call life extinct
A breath, a residue
Your woodsmoke heart
Maybe earthquakes make alarms
The whistles of trains hauling rumbling cattle cars
Warn sharply of collision
Here the benches are hard
There is gentle laughter
As dogs sing
Have some jam and cream
Sweet, isn’t it?
My hands fell off today
On Commercial Street
Where I’m not exactly sure
Near the post office
Or the pub, silver dog bowls
On the path outside
With that algal taint
For mongrels dispensing oracles
A lolling tongue and lambent eyes
Lantern bright and bemused as a lamb
Finding in each passing imbroglio
A curl-lipped growl
Or cruel and doting master
– He’ll take yer arm off at the sleeve
If you pat him – I shrug in reply
No hands, you see
Just a raddled sleeve
I think I saw them on the verge
Over there - rat scurrying
But when I proffer, to my chagrin
My much vaunted ignorance
With a vacillating gesture
From the ends
There they are
Pale, sick anemones
Against a tide of mournful howls
In full bloom
Falling
I eat leaves
They have the gritted
Pungency of autumn
As if humus were the mired death of whales
Between the narrows, the soughing shore
Rain tastes like, an oscillating erosion
Breathe, breathe a breath
There is a leviathan
Waiting in your throat
To hail flukes
In a last flung shout
Of escape
