Poems are hard as atom bombs e e cummings said one day at the beach wavelets laurels in your hair when Lowell (et al) decried his couth unstrictured voice your words are gulls and there a whale, beached promethean, slowly dying watching its own death with that naive, ancient eye a heart so slow it measures time in intangibles like love songs still, while you tear at the monster’s side tears like quills hoping for the ambergris of too studied convention I will bend my shoulder to a poem in the returning tide watch it with an evening’s shadow grace descend
Magpie & the dead
From the chapel, a muttered kind Of evensong As if the day, chagrined At prosaic hours Divides The door prows a wave Holds still, splits Along the keel Where one boat capsized Two resurface A tilted line, in reflection The horizon bisecting monuments and earth A magpie, creaking out Gives the evening silver They are not the dead But fly languidly from grave to grave Perching on our arch and glib effacements Graffiti thrown like sticks On the gateway’s Unprepossessing defences Songs to silence, songs to wake A boat so full of holes and binds Of curled and flaked wrought iron You could easily step through To a more pitiable contradiction Of discomfiting formal attire In splashed pretty chiaroscuro Head cocked, listening A magpie reverence Dreaming the quiet dreams Of the dead
The sea, one day
The sea eats glass Til glass itself In repose, reflection Far in the swathe Of polished rip Arm upraised Decrying buoyancy I am fastly turning There are thousands Gulled in lines Eating waffle cones On the esplanade Loudly squawking Laved in oil (Or made filthy by) As if the fatted ungulate In herb and festal truss Prepared itself for sacrifice The sea swallows them up Returns most Turns some Into nubs of glass Lost in gristling sands Small and bright as jellyfish Dying in the oil and ice-cream air Now, far out to sea I start dissolving
Woolloomooloo reverie
The war starts in the way You pass by anchored ships Nary a glance, at the rats on the ropes Departing with that verminous intelligence In swift, prehensile fingers Eyes dawn red Salt on your lips Envied by gulls (unequally envious) You discard the mess They only for a moment Fold an outstretched wing A squall to bite The morning a lament The plane of the horizon Tilting a few uncomfortable degrees Dizziness is relative (you think) To the sea in your inner ear Slowly soughing While from an unknown distance (You are still with me?) In the imagined interstice, stars fading in the bruise The world tilts like a toy on its axis
Still the grey gets through
Oh, thunder, you said In that innocuous mid-distance Where meaning both escapes and evokes The lights in tall buildings Play dominoes Until almost everyone has left Rain makes static Too lacklustre for lightning scars Just the nondescript Evening noise Of cutlery and creaking doors Too late not to notice In the paint-chipped plateau Beyond wet-lipped, quick-torn fingernails Half open is not the same As half closed Though the window jambed Still The grey gets through
Murder town prayer
The plaster has a star where your fist made a prayer this town is as ugly as a trucker’s gutful forearms graffiti blue with the thousand-mile stare the surgeon stitched and excised peacock feather sunsets a dead fish nailed to the wall with the silent accusation of failure’s mockful trophy when you fast approach deceleration frenziedly singing as if freedom were just another word all the houses desperately homeless dumped here in sixty-seven in three parts, nail-gunned together with that executioner’s haphazard, abattoir inelegance a monstrous angularity in the canvas, struts and rails of rank and empty perambulators St Anthony’s bloody knuckles when the bluster changes pews filled soon enough the roses by the crooked gate with that scowl and bloodshed hue of the evening opencut gleaming and abandoned the shining, semi-precious stratification of a half a century’s still unhealing wounds
Icebergs & snowflakes
We are all old now Or naively young I turned the word You gave Like clay, separated To nebulous parts Not quite rejoined again Stretched, affixed, addended Made to serve the hollow shape Of as yet undetermined meanings Under the microscope Tears of anger, tears of grief Tears of your everyday failures Are as unalike as snowflakes Melting in the caveats of your face The ice shelf calves The beast on unsteady feet Circumambulating a subpolar current As if an isthmus masked In cruciform Pierrot markings A tedium’s dissolve Slap away the proffered hand Topsy-turvy islands Far from reach
Pharaoh’s autumn laundry
A leaf-curl sneer As if autumn fish-hooked petulance From the wet corner of your mouth Almost lemons The laundry scent Not quite a Sunday seaside Still muggy with The thick damp cloth Of March wrung out Until your paled hands Annoyedly dripping Slip on the too-tight, criss-cross tap Overcast and Creased as deserts Speaking sideways The cement sarcophagus deep Strands of hair and muck As grim as pharaoh’s echoing Coriolis voice Rictus lips and In the darkly narrow drain, a glint
A bee in the honey
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
Minotaur colloquy
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