The wound is sunset
volcanic glass
the sea
between the cradle
in the lee
a swell
stretched in a glimpsed hiatus
The cigarette burn you left
still brightly watching
from the harbour
of my chest
A ship with nowhere
but this destination
You said sorry, how you slumped
burnt copper dreaming slept
the way old lighthouses do
The fabric holing
with that mesmer’s grace
Spilling ash and flickered thoughts
the glare clenched in the spasm of your fist
gone wave break lax
Afterwards
for salve a sting, the glassy shine
of long past knotted healing
The grain of sand
in the isthmus of your eye
all that remains
Watchful
in a different glass
(still wide awake)
Of the beach I dreamed
You are semi-aquatic
The silent metronome
Cathected, a pristine serum
In jungle loops
As if you had begun to shed your skin
The translucent arteries displayed
In their machinic glory
Imagining the melodic sound
Slowly drowning
The way Icarus did
The doctor finding
Lodged in your side
With cupped fingers, genuflected
Between crookèd hip and folded rib
Burned from the stitch of breathless running
A kind of knot
Quietly, in amelioration green
Saying, thank the angels and abominations
If the child had not been sick
Treasured, coddled, machined, subjected
Devoured, destroyed, made made
Drowned in the sea inside the sea
He would have died
now I am old
I will shine my shoes
until the leather has
a vexatious gleam
From the caldera
I can see the stars
turning against the heavy blue
of premature evening
Elbow gravelled on my chin
as if time were closer here
fingers hooking a crookèd nape
all extraneous distractions
careless and forsworn
Too tight, the laces
left undone, aiglets
trailing like reckless moons
as I (almost) fall
we slowly spin
If you can count
I will live
on the head
of a pin
or on its point
where the rent is cheaper
Antipas won three break points
at Tiberias stadium, the dead
in their coracles, chagrined underneath
it’s too late to cry
I poured away the milk
the sink’s throat’s ugly gurgling
saliva slick at the side
of your mouth
where every day betrayal sleeps
The wind rails
at everything that stands to oppose it
fly screens stammer
the blue-bottle’s sermon drone confused
how it got to this enclosing side
through the criss-cross interstices
enticed by slow decay
that noxious pyrethrum smell
as if a field of daisies died
to kill a lost insect
We made the shape in bowsprits
Dovetailed, bolted tight
Scrimmed and windlassed in the ink
Of all our oceanly delights
Fifty-six ells long, and the upright
Measured twice, a golden mean
Embedded in the earth
To a sepulchre’s joist
This world and the next
In right-angled tandem
Justice uttered on our lips
Harpooned the beast
With that pneumatic fleeing snake
Watched it vomit up
Ambergris like sacrament
I think perhaps, the drowned preserved within
Found at last release
Drew it up in hawsers
Netted in those snarling knots
That shrink until the rope begins to cut
Block and tackle an ugly face
Double tongued, the bronze
Gone to the verdigris
Of brute seas
In the ichor deep
I am not sure
If the heart
Or time slows
As the weight
Of slumping water
Only that
The swelling aortic arch
Is a bell
Where the silence
Of the god echoes
Under the excruciating beat
Of a slow approaching hammer
Pierced the pale side
For a crown, a strangler’s kelp
The gulls in swooped laments
We will eat this lord alive
Rendered fat in slick fat slabs
from jigsawed hide
That stinking lard
To light the blue-green evening
With a flame’s slight harem dance
Caught in the Salome writhe
Of Antipas’s demand
To keep the god at bay
Watched the monster
Burning bright
For three days and three nights
All came to see, and revel
In his Vitas revelries
After, almost completely gone
Charred vines of rope
Hung from the spars
Still half asleep
The waves in serry knelt
A king tide about the crucifix
The rigs of carnival drowned or gone
I ash blind
Augured, anvilled, awled
On the creature’s back
A sun-gilt morning road
To another sea
Still air breaks
A folded shout
An echo, a chase
A half familiar shape
Always (almost) always catches up
Your mouth is proud flesh
I know you speak yellow flowers
Chrysanthemums, daisies, cicatrix
All sun coloured glowering
Scratched, pierced through, rolling
A grin sunset wide
Chest hard beaten cloth
Entangled scant vehemence
I am that field, over there
The prone face of the hill
Reaped in mown straw
Left to jigsaw the sun
In hard razored angles
Obtuse, oblique
Enough to jangle
The sunburned nape
Footsteps strafing
The clod turned earth
A hole will break you
If you do not
Keep lightly running
Still I am creased
Turned and bent
Crumpled, dismade, thrown and rent
By the origami of your voice
There are birds inside the calliope
I said, when we ran away
To see if the sea
Breaks like glasshouses
Throwing stones
With that sideways trebuchet
Skipped, skipped, subsumed
You bent, bird-quizzically
In your throat
That inchoate swallowing
Of disbelief
I said; look there
Above the rising
Brass of morning
Pipes rayed like the sun
If you turn, just one step away
Let go my hand
The stone still falling
See them fly
I will take calcium from your teeth
Until they are milk and opal strange
Too soft to eat me with
An accusation borne with a bird-bark laugh
My birdsong replies as raw as warnings
Sometimes I feel the mask beneath the skin
Descended from the stranger world
An owlet that you carefully kissed
If I all reasonless wept
Hands against my neck and chin
As if they were his unfurled wings
Here now, away from all such childhood familiarity
Your hands have the eyes of wear
Pulling roots and weeds from raucous beds
Of judas penny and rhododendrons
How with a wringing love
In this embrace they watch
Measuring pale skin with callouses
I do not remember lullabies
Only a lost and dreamful sleep
Your morning voice still echoing
Insistent as a sunrise
Days slip by
I didn’t know
Your face was mired
Til I saw
An animal’s mask
Of rivulets through ochre
When you wept
The women talking
Over wire fences
Hair tied up for war
Rattan, acrylic, linoleum
Didn’t see your fall
Staccato cattle grid voices
The dye fading
The death truck’s passing roar
Of furious evening birds
Leaving, staying
I don’t know which way fled
Just reed-boned silhouettes
Gone in the almost dark
Grit cast in the footpaths of our faces
The washing line creaks warning
In the aftermathing silence
Cries and sunsets
Thin as guttered water
