words & pictures
I nonchalantly threw your coat From the couch to the floor Thought how the trace Of wilted flowers and old books Crumpled like a poem Picked it up again Carefully smoothing sleeve against lapel The faded ring around the fold of cuff Snarkly whispering Into your secret hand As if you wore your dog-eared pages And I in your almost unknown thoughts Still lost
A bit overdressed I thought, it would be cold up here Green parrots and pink galahs On the lawn, amongst bare-shouldered trees Each fossicked seed a new returning soul Borne into uncanny blue In startled opal fire Coins in my pocket (for you know who) The weight of unpaid debts That lock of hair the colour of the dead Swollen gums we used to hide behind Full of street cornered threats and invocations Some broke sticks of chalk to write On the footpaths and the walls Nothing particularly legible Sad and lost and proud held lines With that difficult kind of joy You get in wreaths of disarranged native flowers Coming down, high and desolate ways A cattle truck swagger The blind menace of hungry chrome Eating every crow-crookèd road The hills old dog dun and brindle backed Swaying like a mercy Scythed my mourning face In another town Faraway Nowhere to the sea Through the rust stained eye (Thought of) hurricanes and Carelessly dropped ice-creams Fragments laved away A new day’s shining face An endless broken promise Never going back Got those old commissure scars again From too much hard smiling
The cherry blossoms bloom earlier each year As if the efflorescence bright as the wind Were not a fixéd point in history But brief, new burgeoned summer That burnt our shadows into the bitumen Mistaking prayer for a boxer’s curled up fists The bell ringing out The hollowed temple of the skull Marble blacked and cavern eyed Emptied of all but desperate, whorling signs In concrete, a mocking, splayed-tooth smile Still, we only require paper walls The ink so thin as to be, almost invisible Except in the slaloming golden light Of a lantern’s flinting shadow Gaining purchase In the intaglio The way that desperate fingernails Hold, and hold and hold and slip We only need through morning’s paper walls A slower, gentling sun To read this warning over and over
Aeroplane aeroplane where have you been? I’ve been to Dresden to hunt for the King Aeroplane aeroplane what did you there? I broke the china blue as despair Cattle truck cattle truck where do you go? I go to Belsen for the kino show Cattle truck cattle truck what see you there? I saw your mother in her easy chair Soldier boy soldier boy who did you kill? I don’t know their names, their faces are still Shapeless and sharp and crying and burnt Undoing my days with the mouthed shape of hurt Lonely boy lonely boy where did you go? I went to Hades far down below Lonely boy lonely boy why do you stare? Too old for for rhyming, too young to care
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
