words & pictures
Caught a blue day On a sharp paper wing Thin throat a-howl Until the looped string Broke with that strange Updrawing weight Of a new jealous wind’s Stray trumpeting Gone almost too high Almost to glass Almost as thin As the last shard In your blue orb’s Sun struck glance No longer you No longer me No longer see Gone paper thin A scrabble of ink Through translucent skin
You are the silk Of the daybreak sky The night’s bruise fading Summer is skintight The ceded shape See-through and splitting Watchful with The shells of yesterday’s eyes The husk of armoured life No longer needed Stretched autumn loose You ask, looking up To see what I see What is there left in the empty blue? I feel the breath of wings We drift far apart As fast approaching winter afternoons
You scowl, with that wire coat hanger angularity At castoff people, cuffs and elbows askew Hung on racks in rows marked clearance End of line, stock discontinued, as if Evolution had reached a point Where adaptation were, not now impossible But moot, it is the phenotype that, so often Sways the genotype, but now department stores All look, almost exactly the same One day, I suppose they will fuse my spine With robot wires and cyanoacrylate I will lay, by the crooked looming weight Of an old ghost gum, who bent to weep The noon still river, shades all who choose to sleep But may only ever reach in reflection Still, we wait, a long season To weave new lives and baskets When with that swelling, whispered voice The river rushes bloom
