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
It seems so slight a thing
that you waved and smiled
as if departure were less finale
more seaside pantomime
you a painted backdrop
exeunt all except
the windscreen glass
obtuse and thick
as a dead cathode tv
the angular distortion
smalling
in that rough, jabbed elbow way
of laughing sundrowned rivers
bent and glistering
as the fading edges of a dream
don’t you wish
you were never born
you said
then you could stay, then you could stay
all that blood
and living
costs too much
no deal you can make
the road dust licking
at tightrope martyred wrists
in devils as the wheels
groan turning on the sand
a sound like the sea, and you
in this dry rememberance
not yet done with drowning
Rain birds chisel
A heaving silvered sky
I think how
The polish smears reflections
Until just the wake of it remains
In lines as thin as chemtrails
The weather will one day end, you said
With that delphic nonchalance
Of blue emerging from occluded winter
An eggshell’s upturned mask
Exaggerated so
The sentiment is more easily read
Across the vast arena of your thrall
I wonder if the grass
Remembers where you fell
Sways the shape you left
In evening’s bristled yellow
We have a house of melodies
Not regrets, holed like the lace
Of blowsy curtains, a shadow’s
Brief forgetting on your skin
The fabric, thistle dry
When it gentling scrapes
Against your brow, and lips and chin
A genuflection, anathema
On your eyes, another
Involuntary blink
Through dust in sunlight’s sheaves
Almost the start of weeping –except
Gathered around the street
(The drone almost tired) scattered flowers make
A library for bees, the honeyed
Aftermath of thoughts
Dolloped with the burnt wing fragrance
Of returning spring
The rain harangues
Curtails the rags of afternoon
To a kind of twilit comfort
Of these few close held rooms
You are in my sleeve
Sate as other Sunday evenings
Hesitant as a bird
Crumpled as if you were already thrown away
Like the stone the tailor threw
A knit as camouflaging
As any grass-thin shadows
Your voice, close enough
For doves to misconstrue
Still, against the staccato dark
Of shades rigged tight as seabird sails
In any failing storm
I don’t understand
How suddenly you flew
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
Pull at the reins of sleep
you curve away
caparisoned horses
jangling with
a head thrown preen
motes and stars pinwheeling
I thought I had you
the circus brightness
of your smile
the acrobats of laughter
But, a rain dull echoing
of shod iron feet
On the roof
a mocking skeleton dancing
It is hard to know
if redoubts
are weak as second thoughts
The shapes you left in sawdust
now uncertain