words & pictures
I will wear my morning coat Buttons not half as big as the moon Done up crooked and crooked done down Till troubled as Sunday afternoon Against my nails the tick-tack sound That she only understands In her chagrined gleaming I turn skywest my crinkled brow Beg of her a brief blessing Feel her calming breath and hand Cool my cumbered thoughts awhile Smooth as the nightsea’s far lapped sands Sleep warm inside my sleeves
The bed falls towards the centre of the earth
Beyond the roof’s reptilian back
There is something earnest
In the dust of stars
As if the night’s sparse rigour
could sustain your waning exhalation
Until you were empty and it was full
The rumbling descent of slowing cars
Occludes your ghosting breath
Lights an alien red
As if you breathed out
Another world
That
In dark obscured distance
Still running you breathed in
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
The underside of the table Has colours like the Sphinx In one of those arch Murder mystery telemovies Where white men in white suits Pontificate on how the Mamaluk Beys were defeated by Napoleon With the help of an ancient desert curse Discovering Thebes, Dendera and Philae In the wake of Janissaries fleeing Their horses hooves curving up A sandstorm’s furied face For the uncomfortable planar shapes Of magic carpets to ride on Eating the uneven edge As if the broad, contemplative forehead Of Africa had a migraine The pry ram ids seen from space tack sharp The women pouring jewels In elegantly panelled dining rooms Of cruise ships much too big For undredged river beds Discussing losses at baccarat With the vestal aplomb Of supremely innocent naïveté Prophets in reed baskets Floating amongst the crocodiles Muttering chemin de fer Derricks and dirigibles emerging From a postcard landscape Smoke haze from the burning A pink stamp on the wood Almost wholly illegible As if the substrate were once Prime meat, now the ancient dead But curled up quietly Amongst the galleried forest Of laminate and spindle legs The close carpet smell With the noisy zigzag pattern So full of time Nevertheless a safe place to sleep At least For a little while
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
The morning has holes Like a summer leaf Withered by all those excesses The swelling lymphatic process Curtailed again, in that shirking act That ebbs in sacrifice Closes, a bent fist Inside the marble of your eye Thought you had turned the world Inside out, the moon-thin meniscus Serpentine and fluttering, in return from sleep For that, the ocean dark below All the pooling magma Defying sunrise (you said the name Of some lost shape) Between wakefulness, and The still suffused surface
