A Bird In My Sleeve

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

Autumn’s Horses

I put my hand out, like a fire
accept


yours is gentle, with that
tremulous shake


of fallen leaves
turning slowly
to the bronze of earth


beyond the dunes
of your shoulder
saw in the unevening sky


the roundness of your disapproval


afternoons as lithe as cats
I imagine    
you always have that face


a prosopon, de rigueur
downturned at a scrap of yellow


there are foals in autumn’s colours


the leavened wind
has an insistent touch
as soft and irrevocable as Midas


steam plumes their nostrils and furs their backs 
in their gait, unconstrained machineries


take sudden flight


(as you turn, come back inside)


the evening spills her horses

Beachcombing

There in the seance 
of pewter dark
and falling afternoon
I ran from the rain child’s father 
snail shells eye empty
seismic, abrading, polished sutures grey
skulls in catacombs
tumbling, unmade 
with that peculiar, watchful nonchalance
of sacrifice gone too far into neglect
the gods respond
with neither grace nor storms 
but the dinosaur fragments
of fossil nacre, edges inviting
pressure against, the too soft mollusc
silent, salt and piercing
pedestal like a kiss
lightning fragile (immediacy erased)
in the afterimage inverse
of the slowly leeching beachcomber’s
lope long passing steps