words & pictures
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
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
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
