Five Poems

– then, quiet in the wall

moved along by paraffin lamps

you left for a keyhole of glass;

your ribs and breasts, quite clear

beneath its constellations,

slid behind two strangers' hands.

Knit from cicada chains

to where the earth's rim

stitched the sea to white heat,

we knew it already from flickering leaves…

your hairs' final arousal

blackened the Turkish sand.

In a clutch of yellow and blue spheres

(buttocks, bags, turbans, moons)

a piece of diamante, touched, looms red-hot

on the conscience – green bananas, lychees

blur under the railway arch,

where insolent skies gleam eyeball-white,

we tread forwards through bright puddles,

trail behind us almost three hours

(noted, as only the new notice a stiff mouth's

capacity to still utter words,

their reverberations,

or bats remember their own loud weight).

Years later, whistling while you run the bath

again, carelessly, one loyal foot obeys

without dragging, the stark nature of it

reminds you of last words –

life is indeed ‘rich’, it is ‘miraculous’.

You lie in an East wind

spinning off empty barley fields

in new pink saxifrage collar.

They can't provoke some absences,

and where a master-stroke began

ends in precarious lines

(four are almost entire

some half there

some in a kind of limbo) –

I guess, through criss-crossed light

your bones are just that,

a life's long pentimento

before your mouth enunciates

adjusting to casual quiet,

my near-future's insidious whisper.

It's like devotions real purpose

makes me a listening absentee,

there's nothing but desirous colour

saying ‘Ambrose’, ‘Augustine’

‘Gregory’, ‘Jerome’,

or not ‘there’, but ‘everywhere’.

Seen through an open sash,

what remains (of me, dust),

the lime against cloud cliffs

this quiet August harvest

in a heat-wave's 3 a.m,

is a mere splash of leaves,

the blue cows' breaths and

waking eyes blank drift

slow separating

all enmeshed, silvered

by a bright moon.

Earthed here, rougher, much more

than delicate remembered bones

or even her face's desire

to boulder such impossible loves,

Cassandra, still vanishing

under the weight of natural laws

unable to force things back into place

and all of those eyes still fairground glass,

she disadvantaged, so obviously

that taxi-drivers noticed it

refused her even a no-man's land…

not here by the estuary

nor where a bird hovers

occludes a birthplace of crippled pines

for clouds stiffened like nacre

suggesting all kinds of mortal dangers

or supernatural relief

but under the tree with smashed glasses

embers of chestnut smoking on

boxing hours still held in abeyance.

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