My Storybook

The Sleepers

No map traces the street Where those two sleepers are. We have lost track of it. They lie as if under water In a blue, unchanging light, The French window ajar

Curtained with yellow lace. Through the narrow crack Odours of wet earth rise. The snail leaves a silver track; Dark thickets hedge the house. We take a backward look.

Among petals pale as death And leaves steadfast in shape They sleep on, mouth to mouth. A white mist is going up. The small green nostrils breathe, And they turn in their sleep.

Ousted from that warm bed We are a dream they dream. Their eyelids keep the shade. No harm can come to them. We cast our skins and slide Into another time.

Full Fathom Five

Old man, you surface seldom. Then you come in with the tide’s coming When seas wash cold, foam-

Capped: white hair, white beard, far-flung, A dragnet, rising, falling, as waves Crest and trough. Miles long

Extend the radial sheaves Of your spread hair, in which wrinkling skeins Knotted, caught, survives

The old myth of origins Unimaginable. You float near As keeled ice-mountains

Of the north, to be steered clear Of, not fathomed. All obscurity Starts with a danger:

Your dangers are many. I Cannot look much but your form suffers Some strange injury

And seems to die: so vapours Ravel to clearness on the dawn sea. The muddy rumours.

Of your burial move me To half-believe: your reappearance Proves rumours shallow,

For the archaic trenched lines Of your grained face shed time in runnels: Ages beat like rains

On the unbeaten channels Of the ocean. Such sage humour and Durance are whirlpools

To make away with the ground Work of the earth and the sky’s ridgepole. Waist down, you may wind

One labyrinthine tangle To root deep among knuckles, shinbones, Skulls. Inscrutable,

Below shoulders not once Seen by any man who kept his head, You defy questions

You defy other godhood. I walk dry on your kingdom’s border Exiled to no good.