Dinosaurs & Coffee Pots

Montserrat, 1997

Peace burial, where feral orchids roil

On the land, grey as the faith of exile

Given to red minutes and the unborn.

Once, before them, the Christ-made stood,

Wreathed in pink blooms, mangos prophet-fat

On the branch, constellated by passing hands.

They walk in other worlds, otherworldly,

Parting and sulphur still wet in their mouths;

Grief, that orchardless place, searing their backs.

God-weathered, trailing their invisible storms,

They must begin the long work of becoming

Something else, staring at a white expanse

Where nothing is named, where the sky’s animal palms

Have come to rest, anguished in second-sight,

Naked to the Earth’s miraculous violence.

Cepheid

We stand beneath it,

Counting in intervals.

Some of straw colour,

Some of ash, some of gold.

Feel the delay, the pause -

How space opens

Like a diaphragm.

Light always arrives late,

Repeated from memory:

The whirl of a dancer’s steps, unreachable.

Dream-skin, fringed with visions,

Roused with someone else’s eyes.

Lie next to me, even as a trick of the light.

I would make a perfume of your quietness,

Hands water-heavy with cherry, lilac, fuchsia -

But you, the distance, I can never possess,

Your heart of strobing places.

In knowing you, I know how far away I am

From everything else.

I pilot the shape of my body between the

Bright places of your afterimage.

Intervals. Unbridgeable gaps.

Unable to touch.

Still counting.

On Discovering Metalcore

Call straight into me.

Animate down to the bone

So I may carry the things

I cannot hold -

And I awake.

Beyond the dead, provisioned,

Coins cooling sleepless eyes,

Mouth alight, a swallowed sun

And the urge to rise.

Incantations crossfade

Into turntables, turning throats

To torch-bearers blessing

Their own breaking -

And I awake.

Among the first of us,

Palms stained with berries,

Kneeling to the sun my mouth remembers.

I give my flesh to a stone slate,

A percussion of beaks:

Blastbeat, breakdown, bone-pit -

Drum me open so the sky may enter

Until I am birdlike, almost feather,

My spine an instrument of the wind -

And I awake.

Every caw a recollection of fire.

How near it used to be.

How we screamed,

And how that sound remade us,

Alive.

The Iridium Line

That line did not begin here.

A force without an opposite,

Untranslatable, bore down

On the gentle push-pull

Of their bodies, bray and tide,

And struck the brightness from them.

Limestone, pale and insistent,

Keeps the spirals of spirits

Learning the shape of water,

Cavities that clasp air or swell

With young -

Then silence.

Conspicuous, soft.

Minerals that never beared

Unready hearts

Move easily to the touch.

Transient, almost -

The shortest distance between

Two points in space.

A black line of elsewhere,

Dust in the palm

Instead of hellfire.

Empty white stone where a metaphor

Should grow from their deaths.

Cover it with your thumb

Like a child covers the sun.

There is no difference in the end.

From the Yixian Bed

Most of it is missing.

Kinks like a witch’s knuckle.

Three slight strokes.

Nearly nothing.

It was almost a flower,

Reaching, interrupted,

Beyond the wind.

Clutching seed that is more than

Mouthless prayer.

For the first time they scream

Like the great gate of the sun.

The flower opens like a body,

Sweet in the wound,

Ensouled by mortal hunger.

It learns to be consumed

And carried elsewhere -

But with purpose:

The work of wings, brief colours

Torn and cherished in the gut.

The flower opens like a body

To enter and be undone;

To answer for what is taken

Even as it trembles.

The flower opens like a body

And most of it is missing.

Perhaps that is the point.

Strawberry Bank

I turn a boney fish in my hands,

Astonished, mouth parted suddenly

By foul water.

I look so long it loosens

into movement once again,

A silvery wish for a soul

Fletched on a thin spine.

No wonder the sea held its breath

Too long; held too firm a grasp

Testified in glossy phosphorous,

A black so bright I can see my own face.

The Earth has always known

How to grieve itself.

The eye remains,

Unseeing, miraculous -

A small cauldron

To reflect within.

Death is too unkind a name

For this archive,

Memory legible

Only because it could not escape.

Every arc of bone

Finds air again,

A sentence finished

Only because it could not continue.

One surface carrying another.

I couldn’t follow you, but I know the platforms

Emptied in their usual ways.

I know you shut the door with such ordinary care.

I expected something to resist, including myself.

I could talk to you even as the world ends

And in some lives I know I wrote to you.

I rise, wash, and walk among the living.

Its breaking should have left a greater crack.

Should I make a cup of coffee

Or do the other thing Camus suggested?

But he never said that, did he.

It has taken a life of its own.

Gibran said he loved his enemy

By loving himself, and thereby obeyed God,

Just as light is two things at once, as is the fog -

A breath held by a surface of glass.

Clocks turn back and even time is not itself.

Autumn gnaws the Summer open like a soft torch.

What has bewitched us. Which branches grow

At the second-best time to plant a tree.

Instead of your name I find the words of others

In the corridors where we never met.

I wake. I take the bus to work. I write emails.

Nothing on Earth has told me otherwise.

My life has happened out of order.

I rise, wash, and walk among the living.

The wave form, flesh of white fruits

And pre-dawn rain. A taste of open water

That could down you in an inch.

Earth signs mark the southern passages.

Wheat bores from holes perceived as stars.

Asphodels. Yellow-green scents on the tongue.

Speak in triplets like pressing a flower.

Portals of blue and purple, between states,

Before the invention of time gave words to

Our distances. Something pulls at the back

Of my eye, a slip between the red horizon,

Superimposed from another place entirely.

I will tell my children the sky is the colour of pomegranates.

I will show them that the long river’s pull is like walking on the moon.

I will wash them in the slow days between then and now.

A version of me must carry it.

Heist at the Louvre

By the first acquisitions of day-star

They slip out the back, ledgered on yellow

Touches, marked acquis, acquis, acquis,

As if the world could be held by repetition.

Oba’s head. Dendera skies. Dregs

Of Persepolis thinning into breath -

Cut down and cut down again,

Bone-hard to the trade winds that raised them,

Bright as syllables, to meet approaching sails

From other tongues.

Afterimages burn the nostrils like salt.

Their hands could never know the weight.

Grief as a stranger.

Grief as the blue dark

Pressing its mouth to yours.

Grief as an armless gesture,

half-winged, half epoch of the sea -

Or whatever you can take from it.

The Metro tremors

Like a saltwater heart.

Iron in the dark, dragged

By the daggered clasp

In the back of their heads,

Pulling the threads home -

Pulling home from the storied taste

Days throw themselves across the coffee table,

Drapes of gold turned groundwater-blue.

Towels of sage colour, and some of violet,

Return their warmth from the dryer.

A white sofa. A cathedral for the body

I keep leaving.

A hallway mirror. A boy trying to smile,

Still unfinished.

I hum barefoot by the sink, a small

Horizon to circle the watery years.

Old things move beneath the boards and drains,

A leviathan in quiet hours

Eating days that will not die,

Only dim.

Small Boats

Somewhere, a gull speaks an old name for this

Empire of arrivals.

If they come again on horses with white breath,

Just kneel.

Let the ground do its work, mouthed like a black mirror,

Holding, harbouring -

Its tongue the near sea that takes them,

Not with teeth

But the way a mother encloses a child

In sleep.

Let the thighs of beasts quiver in the cold

Before the charge

And kneel, clutched by your own need of breath

Beneath the sirens.

Once, this island knelt in ice and wreckage

To learn how to rise -

How to reinvent the colour green again

And again and again.

Everything here came from somewhere else.

Churched in blue light, even now, its glacial

Palms lift your face

As the charge is led by bearers of strange

Crosses, red on white

Like a lanced deer. Let them come.

Let them arrive.

A girl holds a cardboard sign, a saint

Lifting her own rib,

And the Earth turns.

i. The White Ship

A boy dies drunk. By now, the world forgets

Quickly in hours of strange mercy, folded

Away like an unsent letter. Hold it

Close, this sea that won’t shatter, as it sets

Again, glasslike, on eyes like dimmed planets.

They circle on, detached, within the blue

Tomorrows. In the scratched boards and regrets,

A father learns what water always knew.

Be still, men of old names - names you threw

In chants before the charge. The blood-wet tide

Combs their clotted hair in silver. They sleep,

Bludgeoned, beautifully forgotten; those who

Spat red - and understood: limp sons supplied,

By worm, the silence we are crowned to keep.

Like a sutured body,

I fold bedsheets

As if discovering skin

I never learned to touch.

Shopping bags ferry through the hall

Like small futures.

Eggs, fresh bread, skimmed milk.

Things that last just long enough

To want tomorrow.

I made peace with the door

For never shutting quite right -

So I can do it again.

There are many more things I should do

While silence recedes in over-brewed tea.

I should kiss the floor for holding me up.

I should thank the curtains for a reason

To stand each morning.

But I am still learning how to stay -

Washing plates that can cover the sun,

Scrubbing them free of the afterlife.

Once, I swear I read a quote from Larkin,

Groping for words, sick of heady nonsense,

Where he said the thought of writing poetry

Held all the appeal of growing pineapples

On the moon.

I can’t find it. Hours staring at a phone.

Its only existence is the itch

In my brain that needs to read it.

Walk, and open the refrigerator door.

A small light lives only when I do.

Swing wide across the fake-wood floor,

Pale straits picking corners on the worktop.

A lighthouse towered at the end of the world.

The North Ship has taken my place on the chair.

This is the first thing I have understood,

Walking the cosmos in ragged slippers.

Loose pages spill, skimming boat-like

To my feet as I pinch its spine.

I try to push it back, or hold it in.

I rake leaves

While the sun explodes.

Plummet.

Gravity is nothing more than falling

Back to the first hand that held you.

Red threads of your body describe

The languages of return -

Featherlike. Wingless. Prayers without mouths.

Marks unmade on terracotta.

You look like the scent of watercolour clouds

Traversed by fallen suns

In centuries yet to come. Black on orange,

A shadow too heavy to hold.

Wear the weather like wax, puckering torches,

White-lipped at death’s shoulder,

Carrying the words as if they too were

Stitched to your back -

A question beheld to the sea

Still burning.

The Dragonflies

Ruptured grasses creek to quickened days,

Spool on stony drains filling the distance -

Knots of glimmer while the vestiges wilt.

Violent echoes of life swept aside for life

Traced from memory. Make confession

Where the runoff was dug. Coalesce

Into something not unlike lightning.

Perennials take tutelage of death

Beside their needled emergence,

Air thread to sigils of great exodus.

Learn distinction from breath, evacuated

In shattered skin from the liminal

Plane across the waterline. Awareness

Comes suddenly, spun like coloured glass.

Powerful eyes ensouled so young,

So recently husked by the foot of August

Rewiring its range. Flocks begin to form.

Each of us takes forward that emptiness,

Overexposed, draped like a century

On vacant hands. Water and sky make

Sheer incoherencies of any origin,

Elements with dire recollections

Of falling staved in brief seasons of flight.

Ply the volts in your cells for second suns.

Mark the stars’ automaton in the thrum

Of synapses, foretelling the Orionids

In a lance, metallic and wraithlike,

Torn across my field of vision. Familiar

Strikes. Lensed like hearts. Plummeting, restless.

Light on the precipice before a white world.

Fountains Abbey, Yorkshire, England

I can but look at the hollowed ceiling

And feel the light too generously bared.

Oaths of chestnut tether us. Afternoons

Pearl to alderflies chasing seasons

On the Skell. Remnants of the Holy Ghost,

Heavy as chain, thicken in river-born

Creatures, legion on the blue and the green.

Endless replications of dandelions

See the wave function collapse. All that ever

Was or will be lines the innards of lantern-

Bearing fish in some far-off darkness.

Geometries of cider apples trace

Oceans of pronouns. Their return each year

Is a miracle. We thread daisies

By sunlight we forget to worship.

We could drown in it, drop by arborous

Drop, and grow marjoram where we rest.

It must know an end in order to shine.

Ruin is not ruin enough. Sometimes

The river tries to swallow it again.

Recollections of great ocean reptiles

Nurse millstones in the cauldron

Of their stomachs. Dust is superimposed

On aquamarine and a damselfly

Could be a supernova. How can we

Compare to this, the gift of flight

Replacing itself in an ocean of lights?

Bootprints leave runes in fingerbone

From a god we never named, and all is held