Only sky,
Only a cloud
Running
February, rue Labat
So you waited in that room,
The hours passing gently,
Ceiling speaking in a dialect of cracks,
Anemones breathing in their water,
Suggesting violet and red and pleasure:
That your solitude bear fruit,
That you invent the freedom to be free,
That in sleep your heart might press
Like some small animal against your ribs,
Towards the comfort of another pulse,
Until, exhausted with the effort of colour
Against the unreasonable neutrality of sky,
No longer with the strength to close at dusk,
They let you understand this choice:
That you can cling to your petals
Or let them go, bright and moist,
To the table, or the earth,
And so, standing naked, call that death.
Then, without shoes or map, you set out
To find, in all the world, the flower
That passes with most grace.
The Silk Road
What better market place
Along this long silk road
To spend my love than in your heart?
So go on, drink of my devotion.
Thick and salt, it swills in your gut.
I know. I too have sucked
From my camel’s throat
To cross this desert.
Bedouin nights I come to you in your goat skin tent,
My gourd overflowing,
To wash your feet in my need.
The stars cannot spin wildly enough to drown me out.
By day I lose myself in the bazaars,
The bolts of cloth, the poisons, aphrodisiacs,
The soft tongued rumours.
There are rivers running deep beneath these sands,
But we lie down to roll in the dust,
Our passion clamped between our teeth
Like gold coins.
Arroyo
Compañero,
Look at you lying there,
Your sad, sinewy length.
What use was it to offer you
The tenderness of roots?
You who thirst
For the swiftness of clouds,
The quick, hard rain.
What can touch all of you
Must pass.
Moth
You cannot say
You did not know,
Those singed nights
Spinning in the dust,
One wing gone
And half your six legs spent.
But oh, that flame,
How it held you
So sweet
In the palm of its light.
Salmon Running
Who isn’t driven
Up the estuaries
Of another’s flesh,
Up rivers of blood,
To spawn close to the heart?
In Opposition
One moon between us,
Two seasons,
What else?
A few stars,
No wind.
In these moments
When we both walk,
How odd,
How we stand
The soles of our feet
Touching
Almost
Only the planet’s breadth.
After
We are there, on the hillside,
Evening coming down.
And you begin to lean
Against some longing
Till it shifts,
The whole stone weight of it
Begins to roll,
To thunder.
And I cannot move,
I cannot make my body
Step aside.
I cannot.
And after, when the night grows still again,
I settle on my back
Saying only, How sweet,
That fresh crushed meadow scent,
Not saying how my heart leapt
Like the small frogs
In the tall grass
After Max Ernst
For one long day we were like that,
Our fingers pierced with heat,
Our bodies, horses, ranting
On a squall of wings,
Our hearts, what?
That caged bird in the deep wood,
One wide eye?
But that was only part of what we were.
The rest, calligraphy of the east,
No images, no pigments,
A single stroke,
The brush lifting cleanly
From the page.
Like Eels to the Sargasso Sea
It was so easy,
Each first taste of salt,
Each coming to that sea
Where our bodies break
Like light
On the surface
Still
We are not what we were
When we began
In river mud.
It seems all voyage now
Between the poles
Of love
And breeding
And something
We may never know:
Beneath us
Continents are slipping.
To the Fig Tree in the Garden
Fig, you shameless tree
You totem pole
Of buttocks, torsos, thighs
And slender midriffs
Dimpled, labial
And sweetly cleaved
Your leaves
Those symbols
Of eternal modesty
Hide nothing
But the sky
Coming of Age in Foreign Lands
Me on the shores of icy lakes,
In stands of unkempt spruce
With moss and undergrowth and no one
Singing but a whitethroat,
Where a road sign north reads home,
And spring is a month of snow.
You in a Sunday world of hot siesta streets,
A cool pineta with its stray dogs,
Old men playing cards,
And restless cousins lying about girls,
Where spring is a place on a mountain slope
Above the town,
A shepherd comes to drink.
And when the sap begins to rise,
Me in a sugar bush
Of straight backed maples, swelling buds,
And vats of syrup simmering,
Tray of drizzled snow in mittened hands,
And a Saxon soul,
That makes me swallow all the untouched white
Before I taste the sweet.
You in your grandfather’s garden,
Those trees, your sisters
With their taut and slender limbs
Pouring their milk
Into the warm breasts of figs,
You, knowing with your tongue
Their fine blue skin,
Their sex,
How they swell and soften,
Like shadows,
Like sleep.
Chess Game in a Garden
Under the breath of roses
We lie
In a summer of white words
Knotted like clouds,
I on my back
Watch a bee crawl up
Into the bonnet of a blossom,
Back my queen into a corner,
Feel the power you command
Hold me in the cool cup of its hand.
The flowers lean in on us,
Touch us.
I turn
On my stomach,
Watch the grass blades twitch,
Watch your knight leap up
Tap down
Felted base on a bare board
Champing for space.
We move at angles
Guarding our strategies,
Our pawns,
Our pain,
Our claim
To a blue streak of wisdom
On a windy day.
It seems to me the kite
Has all the fun,
The view,
The weightlessness
The wind,
Ecstatic shudders,
Tail streaming out,
The urging higher,
The exhilarating dives,
And me down here,
Left holding the string.
Family Reunion
One day out we stop for lunch
In a diner in a college town
With windswept streets
Where my sister was once a small boat
With painter snapped
Drifting far off-shore.
We crowd around the little table,
She and I, our parents, and her husband,
And she holds her baby on her knee
And fills her daughter’s cup with milk.
‘I lived upstairs from this place once,’ she says.
It stops me short.
I half remember visiting her,
Listening to records in an upstairs room.
But I was already under sail,
Out beyond the harbour’s mouth,
And know so little of her days
Those years.
My sister is the anchor now
We all swing round,
Our lines long and loose.
Moored together this one week of nights,
Our gunwales bump and splinter in the dark.
Futura Vecchia, New Year’s Eve
Returning, like the Earth
To the same point in space,
We go softly to the comfort of destruction,
And consume in flames
A school of fish,
A pair of hens,
A mountain poplar with its moss.
A shiver of sparks sweeps round
The dark shoulder of the Earth,
Frisson of recognition,
Preparation for another voyage,
And our own gentle bubbles
Float curious and mute
Towards the black lake
Boiling with light,
Towards the sharp night
Whistling with sound.
Eating Bouillabaisse
She sets the platter on our table:
Pool abandoned by a tide.
The silver scales of our spoons
Flash across the shallows of our bowls
Gathering the threads of flesh.
She tells us all their small fish names,
As if they once had been those words.
And we cry out like seagulls,
Scavenging them for our conversation,
Soft tongues sparring with the bones.
Radiology South
In the dim room
He adjusts the beam,
Projecting squares of light,
Like window panes,
A bit Magritte:
Blue and white flower field
Of the hospital robe,
And all my living bones.
Midwinter, Baffin Bay
How you have longed for this, exactly:
The impossibility of doing all the things
That spring up like weeds in green places.
Absence of axes,
Only proper time,
Internal dark,
Absolute space.
Just your lamp on the snow
And things becoming slower,
And more generous in their infinity.
Yet still you put your back to the pole,
Face to the solstice,
Waiting for the light.
Yosemite Valley:
Coyotes Running through a Sleeping Camp
No matter how perfectly the moonlight
Touches your high blue walls of stone,
They will always be running
Deep under the pines,
Their mad feet skimming over fallen needles,
They will come like a cloudburst
Drenching you in their sweet high sound,
And you will wake for a moment
In terror and in joy,
Their quick cult pulsing in your blood,
Then go on living.
Returning to Camp
I have gone among those rutting
Stamping wind-blown men
Out on the fields of heat.
I have felt their voices hammer
Like the stone axe,
Felt what it is to feel
That need of ligament
To arc the body as a bow,
Unsheaf the bones
And send them flying
Hard into the haunch of space.
And oh how I have loved
To let my spindle rattle
To the dry earth,
Let the soft thread snarl,
Let the grain go ungathered
And unground,
Let even the hot flame perish
In its greed.
But you, my sisters of the hearth,
Without you, there is no returning.
Hanging out his Boxer Shorts to Dry
In truth, it is a privilege to have a man,
To go with his linens to the river
Like the Pharaoh’s daughters,
Like the King’s maids
The day they found Odysseus
Washed up on the shore.
I love their company.
I love those days,
A warm sun,
A promising breeze,
The smooth, sprung wooden pegs,
And crisp, white boxer shorts
With two small buttons at the waist.
I love to set them sailing out
All down the garden,
My private regatta,
My flags of surrender.
Beauchamps: Renovations
I loved the space you held within your walls,
The shouldering beams,
The creepers standing out along the stones like veins,
The moist and private places,
Rare, so shy, so easily dispersed,
The shadow from a fallen tile, where a fern took root,
And high above, the sunlight
Sifting though a loose weave of wood.
When you have borne our urge to resurrect,
The sting of hammers,
Sharp sorrow of a sapling stump,
A raw crack in weathered stone;
When you’ve become our architecture and assemblies,
Something more ourselves than other,
Let us not forget one summer night,
The bonfire high, the old beams blazing,
How we sang and danced,
Our shadows flying on your walls,
How we lay down beside you
In a bed of straw and stars,
And listened to your close breath,
The settling of a stone,
A tile falling in the dark.
The Ballad of Just and While
Although I am about to drop,
I’ll just do this before I stop.
I’ll dust the stairs, put out the bin,
I’ll bring the still wet washing in.
A woman’s work is never done:
I’ll finish something I’ve begun.
But one thing’s not enough for me.
With ‘while’ I could be doing three.
And ‘just’s’ a wedge to squeeze in more.
(Excuse me, I’ll just sweep the floor.)
It’s just the same at work as home.
I calculate, I write, I phone …
But things cannot go on this way.
I think I’ve done enough today.
Let while be something outside me:
The turning earth, the waving sea.
Let just be me upon some beach,
Just sorting pebbles w
ithin reach.
The Still Lives of Appliances
They know hours of frustration,
Cords curled, tense, along the counter,
Switches itching,
Filaments recalling heat,
Cusped blades aching
For the soft flesh of fruit.
But what eludes them
In their bursts of solitary purpose,
(Acts one might mistake for violence)
Is the recipe, the greater scheme,
The contentment of the big box
The refrigerator humming
With the secrets, the contentment
Of his cool interior.
OncoMouse, Kitchen Mouse
Mouse, whose cousins gave
Their many lives for me
Under the needle and the knife,
The awful antiseptic smells,
Whose little bodies
Manufactured murine things
That learned to fight my battle
In my blood,
Here is my kitchen.
Make it yours.