The dead rehearse looking alive
all the time hop into view when least expected daylily peach, or flashes of red in black,
beaks polished with worry wings scattering dust in an effort to be noticed. Sometimes, mostly at night they escape glass, iron, wood, paper, granite, skulls
Dear Ghost My children left a memorial of feathers in the green stone wall, praised the warm loam beneath the coping-stone. I was an ugly,
dead amphibious thing,
you carried me home like kill.
I found evidence of my life in the gaps between ancient stones and
blood cleaned
Fainting I Follow
Who - why - when – how did I follow you to the margin so extreme that to list your perfections would not exhaust me and to think of your body,
to study it like a scientist on a wild hunt
for vital evidence through the night, in a storm - for I cleaved to you,
came to know your contours, pelt, and stink, to hold
where you were most wounded; what I dreamed, though
is impossible to recall. Just ahead of me, always,
you seem, creature, to be preserved, moveable, eternally lost to me, bloodlessly tame.
It all starts with light - how a face shines
from the shadows like the dream of a saint the way wood comes from the world scolded by wind and rain,
before it joins and serves us in flat offerings -- it all starts with fruit
a human hand takes it from the tree
Satsuma, Ortanique, Okitsu, Minneola, Clausalina, Fina, Marisol, Clemenvilla covered, in cool crates above the clouds in vessels on the routes of birds
to reach us in our Christmas ravings and regrets, orange and green like Ireland
shadow and light as marriage
wax coat and flesh, sharp rind and sweet juice the promise broken once the appetite sets in.
Punctum
I recognise how this childish arrow pressed with deliberate study makes measurements of loss. None of us can look away from the bulls-eye
or the fear that this vermilion “O” - is a love letter or mouth of grief - for someone who will not read it. Perhaps it’s a warning
to the faeries, to stay away or a confession,
it will paralyse anyone who sees it;
fix them in the circle of blood stuck on the picture window.
Dark Secret
O forced through my breath, I rose solitary to the day
thou, the beat in me art draws me fast away sick with visions the shadow that is not invisible, nor your mirror worm-worried by the rot that death did not divide us flies like the guilt of dust in sure speed of faithlessness the lack of hold, what’s lost. Night lapses into sleep, into sorrows’ absences
the unspoken frames of darkness howling weather, broken senses storm, wreckages, consequences.
*
Has she started her day already – found it much simpler to be miles away out of the bindings, vows, ties
thy, thee, thou – your bed, you both made
of your bodies in the crimson dusk
joy exhalable and
his kisses dark, her
secret buried in his bones – ? love like an arc light
does its work well, thy dreams extinguished: life happens and happens, to
Crown
Perhaps she’s the cousin of the mother of God, her veil fallen in a moment of divine grace as she feels her child move.
Behind her the façade imitates the cross. Perhaps she’s Mary herself, hair snow white with shock at seeing him crucified?
Perhaps she’s a wife shaking her hair free as she remembers the Liturgy of the Word between
he came down from heaven and became incarnate of the Virgin Mary and
he became man
she recalls the instruction in the text all bow, it says
The Letting Go
as I remember we were freezing in high rooms,
worn out on Monkgate like old
persons rehearsing a winter marriage, and the day after,
in resistance to sorrow, we tested pain through new objects, a
spoon sometimes or formal letter or toy to weigh the feeling like ink in a reservoir, how it comes out in blots and stains.
I remember the music you played, its warmth in the room – rehearsals, repetitions –
snow – – filling the flat roof below our kitchen window. First we held on to each other until the
chill of the season entered your heart then I slept through dark nights in a stupor until your green bones stretched, then you remembered the path and the way, the pilgrimage you had to make, the urgency of letting me stay behind, your insistence:
Late Meeting
When you asked about
ballistic stretching with therabands I knew there was no future in it. I asked you to repeat the words just for the pleasure of your voice. I paid my way and left the tip. All the way home I assured myself that twenty years changes a face: without the fright-wig and pan-stick I couldn't be sure it was you.
Pilgrim after Tom Wood
(for my son, leaving Liverpool, Jan 2018)
“the Photo mat always turns you into a criminal type wanted by the police” Roland Barthes The first time I took you
further than the local shops my skin was still loose my bones precarious,
on our first morning journey to the river through the exhalations and dirt
of the bus terminus to a café where old men
face the same way without speaking I took you to sit in a machine, turned a potty-plastic seat to its highest setting
closed a rough textured curtain to record my disappearing face.
Look how separate we were, even then. You – balanced on my lap
wrapped up tight against the cold. I took time to read instructions thinking how good it was that no one could see my uncertainty or fear.
You were my infant accomplice, my alibi. I held you close and waited
until four damp frames appeared, identical, upside down.
Like all new mothers I needed to find an image to study and imitate, to avoid detection.