January 2012
1 post
...and I couldn't forget
Waking,
the valley crusted with frost,
sun slicing the shadowed grass,
deep sky streaked
with vapour trails
curdling memories, left on the saucer
what do you do with three
pure days? trees are on the ridge,
squinting in the haze of the sun,
mistletoe clotting the twiggy arms
fogged behind
dirty train windows.
The last night in Bath,
she comes through the Pulteney
sluice gate arches,
a...
November 2011
4 posts
the closest thing to angels
November fog blushes between the trees,
does death conceal a green promise in its branches?
Trying to see comfort in the dilute sun slipping
its coins of light through impassive sky.
My hair falls out in three tangled knots.
The day will slump dark before we all get home.
I keep thinking about how they said berries
on the bushes so early meant a hard winter, or how
I wish I could have told...
dreams are sweet / men are kind (until they...
Well you were right about him
it takes years to bury a phantom dog
when it runs away to die
not quite sure if
he ever looked me in the mouth
in the underworld,
the seeds took, and died away
on my rocky spine
I read too much into
a baby’s warm head in the crook
of my dream,
a moon crowning
through the taut sky
- in my mind I’m the one
still putting ice on your bonfire burns
one kiss of my...
shepherd's warning
For a moment it looked as if
the fire were going to get out of control.
A creamy smoke balloon
strained into the neighbours’ trees,
and the pigs grew quiet.
A helicopter flew over.
The farmer was thinking the same
when he looked over at her
and they didn’t speak.
safe
Once more waking up
in the middle of a resurrection,
I beg only for you
and again my head
rested on your fragile breast,
satin pajamas which you wore to death.
September 2011
2 posts
vinzel
September glimpsed
through the open back of my black dress
unbuttoned, strung up
by a single wire hanger
the homemade abortionists’ kind
there’s noise through the balcony doors
city cars, in country lanes
passing the pregnant vines
with their fat roe clustered
in the lower branches,
I’ve seen nothing yet
for such a deflowered traveller
my clothes still smelling of...
a glacier
The mountains leave me cold
precarious silences
and the brown blood-beat
of a river beneath the dull ice
that long low breath rushing
from a lofty hell
that sickening shudder and swing
of a stopped cable-car.
August 2011
1 post
promener
When you’re there
I’ll only wonder
and the sun settles
like a swallowed bomb,
a nuclear meltdown
no one thinks
to run from
will we learn
to be frightened of each other
and the crimes we’ve done?
My floorboards
and yours,
under sinking sun.
I’ll dwindle too,
slip into my dusk
spilling all
with my loose tongue,
and the crack of a bird
in the wood
would come
if you wanted one.
April 2011
1 post
lips on your warm skin
It’s evening, the light is lunar,
the sky’s long brushed tails
draped like silver stoles on the
sagging hills,
metallic sun
burning from a tight-lipped wound
in the clouds.
My eyes squint from the glare.
You are always my winter,
turning chilly in rough blue wool,
shivering chapped-lipped by the car,
sun buttering in like a blade behind the eyes.
Unweaned, suckling from the teat
of...
February 2011
1 post
mother hunger
When I am alone with myself,
half naked, the sun coming in
that seems ever less intent,
blowing open the curtains, slowly,
I go between love and despair
for my permanence;
how I never change. The same face,
the same mine behind my eyes.
I wish someone would say
I carry the weight of the world in
the slope of my shoulders or lips,
that my body manifests
like a wound the loss that caves...
January 2011
7 posts
objects
We shared a Remington hairdryer
but it blew out a few weeks after she died.
There was a burnt smell, and the hot air scream
died down, forever, with her.
slow go
the night my feet went naked
on the sea,
walking my reflection on
the crisp crochet moon,
my mouth made you,
sandman
like the kiss of a name,
the mooring of a shoulder.
I lay down
in the thought of you,
dunes for my pillow
where the dotterels
shrilled.
while the sky slowly burns me
How sordid is the raw earth
above your body,
the plastic pink flower
on another person’s grave,
the jar of brown water
and floating stems.
I walk in the rows
while the sky slowly burns me,
and makes me sweat.
I touch the thigh of a white angel
at the door of mausoleum, but
I’m afraid to
touch her face,
hairline-cracked. How sad
are the sunken-in crosses
and cracked...
melaleuca
in the estuary there are nymphet girls,
slim-bodied, with doe limbs and navy swimsuits
that cross over on their fauny backs.
they’re gliding on the
insistence of the tide, facedown
in the water, snorkel masks
suckered to their cheeks. and they
drift into my ankles, and they startle
unselfconsciously. I remember
to remember them,
twin mermaids, unafraid of
crushed jellyfish...
j'oublie
In the sea
of my sleep,
I drifted up,
a raw body
surfacing into the dark,
hands slow
to my face -
yes - I felt
tears that woke me
from
sad dreams
I don’t recall.
a room burning
The light passes through him,
passes between
the rooms of my heart,
blind corridors he
navigates by night
for a glass of water.
He frays open like a sewn mouth,
bandage unwound,
soft scream beneath my palm -
I let him in,
where the other feet walked across
my welcome mat,
subservient hands on the floor
and creeping out of bed.
In my imagination,
he cries about innocence
and sad...
phosphorescence
Stepping out over the sand in the dark,
we let the water soak our jeans;
organisms of light circled
around our feet,
came, with each wave
we questioned God.
The cliffs draped like curtains into hell,
black and all-swallowing
in our grainy eyes, looking out - there to eternity,
which seems so much closer
in the rising night beneath our
clumsy voices, our heels
in the flaccid bodies
of...
November 2010
4 posts
bad desire
In a bedroom, surrounded by shadows.
Night eyes, the grains of light
and tree shapes touching the wardrobe.
I froze you, mouth awe-shaped
in dreams that repeated as I rolled over.
I gave up waking, to hear your brain beat
like a veined fruit, where all your love lies.
weird fish
I am simply swimming away,
my feet never touching the pool tiles,
my fingers skimming my liquid hair,
between my ears, an ocean.
my devices
A moth flies in, from the corridor of cloud
lit up by the moon a few doors down.
Oh! the things I could do, when I had to.
My cold clean hair makes the pillow damp,
the meaty moth hums, his grey engine
smoking in my lamplight.
I miss you, I miss you.
Calm black shadow on a corrugated fence,
the ivy and the washing line,
it’s not impossible to do.
I’m your rabbit that lurches forward
into...
grey
This is always the right place to start.
When I began to bend,
an old friend touched and touched
my soul that billowed around.
I can’t find the words for his arms.
I take it away from myself. This is
about the obscene cardboard and tins,
the pinkish splashes on skin or floors,
and the scuff marks and the sheen.
If I carry it in my hands, I’ll spill.
Things smell of dust...
October 2010
4 posts
interiors
Be anything, but don’t be what you feel.
Your eyes wincing against the sun,
your hair tight against your scalp,
pulled this way/that. Come to shore and the wind
picks up, whips you cold and old.
I am on my hands and knees inside my head.
In the mornings, I arrest her brown sparkling eyes
before they can tear out my heart.
self-timer
Subject matter: self, at a teetering age.
Self, in skinny furs, enamel brooch slipping off
sagging blouse, an avalanche. Self asks self,
are you okay. There is no need to be.
Harnessed clutch of hair, trailing over shoulder
as a bundled animal. Self is ruptured open
by the cold. Confused lambs die in the dark,
petrified in snow. Little stiff blankets,
the next day they are piled high.
...
foreword
I touched your waxy skin. It was empty because you had left,
and it was cold in the morning to my kiss.
You left many times,
down the uninterrupted street, into the earth’s open eye.
I strain towards you on my leash,
I lick my lip until it bleeds.
There is a horror. There is a pleasure, a relief. There is your body,
slowly put to bed. There are petals that the wind pushed
back into...
a funeral poem
I don’t remember your womb,
or growing like a small pearl between your shells.
In my thoughts I search for your voice,
young and open, full,
before the cup spilled.
It was another time – before all this,
the gradual collapse of grief,
a five-year landslide,
that subsides and lets you fill your lungs again,
thinking, how alive everyone else is…
how warm, and animated, and constantly...