Another sun
appears on the side
of a building block
in a high rise district
West.
You watch it
burn down,
a lit wick
until its great glow

The same congested intersection waits for me every morning. It looks like a roundabout, but isn’t. With traffic coming from every direction, no-one is quite sure of the rules. All the time the tension of impending collision vibrates through the tarmac.   Decades ago a lover had a job planting daffodils in a series of highway roundabouts. I think of him crouching down, hands gently planting the bulbs, the traffic carouselling around him. But he probably just tossed them in any which way, covered them over, thousands more to plant, leaving them to push their way up to the light […]

My father dies in the night That afternoon he said to us ‘get me out of here’ I know this is what the doctors have done It’s called pain killing The next day we go to see him His face is colder than I’d ever imagined   My mother dies at an hour I’m not told It took less than a year She floated on a general anaesthetic up a river I’d never heard of into a small room where at the end she could say nothing   As a child I remember them covering my face and the ticking […]

It is only now, three weeks after your death that I understand in the body, not just the coward brain, loud with cicadas, why we invented the space-walking parents Freyja and Yahweh. For two more weeks in this heatwave summer, in defiance of the huge narrowing of it all you confounded the physicians with their offers of morphine and an effortless exit. You gave us urgent instructions as you hallucinated: German fighters hammering again from the clouds, a 10 by 4 hardwood beam in the roof you were building that might shift without an extra brace. As the temporary rooms […]

He is still the stillest hand, sure that all terrors are palm-sized, can be cupped against the chest like a chick to slow its tapping heart.   He eats the pale heart of a lettuce, grates unpeeled carrots into stew, chews stalks, sucks flowers, pronounces all vowels the same. Marks his page with odd leaves. Leaves marks on screens.   The conch-curl of his right hand, one steel-pinned finger soldered in a rough crescent. He rolls messy cigarettes and lets the smell sprawl over him.   A grip that catches at cock, cat, toe, book, smoke, tumbler of scotch on […]

Bait fed out there, like jazz hands on the lagoon I had to take a closer look. The gobies on the sand scattered before me until the water kissed my shorts, but still the spark meandering frenzy stayed away. Something was chasing them, or circling under them. The sheen of water kept knowledge at bay. I was tempted by what, or whom, to increase my vantage by climbing up a jutting rock, but the late sun kept the water dark. Then something darker, and in motion, I fell back, and shouting splashed away. In the foreground, at my feet had […]

The year the flies migrated south. The year that the fortress of golden porcupines was established impregnable. The year the skin of boiled milk became bitter breath on the young embalmer’s lips. The year that the dead returned and gave small white stones as wedding gifts to the living. The year of fourfold harvests, of wheat in every storehouse overflowing, of ripe fruit rotting before the stonemason’s doorway. The year the snake Eshanuel entered and shed its skin in the second Queen’s bedchamber. The year that the blind priestess foresaw a great gathering of ravens to the west of the […]

Old men in a trattoria. They have sat here since the Etruscans were shoved from the flying buttress of Orvieto, since fly-blown prints were tacked to trattoria walls.   Since the very first dubbed episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos.   Only you draw their eyes from the TV where two bouncing fat people explode through a trampoline.   The old men laugh.   We order a bottle of Orvieto Classico Superiore.   A nearby table fills with young people and you are no longer the only woman in the trattoria.   On America’s Funniest Home Videos a girl blows […]

Ashes in November. & the fanatic burgeoning of a bushfire, the hush afterwards clean as amnesia—its onslaught demarcated by the retreating birdcall. Each spring, through the changing light of the valley, there falls the wondrous rain. Green gowns strew the gnarled roots, sewn with sprigs of holly. Seen from a reverent distance, smoke issues from a rustic cottage jagged as the torn veil of a jilted bride. Over the bald knoll, a choir of clouds uncoil like rumours passed between tongues. In devastations like this, memory becomes the aftermath. The soft-bellied sun nuzzles the lush summer sleeves of the resurrected […]

He stops me dead at a crossroads between day and night— a badger lying on the road as if he is sleeping in his striped pyjamas. I can see his bristled pelt, his snout all gored, the staggered rise and fall of his chest like a troubled engine. I leave the car and approach him, lay my hand on his back.   A porcine grunt sticks in my throat like a question. You have always wanted to see a badger up close but not like this, in extremis, under the headlights’ surgical glare, kneeling in my blood.   No, you […]

for Tracy   Dozens of little black cormorants daylight roosting on the dead-in-the-lake tree with its duckweed halo the suburbs close around them with stilled ibises watching.   These cormorants are florets open and closed, some contemplating difference as close friends dry their wings, the ß-keratins offering sap-flow— dozens of little black cormorants daylight roosting.   Between the lakeshore and an islet, the cormorant tree is preparing for mass ascension, that lift of surprise or agitation, a threat that rows through suburbs close around it with stilled ibises watching.   So many encounters with humans who can’t reach its branching […]

I’ll go to jail for this, the delicate disorder of your night knees pressed against the counter, the pencil-behind-the-ear query of the waitress you left behind, gluing the scene like twice-cooked araldite. I’m dropping this summer and I’m winning all the awards for all the ‘bad sex’ ballads you’ll write in the dial-ahead secret location of our local café. To which you’ll respond with a series of lovingly tailored suits designed to keep all action ever-pending. I’ll use my time in porridge to prepare for our encounter in the cocktail sanctuary. You know you want to run me over in […]