17

Hands cupped for rain
Like the pale, ivory
Throat of an orchid.
The sour water holds
Its structure so long.
Then a flower of light
Breaks on the stones.

*

The helicopter burned
For a moment across
The night, then faded.
A broken dragonfly
Tumbled in the grate
And became a cinder.
One was wished on.

*

The dead, ancient star
Shone. The dog went
Underneath the porch.
A guy came out, and
Smoked. The cigarette
Didn't know it burned.
There is a name for this.

16

The door of the cafe is wide open
to the storm. A bearded man
in a nest of his own clothes
grips a coffee cup. Grey eyes
break open his morained face.

*

In the canopy the monkeys sleep.
A shape stares from the arms
of its mother and the rain falls
and its eyes are black orbs.
Droplets break on the leaves.

15

What a contortionist is God

A man standing on the corner
—The fixed beam of the street-
Light a quality of his clothes—
Performing tricks of horror
With his pale, beautiful hands,
Reaching inside the body
And pulling out his own organs,
Holding to the yellow light
Ruby shapes of kidneys
And the coal bright heart—
Whole arm through the ribcage
To reach and clasp the skull
And turn its face to the crowd
—The lungs unfold from the torso
Like a pair of opalescent wings—
He turns the skullcase out,
Endless coloured strings of stars
Fall rippling to the pavement,
And the limp skeleton of a rabbit.

He goes up on great wings
And they call to him questions.
But he reveals no secrets.

14

Is there a world beyond me tonight?
Action seems a catastrophic thing
As if these forms in motion
Were being pulled apart by horses,
A horse of the past being born,
A shade-horse of the dying future.
The event is dismembered—comes
Charging on the cusp of something
To only whinny broken into dark.
All our little life seems a flail
As some passenger is being thrown.

Yet as I sleep I see a pale mare
Tumbling out of trees into meadowgrass
And the dew shining in the dark
Some confluence of lesser galaxies
And the mare twisting dextrously
In the starlight—then I know motion,
Know the heavens are somehow bridled—
Somewhere a light is coming on.

13

Oh, carry me
The night has fallen away behind.
I am but a body of starlight
In your arms, phosphor elaborate.
My mind is giving of itself
Into the ocean dark out there
Where Capricorn is dancing.
Carry me, my skull is light,
Seems uncoupled from itself,
Like a newborn's.
                              A cold potato,
Rooted in the sodden black earth,
Speaks to itself of universes.
What do I know of rot?
That it is a death unknown,
A seed perhaps of the cosmos
Of which I have only grown.
Carry me aloft, into the rafters.

12

The hand at the piano
Is a wreckage never consumated,
All prodigal motion,
As light falls through branches,
Dappled song.
What is is now gone:
We are yet subject
To delay, are attuned
To the woman typist
Clattering—still—nightbound,
Who becomes mechanism,
Who dreams a music of machine
And while dreaming, moves.

The hand falls, and its sound
Is momentum.
The chord is struck, the word.

11

Religion is a complex fear
And suffering its engine.
The convulsion of a doe
Caught in brier, immanent
To the wolf's rusted jaw,
Is species of a prayer.
Suffering is a sculptor
And a kind of God,
The death in struggle
To which life is tantamount.
A brief, animal, deathly fuck
Is a natural thing: a breaking
Of water over the rocks.

10

"Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof."

Seed-carriers are we: ephemera
Cast up on the shore of this earth
As our birth is dragged out to sea.
Spume of man, of froth, on sand.
A shape that falls off behind,
Thirsting at the air, integral
Of nothing, but simply there
like a shed, white snakeskin.

If death is becoming
What living future can there be?
Only the tide and its fruit
And the high chambers of the sea.

9

They pulled them from the bulkhead
In shirts with bowties & tophats
Heaving them free, embracing them
Like late arriving guests at a ball.

Further out, moving with the swell,
Some more with shawls of red
& crimson cummerbunds & cravats,
& tongues fat with salt, livid blue.

They went naked in Chelmno, 1942.
Hiroshima & Nagasaki were undressed.
Vietnam, a child wore a shirt of fire
That left her nude enough to rest.

No need of costume to expire.

8

The idlest gesture of an arm,
However slight, is born
Of some livid tissue's catastrophe.
Human action, seeming free,
Is finite engine of a subatomic will.
Only death is still.

We are prodigies of helpless motion,
As breakers to the ocean—
The disjointed music of a limb
Plays at the world's whim.
For all our intermittent grace
We are a spastic race.