28

God is good
It is a beautiful night
The bent flowers
Are bathing in their own light

Lost Jack is sleeping
In the hollow under the wood
His mind a little fire
A little flower God is good

These small hours
There are sparks in the brier
A soft bloom creeps
Over the sleep of the little sire

And the dream is far
And the brush is light
God is good
It is a beautiful night

27

They took the bones
In the shawl and tossed in
A handful of feathers
And red earth
The sun bowed into it
The light was a mess among
Bone and dirt and plume
Bounding from surface
To surface, until
It seemed the earth's body
Bled lustre from its skin
As if to give the day
A bright toy
A memory to treat of and
Pass between its hands
Caked with beloved soil
And they said the name then
Of God and of her gone
And bowed heads though it
Was not the custom
But only for awe, as if at some
Incantation of a realer her
Laid down and recalled once more

26

The fridge opens with a pneumatic
Suction. I stare for four and
A half seconds and I take out
The carton of orange juice from
Concentrate, it slides out of the
Fridge door heavily with a seasick
Motion in my hand and comes
Down on the wooden surface of
The counter and I get a glass.
The glass is full of the half-light
From the crack of the lit interior
Of the fridge seeping into the dark
Room and the white skin of the
Carton glows dully like an afterimage
And the glass has shards of that
White in it and much more dark.
The wooden slat blinds creak like the
Rigging of a great dusty ship as
I flick the sealed plastic mechanism
And the vacuumed carton drinks in
The oxidising air with a slight gasp.
I tip and lift the body of fluid in
Its card and glue until it is lapping
At the mouth and a funnel of rich
Opaque orange plunges into the glass
And juice boils upward in the flute
Of glassware until it is full and thick
With the dim light of the fridge door
And it is like the blood of some
Strange creature, all haemoglobin
And particles of yeast and swimming
With little lights that seem like fires.
It gives off a dull fluorescent glow even
Once the door of the fridge eases shut
And I am left in a quiet darkness
Thirsting only for that strange, blunt light.

25

Fish, the strangest of God's
Prodigies—wall-eyed hunks
Of surging white flesh, odd
Pilgrims, piloted by a small chunk
Of grey crawling with sparks;
Like a cold bird dropping
Or a bone of the inner ear,
But full of blood, wet, throbbing.
They hove out of the corridors of
Far water—of one commanding thought,
If the stream of fluid energy
That permeates their gills, their pores,
Their tinfoil eyes and plastic bones
Could be called a thought.
It is the name of the sea,
An idea of flesh that water explores.
Fish-form is a cast that fluid hones
Through dark reaches, architect.

24

When the rain falls at night
It is beautiful to know
The manifest world
An elaboration of nothing:
The garden softly assuming
An aspect of the cloud,
The dessicated soil riven,
Catacombs becoming cataracts:

They broke a proton
And ninety five percent
Was nothing—nothing.
There is a commanding lack
We are the shell of somehow.
Rain arches down out of
A cloudbank, in darkness.
Our shapes, precipitate,
Ride on the deep.

23

He sits at the bar in the African Lounge
Drinking a glass of milk
And wiping the beads of milk
From his lips as they
Stray with a torn corner
Of starched, white bread.
The glass is violently clean
on the stressed black wood of
the counter which has puckered
over decades from water damage
and too many cares.
His hat has a green feather
making him seem a pimp.
The bread is filthy with sop
and saliva and residue of curd
where it lies dismembered at
the black precipice of the bar,
but his mouth is clean.

Turbulent air passes the door,
telling of storm.

22

There is an infinity of possibilities
And an infinity of impossibilities.

These spheres do not ever touch.
Which is to say they always touch,

So far as touch is a command
Of space, a limitation or zero sum.

Two infinities, all containing each
And each excluding the other.

The linen of our earth is strung
Up on these trembling lines.

Sleep is an instant, and an eternity—
Night wind strains at the wooden pegs.

A blustered tree is two hemispheres
—Leaf and root—like an hourglass.

Particoloured bulbs of glass—finite!
A blackbird sleeps in the lee of a stone.

21

A man stands in good boots
On solid earth, feet planted,
And looks upon a maple.

Each abstract, each aspect
Of each abstract, somewhere
Concrete, somewhere housed.

The maple is housed inside
The man and grows from the
Creamy red soil of his brain.

It is rooted in the spine and
Its ghostly branches grow
from the frontal cortex, softly.

The man sways, and the tree,
In a wind without co-ordinate,
A flash of power in darkness.

And the earth is willing itself
In them, its coruscating shapes.
But of the mind-tree, the image

Between them, we may say
It is not a shape of earth,
It is only a ghost of a potential.