51

He lifts the lighter between thumb
And middle finger from the inner
Left pocket of his grey suit jacket
And tosses it up and catches it
With it glinting silver in the air
And gyrating, and in arrest it
Is dull and burnished, still in his
Palm, and he manipulates it in
His knuckles slowly and then takes
A cigarillo from the right pocket
Coffee coloured in the dim bar door
And lights the cigarillo teasing the
End with the flame and the lighter
Closes with a sound like a trap.
The smoke billows slightly in the
Doorway like pigment in water and
He watches the raindrops break
At the worn heel of the curb,
Brushing with a grained hand
At the parrot-yellow kerchief folded
In the breast pocket of his suit.

49

He sits on the green leather
And rolls the cigars over one
By one in their cherrywood
Case so that the trademarks
Show like faces and light
Glances on their fat forms
Dull and flat and coffee.
He lifts one an inch out of
The box with a fingertip
At one end only like an old
Piano tuner at an errant
Key and rotates it on its
Axis fully in his thick fingers
And sets it back in the case.
The green leather is cool blue.
Light is white in the foyer.

48

Crows come up off the roofing
Like torn black rags
Catching on the wind,
Their wings batting crookedly
And they keel and sidle about
The gusts like rags
Dyed black in buckets
And strung along the air drying
The roofing tin burnished brown
And the tea-coloured
Atmosphere of dusk
As the silhouettes tumble upward
Bringing brown to brown in concert
Of a deep speech,
A tousled colloquy
Of air and feather and vinegar
Light on rust and bare metals
And the sky seeming
To tarnish slowly
As copper; sulphates, breaking over
The slow light in a blue attrition,
Whorl out the day.

47

They put the barrel
Of the gun in his
Mouth an ask him
Where is she an
His eyes big an white
He makes a noise
An his skin is black
With bellyfat shakin
Outta his shirt like
Oil an he makes
A noise an they take
It out an he say
"I donut no. I donut
No." An he shake
Down into the grass
Like oil an the sound
Like rockfall goes in
Smoke an I sit down
Backward an I
Look in to my arms.

46

The tree grows out
Of the ground like
Smoke at night like
From a fissure
Thats bleedin right
Outta the earth—

With spades we chop
The rootstem thats
Tough in the ground
And its right white
And blind things
Crawl outta it and
They are so white that
The peatfires spill
Like smoke, like smoke.

45

Smoke comes like snakes
Off the field
And the corn crackles as
It cooks and
Theres no fire nowhere
But up smoke
Comes thick black as mud
And the corn
Is gold and breeds seems
Fire outta it
And the earth cradles up
The black sky
Seems in green and gold
Blue and brown
And white arms as smoke
Scarfs right up
And grazes heaven arcing
And goin up
All of the yellow corn is.

And a tractor
Comes trundling charred out
Of the furnace
Under all of its own power.

44

A caddisfly on a petunia is knocked
By a daylily leaf batting
In the wind, into a patch
Of burning antirrhinums.

Blackbirds clattering in pairs out
In the wind come cackling
Softly, into a patch
Of burning antirrhinums.

A lawnmower shudders to a stop and
The failing sound of the
Engine falls into a patch
Of burning antirrhinums.

Antirrhinums burn avocado-green
And pink-seashell and hang
God-orange their heads
With like broken necks.

43

A light comes through the trees sharp
And moving like on water like a
Crackle that burns one place then in
Another like a soft mobile of stars
As the arms of trees undulate some
In the wind that is like a current
And it falls snowily on the small
Hazel that seems breathing in it or
As if it bore it out of the leaves or
As if a lighttree stood right behind it
And it falls on the climbing roses
That topple from the wall and flame
Yellow and violet at the terminations
Like childrens' fists clenched and then
The halfsun goes in and in but wind
Comes still over the restless grass with
A feeling of grey and the crock
Of stones at the water's edge are veined
Blue and look like brains spilt out
Grey and creamy in the fatted cloudlight.

42

The cumulus is like an anvil.
In the tangle
Of the garden of our earth
Grows a rose and
Livid a rose beaten red and
Blood does no
Colour to it and its thorn,
But the earth
Is black and the thorn red
And the stem is
A dull red glow of forges
And the bloom
A dark white of last evenings
That aches like
Cold and beats like lovesick
On the brain
—It was pulled from the fire
Too soon, as were
We—And sleeps and speaks:

A dark an
                  vi
                  ge
                       l spreads its wings.
  

41

He puts the receiver back in the crook
And the weight goes chunk. The halogen
Bulb in the striplight above the mirror
Behind the rows of bourbon and sasparilla
Flickers in its dust whiteblue and cold.
He reaches for a bottle by the base and pours
A measure. Milk and crusts and glass
Lie down the bar, detritus of a moment
Gone. He lifts the shot and holds it in
The swimming grey light of the doorway
And the amber has woodsmoke and gunsmoke
And tar and sediment like sap in it
Rich and old as the bayou and he drinks,
Grimaces like a harlequin with a flash
Of white and takes the receiver up again
And then replaces it slowly grimacing.
The room floods instantaneously with light
And he walks to the door and as his
Bootheel meets the worn step thunder
Breaks with violence and he looks out
To where the cloud rears like a rhinoceros.

40

At the far end of the bar, a black
Telephone rings. He extricates
Himself carefully from the mahogany
Stool and the underside of the counter
And comes creaking to his feet
Reining his limbs into an upright
Posture one by one like a circus mime
And reaches and adjusts his fedora.
He crosses the floor in four fluid steps
Each step seeming to hitch his frame
Upward in the air as he bucks his
Silver tapshoes like a great black
Puppet. He moves with a slight of
Figure, jerking in the wet light from
The doorway where dense cloud pushes
In smelling of electrolytes and vinegar.
And the telephone still bleats into the
Hush of the empty bar and his yellowed
Fingers find it and pull it from the
Cradle and he speaks into it with a
Voice that crackles and plodes softly
And then he falls silent and listens,

Staring into a corner behind the bar
At a half-empty box of walnut whip.

39

Pale, colour comes over
The broken combines at the field's edge,
Creeping across continents
Of grand design: the long hulks of
Red and white casing and
The machine-painted yellow numerals
And the heavy enginehouse
Lowslung at the crouching rear
And the hidden rows
Of articulated, bivalved, rotating jaws
And the threshing blades and
The vacuum tubes of thin aluminium
And the lightless headlamps.

Their blunt vertices begin to soften
In the dawn and shift and
Once more they seem godlike structures
Hauled from behind some
Far and dark and dreamlike factory gate,
Poised to grind bloodlessly
Into the ordered ranks of wheat
And carve out the chaff
With a crackle of rusted mechanism.
But as the soft light
Comes on their skeletons only groan
And sink further into
Dandelion and white poppy and milkweed.

38

Tomato plants in grey & green
Hessian sacks in black clotted soil
That is littered with cherry blossom
& fertiliser pellets & shed flakes
Of insects like onion skins the
Blossoms brown & dry like little
Toffees there are blights on the outer
Leaves or maybe watermarks burned
In by sun & the leaves collect up
Into a crown of bristling shoots
At the stem-end like the apex
Of a fountain in an ornamental pond
Breaking messily into the air & the
Warm light of morning shows veins
In the wet innards of the leaves
& from the mulch things crawl
Transluscent & whisky-brown like lumps
Of caramel & heat in the sunlight
& their glassy organs are poised inside
Their bodies as if preserved in amber

37

An avocado
And an old grey china bowl
Yellow in the air

It is chalky green
And bleeds from sallow to milk
Toward the heartwood

Its jaundice is sweet
And fattens a deep ochre
In the bowl's hollow

The bowl is silent
Like an abandoned conch shell
Or an eyesocket

The beery tree-egg
In its reptilian skin
Is but sourflesh

And sweetmelt at the
Knife-edge and a flurry of
Rain speckles the yard

36

The birch over the road is dark

Against the paling corridor of blue

Between earth and cloud that seems

Stuck to a brick backwall in some

Old show peeling and thin the birch

Is dark before the passing scraps

Of white almost a silhouette almost

Black the coinshaped leaves fluttering

And the tendrils teasing out wind

Half-obscuring the pale and scarred

And thin trunk that is stark skeletal

Before the lopsided brick garage wall

Layed clumsily in a concrete bed and

Eaten-at by insects and grey vines

Out of the belly of the cloudbank

A lesion of bright white slips and floods

The street skirting the branchends of

The birch and it is like the bottom

Fell out the lightbucket and broke

Itself a place into the world and silver

Are the birchlimbs that were dark

35

Low sun crashes down into
The glasses on the sidetable
At the dark end of the lawn
There where an oasis of light
Breaks through the treeline
It lights upon the lipmarks at
The furnaced rims and the wet
Residue of sugar and pulp and
In the other dust and brackish
Tapwater stale in the rising air
Cotton seeds are caught on a rim
And in the wooden mechanism
Of the sunchair adjascent catch
The light and the faded floral
Covered foam cushions are no
More than wafers of sponge that
Prickle in the rising humidity
Smelling of a decade's smoke of
Barbeques and winter woodfires

The beds are dry and the wilted
Flowers are sated in light and
The yellow grass is flaming

34

The doves circle
From the treetop to
The antenna to
The smoke extractor

Their tails are
Like scallop shells
Cream white
As they clatter up

Black collars
Cuff their milk-throats
And they call
As they sit sadly

And stupidly
In the wobbling air
Pink and grey
And clatter up again

In the evening
Their colour is at first
That of brainmeat
And later that of blood

And the air is laced
With smoke.

33

The bogcotton moves in the wind
And a part of it detaches
Like a spiderling and climbs into
The air and breaks the poplars
And falls to earth in the orchard
Where no bogcotton can grow.

Others tangle in the hazel and the
Peach brickwork of the chimney
And the trellis' grey wood and the
Wet trench behind the grow bags
Or sail down the line of rooftops
Or rustle down into beds of gravel.

The knotted hawthorns all cancerous
And engriddled make a noise of the
Sea as they shiver the gusts off
Their mishapen shoulders and white
Cottonseeds have founded in them
Here and there like ghostly leaves.

The bogcotton lies in the shadow
Of the ancient bolus of ivy trunks
That coil and throttle the remnant
Of a hawthorn over the pool and at
Times it seems the tree will tip and
Break the water and scatter white.

32

A peach sits squat and soft
On a dish dull white
All flesh contained in skin
Of felt and white-fur
And the tissue full and
Fat with sweet water
And the colour blushing
Dull yellow pink and blue
Coming in from the window
The slow light of dusk
And in places purple as the
House is holy and the fatted
Peach on the dull plate
Lies close to a blunt knife
And the keener edge by
Far is at the wooden
Heel of the heartscore pit
In the envelope of flesh.

31

Evening draws the colour
From the earth:
The yellowing grass pales
Like bone, apples
Become opals, moonfruit,
Branches wither
In their own shade,
Leaning down into
The earth and the hour
Hollows and blanches
And rounds out to a pit
And is plucked—

But the creeping roses
Are rusty at
Their station on the wall
And vivid, a cluster
Of young red stars that sting
The dull redbrick.
They seem to speed toward us
From a far night.

30

A bird articulates upon the air
And the air inhabits its
Pound of flesh—hollow bones
Skull like a spent husk
Of wheat and a pinch of mealy
Grey that pilots it—
A bipartite mechanism that holds
The body in air
Pinioned tinily to the chassis
Rotating in its cuffs
At the little pricking breezes
The soil sends up
Flirting moment by moment on the
Beautiful changes the air
Makes, a slight articulated vessel
The evening flows through—

In deep heat blue flowers
Nod sleepily and
The sparrow beats its power
Over the land and air
And air beats up from
Dry spaces in the earth

—Our orbit the jointed movement
Of a ball that grinds
In a far lightless socket and burns—

The hurtling skeleton
Is a species of the air

Deep, a constellation of soil
Passes further into the earth

29

There are cotton shocks at the tips
Of the reeds that seem to smoke
As the wind catches and draws up
Their tasseled edges and the trailing
Edge lolling into the green water
Seems the crest of a water breaking
Over rocks at a fall and the reed
Imbibing the rainfall at its root
Seems irresistibly to turn down
Its head into the pool making a
White plumed collar of its down spray

And beyond this wet cycling-in
A purple flower fires up out of the
Thickest richest scum of algae its arc
Described by the stem the parabola
Marked at origin by a wreath of
Particoloured white-green leaves,
Dust of this first inhuman salvo
And the light of the iris bloom is
Broken as it lances up by the sandstone
That lies behind it and we see in it
The limit of our own amphitheatre
And its crushed colour and spray of sex
Are but the dash of water over rock.