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.

7

What of all our works?
He spoke softly into the dark.
The dark broke, and lightning
Came, leaping over itself,
And in the light the dark spoke.
But it was no kind of language,
If it was a voice at all
It was malignant and insane
And he climbed back down
Into the hallowed valley.
He sung his child to sleep
And returned to his works.

6

The red-eye flight goes softly on
In the dovegrey dawn—
                   Through the portal
A bleary passenger
                   Watches the lion star
Erupt to galvanise
                   The world of form—
Chimera, of which
                   All dark is born.

In an eastern city
                   A boy walks the dusk,
Suburbs rolling away
                   From the same sun.
In every window
                   Lions are being born.

5

At the cliff edge the ass bucked
Into the atmosphere. The earth
Crumbled, hot sods into the ravine,
Hoofwise into the dark, into the earth.

At the night edge the earth bucked
Into outer space, hot-rock into the dark,
And the soil of space was wet
With rain all through its long night.

The ass was broken into a constellation,
Its flesh was consumed by astral fire
And its bones lashed with the rain
Coming in from Andromeda in the dawn.

4

The old man knelt at the grate
Lancing the knuckles of grey wood
With a poker. Light flashed, a jaw
Of flame rose to the hearth brick,
Writhing, smouldered and withdrew.
Cinders fell into the child's hand.
Faggots broke with a roar inwards
And light bloomed in the wreckage.

The light is child of the fire
And is not the fire, the man said.
Light is ghost of what we don't see.
Fire is the death of wood,
And it is an ancient, starred thing
And it is slow. You see? And he
Passed his hand wholly through.

Over the limbs of the starlit trees
Under the hill, a colourful wind blew.

3

In a garden, candle flowers.

A tide of wind comes in
From the coast, and leads
The blooms to nod, and nod.

The moon shivers in
Upturned leaves of ivy,
In ephemera of algea

Swelling the ornamental pond,
In the sinewed limbs and
Hollows of an oak.

Starlight tangles frogspawn.
Eggs and old light
And a studded placenta

Birthed the same in some
Pool of darkness beyond
Starfactories, in reeds.

Hours pass. The candles,
Burnt down, begin to blur
Toward such an old light.

2

Chain me to a comet,
Drag me by the heels

Through a thicket of stars
And I may be bloodied,

There may be damage
In that fiery ricochet,

         But if I hang

Upon a thorny nebula
My last and wasted rags

And if in millennia that
Iron umbilical is consumed

With age and perishes
And the comet dances free

         I may clothe me

In hydrogen and dust
And be some regent

Morningstar, and pirouette
Across the event horizon

1

Wake from a dream of you climbing
For hours out of a vast lake at night,
The lake a fissure in a dark landscape,
Distant mountains drunk with cloudlight,
Bare sometimes like a cracked scalp.
By some stagecraft the lake illumines
Of itself like an organ of light,
Out of which your pale body rises
Without witness, to some other index
Of temporality—astral or geological—you rise,
As the stars excavate the vaulted dark,
As if a chainsaw of the cosmos
Had rent a cataclysm for you to fill.
The vast waters are innocent of you
But the night is not, starkiller.

Holding to the curtain I survey the world,
Drizzle coming off the trees in braids.
The world is falling from your hair.