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.