Still Birth

All through morning, the weight of morning heavied.
I felt words once whispered come back to me:
"Mezzo del cammin..."
                                    I would away to our father's
house and its separation, the slow-din of Sunday's
bells falling his village as all becomes holy.
Or to the Garden before Adam cursed the earth.
"...di nostra vita."
                             Outside, autumn's small print
shifts, hesitates, and as the automatic still
takes hold, repeats itself within the haunt-song
of a cicada. The air full of dull resilience.
"Mi ritrovai..." 
                        I find myself back by her side,                                 
the midday sun pulses through a glass coffin.
"...per una selva oscura."

Tunnel

I would stay here. Marry the dark.
Live a wide eyed silence
within this row of opposites.

Our cars shift identically slow.
Atmosphere sits and traffics
numb murmurs beyond heat,

as I breathe. Just breathe and sit
and realise this could be
the in between of any two points,

a convergence at vanishing point
of any two equals. Here and there
yet, suddenly, no one place at all.

Soon, we will divorce darkness
and the light will burn our eyes.
I have never been alone. I am afraid.

.

Serpentine

Danger camouflaged in grass,
Layers of skin slough backward.
Sinking my flesh, his jawline
Dislocates to unglove venom.

I whisper at pinched nerves,
Feel my neck thicken in sudden
Breath, the snap of the recoil
Sends a shiver through me.

Feeling my blood heat in his eye's
Reflection, I take on new life
And appear as infrared hunger. Fear.
Silence cracks back into place.

Alzheimers

Quick-slow, she wakes from a dream she can't quite grasp.

She was young again, gaberdined, all the continent
An anemone and her there like a hedge hop vanishing
Beyond tillage rows of turnip seeds and on again
To where milk spouts roll down oatmeal at the call
Of peacocks shuffling dusted paths in 1950's Antrim.

Quick-slow, she wakes from a dream she can't quite grasp.

Does it do her good to know she isn't there yet? Wired
For the final fall as she is, imminent and inevitable as dusk
In late August's dew-down scent. Interwoven there,
Lazy daisy stitching patterns as permanent as Winter
Of her mother's epitaph the day they laid her down.

Quick slow, she wakes from a dream she can't quite grasp.

To Auden, In Sicily

“For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making”
-WH Auden, In Memory Of WB Yeats.

Yet, had you seen Sicily in Autumn,
the barren dry deflaxing itself
from quartzed, deserted land;
her wizened oak mistral'd southward
and bent past recognition, tilted
in the valley of its making—

you'd have seen that tree
stretch to survive beyond shape.
And in the backdraft of Spring,
thrive on happenings altered utterly
in a great push toward warmth,
inch by ever increasing inch.

Fermata

Not so much to overestimate failure
But to dissect each rhythm perfectly,

Furious frenetic, Ronda Alla Turca,
She filled the April room

With crescendos and allegros, the rise and fall,
Edge-tickling shapeless mountains,

Before holding the air and drifting out
Through keyholes in flashes of Für Elise,

Chopsticks and finally the Moonlit Sonata.

Synesthesia

At first, a pacific zephyr catching fire
At the point where Plato swore life ended-
Before flinching to the Atlantic
In a trade wind of veneration,
Where blue becomes white, like rebirth.

Retrieval, convalescence, synesthesia.
Now you come to me as an old sound
At dusk on a deserted station bench,
Service announcements declaring delays
And you there, just as you were then:

A perfect stranger asking for a light,
Your cheyenne red cigar sparking to life
And tinting your cheek a sunset red
As the ash falls and I curse transport.

Balnea

Uncovered from our slub sheets,
We entered a room of constant heat.

Coal piles burning and begging
For us to add fuel to their fire

The overhead sprawl of steam
Holding us deep within a miasma;

So far gone that when we returned
Light had become a conclave of light

And each of us wore the shadow lines
Of the other one's reflection.

She Dares To Be Different

Lost my mind in San Francisco
Happened first in 64'. Balances
Of time streaming through windows,
My lesbian dead on the table.
Lost my mind in San Francisco,
Happened first in 64'.

JJ 1943-1970

Hallucinogenic

A flick of the switch blade
and a dig to diagnose
the after effects of heat
within the secular grain-

We found solace amongst
the reeds of Cilicia-
the antiquated Byzantine-
discovery of the unknown.

It was twilight, twilight, twilight:
hydrangeas protruding
from each crack in nature,
their rubescent amanitas

and recurved scales,
the volva'd veils
stretching out from the root--
poisoning us Parthians.

Excavation

A mosaic map of Babylon led me
To somewhere between Cairo and your skin.
Your papayan fruit resting like tumors
On the walls of an Aztec museum,
Where your heart is displayed
And laced by mosquito blankets
Alongside each golden treasure
Ever found inside the dead man's chest.