Oymyakon

The only way to see it, they say,
Is as white desert.

To think each breath a memory of heat
You may never feel again, and hold.

I picture the point where the calyx
Of an alyssum stems from white

Into a full spectrum of colour.
But all is ultraviolet here

And the only separation,
Brief sun before a day of night.

Anhedonia. The slow freeze doubles.
Iced rivers run through me.


                       

Braille

Having lost the space around me,
I have been handed new language.

Not latin. More a mosaic of curves,
A map you must touch to perceive.

I scale over crevices of code,
Fingertip through creases and valleys

To find the bend where continents slip
Off the edge of themselves, to ocean.

Helicopter Seed

 after rainstick

How the heart shaped helicopter seed
is her heart in the silverlight of dawn
paints the scene a pageantry. A blessing.

Her flail, both furious and delicate,
falls blizzard-like in the haze of a hurricane
(where storms become the love of storms)

and lets fly, rises and spreads wing
so that what happens next is a joy
we could not know to hope for:

an effusive half-stop of descent,
lost in atmosphere, holds- then releases-
as if a shift in the everlong of life.

Lady Venice

Tonight, I have come to lie in her arms.
It is not the melancholy of her beauty
Or the rèmo'd slow-brush of ripples
That make this city heart-breaking.
Our reflections swell as they take us in.

Yet, how are we to claim possession
Of our own existence as the mirrors
Of her canal fold beneath us,
And buildings sink where they stand?
We succumb to the archipelago's chagrin.

Transient sailor, Serenissima, Holy Lady:
Something in the way your daydream
Makes an auster of the breeze
Sends our thoughts to the artesian well
And paints you a widow, or a widow's daughter.

So. Since she is only touched by death,
I will etch my name here in limestone
On a San Michele sideboard tomb
And submerge in the inevitable flood.
Tonight, I have come to lie in her arms.

Shelter

Decided on there not being a voice,
she instead lay each veil against mine
silently. Within a breeze.
A breeze born in thoughts of Pacific warmth,
sailing through each sun-dappled stranger
like a wish wished and suddenly gone
until hitting the cold stone reality
of a hand ball alley back in Mullaghmore-
where we sat, huddled and smothered.

Our backs to the ballast of an unused cockleshell
we were soon to be grateful of,
as another ocean wave made large
over the courtside wall in a sluice of hostility
and splashed the port side rust,
echoing the diminuendo of shelter,
in an upturned rainstick's vaulted tunnel
only we knew had ever existed.