I
So much for signs and sky-cleaving script.
Vacancy’s blue heartbeat shines in the
ginger window of a stormtrooper’s house.
On the lookout for a way around.
If not a bridge then a pathway and if
neither then declare the hour lost.
Circle oneself like a nesting cat.
Lie down, in the swoon of moss and
cry oneself to dream-plagued sleep.
II
At first it sounds like anything but.
A harmony skewed on a harsh catch.
Savage, glottal. Determined to rival
the sea, however brief its challenge.
A choir of foxfire stumbled on in fog,
after a night spent racked and lashed
by memory, cat suit in sad tatters.
Peeping Toms slink the sleeping gardens,
spitting candles throwing dubious light
through a room creeped out with whaling
prints, ships in bottles, a slim figurine
of ancient love modeled in a spout of white wax.
A winter’s dawn in the land of Nod.
III
Every twisted thing has hidden in it the namesake of Love.
The truth, or one small coin of it, whispered on a blanket,
pillowed by a stone, a couplet of an elder tree at the edge
of Potter’s Field. I allude according to no sequence
I’m aware of and yet she fetches out some pattern,
a hair ribbon chewed and gruesome, but blue and
gold still, visible still through the stagnant calm,
some beauty unconquered by decay and garishly inviolate.
IV
On each page of this sketchbook of silver nights,
humidity’s bead trembles, skirt of dissolution
spreading out in a perfect circle, ever-widening
till there’s nothing left but blot.
Far better than those stinging words
which might or might not soften into pearls
of remorse, dawn’s grammar reckless, hungover.
V
Word-lists, like blushes,
so tripping, so rare.
Tun, belvedere, netsuke, tos.
Black saddle, green reins
twined in vague artemisia,
mare white as this girl’s skin,
who laughs, in direst adversity,
outside the city gates,
condemned to death as an
afterthought, who almost
made a clean glideaway,
returning so as to avoid
another overdue fine.
VI
The kingdom I kneel in,
gentle entropic bestiary,
crowned with roses and
pricking hidden thorns.
Sundial fashioned from a
single blunted bull’s horn.
The picador’s bandage
is kept in a glass display case
just inside the drawing room
door. A souvenir of wordless,
carnival days. Along with her
thumbprint and a clipping
from the underground comics.
Some visitors look twice,
while others pass it by entirely.
VII
Solar light, lunar light, fields draped in snow.
The graveyard we kissed in, snow falling forever.
In a hotel bar, alone with ourselves,
and hiding out from the weather,
bayed by the flat tones of love’s rough amendments,
represented here, as in a mural depicting
big city vice, by a lobbyful of asthmatic prostitutes.
I spun my spoon in the dark tea, on the lookout
for any cloudy, wormlike churn.
Some dream I’d had, some harrowing from the future.
Tungsten’s embryonic cringe.