Poems
Tell me how they move
for the light and I will gather wild orchids
for you and five species
of cockle shells
and leave them by your window ...
There’s the Bunny
Flashin his Bunny.
Yr seriousness has spread over the parlour
Like a goddam Cumulonimbus Incus
I stare at your broken heroes Nose
& Finger my soft Shillelagh ...
I want to climb back
into the cave of bliss
to be with you
the way you make me feel
strong arms to hold
wise words to listen ...
a spirit into splinters or a night
into day the quavers levitating
just the same see a kind of orangeness
tinge the wrenched event & head falls & sun
caws & moon forgets her name a muteness ...
He went down to the shed to look for a chook
a particular one he’d seen earlier that morning
one he realised he’d never seen before, and
that seemed to have disappeared. It was brown
with white markings, distinctive, like wallpaper ...
Sometimes you took the shape
of an unseen mosquito,
sometimes of illness ...
There is a field that will persist in everything:
what means crucial means
if there never was a thought deflected not to be
a path so far gone? ...
1.
Your beard intrigues me, its rough mystery, patterned complexity.
I imagine burrowing animals under your skin that raise ...
body’s habitude begin
with buoyancy, a saturated skin ...
ending on a line by John Burnside
No one on the boats, just cats – thin, furtive.
There’s the blown cry of terns and the wheedling
embarkations of crows, but you will not slip
