Poem
You woke with a headache
and opened the bedroom window blind.
You bent forward as morning light came in.
It fell on your belly and breasts
and your sleep maddened hair.
I could hear the sickness in your voice
as you accepted a salad bowl to throw up in
and two pills with breakfast.
The new sun tipped itself up over distant mountains
outside the ki ...
For Marianne J Boruch and David Dunlap
We walk past the ruined past
pasted to the Academy’s cloister walls,
past broken Latin stones’ fracture ...
I love the whole world
she said,
without sounding
corporate
(Agnes Martin
said it) ...
When it was nearly still acceptable
to nip the shoulder of the pleasant boy
sitting cross-legged in front of you
(leaning back and pulling the royal blue
wool of his jersey with loose teeth)
I had an elastic idea, which stretched
through the next twenty-five years. Senior
primary school's kingdom of fully grown
flax bushes and adult-sized toilets,
We are following a track that loops
around a lake impaled with trees,
a pinned-down habitat for platypuses
I would like to see, so try to walk
silently until a shadow across the sun-
dried turf in front of me blushes
curls and slides down a bank.
I stop, tell you what I've seen, smile
at the luck. You jump onto a log.
For the rest of the wal ...