Collected Poems, page 24
Quickdraw
I wear the two, the mobile and the landline phones,
like guns, slung from the pockets on my hips. I’m all
alone. You ring, quickdraw, your voice a pellet
in my ear, and hear me groan.
You’ve wounded me.
Next time, you speak after the tone. I twirl the phone,
then squeeze the trigger of my tongue, wide of the mark.
You choose your spot, then blast me
through the heart.
And this is love, high noon, calamity, hard liquor
in the old Last Chance saloon. I show the mobile
to the Sheriff; in my boot, another one’s
concealed. You text them both at once. I reel.
Down on my knees, I fumble for the phone,
read the silver bullets of your kiss. Take this . . .
and this . . . and this . . . and this . . . and this . . .
Finding the Words
I found the words at the back of a drawer,
wrapped in black cloth, like three rings
slipped from a dead woman’s hand, cold,
dull gold. I had held them before,
years ago,
then put them away, forgetting whatever it was
I could use them to say. I touched the first to my lips,
the second, the third, like a sacrament,
like a pledge, like a kiss,
and my breath
warmed them, the words I needed to utter this, small words,
and few. I rubbed at them till they gleamed in my palm –
I love you, I love you, I love you –
as though they were new.
December
The year dwindles and glows
to December’s red jewel,
my birth month.
The sky blushes,
and lays its cheek
on the sparkling fields.
Then dusk swaddles the cattle,
their silhouettes
simple as faith.
These nights are gifts,
our hands unwrapping the darkness
to see what we have.
The train rushes, ecstatic,
to where you are,
my bright star.
Grace
Then, like a sudden, easy birth, grace –
rendered as light to the softening earth,
the moon stepping slowly backwards
out of the morning sky, reward
for the dark hours we took to arrive and kneel
at the silver river’s edge near the heron priest,
anointed, given – what we would wish ourselves.
New Year
I drop the dying year behind me like a shawl
and let it fall. The urgent fireworks fling themselves
against the night, flowers of desire, love’s fervency.
Out of the space around me, standing here, I shape
your absent body against mine. You touch me as the giving air.
Most far, most near, your arms are darkness, holding me,
so I lean back, lip-read the heavens talking on in light,
syllabic stars. I see, at last, they pray at us. Your breath
is midnight’s, living, on my skin, across the miles between us,
fields and motorways and towns, the million lit-up little homes.
This love we have, grief in reverse, full rhyme, wrong place,
wrong time, sweet work for hands, the heart’s vocation, flares
to guide the new year in, the days and nights far out upon the sky’s
dark sea. Your mouth is snow now on my lips, cool, intimate, first kiss,
a vow. Time falls and falls through endless space, to when we are.
Chinatown
Writing it, I see how much I love the sound.
Chinatown. Chinatown. Chinatown.
We went down, the day of the Year of the Monkey,
dim sum and dragons bound.
Your fair head
was a pearl in the mouth of the crowd. The fireworks
were as loud as love, if love were allowed
a sound. Our wishing children pressed their incense
into a bowl of sand
in Chinatown, the smoke drifting off
like question marks over their heads. If I had said
what I’d wished, if I had asked you to tell me the words,
shifting up from your heart
for your lips to sift,
at least I’d have heard their sound uttered by you,
although then nothing we’d wished for in Chinatown,
Chinatown, Chinatown, would ever come true.
Wintering
All day, slow funerals have ploughed the rain.
We’ve done again
that trick we have of turning love to pain.
Grey fades to black. The stars begin their lies,
nothing to lose.
I wear a shroud of cold beneath my clothes.
Night clenches in its fist the moon, a stone.
I wish it thrown.
I clutch the small stiff body of my phone.
Dawn mocks me with a gibberish of birds.
I hear your words,
they play inside my head like broken chords.
*
The garden tenses, lies face down, bereaved,
has wept its leaves.
The Latin names of plants blur like belief.
I walk on ice, it grimaces, then breaks.
All my mistakes
are frozen in the tight lock of my face.
Bare trees hold out their arms, beseech, entreat,
cannot forget.
The clouds sag with the burden of their weight.
The wind screams at the house, bitter, betrayed.
The sky is flayed,
the moon a fingernail, bitten and frayed.
*
Another night, the smuggling in of snow.
You come and go,
your footprints like a love letter below.
Then something shifts, elsewhere and out of sight,
a hidden freight
that morning brings in on a tide of light.
The soil grows hesitant, it blurts in green,
so what has been
translates to what will be, certain, unseen,
as pain turns back again to love, like this,
your flower kiss,
and winter thaws and melts, cannot resist.
Spring
Spring’s pardon comes, a sweetening of the air,
the light made fairer by an hour, time
as forgiveness, granted in the murmured colouring
of flowers, rain’s mantra of reprieve, reprieve, reprieve.
The lovers waking in the lightening rooms believe
that something holds them, as they hold themselves,
within a kind of grace, a soft embrace, an absolution
from their stolen hours, their necessary lies. And this is wise:
to know that music’s gold is carried in the frayed purse
of a bird, to pick affection’s herb, to see the sun and moon
half-rhyme their light across the vacant, papery sky.
Trees, in their blossoms, young queens, flounce for clemency.
Answer
If you were made of stone,
your kiss a fossil sealed up in your lips,
your eyes a sightless marble to my touch,
your grey hands pooling raindrops for the birds,
your long legs cold as rivers locked in ice,
if you were stone, if you were made of stone, yes, yes.
If you were made of fire,
your head a wild Medusa hissing flame,
your tongue a red-hot poker in your throat,
your heart a small coal glowing in your chest,
your fingers burning pungent brands on flesh,
if you were fire, if you were made of fire, yes, yes.
If you were made of water,
your voice a roaring, foaming waterfall,
your arms a whirlpool spinning me around,
your breast a deep, dark lake nursing the drowned,
your mouth an ocean, waves torn from your breath,
if you were water, if you were made of water, yes, yes.
If you were made of air,
your face empty and infinite as sky,
your words a wind with litter for its nouns,
your movements sudden gusts among the clouds,
your body only breeze against my dress,
if you were air, if you were made of air, yes, yes.
If you were made of air, if you were air,
if you were made of water, if you were water,
if you were made of fire, if you were fire,
if you were made of stone, if you were stone,
or if you were none of these, but really death,
the answer is yes, yes.
Treasure
A soft ounce of your breath
in my cupped palm.
The gold weight of your head
on my numb arm.
Your heart’s warm ruby
set in your breast.
The art of your hands,
the slim turquoise veins under your wrists.
Your mouth, the sweet, chrism blessing
of its kiss,
the full measure of bliss pressed
to my lips.
Your fine hair, run through my fingers,
sieved.
Your silver smile, your jackpot laugh,
bright gifts.
Sighted amber, the 1001 nights
of your eyes.
Even the sparkling fool’s gold
of your lies.
Presents
I snipped and stitched my soul
to a little black dress,
hung my heart on a necklace,
tears for its pearls,
my mouth went for a bracelet,
gracing your arm,
all my lover’s words
for its dangling charms,
and my mind was a new hat,
sexy and chic,
for a hair of your head on my sleeve
like a scrawled receipt.
Write
Write that the sun bore down on me,
kissing and kissing, and my face
reddened, blackened, whitened to ash,
was blown away by the passionate wind
over the fields, where my body’s shape
still flattened the grass, to end as dust
in the eyes of my own ghost.
Or write
that the river held me close in its arms, cold fingers
stroking my limbs, cool tongue probing my mouth,
water’s voice swearing its love love love in my ears,
as I drowned in belief.
Then write the moon
striding down from the sky in its silver boots
to kick me alive; the stars like a mob of light,
chanting a name, yours. Write your name on my lips
when I entered the dark church of the wood
like a bride, lay down for my honeymoon,
and write the night, sexy as hell, write the night
pressing and pressing my bones
into the ground.
Venus
6.19 a.m., 8th June 2004
The jet of your pupil
set in the gold of your eye –
nor can I see
the dark fruit of your nipple
ripe on your breast –
nor can I feel
the tip of my tongue
burn in the star of your mouth –
nor can I hold
the small pulse at your wrist
under my thumb –
but I can watch
the transit of Venus
over the face of the sun.
Whatever
I’ll take your hand, the left,
and ask that it still have life
to hold my hand, the right,
as I walk alone where we walked,
or to lie all night on my breast,
at rest, or to stop all talk with a finger
pressed to my lips.
I’ll take your lips,
ask, when I close my eyes, as though
in prayer, that they ripen out of the air
to be there again on mine,
or to say my name, or to smile, or to kiss
the sleep from my eyes. I’ll take
your eyes,
nothing like, lovelier under, the sun,
and ask that they wake to see, to look
at me, even to cry, so long as I feel their tears
on your face, warm rain on a rose.
Your face I’ll take, asleep, ask that I learn,
by heart, the tilt of your nose; or awake, and ask
that I touch with my tongue the soft buds of the lobes
of your ears
and I’ll take them, too,
ask that they feel my breath shape
into living words, that they hear.
I’ll take your breath
and ask that it comes and goes, comes and goes, forever,
like the blush under your cheek, and I’ll even settle for that. Whatever.
Midsummer Night
Not there to see midsummer’s midnight rose
open and bloom, me,
or there when the river dressed in turquoise
under the moon, you;
not there when stones softened, opened, showed
the fossils they held
or there, us, when the dark sky fell to the earth
to gather its smell.
Not there when a strange bird sang on a branch
over our heads, you
and me, or there when a starlit fruit ripened
itself on a tree.
Not there to lie on the grass of our graves, both,
alive alive oh,
or there for Shakespeare’s shooting star,
or for who we are,
but elsewhere, far. Not there for the magic hour
when time becomes love
or there for light’s pale hand to slip, slender,
from darkness’s glove.
Not there when our young ghosts called to us
from the other side
or there where the heron’s rags were a silver gown,
by grace of the light.
Not there to be right, to find our souls, we,
dropped silks on the ground,
or there to be found again by ourselves, you, me,
mirrored in water.
Not there to see constellations spell themselves on the sky
and black rhyme with white
or there to see petals fold on a rose like a kiss
on midsummer night.
Grief
Grief, your gift, unwrapped,
my empty hands made heavy,
holding when they held you
like an ache; unlooked for,
though my eyes stare inward now
at where you were, my star, my star;
and undeserved, the perfect choice
for one with everything, humbling
my heart; unwanted, too, my small voice
lost for words to thank you with; unusual,
how it, given, grows to fill a day, a night,
a week, a month, teaching its text,
love’s spinster twin, my head bowed,
learning, learning; understood.
Ithaca
And when I returned,
I pulled off my stiff and salty sailor’s clothes,
slipped on the dress of the girl I was,
and slid overboard.
A mile from Ithaca, I anchored the boat.
The evening softened and spread,
the turquoise water mentioning its silver fish,
the sky stooping to hear.
My hands moved in the water, moved on the air,
the lover I was, tracing your skin, your hair,
and Ithaca there, the bronze mountains
shouldered like rough shields,
the caves, where dolphins hid,
dark pouches for jewels,
the olive trees ripening their tears in our pale fields.
Then I drifted in on a ribbon of light,
tracking the scents of rosemary, lemon, thyme,
the fragrances of your name,
which I chanted again in my heart,
like the charm it was, bringing me back
to Ithaca, all hurt zeroed now
by the harm you could do with a word,
me as hero plainly absurd,
wading in, waist-high, from the shallows at dusk,
dragging my small white boat.
Land
If we were shades
who walked here once
over the heather, over the shining stones,
fresh in our skin and bones
with all of the time to come
left to be us,
if we were dust,
once flesh, where a cloud
swoons on the breast of a hill,
breathing here still
in our countable days,
the words we said,
snagged on the air
like the murmuring bees,
as we lay by the loch,
parting our clothes with our hands
to feel who we were,
we would rather be there
than where we are here,
all that was due to us
still up ahead,
if we were shades or dust
who lived love
before we were long dead.
Night Marriage
When I turn off the light
and the dark mile between us
crumples and falls,
you slip from your self
to wait for me in my sleep,
the face of the moon sinking into a cloud;
or I wake bereaved
from the long hours
I spend in your dreams,
an owl in the forest crying its soft vowels,
dark fish swimming under the river’s skin.
Night marriage. The small hours join us,
face to face as we sleep and dream;
the whole of the huge night is our room.
Syntax
I want to call you thou, the sound
of the shape of the start
