Next

In latter versions
it was told somewhat
differently

Her following always
the direction in which
her toes pointed

Her disinterest in
recognition leading
to the still belly

Le prochain
Write something
(don’t write something)

When Sounds Leave

When you hear them pack their bags
Their large feet shrinking away through the door
Their hands on the gate

There are
the spaces they leave

Just there
the poem places a last glance back at the window imprinted with ghost thuds of birds
Tiny carcasses already dropped to the purring mouths of quiet cats with long transparent whiskers to move soundlessly through the night
green eyed

Here the sounds wobble as another marches by loudly
measuring a distance with the certainty of numbers noted down
Where their edges are lost in the overlapping

A sharp urgency flounders
behind a dull puckered
These are not sounds
these are words
interrupted by the sharp announcement of the doorbell rising to be heard past the furniture as if unexpected
Hands clench
small pawed in cotton skirted courtesy
Follow the words trailing
As a shrill wind fills the silence left wide open behind them
Heavy lidded you return to the page which shivered blankly beneath a note written then placed in a pocket
A moment stained with the mottled impossibility
of containing an ending in the telling
remains

Not Enough To Fold

Forgotten like air
without movement

The simple dream
of people talking

Animate with hunger
for the unexpected

While the woman
I used to be
sleeps

What Have You

A lean beast
in a recurring dream
feeding on sound

It wasn’t here
Never even passing
close

It touched me in the way
a lover’s words do
when they talk in their sleep

When their tongues don’t
move

Hulled seeds of truths
Sluggish buds

Before the trap of morning-
the questions of daylight-
the tallying of proof
with dusk closing
around each certainty

Scalloped into my thoughts
by soft arched words
a gentle query arranges itself
in the emptiness of my mouth

The pulse behind my eyes
measures quiet in vowels
quickly swallowed

Silence Suivant

Days spent without the dumb certainty of language
The reprieve found in stepping on rock after rock
Moving amongst the evidence of living things and trees
Alongside things running somewhere
Wild pigs have foraged here

Such are the clear moments of small things
Snags of blackberry thorns on a long slow hike
The impossibility of drawing a deep breath
in an abandoned mineshaft
Not even the wind finds us here
Undersides of ancient things stubbornly static
and what collects there
Distillations of surfaces
Channelled into the depths
where we see with our hands

We inherit this;
Vast underbellies of others’ understandings
Clouded thoughts in small crowded houses
Tiny tables shortened by too much Pastis
Closer
Closer until everything touches
Forces the air out
We leave too
the cramped room
the tiny village
the road
Further

Inadequate maps without spaces
show nothing
Give nothing
Cartographers of places untouched by the sun
Hold maps in their memory to draw later
I watch where you place your foot
I follow
Today the curl of hair on your collar
and your square back
Sure footed on an ancient trail reclaimed by green
Following ghosts of Romans
and English tourists
Cradled in the valley we walk long in silence

The clarity of a river full of fish
Sudden leap of a toad
First blossoms brave the freezing air
against a forest of brilliant green regrowth
I watch our shadows pass over the water
birdcall anouncements precede us

Stories speak more loudly here
Voices move
years after the sound has left them
We breathe them in
Silence expands
falls softly into the river and the soil
crackles under our feet
then scatters

Stop Over

This never blue sky

holds me close to the green earth

a butterfly day

Three Part Tale Spin

(i)

I’m thinking of a night full of birds
A confusion of wingbeats and soft
collisions that feel like heartbreak

Crowds are gathering on the hill
in their pink masks
to watch the sky which dwarfs us all
It’s the colour of the desert
Stealing our shadows in funnels of dust


(ii)

They’re there to see a poem unfolding
Where words haven’t arrived
A small underscoring of half-slept moments
Of forgetting weakness

Here we are again
Away from them
and your hands are in my hair
My face is in your chest
You smell of cigarettes and solitude
Your voice is close to my ear
in a form I know but don’t understand
This is no story you’re telling
in bare-knuckled braille
It has a narrative I cant follow
back to your mouth

This is the easy eye of beauty
Silence of the planets and falling starlings
in a cosmic tailspin of absurdity

The black stones under my feet are still warm
from when the sun burnt them
in the middle of the day
I wonder where I left my shoes

(iii)

Naked of meanings your face eludes me
Still the words aren’t coming
The patterns are there
lightening then darkening
The sounds amplify
bird cries swell thick
higher now
with throats full of clouds
Caught as they rise
No truth we’ve been
offered corresponds to this
These are feats of the imagination
To feathered applause and closed eyes

My skin is my mind
These are my dreams
they bring it all closer
Sink it in

Crawl up under my sheets
under a blanket of memory
warp and weft of surfaces of things
Woven threads of messages received
from every cell touched, held, imagined
Hold it, touch it again to remember
whisper into it
into the scars
into the dull ache
like a bridge from some place not located in my body

Or write it and I’ll read it to my hands
with my fingertips in a soft slow scrawl