Little Glass Pen

Orb Weavers

2008-07-13T22:29:00.000-07:00

Loss

2008-06-16T02:44:00.000-07:00

In the tuart roots
five metres underground
the chamber moaned
as the air dried out

In Hand

2008-06-14T17:52:00.000-07:00

A.Joy

Access

2008-05-30T22:49:00.000-07:00

I keep nothing here,
in this room.

No furniture, no pictures.

I like to look out
through the window,

imagine all the bodies
within my body,

which may or may not
exist.

Strake

2008-05-19T02:25:00.000-07:00

Because you
came here dressed as a man,
in a shirt.

Because things keep slipping.
Shifting distinctions.
Hiding your desire for
alike.

Left adrift
you venture your throat
to a word that tightens
around the sounds you might
produce.

You surrender to your own story,
told. Mothlike
hands wide, slow
flapping,
in and
out.

An imprint held.
Curved like a bone.
Leading edge to foil.

To reveal where thoughts are
sinking.

A last glimpse,

until
it bores its way out.

2008-04-14T23:06:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-08T20:23:00.001-07:00

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

2008-04-08T18:17:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-01T01:23:00.001-07:00

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

2008-03-21T23:39:00.001-07:00

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

2008-02-26T03:24:00.000-08:00

This never blue sky

holds me close to the green earth

a butterfly day

Three Part Tale Spin

2008-02-23T01:22:00.000-08:00

(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

(red)

2008-02-22T03:02:00.000-08:00

Little glass pen that I chew on,
wound my expression with
wet closeness of cut lips.
To answer him
with sticky kisses.

Undo the corset of
diminishing faith,
unsigned, unsighed,
unsounded air, that
fills my mouth with gifts.
Sealed and forgotten in pink bows;

the colour of hearts which are
not organs behind our ribs.
Not the liquid which passes
through carrying the
mineral of my will,
beating my submission,
keeping my feelings
and thoughts
pumping together

in a bloody rush of
a tongued faltering that
braves fire.
Lick the cinders
from my white skin,

desires relics are
slipping the leash with disguised teeth,
to announce the beginning is over.

Kiss (A Cinquain)

2008-02-21T05:51:00.000-08:00

Your kiss
The dark shadow
between your open lips
or the mouth surrounding it gives
pleasure

Longing

2008-02-21T00:26:00.001-08:00

It rolls off the tongue
as a thick low plume
hungry to extend
now, slowly outwards

a thickening word
with a hook at its end
when you write it

On Reading With Palms

2008-02-19T20:24:00.000-08:00

In silence
a truth is heard
Fragments of words answer
as if you had no other voice

Patient you, quiet teacher
dispensing wisdom from closed books
As if I would ever listen through
the noise of my raucous singing
and the sound of pages twisting
through my frenzied searching-

To the sound of a single kiss
on my collarbone as I slept through
the morning

Torch Song

2008-02-17T22:43:00.000-08:00

“All the secrets a wise heart has
must be more hidden than the Phoenix is
Because concealment in that oyster-shell makes the pearl
From that water drop that comes from the depths of the ocean”

~from The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayam

Putting out candles with my tongue again
and wearing tiny blisters for days.
I can barely taste my food.

Where statements might be invitations
there should be silence.
Little, stitched-up, sewn together
secrets that stay where they are;
rather than bleed from a vein which suffocates with a blackness.
Pushing with backs of cupped hands
a fine layer of powdery tenderness to the periphery.

We knew about this love,
we learned about it in mirrors.
Cold, clear, we decorate ourselves in front of it.
To obscure what we see, to conceal more than a blush
or forked lightning in our eyes at the sound of a name.
Until hiding is habitual. A proud discipline.

The humble portion, still,
inside is held, nurtured, transformed.
To expose it becomes a soft, slow loss, a seeping.
It aches as tears of a little lost girl, alone in a place of bones
and skulls. Telling herself stories, while the wind encloses her
in a relentless lullaby of an emptiness.
This is impossible to wrap in the warm strangeness of words.
This image of a pocket inside a jacket sealed with tiny stitches
which should remain unpicked. Stays and expands,
becoming all.

A Poem To Read In The Dark

2008-02-17T00:01:00.000-08:00

To read without breathing
between these fragments of words
find me
with your lips
here, press your finger to them
now and say tongue
nipple waist toe
belly button earlobe
Neck offered
a wrist exposed

These things we hide
to discover
beneath beneath
like crying or dreaming

The laughter we seek
as destination, a drawing-
bodies as bridges
arched spine arm elbow thigh
warm blood coursing
below the surface

The thoughts sent to air
or paper
The perfect wisdom of bodies
creeping into our imagination
to slake this craving
where it’s warm and quiet
to change the way things are
today

Stark

2008-02-15T22:55:00.000-08:00

Today I am
as calm as my shoes
remorseful as my skirt

I wear them out
Tired of the closeness
of eyeless things
Where every sensation
returns to another
Held in this
by the heat
by the sound
This is not my hunger

This sleeplessness
like widening hands
This heaviness
of a weight never carried

Your kindness smothers
all but courtesy
I want to bite in half
the words which filled
my mouth
then spilled
They wont stop ringing

Solitude closes over them
They echo full-throated
to devour a truth

Thoughts circle
lips still
quivering
to touch
the skin
an idea
is held in

Basin

2008-02-14T02:53:00.000-08:00

It was fallen in

Not cavernous
or hollow

Nothing had eroded
It was there
It remained
just below
where it had been

There
low slung
prolapsed
Deeper
than an indentation

A tragedy
surrounding it
The history of the thing
stretching back
sinuous
to the level surface
Still traceable
It had not merely
dropped

It was fallen in

A collapse
without rubble
or trapped men
Though undeniably
a point of impact

We Sleep Beneath Birds

2008-02-12T03:19:00.000-08:00

I didn’t catch your name.
Still,
here I am,
wondering what the point is;

In this perfection
we grow like fingernails
Will we ever stop?
No.
We might be cut or nibble-bitten
or ground down by work.
Yet we become and become
Until we die
and then maybe
we become something else,
then, some more.
I’d buy that book.
Has it been written?
The one that tells us what happens
when we stop becoming.
Some of us think we have
already.
Yes, like death
Truth.
If you find it I will lay with you
and let you scratch my back
with your fingernails,
while I search for it.
Yes
it is an invisible word,
there, not here.
So tonight, without names
We will sleep beneath birds.
Unlike umbrellas, our heads
above our bodies
swallowing glittering tears
before pride’s useless withered hand.
In the face of this
pinnacle of pleasing angles
obscuring our view
of details not meaningless.
As none we are.
As we are.
Hand-tinted as stars met
by ladders that end
twenty feet above the ground.
Your name is a script, illiterate.
On a delta of my hand’s palms
let me gift you
my resistance,
yes,
so we meet.

On Poetry and Papercuts (for Joe)

2008-02-08T23:27:00.000-08:00

Protruding through the hoop-
A well turned ankle
steady and straight legged
Extending from beneath
a crenulated paper dress
of immortality

too thin to mourn
the tree it came from

Semi-precious emblem
corroborating a sacred
tongue’s aftertaste

An aural snag-
The version
held in talons

Utterance exquisitely rolled
wince meet within this
settled acceptance of
man-handled nourishment

Of charitable digressions
from the sunken eyes
deep within
your written inklings

Ghostling

2008-02-07T22:02:00.000-08:00

Deceptively simple
the old photo you sent
of that windblown girl

Some jagged arrangement
of cheekbones and arms

Jutting out of nine hole boots
a little comedy of red knees
pulled in close as kittens
to hide a budding chest

The shapes you gave
those grey shadows
The rash of textures
that was a makeshift bed

There again she is
cocooned in her only clothes

The pretty ghostling
whose every exposure
overlooked her age

Bend

2008-02-06T23:11:00.000-08:00

Grass stained again
the dress I sometimes
wore with you down

to the river with
the dark dark deep
shapes where we bend

into eachother below again
into the surface of still
deeper things than eyes

Then I lost in yours so
often forgetting I change
my thoughts of you the

passion lasts and slowly
again the unbuttoning of me
encouraging laughter

another change of view to
offer you another fleshly soft
hand or a foot or touch

my hair or face asking
nothing in return saying
so much more than language

a conversation of bodies
extends and covers beyond
silty soft deposits of riverbank

with its long grass growing
upwards where we lay down
how carefully we listen

Morning

2008-02-05T23:27:00.000-08:00

And so this morning lights up
All the despairing immobile corners
All the chairs where grief shabby sat
The gardens, your little house, my studio
It touches our skin and our children’s
skin and our belongings and our aching
heads, it fills out the bleak day after
the blackened night after the wailing
day of screeching red news

It lights up all the busy things in these
clanging hours of redundant framings

It detonates the silence of that desolate
sleep we went to bed for, pushes into the
past those hours of brief escape from
this sadness that follows this morning
around like a copyist walking crablike
with his heavy hands in his pockets