Month: Jun 2020

Variable marbled hearts:
here is a table of snakes
upon a sump of poison:
gorgeous as a gorgon’s hair

These tombs, thick with glossy ribbons
that nuzzle the stonework, glitter
in the half-light, lick the morning air:
speak for us, and cover our bones.

Here on the floor, the lady fern
(softer, more delicately cut)
is poisonous when raw, will burn
brighter now, curdling her hurt.

Greenery-yallery in the wood;
its habit is erect, the shafts
cross-gartered, hairy to the tip;
it is the shuttlecock of God.

Well-churched, monstruous pursuit
of the fractal Gothick: muck
in the fernery upholds
croziers and fiddleheads,
curling and delicate fronds;
finery is born to the
clatter of a Jacquard loom.

A wave, and a show of hands
a rustle of applause
and high-fives as the wind moves
to adjourn, to cut loose
these martyrs and condemned men
borne to new and other lives

Redoubts: phalanges
of thick and withered
horn: shuttered caskets:
a mustering of
bloody sticks and stones

Here they put down roots:
on guard forever
over the sacred
inflammable core
of all dry places

Paper and plastic, anthracite, shot silk:
heralds of our virtue, you nod and weep
over our grief. Gift us your blood, your milk,
your armistice of miseries and sleep.

This woodland’s curious crown
upon the brows of her dead
is both glory and a wound

Trickling gold over bone
she flowers on primæval ground
a presence that will break stone

How broad is your blue? A carpet perhaps,
or a lake, an ocean, the whole Earth cold
over your grave. Some sorrows are nameless
and lost in the wood; some bells are not tolled.

Carnal and creamy, buttered meat
an opulence enrobed in fat
wreath-blossom, opening by night
the perfume of a lover’s shit

The Lady Laurel: glossy
leaves catching the light; the sweet
heaven-scent unpetalled flowers
in their purple pomp; the flight
and the finding of nectar;
the scarlet and poisonous
berries that cluster and kill.

Past their best now, the tulips
are overblown and blowsy,
dropping their frilled and streaky
skirts to show us the ash-black
intimate crux of our need:
stigmata: moments in red
as paradise runs to seed.

What is it with boys? Aloof
and moody, and full of a love
all their own and never enough;
blowing the trumpet, wearing the ruff.

Turn of the year: squeaky-green
out of the blue, of the black
loam, these pink and white fingers
of soap and wax: the dark is
giving up its ghosts for us.

As ever, this meal begins
with a scribble on the tooth
an itch in the furrowed bone;
cleft and spread eagled, eaten
bare of its meat and fat
the horn in us, and the gore
of our flailing hollow heart

Flesh in this case is long gone
battened and shipped to become
so many units of work

So much that is no matter
now fled the whitening bone
as an abhorred corpulence

Grown fat on such refinement
briefly we assume the so
sorry posture and move on

A difficult wood. Too hard and scrappy
to be turned by hand, its forests mock with
abundance. Despite fire and clear-felling
still the dead prevail; thin papery ghosts
crowd the margins of our cultivation.

Out of his hands the clay
has fashionable dreams
the snake the baroque lie
attempts to redeem is

surely to be believed
in her bed in her seams
the fast earth is relieved
by nourishment of worms

as common husbandry
there is nothing to it
nothing can shake the tree
of its fallen fruit

Previously published in PN Review 163 (2005)