Background

Eyes that squint,
and all the world
gone as dim as the Louve.

Behind that Mona Lisa
the Hollywood Hills
relinquish their little secrets.

Things are changing,
too slow to be noticed.

This is the other light
beyond the light –

if only you can wait for the day,
so dazzling, so cavalier,
to crumble,

you might discover there
the better meaning of relief,

like the secret map
Da Vinci tried to keep
from treacherous clutches.

Meaniwhile, on top of Everest
a seabed is lurking.

Trout

You can string together
a thousand streams and lakes,
and never notice
that the fish in your hand
has all the weight and promise
of a new accordion
which, of course, you can't play.

I remember a time when the trout seemed loaded,
like a purse. With my knife,
I made the neat slit of a burglar:
from the studded jewellery of the gut,
gouts appeared, as big rubies,
and scales covered my blade like little diamonds.

When the crime was done,
I was left with the fish - a silken glove,
ungodly on my gauche hand.

[Mountain . . .]

That Mountain,
that ship of the sky
riding the slashing blades
of hard weather,
of steely clouds,
of solar glint,
until it moors

in cradles
near waiting mothers,
in the quiet and the blue
hearts of those fathers
who wait on granite decks

to nourish
with bitter prayers
the light of heaven,
the light that feeds
on your grain, on minerals,
on the colours of dawn,
on the plans of chaos.

Siesta

Cheetahs dozing in the arms.
Buffaloes grazing in the feet.

The mind, a secreted octopus
jammed in a rockshelf.

An Orphic swan
caught in the shoulders

and a squirrel curled
in the stomach.

In the ears, bees,
in the eyes, fish,

and the heart,
rumour has it,
some kind of a trout.

Untitled- You can have your ice . . .

You can have your ice, and your salt -
I settle for the eternal

in the smell of burning newspaper

on a glowing morning
when others are working

and I am suited
for the company of sparrows

who hop from the shadows
and settle for little.

The Rock Pool

When the shouting began,
I would head for that planet
where human speech is illicit,
my brain-in-a-vat.

Hooked up to a snorkelpipe,
my face all clapped and strapped
into leaking goggles,

I would tractor across the crackpot looms,
the boundless tidings and traps,

purling and whirring,

stirring the sky-sea juncture,

pausing to hover in Whistler rooms
with the odd squid,
with the starfish, half-baked,

or searching for the bloom
of a hollow shell
dipped in luminous glaze,

or watching a wound-up toad fish
dart for the gloom.

Troubled skull

Troubled skull,
you ancient decanter,

never minding
that your days

of being intact
and holding wine

are over.

Excavation
is taking

these most careful of fingers

their lifetime.

Masterpiece

Out there, you craft the water -
but here, in our hands, you make it spill.

To win your affection, we find ourselves
balancing
stone on stone.

We put the flame
to our loyalty,
speaking ill of the dead.

No plan can work –
we hide the weapon in our mind,
as forgotten as a face.

We roast
in our splendid coats
in the midday sun
while the arches of our trust

break under the weight
of a chance meeting,

and nowhere are we closer
than when we have strayed.

At your feet,
we throw down our fortune,
claiming to be more needy than the poor.

Later, our tell-tale tracks
lead them to us,
while across the sand

our own dogs
follow our scent,
barking for our taste.

In the meantime,
you give us bells to ring –

and we swallow them.

Remember Thunder

All the way from one ear to another,

her echo

ranging as easily over
the shadows and the creases
of our bedsheets

As across the strict arrangements
of mountain,

making us wait at the door of sleep
all the way from one ear
of mountain

to the shadows and the creases

of the remember,
ranging over the remember,

making us all wait at the door
of her echo.

Untitled: The shadows. . .

The shadows in the corners,
your nursemaids.

Your stomach,
argumentative.

The rain outside,
a song about leaving.

Your pillow,
a dead elephant.

Your suitcase,
stolen from the trailer of a clown,

too small for your life,
too heavy to lug around.

Home Excavations

From a time when bottles were thicker
come these lips of broken glass,

and these bones, buried I suppose
after a meal,

in the cake of the orange clay
and the ash of a dutiful stove,

along with this shipwreck
of a pen,
and these green brass fittings,

and these bakelite buttons
bursting forth

to the studio laughter
of the cryptic earth.

Untitled

Those years
resow themselves
in the torn fields
of our eyes,

as around us,
gold thread is spun back
into straw.

The mountain regathers
its far-fetched folds,
restores
all of its flung stones.

Lines resurface
where our wake reawakens,

while from the rooftops
the sins of the dead
are shouted - but our ears

have already healed over.

If God has too many children

If God has too many children,
and some can be driven like pointed seeds
into the corner his all-seeing eye,

then I will go backroading like a drunk
in yellow gravel and its corrugation,
taking that corner where aspiring lovers

park at the end of the airport runway
ready to shudder in bedroom cars,

and down the road, past the boarding kennel
where a harrowing ball of blackballed dogs
serenade hard to the western plains,

and into that field of basalt bombs
and broken glass, and a ceaseless sky,
and a thistle-head perched on its hoary spine,

And then I’ll be fine.

Ants

After we have all gone to bed
they get out the board game of their life.

They move outside the spaces,
under the kitchen ledges, along cracks,
forging the rogue lines of their graphs,

breaking their ranks to attack a fleck,
to drink at the crater of a sauce drip,
to capture the rubble of a biscuit.

And if we wake from the terrible dream,
heart competing, scores unsettled,
and if we happen to rise for water,
there we will find them,

loyal as dogs,
excavators of dirty plates,
lifting the great weight
beyond our limits.