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.