Poetry

Inside a single diamond of rain
   heaven might rest. 
   You can be doing anything
   sliding towels into a cabinet
Turning the page on
   an afternoon nap
   and tell in your bones
   the exact second 
When rain, any rain 
   starts, when it stops.
   Aren’t deer, raccoons
   and trees like that also.
Absolutely 
Married to air.

Boxes teeter on edges,
crammed full of younger selves,
formative but now unrecognisable,
faces in thickened mist.

Dancing shoes are packed:
laying head to toe,
mimicking children
in large Victorian families,
nestled for warmth in bed,
coping with lack of space.

As I tape and label boxes,
I wonder which will stay closed,
concealing its underbelly forever,
refusing to give up its wares
for prouder, newer houses.

Sometimes, I wish to crawl in,
tape myself up
with kitchen crockery,
burrowing to forgetfulness,
finding a singular space
where moving does not exist:
viewings, listings, sale boards, asking prices
are ghostly figments,
glittering to coal dust
in darkened cardboard corners.

But then I see her,
eyes dilating with what can be:
more space, wraparound gardens,
kitchen islands to dance around.

Quite suddenly,
cardboard cities
are no longer a place of refuge.

My thoughts climb back out,
placing my imagination
upon taller, wiser trees,
where it can see sunlit bands
of new possibilities.

We regroup, join forces,
as we search for new homes,
eager, now readied,
on the move.

I think of her now, how she loved gardens,
and the genuine grace of her soul

That word she used for the slate of human construction,
calling here and there to smallish birds

Black dahlias, illustrative envelopes of sound,
things no listening can hear

The Cana Lilly, the big flowers failed states
in the small corners we call we weeds,

Dove blue gods that let every sparrow
fall with parasols, from the opulence of their death,

Marigolds, young and disenfranchised, destitute,
payless wanderlusts, half the age of the sun,

Secret credulities of hybrids, upstart redacted notions,
of what a flower might say

Were it to salute the queen bee,
as its rump pollinates the whole,

On the day we have risen into missionary position,
forgetting the frugalities of war,

Speechless as a seed, rounded vowels bootstrapped
to the tigers, crouched in the undergreen,

Strong colours for the wireless calling,
the shyness haunting the internecine affair,

And in the ravine, singer of the olive tree,
orchards illuminated, a dais of waifish sea

Crawling the waves stoked by dawn,
limericks of dancing leprechauns and an unctuous breeze,
Couched behind words unspoken, in the back rooms
of ivory towers, unloved and unheard.

These cricket type things that only live twenty-four hours
having been buried half a century beneath ground.

Moon and stars hand lettered in love, rainbows in tandem dipping cheek to 
cheek
the last tango of torrential light husking the bee season, pollinating the 
night sky.

And the halos of ice crystals bending the fletcher`s one good eye
the shaking palsy of white dwarfs, the twinkling true sentience, asterisks of unending light.

Bluffing shadows in the riddle of a rogue sun, a painful, last cheerful hour wringing its hands,
the face of the invisible unveiled, the dark lantern illuminating only 
itself.

And here in the helix of one cell, in the cocktail of Hemlock and honest Athenian wine,
the Greek phlox that grimaces, in the slaughterhouse of rain.

Ancient quarrels, witch-hunted by a menacing glance
banishing the quixotic fables of both poets and gods alike.

Opaque birds, flying through the slat of the kitchen door, telling tales out of school
space and plastic time, death chasing the plume of its chrysalis.

What shackles the phantom limb of utter squalor, the music box of rage
the limitless self-pity of those for whom no act or word is flesh enough to 
be real.

In the pleated rubble, a ribbon of days, fossils of lunar moss,
washed out in the scrimmage of its own memory, the rusted animal steeled in 
the grind.

The musk of twilight, in the dusking bazaar, of the labyrinthine Malthusian 
heart
the scent of turmeric, henna and sage, tossing a coin, wishing upon nothing 
at all.

And even when I fall into the jagged corners of that uneven tumble
the crimped steel lags on, filled with white fury, scuttles into the unpeeled onionskin night.

Marigolds, marigolds, marigolds, he madly sings
with his lovely knotted hands, night perfumes of the one most perfect thing.

Potting half-blind, with a gnarled palm, the doggerel of a crippling love,
washing his impertinent past, grouting, cleaving the wolven half-sounds.

Painting now those frail laryngeal petals, of indestructible meaning,
the fragrance of fresh marigolds that clasp the sun in the tumbling nubby 
twilight.

Geraniums, geraniums, geraniums he cries, and the sky goes black
as the black-eyed Susans, black tulips, and Simon with his crooked blacked 
out teeth.

There where he straightens the nasturtium’s spine, and waves his wand,
above the chain of boulevards in the Capucine, whispering in a Celtic song.

Kneeling by the entrance that low lines the ground, lilting toward the heart
that rounds the gouache of thick watercolour, a triptych of night stars.

Lifting his brush into a tiny fury, the enthusiasm of one more hourglass 
glance
breaking the earth with the sulk of incandescence, a garden of gratitude and clandestine wrath.

Shingly little tiny stones pollinated from a boulder eighty million years 
old,
the wild quiet coast, pummeled, and the gaping orange peonies, festering with ants.

Tarting up the mole-hilled lot with impatience, petulant monkey flowers, 
thyme, clover and lavender
and the Durban white daisies with faded buttons, laced by toothless yellow 
bones.

In the rough box, a gigantic fuchsia, tied tall with a ribbon of string, named after Nana
the old dog he loved so much, whose wagging tail purses still suddenly in his dreams.

Another he calls Christina, hardy as the whizzing of hummingbirds’ wings
gone now, glib and deathless as the sea wolf gilded inside.

And a third spiraling on a trellis, in memory of Suzie Dow, the niece whom so he loved
loathing the dalliance that blesses her unrequited name.

Captain, oh my captain, as slowly he weeps, the corpulent noise, lacelike in the marrow,
the universe at war with war, in every flower, that goes untried, and undrawn there.

In two hundred million years the Himalayas, will be plains, the sea his 
rotting teeth
and nothing more or less true than the stars, as far as they are near.

The bloom in the vase, vassal and Lord, even now signing the both of us,
“here there be dragons”, they say in an odd vehicle of tongue.

At the edge of the universe, the sparrow kings pluck the dying light, night 
of the hungry ghosts
the local fisherman chant ex voto, the unanswered prayers of hope and joy.

The skylark seed bursting into climbing flowers, chasing a godless god
wild tropes in the little lanes, collapsing under the weight of the roses.

Dear, dear, loveable friend, may your masked eyes, catch moonlight
in your frayed palsied hand, that holds the homeless there, smiting the structured glacial sounds.

In the long night of human, the wild chant, in the green hangers of every 
wild flower
that blossom in the last of us.

A bright moon shrinks, shines on stray cats and lover’s untroubled lips
and nothing speaks.

Healers have the habit
of tending to leprosy
in everyone but themselves.
I don’t want to be found.
I don’t want to be saved.
I don’t want to rile up
old demons and wounds
and burn bridges before
I’ve built them.

I’ve swam deserts and wandered
until my lungs heaved heavy
from breathing heat and converting
lost footpaths into highways
for someone else to find.
I’m sore and spotted
as an uncaged ocelot,
hiding in a sullied canyon,
growling secrets to stones
older than the rings of Saturn,
asking if there are still
pristine things left to discover.

There must be.

Let’s explore the part of you
that finds a cave-in concealed from anyone
without the secret language to enter.
You can whisper open padlocks,
rummage up ruins from lost silver cities,
unearth doors boarded up from storms
long-since passed but warily remembered,
their residual terror tattooed in rust.
Speak it open in whatever way
you imagined conquistadors
before you knew better
and before you knew memory
and before you knew not every heart
ached as deeply as yours.

I can glisten good as any fool,
and I can hold onto things
heavier than you can carry.
And the soft of my mouth will leave you
bitten and unafraid, cat-eyed
and ripping open,
burlap sacks of gold coins
like a ceiling of stars finally allowed to rest
into their next bright night.

I’m not that hard to find.
Even healers need healing
sometimes.