Vigil
Nightshade trails beneath my fingers,
mingles with starshine upon the water,
in the umbered slick of bogs.
Urgent thoughts pressing against my skull:
writhing moths seeking your illumination.
I am called, by your longing or mine;
Why must I always give it voice?
You invoke within me
desperate cries in the wakeful silence.
The late hour laughs at our passion,
My helplessness, hapless irony
And beckons me forth to fill your absence
With vigils in swamps.

Elegy
The little deaths which comprise our lives at both ends of disappointment
Unmarked graves number or excuse compromise and discontent

I had no warning in a heart with hope warring, as though I would dissent
Youth has the years and luxury of folly later to repent

The scent of flesh hangs between us lightning seared pungent
My heathen tears drip blindly heedless of your intent

And so the minutes fall like arrows without you, and neither relent
I am forsaken in this sunken garden as statuary struggles silent

The release of what had me caught leaves me falsely despondent
Even thus abandoned I would not revoke consent

Cassandra in the Carnage
I think I saw Troy burning
behind that last ridge.
I've fallen asleep
at the wheel of a wooden horse.
Fate, a simple mechanism,
Arriving without my revelation.

Relating
When we in nights unslept,
crawled through the wreckage of dreams,
and found and left each other--
to a private pain,
a communal dissatisfaction,
and obliterating darkness.

For Topher
Split limbs emanate from rhythms over rhythms,
Waves under currents catching
Lyricism through melody melding into liquid air,
Hanging like a break about the joints,
Albatross around a sinuous neck, snap and
flung partnered like a limping bird spasmodic
in grace.

Hook at Eton
What drove him from the schoolyard to the mast?
Did he dream as all boys, of irrepressible instinct,
Wild & bloody cut-loose on the lawless sea?
Was he a Huck adrift,
evading the adult world he came to embody?

Had once his feet been fleet & light
of spirit, laughter in song?
His voice channels a child echoing rote;
In reproachful tones he chastises form,
The somber bass having outgrown his words.

creation
inspirated shades of sentiment rising humourous
through the body at the beckoning of blood
the muse throws meat to a captive heart
shall it be found shallow, waning in vigour
waxing viscous moon-eyed & blind as death

Unwomanly
You are the darkness of
decay on my side;
The unsightly tail
peeking beneath petticoats,
The backside of branches
I must never show.
As much a part of me
as unacknowledged nights
down the backstair,
And as visceral a need.

Of Circe
I'm not Penelope,
Don't look to me for fidelity.
I would say don't look at all,
but that's not the way of men.
Even in a shield or a rooftop,
they must look, and possess.
But if my husband whored
his way across the archipelago,
I might well bed the same goddess.

Sympathico
He was stone,
and she was tree;
yet he bore
the imprint of leaf
against his side,
and her limbs
were calcified.

With time
All night I hear the river flow & the river is in me,
or at least in my mind,
though I harbour a notion, like a leaf upon the river,
that it would be better if the river flowed through me,
and so the leaf urges the river to descend into my body,
and one day,
it will prevail.

hourstruck
Our butterfly summer has faded to moth-
eaten memory in the worthless dark
before dawn, when merry-
making has turned sour
into self-parody
more poignant than a
flock of priests
red-faced in the gutter
the broken spring of faith
or dismembered dragonflies
cellophane stained glass
and an offering of flame
to the purity that burned us.

Plastic & Tar
I take a pick-axe to the pavement of time
Splintering cracks in fault-lines we laid
where once we lay smooth-skinned
now stretch-marked and scarred with traverse
such is the birth of souls
Prying these pale reflections of light we cast
thinking to see beyond ourselves
my nails bleed on severed stone
holding aloft what once shone
the recollection brighter than the reality.

Progressive
We who were gifted with grotesque aunts
Wore our slippers through with dance
& could no more gold from spindel compel
Than shirts for swans or sleeping spells
What arts remain in distaff or sword
Upon a barren & concrete sward?

Prints of Tides
This shore is neither of siren nor Circe
I am a child culling shells by whim
Lifting each to sun & ear
to make them come alive
Sand dollar for the penthouse, pale as his skin
Abalone for the image from magazines;
Oh, but they all were pretty,
Razor clams to bleed along his edge
Cast back into the tide
I am still unlearning the art of sea-change

Sand Scribblings
Inexperienced,
I called your idle ante,
Supposing the stone you cast
to be your heart;
(such an easy counterfeit!)
Compassion for a whore
stays my hand,
From rendering it again.

Bath-time Rhyme:
I know it is in fashion
Though not in me
To love in parts,
Temporarily.
As though love
Were a spigot or spout
To gush & run,
And then run out.
My heart is a well,
With depth to yearn,
And more to quench--
Should the handle turn,
A love to drench.

Termites gnaw at the root of eternity
having no end but a beginning
what is, was
what was not, shall never be
& all is wood-rot within
a blighted tree

When the blush on the rose deepens to crimson,
and the petal skin cracks with wilt,
Which spidered Arachne spun these veins,
Shriveled in spite & pity?

I took the path of needles,
let the distaff pierce and bleed
and rouse me from slumber

I suckled too many boys who wouldn’t grow up
And some wolves who left me crying

My only thought now, a tower,
The solitude, if not the right,
to a maiden’s bower…

Fable
I. Tenere
Pellucid chariot extracted
from ignoble gardens;
Rats consecrated equine.
Origins of streets you've crost,
Cannot be held against
The pristine creature descending;
Who after all, flees barefoot from your construct.

II. Occulte
Sister, cleanse yourself in earth & cinders;
I will envelop you dryadic in ash,
Conceal you in stone,
or else divinate a well
too deep for shallow lusts.
Somewhere there is willing
A man to split stone & wood
In search of God.

III. Vox
Drawn dripping from womb
Swathed in a chrysalis of satin
How cold the exposition of his mouth
Against embryonic flesh.

Alternating Current
Lambent in wire & glass
the arrival of artifice;
No schism of nature
could birth pretense
of this nature.

God wept surely,
At the unmaking
Of your image.

Tonguing fictive ideals
& stock panegyrics
on dulcet lips.
Your court of Maenads
will serve your corse
As Orpheus.

Splintered as statuary,
Marble veined with violence,
A swallow or else nightingale
Recalls enough of possibility
To bleed life back into thee.

Physic
coalesced in a droplet of ice
an incident of glass for sand
to mimic soil in the desperate press
of frost to molten panes of stasis

Foundation
Half-utterances rippled,
phrasing effaced in sandcastles
& the relentless movement of sea gulls
I turned to the sea as once to you;
it splayed agape at my nakedness
& crumbling monuments of conceit
(for that is all we shared)
you gave it voice in susurrations of shell
& knew the reason for sandcastles

Breath
Mortality is the tell-tale clock
sewn within a cavity of heart
Inexorable mechanism
'Pestis eram vivus--
moriens tua mors ero.'
Philosopher & physic
Susceptible still
Cannot incantate against
The affliction of breath
'Cogito Ergo Sum.'

He calls me crazy, but at least he calls
This lacks the tremulous novelty
More an ache endured
To the azure of his eyes
Am I now inured?
How oft I prayed for surcease
But passion run cold
Is a dear-bought peace.