Summer
Rose of silence enfolds valleys of houses,
valley after valley,
scruff verges, paving, and dirt.
Holy of roses,
arms enfold like prayers,
then unroll velvet billows, filling
clouds and water, blood & musk,
glistening pixels.
From honeyed places, nectar drips.
Redbrick glows like embers—
Monumental.
Life swims behind.
The cumin-turmeric sky,
flushed pink like rose,
the scent of our bed.
A fading sun drifts down,
a retiring ship to the horizon.
Silence of inaction is
Death, necessary,
acting as life,
making its ritual movements, like ants.
Colours a Day and Forever
The light, the leaves, the colors, the air
passing over—
Dew under moon,
clinging to jimsonpetal’s belly,
sharp-sweet:
the sigh of a blackberry,
pinched from the bramble,
staining mouth and cheek.
Ragged maple fingers,
palms turned groundward,
tongues of flame stammering.
All green and fragrant.
Savor this dish.
Cubeb pepper, with the scent of spiced pine,
strange to a child—
a comet-tailed boulder.
Wash! The glorious luster of decline,
bronzed enamel over us,
like glass on a painting.
In this evening’s swelter,
summer lowers its eye,
a ball against a stick.
Down by the streetlight,
lurid piss pools in the gutter,
and Daffodil, Mother’s hair,
straw-yellow, dripping in the gutter’s gloom.
Hail peals against the window,
water runs under the garden gate
and down the drive,
thirsting for light, each rivulet
a vein, cooling tarmac dark,
deepening summer’s shadow,
shrinking in sparks of sun.
Several insects attend.
CitySong
Stars, as night wanes into day,
fat droplets skating on coffee.
Looking down the barrel of
several shades of gray,
streetlights shudder on.
Rain deforms the glass’s
dusty vision,
like mercury, like gallium
warping these buildings’
grid of eyes in summer sun—
City as streak,
as smear of light.
Stars rain down the office blocks
in the city at night, &
ears seek rhythm
in the dance-flung night,
bodies wrangled,
stuck like a slide.
Solitude is not loneliness—
the echo of a song.
Nothing can
be settled,
wrapping your tongue around emptiness,
the gist of feeling once.
In My Estate
Sun’s rays arrow down and sink into earth,
which drinks it like milk,
leaves provide green shade, dappled with spots
as if we could escape it.
Every contact leaves a trace.
A tenuous quiet descends.
Girls play in the fountain,
its plash and jagged echoes
down shuttered pink streets.
Boys stare from windows.
Sun stored in the buildings,
like slumbering bodies,
seeps into stilling air.
As we get older, things get worse.
Things shudder in their stillness,
Wholly apart,
whole apart,
holy apart,
the great orange
once again.
A strange stillness creeps over
the fences where women talk,
down alleyways of houses,
washing on their hips,
water in their hands.
Children play between squares of sun
and bushes’ shade.
To be naked
in my beliefs.
The slick mound of Venus:
a kingfisher’s rock
for girls holding myrtle and rose.
Her hair hangs
shading her shoulders and back.
Tender girl,
collapsed to curve, collapsed to line,
shading from pink to oyster.
One Sky Some Days
(Or, Six Ways of Looking at The Sky, The Seventh on the Day of Rest, after Wallace Stevens)
I
Looking out, clouds lantern the summer evening sky,
swimming in blue.
II
Sky like dirt and dark berry juice,
slate clouds torn,
speckled darker with leaves.
III
The pour of light lines
her hair on the pillow.
IV
The Secret, ruffled,
thick and fleshy,
carnations,
pink & labial.
V
Roundlight flared and shadow fell,
roundlight flared
and shadowed fell.
