time of light

morning

2011-01-28T11:31:00.001+11:00

Here, in the morning heat
of another day
my heart goes
wearily recollecting nightmares.

And out of the altitude
in the blue and green glare -
through the plummeting scythe
of trucks along the beach road
the small hum of my love
grinds its wings.

beneath trees

2011-01-28T11:26:00.001+11:00

Like the far drone
of an air-conditioning unit
the sea lands out there
in the dark.
Some trees, beside the roadhead
fan the song -
old unswaying calloused pine epitaphs
which break the view during the day
like inkblots
and go unloved.
We parked beneath them
to watch the slow lines of surf come in
pixilated by the night
and to listen, impatiently, alive
until 11.54

on leaving things behind

2010-07-02T15:33:00.001+10:00

I want to descend, faster and faster

And meet you, old self

Halfway up a staircase or somewhere

Racketing back to get what you forgot.

We are always leaving something behind,

You and I, half finished

Books on trams or under tables,

Or a scrawled note about

What you were thinking for instance

Barely ten thousand feet up – which you left

jammed in and lost beside the in-flight menu.

Some part of our selves is always getting betrayed

As easily as that.

What was it you wanted to say

From that seat where the perfect system

Of the city makes sense and dwindles out the window

In the underwater, grey, airport light, first thing?

You lifted your eyes to the world

And said remember something or other.

64.

2009-10-05T20:15:00.000+11:00

Toward Sicily

We left by the rail again, lurching
through the barely lit station and stink of it
and the bundles of clothes asleep in the hollows
nightward, through an invisible distance
And trees we didn’t know the names of.

This line of us summoned to an endless corridor
To crouch together anonymously
Like a chain of mourners
in the hellish dust, readying ourselves
for the new limits of exhaustion.
And through the haze of glass and smoke
And darkness in the cabins
People dreamt with their mouths open
Trying to cry something in slow motion.
We envied then from the aisles
The luxury of that deepish sleep
And shifted blindly for one another
in that too small passage,
condemned by our bodies, experimenting
with our heaviness and our necks
like new swans while people stepped
amongst us, gently as if we were children,
to smoke or piss if they could bear it
in the light and roar and namelessness of places.

There was no language we knew capable, no gesture.
But if we could have spoken then
In our low conspiratorial way
of things unconnected to all that sadness
You could have slept against me
With my hand however way
In your dirty unconcerned hair.
Oh the happiness we blinked and missed.

63.

2009-10-05T20:10:00.001+11:00

Three letters from god to an old friend.

1. The sea

I don’t think you resented anything then
Even the aloof way
I spread the table and left
before you woke.

We unparlysed each other its true.
I don’t remember much before you happened,
Just some sort of long, half waking afternoon
watching rain in the flaring magnolia.
My thoughts moved under sea
Like weeds in a current going nowhere.
But I turned myself inside out for you.

2. The garden

In the garden there were no poems
Just the illiteracy of sun and in it
Trees seemed to burn with no reference to fire.
The dust was far away.
When evening happened on the water
you looked out towards
no such thing as the horizon.
And what was darkness when it came
Flooding the evidence?
Did you wait, drawing breath?
Pelicans came out of it.
You did not dream.

3. The sky

However briefly, coming up from the underworld
or the world
where the languid cities are assailed
at the line of the sky

yes, briefly here
at ground level
even without storm, or rain,
that condemnation of blue
or grey turning blood coloured or milk,
that booming sluice
occasionally stops you.

Stand for a minute, there
in harms way, and
in the stray light
which lets go and breaks like bread
above the heavy traffic

Say fuck, or goddamnit
or invent something else
I could hear you with, again.

61.

2009-10-05T20:09:00.004+11:00

Rome

Sometimes we walk a fine line
Where the buildings rise up
like specters and rot,
only half believing themselves
and a curtain turns high
in a dusty lit window
regarding me like the life
I took a wrong turn away from,
Somewhere.

Tonight it was that life in which
I was not lonely, but still strange here,
carrying each day as if it were a glass
of the only water for a hundred miles
across the bare floorboards of my happiness.
The one in which a woman who was moving
In the next room, barefoot and out of sight
Loved me back.

We pass beneath that window
Arguing about which way to go.
I desire everything, sadly
and our shadows catch us and
move ahead beneath the streetlights
till we drag them in again and
let them stretch behind us,
like live capes.

62.

2009-10-05T20:09:00.002+11:00

News at strange hours

A sideways rain came at me fitted
with ice and the land shone
though it was afternoon and dark already.
I half expected to see
a red arctic moon emerge
to suit the strangeness
of being here again, a world away
from the last few months
and the heat which pushed its way in
everywhere and drenched us.

I heard news at strange hours,
snatched words
you stole the time to send,
from your middle eastern room or rooftop
your crack den you called it
while the sirens tightened around you
and your friend melted her hash and
puked into a kitchen pot.

I talk in my sleep,
giving all our secrets away
and angels or crows pass dangerously
close through the slimy bleakness
at half past three every morning
twisting the plot of that dream
in which we are happy.

60

2009-10-05T20:05:00.002+11:00

Flight

Here you are, lofted
In the dizziness of flight
wanting to cry out
but what for?
in the sudden world of noise,
the lifting weighted roar of it
which churns against all odds
as the dark earth moves away.
Doubt everything in your thrown back
chair, get ready for half a moment since
you half feel already what it must be like:
that elongated moment
of absolution and tenderness
as the known way unfolds from itself,
or some hard wired hope like it.

Look out through your own reflection
at those hinterlands of light
the last phosphorescent edges of the known city
retreating into the slow night
like bright, improbable islands,
Dimchurch. Fairlight. Hellingly.
whatever they were called
veins of gold now on the sleeve
of an ash-turned body,
inscriptions which a proud forgotten
people make upon the darkness
just by driving home at last, numbed or
waking to a cry to walk the corridors
and comfort one another with electricity.

59.

2009-08-30T00:01:00.002+10:00

Come with me in
to the dire straights

and there in the streetfog
breathing fume,

we'll turn
half known, in some direction

and face out

with our hearts streaming out of us

like water in a gale force

58.

2009-08-25T18:39:00.003+10:00

A sideways rain came at me fitted
with ice and the land shone
though it was afternoon and dark already.
I half expected to see
a red arctic moon emerge
to suit the strangeness
of being here again, a world away
from the last few months
and the heat which got used to pushing
its way into our unconsciousness
and drenching us.

I heard news at strange hours,
snatched words
you stole the time to send,
from your middle eastern room or rooftop
while the sirens tightened around you
and your friend melted her hash and
puked into a kitchen pot. Jerusalem.

I talk in my sleep,
giving all our secrets away
and angels or crows pass dangerously
close through the slimy bleakness
at half past three every morning
twisting the plot of that one
in which we are happy.

57

2009-06-18T15:30:00.003+10:00

It came down from the undisclosed heights
feeding on winter.
Down enough to the rubbley land
through the light and darkness and god knows
to where I lay, shedding my skin
in the fold upon fold of sleep.

And maybe a thousand years evaporated
in the time it took to pass again into day.
But what awaited us, we the ceaseless,
when stepping once more into the sway of morning,
we took our next waking breath in the weak sun
and faced out , windward, already forgetting?

A bitter spring crept up through the earth.

56.

2009-05-22T16:06:00.003+10:00

And I saw the wreck force up the white dust
(sea birds describing unhurried circling distances)
and calmly, calmly we were anointed
in the grey light and
terror stole another inch.

Why in this place with no laws
or known boundaries
does beauty still reckon with us
still beat the air with mist still
leak its rancid gold and rancour
and answer us?

From every muddy puddle we drew breath
and climbed the flat unending fierceness.

55.

2009-04-17T14:47:00.004+10:00

I turned to face my face
in the darkness of the shadow
of the wings.

Lavish dogs teemed
behind the fences,
sensing who knows what
in the green air.

Autumn lay upon the ground,
turning to mud.

And what did you say
that drew the tears up from my life
into this day to day light?
From darkness to darkness
from the blood level to here.

I heard you say something
as I came up for air.
You let me breath
before you forced me under again.
"And so shall you live."

54.

2009-04-08T09:20:00.004+10:00

You go within, but to what?
How everything in the night waits for us to come back,
except for the moths, who are insane with light.
And beside us sometimes, the world
of another who is asleep, runs on imperceptibly
alive in the maelstrom of unrecognisable space
and moves as the spirit which so they say
moves in all flesh, moves.

53.

2009-04-06T18:56:00.003+10:00

Mouth of glass
that mouths the morning
that takes the night
and hunts with it
and knows the astonishment
of rain.
Mouth that sleeplessly runs
the length of me
that sleeps beside my ear
like a murderer
that smiles god.

52.

2009-04-01T11:33:00.003+11:00

On almost all such days
seagulls such as these pass
high up and watching
while the dry lightning
hallucinates over there
bending to the dust.
And they go to wherever
white as sun for a second
and sand white and muddy
carrying the homeless
condemnation of the sea.
I wouldn't even have cared
if I hadn't of seen them returning
later, three crows breaking slowly
from the blue; silent, blackened
with news from the otherworld.

51.

2009-03-29T21:46:00.003+11:00

We remembered our dreams
in the kitchen. Two white dogs
moving elsewhere through
crowds of children, flared
and faded.
I took you drunk flowers
and spiders small as germs
and we walked the edge of land
hearing Russian and Hebrew and
wind peal from the dark
moored shapes of boats.
Something glittered and ran
through our fingers.

50.

2009-03-29T21:34:00.002+11:00

Word upon word telling me how to see
the sky, but I cannot see the sky
couldn't tell you what terrifying colour it is
that hangs there or what wordlessness rises
in the morning, making out of the better dreams
whole worlds of real fucking animals.

Life of everything I am too quick to notice
or the light which catches the instance
of the underside of a seagull above me-
disappears without me. Coward!
Traitor who came all this way to the gates
in order to bang his head against the lock.
Fool, who lives and breathes and lives and breathes.
Throw yourself under the wheel of the world for once.

49.

2009-03-25T11:37:00.004+11:00

Sleep
listens at the doors
of many rooms at once
and gossips about your friends.

Sleep
listens at the doors
of many rumours at once
and gambles for your clothes.

Sleep
likens the rooms of memory
to ones you've never seen
and scrambles your codes

Sleep
likes room to move
and once it get's going
goes.

48.

2009-03-25T00:00:00.003+11:00

Take the mere magic
of this half rain
for example
beat it gently
on the roof of the car.
Let the windows fail
in the fog of a few
simple words and
if we get another chance
don't move your hand so quickly
when I reach to touch it.

47.

2009-03-23T10:35:00.003+11:00

You look out the window
and there is darkness
how long has it been?
and you notice the moths
in the smoke light and
the dust rising off the sea
and the sound of one of us
moving in the house
in the unslept hours spent
opening and closing books
and fridges and going outside
to breath and memorise the day.

46.

2009-03-22T01:06:00.003+11:00

We stood alone in the black street
yes, again, departing one another
in the terrible way we have perfected
in the oblivion of language
infected with ourselves.

And without you I emerged
into a city in the last throws of night-
the quiet ornate absurdity of these things
chairs and statues, pictures
in the empty waiting rooms
chandeliers without us
the changing patient stupidity
of traffic lights, your breath
in the deepest part of me
your little fire, your swarm of birds
your north wind, your sea
which drowns my sea.

45.

2009-03-15T23:53:00.006+11:00

Rain
and then something else,
happiness?
no
always the memory
of another
happiness.

We drove along the coast
like some commercial
for heaven, with the top down
and nowhere to go.
It was midnight in someone else’s car
and we were other people,
the sort who play their music
too loud and drive too fast.
In my other life I couldn’t have cared less.
It took you for me to understand
this speed, the excellent sadness.

And once, when we hardly knew each other
And were both drunk
you took my hand in the middle of traffic,
and taught me to change gears.

44.

2009-03-11T23:26:00.004+11:00

Fatten me on the earth
on the awe of dusk on
the summer which fell
on our faces once,
one of those mornings
amongst the newspapers.

Maybe I wanted to fly once
to come unstuck
amongst the other worlds
where time is never enough.

I can sing, badly, but whatever.
Enough is enough sometimes.
And maybe I'm too unholy
to tame anything and
nothing will land at my feet.
Maybe none of it gives a damn.

But the light comes over
the evening and you and I.

43.

2009-03-10T11:54:00.001+11:00

Wing of man
everything else happened
so quickly.
You teach dreams now
on the outskirts
and get by.

42.

2009-03-08T16:36:00.002+11:00

And some gleaming other day
in the beaten down grass
take my skin to yours again
where the fallen world reeks
of autumn and traffic.
We can be reckless again
in a certain light,
unremarkable amongst
the crowds of living people
who will not recognise our faces
or remember.

41.

2009-03-08T16:32:00.003+11:00

Ten years I sat
in the window
as the days below
fed into the pool.
There were those who believed
we should have gone on
and others who grew old
still believing the stories
we told ourselves.
Still others, and here
I count myself, knew
amongst our blood thirst
a higher order-
that the doomed alone
pitch their tents
at a dead end.
Only monsters in this way
understand the workings
of the human heart.

40.

2009-03-06T19:16:00.004+11:00

I stare into the sun
which forgives me.
Sound of the blue sky
breaking on the body
of an aeroplane,
streets which bare
the scars of last night,
the smells and lost charms
the old aches and pains
I am forgetting
which once paralysed me
in blackened doorways.
Bring out your dead,
your sickened loves-
let them dissolve
in the corners of this city
amongst the birds and fast food
where my heart still turns.
Let the algae flourish
on the still waters
you will never once more
step into.
Let us practice
our betrayals again
in the light
of new statistics,
let the sun burn in the afternoon
on all the rooftops,
let it blind us with forgiveness.

39.

2009-03-04T22:42:00.003+11:00

And then some mercy
not much
because the night was cold
and you were far away
came upon me
and she left with my money
before I'd even
gathered what to say.

38.

2009-03-03T19:33:00.005+11:00

Ghosts have tired thoughts-
it's a left over habit
they'd like to be rid of.
You could see them
if you could see them
at night, trying to find
somewhere to leave these
ideas we have about things
walking in each others footsteps
beside the grey and
other coloured sea edge.
Sometimes they find
the right silence or a place
not worth thinking about
and bending to it gently
abandon this world.
If it goes well, it's like
a hand being taken
from another hand.

37.

2009-02-26T11:50:00.002+11:00

O tired stars why
do you keep bothering with us?
There has to be a better way
to spend eternity than this
distant governance.
And we could get on with
our aimless wandering
unburdened of your pity.

36.

2009-02-25T22:26:00.007+11:00

There is a true light I have not seen you in.
They don't do it here. The corridors we run through
are well lit by a different shade of wonder
and I am not beyond believing in that.

The moon is a bucket lifting up a tired light
to quench the dreams of suburban owls
and you lift your hands to touch me
like embers thrown from a wreckage.

There are street lights in your hair and
an ash coloured breeze moving the water
against its will. Light enough for that, thank god.

And there is light in the bared windows
and on the balcony where you might stand,
throwing down those small combustible promises
from your cigarette to my shadow,
to the shadows I moved through.

35.

2009-02-25T15:45:00.002+11:00

where is the room
where desire is met
the black box, like a heart
which lies there
where it was flung?

34.

2009-02-19T21:40:00.002+11:00

The messiness of certain days:
uncertain insurance claims, bad traffic, invoices, dinners
that end badly
the smog woven on the loom of the city
like some sort of collective resignation
as if the low sky itself were made
to harness a degree of sighing.

You went to sleep to the sound
of jack-hammers, drunk
in someone elses backyard and
woke to the white shifting thinly wet air
surrounded no less by a sudden field
of overnight, sky-purple flowers.

33.

2009-02-19T14:43:00.003+11:00

It's not hard
the two of us can manage.
We tend the garden. Things grow,
we make the most of everything.
In the winter it's even beautiful,
stumbling through the mist.
There's no one to tell us what to do,
it's not like you would imagine.
Smoke doesn't rise from the ground.

32.

2009-02-16T20:57:00.002+11:00

And then we sat for a while
me and her
and it was shady under those trees
with a nice wind.
I smoked a cigarette and
it was beautiful and the ghosts
of everyone we had ever loved
came up to us
and tried to sell us ice cream
and postcards and
clean shoes, amen.

31.

2009-02-15T21:33:00.004+11:00

When you're tired of poetry
or whatever
poetry does little good -
a little like the chink
of ice in a glass -
that much
good you can't hold against anything.
It's an ornament
which requires a summer
night for example,
the abstract, slightly drunk business
of a wind smelling of sea, animals
fighting in the near enough distance
yes, hypocrisy of course and
only an uncounted, not even sadness
(if you were to run with it)
which will be gone anyway,
come morning.

30.

2009-02-14T11:55:00.003+11:00

Night takes things and hums.
Will you lie down with me and say nothing?
There are people who are waiting
in bars to be served, talking shit and
ships which cross and uncross the ocean
carrying casinos and thin bones
in the hands you touch me with.

29.

2009-02-12T21:53:00.005+11:00

I am your water tonight
I am your fire.
What comes will come.
You can ask for what you like-
the skin and love of who you love
the tenderness
which incinerates the past.
You can ask
and the darkness will touch you
with its wind.
You can wait and believe
but what comes will come.
I am your water tonight.
I am your fire.

28.

2009-02-12T15:31:00.004+11:00

Music or the sound of rain
which beats
in the skulls of strangers
who carry on, unintimidated
by the change of season.

And sometimes I read
in the faces of these crowds
whole sentences of fear
and in the aisles of trains
where we pass and
in the doorways which
open automatically
onto metal blue sunsets.

brief interlude

2009-02-09T22:34:00.008+11:00

The plan was to write 100 poems in 100 days. Since I'm well behind the required run rate, I'll point you here and here to the wonderful work of Gary Sullivan, who is doing the same sort of thing translating the poems of Ernst Herbeck and who seems to be having more luck than me keeping to the schedule. I first discovered Herbeck's poems on a plane above China, in W. G Sebald's book Campo Santo. They are miracles.

As Gary Sullivan explains: "Ernst Herbeck was born in 1920 in Stockerau, Austria. He was operated on numerous times for a congenital hair-lip, which made speaking difficult for him for much of his life. While working in a munitions factory in 1940, he began to report the feeling of animals or other people invading his body. He was briefly institutionalized, released, and served for about five months in the military. He was hospitalized again in 1945, and spent the rest of his life in mental institutions.

"In 1960, the psychologist and writer Leo Navratil (1921-2006) met with Herbeck and, providing him with a blank postcard and a pen, asked him to write a poem on the subject of "morning." After thinking for a while, Herbeck wrote the following poem:

Der Morgen

Im Herbst da reiht der
Feenwind
da sich im Schnee die
Mähnen treffen.
Amseln pfeifen heer
im Wind und fressen.

In autumn the wind of fairies
align
as in the snow the
manes meet.
Blackbirds whistle afield
in the wind and eat.

Translated by Gary Sullivan and Oya Ataman.

27.

2009-02-09T20:17:00.006+11:00

Under the ground they are thirsty
pushing up the concrete because
it's the work of spirits to do what they can
to disturb the flatness of out lives
to crack our houses, to cast fear,
and come to us and count our blessings
in a strange mathematics
that never seems to add up.

26.

2009-02-09T20:08:00.007+11:00

These are the times
in which the world turns visibly,
the way the minute hand jumps
on an old clock. It's true,
though we only sense it
or read about it, most of us -
or are we the few?
The headlines salivate.
The wind bears the real news
in which possums fall dead
from the wires and someone
is standing in a burnt out circle
looking out at the real sense of it
from glassless windows and
a friend of a friend loses everything.

25.

2009-02-04T18:18:00.004+11:00

This is the heat that I dreamt of
shaking the rotten fruit,
airless in rooms, luring bats.
And the sea limps here
stroking the days plastic.
We invent new silences,
new ways to fail one another
in the same heat, in the
summer I know off by heart

24.

2009-02-04T18:17:00.004+11:00

Why do you go spinning like that
careless among the oblivion
though your creatures turn against you?

23.

2009-02-01T19:14:00.009+11:00

There is a family of awkward bodies
going together into the low surf.
They stay close as if the distance
between them is a type of weight
and when one looks they all
turn in agreement to look
as falling blood-mouthed sky from sky
the world happens, or calls them up
from rock, sand, scrub, animal-
to appear here, unmade for these bodies
briefly and silent, a rough circle
rising and falling with the sea.

22.

2009-02-01T19:05:00.004+11:00

guild our endevour
make time ebb
or languish here
lapse and reach
and find the repose
which every word
after word wont.

21.

2009-02-01T18:57:00.006+11:00

I am writing to you but really
I am working the colours of the air
discerning mosquitoes from nothing
and wondering how much difference
death makes.

Why am I afraid?
I pass too lightly.
I fall in with shadows.
I take the lives of insects
between my fingers.
The sea in the distance
reminds me of sadnesses
I can no longer profess.
And beyond the sea -
the silence of no reckoning.

Today I saw a man drag up a flare of silver
from where he stood, knee deep in the low tide.
Then turning towards the road
he took the last madness of its life
in his hand, as gently as one, in all kindness
puts out a candle or a wounded bird.

20.

2009-02-01T18:53:00.006+11:00

In the garden there were no poems
just the illiteracy of sun and in it
trees seemed to burn
with no reference to villages.
The dust was far away.
When evening happened on the water
you looked out towards
no such thing as the horizon.
And what was darkness when it came
flooding the evidence?
Did you wait, drawing a breath?
Pelicans came out of it.
You did not dream

19.

2009-02-01T18:52:00.004+11:00

You can forget the world.
My god, you can forget
the world.

18.

2009-01-25T23:02:00.006+11:00

Dear light, what have you done with my father and who is this who appears dressed in the memory of his body, in dreams? There are words which I cannot open. Open, they would tear even this careful apparition.

17.

2009-01-25T22:18:00.007+11:00

You watch an ocean like this
unravel and land here, alight.
And you begin the work
of bearing it off, like this
wave by wave to the pit
in these tiny, unfit containers:
baskets made of hair, muddied,
imperfect as bodies, designed
to be empty halfway home.

16.

2009-01-22T19:12:00.004+11:00

As the match decides to burst -
you who have known, in far places
the twin colours of grief;
sea born ash and the Jacarandas
remaking the city -
touch the place of my heart and
unbreak even the dashed hopes.

15.

2009-01-22T18:31:00.003+11:00

And then god
unparalysed the darkness
and bestowed on them
the gift of waking up
again into this world,
into what is left,
cruel or not.

14.

2009-01-20T21:56:00.006+11:00

I'm doing this again, being
something the wind moves over.
I hold the glimpse of cities, as a mirror
holds something moving in dim light
on the other side of the room.
A few sunsets, a certain type of regret.
I examine the old specimens
half heartedly, knowing no cure exists.
The night removes whatever it was
we did today and takes every glance
and smashes it.

13.

2009-01-20T11:07:00.005+11:00

Static of the sky-mixed sea
and from it men slowly unfurl
their own patience
lifting up in private the darkness
weighing the weight
of small creatures
which might arrive
to breathe stunned, as if
this blue light could be gasped.

12.

2009-01-19T00:52:00.004+11:00

Explosions in the dark.
I don't even know
what a gun-shot sounds like.
Might it have been
these ridiculous flowers
blooming, killing men
in the streets, setting fire
to the uselessness?

11.

2009-01-18T20:03:00.004+11:00

You can say the stars
and they might
have meant something.

10.

2009-01-17T00:28:00.005+11:00

There is a waking god who gathers
harmlessness for the morning and
in the unwitting light touches,
through iridescent skin,
the ribs, in the street, of a dog.

9.

2009-01-16T17:53:00.007+11:00

The night windows with their garlands

of shadow, quiet upturned chairs,

the sum of many things.

Sex, ash, the light that burns forever.

I have names to describe these circumstances,

but they've gone cold.

8.

2009-01-16T17:50:00.005+11:00

As faintly as ash might fall

I hear you breathing.

Or maybe it's the wind.

7.

2009-01-13T19:16:00.006+11:00

It's pretty hard going.
The heat looks me in the eye.
We shift dirt with tools
so small as to be almost useless.
The paleontolgy of shadows.

6.

2009-01-13T01:34:00.004+11:00

What sounds will be lost when we are lost
and in what land, where what terrible birds
ricochet from one treeless scene to another?

5.

2009-01-11T22:52:00.005+11:00

All day in a storm of light
I practice the right words,
waiting for some part of the universe
to agree.
The dust, which is beautiful,
abandons whatever it was
to become dust.
The trees turn green, the sky
which isn't even there
bestows its terrible,
unheard of endlessness.
I don't know the language,
I can't even ask for bread.

4.

2009-01-10T20:41:00.008+11:00

The day was gentle.
I walked in it.
Light in the air, and the sea, maybe.
The contented sounds of pigeons,
a child's chalk game
fading on the asphalt.
Yes, god of whatever,
the day was gentle.
It turned to me
its threatening kindness.

3.

2009-01-09T16:43:00.004+11:00

And then you gave me your hand
in a tangle of air, in this incomplete sadness.

You called the sky
its colour, unleashed the shadows
from their things,
trampled your white, ridiculous, godish dress
into the grime of the morning.

You hated me, you threw the aces of your hatred
you broke, little by little, into kindness.

You clattered in those obscene shoes as if
someone were rolling bones from the top stair.

You kept returning
and you kept leaving.
Your car started
half a dozen times
in the grey and ugly distance
of the morning outside.
The mist fell
if that's what it does.
Remembering everything
you waded in and out of it
like someone whose engine
wont turn over
and your eyes
dashed me against the rocks.

You turned me to face
the colours
in that time of light
that time of brilliant darknesses
skin devouring skin
edge to edge
where the parked boats ground
against each other, half repeating
the names of ghosts in the wind

cold meaningless blue
in the dull phosphorescence of cities.

I loved you, you loved me
so much

giants, startled parodies of ourselves,
slaughterers of every moving thing.

And then you gave me your hand.

2.

2009-01-09T16:38:00.002+11:00

There is very little it is possible to do
really.
Choose a place to look from
say the words
love money time.
Why spend years gathering rain
or building bridges
upon which the dead already march?
Every morning
which is an insignificant term
a clot of universes
completes a more final definition
of destruction,
of immeasurable light.
Renew by degrees your faith
in everything.

1.

2009-01-09T16:35:00.002+11:00

How is it
that smoke can have a shadow
in the wind
in the right light?
A briefly moving darkness.
If you can believe in that
you can believe
in yesterday.