New Pompeii clasps the old
in a fingerless glove of
tourist gold. A grubby
British penny is grinning from
the rabblement of dust. In the
West it's all the same. A
compendium of histories fill the
Seine, the Thames back home's
a rotted filed-away old thing.
And I am bound upon the cascade
of the Atlantic waves - no matter.
What's here is here - and here I am.

The windowsill is badly placed; the sun
cannot indulge the speckled flowers. Catch
a ray, my little wilters, hatch
(in some enobled way, you vital ones)
your ancient plan. A blueprint known to man
and woman, aged notions often used
like: getting, knowing, owning, holding. Mused
by scanty winds atop a skyfull.
                               Scan
the skies for faintest glimmers, something clued
inside the trees. But know the placid breeze
has never been against you. Don't fall, please,
into forgetting: every atom's glued
to progress. Nature loves a failed scam.

You orchids catch what little light you can.

A ghost.
Reflected face
behind my own, drawing
a blank in scented bathwater
(or death).

Rapture, growing voice around the corner.

Crisp new diphthongs, sorry rounded vowels

unrehearsed. A twanging reverb. Certain

loosened phrasings shock the doorknob, like

'Clara...octaves...failings'. When I lift the


latch it's broken trailing consonants

streaming past the ceiling; bassy treaties,

sighing falling clothes and chord-crushed feeling.

Welcoming me through that stuckfast door
into your roadworthy womb, cigarette in mouth,
you tell me Socrates was right;
that suicide is so logical;
that no man knows;
that humanity, having spread,
denies a further virus.

A bottle of ale there on the hearth -
the nutty yeast of the head still brewing.
I bring out my gift for you -
a loaf of bread - and remind you,
my wander-weary brother, how yeast
multiplies and multiplies,
furthering itself, and no man cares why.

I can't swim, but I am keen to watch
your ululating rhythm in the pool.
Your head cuts smartly through the water's skin
like scissors through a plastic film.
You inscribe that well-drawn path of constance;
the recurring graph of a heart's green screen.

That's how authentic, automatic, you swim:
by a hidden sense so palpable, so
devastating, and your deadleaf hair so
Autumnal and out of place in the new Spring,
That the wind has hidden - ashamed, outdone.

Fire knows the wood's secrets,
the flame-tipped branch a pointed
lie. Deep out there, rumbled,
your animus treads through
broken brick - from an excavated
castle or a moat which lost its breath
just before the shovel and the gasp.

No hiding holes out in the field -
too open, too wide for lies.

I'd misremembered what I lack,
but in your grip, it pounded back.