Dusk is brief in valleys.

but daytime slowly washed, skin, scraped carefully
to eat, covered in
scents delivered by transparent bag
mingling with garden trees and the cattle flies from fields nearby.

Rare, imported light-bulb light
passes through hair,
hands sit dwarfed
and distort in wine glasses,
the split *** mumbles rises on the hob
for Callisto outside, dancing prosaically about a very thin pole.

Conversations become excuses to stare at lips,
and songs suggested without conviction
play unfinished.


The music is softer now, the group diminished.
Getting heavier things.
Extremities in particular, and a few more sophisticated objects.
Corkscrews like ingots and eyelashes masscarad in lead.

There are the last lights and the thin summer sheets
that get in the way; stuck to sweaty –‘tertwined and clumsy--

Ash and tannin obscure the smell of gums
(and sometimes even the folded sent of neck and jaw).
More sweat is generated
Sleep does not come
or so it feels
when
morning is slightly too soon
bright and curtainless
and the beauty is sifted fruity and fuckless soft but moaning.

Check the maximum
capacity in the lift
but I’m all alone.


phenylalanine
can be used in a haiku
when not soothing

I live far from crops
my mind remembers growing.
did we have harvest?



My family had farms
once at least. What were your kin?
the great grand oxen?



There is a cottage
upon the drumlin yonder
it is not my home

Nylon echoes each movement
and impact of the walking bodies -
we are waiting for them to pass Dante’s place setting

they are bringing the first taste of fruit
– caterpillar walking –
pouring dust
behind them and with the other hand
before them clearing the path of dirt -
Singing ‘It continues where it falls’ - -

The fruit is good – the year shall pass –
and the juice holds still on the soft hairs of your cheek,
then all are packed away until there
are only the gummy bristles shimmering when you speak.

It had always been said that many many pelicans
had always followed each other -
formationless intravenous droplets upon the harbour wall
that grey with clouds and
circle the fish gutting – irreverent mobs of birds
are the realisation that nature is unsustainable -
she believed so – baseball cap echoing
one hand sweeping
a box under the other arm -
passing the pelicans she wondered what you were thinking,
Feeling the damp of her armpit reach the
cardboard,
She placed the fruit upon the boat and
followed the hallucinating Eland to another’s home
singing an Evangelie vir Vissers
and spilling back and forth from isiXhosa,
continuing up the path from
not yet flooded lowlands to a pale breached

In mornings unwoken

A turn toward the sleeper

And presentations to eyes that will not open

Nor see to the chesty howling

Nor a smile shared on skin and other spaces

Tied to the arms moving violations

And subliminals creeping upon you through slats of sunlight and shaking eyelashes.

Dust that’s formed in the folding where the nose shades seep into blood vessels store the dreams nodding at coming days.

Bullet holes admired by tourists, defunct airports admired by tourists and the flashing bulbs which used to carry them away,

We should be taught more often we are wrong.
A figure behind the chair leans over the scripts of younger hands
rocking as we edit blotched letters dangling  figs.
Homeworks describing the Viking day to day now reveal
flat soles on hard mud and the clarity of those lettuces you admired in the LRB
economical by the lb and ‘freshly efficient’.

Low-lit along the coast
young boys play bones upon the stone, and the elders,
waiting for the sea, conceal their interest.
The waves are far enough to ignore
but the salt mist has lingered:
blurs the tracks about the strand made by creatures whose names you once knew;
lost now amongst the streaming lists and orchestral sounds that drown the young before bedtime.

for some time prophesy or tradition,
the journeys tracing symbols down to
the sepulchral cities that rust under water –

Sometimes bring droughts,
reveal spires and penthouses, weathervanes and aerials.
lose a notebook and die elderly gardening temples.

fear life in sustenance.

fear primordial words
that chime like glass honey traps
dull and shallow.

fear
the panoramic shots of cattle
, a great still herd shivering breakers of light,
the temporary herder, you weren’t permitted to see, chasing away baboons with long-ish strides behind you.
poetry is always chasing
and each step will always chase better,
transcribing the soughs of the meadow (or other inhuman acts)
to speak with running subtitles:
in the translation of a voice
to be some natural thing singing
like the humpback corrupting the grace of the older song
whilst tootling along the coast