it's time


       to sleep



i guess

tomorrow

i'll love you



forever



Christ.

i feel not myself the rain or a trees outside the wind or in the dark a bit (slenderly) where.

sunlight
where
your
fatal chord
of music
strains
the mute
scepter
of night
bleeds
crimsonly
a thin note
of thigh
parting
light(


                      your
             mouth
                       which
                 ekil
                      is
                         a
               turned
                         upon
                   medallion
                 ofvery
          Spring.Agape

                     T
                     o
receive

                              the


thick

                  brutal


          ***


                     of poppies

      )

I.

do you know?

have you been?

have you been by the slant ways behind the hills there is store and have you
wandered much in it?

have you gone down the little rows and counted them?

have you looked into the tired eyes of weary mothers and fathers?

have you seen in them your mother and your father?

have you kissed with them your thoughts and wondered on the small
mystery of their being?

have you wondered at them looking at you(and what do they see)?

have you thought to reach out and touch them and ask them how they are doing?

have you wanted to look in their eyes and tell them that you know they are tired but there isn't much left to go and you know how hard it is and that you are sorry and that they are as soft and as infinite as your own self?

have you dreamt much?

have you gone out from the store, into the nice mouth of the city, and have you seen the same tired look in the same weary bodies?



II.

where have you been in the Summer?

have you been by the bank of a river?

did you let your toes in it, and did it feel so cool as to rush across them you suddenly want to pull them out?

and how did it feel, the first time you were kissed, and sweaty between the arms, you pushed in even tighter?

have you laughed much?

when was the last time you laughed?

did it feel as if it was the last time?

did you watch your laughter curl away into nothing like a vine of fume from a smoker's mouth?

did you watch it curl away and wonder if you might be lucky enough to laugh tomorrow(and did you wonder how many more days and nights you might be lucky enough to not laugh)?

did you cry after you laughed?

did you look down at your hands and marvel at the intricacies of your bone and flesh?

did you ever hold them up against the night sky and marvel at the tinniness of their work? (have you held them up before your face in a dark room and wondered what it would be like to not see?)




III.

have you struggled much?

do you ache, and are you sore?

do your muscles hurt?

do you feel heavy with obligation?

do you feel tired from living, and with life?

from where does your pain begin, and where does it end?

did it begin in the hands of someone you thought you loved? did it end in the empty stare of someone you thought loved you?

have you hurt anyone?

how did you feel?

did you tell yourself it was ok?

what did you tell yourself?

who were they?

why did you hurt them?


IV.

are you awake?

are you reading this?

will you wake up tomorrow (and every tomorrow until you don't), and will you remember this moment?

will it fade into nothing?

will you recall it suddenly in some still moment?

will you look out the window of your car on your way to work and catch the sliver of some stranger's face in the quick of your mind?

will you wonder on their life, and the sliver of your own face, caught in their mind?

and will you remember?

will you remember?

The piper coming from far away is you
With a whitewash brush for a sporran
Wobbling round you, a kitchen chair
Upside down on your shoulder, your right arm
Pretending to tuck the bag beneath your elbow,
Your pop-eyes and big cheeks nearly bursting
With laughter, but keeping the drone going on
Interminably, between catches of breath.



The whitewash brush. An old blanched skirted thing
On the back of the byre door, biding its time
Until spring airs spelled lime in a work-bucket
And a potstick to mix it in with water.
Those smells brought tears to the eyes, we inhaled
A kind of greeny burning and thought of brimstone.
But the slop of the actual job
Of brushing walls, the watery grey
Being lashed on in broad swatches, then drying out
Whiter and whiter, all that worked like magic.
Where had we come from, what was this kingdom
We knew we'd been restored to? Our shadows
Moved on the wall and a tar border glittered
The full length of the house, a black divide
Like a freshly opened, pungent, reeking trench.



**** at the gable, the dead will congregate.
But separately. The women after dark,
Hunkering there a moment before bedtime,
The only time the soul was let alone,
The only time that face and body calmed
In the eye of heaven.

Buttermilk and *****,
The pantry, the housed beasts, the listening bedroom.
We were all together there in a foretime,
In a knowledge that might not translate beyond
Those wind-heaved midnights we still cannot be sure
Happened or not. It smelled of hill-fort clay
And cattle dung. When the thorn tree was cut down
You broke your arm. I shared the dread
When a strange bird perched for days on the byre roof.



That scene, with Macbeth helpless and desperate
In his nightmare--when he meets the hags agains
And sees the apparitions in the ***--
I felt at home with that one all right. Hearth,
Steam and ululation, the smoky hair
Curtaining a cheek. 'Don't go near bad boys
In that college that you're bound for. Do you hear me?
Do you hear me speaking to you? Don't forget!'
And then the postick quickening the gruel,
The steam crown swirled, everything intimate
And fear-swathed brightening for a moment,
Then going dull and fatal and away.



Grey matter like gruel flecked with blood
In spatters on the whitewash. A clean spot
Where his head had been, other stains subsumed
In the parched wall he leant his back against
That morning like any other morning,
Part-time reservist, toting his lunch-box.
A car came slow down Castle Street, made the halt,
Crossed the Diamond, slowed again and stopped
Level with him, although it was not his lift.
And then he saw an ordinary face
For what it was and a gun in his own face.
His right leg was hooked back, his sole and heel
Against the wall, his right knee propped up steady,
So he never moved, just pushed with all his might
Against himself, then fell past the tarred strip,
Feeding the gutter with his copious blood.

*

My dear brother, you have good stamina.
You stay on where it happens. Your big tractor
Pulls up at the Diamond, you wave at people,
You shout and laugh about the revs, you keep
old roads open by driving on the new ones.
You called the piper's sporrans whitewash brushes
And then dressed up and marched us through the kitchen,
But you cannot make the dead walk or right wrong.
I see you at the end of your tether sometimes,
In the milking parlour, holding yourself up
Between two cows until your turn goes past,
Then coming to in the smell of dung again
And wondering, is this all? As it was
In the beginning, is now and shall be?
Then rubbing your eyes and seeing our old brush
Up on the byre door, and keeping going.

i slept alone, your
wrists were my hair. delilah
mine, i still love you.