Passage Through a Daemon

By | 1 December 2009

1

where does she stop
if the brush of his hand
draws up from her arm tiny hairs,
lengthens them two, three impossible inches –
finer than nylon, the tail of a comet
lost on the weak naked eye –
and then, when he's gone,
they take more than an hour
to subside?

 

2

stepping into a daemon
a splinter
of his image
slips razor sharp
through her mind's eye
her stomach flips over
her innards
untether
her back ripples
becoming heat haze
she is almost transparent
a person
not of this world

 

3

under a table
the touch of his leg
and her leg
pressing back
a sensation that widens
intensifies
spurts past the knee
in the locked
jigsaw
of what can
and what can't
a pinhole
is scorched
a hole ringed with light
lions
through a hoop
her dash at his heels
dodging round hay bales
and vaulting the fence
without strain
making a maze
to escape
the pursuers
they entered a wood
wind died in their hair
a mist rose around them
and began to erase
solid trees

 

4

at the tips
the half grown leaves
quiver like flames
all the twigs buffeted bend
branches swing back and forth
thrashing in half circles
each independently of the other
boughs creak
stripped of old bark
strain white
almost wrenched from the trunk
which stands
in a gale
like the chemical nature of love

 

5

only his hands
touch
so her eyes swivel inwards
and she's tented by the hanging roots
of Morton Bay figs
fantastic candles drapery and cauls
of limestone caverns
clouds eerily lit like stormy
photographic
negatives
not him
she's lost sight of him
but his hands
do what sleep can't
release the knots of her bonds
tug at pull free
the endlessly flowing
figured scarves
of dream

 
6

his voice
like soft rain
makes every bulb
hidden in her garden
swell
makes each tiny shoot
pressed
between the palms
of uncountable seeds
strive
and begin to grow
his voice
rains down
darkens the soil
topping it up
adding its weight
as the airspaces fill
tenor and bass
beat over her
overwhelm
overflow
a torrent of words
has blocked up her throat
to run from her pores
and stream from her eyes
washing her features
away

 

7

lightning
sees the world
in its mirror
ecstatic
identification
and he's Her
she is Him
himself
his own project
to perfectly
streamline
and purge
electrified
by the touch of a god
Daphne burst into leaf
after decades of tussle
joints crooked
at right angles
she glares from the shape
of a crab
apple
tree

 

8

absent-mindedly swigging
from the drink bottle
she'd used
he gets the faint tang
of the lime juice
that filled
her summer mouth
her coldness
flowing down his throat
his lungs frozen
by a grief
suddenly crystallizing
shatter-lines everywhere
as if the last
grains of a salt
had been dropped
into a beaker
a clear solution
of unacknowledged tears

 

9

the exile's shadow
waxes and wanes
they say
songbird's brains
grow bigger in spring
in summer
love's inflammation
shrinks back to zero
our hero
packed her house
in a matchbox
let memory's
cats cradle collapse
to a lose loop of string
they say
each mating season
the survivors re-sing
their signature tunes
their abolished cadenzas
one diary ended
in a scatter of ash
or blossoms
a stranger
constructed from paper
dry petals unfolding
like time-lapse
in water
the exile's city
has changed

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