after Tacita Dean
i

A toe winces in the corner

As if inside a shoe.

So many frames

Inside frames.

Is a panelled door

A building spliced into rooms?

I cling to possibility,

Two figures blur to three—

Glimpse of lakes on the moon.

Spots of red

Spark like jewels,

Disrupt my living.


ii

In this tunnel of light

No paintbox of blood:

White noise

Flickers polka-dots,

Around its navel

The waterfall runs backwards.

The single pine at dusk

Collects pink neon spots—

Like wormholes.

Like cracks that distil

What light there is.


iii

My personal Everest

Seen from above—

Sharp as a shredded moon.

White nitrogen

Pulses its lost horizon,

A chimney blows pompoms

into a no comment sky.

The doorway clings to blue,

Mountains uluru the red.

Pale ocean sweeps in real time,

Sweeps it out again.


iv

Giant bubbles parry

Downward drift,

Stay intact,

Comply.

A black-and-white orange

Globes so close

It almost dreams a breast.

An egg sits on an apartment ledge.

The quality of flower-pink

Is a contract she clutches in one hand

Not like Mondrian’s return

To infinite flower-shops

Nor pared-back Chagall.


v

A white-barred pigeon pecks

The edge of a field.

The escalator offers up,

But only travels down.

Black slate is spilt

In filmic light:

The floor’s too deep,

The light too shallow.

Nothing lives

Outside its apparition.

Nothing not known at last.

Note: ‘Is a contract she clutches in one hand’ and ‘paintbox of blood’ are from ‘The Fall’by Jordie Albiston.

‘Nothing not known at last’ is a minor adaptation of a phrase from ‘Everythings’ by Alex Skovron.