6
No water here where dust is thick

and even patented. Her lepidopterist’s

eyes quivering behind brambles of jewelry

like an aphrodisiac for the terminally

numb. She listens to the whimpers

of broken-necked birds and thinks

of Latin names pinned to specimen boards.

A horripilation of moths drink

the dried saliva from her lips;

her face the pallor of the drowned.

No pencilled message and no subtext.

Too stingy even to buy a stamp. Here

we have an accurate depiction

of weariness, the solid memory of cushions.


7
You hang on those salted beachside walls,

fading in all seasons’ weather, hovering

over the mute phone at the top of the stairs.

Your crossed eyes the only thing

retaining any colour, other than a bruised

suggestion at your throat. The pursed lips

like the diagonal strike of a pawn

within the circumference of your face.

But it is the eyes which bind,

always at the pinnacle, beyond

the reach of water, whom everybody hated

that lived there, their red intensity lost.

On my blind side, unnoticed, they have blended

chameleon-like into subsequent walls


8
At last the surface of water

is manifest, though it could be the sky.

Unseen mosquito larvae frenetic

in the shade of a bridge. Punctured

membranes of publicised dreams

litter the stillness and eventual peace.

A floating spider poised on the lake’s

meniscus. Reflections of willows

conjure quiet violence, mud settling

on the bottom, a school-bag filled

with stones, the ripples dissipating

after a swamp-hen has shrieked across

the dinner plates of water lilies

clattering into the reeds