ANCIENT LANGUAGES

Her skin is sad

Her smell of smoke


The buzzing of the sun

The asthma of the hens

Hardens her lips


When winter begins forever

She does not think

   
Solitude's warm aroma

is like a chocolate-coated grave


Looking out over the canals

The hothouse waters

speak ancient languages


She Stands

sewing broken lace

and fortunate love with

pale eight o'clock fingers

   
The deep silence

smells of pressed flowers


and the moths like dried butterflies

knock at the light.

THE DEAD TINSMITH'S WIFE

Dust dries in the broken throats

            of the dengue drains


A dog's body bubbles on the road

   
Tinsmiths picked cavities in this land

The sons are vendors in the dead teeth

Their women home shacks gummed black by river mud


At a rush window

The founding widow's centenarian face is

rough papyrus close-written with pain


Time is

the dust dried in the lapels of her throat

   
Watch her watch the car smothered in wild pansies

A goat sitting warming the hood

   
herself sat between her now        her then
   
A fluttering butterfly

LAND

walk the route of

winter bitten posts

To the raw wood stile


follow the grain of the land

knots stains the scar of a cut

   
blackberry brawls

rabbits thump

   
Over the hedge

there are spades broken slates

rotten fangs of tractor

stumps of farm shed

   
one cross slumps at the ground

   
In the soil

I smell older earthworks

   
Barrows ripe to burst like acorns
   
The land swells with dead kings
   
   
their blood coronations

have breathed into me


Before the teeth of glaciers ground runes

Felt over the girl’s face of the ground and

Pocked it with great stones


I have held a hoe over this earth
   
Sunk stubborn feet into this soil

WOODSMOKE

I could not hear his words
   
woodsmoke rose

in the winter grate


With the wet six o’clock

I knew I should rake the white clinkers

of the coal I watched crackle

   
As the blaze spat steam

from split nostrils of green wood

salamanders licked this wounded world


other tongues chimed like bells

breaking over the fields
   

I would not hear his words
       
Above this circle of sloe heaven and stars


I shall study the puzzle

of a pine cone explode
   
fall like a firework

from the cast iron claws of the grate

its maroon heart fuming falling in

   
and not hear the words

LETTERS

Final sun throws into the room

my head is cast on the plaster wall

   
Shadows settling like ink

I write a second sheet


The streetlamp throws around my shoulders
   
a half circle of spokes

   
the room is written with ancient scripts


On their shelves

evening has bound my books

between indigo covers

they are one volume


eyes now define shape

   
screwed up sheets of old words

are moss rocks by the wicker bin


my silhouette pen

moves like a stump of candle

   
This is necromancer’s art


The page is finished.