Thirty-five years
i
Tiresias and the stone doves
instead of a candle in Burnhill Fields, we danced with gauze, bones and clapboard prescience nonconformist until our ribs cracked and the weight of weighing rushed in abracadabra, our bodies an Aegean of ache, madness and grief compassing old age’s circumference to ring in the gods underneath a draftsman’s triangle, divination flickered feathers fauxing us, how to free our heads from the sky and the gods’ hunger that came one June with Icarus’ sharp howl when the voice collapsed in descent,
a father’s DIY pathology and how-to rigging scaffolded against the hard water’s architecture, the forlorn figured less
Tiresias, did you hear the stone doves’ ascent at the clap of soles on liquid stone?
recall when memory suppered heartbeat and hurtbop amin solidarity
those still long in the tooth absences, spinning chewed up, gnarled poems at the foot
of soothsaying where jaws scribbled on limbs instead of crepscular rooms
as we walked and spoke with gestures in the air through the pachyderm day
before fixed wing and fume, long before the women from Athens swayed beneath red,
before the fog channel marked the ephemeral few hours of trust lit up by the banks of the Thames
was it all so long ago?
ii
What a walk in a grave does
as the ghosts look on, good on their damp green dance floor
the dunked go undying with ease and vegetate some more
the carriages cap and cater to two old men who scribble longing near the grass
and with round shoes pick at the dirt and point at the linchen on the benches
how silly we once believed the gods to be in their ordering ordered chromosomes’
configuration at will, the ensnared thoughts that writers engender silence into verbs with lattice and wrapping, corsets under consonance, a fox caught in a teething trap
have you heard the consonants of ants in the weeds marching over the scrap of the books we once hoped to dig up and the language exhumed
it’s all the same in Delphi, the loss and love between the beats in the shape of braggards and balks, defeated marble and word-planted furrows at night
once we seemed infinite in the shadows as we dined beneath the Doric
entablatures and followed a future we couldn’t see past our knees
or the stories of self we hit in auto-barking up the end
Tins, kettles and rain, an old man’s harnesse of time peels love at the rind
and limb juiced up like dragon fruit, the glucose walled chambers of the shelving self
cycling circles around a crypt in the sand
the spider to man, the web to friendship1 two mild lones and a pocket of coins
barking on stone in a park between the grief & mourning
the active and the passive penciled-in margins
the world caught flabbergasted in the clout of an old man’s summersault
iii
Stone doves and Sea shells
stone doves, sea shells and an orange’s shadow sing over a grave
as you and I walked for our children under the trees and cobblestone
spied fear fall from a bench and uncertainty hang in a line of a poem in the trees
pine combs spun in the wind as memory clung to meaning that winter
words on the page dripped in droplets from our coats and sleeves
and we thought the snow’s hinges could unhinge a shackled meaning
between us and our dead babies
the books scattered on the ground as we step bluntly into compounds, longing
behind the glass home the copper arms sweep up the debris
and over detritus we talk and talk to polish the wrangled life from what limbers
at the corners of our eyes floaters, spiders or syntax just out of reach of the graves
our heels’ click and mindsputter for a brief breath once in a while
we watched each other in the distance until a grey squirrel approached
and petals from nowhere fell like rumination around us
the old soothsayer’s stories after all
who teaches us to listen to the slowness
as our bones displace the water of everything underneath
and the grammar of what Tiresias foresaw long ago
1inverse of Blake
for: the writer Marc Nash
