Dream in which we drive all night

All night she drives. She will not stop.
She drives down the night highway.

My feet wrapped in gauze
are soft as my pillow.

Her hands clinch the wheel.
She stares down the white line
lusting after distance,
craving a destination.

My feet are dressed in gauze
that loosens and and falls.

Where are we driving in the small hours,
mile beyond mile beyond the white line?
The sun too far away to rise
lies lost beyond the Earth's slow rolling.

Where have you driven me
down the night highway?
I want the brakes on.
I'm not ready for speed.
What line have we transgressed?
I've no yen for scenery. I see
only unexceptional spectres
in lack-lustre colours.

I've circumambulated days
on feet too tender for the highway.
My waves crest at low tide.
I'm unable to fly.
And how can I walk back in the pitch black?
This gauze is torn to pieces.

Oh, don't despise me.
Get me some shoes!

Tell me there's pleasure beyond
the minute-hand sweeping the morning.
Tell me there's pleasure beyond
the slow drift of stars.  Tell me
we'll be dancing before dawn
in heavenly cities lit
in neon and incandescent dust.

Dream defrosting

I open the fridge.
In the freezer a forest
made of a million speleothems
crushed in a cubit
begins to thaw.

Ice-shards peel from the frozen peas.
Ice-beads slither behind the butter.

My teeth chatter.
My frost breath curls
hollow as a ghost — bleached
as my father's blood
when it disintegrated
at that solstice —
my feet chillblained.

Hollow as a your grandmother's
crying echoing among the dead.

Mummified in ice
blue irides stare snow-blinded
in dead sockets
under the tundra.

There are my dancing shoes,
the ribbons untied,
tossed in a forest.
Moth-wings glitter at my waist,
my muslin lifted on a nocturne.
Under chandeliers,
under my skirts,
upon parquetry polished to glass
my satin slid.
A thousand soles worn to ruins,
the dancers immured

among the substrata
beneath the crisper —
they couple and begin
their shuffling.

Dream of a cherry stone

Now
shadows appear
under the arc of your cheek.

Under the scaffold
where you walk, I follow
gathering courage
to greet you, years
having passed before
you pass this way.

A cherry stone
splinters between my teeth,
the meat eaten, the juice consumed,
red shreds
cling to the kernel.

A concrete stack
looms over the dusky street, the sky
eclipsed.

Your cherry-bright face
was round and sweet, your eyes
nut-brown, now dim
under the scaffold
where we pass. These years
I've never seen
you walk where I walk

under the arc of your cheek,
the sky eclipsed.

I slide between the cracks in the pavement
under the children
singing.

Words

Perrenially contemplative
witness in the median of frequencies,
seeing interstitially
fields blooming
width-wise, depth-wise
shift and counter-shift-wise —

staring in a chasm of anemones,
envisioning the implications of a sugar-ant
peregrinating capacities, opacities
the blenched caul of a fall of light —

mimetic symmetries live in
the quotidien conduit of synergies,
the values weighed, the nuance tuned
fathoms sounded —

your volumes walk with you,
a honey-flow lavishes
the world at your finger-tips,
visions at the distance of your gaze
leave their imprint on your pollen —

sounds, schemes, spirits
weave intricate trees,
their leaves are your quests come hither
into the seeing skeins
spun from the essence of your storm.

White

In the centre of cells an eye spirals
white like the flesh of a snow-peach
pouring torrents of honey,
sweetening the ratchets of helices.
Spliced nuclei rise snow-like
as if lifted in a blizzard.

The pupa's embryonic wings
swarm into flight.
From the feet and antennae of moths
white dust flurries
seeking the moon's heat.

A face blanched,
over-exposed and astral
distills a crown, a ring of tines
spinning in space, keening the sky's
immeasurable evanescence.

White knots of lace
mimic the paisley of galaxies,
each drop of milk a flame,
each flame dazes the sun's shafts.

Through the eyelets' empty mesh
streams the breath of trees.

Through the marrow of my bones
streams the honey of stars.

Dream of golden hair

Butter and sun,
a yolk in a glass castle,
the yellow of all good gold,
your halo spun from your skull
streams out over the crowd
like that song you're singing.

Lyrics older than ages
iridesce like fingerlings
escaped into air,
your strings tuned
to lovers lying
low under stone.

Low under stone
the lovers sound
the high, fast flame
that burned them.
Touch it — it chills.

Clustered under earth
in earth-brown shells
lie the nymphs how many winters
under the roots of trees?

The lovers' voices sing:
you and me, we never were old,
though they sacrificed us.
Together we possess
the courage of gods.
Low under stone
hear us singing
in eternal love.

Your golden hair
the colour of Easter,
a resurrection in a glass cathedral,
echoes voices
older than ages.

From the roots of trees,
from earth-brown bulbs
clusters of blue-bells teem.