Dream of cat singing

My cat is singing descant
to the music in my head.

Melodies roll as if punched
in a pianola scroll.

Tick, tick the clock sits
muffled on the rattan table.

I'm cat-napping,
cat singing.

That could be me
pitching my wail to the tiles.

Ah! a choir echoing!

heavenly antiphons
hover on the afternoon.

Dream of cloud streets

When did the storks arrive
ushered on the wind
along cloud streets?

They've settled on a puddle
in the street by the canal.
Someone has fed them
a side of salmon.

The mouse-grey woman
scrubs the toilet bowl
with a stiff brush.

She lives in the walls of the house.
They are her skin.
She never speaks till spoken to.

She says, I am content,
which is better than happy.

I've taken some salmon
as if it were a gift.
I eat it with my fingers,
fresh, raw chunks.

I do not feel
my fingers burn.

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.

Taconea

Red shoes, red rose,
the arc of your nape
strikes the silk flash into the pitchy deep.

Who strikes
wreathes of flame,
the heat within the black dot where the world
shakes

the hollow of bone,
the rivers of the spine, snake's
fingers lift
the hip, the calf,
the hard heel
strikes

the echoing ground that you
strike

that you
free

that you
shake.

I Abide

The azure is bleached.
The black branches of elms
embrace greying roofs.

My eyes and the air
adjust their veils,
stiffened in the chill.

My warm cat
naps on the ottoman.

I abide
between silence and nightfall
remembering the colours of the city.

Time turns on the edge of day
into the timeless eye of dusk.

Photograph

Ginger tom on the fence-post
contemplates the green leaves.
Framed in my camera he slinks
across the gate and down the palings
to acquaint me with his green gaze.
He gets a pat.
He sashays through his gate.
The beaten boards of the cottage
peel antique pigments.

The green leaves drink the sun.

Fancy Girl

I saw the moon and the moon saw me
when the night was tardy,
whipping her dragon's spiny tail,
headed through the Bardo.

I used to be a fancy girl
with pretty, curling hair,
in love with every luxury
and lovely thing to wear.

I stepped on hearts tossed in my way
and never heeded how
they wept red juices in the street
under my satin shoe.

But now the tide has turned on me,
my heart is crushed to powder.
I lope as lonely as a loon
where the demons loitre.

For love's a two-way thoroughfare
where travellers come and go.
Don't wear your heart tied to your sleeve
on a velvet bow.

Wings

Pin-drop stillness.
The chain-saw is silent.

The immense crane
towers above the pit.
The building hovers
invisible over the street-scape.

Wings sprout from my shoulders,
my breast-bone grown hollow,
my mouth full of the breeze.
Blue flowers pollinate the night-sky.

Call me a miracle
to squeeze love from a stone.
We spliced the quick.
Our thread untwists
(blame the unlover)
he twines his strand
around another.

In an Instant

In an instant
minds uncoil coils
uncoiling coils
uncoiled in coils.

Blotched ink,
refusenik tongue-clicks
jam a dissonance.
The squealing peals
dumb flummery.

Can I construe it
shorn free of old pills?

The pearl within the world
shifts scene, unseen
everywhere and nowhere,
a hollow sphere.

The pearl within the pearl
is born in every world
unborn, inborn
in an instant.

Heart Poem

My heart,
a red bird,
strives to fly
between my ribs
as from a cage.

Red bird, she beats
a breeze. Strange balloons 
strain at their moorings
ready to fly
somewhere, out there
into love.

Old Words

'Fee' is an ancient word
among old words
like 'feudal fiefdom'.

Like the Latin, 'pecu',
like 'pecuniary peculiarity'.

Like the Sanskrit, 'pashu'
meaning to be bound
like animal capital,
like chattels, like cattle.

The nomads droved their flocks.
They were as rich as barons
though paper money was absurd
as science fiction before the invention of ink.

They wept when they slit the neck
of a sacrificed lamb
with their sharpest blade.

When did we forget
to kill clean?

The wolf kills clean.
The jackal eats a corpse.

What entity amortizes
flesh dead before the kill?

What kingdom does it scavenge in?
Not animal.  Not human.

When were cattle changed into
black sigils in a maze
comprised of corporate reports?

Remember the cow
and her sweet milk.

Remember the steer
and his red flesh.

Remember the heart beat
blood heat of the bull
roaring in his cave

for bound souls to be free.

The Animals

The big, gentle animals
who never in their lives willed any harm,
the beautiful, gentle beasts
who feed us their meat

are slaughtered by hacks,
are grossly murdered.
I am screaming though I can't manage the TV.

'Any action
less than the immediate suspension of live export
would be grossly inadequate'
concludes the radio report.

I stroke my cat. The purring boy.
Little buddy. My friend.

Mangala Mantram

svasti prajabhyah paripalayantam

nyayena margena mahim mahishah

go-brahmanebhyah shubham astu nityam

lokah samastah sukhino bhavantu

Blessings on the people.  Let Earth's rulers

protect the Earth in a just way.

May good always come to cows and Brahmins.

May all worlds together become happy.

She Came Down

Late morning I look out
at the leaves spinning
in the sun. Their shadows
graze the white wall

and the song-bird calls
once from the tall tree.

Somewhere there are tears
thick as clouds. I cannot
say where they came from
or when. Time before mind

so it's told, a star
came down and never
found her way again
into the sky.

Butterfly

His jugular pulse
beats swiftly against my heart,
the gravid flutter
interphasing the soft shock —
a butterfly lulled, kissed, flown.

A Pomegranate

On the winter tree
a pomegranate snickers,
red beads on display.

Hand Tree

Among the imbrications
of the palm

two hands sprout.

A span of blue
berries drops left of

fingers dripping

berries thick as

blood.

Pictogram

The black shag velvet
on the sofa back
drapes a brush tail
over the woven roses,
peaks twin triangles intent
on the meander of a gnat.
Enthralled in seeing
through the day-lit glass
I read a cypher written on the trees,
the pictogram for CAT.