for Patricia
We slide the week ahead, pause it trembling
at a future instant, somewhere in extensive
time that underwrites each moment.
All our actions are staged on this surface
We’ll rest upon it during this event, as he
makes a world, augmenting his resentments.
The person who is absent will constitute his day,
a series of evasions to bind him to all he’ll miss.
Everything will curl around the nothing of it
It’s a new game, somehow like faulty traffic lights
guarding a hole in the road, blinking like an idiot.
But the sunflower now you place for me in sunlight
is staged on the other side of sense, making love
happen, firing me with its fiery compound eye
*
His breath takes her beauty away, deep
in his body where language measures the world
One breath it takes to be no longer winning a war.
They cup warm palms over each other’s cold knees.
Wind shoulders against the flanks of their house;
windows shiver.
They stand in front of it to stand for themselves
It chimes into rhythm that celebrates itself,
this looking at tomorrow, guiding the eye back
to the time of their looking, a swoon into cracks
between history and memory. She dressed in black
from frisking ponytail to stabbing boot toe. Out-
stretching her impossible heels, he buries himself,
moulding her sighs, in soft mammalian heat
*
The English sky wipes itself clean
And wind
turbines thrash themselves
Like national
champs in training
I put my arms around you and stop myself
Writing tales
of backyard cargo cults
You nestle
into the hollow of my dream
Which I want
to write out but my eyes are full
Of rusty
girders over soupy canals
You frown in
your sleep that lulls the jargon
And crackle
of newsprint with its fleet score
The trim
roofs of shopping palaces steam
Over canopic
jars full of carbonised laurel stalks
The painted
masks bear no relation
Household gods composted with household goods
*
for Patricia
The young couples in the crushed Amsterdam bar
dance to Barry White in the old-fashioned way
Later, aloft on Belgian beer, I murmur that I
love you, but then slip away, like the dancers,
into the night, knocking over bicycles chained
to bollards, and singing; into my reverie so far
in which we sit again drinking under the wooden ape
Almost human it grins at us both with more teeth
than the accordion it fumbles. This is all times
becoming a new time which is a now time
becoming all, a swoon through cracks in the paving
where vanished children crouch over hidden play.
Next day, a narrow canal house lips at its reflection;
we stand in front of it to stand for ourselves
