your eye and down your cheek
—birthmark? injury?
Close close you drew me in,
Injury—
Your number is lifting off my hand
Your number is lifting off my hand
you are becoming gone
to me but
the cut-out hurts
where you were
behind my eye
around your eye
down my cheek,
Ancient Injury—
*
The Needle North
I had a boat
lost the food
and the shoes
Hollow wrist
fill it with food
fill it with shoes
Some say we rise like dots into the sky
Walking through the snow
the world begins to whirl
from this immortal coil
to that immortal coil
We whirl now into deadwood
but fire inside
dead wood but fire
The Passing
The shimmer
gone
out of what we know
Bells
din dan dawn
but we—down here—you little
Lord
the needle North
and move the boat
In the Burning Air
In the burning air
nothing.
But on the ground, at the edge,
a woman and her spoon,
a wooden spoon,
and her chest, the broken
bowl.
*
She would long
to dig herself into the ground, her only
daughter's ashes
in her nose in her mouth her only daughter's
makeshift ashes
nothing
lying
in the hole in her chest
But her eye would still see
up into the ground above her, still see
the upper air
—Let her lie down now, snake in her hole, house
snake in her hold.
Little house
Little house
clay house
thousands of funeral smell
ground swell
we knew the boat of right action
but the road rubbed out
—water gone!
—the dead girl gone!
(was she pregnant?)
dishes blew by
I searched my hollows rubble
Burnt grass teach me
before I forget you
into a time
when I sit and roar
over the flowers
and don't know them
Notes
NEW POEMS
Page 3, “Annunciation”: drawn from Helene Aylon's Breakings. Page 5, “Occurrence of White”: the first line echoes Jane Kenyon's poem Things. Page 26, “My old body”:
My old body
a drop of dew
heavy at the leaf tip.
—Kiba
Dream Barker
(1965)
First Love
How deep we met in the sea, my love,
My double, my Siamese heart, my whiskery,
Fish-belly, glue-eyed prince, my dearest black nudge,
How flat and reflective my eye reflecting you
Blue, gorgeous in the weaving grasses
I wound round for your crown, how I loved your touch
On my fair, speckled breast, or was it my own turning;
How nobly you spilled yourself across my trembling
Darlings: or was that the pull of the moon,
It
