In The Poetry

The stars

think themselves into existence
and know themselves too good
for words:
dippers,
plough.

The trouble comes at picnics -
the last to leave, lovers lying
head to head, sky-faced,

naming the unnameable with eyes
closed – flickerings – the unknown
knowing the unknowable. After a while,

it becomes difficult to separate
what about them moves the most –
the bright intangibility of [...]

The easel of Mantegna

Empty-armed, like a soldier,
waiting for the deposition
still to happen, watching

as the rough skin is stretched
across the squat square ribs
and stapled, scraped

with a palette-knife, before
the morbid undertaking
of the gesso and the paint.

Or say instead, you always
were inclined to play
an active role in [...]

Spinnings

We’ve come this way before -
haven’t we? – the lanes wet, deepening
the burgundy squelch

of leaves, and the hedges plotting
an articulate sky.
It’s all much closer now: the gravel path,

the spade lying by the open
barn, squints of spider floss tightening across
our eyes. Clues, yes, all of these –

but what about [...]

The Lost Room

Someday I will find it, the lost room,
unlocked along the long forgotten
hallway of the half-remembered
house, whose windows rise moonfully
over an ashen field at the end of a blue

invisible road. And the map I’ll fold
will be a grid of bone and blood.
And the master there will know me -
his study grained with memory, [...]

Camping out

The infinite regression of things
was never made clearer to you
than that starless night
when you took the form
of a chattering chicken’s head
projected onto the nylon
wall of a tent, and looking back

at the pinched forefinger and thumb
that made your beak, back
through the clenched middle and ring
fingers to the flickering
kerosene lantern, you knew that even he,
your pudgy, [...]