I once shook hands with a pawn-
broker in Chicago who claimed
to have the desert saint’s trigger-

finger cottoned in his fridge, and ever
since, each time I twist a lid of pickled
gherkins, lick the sweet vinegar

lizarding off my thumb, my mind
twitches to Chihuahua, like a tumble-
weed churning in the blue tequilaed

sun, lipping to itself Pancho’s
parting shots: ‘don’t let it end
like this – tell them I said something’.

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 something

that’s no longer there from the utter
absence that beckons in between -
the echoed darkness or the dark

unechoing. ‘Look’, she says,
pointing to neither,
‘how cold is that?’

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 this,

our cruellest fiction: empty-
angled and pristine save
where you were brushed

with the death and cleansed
with the dizzy stench of spirit.
You are the awkward ladder,

the hallowed steps, the endless
air forever drifting through
the thin rafters of an unroofed

steeple – on or in or out of
whom the wide sound
of resurrection still remains

for us a thing we listen for
in silence:
untolled, unrunged.

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 this wisp of blood, these
brittle tools? – ghosts
of a weather, your unfathomable skin?

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, kindled
with books eared at the angle

of regret. And there will be a kind
of reconciliation. And the room,
the lost room, will sing silver
in the sky, dangle into dust, and build
itself in other realms I’ve burned.

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, rotten-toothed, dim-
witted creator, could not behold what

you, a knuckle-brained silhouette
could see on the other side
of the screen: the racoon at the picnic
basket, the speckled fawn disappearing
under brush for fear, and beyond
the timberline, the fat orange moon
that was busy, obliterating the stars.