Glyph

In all of the pre-Columbian New World, only the Maya can be said to have possessed true writing, if we define that as human speech made visible.

At first the Bishop asked her for the truth,
that blandly Latin script that ploughed his tongue,
but each new symbol, sound to fit the glyphs
would contradict his righteous alphabet
and so he found a clue in singeing flesh:
her drowning, hanging footless from the pine.

And yet her words would fly to him as birds,
years later when the speaker was long dead:
often the hummingbird’s red-throated whir;
the vulture’s prod for jelly, beak for eyes;
stern eagles swooping on his Indian fig,
while nets retrieved the mystery of cranes.

How could he know tenors of stony glyphs,
their mathematics of an ageing sky.
He sensed a toothless woman in the moon,
but missed the honey harvest of the fly.
He never saw a crone shoulder the sun,
nor knew the lighthouse of the northern star.

The tally of misreading soon advanced
so legions of proud glyphs were rapt by flames,
but speaking in the ballast-base of clay,
new villages were made from wet leaf-beds,
where souls escape to buzz about the pines
and ripening flowers are budding to be read.

My Spinalonga Passion

Desires, lost for the lack of trying,
haunt the frightened trees on Spinalonga Island.
Each day, the tourists ride out on boats
to stand on a squint of sand; beyond the jetty,
snaked spray shivers, stings their faces.
They retreat to land: glass cases
in the once-darkened houses of former lepers.

Here a Byzantine bronze lion, his tail making
a figure of eight and there, a bow
of the Ottoman Empire missing an arrow.

Paths all over Spinalonga are walked smooth:
the circle that rounds the island’s hump
where lepers dreamed of detonating
Turkish battlements. Paths extend
from hospital door to hospice gate:
the boulderous top where a church became
a mosque that opened a grave in Venetian alleys.
The fathoms of the cracked hospital window
are sung by a wind that cripples cypress branches.

Here I wait for you, swathed in milky bandages.
Frail as a reflection, I offer one receding hand
and the whole of my beautiful, infected body.

Catskin

Kind sir, if the truth I must tell,
At the sign of the Broken Ladle I dwell.
–Joseph Jacobs

To break a man’s advance, I ask for a dress of spun silver
and he breaks open stone for a metallic clasp.

To evade the miner’s reach, I call for a coat of beaten gold
and he digs fathoms to leaf my body.

To stop my hunter’s mouth, I beg for all the feathers
of all the birds on earth, which he skins for their riches.

Only in my catskin, he cannot find me
and, in it, I escape by my many coats.

Later and later, I find my desire and salve
myself with silver by the shining puddle.

I line myself with gold and draw you to the kitchen,
the saucepans stacked by the broken ladle.

With feathers limed, I fly to you, like the sparrow
that skims the early morning milk with its beak.

Under the dawn, we change our pelts to catskin,
rippling our backs in a growl of pleasure.

Returning with his mallet, knife and chisel, the man
finds only two cats shaking their ears in the rain.

The Blue Rose

His roses grew in my grandmother’s flowerbeds,
in the garden where the pale green gate fitted the latch
awkwardly. The word, rose, as well travelled as he was:
rosa the Latin made from the Greek rhodea
from Aramaic wurdda that mimics Iranian warda.
Late in his garden, blooms that bowed to his stoop
now pay him remembrance; the fine Floribunda
Miniature Cupcake and hardy Polyantha.

Not Nyasaland figs or the Belizian black orchid, but
the Queen Elizabeth, Comanche and Montezuma.
The Great Maiden’s Blush, the Song of the Stars
and Tangerine Jewel gave way to his tools.
The Impressionist, Teasing Georgia, Chianti, Othello,
Petit de Hollande, Climbing Peace and American Pillars
squint in their fury. The Alba rose wet in the dew,
Gallica, Damask, Tamora: all pay their duty.

The twiggy Green Rose, Crimson China and Crested Sweet Heart
are as staunch in their thanks as the Stanwell Perpetual.
Dainty Bess, Gray Pearl and reddening Vesuvius
shrink in grief to a Penny Ante or tiny Tom Thumb.
In the late silence of his rooms without gardens,
did he lift the latch on the pale green gate to find
a riot of thorns, a wilderness of bourbons, as sweet
and pungent as a dose of dopamine to the brain?

Or only the ripening blue rose of forgetfulness
tended by his care, growing beyond remembering
as full as a moon and still in bloom.