For Richard Youngs

After the cries, the choking black,
was sighting: terra incognita
(but better for that.) I guessed
here life might not be simply voided,
like some used petri dish. I walked
the city end to end, hoping the clouds
might part. Brickwork became flicker,
the streets a zoetrope. I saw
no-one to help me. No matter.
Some boy, his tapes — churning and spooked —
but this, the outward form, could not
restrain. In the endless light, fen-
flowers bud, vision, flimsy film,
burns stand-still. River, rock, field, coast,
possessed you; the magnetic earth.
The rhizome spread, knowing nothing

else, giving wave’s shimmer, limbo’s
last exit, turn of a gull’s wing.

An Inheritance

Late night: my razor sprouts hair after one
sweep of the shoulder. Otherwise, these fronds
poke over my shirt-line, then, scaling, join
my neck-forest. My father has the same
gorilla-back. As heirlooms go, it’s not
exactly bullion: another flaw
to make up Atlas’ weight. On worst days,
to sweat in a jumper’s better than stabbing,
wilting gazes, Lombroso’s condemnation.

My father also gave me elsewhere: past
and place I’d have (with half a chance)
disowned; survival traits: breakfast habits,
his plaintless graft, his awful drain-laughter.
And when tawdry life’s novelty dissolves,
a back to go to: tunnels where the air
slows, gold and green; mud’s feel, the thrushes’ voice,
the smell of horse-shit. Light and rain will speak
to earth: the rupture of an origin.

For Morton Feldman

There’s nothing so much present as a hollowed
house, clapboards rattling with wind’s memory,

the dance of light on dust motes, ceiling grey
and dry, trepanned cortex. We barely grasp

the echoes, streaks, the scratches, palimpsests.
What signals do the lights encode? Transmissions

from death’s event horizon? We can’t know.
I do the dishes, listen to the sigh

of things. Still it drifts, cloud of molten glass.