Stoop

She stoops
and ushers the cockroach outside,
the cockroach, or the spider, the slug, the ant, no
matter,
it is always some creature or other

and no flesh will enter her mouth,
nor milk, nor egg
and she will brook no cruelty, no
swerving

and she may change
since everything changes
but not Her that is passing through her
like a cool wind
full of pine-scent and ancient stone,
a force in filings

just so

you are your eye
your eye goes through you

skin, bones, teeth, words,
thoughts, actions, love

every part of you is your eye

The Past

The past
circles about us.
Nothing can stop it
or quiet its voices.
They stir when they stir,
respond to winds the living can barely feel.
Not that it's just the dead.
Yesterday your priest
in the street by the mushroom sellers,
his strange lisp,
his trapped eyes,
and all night
my old teacher,
petty, judgemental,
his stunned, pathetic face, raw
and bloody beneath my fists.

Paysage

We are in Murska Sobota, I think, or Lendava;
there are a long row of giant poplars,
a railway crossing,
cafés on a piazza
near where we park the car,
and later, in the countryside,
fields of bright pumpkins,
two herons
flying low over acres of corn,
a mill on the Mura,
deep, swiftly-flowing water,
and so much more
but there’s no need to list it here: it’s just
that this morning, waking,
I saw it all again so clearly,
there, in the heart’s other country,
riddled with the heart’s strange messages.

Starlight

The old dog in the lumber yard
whimpers in his sleep.
A man walks down
Station Street in the rain

Under the bandstand
in the Blackheath Public Gardens
a cicada stirs
fooled by some ghost of the day.

In the dark we are
eating each other,
tearing, smelling, entering
with fingers, memory, desire,

there are
worms in our hair,
roots in our flesh,
our tongues taste starlight.

The Cricket

There is a cricket
loose in the house,
in the cantina, most likely, or
hallway somewhere, ridden in
in the last basket of eggplants or
bucket of dusty tomatoes,
its huge, blue-velvet spasms of sound
breaking out just as we have put the
dinner-things away,
filling the cantina night
like slow domestic lightning,
turning the bathroom and hallway, the
kitchen and the laundry and the
drying-room
into a sudden forest or
trellised field under starlight
as if the potatoes and tomatoes and the
fresh-picked beans in the cantina dark
were still lying
ten inches down
in the warm earth under the midsummer moon
or hanging under silver-shadowed
night-breeze-shifted leaves
not in a plastic milk-crate by the wine-vat
or a brown paper bag amongst the
empty oil bottles and still-to-be-mended  hose. 

It is
almost impossible to find it: every time
we make a move in what we
think is its direction it
stops completely, will not start again
until we have convinced it we have
given up and gone away, like deer
no longer foraging in a cornfield,
or pigs
no longer rooting in the deep cantina grass — not
humans
wandering back to their television
and their glass of wine or,
as we really do,
standing, hearts racing, by the
part-opened hallway door
secretly praying for the next
outbreak of shock-blue sound, hoping
to trick its uncanny early-warning system long enough
to track the sound-line, find
the source of this
mystical thunder-crystal of song that, when at last, by
accident we do so
almost a half-hour later
in a crack by the door-jamb
proves to be — this
black and shining
onyx-shard, this
feral poet, this
bellowing sliver of midnight — just
one centimeter long.

Damage

Sometimes I think that just through existing
one creates damage and disappointment,
and that love keeps us open, that
long, beautiful wound

that one has the choice
to do as little as one can
but that even that will not change one’s allotted portion
of sadness and destruction — that it will be there
whatever one does to avoid it
and that the challenge is not to escape it
try as of course you must
but to think of life differently, as something
other than how we thought it was

no matter how carefull one attempts to be
there is always greater care to be taken

as we avoid one thing
another will always happen

the hermit’s solution is no solution at all
simply a re-framing of the problem
a not recognising, a failure to see
how the immense weight of being
is always shifting away from itself
and how the damage is also the gap
between what we are
and what we have been thinking that we could be
and that this is the price of becoming
if that is what we want to do —

not to be sought or welcomed
but to be known and sometimes forgiven

and that pain and error and regret are a
kind of light in themselves, showing a path
one can never see by holding oneself or
them at bay

in the dark one can sometimes see
much more clearly than in the day.