Iseult

I am a queen at a high window
a black sail stands
at exactly the same distance
as always
which means the opposite
of whatever I take it to mean
I can't speak
no matter how many words
clot on the cold floor
some nursery rhymes are deadly
all of them are cruel
here the weather is harsh
and full of dust
words cut me as usual
or the usual words cut me
or was it someone else
I can't stitch a meaning
it unpicks itself
night after night
so many impediments
swell my tongue
you are the bitterest
heavier than rings or water
colder than a flock of birds
dispersed by storm
there is no true north
the stars oscillate
in unfamiliar orbits
the earth is strange
and marvellous
as winter is
and now is further away
than ever

Ode

We were woken too early, before the moths had died in the streets,
when buds had barely hardened in the frost, when stars are hurtful
and famished. They took us through gardens and past the halls
where once we had lingered, past the houses and doused markets.
Our footsteps echoed back like iron. Of course we were frightened,
that was a given, of course we remembered photographs we had studied
that then had nothing to do with us. The empty light of morning
made anything seem possible, even freedom, even God. We stumbled
on familiar roads, and everything turned away from us,
lamp-posts, windows, signs. They weren’t ours any longer. Even the air
greeted us differently, pinching our skin to wake us from its dreams.

•

Words of course were beyond us. They were what killed us
to begin with. They were taken away from the mouths that loved them
and given to men who worked their sorceries in distant cities,
who said that difficult things were simple now and that simple things
no longer existed. It was hard to find our way, we understood
the tender magic of hands, we knew the magic of things not spoken,
but this was a trick we couldn’t grasp. It lifted the world in a clump of glass
and when everything came back down the streets had vanished.
In their places were shoes and clotting puddles and sparking wires
and holes and bricks and other things that words have no words for
and that silence swelling the noise until you can’t hear anything at all.

•

It’s said that the dead don’t dream, but I dream of flowers.
I could dream so many flowers — lilies like golden snow on water,
hyacinths the colours of summer evenings or those amaranths they call
love-lies-bleeding. I dream of none of those. I dream instead
of wind-blown roses that grew in our shabby yard, of daisies
glimpsed through the kitchen window, of marigolds that glowed
through nets of weed. But most of all, I dream of red anemones
that never grew in my garden. They rise on slender stalks,
their seven-petalled heads bobbing and weaving in the wind.
Wind-flowers, Pliny called them, because they open only in the wind,
and the wind scatters their petals over every waste in the world.