There is no Simple circumstance, As when a boy hiding In a closet Beside a manikin swoons In the mist of A grandmother’s sachet. The crooked White sticks of the legs And arms bent around Him, as he imagines He is older, Standing in a wooded field, The beads of lavender Rolling In the yellow…
(from a novel to be called: Nothing Happens in Carmincross) Below them is the sweep of the valley, widening from nothing in the grey-brown mountains down to deep green pasture-land. The river winds in the most approved style. The farmhouses are square and white and solid. No poverty in this part of the world. Never…
Emptying the teapot of tealeaves I moped at the kitchen sink: Thinking of thinkers who think that they are the only thinkers who think. The teapot was red enamel and the daylight outside was dark And the appletree at the end of my cabbagepatch was peering back up at my cottage Quite unable to budge…
Wanting leads to worse than oddity. The bones creak like bamboo in wind, and strain toward a better life outside the body, the life everything has that isn’t human. Feel the chair under you? What does it want? Does lust bend it silly like a rubber crutch? Tell a tree about the silky clasp of…
She re-enters her life the way a parachutist re-enters the coarser atmosphere of earth, exchanging the sensual shapes of clouds for cloud-shaped trees rushing to meet her, their branches sharp, their soft leaves transitory. She notices smells, the scent of pines piercing the surface of memory— that dark lake submerged in pines in which her…
Spain frightened you. Spain where I felt at home. The blood-raw light, The oiled anchovy faces, the African Black edges to everything, frightened you. Your schooling had somehow omitted Spain. The wrought-iron grille, death and the Arab drum. You did not know the language, your soul was empty Of the signs, and the welding light…
Here I am on a cross-channel ferry: I have run away from Co. Kerry: I could not stand it another day: But well I know there will be hell to pay. Girls in Dublin reading “Roots”: Girls in London reading “Roots”: Girls in Paris reading “Roots”: Eyed by silent herds of screaming brutes. Outside the…
In dreams silent secret and unafraid I steal away to find you I’ve divined Your wish to see me I steal away to find You in a forest digging with a spade I touch your shoulder feeling my heart race To think how glad you’ll be but slowly quite Slowly you turn blindly to me…
Dragonflower. Ice-flame fontanelle plume Of the Virgin — The spine coarsening on upwards The leaves centipede and sinister For swarming up the body For stiffening out the gorged soul Ribs Fish and perfunctory To lift the flared cheekbones, the mouthings Of the hydra-face. Core-abstract Shameless and craving Of cunt-flesh — The splitting grin and the…
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