I
The angel came again
Past the ivy-shelled house
Only a day after
The photograph was taken
In this embrace
Can’t you see?
We’re dying
In certain pictures of the ascension
She looks at him
Over the shoulder of a lover
Invisible
The only clue
To his existence
In her expression
Of having been interrupted
In the middle of something
Important
The painter looks from heaven
This adorational subject
I imagine he could not see
In whose arms she was held
Whose body she enclosed
With her own
Supplicant arms
Mistakenly depicted
Encircling nothing
As if raising an emptiness
To the place of the ineffable
Foreclosed to him the lover
By his invisibility
He sees the angel of the ascension
A dramatic interior
Her start her gesture
Belies his absence
If god couldn’t see
Would he be lifted up
By her? Had he any chance?
II
The angel passes before I’ve time
And call the children
Staring up at windows that reflect the sky
Almost my life
Staring up at windows that reflect the night
A strange profile cut by light general
In the ivy on the mullioned panes
Besides he’s nude
In light particular
Do I want them to see whom I’ve invented
To be scared by an adult despair
At the absolute theatre of the body?
The car-crash of history continues
Expensively achieved
In this embrace you grow old
Another opportunity missed
Here are your lines here are mine
III
The photograph pretends
Exactly like
A mariolatrous painter
We’re not hanging to the precipice of time
I’m in the temple staking justice
Against peace
Gaming on every fall of the die
The appearance of one of a couple
Against two of a kind
On the opposite unequal die
I’ve already palmed in play
On entering Jerusalem two dice
One surpassing fair
Two of the same die
To gain her skin of honey
A six to hold
The air was seven
Seven sided
And not give in
To the stone
Or perfume of hope
The quantity of years
Pressed from the olive
Buying nothing
Nothing nothing one die
And nothing
That one die
And luck will have the quality of an action
IV
Before the photograph wants to have
Needs it like water
And then he drew it
Incense from the mouth
Absence of justice
With in a voice
Within a voice
Inmost in
Close to breath
Closed on a breath
Inmost of all in
Separable thread
The near below
Threads the near
Under the near
Can’t you see?
In closing a way?
Farther away
From the neck
Her sweet bone link
Going and forgoing still
And broken still
And broken from us
That I can’t go on
But threw us unreconciled
Into the promised embrace
V
Between the scapulae and
Slow-filling dish of our loins
It appears
The eclipse of what we felt
By what we see
On tables pushed back to the walls
To encourage dancing
Sincerely attended by mums and dads
In whose number for some reason
We don’t count ourselves
Whose resolution has rubbed out the sum
This shared sense of loathing
One of the strongest bonding forces
There is because I ask
No knowledge in chains
Not one sided I ask
Not seven faced either I ask you
Freely to give
For a story made on painted sand
You to ask not him
Questioning beauty not him
Near under
Under the gloom
Light pixels in dusk
Light below
A theatre of love and blood
Here with dirt between floorboards
And fly spots on the puppets
Belonging yet not
In a classical room
Furnished with satires of the baroque
Chained yet not belonging
You to ask
Are the children dancing?
Not yet.
VI
I don’t want you to write like that anymore
I don’t want you thinking
I don’t like you washing
To think all these
Chemicals make water
A hanging garden of tears and heights
Rubbing your hands
Then drying your feet
Bathing the wounds
We don’t speak in real words anymore
For the peace for peace
To distinguish the man in mankind
I hope we make justice
About this proposal
Its portion adjusted
To fit an eggshell of convenience
And it’s so very dry
The tins mottled by rust in the air
Off the scar
Nobody dances except air itself here
As if to mark the oppressing presence
Of a difficult landscape
Nobody assays to eat cake
The mothers are so very ill at ease
And the fathers off the mothers
Understand the renditioning
That makes the air dither so
So elsewhere those pieces turn up
That are absent here
The scars are shells and
Imagination quarantines
Lagers them that offer opportunity
Such is the colonial riddle
Prefers from the tyranny of distance
An offertory plate
To the distant tyrant
When they sleep we’re awake
The party’s in full swing when I enter
You on my arm
I am a thing
Accepting change
An empty lavabo
Tiered above the ewer
Time on a cast iron stand
VII
Extinguish the lights better
To hide the cracks
Everything has poured away from
Leaving a residue of dissent
Not unlike a sheet of paper
Between content content and form
Form guttering in the dry riverbed
My mind is a story made from painted sand
While happiness writes white
Guttering in a language belonging
Yet not belonging
Travelling that crumbles
On its feet
To long be
To own
To be own
To be
Not unlike a photograph
Taken only a day ago
In this image
Can you see?
The ruined figure
Who has paused for something
For effect
For particular affect
For something
Important to happen
Then continues on
Before I’ve time
And call the children
Who dance now
Who is there
Who is innocent
Who is there
For a breath
Who continues on
(November, 2005)
