I

The dead of nothing doing is midday;
the waiting highpoint of a sunfall’s
quick electric thunder flecks and strangles
with the sudden chatter of its languages.
Hard air, hard light, draws out the mask of pain
from the stark air
where all our bodies stand and breathe
their momentary pulse;
dance the straight middle of laughter
with bare feet about the deep through
to the long decline and sunset blazon
into the possibility of all the other endings,
other beginnings of the word
we could bring upon ourselves
over the stark rocks near finis-terre.
It is last light that does it, not the dark;
the midday promise of last light,
here by our side and counting.
This is the poet’s brilliant, hard and light,
through which the falling, broken prism of the sun
draws itself to language, now
while the blood still sings,
scorching against the brittle rage of sand
fasting off shadows, hourly, slowly,
crazing its eye to burn away each soul
flecked in the losing cobalt
and hard liquor of life
creation merely eases.

VIII

Midnight, almost lightless, has its colours also,
all the furnishings of each eye’s
myriad prisms held back into the deep
and shadows speaking and denying
words and all their worlds and other truths
we can be freed from, turn from,
come to us upon that sharp rivet of silence.
Thus the enormous act of immobility enshrouds us
othered, chamfered into being,
which is the miracle that words can help perform.
Thus does the poet write
not with the pen
but with mortality between his fingertips,
prey to the doubts that skin commands
at each long draught of breath;
and thus against the dead of nothing doing
can he place with terrible care each word
against forgetfulness.
We are the dark consumers of his words’
stark expirations that eat at our poetics
of decline and leave our tongues unspoken,
the door ajar so that the glimpse beyond
to where raw fire is white with our
impossibilities and all the tumults of the
riven mind is token that we hold
against the claw and burn of our defiance.

X

Evening star
++++++++++++– Hesperide –
and spear of silver printed
on the dark lids’ night windows
starred on the face of all the ocean’s reaches,
fades into blindness.
This is the hieroglyph of silence
and the dead dream that each past,
passing, has looked forward to,
retreating to that always already
sudden and declamatory moment of
the sacrificial power of the forsaken word
++++++++++++ – mellta shabiqta –
Yet it is given.
High water mark against the spew
of a close mist damp on the skin
is cormorant against devouring deeps
and ooze that lithes between
water and air, between our black
and knowing.
And so the poet, lacking the music to do other
but gently close his eyes and kiss the void,
knowing the skin is eggshell to his bones’
owned whiteness, weeps
and his lament, wordless,
always at the edge of the wide waters’ flaying,
catches the tang of harshness and its peril
and cannot turn,
++++++++++++++– for blindness is the secret here –
and cannot turn
to see what he has done
and left undone
but in that failure answers
into the silence here
++++++++++++++– and always ever here –
among the broken rocks
and breaking seas at finis-terre.

He cannot, nor the great swan of angels
cannot, like the cocks of Hades
crow him then to a new morn.
Only the muse can tread the rocks
+++++++++– the dead and sea-welt rocks –
with him in peril to a new counterpoint
and sudden nakedness of flesh and eye
and word
+++++++++and word.