ships or tails


1.

Mother.
To whom else?

Town of chemists and churches
colliding with your miniature horizons
yesterday. Forever
those stars behind stars behind stars.

I come from the bush, I come
with my sequestered mind.
I cannot think but to write;
spiked by the trail home, employing
all my languages
I never made it past the rectory -
of course I lost that film;
such visitations are not meant to be kept.

Still, I crawled the hill,
trees enough to be exhausting,
visions hammering blackly around me:
Nature will not betray the heart that loves her.

And when I reached you, mother …

The blood that runs in gums, and
saps of all deciduous things -
that summer naked, I tried to take it with me
vibrating roundly; breath rolling between
us or them.

2.

ships or tails?
The headland stained with creeping shadows
semen tides lap dead Leviathan of rock sent to terrify
And an elf of mislaid love
dances in salty shrinking pools.

People on the rock I feel
nothing
nothing.

So which of you is the occluded saint?

A band of lighter green, icy and pure;
Her gathering sneer cools in the joinery of contracting weather.

Is there more than this, Mother?
maybe
always maybe
And wait.

An ocean’s affections
my darling, catching in your fluids;
warming in an architecture of combed heat
and back again
all night
the waves

in my ears
in the dive and plunge of alcohol
in attenuated current from the body turning to mine:

the storm breaks.

You’ll never know it was Neptune not you.
I showered, braced against the cubicle, while the dawn pounded down around me.