As payment for your colour storm
An acid sky blackens every flower.
You feel your breath touching down
And hold on to the voice you know
On each lip corner, two now frozen
Hedges to your country.

You can still alight on words
Or sharpen them as you wish;
You can linger on and stretch them
Like the skin of a birch bark letter
Read before a mirror.
How easily you get what you want.

But if you step on the spot
The fully-grown mouth passes 
The feather of a red-headed
Irish angel three times between you.
When you are breath-bound
It is purely breath that is stopped.
 
 
 

South of Mars 

It's over now. Part of the story
Has disappeared, into the void
Of something that has ended forever:
I know the exact place, behind the house,
A place where waves can be counted,
Seven hard cold waves,
Like the ones in the sea.

Undreamt of blues and marvellous
Greys set up a background,
A flat light and a mask of ocean salt,
For a sea full of inlets, harbours
And ravines, shipwrecks and sudden
Green splendours: green, I want you,
Green, I am half-full of seawater

Though far, far from the sea,
And the smoothest stone
Is a freshwater myth.
A cool oval breeze reaches me
From the sea, birds can fly in it,
And every half-minute comes the smell
Of the sea, newly cleaned, like a loaf of silver.

The sound of the sea fits inside
An orange in a wicker basket,
Or your face when it is still wet.
Its fine sand, of which there is very little,
Licks the shell of the sunset without
Waiting to go in, as if I had
A gold coin in my hand and didn't

Know how to let it go.
I'll do the whole thing in one breath,
And soon this house will be happier 
And more logical, without the dark
Corridor, without its quiet humble  plume
Of smoke that was warm blood
Mistaken inside a windowpane.

When you're all in the door of your house
With that sense of Saturday and garden gate,
You'll know there's no place I'd rather live,
To finish out the summer, the last days of August,
And the blessed September,
Above all, waking up,
And finding THAT.

Send me news how the sea is doing,
Wave-like wheat and wheat-like wave.
Remember me when you
Are at the beach, in that yacht
With the name of an island -
I would like the water to grow calm
For you and send blue telegrams.

My back to the frozen field
And just one star, I have the joy
Of thinking very differently than I did
Last summer, the year that the pillow
Was embroidered. Who would have said
That eight years later, I would look
For the timid city on the map

To see the mountain stripped of mist
And NOT look at the sea?
The church tower rock back and forth
Over the pitiable houses? A verbal
And musical ruin. I never understood
The number in your address this past
Season, your passport of smiles

Like a train without wheels 
Or wheels without a track.
Surrounded by corpulent trees
As if the tree had just been invented,
The woman who went to gather kindling
On the beach of day sits down
With all the excitement pruduced by jewels.

But anything is better than to remain
Seated in the window looking 
At the same landscape and its surprises.
The sadness that slackens electrical lines
Can lengthen the radio waves
Of its golden poverty. Perhaps
What we thought would cast a thick shadow

Will cast none at all. And thirty Aprils
Traced by your fingers will sit down
In the shadowless nudity
Of the last lamps, letting the things
Themselves decide where their shadows
Fall, the cool shadow of that blood,
Watching all things take flight.
 
 

Backwater with Beautiful Churches 

During the past ten years,
Getting it to make the right
Sort of curve, it was de-cornered
In a way.all wanting to say.

Yet this message comes second,
Crossing through danger and their
Bleak steppes. He should have been
The first to say something, saying too much.

The language that held him ran
Through him, a sea barely flushed,
Suffocating itself into a trance,
Kissing the planet goodbye.

The word has done a somersault
Like the ambiguity of the jewel,
As if it had never lived on a body,
A point of light supporting our gaze.

How light's modesty is turned,
By a light-proof muzzle. How a beam
So pronounced like a milky cone
Frosts the boughs in nickel and platinum.

Next to the eagerly expected
Wood anemones, a silk bridge
Of aluminium, a meandering
Zinc stockade.

Even when the sky shows itself
In its qualities, every poem
Has its twentieth of January,
The scarred floor's quota of sunlight:

Apron of brocade, paisley
Or willow, its almost minimal skin
A virtual pathway
Desertified, paved-over

Wasteland actually seen,
By the eyelike container,
By the dark edge of bowl,
Soft lead. The melted -down

Statue reinstalled, apostle
To the apostles, where 
The remains of the nine-thousand
Year-old fishing net were found.
 
 

Emily Noether's Theorem 

Poets are divided according to the rivers
That are closest to their home. He glances
At the lance in the lance-rack,
At his ago, the site of a single-hearth house,
Which must come down in the bloomed fields,
Thorns, earth broom and overgrown grass.

Then pursues a heavy-heeled diagonal
Towards Urania, robber of the verbal well,
With her purple riding scarf, saddle cloth
And cushion, seated next to Apollo,
Who raises a lustrous quill,
Conversing with that laureate whose signet finger
Carved his own name in large letters
Over the very breast  of the mother of God,
On the black sash of his Pieta's Madonna.

The flutist poses  in stocks with a clock
Holding the brass flower which  Dante wore 
Dressed in darkest pink, late as the mulberry,
While Petrarch masked in  a sad green,
As leaves should shelter fruit,
Accompanies Sappho's stockings of straw,
Garters of felt, amazing sky-blue gloves,
His bare-breasted  muse of choice,
Brave in the next to nothing of a line.