for Kate McAnergney 

1. 
all fall toward whisper. and breath,
loose in the lung sail:
to extend in step,
never upward, nor toward
where the full stops give us peace: earth,
such as flesh holds its sense
of incompletion: the artefact
of all and none, an attempt
repeating reading:

ships in distance,
your gestures, brittle with light -
 

2. 
redemption, the loop of currency,
such cutting and uncutting, as
to weave the sun
into bones and words
on an unpractised earth:
but as with all heresies, now
simply neutral in their variation,
the secret taste, the oil fall
of night, stains the eye
with mountain:
 

3. 
in this version, the wooden book
remains unread. on the blurred
boundary, sand yields to language:
you foraged for washed up scraps
along unlinear tides, frail icon
billowing in earthwreck,
stiff-necked with wonder, saying

this is the sky, the same sky -
 

4. 
in southern states you entered
a narrow meaning: a space
previously unspoken, between
recital and quotation, and as a result
of this twisting, this
primacy, drunk on the illusion
of permanence, we spoke: lifted
out of self and back, the wounds
progressing through a succession
of exfoliations, many-flowered,
snapping in boneforms, standing
isolate, in the island
of the act:
 

5. 
among us, the land is self-perfecting:
out of the narrow and dark,
a garden: at the close of trees
night must blossom into music
or sympathy: beautiful girlflower
crosses her tiny ankle, cups
the dry ear of the field, looking out
on the clear and stoneless moment,
arranging the stamen and pistil,
the island, the little boat of us,
trees, bent close, quiet as birds:

the stone bell silent
in a cathedral of grass -
 
 
 

Zhivago

lie a walk
on the edge of eyeline,

mapped under snow
or against a white quiet,

toward or from
a light blondness, recall

in spots: parched lily,
horizon, upright rifles,

grass dry, an egg basket,
a sun hatches, inside

the corner field, where
I would stand, propped

in the kind of insincerity
talk is the cloth of,

where stems break apart
the thick weave of the air,

there is a dryness,
inside your formal body

a kind of fraying
I can no more border

inside the very
word of you, a straying
 
 
 

a forest

mothbooks'
scale notations,

the pairing
of lich- 
en like. keel

break in 
rippling, closed

at river volume,
rever- 

bed.
 
 
 

Kiss, first winter

ice in the road, the off-white
sky, lace slipped
from shoulder of sun, if love, discerned

in weak light, embodied, shifting, subject
to the raised eye, arm, pelvis, pear shaped cup
of lap

and wane, in a linen chill, half-drunk on metaphor, why
in the winter ocean
of yesterday's wine

will the ideal unrepresentable weaken
its glint against
the beauty of it, the cold

skin, cut by light, the lips
no longer private but purpled
with parted honesty,

exhaling into your air
a small cloud of visible summer,
mouth, sealed from all loss, feeding

elsewhere, in sun becoming
the fall of blank milk on
the handlebars of a child's moving bicycle

near where you stood
by the roadside, walking out on such a thin

and ordinary water, it was the first white
lie, when the tinny, chardonnay brightness
failed, snow had emptied the page,

and how beautiful it was
that she, he
was cold and smooth against the light
inside your wintered lips, failing all metaphor

in a car-crashed season, the sun's knee skinned
sanguine above the leafless
trees.
 
 
 
 

Blenheim shards

a mountain
group, losing

heart among a sun's
carcinogens

*

townwork calcified,
stone passages cited

by kneecaps, herbaceous
fringes of watertowers, limits

gulped under
the eyeshutter

*

leafs, leavings
dropped from spoke,

the edge of focus,
yellowed or golden