Possum
It was a month for death
I guess, or seemed that way at least,
When little losses swept
Like leaves against the trees and made
A litter where you lay, half born,
A broken little thing
Still slick with birth juice,
All blind and oily, trembling
A frantic frequency.
I felt your life was coiled
In that ring tailed muscular knot
That bound you boa tight –
A serpent strangling – knuckled white
And fraught. Your time unwinding meant
The stress was holding at
The threshold, where the light
Bends back upon itself and waits
And there is nothing else.
I tried to climb you back
Into your tree. An easy height
I thought, just far enough
So that your mother would descend
To where the knotted branches made
A secret hiding place
From time and other threats
That scuttle in the dirt and write
Scripture for the Zulu gods.
But I was un-careful
With you, or else you meant to fall,
You twitched and slipped and arched
Into a final spiral. And
I watched and knew that now the blame
Was mine, the traumas passed
Are stains that will not wash,
And I am scarred by running fast
And failing. Always. Stop.
The earth life
Gnat fuzz hums on pregnant buds
While fruits, fleshy and swollen,
Arch and bend on fattened stems
And dewy blebs roll and fall
To heaving soils, where grubs
Congregate endlessly.
The season is thickening:
Its scent concentrates, like ether,
In creeping clouds, blending
The giddy whirr of mosquitoes
Into amnesia and penitence
And a clutching of roots.
This is my earth life: to follow
The worm’s meandering,
Through saw-jaws, the spider’s scrawl,
On paths traced, untraced and retraced,
By Brownian ants, millipedes
And others, less imagined.
A song for Auden
Stop the clocks, Auden said,
Like grief was something quiet
And still; a deep breath and calming
Exhalation, soughed
Through stiff lips by stoic men
In mourning dress on damp
Tarmac streets, where heavy skies,
And terraces with dun,
Rendered walls and sodden lawns,
Dull the hearse’s engine,
Effect numb the congregation.
And though the poet turns
The verse to private lamentation
And writes his loss across
The skies and finds no words worth
Rhyming: it’s not enough.
The clock is stopped, the world stilled,
The metre’s taken measure,
The loss is parsed in careful, weighted
Metaphor – because
Auden’s too refined to say
That grief is snot and fury,
Torn photographs and ragged
Scabs and endless hours
Spent in tortured spinning circles.
And Time’s the frozen vortex
Where we once floated,
I am now sinking,
Raging, and nothing ever changes.
What world waits for Auden,
But will not wait for me?
Still life
There is a button missing, the thread
unwinds across a gut too heavy for
its frame.
He sits in grey-light, very still,
and half lid eyes urge on
the fading day.
He grew old slowly; shadows seeped
through tired rooms,
fabric frayed, the edges
first diminished.
Upon the mantle, photographs,
like mourners at a wake.
In one a couple sits, a crowded
rooftop scene; they have the
corner seat.
Across the city, blue lights and neon glow
and traffic flare like fire burning low.