fell bone
Outside the house the swinging ape
swung to and fro
swung to and fro...
Stevie Smith
great ape of love inside me,
swinging around with its limbs too huge,
swinging me round by its weight –
it just sat down and turned to bone,
its hairs to filaments of finest bone
and its eyes to flat bone, yellow bone.
love is attention, that's what it is.
it soothes performance
with caresses, movement
for movement, big for small, words
for a moving mouth or face.
I only love you now with this great still weight.
I don't want you to come back, I do, I don't,
groom – smash – animate –
from the hair I grew dreaming
i'm in a bad bad
bad bad bad
bad bad bad
bad way, lasso
you and an iron
star, replace
passport, prepare
the bomb sweep,
mark time,
mark sneaking dogs
avoiding the bells
on the meat. you
desolate, you desolate,
here's the evening
closed over. a cold
oily hoop of a
primeval river,
slippery backs
breaching, spume
snatch, please
don’t rest here,
skirt, bear it, dip
your fingers in
silver nitrate, box it,
grow strawberries,
grow strawberries
softly, the irritants
soak in our
opening nailbeds.
what do we call it?
this is service,
we’re servicemen,
we’re giving it
everything we can. so
called lassoed waist
on one coast
to lassoed waist
of the other.
reach into the
brine my darling with
cupped hands.
so call. so travelled.
so lassoed.
coda
these two silk birds are frayed and then it touches them. two
frayed silk birds. into the river diving and emerging. one such silk
is a cracked river stone and this is the surface of its silk, the green
surface of its time in that silk time, its water. you could cut your
foot on that accurate division. if you weren't aware. you could lay
your hand on it and feel the sharpness aware in your hand. these
silk birds come down from the leaves of the grey way up on the
edge of the cliff, they come down to the water to drink. they fly
past the roots that break the cliff and through the stone cuts water.
absolutely slowly and too fast to see. so in acceleration holds array.
lake
wanted to fall into
you feather you foundry
follow your mouth or thank
your neck to thank
your lucky neck
now I don’t know what kind of bird gulf
moment with its painful fish struggling up
that was my instep shining
in the beak of a kiss
that was my waist, a deer and its heart,
nettled in the palping of your trouble and care
carried through tattering trees conspiring
in wetness and in branching
to slow,
to meet with the fibrillant capillaries of your antlers, dear, and mine
to slow
now I can’t think how to memorise
or walk through coral
Campus Accommodations
for Hyunjung
monsoon morning
riding
the umbrella to work
ladies glow
leaves get heavy or give it up
*
flug in a well?
what does that mean?
tip of my hand breaks shadow
into rings of blue sun
while this guy
squats underwater with his
face to the wall
I do ten laps
I do twenty
like I can’t crawl out
*
everywhere I walk is somewhere I lost my ring. that complete thing. head down, walk on. under dappled half-moon, brown butterflies, blue-crowns. M16 triplets soft in the jungle fringe. cicada shriek narrowing in.
*
at the end of the day – got nothing
for swarming turtles
*
SPLASH/SPLASH/SPLASH
SPLASH/SPLASH/SPLASH
SPLASH
SPLASH
Dear Resident
The Dragon & Lion Dance Troupe has encountered
some problems with the faults of the existing lions.
Additional drumming will be urgently required.
We wish you a Happy New Year.
*
Dear Hyunjung,
You are
our best defence against terrorism.
Learn to be vigilant
and win attractive prizes.
*
9 am
the fogging man
wears a t-shirt
tied over his mouth and nose
his tractor chugs along
on the billowing fringe
wind change: fog
takes him over,
rolls over our block
roaches fall out onto their backs
a piano stumbles upstairs
*
SPLASH/the outside
dances on stilts at the window
& shakes
electrical wires to their roots –
head of a lion &
body of two men
& moving close to you – luck! –
better watch out
better find green leaves
for an asking mouth
forest
maybe that's why she calcified our secretions, to keep them close,
or to support a sense of cleavage.
now she has growth on growth. these don’t sustain weight
without losing their colour.
under certain pressures they creep up out of the water,
up into schools of visitors and revisitors. the visitors
are spotted and striped, they swiff through the halls,
impersonating pets and memories, biting moles off where they can.
they get carried away, like these plants, the dappled drifters,
and none is thicker than an eyelid but when they cry
they shiver the ceiling, they shiver it wholly like a bell’s waist,
crackling until it opens, the central mouth of the sky
that our growths grow to, that we take in, melasynthesize.
many hot summers later, many brilliant years later we find
the remainder on the pontoon.
they look saucy, and as we come closer, listless, bleached out,
could be easily kicked in.
one is paler than any former camouflage, and its eyes are hollow,
mined for significance. what a pinprick of a former night –
the separation’s in all our limbs.
we untie the ropes, unbottle the air
we tip the edifice up and join the spill
©Jen Crawford |
