Fragments
all that’s left for now is the estuary
and a ramshackle house populous with Gothic ghosts
a striking bastion midst the
nothing but the marshes
of our joyous, ugly world
aged as the river
that meanders in its heavy frame
and raised and slowly searching in its open delta
he is mesmerized by the beauty experience is shaking
from great criss-cross bracts of tall reed and stumpen shrub
this is where the dead must surely come to die
the eerie water like phosphorescence a mile away
is breached by the heron flight
that lifts one back
the great wings of lyric spirit
to long before the child suspected the existence of childhood
and those soft, green years
and the plump blankets of his hibernal state of being
his parents shout
they have other lovers
like long grasses torn
exploding anger-words
as sharp as shards of debris
flayed into the air skiting
violent abroad the freezing tempest
he seals his deep affinity with sadness
like a finger scraping out a heart upon
the frosted panes of awful adolescent devotion
conceived as a winter transcendent from
the breakdown and the acid and the acrimony
of wretched divorce
later
like a many reed
harvested by shiny sickles of bitterness
and woven by its peasant hand
as convoluted as the rivulets of twisted gizzards
as matted, a straw man
an offering to be burnt or rent or severed or
chained to a wall by the shackles of depression
an issue of that childhood metaphor of transitory
and impossible loves
where do rivers go
when their seed is transported
to the archipelago
that scorpion sting of
tiny islands of made relationships
a map, kind of marinaded in the compromise of being
whose contours like the corpse of thorn
run to a single point
which amplifies the call upon a sacred world
and enhance its echoes
a girl whose disquieting sensuality
whose soft murmur whispers colour to this bleak estuary
transforms the life into destiny
adventurous earth singular becomes the plurality
and by this girl he blinds and fills with that duality
with the contraband and tragedy
on whose camels and exotic caravans that cross mountains of
bizarre existence a far away
distant like fantastical stories
two strangers are approaching
and mingle in the miraged heat
two strangers are united as a kindred
glass weaving lucent soul
so they turn to that oasis
and attention, the delicious dip with which she savours him
and the carnivorous temperature in which she is absorbed
are like desert rain
alas when the sun is downed
and all trace of hallucinations
eager wanting mockery has vanished
through the contours of our foreign map
and slithered through its sands
to re-well beneath the bedrock of some
far off sea
ken to ancient caravelles
and curse of haggard mariners
the shipwreck of a sad history of love
whose bones like rotting fingers
of the skeletal ship
whose carcass sloths in darkest mud
that called beyond the delta
and whose Gothic spirit rides
like desperates abroad at moonlights hest