Caught up in force fields
It’s nearly dawn in the zones and smoke presses the room.
Talk is now inanimate, you can't get away from circles
the band pounds them, beer walls become automatic.
Can you go far enough away with your poor tongue-tied body
safe in ragged circumference? You'd be better off near water
or plotless in heat. Come to the river to pray where
alien versions connect, gods swinging as we're dodging.
Huge elephants dance among us.
Fear the stillness washing away in the heart of rage.
You can’t stop to give tribute. Language detaches its tongues
tracking this crowd as familiars merge. You’re deceived
washed with the eternal, or one of a piece with the new state
of hardness, scared of your own versions, your own release
locked on top of night, if it’s enough to be discovered.
Into blue
Blue lifts from the horizon
fish hide in the eye of the sun.
Travelling back over, closing.
The dark water's mouths
whisper at the bow
white songs.
So wave cuts story
in green sea, cross currents.
Salt stings our vision
oil spreads surface with shadow
slippery, memory's taste.
Journey sticky with scale
pattern shaded with weed.
And always moving away
Angle of the sun
A yellow gleam bends walls open
inside replenishes its fruit
a quiet exhaling slips through day.
Breadth of flowers – welcome! extend!
Sun shapes the ordinary, an open drawer.
The long silence perfects blue walls.
Or in afternoon’s lateness, light of
a day’s weight, and instant, encircles
the near motionless, books half hidden.
Intercept shape! catching that can.
Forms steep and soften, green and white
in the window’s presence, brush flowers
as though they are slow, erasure
is never complete, curves are wild props
and what is collected, never still …
-after ‘Chinese Screen and Yellow Room’, Margaret Olley
Getting burned
‘It’s all gut stuff’ he said or something like
she was afraid of the bunnies, or the crawlies
‘the kinder are in the garden’, little stings and fun
and not paying attention though somewhere else
is here too. The world isn’t made of china
things crack, a crisis in the crystal. ‘What is this
bombing madness’ is no longer a question
and the yards not refuges are where you watch.
Come out to play, you will get splinters
you have not the stomach for but there is
more hunger than you understand, no longer
is there time for you if the plants won’t grow.
You can say your finger was not on the trigger
the gun went off anyway.
and so ...
Perhaps I never recovered ghosts from the
Sounds of ravens given air the
Sky tended to spill travel guise that
Resembled the thirsty travesty game they
Hid within groans phones stank of them
Crashed to ring simply dishonestly this
Metropolis of summer whether, fine!, it's with
Whatever assails phases you into
False dreams of a rose choosing love if
Radar blips canker darker in eyes where a
Picture emerges rages as high as if
Matter itself paused warding the end off.
Never comes goes this cloud-waving into
Future, no force worse than time, is