Me & Mrs Cardrew Share Another Bright Erosion

I will, perversely, begin here at the end

With a hole for a smile provoked in my arm

Pale, twining fingers for a face

To shield the eyes

From the dirt, from the sun

In corrosive bloom

Arise! Arise!

Dishwater is a kind of ugly death

A cigarette hanging between smeared lips

– with a desperate breath, ash falling

To a greasy slop that makes hands stink

Of rancid bacon fat –

Is the end of love

Another stuttered inhalation

It was a dog, I think, in the manger

With lolling tongue and gravel bark

That woke the babe

Mrs Cardrew washes off her carrion night

In the morning’s tepid water

Wists on a holly crown she wore

The trees above a bare and sky paned folly

When she for a night was once Yule’s queen

For my summer sweetness I will have

Wild mint and dew, honeysuckle, bergamot

And evenings coloured midnight nearest blue

Now she knots her hair like anchor rope

Stained by salt, coils frayed

And of a weight to hold her

To a sea of yesterdays

On the mottled city street I sometimes am

A foundered branch catching loss like flotsam weeds

As the river in its surcease of dismay flows around me

When stillness falls in penance on red and corrugated earth

Booming with a voice of shaken tin

what requited waters pass

What radiant jetsam

Catches ‘gainst my chest

Climb to me she says

I do not know if falling or ascent

I think, below the moon, you gather light

While I laugh with crooked sadness

Or weep unruly joys

What ever brings this moment most delight

Drowing on the linoleum once more

Arms weakly flailing, comets in my eyes

The ceiling is as distant as the stars