Past the Cemetery

It's nice here on the shady side of the street.
Our small, outdoor table
Faces a building
Golden with late afternoon sunlight
Under a cloudless summer sky.

Together with daily horrors,
Life doles out these small pleasures:
A platter of raw oysters on ice,
A ripe lemon sliced in half,
And a glass of chilled white wine.

If the couple holding hands at the next table
Are now in a hurry to leave,
Let them go ahead.
We'll linger over another bottle
And then go looking for a bed ourselves.

Jung Doubts

It may not be possible to go deeper, beyond
or beneath anything but birds and their
little thoughts feathered among the leaves.
Perhaps we're stuck in the bruise of broad day
with its donkey cart clang and silence like a choir
of gestures
or an aerial view of schoolgirls spilling from a school.
Perhaps we will open the inner door and find no stairs
or an immense frozen stone pointing at its old friend
the moon of our echo
going round and round with little trays of sweets
remembered and given
casually
in the service of regret.
And though the deep rooms knock and sometimes sing
we can't help thinking what if our minds aren't really
anything? What if no one's there, dear lady
who lifts her arms up to our own, dear contused old man
whose tears run in the blackened street
we climb, convinced the beloved is behind us and our lives
before us in a shadow of the shadow of the light?

Knuckling Down

Oh for the gift of eptitude. No job too big or small or awkward.
As nifty with a reciprocating saw as with a humble bradawl.
Adept at fitting unfamiliar widgets instinctively in place.
No ceiling, joist, masonry or quarry tile an impediment.
Marking out a rebated joint one day, knuckling down
to a cavity tray the next; checking the leak from a valve
spindle, then flush-mounting a socket outlet nearby.
Keeping the show on the road, the jets in the air,
the world's motor lubricated, its axis oiled; waving
aside the clients' plaudits, though their bafflement
is absolute when that guiding hand withdraws.
But by then their lives are set to rights: piped water
sourced again, heat coursing through radiators, the car's
smutty engine blasting off with rejuvenated smoothness.

Then wrapping up a job, settling the tools
in the metal box, folding paint-drooled
drop-cloths, snapping the padlock back on
the garden shed, hosing down your splattered boots,
changing into a fabric-softened cotton polo shirt.
Even clicking the cap on the felt-tip, after
you sign off on the planning application.
Filing away invoices, certificates, receipts
once the online tax form is completed
and the Send button flicked with relief.
Unwonted moments when all the pieces
cohere, loose ends tie up, quandaries resolve.

The Reflection of All Visible Light

The faces are white.
The flowers white.

I drive around town
expecting the familiar—deer
lashed to trucks,
kids on skates, the metal scent
of winter—

but an empty stadium
floods with light, a sky full of geese
fails.

Time is white.
The yard white.

I turn in the driveway, white
as the butcher's bar of soap.

Down Through Dark and Emptying Streets

Open a new window.
Go and Google yourself.
Open Facebook and update
all trace of yourself.

While you search MySpace,
sync your apps, correct a wiki,
blah blah on your blog,
stream and twitter, you see

such-and-such has got in touch,
requesting you as a Facebook friend.
And the name's slow-dawned gravity
widens the window, weirds and sends

you plunging into the déjà-vu
of a phlegm-skied twilight
with unreal soldiers on the walls
lit by fire-red and air-blue streetlights;

sends you trampling through the fank
and crumble and Regal packets
of your hedgeless estate
in a tufty and tarnished leather jacket,

flappered and frazzled paisley shirt,
scuffed and shagged-out oxblood boots;
walking away from your mother, the screech
of your sister's wee black flute,

past the clanking monkey bars,
swings and roundabout of a dog-dark
dungeon of a playground,
through a sinister elm-guarded car park;

cutting to the main street through
the grounds of a windowless factory,
past the pock-marked and Jesus Lives
walls of a public library

while the sky turns to liquorice,
dull cardigan and tobacco fumes
embered with persimmon blushes,
melon-flowers, mango blooms;

walking until you catch a hint
of her toe-to-heel click-clack
and follow her past scuppled shops,
dead-end alleys, hokey flats,

past head-the-ball hardnuts driving by
in souped-up Cortinas and Capris
hunting their prey; and she's driving you
doolally, knocked at the knees

as you follow her past the bookies'
arcade machines and nudgers'
Fisher Price lights and beep-bop-bings;
past the queue of scratching pudgers

in the chip shop where a pouty girl
shovels cod with a lizard-eye
love bite, Princess Diana pendant
and powdered-over black eye;

past chain-smoking bars with ducktape
on the cracks of their panes
silhouetted by the awful size
and dormant metal of dockyard cranes;

and you're all hearts and flowers
with each step into the square,
where she turns so you can finger
her pampas bleached and hair-

sprayed hair, and she says Hey there,
in her clown voice, is that a spanner
in yer works? under the twenty-foot
high frown of an Ulster Says No banner

and her rib-cage is delicate white
as flour on a fillet of fish
while her lips, still hot with sausage,
salt and malt vinegar, mouth a wish

and clarty newspapers carry news
of the weekend's nil-nils
windblown with Special Brew
cans and Styrofoam cups as you thrill

to her octopus fingers,
the probe and prod of her plum of a tongue,
your teeth and her teeth tapping together,
holding breath until kingdom come.

She asks will all this last forever?
against the dun Woolworth's door.
Now your hard drive hums and haws.
You waver between Confirm and Ignore.

Dark Spots

In the late nineteenth century, some photographers
claimed not only to capture images
of loved ones from beyond
the grave, but to be able to photograph memories
of the deceased, their auras still glowing
around the bereaved,
as if to capture light reflected off a body could preserve
that body over time as Beatrice explains
the presence of the dark
spots on the moon to Dante in Paradiso, how
the brightness of a celestial body
reveals the angelic
gladness that quickens the body, letizia that shines as joy
shines through an eye. Visit Fort
Courage—Take Pictures
of the Past, the billboards across Arizona advised,
and at the base of the mountain in
New Mexico, a note taped
to the gasoline pump read, Hold tight to your money—the wind
will carry it away. In the snapshot of
my grandmother in her
casket, wearing the Elizabethan collar and perm'd
curls she never wore, my mother
gazes through her
to a planet she always knew existed but which, without
the darkness, she could never see
before. They call
some bruises shiners like the violet stars of the Rose of Sharon
that come out in the morning and shine
all day in their leaf-black
shade, shade carved into the yard like fish scales covering
the sarcophagus in Sant'Apollinare in
Classe near Ravenna
or the stiff, veined hands of the sycamore stretched wide
in applause, the Italian gesture
of mourning.