like a newish smoking, asphyxiation by kilometres;
the disembarking heterosexuals pit
picador arms against the heads of females,
high-end climate-change cologne;
they have vetivered and tidalled out.
Two women, seated, remain
like money, like any underground objects,
like a philosophy of inexistence, like earliness, unperceived.
Soya latte meets box handbag
meets lack of a glossy magazine
meets lightweight summer brastrap,
countenance facing another, scarlet and opposite.
Laptop Blue Screen Rationalization
I need to delete the shortcut that is Timothy. He sold me the one and only futureproofed summer of my experience. Standing ankle-deep in wild garlic in a Sussex lane he spoke of roses, and I almost bought it; I almost bought it right then and there when a 4X4 careened down the middle of the national speed limit lane sprung with Tudor-looking hedgerows almost spiky enough to stick a row of heads on, and in a whiff of gasoline one of those very common rabbits paid the price of someone else’s rich misuse of private transport and screamed time no longer.
I need to delete the shortcut that is Timothy. It was down the river that he sold me that summer. Wearing the feminist Germaine Cellier’s Bandit perfume, which she formulated after sniffing the knickers straight off the models on a post-World War II runway… I actually bought it; I actually bought it, a scent that accelerates from a whiff of gasoline only to end in the cabinet, medicinal dead wood branching out into fatherly hangers.
I need to delete the shortcut that is Timothy but first I must delete Linda, because he added her, but if I delete Linda, I need to delete Susan, because they were on a jobshare and they were never more than workfriends, who should not have had any shortcuts anyway.
I didn’t rightclick on Timothy. I leftclicked on Timothy. I’m opening Timothy. I remember the summer that was Timothy, but I do not recall what’s inside Timothy. How many keystrokes have been wasted on Timothy…
Timothy contains seven folders: Wrath, Greed, Pride, Sloth, Lust, Envy and Gluttony. These names do not look right. It was a night to remember when I went into Timothy and renamed everything within Timothy. I do not recall that night. I do not wish to delve too deeply into the sevenfold contents of Timothy.
Timothy was a project manager and he made projections. Perhaps the sins correspond to the phases of our project; our futureproofed summer. Wrath is Thinking, Greed is Planning, Pride is Doing, Sloth is Monitoring, Lust is the Exit Phase leading to or perhaps including the Feedback of Envy, while there’s no place in the scheme for Gluttony, which clearly means this guess is wrong. I might as well call the notes of a musical scale or name the colours of the rainbow as continue with this childish game. I’m hovering over and selecting the entirety of Timothy, about to finish him off.
Timothy had set the background of my laptop to roses, which used too much memory, making everything freeze, and he introduced a Trojan horse by unprotected browsing. There are babies in foreign lands named after Timothy by mothers he never met; many project workers relied remotely on Timothy.
Now it’s all blue again and it’s coming back to me. It’s coming back to me since I’m deleting the shortcut that is Timothy.
What was most difficult was proving that it was suicide, though the irregular little room with vodka windows and cranberry shantung curtains in the hotel near to the railway station seemed made only for that or the other thing; but I had no interest in finishing off the real Timothy, who taught me that income and happiness are not linked, so whether I am worse off or better off since the death of the real Timothy makes no difference, especially since we are in crisis and also at war, and for such a long time I hung on to the shortcut that was Timothy. The real Timothy was philosophical; when it turned out that neither Susan nor Linda could spell, he said: at least we know where they were educated and that they’ll have no choice but to listen to us when they make their choices; then he struck a deal under the table with the futureproofer from the rival company, a deal which seemed as if it could turn out to my advantage, though instead as you see I’m living in this different place now, with people like you.
And if the real Timothy were here he’d pluck out the heart of our mystery, reminding me that a positive correlation does not necessarily indicate a cause.
Though it’s a pretty rotten coincidence that all my other icons vanished almost as soon as I’d deleted the shortcut that is Timothy; and the blue screen is bluer than you’d have thought.
María Lloró / Blue Sky Tears
for Maria Jastrzebska
Ministry of Tourism
edict:
henceforward, islanders, utilize
naturally strippable skies –
way to have
succeeded
since our bluedock
coats are shredded;
pitchy patchy citizenry
sailors,
rum ’uns, several-headed,
ordered to repair
indoors, permitted only
strictly
necessary sky-strips, unsatisfying radical geometría – ay, María,
azul
celestial’s glued beneath
pinked nails, jiffed
away multiplicatory trapezium
smiles,
leaving this oval
blank of face –
qué hacer, flat-out
cielo
emplasters our changing-room;
if window glazing
wipes out outsideness –
Me
extraña tu ausencia,
absent carnivaller, auditor;
specks of dust
general
all over island,
(dóndequiera, mi general)
who’s to rationalize
(merced)
our clean-up job?
Estamos listos. Bring
the Google car.
Presentable.
We’re readied by
being gone again.
Inhuman Triumphs
for Nicholas Laughlin
(I) THE POET TRANSFORMED INTO A BOX HEDGE
it was a small snail
on a rainy day
it was a small snail
a petal vertex
it was a small snail
nestled ascendant
the heart of a rose
an apricot rose
and for a small snail
on a rainy day
the sea was beating
about my heart; O
love, beating about
my green heart of hearts
(II) THE POET TRANSFORMED INTO A DOUBLE VODKA
Accuse me, before I start,
of seeking forms to shatter –
at the icy least, to overspill –
you, meantime, pouring out me
on the rocks. MAN DRINKS MERMAID
MISTAKING HER FOR LIQUOR!
Seizing my mirror, make up
wars for islands that aren’t cold;
you grin; I chill; water wins my heart,
an alien drop in my interior
and into whom I’m melting,
a cubic volume of undrunk spirit; O
love, wrapt in glass wrapt in a set of bony fingers…
Air, how does it transpire that we are from each other?
(III) THE POET TRANSFORMED INTO A HEAT HAZE
& it was not a hot country; but occasionally
hot, though not by decree nor description; even a day
like this, where it rained fiercely on sheets of sun, jubilant
about heat, but denying hotness; not a hot country.
& it drove the insects in droves, it drove drivers off roads,
drove drivers into whatever grows on the sides of roads
& roads became what happened to be passing by, because
I melted them; & beggars died too sh
y to beg for drinks
because it’s stupid to feel the heat, admit to feeling
the heat & to not liking it & not to liking it
but to feeling everything twice as thick, feeling at all;
the stream sucked it up, milled on wordless; the trees rebelled, O
love, voted with their roots, forgetting how to vote, vowing
their all to – as a leaf double, shape, shade, light – a stitch-up –
(IV) THE POET TRANSFORMED INTO A PIECE OF PAINTED FABRIC
That night laid hands on my back,
ironing out a castle,
finding no body, is true;
that night’s pursuit turned up
a green sleeve flat as a wall,
that’s true as well; sky & I
locked eyes; who called curtains first
no journalism could tell. Shall this
poem turn to the wrong side?
A fine seam of gold stripes me;
righteous buyers mutter, mined;
mine, I said to night. And O
love, night kept going round in circles,
trailing a moonless shower, lyrid threads.
(V) THE POET TRANSFORMED INTO SPACE
*********************************************
L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle
L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle
L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle
L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle
L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle
L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle
*********************************************
*********************************************
sphere gas gravity heat radiation collapse
luminosity colour temperature location
**********************************************
***************************************** * O
love, *
Measures of Expatriation — III
Neomarica Sky Jet
for Helena Taylor
GIVE ME YOUR REASONS
that I may have tokens
by which to remember you
no please no more keeping in touch
you have already taken so much
of myself from myself, reinvested
in paragraphs to your prosaic advancement –
keynote speaker hired to dust off archival blues –
give me your reasons
THESE WORDS, THOSE MOST CRYING THINGS
a poem
possible, consisting
not of those things
he meant to write about –
a poem: merely
word reminders
after some tumult
that embarrassed him
into writerpoise –
small change,
high voltage,
burning his own
adjustable light.
and these words, those most crying things –
sunk for now
in his private code,
like his ‘moonrise’ stands in
for black black tree
since felled,
street lamp
once upon a time
unrepaired,
across the road
alsatianed and unplayed-with
shotgun neighbours
in three pinkish storeys
(all this
his ‘moonrise’),
and night
adamant leveller
pushing blues
on a land
already halfhearted
about difference
(this too coded
in his ‘moonrise’)
from big-word-
originary, and rising, sea
OUR OFFICES
This poem isn’t his. So let us leave him,
nary a flicker in his groin: only
when those no-longer-his-kind hoist defeat
in their homeward eyes; televised killer
whales fountainpen ice floes;
violin-case nails,
lower-salary-scaled, female, tip off
from the everest of reception orchids
insects camped in uncompliant dormancy:
only then a flicker in his groin. So
let us leave him. This poem was not his.
It is the window’s. The precipitant window’s.
The window, who believes in this poem
it is the only thing personified;
grieving after wholeness, split in glass sheets,
steel-sheathed, lethal to the weather. New York
rains New York: different, technological,
skyscrapery grey rain; heart-of-a-pearl
chorusing out of the gutters... One drop!
The window’s gripped by hopeless passion. That
one drop! that isn’t personified! So,
this poem is the window’s. (You’re a star.)
SHE SAYS
Does it suit me? holding up
red cloth tacked in some fashion –
hoping that colour flicks on
redemption like a farm-shop
bauble, gleeful fruit of joy
seeded throughout colder days –
and she speaks
full of glorious veins,
anxious over scarlet rayon.
Who
could have an objection; have
her as an object? She is
no thing; she is everything.
Who says:
Poem, like a clasping knife
shut in safe relationship,
guard what you’re made to cut out?
NEOMARICA SKY JET
Why, one of us, sitting
in a raw-hemmed purple garment’s
softer flag, where the sand’s flare
maximal against jade water
demarcates the old dance-massacre,
wished the other also sitting
at a marred dance-step’s distance,
not as you and I sit
now and there
at unadaptive distance,
making as if perfectly aligned
And she has lifted or lowered her arms
she-who-rips-open-intention
for this is in time without warfare
time in between
her scattering-of-sinews dance
Sand queers itself as light retreats
sea blue at last and last
neomarica sky jet
one and/or both of us sitting
the wish the distance
less and also perfectly aligned
Cities in Step
for the Weyward Sisters
talk about sleeping
you dream in black and white
i dream in fauve and phosphor
cities where people are held for interrogation
cities where taxidrivers and policemen
systematize their criminality
cities where the friends i can depend on
meet for the first time outside and by chance
mispronouncing hello
cities where the script is not quite Roman
crying out is currency
and so are sweets
i dream cities overwhelmingly
not people
you dream of flowers, dreaming you are
a girl
clothes shopping
you say what colour suits me
you see what colour suits me
is i-see-no-one-enter colour
is try-the-shop-three-miles-away colour
is would-your-friend-like-to-sign-up-for-the-newsletter-and-the-prize-draw colour
is you-probably-aren’t-looking-for-anything-expensive colour
is oh-sorry-i-thought-you-were-together colour
you
aren’t you with him
his hair disinterred from a scalp hung in basements
his ski
n pocked and bubbling spread under soil
his shoulders reaching down to smoosh his elbows
his hands growing in your direction
how else do we know you are here?
didn’t you come with him
into our sunglasses shop
our expensive sunglasses shop
isn’t he the one wanting
polarized designer lenses
why are you behaving
as if you are not with him?
he came in behind you; aren’t you
together?
step from there
absolutely no change
and a good face on it
absolutely no change
let’s go for a picnic
absolutely no change
we have the same basked
absolutely no change
how was your day? Did
you do, have, get, like, buy,
eat, drink, make up, make out
like you don’t
dream cities
overwhelmingly?
we have spread a cloth on the ground
share another cloth over our knees
pass a flask without commenting
fireflies, their matchbox likeness,
pulled out like a thought of thinking
or of polar exploration,
Scott of the Antarctic, the taste
of chocolate dismissing him, death
seeming more New World, more Aztec
something my company will not
translate
talk about sleeping
being happy
i dream giraffes mostly
having put one together
from sand under seawater
dappled by sunlight
at paddling depth
or having seen it rise up
amiable
companionable
with a friendliness seldom measured by scientists
a long-lashed
essentially solitudinous yet
occasionally-leaning giraffe
truly i wanted
to build bridges
reinforced with bamboo
and a castle
using the classic
spade and bucket
where living shells
cut or sink
tiny silent circles
hissing with air
and what happened
the colour of
black happened, rainbow
Measures of Expatriation Page 4