Poem

Late afternoon. Another forty degree day.
Sick of ecological talk I decide to meet it,
take my book into the park,
not sure how far I’ll go with Against Nature.

Head tilts to strings
beyond setting –
cross-notes of talk,
gallery folk

Cheerily inquiring, I came to Heaven’s gate open to a simple throne,
the sky perforated with stars
and Jupiter’s two-faced moon trailing its orbit
‘Teach my walking soul’

Night’s the ground beneath my feet
since I learned to walk with you.
Scented guide with birds and flowers on your breath,

Our competing lifestyles lost us the Australian double
that semester. And couldn’t we then arrange
to do the other, and was the desert that limitless,
and why not say so? You see, griping comes naturally

The ice-cream headache has you seeing double
as Goody Twoshoes calls by your table to arrange
some kind of smooth-talk conference full of limitless
possibilities, lots of cocktails, two naked men and naturally

Much as I loved you in the snow and ice,
Side-slipping down the chute below Spinale –
It’s twenty years now since we saw Madonna
(Di Campiglio, not Ciconne)

And once again that field of neutral light,
Those same few vessels subtly rearranged
Across the surface of a table,
The pots and bottles, vases, with a slight

Apart from those
occasional wrinkled socks
you are aristocratically pallid