Poems

[      ] commands a thunderless lightning, a noiseless rain
to spill strange – cold and dark –
over the prostrating city. [      ]
does not shout tonight, the veins
in my legs do not swell. overheard:
a child mimics a lightning strike

Like I’m doing something a lone self
determined, I put foot to floorboard.
Into a harder and faster world
brittler and slowlier

What had art – their
own, anyway – ever been
about, though, if not

A son doesn’t love what he’s supposed to love,
so what’s left to abandon? I have abandoned you,
failed forest, I say to the jade plant. A cube of milk
defrosts on the counter and daylight floods the room.

If I love wine, it’s as an admirer of colour
and texture: how the glass sends a skewed
view of the room’s edges away from me,
as desired at five when I require distance

What was the point of a landscape’s allegories,
or the show of fractured bedrock in Bellini’s
Transfiguration, the way it caught the folding
and tightening, the rough-shod squeezing of old
strata, and the intrusion of the igneous, ferns’

When I think of Bach, I recall powdered wigs, a dim, gilded hall, limelight burning on a stage, rouged cheeks, finely turned men’s calves in stockings. I am in the audience, I am in a box seat, I am holding a fan, but really, I am nowhere at all.

Red maya birds that are not
maya birds, but sparrows and munias.
Words for the kind of rain that will leave us
without power for days, then the kind that sprinkles on

After I cut your hair, running
the clippers back and forth
until the tiles are littered with tufts
like grey lint swept from the drum

for Yumna Kassab

As the bridge appears the train changes its music
Hollow and open like a drum
Every sentence curves to amplify itself the way blue
                springs over and we say ‘sky’