Held

half-jutted

from the corner

of an old apartment block

persisting through encirclement

by one of many business zones

that pock this Chinese metropole

is a fossilized ammonite.

Up this high

in a concrete wave

with its view of aluminium

plants twinkling like scales

and a lead smelter belching

clag as black as deep sea plumes;

the ammonite, dreaming,

remembers the ocean.

Your Name

(1994 - )

As if you could

go on forever.

You told me not to feed them, but they come

regardless, tracking their translucent feet

across the frost. I leave persimmons for them,

papers, also.

On our porch they loiter like mourners

anxious to leave, wanting not to be the next to go,

they flip the pages as they breathe.

The wind arrives, and agitated

they take up their pages and hurry

into the sky.

Taut as a drum,

let the sea slip round us

as it slips to circle

continents, as it slips,

obliquely, into a poem,

as it slips on like a dress,

and off like one too

when it

is done

with you.

The grey sky hung like a flannelette sheet.

Frayed a bit with yellow light, the centre traps

the muggy air. The sea will wet the hems of it.

I think my Nan has tucked it there.

Anxious in December that we might catch chill,

she snuck in with the moon as we slept.

Loping like a ghost along the moon-slick pavement,

the white dog is trotting on beside the gutter full

of moon-beams and blossom and delicate

orbs that are the images of skulls of mannequin

all leering like corpses from the sex-shop-front.

The border of the sky is torn

to lilac-gold. Between the sun

and streetlight dips a sudden gust

of melancholy, fogging rain.

Inviting like a lockless door

the night to bring her shadow in.

You always-walking waves of men

whose footsteps sound our stony deep,

step lightly now above our heads

or else you may disturb our sleep.

Doubloons, fat pennants loll

and lay about on greeny fog,

and each twig tilts their shield-shades,

each rough-cut leaf, to interrupt

the broad blue back above.

Rain spoiled the fruit, they clot the nets –

these oblivious, night-black plums – dropped off

to bloom white mould, and shrink, and curdle

like so much pelagic mass hauled up

to dry in the drag-net off Nantucket or

Here, between the trunks in cemetery rows –

where glass-eyed flies once clung to fruit,

and burst like dandelion heads as we passed

above the matted undulations of the grass

shot through with rusty pickets – jutting up

Like galleon bones, half sunk in silt

and scoured pips – mis-sown by time to bare

the porous ridges where their flesh hooked on

much as it does in us, still straining dark

and silent as a dragline in the empty sea,

Or the grass that snarling wrecks the wall

where a fig switch sits – snapped at the brittle joint,

and a trough inclines the rain, whose skin of light

crosscut by fine black furrows of shade

is like the scale-wrapped flank of a fish.

I realise I am sweeping your grave, when –

somewhere, a magpie sings, and I look up

through the naked lattice of the plum

and I see the sky is white, with one red edge,

like a segment from a peach.

The cattail bending,

hidden in the autumn wind.

A silent blackbird

The sky turns with crumpled leaves,

a flock of sparrows - tumbling.

The tap tap tap tap

of drips on my head. Is God

delayed? Impatient?

This frog in my hand

is round as a pond. It jumps

onto dirt. A thud.

Ink drips into ink.

Starling skating black and green

across the river.