I

What does the hard look do to what it sees?
Pull beauty out of it, or stare it in? Slippery

heart on legs clops into the boiling swirl as
a pale calm page shoots up, opening rapidly

to say I know – something unskinned me, so
now it bites into me – it has skinned me alive,

I get dried from dark red to dark windspun
withered jerky, to shape handy flyports out

of my lattice, or pulled out am membranes
arched bluish, webby, staked out to twang

or am mouthslick of chewed gum, dragged
in a tearing tent, flopped to a raggy soft sag.

Yet none have hard real edges, since each one
is rightly spilled over, from the start of her life.

How long do I pretend to be all of us.
Will you come in out of that air now.


II

Black shadows, sharp scattered green
sunlit in lime, in acid leaves.

Hot leaves, veined with the sun
draining the watcher’s look of all colour

so a dark film moves over her sight.
Then the trees glow with inside light.

Hold to the thought if it can shine
straight through a dream of failed eyes sliding

to the wristwatch’s face, wet under its glass
a thickening red meniscus tilting across its dial.


III

And then my ears get full of someone’s teeth again
as someone’s tongue

as brown and flexible as a young giraffe’s
rasps all round someone else’s story –

a glow of light that wavers and collapses
in a phttt of forgiving what’s indifferent to it:

not the being worked mechanically but the stare
to catch just what it’s doing to you –

there’s the revulsion point, puffs up a screen
tacks cushiony lips on a face-shaped gap

a-fuzz with a hair corona, its mouth a navel
not quiet, and disappointing as adult chocolate –

I’d rather stalk as upright as a gang of arrows
clattering a trolley down the aisles

though only the breastbone stone
the fair strung weltering

a softening seashore clay
steel-blue with crimps of early history

the piney trees their green afire
a deep light bubbling to grey

long birds honking across
the scrub, the ruffled shore

coral beaks dab at froth
the pinched sedge shirring

unbroken moor, spinney rushes
petticoat brine, bladderwrack-brown

coppice rustlers, always a one to fall
for – Cut it, blank pennywort charm, or

punch of now that rips the tireless air
or gorgeous finger-stroke of grime.


IV

True sweetness must fan out to find its end
but tied off from its object it will swell –

lumping across sterile air it counts itself
lonely and brave. At once it festers. Why shape

these sentiments, prosecution witnesses, in violet
washes of light where rock cascades to water bluer

than powdering hopes of home. A hook’s tossed out
across one shoulder to snag on to any tufts of thrift:

Have I spoken only when things have hardened?
But wouldn’t the fact of you melt a watch?

Unfurls no father-car umbrella here. No beautiful
fate is sought, nor any cut-out heart renunciation

– if only some Aztec god could get placated! But he don’t –
there’s just a swollen modesty to champ at its own breast.

High on itself, it sings of its own end, rejoicing
that this cannot come about. Because I am alive here.


V

The muscled waves reared up, and scrupulously
no hints of mock neutrality were lost.

Containment-led indifference, or conspiracy
accounts of generals’ pensions, cost

no setback for the partners of democracy
who portioned barnyards out to each volost

while florid in the twilight, Nation stood
alight above the low dismembered good.