Schlummert Ein
In memory of Sara Wilkinson and for Liz Miles
Eyelids, fall softly, from their gritted corners
chalk, let it drizzle,
let the streams flow
thick with a waste glaze, let imagery run off
its surplus of kaolin, choke feed of sediment
plumed into the blue,
tulipping its stem.
Cress bunches thickening in shallows, flukes
stinging flank heifers in their shove and jostle
down a bank, drinking,
mud caking lips.
Eyelids, fall softly, let me linger interrupted
behind the curtains billowing with images,
how the unseeable
sill even so snags, how
the very point lights from behind, thoughts
dispersing into folds slung aloft in sea mist,
impermissible point
breaks every motive
falling back behind the eyelids that then fall.
I breathe, I look, I carry forward, I can sense
the last of you, taking
walks of air thick with
waste breath your form displaces. O curtain!
O rail! I hate the thick floor beneath, breathe
over a market quarrel,
rise over the bass
sawing at its stems to crash down the vault,
let the vault branch recklessly, light-streams
maze, air’s stirring
carry song back and forth;
I hear your recorder pipe, long for its repeats
giving what-for to earth seeming to attenuate,
rock is marked
with your aeolian flow.
Eyelids, fall softly, the cast of their fluttering
fans across the inlet a white shadow, writes
over deep-set floor
captivated ripples.
World, gaze out! Rise from a shrouded point.
Source: Poetry (October 2014)