Dick Jones
Names of the Moon
Sucked pebble:
tongued smooth by black sand. Starflecks on a sable field, sour white, bleached as night, juice dried, a flat splash. Old coin: dun metal edged like a flint shard, spent, effaced, the ghost profile watching west, the setting point. Bleached horns: hook hanging, depending nothing but planet-wrack, clipped strings of light, the dead hair of comets. Broken button: tugged and twined, frayed against the cape and cowl, shrugged high and loose in ice-heart marrowbone dark. Flat cataract: milk or smoke or silica, obscuring the macula, watching only what she remembers of red shift, of spectrum drift. Abalone pearl: infected by a flushed horizon thus pink and purple, deep elliptical, frozen albumen. Eyes in the night: tsuki, menes, chand, spogmay, he’ni, loar, namwaikaina. Mal
Strange word, ‘stroke’ - a gentle sleep
and then you wake up, changed. Caressed by infirmity on the brown hill, kissed by disability as you climb the long drive. The farmhouse tips and, heart in crescendo, you embrace the grass. Indifferent sheep manoeuvre, crowding out your sky. You lie in a lump, adrift at the field’s edge, floating on the dead raft of your limbs. The sun nails light into your one good eye. Near dusk her scarecrow voice scatters your crowding dreams: she calls you from the house, the sound of your name curling out of the past, a gull-cry, fierce, impatient, tearing at the membrane that has dimmed your world. Root-still, potato-eyed, you are another species now. Your medium is clay and saturation. Mummified, like the bog-man trapped by time, you lie dumbfounded, mud-bound and uncomprehending as the sun slips down behind the hill. The urgent fingers scavenging for a heartbeat, fluttering like bird-wings at your throat, are busy in the dark. You feel nothing of their loving panic, their distress. All love, all optimism, pain, all memory, desire coarsen, thicken into vegetable silence. A dim siren wobbles in the dark. And then rough hands manhandle your clod-heavy bulk.. Night swallows the spinning light and closes in like smoke.
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Superstitions
Across my godless sky
a magpie skids, a barcode flash, trailing misfortune. I paint a cross onto the air. And then that night it’s the full moon bagged in clouds swollen with snow. I must drop three wishes into her milk-heart before the clouds hustle her away. In a last heartbeat of light, I invest a trio of dreams. But silently, as if to confound negotiation, snow fills the bowl of the universe, the sky falls to meet the rising earth and the seams are drawn. White darkness, a breast of feathers. Without my lodestars, compass spinning, this sailor must dead-reckon his course alone. Bebee Ellen's Merripen*
Sometimes they stand in twos
and threes at the edge of the road, arms folded, eyes unfocussed, expecting nothing but more of the same. Dogs bark staccato over the pulse of generators. Washing flickers between the vans, random semaphore, and clocks run slow. Sun rises over the wasteland, sets behind the chain link fence. And on Sunday old Aunt Helen died. Inside her trailer mourners fidget, watched by the gold-haloed faces of her best Crown Derby plates. No-one speaks but half-words form in the gas fire’s popping, in the wind around the broken door. Holding flowers and a card he cannot read, brush-headed Johnny, the boxer hero, racks tears into a cushion. Sister Lizzie glances sideways, gnaws a fingernail. Traffic raises curtains in the rain and Georgie stands where his mother used to sit at night with her roll-ups and her pint of tea. Arms folded and his eyes unfocussed, he dreams awake, pondering atavistic visions of the fires of Little Egypt, of the briar and the gorse, of slower tides than these that pull us all from history and into the new lands. *Bebee Ellen’s Merripen: Aunt Ellen’s Death in Anglo-Romani. Bridge of Dreams
Sitting here between you in the dark,
breathing hard from the stairs, your cry my summons, I wonder where these boat beds are floating you all tonight. I wonder what kind of cataract spilled you and then splashed you back. Is there for us a commonwealth of dreams? I ask into the dark. Are you both heir to my dusty fears? You lie across your beds, beached starfish, the ragged pulse of nightmare flickering behind your eyes. I try to read its narrative through shadow and across the years. Is there, then, a great pontoon of dreams, bound together like Xerxes’ ships across the bay? And may I cross it, boat by boat and so go back, go forward? |
