Kerry O'Connor
The Handflower ☊In this night’s dark stain, come, lay beside me;
I will take you, man without a name, who turns his face away and bites my shoulder, who needs but cannot bear the bitter dregs. I will carry your weight, as every sister who wore the handflower became the bangle, learned to spread her bones and sink beneath the waves of each particular obsession. Curses follow me of those who fear my right and shudder to know the love I count in minutes of every hour, who spit their gall where I laugh. This flesh is mine, it has bled, and shed, like a snakeskin every unworthy touch and kept for itself, the taste of one kiss. Landscape from a WindowWhat comes in at the window
is more than the bitter tang of noon grass, the aftertaste of love’s hidden thunder you imagined you heard as you lay, supine, on the single bed the sunlight askance upon your hip and thigh. What drifts through the window is the feather of a bird that fell through sky, its black mass defines the leaf and blade; it is the isolation left behind the corner of a farmhouse where a single garment snaps the line at the bite of a colder breeze. What lifts the edge of curtain lace from the frame is a terrible precision of sight that views the empty field with horse standing in its lonely traces, and sees its own mortality in the landscape of your shadow cast aside in naked sleep. On Desiring to be RainPortrait of the artist as a raindrop:
I adhere to the deep secret of moss. The dampness encourages me to grow in hidden ways. I give birth to strange mushrooms of infinitesimal thought, pale and convoluted and delicate. You may think me dumb and dull, because I will speak of the way I see a glint of light run along a sunbird’s black beak; shackled to my ink, I write it into lines, and add besides, that feathers are the perfect colour. I have yet to be born as a snail and unravel my spirals of thought in thin trails of night silver. Rain me as some thing Rain me as glow worm Rain me as curling leaf of fern. Under storm clouds, I will sing the song with words I do not understand, in B Flat Minor. The Ashes and Other Lines1.
Once I heard a peacock cry, harsh enough to crush the last hope of a weakening heart. Once I saw a man, back bent to his guitar, plucking a trail of tears from the strings and beyond his window, the sky was blackened. Why do you sing to me of suffering? Rather let me go. 2. Once, I was spared drowning and washed up, rolled in the small surf with other broken things – shells, nets, glass rubbed smooth, opaque as a dead fisheye. My white limbs were too limp to hold me so I crawled over cold sand, alone but for the bitter curlews picking over stones. I could not see, then, beyond this spite of survival, when every shore seemed too meagre for hope, nor guess what hands might reach for me at the low water mark. 3. The sky looked down and seeing me broken, reached out and brushed his hand against my shoulder. “Come with me,” he said. So I followed him, for his eyes, though fathomless, were kind. I belonged to the bat’s wing at dusk, and the swallow’s arc at dawn until the space beneath my heart grew brave. 4. And I have seen the sun set into a westward ocean in a slow bright slide without giving a hint of steam, like a silent sigh. And I have felt the rough edge of a lover’s jaw slip down my neck, leaving a raw trail of nerves my skin remembered long after he was gone. Why do you speak to me of beauty? These are only ashes. |
The Trees Held Their Silence ☊The trees held their silence through winter,
wrapped tightly within the hardiness of bark and brittle outer branches. They were silent, as was I, as were you, my Love, unshielded. We touch, without touching, sometimes and know without knowing how we do. We sink deep, sometimes, fall into blank spaces, shivering our way through the cold. The trees called to me in the early spring, telling me to look up – I looked up and saw the swallows had returned to me and in their returning, I returned, as did you, my Love, unhindered. We rise to the light. We awaken, seeing no further than each other. Absolute SpaceThe moon hides its corners
at full brightness, demands attention takes up space, which is no space, which is merely time and fixed motion no absolute. Though I try to turn my cheek, moonlight scratches the corneal edges until the tears drip and cling to blades of night grass, and no amount of time will bring back what has been lost. The wind blows down my throat, deflects the gravity of hair but I am pressed to this square of earth I occupy; space will not move for me, nor time, unspooling its infinite line without binding consciousness to any fractal sliver of present tense. The immediacy of the moment has passed like night birds that flit before my eyes, utilizing motion through space until time swallows them, as my conception of self has been swallowed and spat up in these shallow fringes of midnight’s eddies. A thin mist settles on my shoulders, conversations play out in other living rooms, somewhere close a dog’s voice cracks the moon; emptiness fills the space in which you never loved me. Time has reached the natural limit of reverse. Contemplating people, I have observed ☊the vast divide between the clean and those
who choose to remain unwashed. A child will feed pigeons, happy in the dust. A bull pierced through the shoulder sinks to his haunches. Never was red so dull. The female form excites the muse but all becomes ordinary in reduction. A platter. A bowl. A long-legged table. While masculinity resolves its headache in paunch and penis. Hills rolling unregarded. A study in plane and colour is as academic as mud and blood, piss and undressed lamb. We have eyes that slide past drooping nose, and oh so many teeth. Sharp. White. She scrubs herself in a blue room. He plays ball on the beach. Lover of sand. Here at last, a man with a guitar. To wake me in my grave. Carve your tune in basalt. Singing the seas to a crying woman. Where she reclines nude under stars. We cringe. We crawl. We crow. So little time to find the soap … Rinse the sullen crimson tide from your fingers. Ponder the inevitable fall. Cracked heels. Rise from bed. This life. Uncovered. Art. The Return of the MagiMy mind is missing
a vital part – a tiny pendulum cog like those that switch back and forth inside old pocket watches balanced with a chip of diamond and necessary to basic function. Without it, I don’t see the need for polite conversation; my smile has developed a mechanical hitch which stalls it halfway. I have given up on epiphany, on cognition – afraid that any thought would lead me to retrace my steps, go over the same ground, rearrange the syntax of a single sentence in the hopes it might say something different. Anything other than: Your journey has been nothing more than wasted effort. Maybe this is preferable to the discovery that my fallen star is crowned with thorns. |
Waiting in LimboA journey brought us together
at a crossroad, star-mapped, when moons spun retrograde bright as hollowed pumpkins. I forget the day before: where I was, the odour of sunlight upon the daisy path unsingular beneath my calloused footfalls. But every day since is measured by the nano-silvered liquid of my brain; suspended and expanding like constellations invisibly connected points of light. Did we think to die unexpectedly at the door of this bleak planet? Or lose our grasp on language so thoroughly as to dissolve in the void, lost to these empty spaces of in between? Still, I call for you through closed lips, trembling lids. Waiting in limbo. |
ValedictionIf I had known,
the day before you left, that the cold fires of dawn would never be as warm, nor that birdsong would not be written for me alone, but that I would hear it as a stranger; if I had known you were never to return with the turning tide to the harbour of my bed, nor to reply when the winds followed you, calling in my lonely voice with its plea to come home; if I had known the hour of my loss, I might have died slowly upon the last kiss, or saved my tears and stoked the night fires with your name, until love was burnt to ashes. |