The Blue Gate
Book Sample


For Ben

Child, the world is swelling, light wavers
over your unblinking eyes, the ocean lifts you
on dark mouths towards the sudden dawn
when you’ll howl the sea out of your lungs
and harden in the air.

To welcome you I have these eyes and fingers
to open their delight on your sundered skin.
They’ll fail, as all desire fails, breaking on the reef
of human weariness and gathering past
its violation to simplicity

perhaps. Here is the cushion of my blood
and there the grail of sobs with which I’ll bear you.
These breasts will weep for your innocent greed
and bring the void of solitude and your first fears
stalking you like witches.

Yet still I wish for you an inexhaustible love,
the fruits of every season, a sure voice to name them,
shelter when you seek it and the sixteen winds
to call you from yourself back to this first ocean
and further to the wider ocean.


Ultrasound

Life with its kindling fists
strikes a sudden pain
inside my pelvis.
I’ve seen its nameless face
lit on a sonar screen
and thought it beautiful, the clean
bubble of its skull, its budding fingers,
its black mouth innocent
of words, its coruscating
fearless heart.

Child, if you remember
the truth of your making
if that carnal song
lingers in the ichor
you swallow without thought
and pulses beneath language
surely and silently
perhaps you’ll burst the sorrow
of your swelling mother
who cannot remember.


Bird

The bird is
a deep and troublesome fidelity.
Even as maggots crawl through its braincase, it is still bird.
In the skirl of storm
it is bird, torn feathers, tiny bones,
breasting the weight of air.
Its song pricks out the present
but is the shape of itself, the whole heart-trembling arc
of its small time.
It persists through winters and summers,
never less than bird.
If it knew any better, I would call it courage.
Somewhere beyond me
is a wholeness, a memory of being stone,
although this consoles nothing and explains nothing.
The dark is a burning sky
shot with flight, its solitary, naked love.


Aria

Because you love me, I fear the angels will be jealous
and send down their curses from thin heights
to break the bones that have so wounded me
and spill the sour honeys of your tongue.
Maybe they’re jealous of the sea as well
because she rolls her colours in so wide a bed
and never finds the end of her secrets.
From the clouds they cannot see her bitterness.
Perhaps they’ll merely send us earthly treasures,
ships, minerals, spices, libraries of skin,
the mercury of fame, dining tables, clocks,
to bribe us into solving this conundrum
which bathes our bodies in such troubling flame,
so much light out of so much anguish.


Billie Holiday

and did it frighten you
that stench in the dark heart of the flower
you pinned behind your ear

and did your skull eat out through your beauty
every time they pressed their faces in you
seeing in your drowning face how their flesh collapsed inside you
and how the pure note hardened like a child
and wouldn’t give in you
even after everything was given 

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