This afternoon while looking for my watch
I found a love letter from your mistress.
In 1947 while searching for his lost goat
a Bedouin boy found the Dead Sea Scrolls.
There is no connection between the two events.
I exist continents away from the Qumran monastery.
And words on paper predicting a future
cannot compare with copper scrolls
etched with clues to a biblical past.
Yet I encounter coincidence. As a snail shell
may only reveal the extent of its secrets when the snail
is crushed, so each ancient carapace crumbled as it unrolled.
And I am broken also, unravelling this script from eye
to tongue. It is not so much the shell that cannot take
the pressure. It is the space beneath the shell,
that once upheld its shape.
2.
Reduction
The Bedouins forgive male adultery.
Only women caught in the act
are killed by their fathers.
The chaste among females wear a family’s
fortune around their throats. Each small
and perfect stone - turquoise, agate and
ruby - balances at its core
the weight of obligation.
I have removed my wedding ring, uncovering
white skin beneath, like a blind cylindrical
animal that has never known the sun.
Or the wind, that once blew the sound
of its name enormously through the desert
and is now reduced to a breeze
whispering syllables to grains of sand.
3.
Numbers
Under the obligation of courtesy, Nomads
welcome strangers to their camp for three days.
It has been three days since last I sheltered you
and you took nourishment from my table. All I have
offered has now passed from your body and I am
as alone as I have ever been.
***
There is a need to divide things evenly:
possessions, children, one-and-a-half each
or three halves.
The linen unpicks itself
in wedding boxes we have not unpacked in
fourteen years.
I always avoided the his
and hers
towels,
seeing their message as an omen:
If you lose the
clean-ness of your gender
in this
marriage, look to the words in embroidered
corners
to re-discover what you
have lost.
I have lost the memory of your mouth on my mouth
and the night you removed my dress with your teeth.
In this arithmetic of relinquishing,
I count backwards to the passive nought.
4.
Text
I am thinking of moving on,
being led by the seasons and the
cyclic renewal of grazing lands.
To look up to a night sky
whose stars are so old, they write
posthumous biographies. To ride
for forty days with no plumb level
of horizon to judge the degree of my unsettling.
Just the ground-tilting vertigo of camel beneath,
and in the distance, a mirage:
the semantics of water on dunes.
Like longing and the end of longing
both admitting to indecision.
Or seeker and sought
indivisible in a text.
5.
Horizontals
I found this old photograph leaning against
some coasters in a bottom drawer. On the hottest
day of summer at a distant relative’s wedding,
the camera caught us both shimmering like impostors.
I wear the cheesecloth blouse that you hated. Your head
tilts back, searching the congregation of cloud
faces for your theoretical God.
Eastern mystics believe we are held between
Heaven and earth by a silver cord. All movement
takes relevance from a point on top of the head
where body co-joins with soul.
We are able to move within lateral boundaries
as a dodgem car at a funfair is controlled by the wire
that joins it to its limited grid of sky.
To look up and back in order to catch a glimpse
of destiny, is to break the law of
horizontals and invite
a blade of sun across the throat.
6.
Excavation
I drink red wine after dinner, fall asleep
to the radio announcer’s midnight voice
and have this recurring dream.
I am outside, in the desert. A crescent moon
hangs like pale cheese in a muslin sack.
The events of a day are raked over by
gravelled voices. Men in a circle around
a campfire drink from a goat skin.
They are vertically coffined where they sit on sand.
The flames leap to ignite cheekbones; darkness pulls
in like the pleating of their robes. I realise then I am
a girl-child, the side of my face pressed
to a dog’s jaw. It is chewing a knucklebone,
my ears transmitters for some essential excavation.
I wake to tears; my jaw aching.
7.
Possibility
Weeks on, the sandalwood smoke of a candle
rises to the ceiling. Always the small translucent
pear at the centre of flame defies burning.
The surrounding heat is unrepentant,
image mounting image in the dark.
My limbs by association climb the walls.
The woman in the painting above my head
is a Dali dreamscape, her flesh pegged down
with hooks of light. As I bend over the page
to write, an ancient astronomer charts the
planets on the sky ceiling.
I remember a childhood game of shadow puppets.
How with the careful concealment of finger or
necromantic slant of palm - dog becomes moon,
becomes star, becomes snail, each sleight of
hand light years away, yet immediate
in its consequence.
I turn my neck and the tight collection
of scrolled bones beneath the skin
both choreographs and hides
evidence of premeditation.
As the candle is broken down by the same process
that lets it breathe, I am demolished and freed,
recognising possibility by its flicker
in the second’s space before each new turning.