The Yellow Cloisters

The buildings were in sight
when he fell: the yellow cloisters. How long
he lay? It was still noon

when his staring eyes saw—
his floury hand loose in the stones—the brown
strings of his blood. The sky

had purpled, this he saw,
the sun a slot of sudden green as he fell, but it
was not the light felled him.

A steel whip of sound lashed
over and down and into the soft meat of his head.
The insects gathered to him

with their metallic breathing,
then the hound quivering over his dried-out eyes.
Then, at last, it was she,

straddling over him, leaning,
her knees pulling the horizons together around,
her familiar body resounding

with dropping water—brown.
There was no reaching. He had seen the place:
the low walls, the colonnade,

the cool door-arches, yellow
and simple behind the pines. The dog was licking
the face he could not move.

The sound was the bell; this
he knew. There would be no reaching. She melted
like nightfall. It was still noon.


The Supper

It was the veritable air opening, its rasping
folds shifting, and the stubbled
earth thrust through him, through his wet shirt,

through the back of his scalp. His house-guests
were flickering aimless as moths
under the iron trees, through the music of tulip-

glasses and of their slow tongues and teeth. Holy
Mother of God, his mouth said. I
am the maker of the world. I ordered these porticos.

But the bricks shivered and rattled and the floors
of his pools bulged and hissed
to a crazed dryness. From his eyes and nostrils

they tugged the thistles, and they smoothed his lips
closed over the cactus of his tongue.
He was carried to the table in the fog of their wings.

Probing the tangled circuitry around his dead center,
their blades worked at his breastbone,
and their fingers slipped under his sequined skin.

He sits at ease now on the warm step, watching this,
easy in the simplicity of July night
and its recognized fragrance, while the world rolls

on careful tires, moving somewhere. There is one
rises from the table, a stranger,
her eyes misting like the memory of warm loaves.


The Salty Fields

Under the shocks of dune-grass we worked at our tunnel.
Do you remember the cool where the sand
stored rain?
The grain stuck to our hands and knees?

The horizon plunged into parabolas of indigo. The roof
tilting from the sea was for our touching
and shaping.
Our bodies were spreading silver. We found

a tree like a severed hand hooked to the sleek land's-edge,
and we knew we too could not release. We
were children
of the salty fields; our pale tap-roots

fronded underground and met, and we were held in one
shared dream. Our images differ now.
For me it is
a cottage I never lived in and the smell

of baking bread; it is sometimes a bed of pine-needles
in my south, or in my north the silence
of muskeg
and starry flowers reaching from red boles.

I do not know your name now, but you have surrounded
my sleeping. Last night we found that
shore, that
staggering tree. Last night we were again.


Amelia-Anne's New Stockings

One night, when I
have convinced myself that all
my friends never lived, I will open the door

to the back stairs
and find you there, collapsed,
shivering under the new fur coat you wear

over your expensive
lingerie. And when I carry you
to the chaise-longue, I will delight in noting

that your new silk
stockings are pearly grey, rough
to the touch, torn at your pink knee. My hands

will know that one
music roars through all of our
multifarious days and elsewheres. A tide of grey

wind drags through
the mesquite, raking a tatter
of sparks out between the fire-stones. The first

dust of snow hisses
in the embers. I am become he
who remembers that—having peeled the overcast

down to the western
horizon—the grey wind burnished
the bones of her face as she smiled and leaned

into the withering
afternoon, her hair tugged tight
across her brow, one strand a flapping rag against..

her mouth. The color
of sand, the November grass too
hissed, horizontal, under the wind. Her tongue

moved—he saw it—
between her teeth, but her words
were wrenched out of earshot. Bread became stone,

his own voice failed,
and the permanent noon burned
in a pool of silence circled by the yellow walls.