Bract

The dread can’t sustain itself and I have fallen
among silvery things, the hoarse crow who lives
in the hedge saws her breath across the morning.
The house is so silent that I hear each tide stifle
through the dishwasher, gluing and ungluing
itself. When you finish a book you can just start
another book. When you are feeling bad you
can go out to the greenhouse and draw all the
tendrils of things. It’s like being a kid, a spiral of
unlearnings into hushed enamel coffee cup, and
eucalyptus bark, and rabbit ear plant fuzzed
with rain, and cloudy pavement, and weak wild
sun. And any other colours that remind you of
a sigh, substitute accordingly. There are some
things throwing me off today (looped space of
coffee the exact warmth of mouth), something
like a crowded dream. Colour leeches from the
garden into a still corner, the shallows cooing.
Pavements darken and make that smell, quietly. I
chase the blushed part of the sky but it’s always
somewhere else: moth and flower are both frilled,
made of constellated projections. I would tell you
about everything that enfolds and/or subtends
me, all the grey and pearl surfaces (of course)
their bandaging stretch, but it seems indecorous
when I could just write a poem about the garage
instead, shapes hiding their bulk in the rafters. I’d
join you in the chairs at a probable slant, doomed
to wonder about the tingle starting in one cheek.

Resolving

What are you
               thing like a sewing machine
               thing like a writing desk
               thing like an ironing board

here where the forest steps back from itself
I remember you, with the air of a video game
portal, centre stage in the gold undergrowth

the sun has concentrated in your flat weight
rust-bleached, and I am only now looking at you
properly, full of silent corners that invite rupture

you exist in the blind edge I run past head canted
angling into the showerhead warmth of song, your
shape resonates from the first walks around this

new archive of shadows, a quarter-century ago
you swam out of my boredom, a marker in the
woodland, those trailing trudges whose ends I

couldn’t wait for. Back in the kitchen where the
dog skitters fresh from the damp air. I think of
sometime in the middle, when I was say sixteen,

the bright borders of fields as I sweated wanting to
throw my navy jumper into the high-contrast plunge
of shade, bluish brush. I was elbowing out of the fine

limbed lines along which we observed ourselves at
three-quarter turns in the tiled murk, there were
hand sanitizer dispensers left over from an earlier

sickening, a panic last decade that wavered into
elision. I am falling back through time as I look at
your amber shape, the slot and lever suggesting

haunted motion. Your equilibrium is inexplicable:
ghost-loom, gymnasium horse, surgical slab. You
look paused mid-resolution, there is a part of you

that arches wrongly. If I stare longer I will fix you in
dream-language, if I take a picture I can go home to
ask, what does this do, this iron woodland table.

Hells

In my dream water fills the sitting-room up to its ceiling,
the TV zapped to black, I run upstairs and find things
unaffected.

               The narrative drains into the carpet of another life, where I
peek through the curtains and my parents tell me to keep quiet,
there is someone waiting in a parked car outside,
monitoring how our shadows shift in the lit square

another dream still features a racoon:
a furled presence who appears on my desk,
has been causing ominous movements in
the corners of eyes all day

throughout all these fragments I am looking for people,
they wait in an unseen airport
and I crave updates on their progress
                                                          (In one scene, which appears
                                                                   disconnected from everything else,
                                                                   I throw a full cup of coffee
                                                                   across the room)

Chime / pathway

There’s a water-surface in my right ear,
the weight of a horror creature breaking
the gelatine lake centre with its leaps, its

sudden unease. Bubbles in a glass of fizzy
water make a thin clamour, a noise like
the steepest end of a cymbal self-erasing.

The glassy weight that would sit on my
bedside table growing up has relocated
into my personal shadows, the interstice

closest to my brain, the carbonation is
internal now and never goes away. In a
more elastic time I measured rain by the

apertures in the hedge. In their leafless
mouths I saw trajectories sparking flung
pain as they crossed each other. This noise

is both deception and curio, the percussion
will only ever pierce you in the snow
blanketed language of twins and of white

mice curling. It is measurable or so you’ve
led yourself to believe, the qualities of
littleness and scattering gradually bend to

touch each other. Like all the best ghosts
it thinks you’ve figured out its contour, its
path through the house. You’re tired now.