Still life

On this April day, the trees shed themselves.
The cruelty of seasons
is the only cruelty today.

On this April day something has ended.
Leaves muffle the stridency
of metaphorical mercy killings.

All day you watch a pear on the table.
This pear is all you have today.
You watch it ripen into bruises.
The fruit is here but you can’t have it.

If only you could catch that instant
when ripening becomes a bruise,
you could have known once and for all
how we stop loving.

 

Insularity

Each day, the house contains you.
The shower cap contains your head.
The plate contains your dinner.

Outside is the terror of leaving,
The vertigo of pavements,
The inquisition of the sky.

Inside, the corners shelter you
from the centre of rooms,
the walls soothe you
from the abrasion of carpets.

But in your coat you wriggle
like a minotaur inside a labyrinth:
not looking for the way out
but hungry — and alone.

 

How to survive in the desert

I cannot be lonely, I am a desert
- David Howard

Once I opened my door and a desert
drifted in, the most beautiful I had seen:
mellow, rippling with mirages

I entered it
It whispered to me storms of sand
It stroked my future with its whiteness

It sang to me from afar, it retreated
It undulated and sighed
at the crumbling edges of my thirst

until there was nothing left
not even a small cactus or a passing cloud

I had gone too far to return
I couldn’t advance any more
The sand had drunk the water of my days

Desert, I whispered, I offer myself to you
I lay down and waited
But the desert would not take me or let me go

Time passed away
The weather stopped
Nothing remained and yet nothing was over

Until I understood
There was only one way now

I had to become the desert
To lie, to sleep, to hum
To never want again

 

Mirages

Waking up in the same skin isn’t enough.
You need more and more evidence
of who it is that
wakes up in the same skin.

But what evidence?
Reality is unreliable; a whirlwind
of dust that appears
and disappears every day.

Your thirst stretches out its white dunes.

Every day in the dust
you distinguish

not islands but their darkness
heaped on the polished mirror of a sea.

Not doors but their shadows
slammed in the house of wind.

Not lighthouses but their half-second SOS
in red, green and yellow.

Not language but languages.

Not your hand closing a curtain
but a hand.

And the day is over,
not wiser than the night in which
you waited for something
that came and wasn’t what you’d waited for.

~