Feet

 Feet clench, make themselves small, run away,
 creasing their wretchedness and fear in lines
 identical to those on our palms and different.
 Feet are extensions of God
 (which is why they are low down),
 hence their distress, their rounded bulk, their lack of balance.
 Feet are like startled crayfish. 
 Such vulnerable things, feet.
 When they make love they clench and huddle together
 as though they were their own subjects.
 So feet are not made, then,
 to grip, wasp-like
 with every stab,
 each branch of the soul that might shape them there.
 They are more wings than feet,
 tiny and fragile and human.
 However much we overlook them.
 

 Four Birds

 These four scribbles, unlovely and torpid, flop down,
 shadows of thin wash against sea and grey sky,
 Prussian guards in uniform.
 Bending over,
 with that spike on the helmet’s point,
 sluggish and squat,
 aimlessly veering at no given signal, sly,
 higgledy-piggledy, doubly obstructive.
 Awkward in the hand of God,
 they collide with each other;
 trusting their fellows, they’re Rigolettos,
 stunned and erupting in confident laughter.
 At times, a gust buffets them sideways, startling them,
 and their small wings whirr, get into a flap,
 cross-patches,
 grazing each other in tit-for-tat.
 Crests erect, cackling
 their ruffled dignity,
 their stiff, rust-coloured wings,
 myriads in a plump display,
 dropping then folding curtsey after curtsey.
 Foolish poets, pompous and fat.
 Lazy at heart
 they rehearse a stiff rocking,
 coo to the tango of courtly heroics.
 Live and let live, I tell myself, and noblesse oblige.

 
 Palm

 Inch by inch it burns,
 with every turn surveying
 strength and life.

 Fierce wheel of suffocation,
 of maimed scales,
 merciless exposure.

 Upright and in the open,
 it plates the body’s column,
 squeezes soul and treads it down.

 Wrapping self up in self,
 it breathes, like a beseeching,
 an altered anguish.

 A knot of light at last,
 a round cluster of hands,
 it raises its cry.

 Emerald fire,
 palms outstretched,
 it lets sun swell its wings.

 It escapes with high-pitched clamour,
 whitish, calcined,
 immaculate bird of love.

 
 The Jeweller’s Craft

 Step by step, little by little,
 he gathers his dung, the scarab-beetle.

 Noises he’ll make, and paw the air,
 a trick well-known to the conjurer.

 Over lime and dusty ground
 with feet together he tries to plough.

 Nothing there is that can’t be used,
 straw, spent matches, salt and lust.

 Finally, like beaten gold,
 he hammers and lifts high this rich brown globe.
 

 Snake

 Locked in the slow circle of its actions
 it uncoils blue and red and yellow,
 damaged rings all gathered in a necklace,
 gόichi, gόichi, the ground is scraping, hurting,
 lodging grittily in the body’s slowness. 
 Creeping forward, gόichi, gόichi.
 Barely a blade of grass it flusters,
 making dust run on the level,
 a line upon the horizontal.
 It stays reared above splendid groundwork through an impulse in the neck,
 through a continuing of a thousand coils advancing,
 through a tightened and contractile effort.
 At the same time too the tail’s tip,
 whip-lash watchful,
 tongue out flat like a dog, afraid of being trampled.
 All that strength and anger rub the ground beneath it,
 going inwards,
 flattening and tensing up for capture.
 Gόichi, gόichi.
 

 Rodin’s Garden

 Like water in the desert
 the snail slips down towards grass,
 a branching, phosphorescent stain.
 Tiny pigments in the turned-over dampness,
 along the mud’s slow furrows,
 in the webs of shade.
 It sticks to the wall seeking relief,
 respite on the paving-stones, spittle on the back of the fountain.
 It goes breathing along the difficult channel
 between rough leaves and astringencies. 
 Stickily it glues itself to its own fright,
 it lets itself go with the swaying cats
 who mew their way into harbour.
 Utterly fragile, that dart and circling,
 the bruised flowers it has dredged.
 It hears water failing,
 how vegetation hardens and rattles,
 opprobrium and raging thirst.
 Patience, patience, the beggar’s principle,
 the mark of the eternal slave.
 Imprisoned in its stiflement,
 the tiny, nimble horns alert,
 it leaves a salty dribble, its trail.
 Then goes nowhere if its shell is broken.
 Water flows and fills it full to drowning.
 Passing and plundering.
 
 Two Women

 Like misfortunes, they share a bed,
 Siamese twins in squandered intimacy,
 clawing in terror at the one who tried to grow.
 In the same bed, hidden in sonorous rankness,
 loofah and divining by coins, essence
 of cedar and an old floor-cloth,
 for years a lumpy journey.
 Like two hopes,
 rancid spite and stale smoke,
 the worn-out left slipper,
 failing water-works, lameness.
 Until death do us part,
 those chamber-pots in the dark 
 within earshot for the sake of the night,
 they doze, and repeat their distress, over and over,
 mother and daughter.
 Against this outrage the young one turns, searches
 the withered face for the grudging need for company,
 oh, let it warp into love, somehow.
 Love me, mother, give me
 water to quench my thirst and my lamenting,
 hold some sugar up to my cheek,
 come with me sweetly, mother, look at me,
 weep with me, mother, give me, give me.