When you walked with her you walked into vespers
and dusklight below the lapwing’s ululation,
indigo skies, lost to the signatures
of the river, its phantom syncopation
pouring cantatas into the chalice
of her ear—through the mascara-ringed moons
of her eyes, malice
through the looking glass, that music loomed.
When she made a beeline for your bed
your numberless nights were almost numbered
as you tried to enter the crunch of her head,
the sardonyx of her eyes, the amber
of her pelt, her thighs’ riverbed—
swinging your huckleboned rumba
on the buttermilk cotton of her bed—
until the morning found you, wildly encumbered.
There were times when you felt you could rip through
the night, that the hug-me-tight
leather of the night
would unzip and pour you
an Absolut vodka and lime
as you drank in the calamine
and hairspray, darkshade and tubelight,
your eyes big-widened screens of skybright blue.
She said goodnight sweetheart, it’s time to go
where the sky is always blue and you can’t hear
the river because the river always flows
in time with the constant atmosphere
that half-forms and tingles mind and throat
in measure with the treeshade and tambourine leaves,
the crow-picker’s lustration of the whiskey-tinctured eaves,
and not the flimflam and jissom of these indifferent notes.
In your dreams her eyes mellowed into milk
and Kahlua,
she plunged the queensize sea of her silk
bed like a dolphin, dancing hula-hulas
until you awakened to a sky of ocean blue,
drinking volcanic water with Tesco’s Finest Earl Grey
as yellowhammers loitered in darkgreen bridleways
on a screensaver that stayed the night for you.
On other nights you writhed in the dankness of your bed,
a writhing seedbed of termites
that chawed on your eyeballs, your fetid cheese head,
welting you in the molar crunch of the night,
melting you to corpse juice and meat rot,
death bones and finity and forget-me-nots
igniting you from toetip to head,
a red-whipped bushfire of wild-lipped lovebites.
You would find yourself driving through
dark winding roads, sycamore groves
under an inconstant sky: chameleon grey and greengrey,
carrot, heather, mushroom and ivory,
almond green, lavender, peach-bloom and jasmine,
khaki-flecked, claret, oyster pink and citron,
constantly changing from dove to duck-egg-speckled,
quilted in caramel, biscuit, petrol blue and gun metal.
You parked to walk by the river, initially in time
with the bubble and rush of its fishscale lather,
but soon you were lost in the bluegrass pantomine
of slurp and bebble and girny-gab glissando,
stopped short by its doo-wop, its pizz-popping jingle-jangle
as its velocious surface of calypso ripple-current
puggled up a torrent in a billow-warped refrain,
yammering to rigadoons of light vibronic rain.
You turned away to climb the hillcap
where the river couldn’t reach—through feverfew
and agrimony, the submarine shit slaps
of snuffle-steaming heifers, where the ash and ember
coloured town, its diminishing corrugations,
fumed below the landfall and vapour trails—
wondering, as the spoilt sun yoked the sky,
what you’d see if you could see through her eyes.
You saw a deathtoll carved in the middle road,
the numbers zip-filed, downloaded holes in the night
where peace bombs slept behind the schoolyard fence
and cadavers flared their teeth in self-defence;
watched over by satellite,
you took a heavy-booted saunter through demeaning fields
to where morning broke, the sky became lychee,
the sun’s head served on the platter of the sea.
Some day you would wake and find yourself dead
by the river, the multitasking trees,
zephyrs rubbing salt into your hardboiled head
beneath a big blue sky, collapsing to the sea,
the river, river, easing through your bones,
turning to the town at last with ghost-drafts
of wisdom, breathing ‘blessed shall they be
who give your children grass instead of stones’.
And so you tumbled down the hillside lurching
hither and thither until you finally ran aground,
where you awakened to feel your head without touching
on the outskirts of town, and you found,
beneath the big blue sky, a river flowing into sound
among whin burns and hazels, never to know
what might be benamed and behappened below
the still breathing sky, where the river runs its round.