A third cornice is a cornice made of mud and saliva,
is the chamber of the parasitic wasp, drinker
of nectar, ruddered hang-glider charting tides and swell
of heat waves, up to the brickwork to build chamber
on chamber just closed, to see the angel (good
by whose definition?) come down with shovel
and cut away the architecture, design in nature,
spilling four varieties of spiders, paralysed,
supped on by grubs, then fragments
stoushed to the walls by crisp brown cases of pupae,
to dash all hopes, unpick the envious
compulsion to light, the willpower in instinct,
desire to dine out and taste the good, clean
food of plant, out of charnel house, out of horror
script, out of crumbling domesticity
where red ants come suddenly in droves,
forming ordnance and burial parties
that’ll pick it clean as…clean as the easterly
clean as the conscience pricked by ‘necessity’…
And so I went, and my guide seated me down
on the white plastic garden chair
cleaned by the mother of invention, stripped
of redbacks you didn’t have to kill,
stained with paint beneath the parasite
feeding off a living jam tree next to the dead jam tree
opposite the library, within the spectrum of the eye
of the needle, the strait gate, reflector mirror,
tunnel, grass green mid-summer, grass
green to the point of seeding the dead
as grubs abed, pupae of wasps,
gathered together where mud grips,
gathered looking into white skirtings
of house-pad, leveraged banks hacked by run-off,
protected by sheets of corrugated iron hushing
runnels where drainpipes disgorge
more unseasonal rain back there,
out of my line of sight now, as if to leave
by not looking gift horses in the mouth,
cantering up the bitumen behind me, stretches
of night drawn through day and night the same,
that would make equine the stretch of generosity
singing through dried seed pods,
along liquid fencewires, sky’s eye
wired shut to the page so white
glare hides words as written;
and so, in leaving granite we imagine as stairs,
massaging neo-tribal IDs, lupin heaps heating black
in fibrous implosion, appearance of paddy melon
seedlings wanting uncanny now-runs, Dow chemicals
targeting, loading revolver with exactly weighted
bullets, down grains of chocolate soil
disinterred by ants coiling miniscule Babel florets
tunnelled but with sealed exits for when storm rain
rushes back and chokes the chambers, not elevated
like wasps that fell: a wasp–, another letter nose-dived,
to the river. And steps of love seeds where dust irritated
the feet, as bound down by souls clouds gave way,
exorcist’s righteous shovel, plutonium core shot out overhead,
or at a tangent, to define cold observation, Pluto’s
dregs in this semi-formed night sky we wait upon
to whisper mere extremity, push further
in viscous side-effect, lathering of habit
whiffed in moving upwards.