Petal lids
I want to call her closed lids buds because shut
they look like petals
tucked away which could
at any moment bud'.
- Will Harris.
I,
a conjecture of want,
didn’t know I’d need her eyes to
see my sight until they couldn’t open.
Call it reflection if you want, but it’s self-witness. In her
the daughters immature mirrors were fuzed closed.
If the veil of her lids were buds,
her eyes would have refracted a sense of girlhood because
as my Sun, she would light me into rising song. Shut,
she never saw her image in mine either. If they
who are us not observed in our look,
do they live? This book is our gaze. She is present, like
petals
that perennially pierce colour tucked
into green and fall when bees take pollen away
and crisp to dust before dirt before earth and which
dry up in the home but stay as a memory that could
become an awakening. It’s natures fierce happening at
once, arriving and parting, planting and weeding any
omperfection to protect the view of each moment
and give a thing that needs some air a chance to bud.
remember you are an extension of nature
with hunger. Leave water on a sawed table
at the bark gates or root foot of an Oak.
Notice the bottled source leaning in its
crude oil window at the trunk.
Better than that, leave it on the mantle
before you set out. Keep your walk empty
past no longer able, past the urge
to turn back. Wear itch-less clothes
that hang. The only cling should be a child
to your back or hand like ivy twines root
sideways up spines of future books, book
shelves, cladding and fire wood.
Go with a line of legs through the bush,
not just your own, with enough space
to feel alone, almost reluctant, slower
than you have the time.
Knocking
Opening the door
was more than a push
on and on and on and on,
until a tear at the cusp of
can’t take it any more
on and on and on
hum and hum and hum
then a light
too white to be blue
shone in a circle on my head
out like a lighthouse
torched across a landscape
of faces
miles and miles and miles
of faces
waiting
looked to me
to bring it on and on and on
I saw the other side
in me humming and knocking
hum and hum and hum
knock and knock and knock
push and push and push
miles and miles and miles
until the Sun rose
thorny and fighting
and all the faces rejoiced
in their first experience
of love.
There’s no one answer
In the immediacy of her
afterlife, relief, at least no life
of oxygen tanks, and I could sleep
without guilt I may wake
to her ending. At last, no life
of days hung up on intravenous
poles like question marks,
no intruding strangers asking
that I knew better and could advise
as life-giver against professions of life-savers
I had questioned the life out of on if
they thought her alive.