X-ray

[the] Airport here will test a new federal screening system
that takes X-rays of passengers' bodies – AP, 2006

It is late. At the gates to her city 
she calls your name, yes you, moon moth 
pinned here on the pages of this open book.
So much yourself and not like you at all.

The night is carbon. You are long past sleep. 
Here at the crossing point you meet
her scanning eye in silence, though 
there's much more you could tell.

How you played the violin each night 
at gunpoint, how you sang among the dead
in Thrace, how you come as a messenger, 
bring news from another place.		



Whiskey

A match struck
in the house of ice. 

Deep-sea flame fish
calling, the heart

harpooning. Something 
in the dark is flashing. 

Gold in the blood -
veverything you know.	

The fire on the little sandy beach.
The bear at the window.

No-one escapes.



The Square

Across the square a woman is looking at me
from a window, the shadow of the room she's in
pressing her like a flower towards the light.

In her sleeveless linen dress she is beautiful,
a cool candle in the vast dark glass,
like my mother in a time before I knew her.

Between us, a river of tourists, faces lifted
to the great bronze horses stepping off 
into some other air we cannot see.

Like a lover across a room I return her look 
but she in her eyes is saying It's too late now
and it is: I might as well be invisible.

Even if I crossed the square and found 
that room she's in, she would be gone for sure.
She isn't interested in me any more.



Pass
for Holly

We calculate you´re two corners away by now,
first time alone in the car, navigating through
the twelve big houses at the edge of town, 
the fallow field where once in a blue moon 
a spring appears like a flying fish at sea.
The winter night´s as clear as cooling glass
but you accelerate away from us too fast 
to see the stars, the arrows on the ground.

Your music steers you on a sail of sound, 
you are on fire. Your hands are Mercury,
your heart and eyes the Sun. You plough
the top road like a submarine – we try in vain
to visualise your course, the unlit shipping lanes,
the shoals of stars. We cannot see you now.



After the Meal

After the meal (for this is the hour) comes 
	the helicopter. Each person's plate 
wiped clean as an ice-field, miraculous flight

to rise like a mythical insect over the mountains,
	the legendary gardens hanging like hair,
 then lower one's body and winch down the post.

This is the hour when husbands and wives 
	at their tables gaze at each other amazed
like looking at photos of earth from the air

the miles of mangrove, its jewelled brocade
or their own letters found in their parents' effects
or the wonderful clothes they once wore.

This is the hour in the high alpine restaurants 
	when lovers of many years standing
wonder if they have ever existed at all.



In the same way

In the same way, a man might leave a house
at dawn, closing the door as quietly as he can
(though still it echoes in the street like pack ice
or the trigger of a gun) and launch himself
across the local street-map on his bike.

He rides all day and night, he rides for years,
the stony tracks, the hills, the deep crevasses
and the bright blue light.  Until one evening
like a total stranger on a pitch black road
the land puts up a hand and draws its knife.

So when he does return it's with a deep map
of the landscape carved into his face
as its catastrophes are locked into his voice.
All night the hills and crushing ice roll under him.
Sleep now, nobody can understand everything.