Curfew

(After William Carlos Williams)


For J



They unblooded your palms I heard.

Left you on hardwood floor and sunk

your bed where you once rested
on your man’s torso, in his sweat. They

unknotted your dreads uncurled your lips

plucked the silver from your arms unfleshed

your thighs struck the thick glasses from your eyes.

They undid each chord of the song. They broke

it down; it sounded like the sound of 

               and I could see through

city rain They untoasted your skin 

blanched like vegetable, now fibre and string.
The worst: 
they unlettered your lovers, so they couldn’t read
the poem that carried the night in its unrhyme.

but you would not cry

Breathing

is migration. One purposeful intake that will rest
in his stone-caged ribs for a minute century. Travel

that takes him from the echoing dark
of his mouth in sweet, sinking seconds.

Sometimes he also lets out a low groan enough
to redeem his exhaustion for days, a deep grey

black sigh that has the quality of
corrugated roofs. His hands touch the air

above his head. It looks as if his fingers
play a soft drum.

He separates every sheet of thin-filmed nothing
as his eyeballs plunge to edge of the earth,

but he has only reached the edge of the room. When every
part of his body is in vertigo; an indecipherable

elevation after all breath leaves him, slowly discovering
the end of finiteness: in his ribs, a ripple.

Mammals

We inhabit a tree in the pre-dark like early mammals, soft and brown. Our bottoms slide

against its coarse hide. Ours is a private ritual, you say, when we look for our ancestors

in the pixilated air. We look for the beginning of limbs in the sky, spread thin as palindromes,

and as simply. We have vertebrae, foldable ears. We give birth.       How strange to see the world

in monochrome this way       We’re taught we love we contemplate stains we may write.

Even the policeman who will soon drive us out of here is made of this cartilage and –

but why doesn’t he see the miracle of our journey to the branch?    Or hear the gasp

in the general anxiety when we realise we are? We are. You say it many times like the first

words breaking the ice of a world tunneling orbits bouncing off hemispheres to this spec

on a slow-drifting continent reaching two people, stick figures in a comic strip of the cosmos,

of science, of disintegrating paper. This is the year of the tiger, you say,

when we see an emaciated dog eating out a rat’s heart.

That was us. That could be us, today.