THE GAZE OF PRINT
Catches my eye in an oval mirror I thought my eye was green. Gamines. Shines
from the page. Adrenaline races with every heartbeat.
Flickering over Seamus & Niall
Who have a laddish bond. Seamus visits the hospital
After cancer carved ports into Niall’s chest. A kiss from Seamus closed them. Comity came.
Bald child-head like ivory while
Suicidal children
Who were shadowed live on the floor below.
How many years will the surgeon? sleep on her phone? my laptop?
The long-lost twelve—year-old she was could sprint:
Now she moves words with thought the gaze of God in print.
Newspaper Item: The death has occurred of Maura Glenn Riverdale Whitehorse Unexpectedly and peacefully at her home on Friday 25th October.
II
UP & DOWN ELM STREET, mothball street lamps glow
Up and down moth street
elms sway
Hometown
Homilies;
How embroider lace with childhood tragedy
on an escritoire
love letters
broken open Ekstasis
change of mind reflected
loose silver change musically clanging, tumbling to cobbles
as a horse passes
Old Marmalade stranger than the streetlights breathing out, bearing on.
III
WORDLE & CRIBBAGE
To be learned.
Life went sideway. A little ball of yarn. We’d just been slammed.
But after multiple splinters,
You found an unbroken orange crate
And came home in the glow.
Be my dark doll, a dot on each cheek, heart engine
My elegant toy
For all that gets done
Impotent
Against decay.
IV
AS MUCH DUST is on our tables as, earth churned by pinto, or in an antique house:
Move a right arm
Limp as after a stroke
Kapok.
The wooden one is cleaved.
A crapshoot nightie
I looked to east
I looked to west:
With the elegance of a callipher
I’d write my way back to her: Lo snowy winter lace.
There’s as much dust in our love as in an antique house.