The count of cappuccino,
the marquise of meringue,
all the little cantuccini...
and what was the song they sang?
Oh, the best of us is nothing
but a sweetening of the air,
a tryst between the teeth and tongue:
we meet and no one’ s there
though the café’ s always crowded
as society arrives
and light glints to and fro between
the eyes and rings and knives.
Oranges and lemons,
Say the bells of Saint Clement's.
You owe me five farthings,
Say the bells of Saint Martin's.
When will you pay me?
Say the bells of Old Bailey.
When I grow rich,
Say the bells of Shoreditch.
When will that be?
Say the bells of Stepney.
I do not know,
Say the great bells of Bow.
Here comes a candle to light you to bed,
Here comes a candle to light you to bed.
A horse is shivering flies off its ribs, grazing
Through the stench of a sodden leachfield.
On the broken stairs of a trailer
A laughing fat girl in a T-shirt is pumping
Milk from her swollen breasts, cats
Lapping at the trails. There's a sheen of rhubarb
On her dead fingernail. It's a humid morning.
A narrow girl sells purses made of reed.
Dead rabbits hang by feet, their red eyes dull,
while chickens crammed in cages peck their seed.
A vessel in Juan’ s brain begins to bleed,
spreading into the fissures of his skull.
A narrow girl sells purses made of reed.
The madams in the district underfeed
hookers they line up for a spectacle
while chickens crammed in cages peck their seed.
A vendor buys his wares, then smokes some weed;
he seldom deems police an obstacle.
A narrow girl sells purses made of reed.
Whirl up, sea —
whirl your pointed pines,
splash your great pines
on our rocks,
hurl your green over us,
cover us with your pools of fir.
Through darkness they came,
covered in ash, scarred by depths
and distance, they bore salt and fire, breath steaming
at edges of decks, hands clutching
railings, their bodies dizzied by the lurching vessel,
trunks pulled by hand, Where are you from? I unwrapped
my legacy from cloth, the marble Buddha
from my grandfather, ancient
as the sea-stained covers of his sutras, the briny odor
Powder rises
from a compact, platters full of peppermints,
a bowl of sour pudding.
A cup of milk before me tastes of melted almonds.
It is the story of the eve of my beginning. Gifts for me:
boxes of poppies, pocket knife,
an elaborate necklace
made of ladybugs.
My skirt rushing north
There is something round and toothless
about my dolls.
They have no faith. Their mouths, young muscle
to cut me down.
Their pupils, miniature bruises.
I hear the cries of horses, long faces famished,
Lame again, I limp home along Lawn Terrace
with a flowering sun star in a paper wrap
then back to the village with a lame cat
twisting and woeful in her cage.
Bread these days isn't baked to last:
how sad those posh loaves thudding off
in pine breadbins all around the Heath:
soulless latterday pets, frisky for a day
or two, then binned or thrown to foxes,
loaves just an inch of gloom below
the caged birds you notice in corners
of those same mansions when you seek
Gone to seed, ailanthus, the poverty
tree. Take a phrase, then
fracture it, the pods’ gaudy nectarine shades
ripening to parrots taking flight, all crest
and tail feathers.
A musical idea.
Macaws
scarlet and violet,
tangerine as a song
He glanced around to check if the treacherous gods
had really given him the reward promised for his accomplished song
and there she was, Eurydice restored, perfectly naked and fleshed
in her rhyming body again, the upper and lower smiles and eyes,
the line of mouth-sternum-navel-cleft, the chime of breasts and hips
and of the two knees, the feet, the toes, and that expression
of an unimaginable intelligence that yoked all these with a skill
she herself had forgotten the learning of: there she was, with him
