The junipers that bloom in autumn—they
ignore the signs, and stage their anti-spring.
And when it’s spring itself, their kind withdraws
from vernal vogue; like black-clad men of dawn
who pass you going through revolving doors.

*

Epitomes of poignancy, those wrecks
of glinting ships divested of their crews.
Like dice that spill across the board and slip
below, they make-believe the sea’s a pit,
a tomb. A lonely game they cannot lose.

*

His death by fire—an image that competes
with memories of lying in the dark,
consumed by the elation in his eyes.
Now every time she sees a naked flame,
her stomach turns with ashen butterflies.

*

Like something from an old Eurasian painting,
the grounds were vast, the trees were green with sky
sickness; while in the distance, under boughs
crossed over in the semblance of a temple,
our host—as though from heady news—was fainting.

*

Blackout drunk on boxwine for a year,
eventually my body told me no.
And dreary as life is without those gaps,
my dreams are clear as matinees—as though
my mind were telling me perhaps, perhaps.

*

I saw my daughter sleeping on the wing
of a plane I took, her little praying hands
tucked beneath her cheek. Better, I thought,
to let her doze than wake her with a start,
a slip...? Meekly I began to sing.

*

Brushing of hair—is this what life entails?
As though to straighten paths across the rough,
we brush; until our strokes are numerous
as hairs themselves. But can they be enough
to tame the strands whose coils are posthumous?

*

The afterlife was timeless; thus he recalled
each moment of his life as though it happened
moments ago. ‘How strange,’ observed the spirits,
the timeless entities devoid of souls—
‘It is as if we too remember it.’

*

A world of frozen time—a world in which
no lawful hand’s determined to unstitch
the youthful body down to a sagging skein.
A world in which you never hear the bell
subside. An ideal; if not some crystal hell.

*

The ideal set of symbols—must they lie
just out of reach? Like holograms whose flickers
are lightning to the buried lizard brain—
the ground on which one’s footfall scares
exotic birds that scatter, fly away

*

(The Quintains)