“wreaths of smoke”
      “in silence”

          “dwellers in the houseless woods,”

                        “alone.”
                                  “Though absent long,”





“Felt in the blood”

"A man who does not move with pain, but moves
With thought. He is insensibly subdued
To settled quiet: he is one by whom
All effort seems forgotten; one to whom
Long patience hath such mild composure given,
That patience now doth seem a thing of which
He hath no need. He is by nature led
To peace so perfect, that the young behold
With envy, what the Old Man hardly feels."

[mo[n]ths][

Somehow I had forgotten about April

"I compare human life to a large mansion of many apartments, two of which I can only describe ... we no sooner get into the second chamber ... than we become intoxicated with the light and the atmosphere ... this Chamber of Thought becomes gradually darkened and at the same time on all sides of it many doors are set open - but all dark - all leading to dark passages. We are in a mist."

"cassandra: The stench of slaughter. The whole house reeks of blood.
chorus leader: How so? That's just the smell of sacrifice at the hearth.
cassandra: It's like the exhalation from a tomb."

Fall VI (Door)

Off a coat hook

(the weight being too much)

it just snapped.

"Sometimes
I'm terrified of my heart
of its constant hunger
for whatever it is it wants
the way it stops
(and starts)"

Fall V (The Tree)

I don't actually imagine the fall
would be so terrible,
cut short the way it is
by those sheets I spent months
convolving.


Hardly a breath
between the drop and the

Stop.

Perhaps the bridges here are less significant than the types of falling.

Bridge IV (Styal Woods)

I don't know how old that sleeping thing of stone and moss is.
A few years ago they blocked it off
with a low fence you could climb over
(and I did).

In the forest there's always dead leaves
flooding the earth, still, settling into years;
though mostly they slip off
the bridge. It has no rails. Nothing from the edge
to their fall. And on the other side
there isn't even a path.
It just gives way to earth,
a hill, leaves. Again.

Bridge III (Golden Gate)

Apparently my subconscious
had a thing for clichés. I dreamt

it was the calm of a face
too familiar to recognise
that lured me down
off that precipice.

Bridge II (Parc des Buttes-Chaumont)

From where I stood
it didn't look like much
of a fall, especially with the green
of that light the river cast back
to the stones.

Still, they strung wires
beneath the ledge.

A strange net for fishing.
Though, in retrospect,
it was with some difficulty
that I pulled myself away
to walk around the grotto,

studied the pool,
the artificial waterfall.

"Under the iron bridge we kissed"

The sky was iron too when you showed me that bridge Morrissey mentioned. "I hope you don't take this as a 'signal'..." you said, before you told me about The Smiths song, explained the history of that place. It was difficult. And yet such an ugly place, concrete twisted through with rattling chain links. They couldn't stop the wind.

It was the next day and everyone else had left when I was vomiting eleven times (I counted) in the toilet of your apartment. You were there in bed, facing the wall as I came and went, came and went. I'd fall back beside you for thirty seconds, before I had to climb up again. You said you were impressed by how close I was cutting it. I always just reached the bathroom before I vomited.

The next morning we had orange juice (not all had been mixed into the vodka) and croissants. Even jam. The sky was more or less clear by then, though it was still cold.

These nights I'm sat on my carpet by the light switch, hitting it whenever the next wave of nausea comes, so I can stare at the book shelves and imagine the world isn't spinning quite so much. So tired that I have to learn to sleep by increments in those small intervals. The ones when I've just switched the light back off, where I've managed to forget that there's walls all about me.

Verity Taylor

Your histrionics bow out.
I'm sorry, Verity;
you weren't soon enough,
not as late as
you should have been.

People played at imitating you.
The screams were hardly a substitute.
Even the doctors dismissed the fits -
done to death
psychosomatic
overacted
(shamelessly).


You are not found.

"I conceal myself in the shadows of a cistern or in the corner of a corridor and pretend that I am being searched for. There are rooftops from which I let myself fall until I bloody myself. At any time I can shut my eyes and pretend that I am asleep, breathing deeply. (Sometimes I really do sleep, sometimes the colour of the day has changed by the time I open my eyes)."

"I have also meditated on the house. Each part of the house repeats many times, any particular place is another place. There is not one cistern, courtyard, drinking fountain, manger; there are fourteen (infinite) mangers, drinking fountains, courtyards, cisterns. The house is the size of the world; better said, it is the world. Nevertheless, by dint of exhausting all the dusty galleries of grey stone and the courtyards with their cisterns, I have reached the street and I have seen the temple of Axes and the sea. This I did not understand until a night vision revealed to me that there are also fourteen (infinite) seas and temples. Everything exists many times over."

The tree croaks again its promise song.
what else is there to hear?
I hear it all. all I can.
sound over nothing. at all. by all. swallows all. all gone.

“GUIL: (Rapidly.) Has it ever happened to you that all of a sudden and for no reason at all you haven’t the faintest idea how to spell the word—“wife” —or “house”—because when you write it down you just can’t remember ever having seen those letters in that order before.... ?
ROS: I remember—
GUIL: Yes?
ROS: I remember when there were no questions.
GUIL: There were always questions.”

The mirage is nothing,
    it is still and flat.
         Only when figures pass,
cut over sight lines
   is there anything to see.
A flicker, sweeping across their feet,
             and in a blink I can see
                     around corners, looking at sky
    that should have dried up
days ago.

And when they go,
the sky goes too;
         horizons slack and lose
their curvings, lines diminish
into sand,
like that cheap plastic
        hourglass
which you unscrewed
 at the base,
          left an awful mess
on the windowsill.

Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?