Too little promise in the curl of air,
too much decay on its breath
to signal the swing of a door – only
drafts from the cellar, the chimney,
from the spider-cracks framing
Victorian fittings and dry-rotted sills.

Tucked into the trunk, our silence was closer,
a shawl of spun of waiting
for the stir, then the clap of three brass clasps,
for the bright lifting flight to table or knee
between footlights and curtains,
even the dust too buoyed to settle in the spot.

Arrayed behind grate and glass –
occasional audience a shuddering mass
stepping back from unblinking eye,
rigid grin, imagined ragged turn to face –
like starving dogs at the station we sit,
alone with no one to throw.

(relentless fill and bellow,
taut and tense, intent)

pull against the mast
as a mule in harness, adamant,
intransigent, drawing plow blade
true between the furrows.

Then down,
down until dark, until
fingers scour silt, search,
sweep settle from shell and beam,
deep down into the danger
of running out, of drowning
among murmur and reed,

down until not one
more moment left before return,
before the slow suspended pivot toward the light,
before kicking the covering
currents away,
retreating to a distant surface.

songbird falls,
featherless flail and flounder,
shattered eye and rent wing

trailing like a ruse behind
an oily cloud, dispersing
suspense, slow settle to silt.

And then a snap and summons,
creeping freeze in a beeline
back to the ash and the cooling stone,
to fumble too long with the fuel.
Too late. Too late.

I don’t mind it, though.
I don’t mind the rain,
the cobbles bound
for noplace, the evil
flowers ringing
things I fear to touch.

I don’t mind the bees,
the furious trees, the
frozen or fiery hounds
out from the dusk and the passage of time.

Even the disquiet that’s following twilight,
sinister, seething from shadows
I don’t mind, it’s staved off with
petals and hats,
with taffy and sleep on a mat.

between the pangolin
and the Fennec fox,
whose ears (with the wing

of the sleepy mourning dove)
kept the flakes from the face
of the little lion tamarind.

Hedgehog hid deep in the drift,
spines barely breaching,
tiny flurries flitting down

like the settle of a gown
around a yawn. With an ocarina
and a kittenish bus, Totoro led

the duiker back to bed and lay a paw
on the gundi’s head before
vanishing in a goodnight nod.

or a killdeer’s pip like a piccolo, painting
a probe piercing crayfish and snail,
reedy feet skimming spray and sand while
a trailing wing stirs a wake of deceit,

and jay’s scold, and bittern’s thrum, and a trill
as red as a blackbird’s wing, and peacock’s
despairing vanity, all of them singing
like birds, like birds, like birds.

I wish I’d kept it to myself when I was done.
You always had another thing
to say before I drew the dome off
from the secret.

And apart from you, from your whispered clues,
your always teasing twist toward truth,
your many synonyms for “deeper,”
when I had the key I had the rooms behind the door.

I ballasted my pockets
with words I should have left behind,
and still there aren’t enough of them
to make you know me.

You should have guessed
I’d be here,
knuckles a wedge in the sandstone,
skin rolled back like a rug and bone
bruise from beneath.

Flooded with the drain
of effort, dry-drowned lungs,
tendons creaking
like rigging in a gale, I wait to be
spied from the brink.

The days since then have pattered out,
half Earth and a quarter Mars
to the constant lure of discovery,
brushing the dust to study what’s beneath,
then to glean from the dust itself
what we ought to know about each other,
our two satellites, our geology, the soils
of what we’re made from.

An hour in and still
it effervesces, steady
rapture from the glass’s bed,
like the breath a swimming sprite
must capture underwater
on her way to treasure, to a dragon,
to a portcullis rusted shut
with too little air to surface,
a gasp and down again.