Poetry
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Festivity

painting: Elaine Fasula
We met by chance.
I’d thieve your skin.
I’ll drink you down
to a blur of glass.
This is the end, now.
Let me in.All Souls’ 2006
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Picnic’s Over

painting: Elaine Fasula
Here is the lesson these travellers took:
a river, a lover, a broken book.
Dressed for the weather, naked as rain,
roped one to the other we set off again.That one has packed up his tricks for the night:
the jack-knife, the skein, the mariner’s light.
The wren is the gift at the heart of the wood;
her song is washed clean in the travellers’ blood.This one lays bait for the stars to devour:
a feather, a saltbox, his enemy’s power.
He thought that the sandwiches tasted of shame,
his hunger a dog off the edge of the frame.I will go with you, the fifth one remarked,
past the bridge over silence and into the dark;
the blade and the seed to temper disaster,
the clatter of horns to carry our laughter.Here is the lesson these travellers took:
a ladder, a letter, a scarlet book.
Stripped by the rain, worn in the weather,
the lover, the enemy, vanish together. -
The Arrow
This is an old miracle.
No one really remembers now
if it was by fire, by water, by wire:
if it was a footprint in the snow.The lost gift echoes in their open beaks,
curls around their coiled metal tongues.
That girl’s spine makes a bow:
once, the bowman was young.He sits with his purse at his hoof.
Desire has made him blind.
Watch them walk past, loosing
their answers into the wind.