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

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 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.