Dark Threes

Tredegar ward has many gods, mantled in ancient flesh
mouths agape, or chewing at invisible threads of fate
making whoopee with the sandman as if it were 1923

minds are loosened, clothes shed, and Carnival whirls in awkward
shuffles across the medicine floor
looking for contact in a world turned upside down,

run aground, leaking life-force in tiny defiant winks
and bloodless wounds, haemorrhaging memory
in simple rhythms, presenting complicated algae

at the altar of Eros. Crazy Jane unpicking the hem
of her nightie, ancient hands of spotted papyrus,
occult prestidigitation, preparation underway

for another journey, beyond the remit of nurse
or geriatrician, beyond the origami attrition
or wheeled chair, on towards her ghost-visitors

those who whisper from behind the ice-henge
of death, seeing through closed eyes, bringing
continuity to the human slippage of change -

impersonal fires dim in the boundless desert,
He walked this way once before, she can sometimes
see his footprints, still sharp despite the wind’s insistent kiss.

Knowing this, I withdraw into the cowled
dusk, a Baader-Meinhof Buddha out of time
drinking a heartful of this glimpse of empty mystery


Kh
21.2.07

IMAGE: Vast, Empty, Calm (2006) Photo of Iranian Maranjab Desert by Mohammed Reza Tavaijoh