Bastet

He lay face-up, on his back, like a corpse.

He wouldn’t speak so I bit him, trying

after five thousand years to wake him up,

pressed to his side like a cat.

He thought himself a dying dog

so I pawed him, suffered his wet black jaws,

kitten-hunched, bent to his huge skull

and cut him with my claws.

He once said all women were animals;

wore each tail like a bandage—

my sleeping, jewelled Anubis.

Made me his snow-soft Persian

to warm his buried bones

but still he wouldn’t speak

as I tore him, my whimpering king,

underworld and underdog

who holds his dripping tongue.

We could fight in hieroglyphics,

lie flat in the freezing crypts.

But I could match his silence—

sanded claws etching his belly,

writing my rattling name.

Bastet pearled red from his skin.

Ar Lan Y Môr

Ar lan y môr mae rhosys cochion.

In the front seat, his hand a bloodless glove

pressed to the passenger window,

grazing a bard’s palaver of birds with the point

of a stubbed little nail—

charcoal mornings, the bleary light

crumbling art-canvas, open-eyed

seatown galleries spitting oil-skins,

mother-of-pearl tides roll themselves out

like wounded dogs, limping the shores

of all we know

as the crowblack, fishboat-bobbing sea

foaming the ale-coloured glass.

White rose spray on the drowning bar;

the salt-nut crunching crowds.

Some days in a Celtic mood

he will sing the shimmering rain,

roll out his tongue in a London sky

but tasting only ash

remember a hymn in a Swansea voice—

blow every word til the flowering smoke

sheds itself like a rose

in an evening starless and bible-black-- 

suffer the wheeze of city haze

to find the old sea in its lights.

Telegram

In the week the War was over

she leaned over the hedgerow,

cracking gum in the rain.

Dad would be home any minute, she said—

loping through iron gates, drops

spitting on his brow like wet bullets, propped

on a bad leg, arms wide open.

Poppies licking his fingers.

Fields of red, so she said, as though

she were speaking of fairies—

whole meadows, masses

splashed in the wild, curtseying

in their little red skirts ‘til the grasses
spat out the crouching-men, smoked,
found peace in flowers.
Later, wood crosses

pushed from the earth like bones,

calcium gifts, the rise of an old friend's rib.

From a crying gate, she frowned

at the thought of him sailing to Britain—

the apple-bobbing hills of gold;

roar of a slaughterhouse gun.

The late sky cramped with thunder

and Mother died making tea.

A letter, curled white on the milk-jug.

Telegrams told of the rain.

Candles

The sudden shock of the dark

turns us both into strangers.

I feel its weight upon me

in the hand unwrapping my thigh

like a soft gift. Somewhere

the clouds have howled shut,

trapped a whole moon between them

like these smoke-haloes, wax rings

bound to my body from memory.

Ghost-candles burn you to verse.

It is like this, remembering

blank inches of cigarette trapped

between laughter, blowing blue words

on wet pavements,  rain-mizzle;

a drunk chandelier of stars

where later the sick-swinging glow

of a lightbulb shatters,

melting our shapes. It is like this,

remembering—

the sweltering wax of two candles
tipping, our glittering stalactite limbs
a knot of Pompeian stone.

The flickering breath of monoxides.

When the dark staggers in I will kill it—

remember with struck little matches.

Smoke-stalks and shadows like inkwells.

The candles crack open like blooms.

In Time

My lovers jut out of photographs

like broken bones. In time, I will shrug them off

coolly, pack them off like bad children

running away from home. In time

they will not hurt me.

My twenty-year old lover on a keyring

has a smile like a shattered plate.

I liked his crooked ways, his broken lips

were a masterpiece put back together.

I feel his mouth out of photographs

blowing my perfumed neck,

sucking my petalled ear;

my ivory skin was a china doll’s

his grandmother kept by the bed.

I pressed to his light like a flower.

He hardened to pockets of rubies.

My boy from the glittering seashore

gleams like mother-of-pearl,

the water forever rolling

over his hairless chest, smooth

and brown as an almond. His feet grow

upwards from sand-dunes, his body

a spreading tree. I pluck at the dangling fruit;

remember the taste of sin

as it clung to my mouth like lemons.

I wore the same china doll dress,

only this time he called me a siren.

Thrilled with my dangerous legs.

Stupid girl—

in years I will find them in sepia,

discover an old dress

like pulled seaweed, drained of the girl

who has outgrown the full-length mirrors

but waltzes forever in frames.

In time I will haunt his old body,

find it stooped like a reed.

Despite myself, count all my fingers

searching the tomb of his mouth.

My watch ticks on, medicinal.

In time I will slip on old ballgowns,

pick at a pearly old wound.

Dialling Tone

After the tone, there is only a gap

I can try to pack with words.

It is like singing a serenade into the eye

of an utterly useless skull,

its dusty smile locked in the bones.

I press my nose to the mouthpiece,

draw out the foul odours

of small talk. We were always shouting

down telephones from separate rooms,

coughing goodbyes in hotel beds.

Room service charged us the earth.

The white walls shrank to a telephone box

so I always kept change on the bedside.

Those were the best times to call—

3am. I could shock you into greeting,

listen to you wake and turn furious.

Now I must leave you a message,

a small skeleton of words

you will shoulder to your ear whilst you dress.

I hesitate, hold the phone like a breadknife.

Make the first terrible cut. Hello.

My heart jumps like a punched number.

On and on it flatlines—

dialling tone.

The Conqueror

You wore your new accent

like a souvenir. You returned to bed

in your hometown one last evening

with an emperor’s walk

and laurels in your hair, picking out

my olive face

from a photograph on the stairs

as though you were walking the groves.

Under a graphite sky

Venus spat on your shadow

as you passed. Your mouth found me out

before I could speak—

persistent as ever, there was something

Roman now in the boldness of your hands,

heavy with your tongue;

a marble god, unearthing me

like a Phoenican.

You believed in women too,

claimed to have fistfuls of goddess hair

on classical evenings,

tasted ambrosial blood, the dull whirr

and hum of electric lights,

the cheap hostel nights with Artemis

and the wars you lost

in her stockinged summer nights.

Home now, the hero,

my knight in shining pinstripe

while somewhere in a whitewashed house

your cigarettes smoke to a ceiling of stars

in her conquering, iron lips.