(i)
1 a.m. bird call, once he shrilly rasps.
a murder of branches wrapped
around that flat reed
blown like a raspberry
in the silence of a court,
in the silence of a bedroom
with one lamp masking shadows
to the abandoned walls
that will be wrapped
in a curtain of mirrors,
the next night, the next show,
and I, writing this poem for no one
am clinging to the slouch backed shadow,
a life raft that will see me
to the door of an incomplete
dawn-rise
(ii)
The magic carpet's camel hair
eventually tires
and I plummet into a dark,
soundless sea,
a thread being torn
buried in a pile of stones.
To sleep is to drown
and be resurrected in dream.
Aegis, the breastplate of a protector
in this kneeling, pointing to the sky
he says "each bead is his name,
each portrait is a walk among spectres",
the dead eyed glare
has never seemed so beautiful.
But still, I want sprinkled salt on this earth,
the walking place of ghosts
enticed by the scent of rotting, of ethereal soil.
EVENSONG
(iii)
(v)
Nightfall, the firstborn from the dead.
Tonight I sit and witness
This night is a traveller,
an illusion of sky
both the oak great and thorny small,
a model of the universe where nothing
in patched cipher fabric
roving underneath our pillows.
accepts that nothing can spawn everything,
with this I find a certain kind of beauty
Thief of magic,
a cruel moon's ragged spasm of purple.
in the beast of the backstreets,
in the depths of the empty handed.
Thief of resurrection,
bury me so I can see the sky
(iv)
inviting Time by the sun,
to a field of a rebellious Russian blue
Made as a bed, your loathed grave,
throwing dirt on a wreath of the dead,
box coat, framed in a glaze
of my window,
as delicate as blood.
The dust of you had shadow turned to stone.
and life is a somber shadow
mopping the reflected water from the room
GRANT TARBARD
in my undecided shoes,
in my Russian novel of a head.