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Me and Two House

Fingering the falsetto light or listening to the baby

in the eternal moon, is routine: as magic to us as

machining steel, or hack sawing a bolt, or sealing a

lead-sheathed telephone cable, climbing out the

manhole, replacing the lids, stashing the gear. It all

fits in somehow. It’s part of your duty to the - the

sea - that old standby, rumoured real.

Then there’s your daily walk to find a finger in the

sand, or something more horrific - or less. Then back

to the shack, your tucker, tousley bed, and old dreams

of old fucks and telephone calls: this place is you,

and you are you - not me.

The book grows. Never mind death - but the night

greater journeys into greater darkness - quit, for

now, by life’s light.

Something of this - we are tempted to throw in an

expression like “Ut pictura poesis”, but we don’t know

what it means - breaks thru and taps out a violently

beautiful message In Russian Morse, that saves the

world - something like:

“I am the shadow of the waxwing slain

Caught by the azure of the window pane”

Something as simple and crystallic as that, yet

announcing a mercilessly haunting tragicomedy that

sends us ducking for cover into unmitigated madness...

Oh, well, enough of that, whatever it was. You are

always raising that eyebrow, hating my iamby frostics,

my brownian moments of tomb wish studied by same

stone - poking me crably with your stick - but you

never were Anyman, what with your endless edgy folding

and refolding the endarkling layers, with their so

many bloody shells, shells of black.

I’m still here you know. Perhaps I could unclever

myself. I know too much, or think I do - I reach out,

seeking clasp, but we lean past each other. But I -

You are you. What am I? I was -

And you stand there. The tree, despite

stupid men and the blind and unordinary sun;

is not totally dead....

And you cast a stone at the sea

that it might splash, and a gull might rise. The stone

boomerangs back, and you laugh. You laugh your

knowing-something laugh, your usual getting-into-the

next-thing laugh: your laugh full of fish.

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