Morning High Aracne

*



in the sky, battlefield, grey kindles the peach of sun, hot - 
a grey shot through with the tracks of planes, each a gassy shell
each a miracle of air, and beneath, amongst rock-toothed grass
a black spider rests on a headstone
the gold-red light covers everything like milk

the waters in my face are ever-present, it seems
crouched behind the hard skin and muscles i spent years on, carving
they press at the edge of my eyes, pressure kept in check, alive, yet, 
through the valves of jaw and the spill taps of taut lip,
they rise

i salute you, friend
dead now
i salute you with my silence, i keep deeply, deeply quiet
i will never speak of your death

around me, statued angels snore, bitter or
pitted with the repeated scoring of acid rain - moldy stone, bored
for compassion, bored for tears, bored, bored, bored,
bored, bored

bored. despite their pebbling gazes i say
ashes to ashes, again
again

for you, friend

"there were points when things were so irrepareably bad, so
bent, so heavy the thick pebble thrown at the webs we both strung happily with
drunken jewels, peals of dew, tiny wet bells, so torn the lace,
so caught upon the stone and
so far the small spinner carried from you, so,
so far - there were points when the lost male was guillivered
irredeemeably far from the safeness of heart,
and I look back, now, having left an eightlegged chrysalis far behind me,
like a cast,
long gone, and wonder if death happened fast, or
slow, from the start, that is,
if death happened to you as I rode the stone
or if it happened, say, before its path of 
rupture - before that day, the revelations of saint james,
the tearing of the world - the apocalypse of scripture, the rend,
the end of simple thread, the splintering of grey, if it
happened, a year before, in some garden party with the wrong thing said, or
even perhaps, even perhaps, when we'd met,
maybe you died then, all the same"
i mourn you and i mourn you and i mourn you

i whisper, laying flowers like words, or words like flowers,
i am so sorry for being mad.

in the sky, fallow, grey allows the fruiting sun, solid
a space to wander
and through the milk, red-gold, the clouds slip schizophrenically from stratic to
cirric to pyroclaustic to cumulus to nimbus
from cloud to cloud to cloud to cloud to cloud to cloud
amidst the water vapours
brave spiders, tiny, paratrooping spiders, cross continents
and wait for it to shower,
for the thrill of rain






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