John Wilkinson

In memory of Sara Wilkinson and for Liz Miles Eyelids, fall softly, from their gritted corners chalk, let it drizzle, let the streams flow thick with a waste glaze, let imagery run off its surplus of kaolin, choke feed of sediment plumed into the blue, tulipping its stem. Cress bunches thickening in shallows, flukes stinging flank heifers in their shove and jostle down a bank, drinking, mud caking lips. Eyelids, fall softly, let me linger interrupted behind the curtains billowing with images, how the unseeable sill even so snags, how the very point lights from behind, thoughts dispersing into folds slung aloft in sea mist, impermissible point breaks every motive falling back behind the eyelids that then fall. I breathe, I look, I carry forward, I can sense the last of you, taking walks of air thick with waste breath your form displaces. O curtain! O rail! I hate the thick floor beneath, breathe over a market quarrel, rise over the bass sawing at its stems to crash down the vault, let the vault branch recklessly, light-streams maze, air’s stirring carry song back and forth; I hear your recorder pipe, long for its repeats giving what-for to earth seeming to attenuate, rock is marked with your aeolian flow. Eyelids, fall softly, the cast of their fluttering fans across the inlet a white shadow, writes over deep-set floor captivated ripples. World, gaze out! Rise from a shrouded point.

For Andrea Brady As though the overcast might tweak an airman’s maps, his foretelling — as though in chains of stop-start ischaemia, I count myself unstressed, I walked along the human promontory rough-tongued as sugar paper, walked from the metal-bashers’ shop, vinegar and cayenne sprinkled, spiked my glass of milk. Well-set icing blistered. Ice set into cat’s-eyes. I walked through the empty lot the enormous empty lot towards the store beckoning me, soon I turned my back on every now forgotten unit. Get yours I said. Get yours. And I kept mine in ghost capital. Such was our material ease that year in plenteousness, in full flush. Sumptuous but interfusing, basking all the while June was leaching sweetly, bite like molasses. The block the far side of the apron squatted with capacity. Happy to take things as seen I browsed, I window-sloped, honey lanyards brushed my lips. Then I too was stopped by the incident, the episode, the voice that spake, lushness hit the doldrums. Frigate birds collapsed on ice, wings like stick pyramids. I stood dangling my bunch of keys. Saw in the lake’s heaped frozen waves a new car exhibition, restaurant, luxury housing. This then was the block whose feed I hung upon, suckling on the live stream so generous I could overflow, creeping to within earshot, stealthily advancing within reach, this then was the source marooned in transitivity, flushed pink where sky spins and grips or tries but soaked it slithers off, its dazzle-shroud sagged sopping with new storylines, slid down in folds, pleats, bales of episodes. Lines aspired to mottoes, mottoes to a motionlessness tethered to reflections on void lagoons where intermittent light spelt far less : blemished forms of love loving fault must needs be filled but the field is made of faltering, we walk on thin ice, images that relay genital parts. Look, each of us knows what we could do with any of these. A peasant with his crippled back and upright broom dusting off the sun-gilded runway, a banker’s shouting ontic features crabbed and tentacular, crabbed and tentacular. Like everyone turns in on himself I saw the gathered looped and spooking out their children, these too stretched in their fire cavern, talk would shift about the board grinding thick lines of violence. Activity lights flashed, cycles juddered to a pit reprieve behind star-blasted rock pooling oil. Still within a smoke scarf three sit and talk and think to send a call through wintery clearances. Across the asphalt my bone vibrates. Tap Tap.       Buzz. Calendar beetles tap inside false ceilings, failing brands collapse into the flickering of a hearth. Clear light annuls red crackle, time-stamps every flash expiring assets show in. Look, to make my call I found my mouth, licked the barrier streaked with fuchsine, nibbled at the pith between the tree and bark. Red daddy, aren’t I big enough to walk, pick up my legs, my pace Look, I hack at overgrowth, too grown up, well-fed for jelly mould cars and download junket. Magenta freights a weary sky, heaved limbs abdicate. Who hankers to walk grass and thrift. Ankles pricked by gorse and heather. Who walks on creases now shale pockmarked with spots of tar. My ghost is trying its weight on stepping stones, look, it’s peeling off, weaned into the asphalt river. Ahead I see this huge container.