Schlummert Ein

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.