The Golden Mean Read Free

write. British pearls
    are commonplace and waterish and dull,
    but their women wear them as if winter were a jewel.

The Constellations
    The trick is always to appear fixed,
    whatever happens. To hold the pattern
    we were born to, though its significance
    may be lost to us. Here is where we make
    our stand and our love will be defined not by
    touch or glance but by the distances
    mapped out between us. We’ll light
    everything that needs our light, steadfast
    as the stars we fell from, trusting
    in them through disaster and adversity,
    though we know in our hearts
    they are burning in their shackles, like us all.

Lacerta
    Not the browbeaten old king,
    or his poor wife handcuffed to her capsized throne,
    or their sad and lonely daughter
    waiting in the darkness for her perfect monster.
    Not the dead swan nailed to its right ascension
    or those pointless feathers harnessed to a stallion.
    Grant me the bleakness of the northern sky
    and a yellow gaze that burns relentlessly
    and the scales and the claws and the flickering tongue
    of a constellation none of you can name.

The Moon is Shrinking
    It isn’t just at night the moon sheds its skin. All day
    you can watch white dust catch the light as it settles
    on the world, turning distance the watery blue of faded
    colour photographs. How long can this go on?
    Each year the moon grows lighter while we grow heavier.
    Can you not feel it as you walk the streets, how gravity deepens
    and there always appears to be more to us than we know there is?
    Each new step more arduous. Have you not noticed
    how year by year the tides abandon us? Each month
    the blood less eager to flow; each month the pain more distant,
    more unreal. The day might come when you will forget
    your suffering, and reach out to it.

Windfall
    What is love if it is not an unravelling
    against the dark? In the moonless field
    between house and river, remember
    how you stood with your arms
    wide to the night, under every tumid
    star, waiting for one to drop.

The Darkroom
    im WK
    If I am the one who is said to be
    alive, and you the other, how come it’s me
    who ends up trailing along behind
    as you stride ahead, humming
    to yourself, crossing from shade to shadow?
    Every morning I wake
    longing for you to long for me again;
    to dawdle, to loiter, and then – to hell
    with the cost, I say – look back.

My Mother’s Favourite Flower
    This world is nothing much – it’s mostly
    threadworn, tawdry stuff, of next to little use.
    If only it could bring itself to give us back
    a portion of the things we would have fallen
    for, but always too busy living, overlooked
    and missed. So many small things missed.
    So many brief, important things.
    It is my intention never to write about this.

Elegy
    and now that
    his song is done
    open your hands
    there can be no
    harm in that
    let the notes go free
    let them become
    ash in the wind
    gone back
    not to nothing
    no
    to everything

The Walkers
    As soon as we had died, we decided to walk home.
    A white tatterflag marked where each journey began.
    It was a slow business, so much water to be crossed,
    so many dirt roads followed. We walked together but alone.
    You must understand – we can never be passengers any more.
    Even the smallest children had to make their own way
    to their graves, through acres and acres of sunflowers
    somehow no longer pretty. A soldier cradled a cigarette, a teddy bear
    and his gun. He didn’t see us pass, our light was far too thin.
    We skirted villages and cities, traced the meanderings of rivers.
    But beyond it all, the voices of our loved ones called
    so we flowed through borders like the wind through railings
    and when impassable mountains marked the way,
    soared above their peaks like flocks of cloud, like shoals of rain.
    In time the fields and woods grew weary and the sea began –
    you could tell we were home by the way our shadows leaned.
    We gathered like craneflies in the windowlight of familiar