dmines. Camels wait for sand dunes
to drift into ridges - blue flags flutter
back at Fort Apache on brave
white trucks (what gets through
is the scent of coffee). A footless boy
hobbles past, bargain hunting,
a life at odds & ends - smoke drifts
over Manhattan, out across the Hudson
river as from a Bedouin campfire.

*

Circuit; right hand wise,
homage to the sun - as did ancient
Celts, Scythians, too - host to
the Milesians on their last leg to
Ireland as the first Celts castaway -
whose home precinct the Black Sea,
the right hand to the centre;
memoried in standing stone circles.
Yet homage to a sun as walking
pillar of fire, with hell for a coronet?
The world's breath and mystery
end here, earth's innards engorged -
sprawled redly coast to coast.

*

If streets had cobblestones
blood would flow in tatters - torn
flags to a revolution lost. Streets
smoothly ease to drains. The cut deep,
and blood wakes from its blackness,
crushed as berries in the runnels
of a wagon, oozes its oil from
the body's casket - til flesh becomes
porcelain, perfect surface for moon,
ice, the glass-edged sky to play upon;
in silences deep as birch in the
bayoneting dark - and leaves finally
resemble paper money piled up
under the turbined lamplight.

*

A Public Works draughtsman
spent thirty years designing the City
Sewerage Reticulation System
he eventually hoped to escape through -
a masterpiece! A prairie dog would
have been proud of it. Complex of
accented runs, angles, drops, sluices,
pumps, ditches, endless unbowed
archways, treatment ponds breaking into
sunlight - the architects of Athens
would have been proud of it.
Only on paper - not one trowel lifted!
miles and miles and miles of it.

*

Pyrrha, your dewy hair,
yellow, scented, doubly wreathed
in Jasmine, fresh from the trellis
this morning - your new lover yet to
arrive, breathless. Your tantrums
are as sea-storms, heart-wrecking
for that unsuspecting voyager - maybe
as survivor, I might warn him
against your squally lust, he won't
find safe haven in your arms! This note
is record enough - that I set down
against your lubricous hold.

See: Horace's 'Pyrrha' ode. I,v.

*

The flames above the wall,
private show for the Gods, the city
burned three days, at night, smoke
warmed the stars. Border forest
shifted with shields - scritch-owl,
a horse's impatient breath - the hawk
wheeled under a pennant moon.
In the gre