Claire Potter

Northern hemisphere it's almost Christmas.
Sunlight withdrawing into its darkest shell of green
coils ring by ring like a yellow snake in a tight burrow.
The snake's sleep maps an origin pinpoints the start
of where morning lies — its polished skin a simple clock
turning every so often leaving a scaled topography behind.
But just as rain can fall sideways and eyes look aslant
might a northern winter not widen light in the same way
a snake exceeds its skin?
Last summer I stood over a sheath of snake in the bush.
The tail tapered the head was marked with the shape
and angle of invisible eyes.
It could have been a hairnet or a ghost but it was quieter than that.
It could have been laid out across a plate of vine leaves.
A seamstress could have used it as tulle a fisherman as netting
the desert salt as cracks.
Trees are empty on the sidewalk their fallen leaves layered
and overlapping like shelves of ancient papyruses.
One tree casts a long shadow two arms striking upwards
as though piqued by pavement light.
Between the shadow lying flat and still and the tree standing
long and tall there is an angle of forty-five degrees.
There is Icarus falling from blue to decimal to amber.
The distance between north and south is mapped
with the shape and angle of his eyes.
The snake's skin is colorless his eye invincible.
The winter light is warm piercing darkness radiating
a trajectory that points in all directions.
...

lamplight faded as inkless tattoo
burns inside the factory where you used to work─ we cut a cigarette
between us & watch violets out of vases tilt sideways in thin shade

above, one-eyed bird circles burning treetops─ leaves split open
in the heat & throw mouthfuls of thistle downward
a different bird, this time breasted in metal, pulls on a knot
of hot white bells & more fires
are lit
in the lucerne crop

. . . . .

above, your fingers (coppice of indifference
flick shrimp-tails into the pink yawns
of elastic old cats

I turn vases in the kiln & sweep dead blossom
with the shaving brush you found lying cold under the garage─
I get you a beer─ you ash in my teacup─ I drink from your ashtray

you give me a starfish

hand pulls shut the door, puts metal bird
back in the box & notices wings missing
missing in what I suppose you would have called a sky-blue disaster

there's a flag over the table where you lie, a burnt flag
flag nonetheless & dirty yellow petals adrift in my brain

above, silhouette breaks, contents wash in with veins of clay (I ask
you to hold me (as if slipping a paper weathervane
...

Ornament of you hangs around my neck
in the shape of a smooth brown seed

you walk In the dark apple-eyed
along the ridges of my skin

its surface a bed of nails
you are forced onto tango-tip-toe

white conical lamps strung down Christmas hill
wreathe this meeting with nets of damaged pearl

fire flies flicker around the rims
of honey jars

in the heart of the house, a kettle boils ― it sounds like rain
blossom
...

. . . over us a hand, an ocean heavy and cold, as if we
accompanied stones
Seven hours earlier, beside a park bench
he slept standing

Now pendulous & out of his shell, drawing thin
blue lines & flowering water-blisters

through the pool behind him,
he wonders what it would be like

to speak with her again
but possibility as unlikely is a drawer for reddened eyes

where days spent
under the acacia tree, where
the missing xylophone keys he found in her car, where
an empty house, thick with imagination after a long absence

are stowed between
warped playing cards, plastic goggles & a coil of chipped,
yellow beads

. . . . .

Trembling, he pauses on the ropes to de-splinter
two sorts of daydream

one he can dispose of & the other
he is lacking

from the open window, a swallow half erased by the sun
swerves into his mouth
...

That she should have been eating
an apple underground
on the metro at 6am, was not
unusual

I have seen people before
eating on the metro: bread usually
torn from small
paper bags or
thin biscuits
picked from
plastic cylinders,

but this girl, and her reflection,
ate noisily
tearing at the lime skin & mulching
crisp pulp between
open teeth

Bright twigs of apple-
juice toppled from her palm
down her elbow &
into the tongue of a
silent shoe
& my curiosity became an apple
in the heart of a dwindling coal . . .

but then, there were also her nodding green-black
starfish eyes:

momentarily crossed on the apple, then peeled back from
forced awakedness
...

Snow tracks filled with nightfall, strange
how ice so quickly erodes
leather soles, flying foxes, imported oranges

Part of the frozen river; against the hull meaning
dips: Bukowski turns
to Oedipus
via Prokofiev & pens footnotes
to his father's reckless semen

writes how he wishes his I
had never been born, his trick that he'd
been stuck with

Three black oranges
cradled in park snow, flaccid as liver
croak with the muscularity of
an oboe when
I crush them with a stick

Spilling out of my pockets
envelopes distributed like dull frosted pea-
nuts - In the parking lot
I pass a bevy of disembowelled post boxes
drinking turps &
begging me
for the hiss of a letter

there only remains to say since writing
has become impossible:

hooked fish think of water
only as well as they can

your invisible calm
balances fruitfully a circle of dampening stones.
...

Suppa vagari, Lucretius, line 76
describes motion as beginning in the will of the mind

Glass, clear
As, as Ants raising baby wasps, unable to tell the difference
between ant larvae & wasp pupae

or Crystal, clear
As, as the dance-language of bees,

home from their morning flight, indicating the distance
& exact position of each flower

between the petals, white crab spiders, fronded as daisies
wait for bees ―

taken, banded thorax goes limp
& cellophane wings tremble not slightly

fresh canticles of lavender still ringing on their tongues
three black ochelli turn inwards
(You will need: a yellow paper cup, black pipe cleaners, small circle
stickers, yellow felt, black vinyl tape, a large cardboard flower, a red marker, scissors)

After being emptied & let fall
bees become puppets for travelling ant shows
...

In a warm room where, as in a hothouse,
The air is dangerous, fatal,
Where bouquets dying in their glass coffins
Exhale their final breath . . .
Baudelaire
1

If not for oneself, leave me a carton (a garland that holds
of idle black blossom in the garden where you walk

I peel you upside-down from the vase unaware you are naked
underneath skin bowed— talk of sunlight, pollen attacking your
eyes livid, fingers blue
the ink of asphodels trembling still in the lines
of your hand and aside
from shiver & pace swans threading
a second horizon and aside from them
pond of nothing

except perhaps a willow lipped in perspex stone, or costume
artillery only in the silkiest had we a stencil of sky-coloured leaves— audible
& leaping we would read notes from the gallows & float
in light of
idioms
but a centipede away
you crack only a vertebra of silence
at the afternoon, dig a hundred
quivering heels into socks
of red quilty mud
. . .

hairpins of rainwater gaining behind me, beat of a drum
of fawn-green leaves
the passage of itinerancy malformed in hibiscus

we drift downstream

Tsvetaeva weeding banks of the Styx, her moulting heart a periscope
into the persimmon lights of Prague

language clear & water weary, she cuts our orbit piecemeal—
ducks coins you fire into lamps to keep the sun from shining

we enter the vase from behind the rosebush— fingers fall away and you, injured still, coil
into a swallow dive (paisley underbelly, tinsel-tipped, wing-singed
one-sixth of a drachma failing on your lips
swift, flapping, shadowful,

it is not
that you will not return (today, yesterday, tomorrow
but that the thimble you gave me is as appalling for rowing
as for drinking





2


. . . reddened by rime & rot rose leaves arch and turn amid fingers of second winter
—I bend around a corner
scuffle of pigeons harrowing a bread roll
grey dog in a window slanting a gouache eye bowl of hot purple mussels
hands waving paper-cuts into an aviary of goodbyes

we weave dishevelled
beneath windmills gnawing sky into tethers
of cloudweb

a tinderbox peddling spider love opens onto the rift
of twelve soft vein-cheeked women who glide, glide (black & white back
& forth murmuring always (in unhurried motion
the same eight bars of Peter

and the Wolf—
night folds away with

(stay
he exits fierily disappearing majestically into eyelets of brick
wearing the carpet
in-
to warbles of thunder
. . .

permafrost down the window
tongue lolls into calamine, rolls over shoals
rocks, coals
and sandbars pink-purple shells a-clap a clap (full of thought and
civilised commentary

a thing once called midnight glimpses back in the dark wind blowing
across an utterly black pitch of saline
crosses fissuring gold sparks and
mud and stars, mud and
stars, mud
and stars
and lightening
and a stranger who opines to neither stay nor leave
but squats inside the acorn tree within the orthodoxy of a cape

invisible chaos into a flotilla of spears, impression of salt hammers
openly hewn— cannot wash ghost from gist of the daffodil





3




See how deeply I dive, clutching seaweed in my hands.
Akhmatova


5th February such little bonheur
in the half-present moment
instead brouhaha
velcro stars verse cracking winter
full of tinsel bees a flame smudging wax across
a gunpowder sky

voice from the fountain came and said come
grey deer woman picked us an oversized heart
from the moat of twinkling aspirin in which our oily eyes
had been swarming amorous like drunken carp
perhaps because you (recognised
the forked eternity in her gesture &
harsh unhurried
caught nape
my
backwards
(in the quick of your hand
until the imprint of fingertips had been transferred until the up-
turned grave I had hitherto forgotten roused the barb of wasp-whispers howl
of nothing ruffle of half-moons tucked into hunting eyelids

decanted throat loosens
bands of neck-tie and touch- words stumble (errant madly
in the gorse of your hair

shadow of baobab tree leaning into broken paths saluting ceremoniously
shades of false white

you look on as I speak (reflecting
the law of sandbanks
pulse pressed turbulently palpably into the corners of my tidal
dress
...

chocolate bird who could fit snug in my hand
just landed on the tongue
of a bird of paradise & pushed its way wholly
into the envelope of bruised petal until
disappeared

in the dark, lights blonde, it could be said
that circus wires wouldn't connect us
makes me think of the afternoon in the tilting park
when you refused to sit near

eyes remember the blue creases
in your jeans as you lumped onto the soft grass,

they remember banks of the harbour
creeping to unnerve us overlapping
our shadows with crescents of yellow reflecting
what I liked most in your disinterested silence

──heart doesn't remember what year it was
...

wing opportunity
to see impressed in a wall
held in special —

priests severed wing shape marriage
but which a couple
dancing in frieze facing winter
tempting monogamy appropriate a wedding

a ritual connected to costume destroyed
(one wing, one cattle horn deposition of materials
origins ancestry Division, of birds
...