Arrivals/Departures Poem by Kevin Kiely

Goodbye and get some sleep!
a slammed car door and she switches
on the ignition. He is on the flight,
a drink in hand by the window
above Pompeii, Herculaneum
Palmyra, Vilcabamba or Helike…

It is never a matter of life and death with these liars
these lovers, their looks
and suggestive glances in the liquor adverts
the motley apples quivering on the photo-shop green trees

Eternally revealing and concealing
in the technicolour of imagination
she gives and receives the oily reflexes
under an alpine shower

To gorge among her fruit laden paradise
the juicy lucid all attentive compliance and excitement
rosy rainfall before dusk akin to the medieval ecstasy
of saints: not that the stars don't move and celestial bodies ooze

The woman adorns the adorable product
a silver metallic roadster: hub caps and chassis
mimicked in her lingerie
the private jet with its cockpit
pointing to the blue horizon, the beach house
the horses fenced in from the placid seascape
while she stares: free of anxiety, doubt and debt

It is a matter of life and death at the bus station:
she is deciding while he looks defeated holding a
ticket to Lonely Street or Boulevard du Libertine
the swamps where gravestones
names and dates are sinking
yet etched into the inventory of memory
or where the nightlife resurrects itself in Mardi Gras
shrouds to suit every taste and predilection

If you board the bus, plane or train
it is over as the slope of years lights up
each personal disaster history.
Liar, I want you to leave with your lies, lies, lies.
And significantly I do not miss you at all
as autumn leaves start to fall in the narrative

Advert of the horses who rehearse
and swish tails in unison to beat the summer flies
off their brown backs and hind legs
the couple hold hands, walking in a flaxen meadow
the sycamore canopies a table, the breeze on cue
blowing the edges of the linen cloth
the bottle and two glasses, the cork pops:
laughter and they kiss savagely

Linger on the scene that moves above the tree trunk
framing it as a wooden tower, the sea waves drown
out their voices and from the sea-aspect you view
the sycamore like a wrist with overflowing hand
still a tree becoming one tree among many trees
each branch suspended by the pillar-trunk
each bough-top a hedge of wands