THE HATING OF FLOWERS Poem by Claire Potter

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