the human chain

When the coal fields were open they were a link between us, and between sun and earth; glistening coal of my homeland like the dark soul of crow.

We have been homeless for so long. The migrations, as predictable as the stars. The slow divestment of words, accents, tones.

Question-answer-question. The dance of our lives reignited in each child's face. Blue Milan tie, too perfect to knot; your favourite picture books, of the Red Man and Eastern Kufic, lovingly wrapped in navy blue striped thick white cloth, kept in the dark, in a closet or under the bed, thickness muffling the sounds of the house, too perfect to read; the perfect loves, too perfect to love...

Stare and stare into the faithless mirror. The untrue mirrors of our lives. She who speaks last, echoes my thoughts with her silver-smooth silence, reducing my image, bit by bit, to its archetype, its golden beyond. Matches splintered, their black tips like ancient arrows or flint recovered from peat; the burial of the centuries, carbon returning, bit by bit, to its first Form...

Obsession, 212 New York, Opium, the sweet sickly fragrance of decaying East, the death-sickle and the field, the years spent with bent back asking under the sun, imagining fresh north. The hours flitted away, heaved out to satisfy the gleam in your eye, brother, or the whim of your hands. Distant cousin, who gold and fate took from me.

'Struck by lightning...
Like a girl taking off her petticoat.
White linen eblouissante
In a breath of air...'

The breathlessness that arises from my station, the awareness of my destiny; the penitent's chains dragged in the dust, inescapably bound and free. I stand bare-chested before you, sweet mirror: the flesh weak, marked. We circle around one another, our offerings like a land fertile from decaying mass and abandoned objects, like death's rich pickings. My heart lies open to your open hand. The invisible bond as frail as a chain of dew, as dark as the salmon in the deeps, as elegiac as the evening shadow in the dying grass, as beautiful as when the snake enters the snake.

...