The birds
 
He rolls around in circles, she says,
To stop the universe.
 
“There is
             in these circles
perhaps
some kind of permanence.”
 
A swarm of birds fly round
Like dust
somewhere in Newville.
 
There is no need for death
to remain, she writes.
 
The lines will stay
indented in the sky
And dust will fall always in the same pattern.
 
“The birds they circle back.”
(Or perhaps some different birds)
To be
incessantly
where they are not.
 
And feverishly we’ll sit
at the edge of everything
And trace
these patterns
in our hands.

MOVEMENTS ON THE THEME OF PERMANENCE
 
i.
Water laps at lashes the wall
screaming soft music. The gulls
calling they clutter the crying sky
the flood rises. Four towers
last to list above grey waves
incongruous from the cabin
until the hull scrapes stone below.
 
ii.
A fleeting glimpse
a phosphorescence 
face-to-face and 
six feet between us.
 
iii.
One day he’ll realise
When do you suppose
O I don’t know six months
Long time
Sooner perhaps
Will he say anything
I’ll know from the colours in his eyes
 
iv.
Here we are 
on a boat again. 
Storm petrels flash black and white.
The wake thickens.

Control
 
Silken
is the sound that sends
the cat leaping, in a stroke
of instinct and fur
 
—as the cat skitters,
I am reminded of the violin
re-stringed and pitched below
its habitual strain: in a minute-
 
or now- it might resume
its long-trailed slaloming at the scale
I presume him to know best.
 
A purr,
muted, on the new gut-strings:
 
        the instrument unframes
the dream-loose fresco
spun across the room,
 
and (as if it were a serious jest)
the dancing in it: violin-tail
and cat bending the bow
 
in a stroke
of silence