Sarah Wardle

All Souls Day
 

The dead have come to visit.
I don't know who they are.
They mark the glittering streets
With footsteps of rain.
The last leaves of autumn
Are their lost hands. I
Can almost hear their voices,

A rumour of wind and water.
My chest shakes like a window.
I have nothing to give them.
When I show them my hands
They turn away, disappointed.
Their eyes see through walls
To irrevocable horizons. I

Do not know their names.
Their breath beats in my arteries
Like ash, like earth, like rain
Which will never stop falling.
Their injuries taint my mouth
With a taste like blood. I
Breathe their sour bones.

I do not know what they want.
They seep into every cell
The purities of their lack.
Knowledge crumbles against them
And pours into a vast river
Where I am nameless.
The dead have come to visit

Hungry as birds in winter,
Enclosed by mortal grief
As light encloses a gesture
In darkness. I do not know
If it releases them.
Only the living are sad.
Dona eis requiem.

Cambridge November 2, 2002
 

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Nocturne

the stink and clutter of love
makes itself in its small houses
how distant! that cloud like a hand

dissolving opens on nothing -
how distant the operatic stars
from these fingers that clutch

for a white chord that dissolves
in the sob and ebb of sleep
as hunger burns its trace

into your solitary voice
which blushes against my skin -
the white unbitten apple of your throat -

we linger in these shadows
supple beasts slinking
through the startled eye of light

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Prayers for the dead

may you be blessed by clawprints
may tolerant winds kiss your ashes

may you be forgiven
with the generosity of clouds
 

may the dust of your nightmares
drain into ample rivers

and may the sun consume you
with the busy fire of ants

and the creaturely parliament embrace you
as the soil humours a leaf

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Blind

The poet has no identity. She is an electrical cloud she is a swarm of bees she is a kabuki scream she is a shadow on the blind the plates in a cupboard the roar of trucks on a freeway. She is the fiery neurone and the mark on a piece of paper. She speaks on the telephone into the ether. No one there. Maybe it is god. She writes her body with the tips of her fingers but it is no longer her body. The words are not her they belong to nobody. She writes to slough off her name. She speaks to become invisible. She desires to become what she is. When she wakes into her name it is falling asleep again. When she dreams she forgets. She is blind. She has the power of flight.

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Spring

it is easy to forget me
I am a cloud in the corner of your eye
that vanishes in your direct gaze
when the rain comes

I would like to be
the whole of your sky
when the night falls over you
and silence begins

I will never be the whole of anything
I am the air¹s inconsolable heaviness
and the stars sadly glowing
in a dark well

I will never be whole
bits of me have fallen everywhere
I wished on every star
as it plunged into blackness
my hands vanish in my dreams
like the smoke of a flower

it is easy to remember me
I am here like summer
in the voices of crickets
that fall silent at the sound
of a footstep

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THERE ARE BREAKAGES CERTAINLY

there are breakages certainly

although bone can withstand more pressure than reinforced concrete

the psyche has its own architectures which pay little heed to gravity

an entire city can be populated on foundations little bigger than an ant

I have often watched these insects crawling across the desolations of tables

in such malarial humidities perception is closed to a perimeter of twenty
feet

the night is making jaguar roars to scare away the blue skinned natives

within the circle of sight all objects are pretenaturally large and clear

I sip again the vitreous humours of my companions

and I have detached each lunate from each wrist and woven a palace from each

the dust from the ulysses butterfly is an excellent material for windows

such altitudes are dizzying but easily dispersed in alcohol

later the body will wither and every capitol crash to the earth