Friday, 4 June 2010

calligraphies of bones

Calligraphies of bones

No words dare deface you
your arms around my empty hips
this time
more truth
under the death smog
the earth is over
waking up in hiroshima again
this time with you, little different
except the happiness I feel
the crisp beauty of your sleeping face
I said you only need one love,
meaning, I only need you, you are
all my heart can stand
you are everything inside my heart
you perfume the night
I want softly this not
to be an end. To be for you forever. And
that we speak, when no words rip
from me my dengue. And there
in the heart of your silence
you always bring me up. Our
book born in my mind like a child.
The silence of your ways.
I slept with you at seventeen.
I slept with you at eight.
I felt the fullness of your kind
smile linger over me.
What you give and what you
do not cannot supercede.
I never tried to take you
I never was so blind
to walk too fast into
your light
the others were too fast,
each year will be
flirtation, confection,
or a noose. So
slowly, I will love
you and speak
to you in prose.
And if in years i'd
have you, or if in
three you me, I will
not hope to bargain
for things that make
me weep.
Beside me last eve
ever, was more than
ere I need, to walk at
noon beside you, and give you leave.

II.

let out of prison to the heart of your love
your love is honest
this I have known
you make no promise
of things we don't know
your love is honest the heart of your love
is finally beside me

time was hiroshima
aftermath
I was waking in hiroshima
without you for years
now I am out of prison
to the heart of your love
a love which is honest
which doesn't ask much

my love is foolish in fits and starts
my love is sleeping in the sepulchre of hearts
my love awakened to say goodbye
out of prison to say goodbye

your love is honest
I do not know why
you ask for nothing and then I reply
your love is honest
so patient and kind

your love is honest
silent and kind
your love is honest
goodbye, goodbye

III
awash in your golden orb
scorpion I cannot say
propaganda master for
fools gold
your eyes on the ocean

in time the thames
washes in the blood of
Kipling's rue

I crafted your name into this verse
but wrote not what you
are
In the silence of sleep and time
you teach me melody
contingent on life and breath
when all was question mark

pushed to the point of
silence and cured by melody
I wish you could have known
my mother's name for me

hungrily I devour these
seconds here with you
terrified at the expanse
of time when your
face will be far from my eyes
in this my memory feels you
as in absense I held
your ghost
invited through the window
as incubi or host

angelic priest of sound
you are to me ever pure
and the terrors of my carnal silence know no cure

I want to hold you and
I do not, as this
exquisite pain to me
delivers me to ecstasy
where now I live with thee
and here floating silently
through memory and time
you muse are master of
then and now, the future
and the end

if only I could wrap
my bones around yours
when I die
all this wanting and
denial would quickly
realize itself into
calligraphies of
bones our bodies do
now make and in death
stillness might make
the shape of love
eternal.

by mary eng
for nicholas alexander maybury

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