is this rudimentary study done

with a compass and a pencil:

Black Hole (Artist’s impression).

In modern death no light escapes.

You cannot see it only note

the wobble of the bodies

on their axes, in their orbits.

In Cookstown District Cemetery

hundreds pack the graveside till

mid-hymn, a dog gets free:

the animal I cannot see

only how the faces turn,

one-by-one and radiant,

to watch the mongrel running

masterless among them.

Tuesday

Me and a single mosquito

spend the evening in, suffering

a lightly withered baked potato

and the defunct aspect ratio:

all the ruins of Quintana Roo

slide in and out of lit bamboo

and listen, I tell the television,

who’s standing in again for you,

Bring me the Rose of Jericho,

the left hook of Rocky Marciano,

a stampede of water buffalo

and an easier way to make sourdough

or fresh tortellini . . .

Don’t. When I’m alone

I swear this whole thing’s touch and go.

Annals of Alan

Donna

Her younger brother stole across the river

to boost beer kegs from the Royal Hotel

and float them back across the river –

and in accordance with all classical myth,

he hadn’t bargained on the current.

The weirgate dredged him, dead.

Music was heaven to Donna, just heaven

overheard on earth, sifting down from

the shifting spheres or an open window,

the hi-hat moon. Heaven, with the heat

of evening, and her singing coming down

the stairs. Billie or Nina or Dinah.

Accompanying Death

The eyelids are generally half-closed;

the pupils dilated; the tongue approaches

the under-edges of the lips and these

are covered with a frothy mucus.

When the man in the eye turns away,

he becomes non-knowing of forms.

He does not see or smell or taste or speak

or hear. He does not think or feel.

Breathing and the heart’s action cease.

Coldness and pallor of surface increase.

He slips into air that spins out and opens

to him as the hole in a chariot’s wheel.

He does not see or speak or hear or feel.

He steals upwards, outwards, inwards.

Avi

They want to be happy, forgiven or healed.

Or a decent job in Tallahassee or Monroe.

Or enclose their numbers for the Big Sweep

next week even though they know He’ll know.

One prays for his marriage to work. A sufferer

in stage four doesn’t want her son to be alone.

I have come to The Department of Dead Letters,

correspondence that can neither be delivered

nor returned satisfactorily to the sender,

and this is the Letters to God Division –

which means a cardboard box and Avi Yaniv,

who runs it from a sorting office squashed between

a vacant car lot and a dry-cleaning business

on the outer outskirts of Givat Shaul,

and Avi, having slit open the colourless

envelope with his utility knife, unfolds once and unfolds

again to read how the writer asks from the sister she fought with