along a buff wall rose bushes had once hidden

and looked up through the ladder’s rungs

at a lump of coal flaring in a blue-grey spoon

bent over with the rough heat it held.

Sun in my eye, the roof a milk cloud

that had stopped in its tracks.

This house

that had found me again, I thought, could do

with more than the sizzle of a welder’s torch

stitching up an iron seam, the lick

of a painter’s brush jabbing and nuzzling

at cracks in the plaster, more than cement seals

to patch cracked bricks behind the hibiscus.

Might the spiral staircase

with its gnarled garlands of Art Deco leaves,

rusty, peeling off, have been trying to speak

to the men in their dusty overalls, its cadences

white noise lost below the gushing pump,

the whine of saws, the pounding of drills?

Logos before topos, the word pushes its abstract self

before whatever the eye can open: what words

could magic this place back to me?

Might the beat of a deep-buried mineral heart

have faltered through flutes that no one could hear

above the squirrels chittering in the gulmohar,

the anvil fever of hammers? And my own ears,

stopped up against sirens but also the twanged salutes

of cotton-carders, the descants of street acrobats:

Had I heard nothing at all? Had I missed a step, or a fall?

Self-Portrait as Child in the Rain

shadows trapped in the door

rain tapping out a message on roof and branch

an ampersand of cloud

scared bird wet waiting for the others to catch up

at the finish line

Marcus Aurelius

Battle’s end. The mare sags through the rain.

The emperor weighs nothing in the saddle.

The clear, unimpeded thought

is his torch and blade:

he scorches a way

through the forest

of corpses.

Planetarium

A stupa with the night sky trapped inside, growling.

Kushan Dawn Song

Water wails through the house of bone,

leaving trails of silt in my sleep.

The weight of crumbling hills heaves down the melt,

carrying the eddying tumult of war, festive cries

and forgotten shapes of heaven.

I wade through these Blakean torrents to meet my image:

my image meets me on the steppe. Lost twin, I thought

he’d be holding out a unicorn’s horn. Look,

I’ve saved this for you. But no, instead,

a round red stone burns in his trembling palms.

Above him, cranes gather in a wheeling dance,

shuffling off the sins of antique winters:

a harvest of phantoms darkening the sky,

shot out from the veins of bursting rivers,

shaken from deep seedbeds of snow.

Set loose on the world, they wassail their hunting songs

far from their scorched pastures, in someone else’s blood.

I look at my twin. The steppe shows in patches

through his skin. His eyes are gold, his sleeves

are dripping sand. I take the stone from his fading hands

and run.

Dunhuang

For years, nothing.