Then torrents of sand.

What could you chant

against the howling wind?

The caves swallowed themselves.

Centuries later, abbots would scan

the sky for flights of cranes

to lead them to the lost lake

they were trudging across.

Here and there, they’d find strips of silk,

bookmarks in the archive of the dunes,

as they stumbled away from their dromedaries,

holding their breath, saving their prayers

for the other, drifting, shipwrecked shore.

Bactrian Drachma

for Shailendra Bhandare

On one side, a face that’s been kissed, spat on, spun in bright air:

basileos,

tyrant mining dry valleys

far from Homer’s wine-dark sea.

On the other,

rimmed by a halo of worn ass-lip script:

trātara,

a cave-born echo, never heard the same twice, never fully deciphered.

The Swimming Pool

You’re dripping away, shedding water and scales

as you climb

out of the pool, giddy, gills wilting into lungs:

searing balloons

of trapped oxygen. The light and lyrical self

is burning up on re-entry.

Purged, it stumbles from a wet pelt

sloughed off on the floor.

*

Shavings of sky, sawn by the wind, drop on the water.

You flick away the light of unreported moons.

Never disturb dust, attachments or silences.

The handprint you left on the wall

when you came out of the pool

is drying in the noon-heat:

you’re a thumb and a digit

away from extinction.

*

Noon-shards: a grey man’s hacking at a block of ice

with a sickle. Leaves shimmer on the water

that flinches like the skin of a sleeping dog

when he trawls the tree-fall with a frayed net.

Your body is a gathering intensity of shadows

broken by a surge of glass.

Regent of vacancy, gather up the folded bathrobe

from the abandoned chair. Settle

under the deck umbrella

whose shadow has migrated across the pool.

*

He gives in by degrees

to the slurp and sluice.

Little deaths claim his time.

Now another he enters his mind, tissues, cells:

that he is plunging through the upside-down sky

to catch the diver’s farewell, the lost pearl.

Centaur foundling, surviving twin: they wrote me

on the brittlest pages of the songbook.

I’m wearing this season for the last time:

for the last time this green shawl, these leaves twisted

to form a diadem. Next year he will return

as fire, gulls floating above his head.

His image will trail behind him

in a canal of shouts and whispers.

Thank you, he will say to the lifeguard,

That is not my skull you have there

in the raven’s mask.

The Poet’s Life

He married birdsong.

He sailed to the black island.

He survived gunshots.

He wore a sweatshirt under his linen jacket.

He talked to parrots in Greek.

He excavated lighthouses by night.

He asked to be paid in paper money.

He counted up the day’s syllables before dinner.

He wished the balloons hovering above the docks were Chinese lanterns.