Dead Straight Meanders

Marzipan

use your artisan’s fingers to make
fruit figurines for me;                                                                spray marzipan mangoes
with edible colour, place them in a                  dark
chocolate wagon I’ll not eat,                                              but admire.

Fragility of your                 folk                                 art evoked
when, on my skin,                                                                     those fingers put bloodless marks;

I long for you to paint another water hyacinth
                       at our beach-house, and sign it
with your French name                  so ruined in English.

Skip     dinner to work;                                                                        stay awake all night
                                                                                                  writing – and at the crack of dawn fashion four
fruits fit for winter,                                    before  we wash naked in the sea;

         rub      sand on my face,                                                                I topple backwards at a sleight

of   those   artisan’s   fingers.

Your black braids, they are always                       thinning; hairs
on the calm                    surface like tiny                  crisscrossed currents;

gulls overhead and                                                         flattened coral skimmed into hips -
I can see every vein on your body.

A basket of marzipan flowers – centerpiece of your new studio

was left too close to the kiln, now dried and cracked

and the book from which it was copied

published a century ago.

The Alice

And Lily in tears again

at some trifling fragment of nature

koala maybe, or a gum-leaf lumped

with spider eggs;

there are people around - why

does she embarrass him? Never call a spade a spade
she says - beauty is its own purpose;

usually he loves that about her
but all he wants now is a decent meal

and a cool place to sleep in The Alice.

Mania

When frightened people act in concert,

bowing to the mania of the gut

like meadows to sudden shade

watch freedom’s vain illusion fall,

collapse in a ruinous heap, and panic
slashed onto faces, and bodies running.