Lucyy

A glare chunk of moon

The hill of no colour

Under the polarised light.

Like a day pushed inside out. Everything

In negative. your mask

Bleak as cut iron, a shell-half - 

Shucked off the moon. Alarming

And angering moon-devil - here somewhere.

The ancient Mariner’s Death-in-Life woman

Straight off the sea’s fevered incandescence

Throwing black and white dice.

A sea saracen and cruel looking.

And your words

Like bits of beetles and spiders

Retched out by owls. Fluorescent,

Blue-black, splintered. Bat skulls. One day, I thought,

I shall understand this tomb-Egyptian,

This talking in tongues to a moon-mushroom.

Never wake a sleepwalker. Let the blame

Hit the olive trees.

The black blood of their shadows

Might cry out like Abel’s.

Who’s here? That’s the question: Who’s here?

The doctor who humours, and watches

As the patient dies in his care.

Something else shares the skin of the day.

The mimicry of possession, the set of the mouth,

Would be awful in a dream. Awake

It’s a question of patience. Like a phantom

Womb tumour. The full moon of radium

Had stripped herself for the operation - 

Stripped herself of everything

But moon. What is moon? The raw lump

Of ore, not yet smelted and shaped

Into your managed talent. Or it flings

Onto the X-ray plate the shape of the ape

Being led by the virgin, both helpless

In her hell. The moon

Takes things like that seriously - 

As it stares at the kitchen implements.

I was the gnat in the ear of the wounded

Elephant of my own

Incomprehension. Curator

Of the tar-pit. Around us

On the moon-brown hills, the stars rested

Their possible anaesthesia,

All the mythologies, all inaccessible,

The sardine-boats - off with Cassiopeia,

Every stone a rosetta

Of moon-marks. I could no more join you

Than on the sacrificial slab

That you were looking for. I could not 

Even imagine the priest. I walked beside you

As if seeing you for the first time -

The moon-shadow of a strange dog,

The silent shadow of a dog

That had befriended you. Your eyes

Were in their element

But uncomprehending and

Terrified by it. Like the surfaced Kraken

You took it in the round

Of moon and starred sea, littered heaven and 

Moon-blanched, moon-trenched sea-town

And its hook of promontory halving

The two wings of beach. A great bird

Fallen beside the Mediterranean.

A sea of lapis painted 

Glitteringly afresh, just for you,

By de Chirico,

You carried it all, like shards and moults on a tray,

To be reassembled

In the poem to be written so prettily,

And to be worn like a fiesta mask

By the daemon that gazed through it

As through empty sockets -  that still gazes

Through it at me.