After the Bourbons returned, people claimed they saw

Napoleon’s face in the moon.  Others caught the rigging

of his facial bones, the holes of his eyes, ghosted

on the flattened white of an egg.  Myself, I’ve a fear of touching

a white balloon and finding my husband’s head inside, of feeling

through latex, shapes I know – a nose, his forehead.  Ears.

Some nights I’m out till dawn on the Astroturf.  The birds

never go quiet.  Napoleon is still up there, in his white tights,

pulling like a tyrant on the North Sea’s guy-ropes.

I keep out of the kitchen when the caterers come – mozzarella,

lychees, meringues are ripe landscapes for mapping by generals.  

Our dinner guests drink toasts with sweating hands.  Afterwards, I bath.

Arabesquing over my shoulder at the mirror, I see the Emperor Hirohito

smiling bluishly through the white skin of my arse.  (Later a blank canvas.)

My husband says no: it was only mist passing over the security light.  

You think too much, he says, still wanting me to read his palm.  

We both know I could do it.  Up here, clouds shred over the city,

over the river, like the sails of tall ships, only half-remembered.

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After bad news, and its pulled-back fist,

flows in a sound that’s not a sound.  It’s not

the brain’s tide beating blood in propped

and shored-up workings, not the tapestried

texture of attended silence, the goffering

of quiet air folding and unfolding

        in a house where nothing is happening.

After bad news, you tell the seconds,

hungry for the hurrying thunder

that never comes.  Instead, a chemical fizz

fills the ears, before the descaling.  An angel

rides the stirrup and anvil, spurring on the drum,

works like wild weather in wet sheets,

        flapping and cracking the body’s flat muscles.

Long after the bad news, when it’s bedded in,

you notice most clearly the mild loudness

of the not-so-old man in the foot tunnel,

drumming and drumming and biting his mouth.

The posed coins in his blue cloth

        are tiny, like a cast handful of earbones.

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One lay in the mouth of the Chinese bowl

for years, a hint of petillance trapped

in its globe.   The grip of the glass held a twist

of iris, a fluke of coloured muscle

in North Sea blue, as cold as holidays.

It looked like an eye gone bad, locked up

in glass, like the dust that’s left in reactors

at shut down. They say, by the time you’re sixty

you need three times as much light to see.

It’s true the calorie count on packets

and tins is puzzling, like tiny knitting.  

I search for the fibre to tighten, something

to change to focus the image, but the lens

has lost its flex.  There’s just a cut glass inch

between me and the mist.  If it slurs

I’ll be stuck.  When the sea slips in

to the suck of a wetsuit, they say,

it warms up in no time.  Maybe I’ll learn

to see underwater, to bear the lick

of the pool on my eyes, to enjoy the view

of its four bent blue corners.  I grope

in the bowl, out of my depth.  The blur

blooms wet in wet just out of sight.

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The streets shift out of the violet dark.

The churchyard gingko is flailing again,

branches tangled in yellow disorder.  

Here in the café, Silvano fences a knife

to sharpness.  There’s the scrape

of spread on flags of toast.  I order tea.

The mug comes steaming, pulled

from the gasping dishwasher

in mid-monsoon, a thick white saucer

like a worn-out moon, brittle

from too much shining.  My hands column

the mug, drawing its heat.  By now

so much of life is already decided

but there’s always a shiver

in this waiting moment, before the day

snaps off from the night, locks,

engages its rack and pinion, and starts

to grind and climb.  They are stringing

the shelves with panettone.  

The red boxes swing like bells

in the draught from the opening door.

in collection Pillars of Salt, Templar Poetry, 2006

first published in Smiths Knoll, 38

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