Gillian Prew

Crossing Autumn Again

 

First autumn    piss rain           and the silver bone of the hill.

October’s bite

and the gold wound. A slow odour limbering

and through the trees a split-grave mist

of gifts and rumours               a loose diamond

boxed in a tumbled hour.

            My stone muscles

with their woollen coats          still as beggars

see no audience. They hush

in this cool room of leaves.     They narrow

to a word. Nothing hears

but the birds                who are not judges.

            My loss

my glittering crust from when I was first knock-kneed. I am

crossing autumn again             one arm sleeved in sadness.

 

The View Repeating

 

I cut my tongue on something good

and find a fist like a small blush bird

flung into one more dew-molested morning.

My eyes whisper like two blue seashells. They whisper

a quiet wedding tune. They ask what family is. I sigh

through my skin, the way the rain falls.          I am alive, I say. I

drag the sun onto a spoon. The light

could have been blood but I am bold with old sunrises. I

imagine the dress I will wear

with its needles and its silver-sewn medicines. I read

from a book of poems about infidelity, about the art of dying. I am ready

for a fit of vows, but the view is the edge of the sea

full of quiet that repeats like a grief.

 

A Conversation Condensed and Expanded

 

 I am more than one melancholy moment;

a drift; a sighting of sea. You washed me

through the night with your tongue

and you caused me a flood. I sleep blue

beside you while my dreams keep company with ghouls

and my dumb eyes open each morning wishing

poems were more than hospitals for my afflictions.