Chris Murray

The Zeiss

from that 13th moon you'd to fight for breath :

eyes , vagina, your lens was cold. 

But then our shadow-plays were always red.

I awoke with the word musculature in my head -

the primitive Zeiss dilated

with the mathematical implements of your pornographies : meters , lenses,

                                                             colour-charts,  grey spectrum-sheets,

                                                             and white -

all these rotated in your skull-disc, and I 

spread wide as cut-fruit onto a plate-fallen

 dilated,

            and captured you                                        

            I wondered which of your screens I was playing on ?

dead table

(stone)

black stone inscribed with a talon a wing a tide-mark 

its a bruised maybe sea-etched lucky charm that

weights the silk-back cards orange-silk purple-ribboned

they describe

a circle where those fall-plummet

a wheel

maybe it is a maybe wheel -

(the story or tale) :

a marble table in Kilkenny Castle

small hands pressed to the colding planes of it

and then a whispered legend

- it was here

here, where the noble-dead were laid out on this very table

and a curse travels through the handskin into the blood and bone of

of those of us whose skin contact its surfaces

(the legend)

we were told the legend then about :

the kitchen-caraytid is black-faced marbled-black

the limestone is soughed off her bone-face from hands wiping

wiping the death-grime from fingers

she stands holding those arches-orange-arches part of the orange-archway

alone

her companion-caraytid (opposite) is etched in limestone

grey and placid-looking she is holding up the same orange arches

alone across from -

she-who absolves the homely curse it seems

(wheel of fortune)

They plummet over the wheel out of windows in flames churches fill

those people lay a flaming-table of votive candles hand-still in the no-breeze

with wishes,

wishes ceremonies prayers the grime of it not visible in the blinking flames of the votive table

its orange however :

an explosion of twisted steel and not the wood of the inescapable circle

black stone etched with a wing picked up at a beach a building site a roadway a track in forest

a near fossil of crystallised marks but a lie 

no bird made this stone with its neat talon from his own sacrifice of blood and claw thereon

 it weights the cards as they fall orange,

- and blindfold(ed)

like petals