Valence

1.

all day long the gods have been screamingtheir prevalent song of war and preemptive strikewar leaves you gobsmacked words slaughtered in the throat

2.

that widowed ground has been filled with half-grown treesalmost impassable they are topped by yellow-crowned floretsalong each side run sorrow pegs a means to navigate griefagainst the fox-pelt cloud a woman stumbles tear-blindedhalf-demented her mind dismantling itself in a meltdownso profound that buried poetry rises unbidden

tiger's tongue is red at the root like a meridiandissecting the fearful symmetry of its bodymelting in the delicious buttery light of late afternoonyou dream of Petra's rock red caves imagine the bone-drysevered joints slumped like a ragdoll lumpy and disjoinedcranes settling above the old city in their precarious nests

no ladder long enough to reach them no florinof pure gold to take you across that stream of airyou know you'd have to pay a bigger price for death to mint that coinage sometimes you wish you'd learnt morethan just the Hebrew alphabet like raindrops in an eyelashpreciousness is nothingness against silk and stars

in your heart is a great hollow of pain like the chiseledsound of a cello washing away the world's griefa pilgrim on that Spanish trek to Santiagoyour world turns illegible with its multiplying echoesall you can do is eclipse the scream stuck in your throatlike a sow at sacrifice roped to interminable silence

3.

you study the index find grief sitting alongside greedhow dictionaries can turn destiny on a few lettersconsider the difference between a water sprinklerits afternoon sun of rainbows and laughter runningand a gas sprinkler its grey days of mud rag and bonewhat a difference our meanings make of the world

you pick foxglove from the garden hoping for curethere in the corner among the electric ferns is an old nudegreen with moss her eyes crossed her forearmsbroken at the wrist like a museum Venus her breath saltylonging for the nostalgia of flames foggy windowpanesstreets that cobble between old stone buildings

leaping shadows of gaslight in real-world film noirgaloshes keeping out the damp as you stroll the stream'sbank your lungs filled with the effigy of cold airthe Sistine Chapel your destination but Rome on aMonday has no secrets to give up to naive backpackerswith budget time and so you wait twenty years

to see that composition now engraved in your dreamsarriving in Cairo might never have happened had youtraveled a day later not the shock of machine guns in the streetbut in the hijacked plane sour breath a blurred video death you talk the half-dead tree fern back to life gentle it outwhen the time comes to write the word grief yet again

4.

on the tv last night the dead of Rwanda remainwhere they died in the school buildings their bodiespreserved displayed as if part of an art installationhands grasping at air mouths gasping a vacuumskulls and leg bones sorted by size like hats cloths and ragsskins slung from a fork is it ever enough you never know

in advance what life-dice you have thrown the one whereyou get to decide between flat buttons or round oneson your jacket where foxes minks and seals sacrificetheir lives for your pleasure will you be the one whose foliagescreens the pool's liquid arabesque where cigarette smokewafts lazily in summer air not likely these chances are few

5.

at the beginning of every year we ask whetherthe killing spree is over for now all the soldierswho heard earth's tinnitus ringing on the frontlinefly home walk through the front gatecannot explain what they have seen have heardthat there is no longer any grace in the world

in the houses where women keep time with daysover stoves where hunger is the taste of childhoodand...