A Promiscuity of Spines, and: Dragonfly

A Promiscuity of Spines

You have a synecdoche dream."One day, my dear, it would be sweet;It would be very fine indeed, one day,

If all your books and mineWere stacked against the future,Packed on the same set of shelves

Under the same star-proof ceilingSomewhere with a mountainAnd maybe a lake."

My Barnes against your Hoban;Your Mitford on my Matheson—I get the picture. Good. It's good

And fitting that this should be so. ButThere's one thing.There's just one thing.

I promise that I will not be put outIf among your books I findA dedication from the past, from

Someone wholly unlike meBut close to what you'd had in mindOnce, before you changed it

Or he changed;Long before I came to beEven half a bookmark in your week,

Let alone a finger lightly touchingYours between the second glass of wineAnd everything.

But you may take exception if you like,To the Miller and its "velvet kitten kiss"For who would welcome that among her Penguins?

That one's gone, the one who wrote those words;Was gone before her nib was even wet. Off to beOutstanding in the snow. And yours are gone.

I do not mind their traces and their names;I do not mind their strokes, their wit, their style,Flat against the grain.

Dragonfly

Nothing will make sense of it. One day all yourLove songs come to seem like overreactionsTo misconstructions. Tsar Bomba ignitedBy a safety match on splints. And even thoseWere never redwood; they were barely even timber.

There is no more fire, for nothing demands it.Your lips and tongue as good as sewn with gut,Never again will you sing another's miracle.

Your eyes might never blink again for you will riskNothing but this: the almost imperceptible,Continual accretion of photons that layerPalimpsests of light, without meaning or weight,Green on top of blue on top of red, darkening

Until your lenses polarise, admitting nothing,Not even the sky. Your ears burn down the doorsWhere once had come in saxophone and rain.