(A Bridgetown poem)
When the sun’s
no longer a wrecking crew,
when he’s wielding microscope
and precision tools, and presents
himself as an altogether different
class of brute
meet me
on the bridge.
We’ll consider our pores
in the tempered reflection
of the waters
below
Join me
at my frayed edges
where I trouble the water;
laden it with ghosts muscling their sweat
from wharf to deck to cargo hold
and out to sea
where memory fans
like an installation of clay pots in the sun
(that brute baking them all over again);
the gallery walls, my writhing
Constitution.
Sense me
in my boarded-up doorways
my backstreet tragedies and
cluttered, rooftop dives
Roll with me
in the muddy gutter
of dark experiment, blood matter;
the stained cloth, splattered: Laboratory
and testing ground.
Feel me
as runaway dream. As cage
of lost, stolen and found. As bones
in the back of the closet, proof
the cursed thing could work
and testimony it could not survive.
Screw me
in my mediaeval maze,
in the claustrophobia
of my piss-soaked alleys
with the unsilent
sweating stone.
Meet me
at or near any of those shadows.
I might recognize my numberless parts yet—
up close, the shifting innards, layers,
lines—the comforting alienness
of the whole.