My grandson sees a creature in the corn,

inside a nearby mirror … Your eyes soften,and, pale as blossoms or flesh from a pear,your skin glints in the light. Snow falls outsideamid the greyness and the winter cold,yet this one moment it is warm inside.Crouched in the slipper tub, you sit and holdyour sprawling hair in your right hand, and combit with your…

for holy water, afterlives beyond Ukraine,sure heaven neither judges nor atones?Atop tarn uniforms, their sun-bleached skullsresemble cauliflowers amid rapeseed,fodder for architects and lords of greedwho build Earth’s fences and tear down Earth’s walls.No second coming for these meek and poor,no Christ to lean on, anti-christ to blame—they mistake fuse for wick and pray to flamewe’re…

on the four corners of the smouldering earth,waiting for a god to mete out justice,but he too lay among the rotting corpses,a trillion myths and dreams his resting bed.Only the most resilient of the mammals,the lowly rat, cared to attend the wake,devouring the limbs of both the good and bad.And then the winter came to…

to know why it is done to you.”—Ezra PoundYou hear your lungs begin to rattle.This is the rattle mother toldyou about: it comes before your deathas vital organs fail.It is the end of agonizingsuffocation, when life putsa pillow on your nose and mouth.All death is suffocation.Indifferent light penetratesthe jello in your bedside bowl,and hell absorbs…

yet sometimes at night a nova calls you friend,and the moon itself recalls your rise and fall.

older than the joy of loneliness.And again: those beautiful black birds,the rooks, waiting for bits of stale breadwhile three storeys high, I cast them spells.And again: the harsh coughs of gamblersand visionary loons limping to kiosks,and the curses of sobering drunks.And again: the smoke of burning coalwed to the melancholy rumourof faintly pealing cathedral bells.And…