For Giselle Bruckner
Their backs are oil-green and gold
Like Levantine silk: starlings’ slip-creamed
Beaks jab mud by breeze-scaled pools bright
As beaten tin.
On a flimsily cordoned site
Of blue and ochre clay, sharp collars
Of sheet-mesh, partially recoiled from tarred posts,
Fence red brick stacks
Which glow on dull days.
Luminous sludge tracks batter boots as bikes whisk through.
Giselle sweeps crisp grissini in clear soup;
Balancing it limp to her lips.
My ashen feet smell like vinegar: pared crescents
Of pearled horn collect on an abandoned play.
Old hats are kept on top of the wardrobe:
A sulking fedora and a trough-brim straw bowler
With a crimson streamer wait for summer
On Cardozo road.
In a frost-silvered field smoking
Hounds skin taut stockings of muscle
Across glaring grass.
Her leather chair sounds like a Geiger counter...
Translucent rinds of coin-thick corn crusts obscure
Lines of two-tone typeface, improving dialogue.
The cat licks a tonsure of soup from the bowl
And grooms; rasping tortoiseshell coat to a sheen,
Then sleeps. One oilskin ear curled back
Like a chanterelle.
Page(s) 142
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