Feverfew

 

That night the moon – a pearl bowl in the night sky

tipped a glitter into my upturned face

and I drank it deep.

 

Now I am drunk all day,

and this morning I plucked febrifugia,

to smother my flames.

 

Surely these white stars will heal?

 

Their heady scent fills my rooms, like an animal

moulting musky fur.

 

I dreamt I pushed my petals into your mouth

to soothe your throbbing head.  

 

My realms are sky, the moon is mine.

 

I carry this lunar vessel,

cold but burning in my upturned palm –

a second offering to the gods.

 

 

I Stole a Butterfly

 

carried him home under my shirt, a second heart

fluttering.

 

In my dark rooms I stripped,

wore him as a plumy brooch against my bare breast.

 

I laid out every flower from which he could feed,

gave him ripe fruit so he guzzled and swooned

 

but when he flew towards the window and battered

against the glass I pulled down the blinds.

 

I couldn’t blame him for wanting the wild flower meadows,

beauty draws its double

 

but I wanted him

with his mirrored wings, to reflect back only me.

 

He didn’t last long without light.

I found him cold – wings flat as a fresh new page.

 

I scooped him up too easily, expected something more

than a gaudy fallen feather.

 

Who would have thought he would be so weightless

when dead?

 

No one told me quite how much he needed the sky.  

 

I still feel that extra heartbeat, hard against my chest.

 

 

Please step Aside So I can Write About the Living 

 

You need to get the dead out of your poems

 

you told me but here I am writing of how

a month before you left this earth

 

we stood together in the gallery and I saw you reflected

in the fictive space of a painting

 

your form, gleaming white, translucent

as thin frost, or a sleek gauze

 

floating on the black glass as if airborne

a premature, amorphous haunting

your ghost getting here ahead of you.

 

You, see-through, overlaying an oil sky

which takes up almost all the canvas.

 

In that huge starless heaven,

a white dwelling is as diminished

as a tooth in a cavernous mouth,

a moth flying in space.

 

Your steps are so light

as you walk nearer to me.

 

How brave to paint so much darkness, you say.