Alex Houen
soiled tu
as if your name meant once / for all / as if a breast were
smoking Vesuvial background in oil paintings / some gallery
in a drizzle so long ago / so sick of all involuntary flashbacks
of you / as cobblestones fold into a field a walk in the Peaks /
baroque / a crow in a cage crowing bait for a fox of other
crows / bidden not by madeleines but accidence / you woke
in a choke asking if you’d spoken your sleep / our cupid
called ‘none of the above’ /
it’s only next day i realise / no /
you’d already gone and i was reading always sheets of news to
block the views / i call this composure for getting ahead / as
if your name meant once
to hell with it let’s name this
place a trip to Pompeii / our face stuffed with carciofi / penne
arrabiata / Macedonia / as a guide appears and forges ahead /
now here is bloodstone pigment on plaster / here where wool
was softened communal in urine / here a local plastered
skeleton in glass-casing facing perpetual a hunting fresco /
there a girl kneeling and begging for face with no nose / light
islands a calf back / second nature / obliquer baroque / your
smile a simile / and a blush is an allergy of others you have to
feeling on the face of them /
see this wall macaronic of plaster
and lava begging for some marble facing / a marble face
applied in bleak Peaks, say / stumbling on / immaculate
conception of rain-picked lamb-skull in grass / organs flesh
and the rest to come / holding the glass case of your hand /
let me view you then / as if your name meant once / your
benedictation / lets go my hand to
please let go my hand in
this / a composture / as attention is plucked sudden by lucky
graffito of winged phallus flying static on plaster but then it’s
back to sleep / now we’re in a crowd of botanical gardens
watching a pitch-black creature / looks like a moth / no, crow
that billows itself an aerial oil slick of one worried eye before
oozing down for the lushest valley /
what vow is broken
there? / those times we snuck into knick-knack shops to snap
off heads of the porcelain figures / I’m still not composed /
but maybe after the ferry to Naples for there in the Royal
Palace ‘Psyche’ is a baroque sideboard of ormolu bearing a
mirror in which your face is what you damn well have to see
At Sergent with Sea Exhibition
Slick light flicks thick from oil laying
it on no land in sight but a text
telling me she didn’t get the work for us
to work to gain no land in sight
but a window-checked suit I bought
in a sale betting light lilac light
on squids of cloud next stormy graphite
sea the aft deck spuming then
‘where are you?’ –
drifting Nilotic’s
where she is now I imagine
trusting her hands on
Abu Simbel’s temples ‘bring a tear’
to her eyes as for me
she promises a souvenir
this sea we’re at
is there oil deep seeping into it
and can it be capped
and is there a point to playing
oyster or should we rig faith to caudal
peduncles of bioluminescent lantern-
fish that bask so bathypelagic they avoid all
oil as much as their own lantern?
No; they’re so ugly
it can’t be right to feed off your own enlightenment –
better to be ‘frightfully bitten’ like Sargent
not only by insects from Capri’s rocks
but perhaps by an urchin rolling up
his trouser leg of sand
his burnished face
a sail oblivious to buying time
– or could be slicks of water pooling looks
segmenting signatures
– or could be a deepest well well
the navy of your shadow
fast encircling to show
that what you scratched out
no land in sight
is indeed how you scored the wrong time
as right fate
so rigged it was
so there we are
shot silk hanging
Alex Houen is co-editor of the online poetry journal Blackbox Manifold <http://www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/> and has published poems in various journals, including Horizon Review, PN Review, Cleaves, Stride, Great Works, Shadowtrain, and past simple. His book Powers of Possibility: Experimental American Writing since the 1960swas published by Oxford University Press in December 2011.