1
Even red, first and loudest, is silenced
as it totters into cornfields and flirts,
as it murmurs and smudges,
shelters under the rock
grunting words for deer, stream, placenta.
From somewhere in the mess of a peony
collapsed on a table, from veins in an eye,
the tip of a tampon, a sore and a crater,
red is smeared with its own absence:
what remains when there’s no skin to paint on?
2
It roughens your tongue and roof of your mouth,
sleepy in the afternoon,
limb wrapped around limb.
At times when green enters your eyes
it won’t leave.
It sends out echoes endlessly,
travels down the centre of roads,
bends over them,
turns them to jade.
It flares, but its great inland seas part
for anything tracing straight lines – a lorry or a cat.
It shields the cub in its den.
3
So hard fought for, ground, boiled, simmered, left to ferment,
it’s the hum or reed in your ear, a string picked steadily.
From morning glory to a vein enlarged by heat
it’s drawn to mist, deflects your eye to space leaking into a wood.
Blue’s always in your mind
when you look up from a job,
when your head tilts in its cup.
4
Drink, drink, drink the desert and sunflower field,
there’s never enough,
urine yellow, the nearly gold
of feathers and fins.
Yellow boasts its elaborate gateposts
arrows of sun.
5
Disappearing tail,
white doesn’t exist. It does exist.
It belongs to sky, to earth…
to sky, no, to earth.
6
Your pupil is drawn into a hole,
cell after cell,
all the rooms you lived in,
sucked into a Dyson,
one containing rosary beads, another willows by the stream.
Black pulls you to the seabed head first,
your fists around a rope, air strapped to your back.
Breathe through your mouth. Trust your hands.
