Sunset with frost, Monica’s front window 
After the painting by Robert Rhodes
 
This could be how the world began, heat and frost:
a molten land between the two, where first flesh
quickened and a giant rose in the great gap.
Then the gods brought him down, split his skull
and made the vault of sky from the upper dome.
His body became the earth, his blood the rivers
and the seas. His bones became mountains,
his crushed teeth boulders and stones and pebbles
and sand. One gray eye lit on fire and became the sun;
one stayed milky cold and was the moon.
Wolves chased them across the sky. From his hair
the gods wove trees, whole forests guarded
by ravens and owls. The maggots on his flesh
they made into us, who delve and plow, and build;
struggle and war, conquer and destroy; paint and sing
and make up stories against the coming time when
seas boil and the flaming sword burns everything to ash.

Wet Evening

​
The kind of scene I love: ten past
six by a clock fixed to the top

of a building in the foreground, sun
just two white streaks behind olive

green clouds, rain glistening in gaslight
puddled on crowded George Street,

shining from street lamps
and ground floor windows, carriages

and human figures fused
in the background, a black mass.

Behind, a faint skyline and one high
steeple far away. So wet you feel

submerged – scent of leather mingled
with wet wool and horses’ flanks,

wet ankles, wet hair. How sweet
to feel rain on your face at this fading

hour, your weary body trudging home
with every sense alert, entangled and alive.                 
 

Untitled Owl
 
This poem is not about an owl.
The owl that flies across this white page
into the dark woods

will never emerge in your dreams
with its deep-set eyes
and blank face, its little hook of beak.

A white feather falls on your doorstep,
but by the time your coffee gets cold, it dances

down the street, snags in a distant bush,
or slips down the sewer to make a nest for rats.

There was a witch who could transform
herself into an owl,
but she didn’t like it much.

The spell was tricky, and involved
foul-smelling tea and quite a bit of vomiting.

And then there was the issue of her breath,
which for days would smell of mice and voles.

Still, there were the woods at night,
and that great span

of wings, her strange face
staring back from a moonlit lake.
​
So maybe once a month she would slide
into herself
like a switchblade knife
to penetrate the darkness there.

I confess, I would like to be an owl,
some nights, when a sea breeze
blows summer heat away, and pines disappear

in shadow. I would feel my wings
riding a little tsunami of air, my feathers

blowing their way into your dreams, a scattering
of words rustling in the dark like little nests of flame.​