your defoliant shadow leaves you with nothing but sunlight

 

crisp air swings its murdered hand

in contrast to the falconer’s glove

that waits for your father to land

 

as the wasp stings the mirror your image swells

 

the tonal palette you emit from your displayed absence

yet to arrive as it takes your hand and you both walk

eyes closed through the crushed mineral state

into the monogamous colour theory of one man

 

the figure as a trenchcoat keyhole

imagines itself unmarried to an open door

 

in the nostrils of the approached and the approaching

sulphur unpacks the cold

 

in one downward stroke

the thermometer is painted over

 

at last count mercury was not elected

to the register of favoured poisons

 

simplicity is simply the simple white pill

on a push-mower tongue that is never swallowed

 

this is the possibility of who the coat carries in its pockets

 

lint as raw fibre unspun to memory

deep in the digestive tract of prospective touch

 

[ …  gust-powered . . . the pincers

from a single chlorophyll claw

breaks open this mock ovoid head

to disperse the conscience in turpentine fog … ]

 

angles are never alone until they’re measured

 

vertical + cranial = horizontal

vertical + cranial = horizon(  )

 

grey poles as the three graces

sucked through the straw

of their own shadows

 

here is the restraint you sift through a soft valve

only to recapture it using an eyelash

as fishing line

 

the exotic servitude

with which you climb inside

plain things

 

the skin lisp

of the wall as it walks

through itself

 

the theosophical errand

you continue to run to yourself

in order to forget what the message is

 

as always or not at all

art allows us to comply with its request

to retrace the steps that never occurred

 

what you can’t see is joined at the lip

 

what the eyes exhale to surface

though pores for thought

inculcated in sleep from medicated colour

 

your request to blindness

to confess its symmetry

will be ignored

will be accepted

 

they would have us sink worms

as supple tent pegs into each other’s graves

 

 

 

silent approach – c. 1924 – oil on board by Clarice Beckett – collection NGA. After her death, her former teacher Max Meldrum graded her work based on how closely Beckett had applied the tenets of his theory of Australian Tonalism.