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[Furies, ‘your steps are dark’] Forests run howling for water; air shredded, wingbeats. She cannot look into the burning, curls under herself as if she were unborn. Walk in my footsteps. Her hand. He leads her over the border, into dark, out of sight. [Colonus, just out of frame] Halting, lame. Halt where a spring overflowing a basin returns his face to him in silver and sunlight slipping over the brim through wet, open hands, into black earth. He sees the place when he knows it. No one can look direct into the sun. [Light. End here] It begins, no way back, in a dark room, something taking the imprint of light. In this photograph are constellations, musics, scribbled maps, our chancy travel across peopled time, and there is no exposure long enough to make this visible. James Turrell’s Deer Shelter Skyspace, Yorkshire Sculpture Park Temple, lake, deer shelter triangulate arcadia’s vanishing point. Leaves skitter in the empty summerhouse; beyond the sliding water shadows herd beneath the arches of the deer shelter. * Walk into a concrete silo open to the sky. There’s nothing to see here. What does nothing look like? 8 New Poetries VI
page 29
Flying over the curve of the Painted Desert, air opening like water, barrel-rolling over fathomless sky in Pyramid Lake; farm lights at night far-flung as stars. At dawn, the hangar shining: a memory of sunlight on a wall. * 7.30am: mussel shell; split of gold; skirl lifting and spilling, 1pm: ragged pennants; vapour swags; sting of rinsed shorelines, 5pm: damson stain; smoke feathers; ink. That this is nothing – how do we live with this? We stare like deer into the event of light. The years before That time my grandmother went to the sixpenny hop in the years before they became the years before Tom Baxter and Rabbity Dixon played through the roiling night of longways and hands across down the middle back again and turn and K-K-K-Katy and Haste to the Wedding and oh how Tom could play the birds out of the trees with that old concertina pouncing and bucking high jinking over the honk and growl of what moved in the forest at the edge of the tune Rabbity sharp and quick as his traps to snare the beat sending the tambourine’s silver starlings whorling over and over towards a room she walked into one afternoon when Will ran into the kitchen come down to the shop you must come and see this there’s a man here says he’s a and there among boxes of collars and gloves resting palm to palm the day quietly folding its hours away she shook hands with a lion tamer Judith Willson 9

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[Furies, ‘your steps are dark’]

Forests run howling for water; air shredded, wingbeats. She cannot look into the burning, curls under herself as if she were unborn. Walk in my footsteps. Her hand. He leads her over the border, into dark, out of sight.

[Colonus, just out of frame]

Halting, lame. Halt where a spring overflowing a basin returns his face to him in silver and sunlight slipping over the brim through wet, open hands, into black earth. He sees the place when he knows it. No one can look direct into the sun.

[Light. End here]

It begins, no way back, in a dark room, something taking the imprint of light. In this photograph are constellations, musics, scribbled maps, our chancy travel across peopled time, and there is no exposure long enough to make this visible.

James Turrell’s Deer Shelter Skyspace,

Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Temple, lake, deer shelter triangulate arcadia’s vanishing point. Leaves skitter in the empty summerhouse; beyond the sliding water shadows herd beneath the arches of the deer shelter.

*

Walk into a concrete silo open to the sky. There’s nothing to see here. What does nothing look like?

8 New Poetries VI

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