From ‘The Atom Smashers’

From The Atom Smashers

1
             You’re not,
he asked, coming up the road,
             you’re not
             painting it
             that colour…?

Saturday night I walked down the stairs
with a bucket of hawks and floats,
the wet plaster red on the wall,

dust in the webs thick as goldleaf in any Paradiso.
I swept that room myself, banished ghosts
from the cistern, the wasp-husks suspended by threads.

*

Three times the blackbird built:
petals, wire. Now she must weave
the bones of her children.

Red as a match-head, Arcturus.
But its flame already struck.

*

I stand on the fulcrum built to raise the back gate
...