1.
I will say our secret...
a stone holding its own weight
we were lovers holding each other
warm in the unfolding
there was a garden of silk
soft buds of fabric perfumed like violets
I fell through the Genesis hedge and topiary fig
Pass through your fingers like a bead of rosary.
into your walled garden.
Iodized underlining fruits, red cardinals, tigers with needle eye teeth and twisted vines of
mandrake copulating roots entering her raw pulp, the whore's paper peeling in leafy exfoliation.
I enter the whore's room and wait while you render a
pencil drawing. Rousseau foliage on a whore's lips
Her body painted with sex
nude silk rope
A resonating box with strings of different thickness, tuned to
the same deep note. Deep rolling world.
She is submersion, genesis sail boat and orgasmic stone, lost
rosary, organic
lacquer, portable sun, stalactite assassin without foot prints.
balsamic of kiss slips from lips
every seed is given away to another
part of ourselves
in the incense of heart
we become sleepers of each other
twenty one grams
the weight of a soul
unhinged
the growing wings move forward
2.
Hold on to the weaving, the flax basket with a paua shell
lock, hold on to the stone carving of a wave, gold leaf carved
to its navel, the plaited string that ties the bone hook from
the rib of a Moa bird, the moss and feather shoes of a man
who was pointing the bone in the sacred bush.
3.
a photograph of a man gazing into receding landscape,
The scrim of him
watching me like he used to.
Another print of you lying almost naked,
A batik across your belly, secret folded up in silence,
tangerine strips with lime, a marble landing on saltwater blue of frozen sea.
You bite into.
Hair a bundle of warm wheat,
grain in sunlight.
Rocks of her spine,
the land belongs to the past.
There were fence posts rubbed silk by his flanks
Animal shadows hardened on the banks
gold smuggled in hem of my skirt.
What astronomic path did you take to get back home?
The answer is on the engravings of silver...someone left the
argent blank.
A ghost writes on a mirror and places it opposite the sleepwalker.
Then he reads the inscription reflected in his eyes.
Remnants of finite difference between life and a ghost is
breath you inhale and exhale.
An air full of marble dust
He had cut through the chapel walls when he was walking inside my dream.
I always dream of a woman with green eyes.
4.
She pulls on night's shirt: dark robe of celestial fabric, someone
painted stars before she was born, tore animal patterns from
mulberry paper, phallus monolithic, theatrical shapes
etched in a far piece of earth. When wheat fields flattened and
mistral breath spoke to her in the womb, she was sleeping in
the uterine shed, sentient being she knew she was, albumin in blood
& placental jellyfish & the curve of her bare shoulder by which we
map her belly & hips & breasts; slow suck to earth contours;
call her pretty & heroic, her eroticism stalked & hunted,
when she gives, she gives by her own laws...
5.
You are the Man who carves a whale bone into a hook and ties it on a string around my neck.
The man who loved me on a whore's mattress in a student house. A room full of nougat
freesias stolen from a garden while dogs were barking.
Between pavement cracks he leaves a message...there are cat flowers… cat-tail, catmint, catnip, and cat's-paw, arrowed in the concrete.
winter night waiting until dark,
our shadows grated together in streetlight & sea fog.
In the ruins of us all
they remain for a long time,
like inky souls
6.
An Artist's trace is memory charcoal.
in the afternoon you teach me to draw primitive
secrets of breath and space
I will draw your wrist where heart beat pulses to spine
Where do you want me to lie?
brush catching teeth of paper.
how pencil lead releases to parchment with each stroke,
if you force
the pencil hard, you pepper holes in the linen.
Rubbing with his fingers
charcoal traps softly. An image emerges that way
An identifying mark is a symbol that never changes.
Wet charcoal turns to black stain like earth rocks that burn in winter fireplace.
Are environment and climate absorbed in creation?
photographed priests preserved in gold,
cold blood an empty shell on pavement,
A human body can not last
Seven days without drinking.
Scratch zinc plate; recover her naked image, and then you,
7.
I found a lifelong taste for you, your voice filtered in my throat; I breathe you
out, my lungs fill again with the breath of you, fossils of our time, sometimes
I feel a palace of glass fish bones, breaking inside my heart.
How do I cross the Bridge of Gold?
The bottle answers with the sound of broken glass
I am afraid of spiders, living with lies and lightening. In the distance a man hears violent
bombs of thunder crashing off rails. The splitting of an hourglass, cracking of
knucklebones. The warmth of his body against mine, familiar now even in dreams.
His arm curves around my belly, the weight of him holds her in.
8.
Out of the circus tent into the Jehovah comic, distract the
lion catch yourself by the tale, silver fur in your mouth, fetal
teeth under the pillow, distract the whore with a broken
chair, shaking hands with the mannequin again, holding a
gold ring inside your palm, an oak tree on a rock belongs to
the dead, running down the dirty road forever, when we all
fall down, fable and broth in the chaos, you were born by
accident in a night of shot down stars, a moon washed by
night oceans, we are orphaned in a city of memory and
theatre junk, In the house you find traces of us — a white blossom, an incense burner with powdery warm ash.
9.
In his canvas world, an island sun sets the color of exquisite
persimmons delicate grape vines entwined, a moist kiss left on
his model's lips, sweet stain of magenta, wild doves caught
in lime wood cages, the artist leaves images after himself.
10.
I want to be filled with you, skin, muscle, bone.
photograph you
a room full of sun as it breaks into rainbows
through glass
you are wearing faded blue shirt,
the same heavenly blue
of painted Saints
found in illuminated manuscripts.
In old books, they do not save the image of every man.
but everyman is worth saving.
From a distance, I believe all men are the anointed ones.
What were you thinking about just then?
A field of blue.
The photographs I took of you.
Images of a young woman's body. Hair to her waist.
Standing in a doorway, you were
naked, looking away from the camera lens.
The weight of light
Falling off her right shoulder
All the men wanted to touch me.
An image filtered through an image
And the other girl bending over
eyes looking into his eyes.
****
All images are dreamed first.
Slow, gray, light.
The touch of an eyelid closing
And a timber boy lying on gravel, watching her change.
11.
Erotic encomium of cardamom. Spices make a woman taste
the way you like.
His tongue in her cinnamon room.
A man takes inventory
a woman's culinary
compendium.
Your perfume reaches a man's most primitive kiss on a throat.
A woman of orchard
camphire with spikenard
saffron;
calamus and cinnamon,
trees of ice pear and winter plum.
No rosary of apples: I tell you. An apple is not a woman's temptation.
Remember...a woman took the fruit of the tree in the midst of the garden.
It was purple passion growing aromatic on vines threaded through
peach tree
I watched you: he said
****
Does what we see have more layers?
crossing the river on your back, naked model in your room, ghosts behind ice glass inside my dream.
Stories not as history but the way things remind you of a place, a person, time.
rusty placenta planted under a native fern, the small boy turns around and leaves,
a wedding dress left at the train station.
catching piper fish in a net, frangipani lei
around your neck
Making carved naked foam.
How a woman harnesses him.
****
You should know, part of me is held hostage by you,
whatever you know about me,
the robe I wear is your cloth now,
the secrets & surges in the cells of our bodies,
blind grinding of belly & hips are formed by hands, not our own.
I felt it happening.
****
I'd like to do nude rubbings and Jesus wraps: he told her.
Indigo morning. The end of the month where September falls into October.
It was four thirty in the morning, when I saw him.
I was riding in the back of a taxi cab on the way to the airport.
A man walking barefoot, he carries two feather pillows.
the sleepwalker has the world tattooed on his shoulder.
He escapes from one dream to another.
Harmony in spheres, sun and moon and
planets move in rotation: the Ghost told him.
Still he asked the question of the moon: is there a man
leaning on a fork carrying a bundle of money? Or is what
you see, a man with a dog peeing on a thorn bush? Or
fishing for a whale in a bucket of water? Or a woman
holding a basket of filthy laundry
Susan Blanshard is a British-born Poet, educated in the United States. An International advertising copywriter, she is currently writing a novel from the West Coast of New Zealand, in the South Pacific. Her book, Sheet Stone, Memoir for A Lover is due out this fall with Spuyten Duyvil Publishers, New York.
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