Imagine: to ask
and to be answered.

Even the son of god
knows what it is

to beg and be met
with silence.

At noon the black sun
coats his mother’s eyelids

while everywhere
so much beauty.

I pray and the prayer
is beautiful

like the shadow
of a corpse.

I pray and knit
the silence

into something else.
My anger the hot heart

of a just slain fish
still beating.

My womb the wet
yolk of a coconut

losing water
over time.

*

Octopuses live
alone and do not

like to be touched.
Scientists once

fed them ecstasy
to make them tender:

a high dose caused
hypervigilance

a lowered dose
made them gentle.

Affection gained
by trickery

drugs
through the gills.

In this way
I was once married.

Back then
I asked god questions.

*

These last two
weeks of lent

worshippers wash
in spilled blood

together. A mercy
god does not give

his own son
who dies alone

the most human
he could possibly get.

Whether god
or an octopus

the question is
what is life for.

This passiontide
marks my sobriety

from illusion:
perhaps

I am not a worshipper
but an octopus.

Perhaps it is bearable
after all

to ask
without answer.

Like god’s son
I can wait alone

as the seed goes down
into darkness.

You see
the vast nothing

is holier than
the poisoned tank.

Quietly we have watched each other
with the intelligence of oxen. The light

in this room bare upon us, bared. Deep
inside me time is moving. Let us come

without clamour to be sanctified, against
histories and blank bodies and reasonable

expectations. Let us come. Nothing
to be explained away. Kindness must be

the last to go. All else we have carried
can be abandoned with vigour. Thus

we are forgiven; the past is a collapsed
tunnel. Let us kneel on this mattress. Let us

renounce with our hands the refusal
of adoration. Confession without

repentance. Flinching from the cutting rim.
With my mouth and yours let us forgo

old fictions of the immutable self.
Dithering addictions. Performance

without surrender and heaving hungers
making prey. In the scant wet air let us

renounce dowries and contracts doused
in shame of nakedness and the murk

of unspecified fear. Darling between us
let’s renounce joyless obligation,

spending mercy like coins, overripe
grief rotting and carceral. Renounce

all the walls in your head
in my heart everything.

It is simple enough now to say
No I don’t know. Yes I want. Yes

yes I really do want. Despite. Because.
Yes.

“When a bee-master dies, funeral biscuits soaked in wine are put in front of the hives so the bees may partake of their master’s funeral feast.”

— Household Tales With Other Traditional Remains, Sidney Oldell Addy, 1895

Afterwards I take the train and cross the river to the exam hall. I should stay in the carriage until a nearer stop, but a man glares at me for crying so I get off at Waterloo and walk. And so it begins. The life bureaucracy that comes after a death. The awakening in wet sheets, heart sinking and settling into all else drowned. I’m walking and all around me I hear the sound of cannons — carried violence in a child’s laugh and a mother’s scold and the chime of that big ugly clock. You weren’t you — too thin, too serious. I’m going to be late. If I fail this exam nobody here would care. The only ones who do are back home, bated breath and vicarious hope. The angle of your mouth — unnaturally prim. Later I learn they’d wired your jaw shut so it wouldn’t fall open. People are swarming the cloakroom and I haven’t brought my book. Silence in the royal horticultural hall. The sun leaks jaundiced through the ceiling as everyone starts scribbling, stuttered rustle of pages, annotated oracles consulted. I have to go by memory. Once they called Artemis Bee. Did you know? The soul spilled murmurous from her as an insect cloud. Once they believed in birthing bees from ox carcasses. The life of the bull passed into that of the bees, sudden and unquestioned. Where have you gone? Into whom has your life passed? Let me tell you something else I learned from Virgil. Honey, at first, is like water. It thickens as it ages, as it sweetens. When I visited your mother last week she handed me a tear-open packet of ginseng honey. My fingers brushed against hers, which once cradled your skull fresh and sticky from the womb. How lucky, I think. How sweet.

after Dianne Seuss

I who have loved the practical
have fallen a bit out of love
with the practical.

I had never
looked with hunger upon a man’s back
in a dark room. My first mistake
was believing what I did not want
could not destroy me.
Last Sunday I realised
the terror of an open mouth —
what I was capable of
with your fingers circling my neck.
You have to tell me, you said
not knowing the extent of my unknowing.
I could not tell you anything
except your name.

No, not only that —
I also begged. It’s too much, I said.
‍By this I meant dismay had gripped me
by the hair: I knew now the sweetness
of subjection. I could not reason
with that knowledge, and sensing this
you said, it’s me.

You. My whole body unlocked,
maddened by twenty hard years.
I can’t live up to the girl
in your teenage memories.
That girl had her eyes closed
in order to survive, and now
I have survived nearly everything.

Have you been happy?
I have, and I think you have too.
Yet here we are. At Communion
we both turn our knees and let
the holy pass. Neither of us
has due disposition to receive,
only to give. And the sun continues
to pass over us like a mother’s hand.

Here we are — I’ve taken to burning incense lately. I buy it on the internet and it arrives wrapped in sheets of murderous plastic. What else can I do but chuck them in the recycling and bear the slim coffin of sticks aloft, in my hands, into the study, where it slips unobtrusively onto my desk as if by accident? As if I haven’t, at this middling hour of life, fallen prey to marketed ritualism? Devious. At this point I think of you. I wonder if it was all a trick; if in the end that’s all we’re doing to each other, with each other, for each other, playing tricks. And then I’m rearranging things on my desk as if wilful beauty will make the ritual less of a farce. The incense box says Japanese Cypress. I light a stick and watch: it doesn’t self-cannibalise like a candle. It transmutes, gummed powder and wood into ash, matter into equal matter, and then it crumbles. It doesn’t do this with a candle’s inexorable drama — slowly then all at once — but in clean, quotidian intervals: it burns, then it dies, and then it burns, and then it dies. As if at any moment it might pause its dying, hold together a little longer. And each grey death lies curled at the base of the burner like a worm. I wonder at how the end had come so soon for us, so suddenly, with my taste still on your tongue. Why? You don’t owe me an answer, but despite the world not everything is about debt. What do you fear? Me, I fear never finding it again: specificity. But perhaps everyone settles for the general in the end. At the end of my life it will be your young face I see. Herald of newness. Herald of possibility. I won’t send you this letter, but you might end up reading it one day regardless. I hope you do. If you are reading it now, know this: my answer is yes.

then when will we break into Eden?
Night the snow rushes in silence,
day the angels are burning.
Our hope is the in-between.
But you are shackled and reeling
from recent escape. Hard, isn’t it?
Get a grip. I love you.
I have waited long enough.
We are perilous and overdue.
Come. The hedges are breachable
where desire burns through.
Turn and kiss me on the mouth
and we shall slip in all at once.
Look — the sun begins
to remember why it was made.
The angels are draping their eyes
with charms. Minutes now.
Forgetting is past. It’s not too late.
Who would blame us
for being happy?