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I offered to build Veronica a house,
she shook her head, told me to build her
one in my dreams; I made it in virtuality instead,
a modular thing, oh the empty echo. I recall
her last: I will my poverty to the streets.
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I wondered how many virtual homeless
I could shelter, my eyes old, my memory running,
rippling, youthful, endless water.
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__________
©Marie Marshall
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that dull fire red dawn gendered f
we hand-in-hand barely able to see
each other smile close in the murk
will magic heal the new wound and
birth the good grey baby day
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__________
©Marie Marshall
I don’t often reblog stuff.
fairest minds we see
waves rolling strong former she
surfacing the fight
flailing hard to breathe
drowning often unbelieved
neath a stilled glass sea
(c) Janni Styles
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my doorway
lets in your first foot
– the house warms
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__________
©Marie Marshall
She sang to me, all about
moonbeams and evening,
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and what’s more we danced;
the coffee cups rattled applause,
their good old brattle –
……….. terpsichore! terpsichore!
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Someone wrote our names
on paper, folded them together;
she burned this, saying
that clinched it –
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we laughed like a pair
of wind-shifted bushes,
danced again, more applause.
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__________
©Marie Marshall
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You unbuttoned my waistcoat
and laid your hand on my ribs.
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For warmth, you said.
For the moon, I replied.
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__________
©Marie Marshall
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your adze dipped
into my heartwood
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where tree was
became your canoe
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by cunning hands
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__________
©Marie Marshall
preach it
I see across to
your even brow
you have access to me
you’re green in winter
my watercourse
look to your own moon
that’s you
my only skyrock
do I detail you?
I sip your light
I sip you
am I your lair?
I see across
to your even brow
preach it
how my hand’s a wave
that parts a kelpfield
I’ve preached how
your hair’s my blessed night
breathe me
dawn you
oh I preach
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__________
©Marie Marshall
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She sleeps symmetrical
her limbs parallel her eyes
and mouth closed to colour
I kneel with a stone of philosophy
and try it to her cheek so
that when she wakes
and the sun bloodies us
we’ll be gold to each other
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__________
©Marie Marshall
very moment of sand, every tiny flame that kisses, or burns when the wind snatches it, each word taken away, she’s a second-to-second savant, and looking at her lover the girl thinks (it all being too loud to say): I don’t give an Etruscan toss where she started, just that she’s here now, hair cut out against the sky, look bold, smile stealing up a flash wolf, a thousand million therefores, brittle in my arms, sharing the wearing away of the sand though sometimes outpacing it enough to excuse me for the breathlessness I feel anyway, hidden, revealed, true, a game, a deadly seriousness, the found beryl in a box of cheap glass though its setting is base, a sip of a new and sharp alcohol with each wary buss, my fingers ploughing her hair to delve the shape of her head, wand, knife, an arrangement of cryptic objects on a tray, the sole plant that grows its own slant in my garden, she wrests my sense from me and with it an entire vocabulary but no matter because she brings a new one filled with sly promise, sly, sly and high, sly and high and salient fit to murder my old and birth in my beginning
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__________
©Marie Marshall
