Once of an evening – a woman
with an arrow of mouth shouted:
‘Come this way my sir, now! Enter
our sculpture garden!’
The leaves were a lot of lips
that advertised delightfully, so I agreed
with yellow sighs – sighs I’d not seen
leave me before.
The garden of sculptures, it turned
out, I found
out,
was all bits of me strewn through
wild woodland & well kept & clipped lanes
alike.
As I rushed (with the chair of my skeleton
strapped to my back; the clean gleaming chair
the arrow lady had passed to me as I’d dashed past
her too-tempting silhouette towards my fate
of trunks & grasses & gasps of solid shapes)
as I rushed (like a clock-struck rabbit leading an Alice)
as I rushed each
of my memories became pigeons startled from roosts.
I walked briskly as birds of me clapped up &
away into space, away
from my shady frame. Suddenly
I
stumbled upon some
of my brain cells floating like oversized
dandelion seeds entangled in the branches
of spicy pines. I could
see
two or even three, maybe four
coppery thoughts gleam. O,
it was my navel that shocked most: ripped
away from all of me,
not even left attached to my ghost. The sculptor
had fashioned a mound of my centre;
a spiral of ground grassed over;
a barrow as tall as a small house lost
to the grasses & massive insects
eating my voice. I rushed
past.
Didn’t stop to sit on my skeleton strapped
to my sweaty back. On the way
out the arrow-mouthed woman blew
me a kiss that thwacked through
the thin skin of my shadow brow – and so sprouted
as a bronze blackbird bleeding
the chimes & clinks of some busy soul
chiselling.