Zarin - Orbit: poems

I do not know how to hold all the beauty and sorrow of my life.

Crispin or the children chanting, please you, night and day, or the stained glass of the bay as it opened for you when the tide rose to meet the twilight. But never asking for you, who had become a bystander, salt caked by salt to a pillar and even then slipshod with the truth. That swerving eel whose charge switches the current is you, not another, slick tailremorsecaught in its own mouth. * The house a shell and not a shell. Dreaming, I stop at each turn of the stair, kite winder, the balustrades tipped ladder tracking infinity, each door a lid shut tight my damp snail foot, proboscis, wrack fishtail. Gloves. Gloves.

A walking stick, Grandfather in his overcoat, clearing his throat, the winter smell of carnations. I tried to write it down but lost. Missed tread. Footfall of what the dead said. Dont, or do? All ear, I have no hands. * All day a playing card at the kitchen stairs hairpin, seven diamonds, each red gem a step, Mnemosynes daughters, sun-sprockets, whirring to make you listen. On a sequined pillow from Bombay, our Unas papoose doll sits up beneath The Bookof Justice, a pop-up fugue whose page unfolds a toothpick temple, each strut a reliquary, its cellophane banner sheer petroleum. * All day a playing card at the kitchen stairs hairpin, seven diamonds, each red gem a step, Mnemosynes daughters, sun-sprockets, whirring to make you listen. On a sequined pillow from Bombay, our Unas papoose doll sits up beneath The Bookof Justice, a pop-up fugue whose page unfolds a toothpick temple, each strut a reliquary, its cellophane banner sheer petroleum.

By midnight, the card picked up: tears, doom-bringer, futility: the owl asking its question to the barking of dogs. Rusks and cardamom. If Chronos comes to Hecates door, what use is squabbling? Yew-eyed, the cat mews the stair, her footprints red after she steps on glass. * Dusk. Bees Sea of Monsters butts the chair its shiny cover wreathed with lashing tails while eight steps up, the kite winder, littered with gilt ribbons, sails into Whitehalls helter skelter. I sit on the stares.

Fight or flight? Downstairs, on pink ice, powdered ginger spackles the Victorian molds flutes with gold, red lily pollen, prodded, makes us all Macbeth. Tonights story? Trawling for loot, wan Elnora, A Girl of the Limberlost, pulls from her torn pocket a scrimshaw boy, a locket, a painted topeach butterfly she nets a flustered treble note. Were not good at being good, nor being good-at. * The fireplace log breathes fire, pooled amber, bejeweled topaz lighting a goblet. The air is sap. Dragon, the pine log shatters to a monkey face, two knots for eyes, thengone. What else eats itself alive? The child, not eating, rattles her shark spine, wind chimes for Belsens banging door that only shuts.

North, the smudged mill towns carbonize, each one dilated, black iris beneath the days cloud-muddied brow, horizons dorsal fin snow grey, as if the flooded dawn held dusk, the sharks inamorata sunsets skinned knuckle try at holding fastgunpowder sky that drinks smoke from an hourglass. * Each one Echo (spitting image of Narcissus in diminuendo), the seven sisters play bridge on their upside-down card table, their meteor go-cart running on a firecracker. Their swaged tablecloth is the snow sky settling on the dark town. Who could do wrong? The eye of the world opens and shuts. Remember the legs under the table, silk and suede, pine bark, sharp hooves, clattering? We spoke in whispers, hardly breathinghouse of cards where every breath disturbs the dreaming portraits. Shuffle the deck.