Sex and Affection
Poems by Elizabeth McKague
I.
Your unspoken silence
is lost when you speak.
I must be losing something,
beginning to tell the obvious.
You just get a token of what’s leading up in your mind
and the medieval drum moves
to almost touch the pineous painting,
but gets lost in time.
Measure.
It was nice today in the Shakespeare garden-
(beside the nautical clock, adjacent to the miniature, Greek pithoi
where the three naked, porcelain angels
kick up their wings).
Night flowers shining.
II.
“He probably doesn’t even know what it was.”
“But then he must know something,
because it happened.”
III.
On the cliff edge of life
Not to fear the obvious.
A blank canvas trying to conclude itself
On track with a contemplation of the wind,
a puddle of beams on the sea,
liquid association of the view.
It’s like glass.
It’s supposed to be about feelings,
So, where’s the mood change?
“You turned the light on.”
“I did.”
They’re all included.
What we’ve got
is grounded in beauty,
scaffolded in beauty.
There are no loopholes,
it’s not a Russian building
nor a Russian doll.
Nothingness is my nature.
Push into the sky another breed of blue.
The mountain is created by power
and is resolute upon its call.
IV.
What is this?
Brahms,
I know brass when I hear it.
V.
This is real.
Yeah, I know.
That’s the help and that’s the problem.
Don’t take it, look at it.
The soul comes through the mind,
it is it’s product.
It is better to write a free word, endless poem
than to write about contradiction.
VI.
“You lost one.”
“I got it back.”
The shade of the building is more important
than the apartment.
Across the Atlantic,
Colour without the you.
This is where I will pre-empt.
My tongue flying toward your cunt at 500 miles an hour.
VII.
Dead, opaque eyes
A graveyard the moon disregards,
caught in the glint of reawakening stars.
The waves come in waves
and each jettison tells a story
So that by the time you read them all,
you know the history of the rock,
you know its birth.
The sunset becomes a mirror
of our mirror
and the hawk says, “Who...”
An invisible chapter,
and then
of the song.
Sea view
close in the arms of the sea.
That’s where we are in the morning.
Frame of direction when then is no frame.
Just one grand reflection
that spans the universe.
VIII.
“You think that will do it for you?”
“We’ll have to wait until I look away from the mirror.”
Brush strokes, fully ground wings.
The branch,
breathing,
near your house.
I am sufficiently getting ready to leave.
Corkscrew smoke rising from the telephone wire
in the rain.
Long ago,
before shadows had lines
She knew him.
You know it’s working
when it can’t break.
When everything cuts into freedom
and the war had forgotten its cry.
My eyes,
your eyes.
IX.
If it has a hood, it’s got pockets.
Finally, the bricks are emptied
of all space and lapsed time.
Child cave
without walls.
Hallelujah.
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