Two Poems

Notes Towards Something Nearly Allegorical The ground, clay heavy, follows you across the field because you carry it, caught in your tread, grey and mottled with the aftermath of a hobby harvest: the stalks of sunflowers mummified, light as bird bones. You arrive at the back of the property, your feet scraping equine on the unmowed grass behind the house. There is the house again in miniature, in stone, and you go inside. Sitting in the centre of a room shrine-turned and freshly so, you reach into the viscera of a dust green duffle, passing your hands over. When you leave, you’ll pull yourself out of the valley to the tune of a few hours’ hitchhike, moving at an odd-digited limp, carried onward by the skin of your thumbs.   Notes Towards Something Nearly Allegorical Also You’re in it: umbilical building reaching toward the day’s membrane, a thin container of amniotic sky. You’re rising, looking out onto a spread of city that pivots on its own logic, a compulsive Rubik’s flicker shifting nearer a more reasoned end. You’re still and standing, letting leverage go through the motions that confirm your winging upward, box-bound, untoward. Aiming from everywhere, light passes through what it can, sifting particles to say with authority what is solid. The lines below won’t tell you much as you try to determine which directions will cleave cardinal, and move the magnet of you. Glass never forgets how it began: viscous, easily blown open.