The Week Between Christmas and New Year

The dog’s eaten that part above the moon

And a snorkel of hollow spaces

Between the unmapped furniture

Has smashed blood drops

Into a mottled rack of clover.

Inside there are coaster rings

On sticky vinyl covers, government walls

And pieces discoloured by the way

The sun has filed its tax returns.

Dragged by the rainbow, I emerged

On community centre roofs,

Studying

The way death metal band practices

Have changed the moss distribution

Inside the cathecting slate slants

Of summer windows.

And the days stuck together like old

Encyclopaedia pages.

There’s always some unwritten distance

Between each adjoining piece

In the vagaries of disaster.

A history of rain and powder tracks

on the girls’ dull blouses.

(I can’t see furnace fires the way I want them to be)

When we reassembled the whole thing

Years later

The lake was a choker smashed

In the knee-deep quagmires of stars.

Photographed in the lower-dust lighting,

It assumed less angles, dated:

‘Jigsaw, 1955’.