After the rain a little pergola

At first she didn’t see me

sitting there, the corner dark

and edged by shadow rays

as if it were a mission station

for the night. They reached out

beyond my waist

to her, all neck

as she peered into the obscurer

specimens, lifting leaves

and looking down

into their dark hearts of green.

I looked up at glowing

canopies, speckled chandeliers

of trees, until her orbit

brought her close to me and she

said “God,

you must be soaked”.

“I was”, I said, as one last drop

ran down and past my knee.

Still life

It was no surprise to me

to find Homer toppled

backwards in his chair,

his head the source of a

growing brook of blood.

But I couldn’t figure how

he’d got the gun, all those years

ago. Or why he’d chosen it,

surrounded as he was by swords

and rope. So inexpertly

had he done it that he was not yet

dead, and he just looked at me,

his mouth open wide and dumb

and just the hint of surprise

amid the closing clouds

of fear behind his eyes. 

When Odysseus fell off his horse

When Odysseus fell off his horse
in the courtyard dust, nobody laughed.

 As waves of miniature tsunami tickled
the sides of the water trough, not a stir

in the stable boy, tying and untying
nooses in the shed. Nor did the waiting-girl,

whose aberrant back he’d lashed once more
that morning, work up a smirk

when he tripped on dizzy feet and landed
face first in the shit. In fact, nothing moved

at all. The air hovered still as a bubble
as he got up and dusted down his thighs.

Then one noise - a slow and careful tearing,
a scalpel slit in time, and then a sucking,

a taking in of breath to the hot dark forge
of his throat. Here things done are melted

and recast into words, into another space
where he tells his waiting audience of how

he rode off on Polydorus’ strong backed mare
to fetch the raging boar and have it home

for dinner. And you don’t see a thing
but his mouth, his grin and his tongue

carving up a tale with the sharpness
of a fishwife’s blade, as she guts snapper

and tosses the dark innards to dogs and gulls
whose rabid beaks always look like laughter.