By Christian McKenna.
The grotesque comb of cypress.
Djinn arms, eight of them flexed on a flank
Devouring my ambition.
Conehead. Emptier of Light. It holds onto Wind
Like a tailfeather.
Callipers between thumb and forefinger.
Its basket of dart feathers, wedged in its lap.
Impressionable hummingbirds fed on a drip.
Quieted. Happy. Limp as fish.
Under the curtain
A treasure trove of deserter assemblies. Mats.
Cypress bleed white and red. In free flow. Anticlot.
Like petals unfurling. Beachballs tumbling.
Rotary sweet lozenges.
Cypress are gramophones hiccupping.
Steeples of cypress. Goading hunger.
Out of a cupped hand, an empty burp.
Redundant crackles. God twitched at the sink.
Waffle-y bark. Openly poison-lipped
and a bad influence.
Its hidey-holes, hernias in its side for me!
To sleep in
And fall out as another rock or cypress apple.
They’re at least upfront. More and more appear
Like odds stacked in a story. They come
Each one strong as a demon. Bolstered as bull-hide
Upholstery for its leaves – some cockerel, ostrich demon
plumed from head to heel.
Others let their hair down to the mud:
A hand-reader’s tent at the circus
A cage under a cover.
I get an amulet, a charm, a small saviour
out of an upturned palm – a wonderful bird
Rare as twice in my life: black with white ear places.
Out of a camellia it pecks pavement
Like its reordering odds. Moving counters on the balancer’s board.
It circles and lands in a fuse of hedges behind me.
The nether branches, volts at fingertips
confluence of the storms.
