
Rose Chafer
Rose chafer, green knight in miniature,
Cumbersome in upper body armour
Whose chitin can shimmer gold
At a slight angle to the sun,
Underparts a jointed pure copper,
Shinning the stalk of a white flower
In stops and starts like an elderly beachcomber
After coconuts, tiny head swivelling
As it munches pollen, legs notched for purchase,
Does not crawl, but clings to my knuckles
As I place it on the edge of a petal
Of a pink Jubilee rose
Where it hangs like a jewel
From a pierced lip until it whirrs
Helicopter rotor blades of wings and soars.

September
An apricot left unpicked in August
Has wrinkled on its twig so that its skin,
Coloured like a sun squinted at through dust,
Possesses the folds and contours of a brain.
A Camberwell Beauty, old, to judge by wings
With frayed yellowing edges like worn silk, floats
Down every ten minutes and unrolls a tongue,
Curved like a long black eyelash, to the apricot,
Which must be fermenting as the insect's flight
Becomes unsteadier and unsteadier.
It is the soul of a Chinese poet
Whose verse and life were always much too sober,
Unwilling to enter that space, which is neither
This life nor the next, after many glasses
Of chrysanthemum wine. Now desire
Compels it to suck at a sweet lack of neatness
Until a disorder in the air shakes the tree
And all the poets rise; Camberwell, Peacock,
Red Admiral, towards an assembly
Of birds whose songs and appetites now unlock.
The Blue Slug
A blue slug, the colour of biro ink,
Makes its way down the side of a rotting log
And slides past the fire I've cultivated.
Is this the month that slugs and snails change sex,
This blue a final blue of indecision?
I don't inhabit the kingdom of the slug
And am, alas, only and forever male
With worse indecisions all of my own.
The sun is setting without hesitation,
So colour and temperature reverse.
Will the White Admiral, mostly brown,
That seems to think my cabin belongs to him
And sips sweat from the bald patch on my head,
Now expand and reappear as an angel,
A lord of light with a flaming sword
Saying, "Welcome home, Son of Adam?"

Boots
We carried a treasure without price
On that long retreat from Moscow,
But the blizzard caught and froze us
So our legs stood like fence posts until Spring.
Then a wanderer found and pulled us
So easily from ankles withered and dry.
He sang the songs God made for our redemption.
Though before he could write them down he died.
We were on the legs of a revolution
That babbled truth to a field of hares
And on those of a boy deaf and blind
Who received messages from the stars.
Now we're empty, our stitching rotted,
We'd fall apart before we reached the gate.
So we stand in darkness long out of mind
While behind us a window blossoms with light.

Photograph courtesy of Shamil Khairov
Dialectical Materialism
This is the shop window
Into which you gazed long before we met.
This is the daily view of the world
Which glimmered behind your eyelids
Long before we kissed then sat
Talking all day how we just might,
How we just might, how we just might.
This is the footwear, fur-lined,
For a cold May Day parade.
These are the shoes and boots you considered,
Pouted at their lack of style, then set aside
For dreams of Italian heels,
Something a girl of taste should really need,
Should really need, should really need.
This is the face, now wrinkled leather under glass,
Once so persuasively talking.
These are the consequences, so cheap, so
gimcrack,
Though to admit them is, of course, shocking
Despite the secret catalogues, gifts from overseas
And the girls who sing, "These boots are made for walking,
Are made for walking, are made for walking.
One of these days …"