Moment

-I-

Stare, stare
at those figures frozen in motion,
the pale splendour of lifeless limbs
shivering in the soft ecstasy of light.

Nine nights have I wept for you;
the inexpressible horror of beauty,
the pain, the quaint handlessness of your soul
so helpless, in this mad dance of light.

-II-

In the grave mouth of death
you placed your purloined soul,
so careless in oblivion.

The mad dancers of the night
brooding over this emptiness;
I have seen it all.

What can I not tell about you;
the strange moment of flesh
with entangled limbs speechless in awe.
Stare
stare and thrust,
with the strange harmony of motion;
your breasts turning into branches,
your lips into leaves,
shattered in flow and form.

This death of the moment
frozen halfway between form and flow,
writhing in the vigour of unfinished calm.

White darkness of stoneflesh
disrobed and twisted with the precision
of the mist on a soft December dawn
caught in the throes of night and promise.

At the third stroke of midnight
the door is ajar
between sleep and ecstasy.

Emptyless space, simultaneous morphs
into rootflesh,
calm punctured silence
between loss and desire.

The shiver spreading from the branchbreast
as we speak,
the depth of desire along the barkskin
as we watch,
the meeting of time and flesh
in morgues of light, beyond moment.

Between truth and eternity
lies the immortal shadow of the moment of change,
and in this region between sleep and forgetting*
sits perched Bernini’s Ghost,
brooding over the corpse of time.

*’Sleep and forgetting’ has been borrowed from TS Eliot.