i drive through an urban august evening sticky with half-dried sweat
the threat of autumn a distant rumble. those who remain behind writhe
like thunderflies black and purposeless suddenly out in swarms
let loose by the departure of school-child families flung off in grumpy diaspora
to bicker and sulk on foreign beaches under the au pair gaze of foreign skies

it is may. my unhappy month. i hide from flowers and slightly drowsy bees
interned in my bed. with you there, this piece of furniture is an empire
greater than the world has known. learning the language of your skin
a braille chorale sings out joy. in two minutes we have talked for hours
i could not translate that moment's minute grandeur in a thousand years

early on a february morning, almost awake, i cruise down a frosted country lane
not seeing (in the hedge's northern lee) the asphalt-coloured ice until i skid

and swerve
regain control

then slide
into a field, burying my car roof-first
into a reluctant soil unready for the forced insemination of spring seed

notes

the tao te ching, as other early chinese texts, was written on individual strips of bamboo which were then strung together to form books. the strings were prone to break leading to potential loss of individual bamboo strips and errors in their order when they were restrung

various names for god appear in the old testament. jah appears in psalm 68 verse 4; yahweh is a conjectural reconstruction of the tetragrammaton YHWH; elohim means lords and is grammatically plural although, because it was usually used with a singular verb ending, may have a singular sense; adonai is the plural of a respectful term, meaning sirs or masters

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