The eye is the light of the body
- Matthew 6:22

we see only objects, not light

let the light into a room too long
shuttered like an out-house

interior ocular fire: you must burn in order to become

the only one in the red room who knows
how to blush, you know

another: nostalgia for the emotion of the moment

we don't need to see each other to be
in love, that the idea of cleaving can

yet

transform the scent of the nor'westerly
into sweaty flesh, and that you were

to come: nostalgia for the words 'I expect you'

moved like the cumulous in my direction
now this house cannot hold our breath

and that is not the half of it (exhale)

*

blue sky offsets the coming dusk in your eyes
but I'll recite the spectrum into black

a flag hangs like a widower's declaration of love

and white my back turned to
you, you'll fondle my favourite scarf as if

oiling my skin with a smile finer than myrrh

it was borrowed from your drawer
'How long has this been going on?'

you remember the cicadas last spring shrill as metal

move to the doorway
eyes touching every thing except my

expectation of rain running along

outstretched arms: lips slightly
parted, startled, leaving the blue sky to sunset's gull

the surprise of sunshine in tractor-track puddles

*

you are that heroic nude attended by a feminised youth
who is neither noble nor savage: your desire

mechanistic rather than spiritual light

recedes like an old queen's hairline - while hope
withdraws with your Lord from Gethsemane

the sun becomes a lioness in the eastern mountains

where melons burgeon, olives
drop into the mouths of apostles who cannot remember His name

where fires are fed by incense and animal fat

and condemned leaves curl up their noses: you step
into the blue-collar universe: these fruit-trees

in Plato's world of number, ratio and geometry

overflow flies (those minor gods multiplied
like motes from a single teardrop)

how come the material world is spent light, Son?

your Father sleeps in the bed of a river where countless
tourists hiccup like drunks into eternity, learning

'If thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be

water is not holy until it is swallowed
the dawn star is a cartographer's nightmare

full of darkness.'

David Howard