Among the colonnades, Count Pierre stalks and surveys
the blooms. He must select the best-sized to abscond to Genoa,
where a boat awaits for England. The tiny petals bugle
their lilac time. Blurry, tribal. They say they are sterile.

He has heard it said that love can grow
inside one, no matter how rough the ground,
just as a twig thrown into a salt mine will, after many years,
come out crystalline.

Karen Philpott and I would meet behind her estate
on the wasteland. Her bloodless face, her hair straggly, unkempt.
She gave me a Parma Violet and I placed it on my tongue. It
      tasted of iron.
She said it was OK because she used them like the pill.

They say the yews here can ‘walk’ by dropping branches,
which then take root and become a trunk.
Diving into the ground head-first, the cemetery is never still.
They say a yew can walk an acre a year.

‘to step on an island is to die…’

It took me an age to find you,
your final port of call
obscured by a turmoil of long grass and eucalyptus.
On the mossy slab, the words:
EZRA POVND.
Each glyph sharp as a knife,
cut to the bone.

The sun beats, peacocks cry,
pansies shrivel in the heat.
Each of these cimitero is like a Chinese character
legible only from the sky.
Who reads them now?
Just the birds, who, passing over, break flight
and drop like a stone to the ground.

When I emerged from the shadows,
I should have seen light,
but saw instead a deeper black.
Since then, it has been a struggle,
the mornings weightless, cramped,
my life stuffed into a sour gift.
I can no longer sit still. That failure dreams me.
The girl, pale and thin,
her vacant stare at my expectant back.
I remember walking towards the trees, and beyond,
the red chapel, where we were to marry.
In that last turn, I carried with me the earth’s spin.
I should have foreseen my failure,
should have been dutiful, as they say I am,
but there was a sense of falling,
and I knew the song in the seashell
had melted away like foam.
Everything is clear now. Then, the land above
was nothing but pure illusion,
and I understood this as I rose to the surface,
gulping air but losing love.

A man sweeps a field
armed with a metal detector,
the plate aching to find
the sternum bone or shield
of some Saxon lord and protector.

My radar reaches three feet
and searches for the band
dropped somewhere long ago
after losing all the heat
and the half-life of your hand.

The eyes of a submariner
lock on the ghostly green ring
as the sonar scans the immensity,
his finger presses on the monitor
and ricochets into the ocean, one long single ping.