Star Matter

Orion’s plump root hangs upended beside the jogger’s wet reflection
on the sand. Or hung this way eight hundred years ago, when photons

left the blistering tub of raw burn, to rattle aeons through the stellar
debris that span in the cold wake of a nova in the Crab Nebula.

The photons touch a carapace of live eggs beneath the jogger’s foot.
He pauses, bent, to clutch his naked knees, suspended, his breath and fat

back steaming. His wet eyeballs flicker over what he stepped on.
Keys are bunched between his fingers as a rudimentary weapon,

in case a dog comes at him. In his throat, the lactic acid gathers
slower than hydrogen might fuse to helium, as he delivers

a milky nebula to the silenced crab. Perhaps he is star-matter,
a momentary collision of waves and particles. The thin sea water

takes the splintered chitin back into itself, and his reflection
resumes position upside down beside the swung root of Orion.

The Long Horizon

When all has been said and done and what remains is submergence
our bookshelves mulched and cathode ray tubes cracked under pressure

and a coelacanth noses our skulls on the carpet as it gums the last fibres,
the freezer aclick with live crabs and the windows gone back into sand,

as an octopus sleeves itself into the driver’s seat of our van
and thrusts out great billows of rust where the light fathoms slowly

over a copse of dead oaks given up to the brown limbs of algae,
and the horse in its trap is hollowed by seahorses into an ornament

having waited too long for an ark, and dust rolls through radio silence
reflected from satellites forever in orbit with no landing signal

and the waves have nowhere to crash except for the odd mountain steeple
where the last nesting gulls batter and fry as the lightning grounds

and there are no more words for rain when the only recognisable sound
is the sounding of bells slower than whalesong as the tides keep rising

with floating canopies of corpses that give up their gas and then sink
past the curious mouths of fish on the long drop back to the cities

and the leviathan rolls in Hyde Park beneath a waterlogged sky
and jellyfish parachute over Tokyo in the wartime flash of an eel,

tell me whose fingers will indent our daughter’s ribs as her heels
dance the mad dance of the Jesus Christ lizard, hurdling the troughs

and the waves in the settling night, down onto her ramshackle cot
with two handfuls of sushi? Who will praise her diligence?