the contour event

you can easily diagnose from any point here
the voice to the burned out trees scattered

or the hair or posture any of it clear enough
as downed fighters around him where he lays

to sleep in fact a nightful of pathology in which
a physicality of pain is recast as predation

morphologically knelling up sequences of seashore
mutations then throwing itself out again and back

by the absence itself of love look look again here
at such dryness and extremity such sexuality

of the obsessional go and ring these bells
upon high they are the languages of trees

under which are buried siblings and pets
slowly unwinding themselves chemically

towards rivers of remembrance and a realism
of grief that grows as a new arm a leg a sense

of the phantom shouting at dawn naked
among the lurchings home O if only we had some wits

about us ready to record everything and play back
the figures behind them and us that disappeared

but were seen clearly riding at those times
just before we woke on doorsteps with the clinking

of something that had just turned the corner
still in our ears but forever lost in the start

of where it cries itself into waking
then how we would look and look again

.
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