Onsen

Seal-skinned, you pour buckets
and buckets of water over your hair,
straight as the village roads
we drive on. Your body, your limbs
are long and mirror the furrows,
the angle of your rake.

I am the fluorescent pink seeds
dropped in the line you have created,
luminous and out of place.

Sweet cheek

In the beginning we sat in front of the computer
and tried to translate each other’s incomprehension.
I wish we had managed to find our version
of ‘you will become a fortunate feeling’,
‘ecology is a form of tenderness’,
or ‘you are the because’.
Instead we turned off the screen,
let our hands do the rest.

page 215

From Loch Fyne with love

You have two faces and no guts
but you are strong under the armpits.
Mr Prettyman, you use your long kipper nose
to peep over your shoulder. Your eyes
hold the dram against the sun.

Herring-monger, you are a kipper nut
smoking your splits, butterflied
along the dorsal ridge.

You send these russet flattened fish
out across the seas—shrink-wrapped
with a flower of butter.

Night swimming

The sky is roomy as a piece of glass,
she ticks in Trans-Pacific time.

The sky hangs heavy like lightning on contact,
she wears peacock blue and her eyes are matching.

The sky is clapping and bells clanging,
she listens with one ear.

The sky sleeps in feathers,
she is an empty breath.

The quoted lines in ‘Sweet cheek’ are Japanese and Arabic interpretations of English phrases. ‘From Loch Fyne with love’ takes its inspiration from Oxford English Dictionary entries on the word ‘kipper’.