A Bone In My Throat

Sample piece from A Bone In My Throat

We have only just met
Downstairs at the Chester Beatty Library
We have not touched each other yet

Upstairs Durer's Adam and Eve are contemplating
Each other and the apple
The serpent is already waiting

Upstairs are jars older than Grecian urns
Where lover strains towards lover
Fragments assembled so the hero yearns
Towards a clear plastic mould
A stopgap in scuffed images
Whole stories cannot be told

We have not yet become curators of ourselves
Guiding each other through halls of memory
Reading the small notes by the shelves

You have still time to discover
There are whole sequences lost from mine
Here or there, a missing line or lover

Upstairs in a story within silken story:
Silkworms who shot threads like tiny roads
Were miniature cartographers of glory
For emperors who mapped their own silk routes
To carry gleaming bolts of gossamer
In colours of dreamed forbidden fruits

And we have not yet
Set up paths to each other carrying bolts of brightness
We have only just met

Upstairs are fabulous creature with horns
In Cantimpre's On the nature of Things
Monsters with benign faces, unicorns

Upstairs Usabella's marriage contract has no seal
Though holes gape where a ribbon might thread through
Louis loved another and thought better of a deal
That would have sealed up a century of war
Blood ribboning between England and Flanders
Love pounded louder than a battle's roar

Everywhere there is love and contract
Upstairs in the Chester Beatty Library
Where we have not made contact

Downstairs only our eyes have met
Beneath the weight of silks and histories
We have not touched each other yet.