Sally Ann McIntyre



Stray (beneath the books of winter)


what unpacks of wolves
where i find love the motioning toward
that toothy horde, child

to find the unfinding motioning
to find i
break unfounded

on a hot dry night, a pair
of children stepping
gentle sleepless pavements of grain

cracking up among bookstacks, gnashing along tall dry dreams
of summer riverbed
with a pet sun, in air
tough-husked like sugarcane

& along the wave
phrased crowds of blue

fossil-formed of many skies self-blooming
of many hands spooled long chain letters
yellow white, daisy drooling

dawn through the needle comes
pricking blood from the wadded
cotton, picking gold in the hair straw
a fluttered consciousness,

your fragile smile
knitting these terrible suns
together like friends

and their heat, an opening
between first child and second
roselike, your mother groove, breaking
birds of blood in every jowl & finger

and no i is where you would find
the mean, the centre the third
person i by any other

name: Descartes you can't stay here
was it in spring that the world rested
in its last apartness, a pivot
of matter defining on a lean

a bald assumptive, an old grey man on a park bench
feeding the pigeons

uncorking the wings of the brain
into grey papery feather sheaves and then

let the archive loose
toward a whiter sun, the bald naught of dawn
flown in a stormy litter of its leaving

a waveform of autumn crystalizing
under tarmac an edge

death like a kind of seasonal
misrecognising, i all wither am not to be said again i say
i say

beneath the books of winter, there are undone coming todays
unfruited blooming

in dawn lines, their graphism, forecasts
of your leaving and hers, and his, and in flocking all

to toothraw lines ragged indexical, patterns of land
and wrinkle and sky sites where unfamiliar horizon blues fray






e-mail the poet at sam99@student.canterbury.ac.nz
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