Jemma Borg
Nocturne
Nocturne
Then the Moon is a painful desert:
no heat or ice bruises and fractures the rock,
no overripe clouds pock its surface with hailstones.
This is what fell from our side: ocean floor, basalts and ash
sizzling, then reforming into this
bare and luminescent skull
over which the great mare, Earth, rises
in signature.
*
Among solutions of rock and rubble,
iridescent planets riddled with sulphurous breath
and a dark in which nothing rattles,
there is this: our absurd realm
of hurricanes and lizards of mountain-spines
above which the stars
like thousands of enlightened souls
are guttering and guttering
and our Earth's flowering in all its effervescence:
brief, as all possible bliss is.
*
Look at Saturn! Falling like a pale apple
along the ecliptic's line: imperfect circle
orbited with ellipses, blue diamond in a ring.
Tilted by an hour, it drops - lens by lens -
to arrive at my eye and light, directly, my mind:
I see it! The distance between us is nothing!
I go to it as though I were shipwrecked
and this my island.
But we are sinking, the Earth and I,
to the right, to the right, and drifting to the left
in the telescope's eye: this apparition, Saturn,
unrooted in the night sky.
*
Midnight. And I wake to find nothing asleep.
The pods of last year's love-in-a-mist
open up, leaking their black moons,
and night-lovers - tobacco plants and jasmine -
wreak opulence on the dark,
under the lit matches of stars.
The Earth seethes with moving mouths
and captured light alive in leaves.
In the garden, with the cold rising up through my feet,
what is it I'm enacting, moth-like, transient?
Life runs against the tide.
It makes errors all the time.