John Levett

It might as well be gaslight now That soughs and pouches through the trees, Lost pockets of foxed sepia, The silver, pollen-haunted sneeze Of sunshine and magnesium Caught in the filter of her veil, Uplifted faces drained and dumb, Each smile a failing chemical That hovers in the nitrate’s mist Where moth-like cousins, lunar aunts In gauze and satin gloves persist Through acid-eaten...

The barber’s tubes and rubber bulbs, their wheezing scents, asthmatic talcs, have long since perished with the rest of his tribal paraphernalia; the Brylcreams set in misty jars and the almost medieval singeing straws, wax tapers with their red-hot buds that, smoking, sealed the ends of hairs and left the neck an acrid stem, smart meat, a stook of tendons. They don’t go in for...

Tipped up inside the gleaming room Her wet hair streamed into the sink, Warm water shed its snorkeled bloom Onto her raw, responsive nape; Dead lathers left her in the pink, The bubbles made their charmed escape.

The whole scene was detachable. Oatmeal and lemon, white and green, The towel fluffed on the cork-topped stool, The burst sachet, the malformed tube, The three sides of wet polythene...

The slightest words define the most. Am, for instance, filling up a life, Expressing, if expression is compelled, The body’s territorial extent; Assertion’s power to concentrate A colony of egos in Their dusty settlements of skin. Denials, deprecations, steppings down, Apologies like mornings, wry with mist, Assumptions of uniqueness, leaky dawns, Fluorescent, repetitious...

Day breaks and the night steams North, Its pitch-dark barges heading for Cape Rigor and the Land of Truth, Perfection’s speculative glare; The seas ice over and preserve Their endlessly refractive coast, An empty and eternal curve, Light packed against the polar frost.

These August nights are nothing more Than souped-up evenings, sweat-soaked sheets, Or coming to on...