i
Sleep is a slow tide
stirred beneath a fan blade,

and all the little jellybabies roll over
and shift in sticky sweetness on the sheet.

Does it make you uncomfortable,
the sweet sticky and the babies?

The border is a place like that,
one uneasy breath between.

ii
Gulls hawk the night, so distant they sound
like the mother of the ocean,

the baroque sepulchre of her heart
hoarding the sea's bones.

Fish foray over her pearl eyes,
dream shadows played in greys.

Tidelines move and roll restless edges
over shingle and sand, imagine

a quicker land between fluid and solid,
tangible only in the flicker behind eyelids.

iii
I walk the borderlines along tops of walls
careful not to fall

because of all the people
who have only me to call on.

There are blisters on my heels,
and the arches ache with tendon strain;

like me, they carry too much load
but have nowhere to lay themselves and rest.

Now mites have burrowed beneath my skin.
I let them in and so they build

their own metropolis. I try to be a gracious host
although they scratch till red beneath my fingernails.

All their cities balance on a slender limb.
Highrise towers waver back and forth

and tremble as power builds
in the southeast wind.

iv
Don't speak to me of sin,
lives have been destroyed by less.

How will we find a priest to bless
the fragrant hair of babies' heads

if days outstretch years and all foibles
are recorded and recounted

in a litany of imperfection, projection
of potential, from the first breath drawn

on leaving amniotic dreams. Through flesh-tone
barriers
fences collapse, lines blur, skin to skin,

mother and child, whose cradle are they in?

v
These words, pushy, stray the page,
embrace the bark with textured grace.

There is no dream, just a wilder shade of deep.
We remain awake, five sticks, maudlin in their click and tap.

The jellybabies turn again, repetitious, no skill involved,
no effort. A sheet rolls and writhes beneath,
and tastes
of edges.

The blade, honed, slices in the rim of space, the dark eye.

We have not cut the light as yet,
our knifework slips.

See how borders divide, juxtapose, rend asunder,
clarify /
how close they lie, each against the other.

vi
There's a white tower of gleaming stone
standing on an island, languages

burned into it with fire. They dance, a flame
in constant motion. Meaning appears and disappears,

indeed, all meaning illusory. No two people
see the same message inscribed, but each,

the letters his heart would form.
The tower itself does not comprehend,

a tower has no thought to share,
stone and mortar non negotiable, inanimate.

Words, code and key, attempt to span
borders between minds.

The shore, the wall, the conscious breath
skin to air and dream to reality,

are joined, divided, described, defined,
by words.


�2005 by Rae Pater
posted 12/17/05