Ariadne

Busy whisperings spill ashore
Regretting and retrieving
Sleep's jumbled memories
Scraps and flecks of fact
The disordered rearranging
Of kaleidascoped fragments
Stained with too much colour.

Duty gowned in fine-spice smiles
Salt-swollen tears are born
Each chord severed from a whithered womb
The chrysalis cracks and spills her crying
As red milk bleeds from broken jars.

Black sails on waves of magnet calm
Bring cargoes jewelled in blood-rusted iron
And Theseus takes her silken binding twine
And loves sharpest blade
Cuts her pale light's nervous flame
Hooded in heavy folds of sadness
(Her)... The spreading oils unfurl
In his deep watered past
Reflecting futured glory patiently barred.

Guilt rocks her loyalty from father to lover
As she wakes on statued waves of sand
Moulding a fool's unwatered ocean
Where her besotted web of sticky threads
Traps its own innocence
And drowns on two horizons
Of the sea's exiled screams
Deserting and returning
Infidelity's empty dreams.

Fear thins in purple wine
As Bacchus melts the seals
Of a millionwords
That rule the depths
Of seven stars
Death's touch on time.

(March 1985)