I

Must it always be descent, nekuia or ‘blue-darkness’?
Eros clutched by Thanatos and the nouns, in rigor mortis,
know well their permanence as they, for dead ages, fossilise.

Meet me, reader, at Michaelmas, at low ebb: embark, convalesce.
This morning reeks of sacrifice. I’ve awoken: restless, monosyllabic.

II

Chrome-negativity, a fluorescent nihilo. Seems
like I see your vision-line, but can you see mine?

Bleaching into transparency, ah these merely transverse
wavelets. Or is it a metonym? A larynx emitting
its vibrato? As a showcased musician plays the ass
off-a midnight with embouchure & elongation.

Meet me, reader, at an apposite caesura; pause,
breath, intermittent; music, cool, inhabits the silence.

III

Snow thaws, it always does; an equation factoring
its equilibrium. Meet me before Advent, before
the terrible, immovable parturition. Tell me not
of its recurrences. We attain mystique with oft-
repeated salutations; knowing smirks which conceal
the unknowable with a legerdemain: unassailable.

Meet me for the long haul, else forget language exists.
Such complicity’s preferable to grease-palm compliances.
Pause, hollow cornet, before lift-off. As in the films
of Tarkovsky, levitation’s most becoming to our ethos.

So meet me in the library pneumatic above Solaris.

IV

A tryst’s always cliche-ridden, but paramount
to existence. I will not get too Wittgensteinian
on you, promise. No domestics at the denouement
of a stanza; no hysterics between line-breaks.
You may not recognise my acquired hat & beard
superimposed upon this vacant, inscrutable profile.

So bring in the Mata Haris or the Houdinis,
or those French New Wave flicks, your cinephile gaze
is rapacious; we may not make it through advert-
preliminaries. Still, there are glaciers congealing

perpetual; so meet me before my wound scabs over.

Mark Wilson has published four poetry collections: Quartet For the End of Time (Editions du Zaporogue, 2011); Passio (Editions du Zaporogue, 2013); The Angel of History (Leaky Boot Press, 2013); and Illuminations (Leaky Boot Press, 2016). His illustrated chapbook, Fenlight Sonatas, is forthcoming. He is also the author of a verse-drama, One Eucalyptus Seed, about the arrest and incarceration of Ezra Pound after WWII.

Mark’s poems and articles have appeared in The Black Herald, The Shop, 3:AM Magazine, International Times, The Fiend, Epignosis Quarterly and Le Zaporogue.