A girl in a shabby green coat, on a railway-station platform

motionless sap.
ogling your shadow,
you have much thinking to do.
has the potassium kicked you
in the arse yet-and got you going?
you are such a bent, yellow creature,
much like that banana you have
hanging from your mouth-
you are some kind of ogre.
there, now you look more like yourself.
foolish man.

Box three, spool five.
your fingers dance with it
as you put it on.
nothing so precious and
fragile as this tape with it's
faster, faster-slow
hypnotized spinning.
you know the exact-not quite
you know the exact-not quite
you know the exact-not quite
oh for heaven's sakes:
you know the exact-moment.


a younger man's voice, curses-
but he has such a way to sculpt a woman.
first with a curved blue bite
into nothing but a heartache-
which rather makes sense-
you get the sense she is a windy creature
who wraps around his brain-
until it is icy and lost in it's own howl.

curse this younger man,
who has such a way to sculpt a woman
as a memorable night in March.
Not April, or June-
which rather makes sense-
not many forgettable flights of fancy happen,
in March, I suppose.
but how many miracles of fire
are performed on a soggy sloop in spring?
Not many.

CURSE HIM, the idiot sap with no
foresight, who has such a way to sculpt a woman
suggesting she is the great granite rocks
or is she the foam flying up
or is she the light of the lighthouse
or the speedily propelling wind-gauge?
or is she the hidden dark,
or the only thing in the clearing?

what a way to sculpt a woman
making her your "unshatterable" association
your dissolution of storm of night, of light?
making her your understanding
of how to make fire, you ape.
curse him? CURSE YOU!



No, there was only one true
way to sculpt a woman
in the lapping waters of the
upper lake. Her malleable peachy
nature bathing off the bank,
she pushed herself out
to the stream and drifted.
Only a goddess such as she
can afford to stretch out still
on the floorboards.

her head resting easy on her hands-
Oh there is a good God who
knows where to blaze the
sun to shine it down on
such a form.and still to hit
her bare fuzzy skin with a
bit of a breeze,
her skin, her smile,
the water nice-
and lively.

"Picking gooseberries," she said.
picking gooseberries.
what a muddled head and yet
you were the one who
was hopeless and with
no good going on.
she agreed,
without opening her eyes.


Look at me, you think
and she does eyes just slits-
Oh merciful God, what a glare
to let in. or what a shadow.


Let me in. (Pause.) We drifted in among the flags and stuck. The way they went down, sighing, before the stem! (Pause.) I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side.Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited.

What remains of all that misery? A girl in a shabby green coat, on a railway-station platform?

No. Turn off the tape
for really, it is just your
only record of a memorable equinox.


inspired by Samuel Becket's Krapp's Last Tape