Murder Mystery in Jardin du Chizle


Once of an evening – a woman
with an arrow of mouth shouted:

‘Come this way my sir, now! Enter
our sculpture garden!’

The leaves were a lot of lips
that advertised delightfully, so I agreed

with yellow sighs – sighs I’d not seen
leave me before.

The garden of sculptures, it turned
out, I found

              out,

was all bits of me strewn through
wild woodland & well kept & clipped lanes

              alike.

As I rushed (with the chair of my skeleton
strapped to my back; the clean gleaming chair

the arrow lady had passed to me as I’d dashed past
her too-tempting silhouette towards my fate

of trunks & grasses & gasps of solid shapes)
as I rushed (like a clock-struck rabbit leading an Alice)

              as I rushed each

of my memories became pigeons startled from roosts.
I walked briskly as birds of me clapped up &

away into space, away
from my shady frame. Suddenly

              I

stumbled upon some
of my brain cells floating like oversized

dandelion seeds entangled in the branches
of spicy pines. I could

              see

two or even three, maybe four
coppery thoughts gleam. O,

it was my navel that shocked most: ripped
away from all of me,

not even left attached to my ghost. The sculptor
had fashioned a mound of my centre;

a spiral of ground grassed over;
a barrow as tall as a small house lost

to the grasses & massive insects
eating my voice. I rushed

              past.

Didn’t stop to sit on my skeleton strapped
to my sweaty back. On the way

out the arrow-mouthed woman blew
me a kiss that thwacked through

the thin skin of my shadow brow – and so sprouted
as a bronze blackbird bleeding

the chimes & clinks of some busy soul

              chiselling.