Colour for T.S.Eliot and after fourteen poets The purple stole away from the skins of plums Everywhere we turned became a maze of colour I protect you with an indigo coloured whisper You curve the ends of my black and white day Coffee brown, is mole, dying leaves, dry earth But smell led me here, the smell of yellow The blue, white and red stripes of exotic confusion Moving over the green gravel of a formal grave I wet my lips and a blackbird flies out of my mouth Faces in the front row, silvered in screenlight, focus I thought everyone knew what was meant by sugar-paper blue Tyrian dyes and flax and peacock plumes Gold and yellow where the clouds crack and break away Anemone-blue mountains outlined against the pearl-grey morning Colour was first published in Live Encounters Fishapod out of Watercolour The Spring sea arrives in flailing sage, clutches lime-white soles with the early hunger of sand. Seeping, air-bound, caught on the cusp of an inner eclipse I turn to olive water. Nothing …