Miss Johnson sat on the palms of my hands,
inside a membrane that I peeled away.
She was a bit like a plucked hen,
her head was the size of a plum
and she wore her wattles like a hat.

There was nothing of the fairy about her,
she was vulnerable, but had no delicacy.
I gave her the little room under the stairs,
where she slept on a cushion in an old wicker basket
and used a lace hankie to cover herself.

She was fond of müsli and grapes
with croutons fried in bacon fat,
and she drank her milk from an eggcup.
Once, I disturbed her toilet under a buddleia
and felt ashamed. She liked to watch television,
especially old John Wayne films, which made her laugh,
even when John was being serious.

She stayed with me for more than a year,
then went off one day with a salesman
and I never saw her again.
Sometimes I use her eggcup at breakfast
and remember the times we shared.
I hope she’s all right.

Among the bony limbs of shrubs,
with their cowled and wrinkled blooms,
between the heavy hips
and the fevered faces of the haws,
above the ribs of an old machine
flaking into rust,
a spinner hovered in his mist-fine home,
gently sucking juices from a cradled form.
As I bent, he looked at me and said:

I made the charm of rainbows
and the distant stars,
I cast my nets in Galilee and drew forth men
whose souls were winged like angels
and the soft-fleshed flies.
Such were my companions for a while,
until I went to Death’s concealing house,
so strangely shaped,
and found I liked it there.
Today, I will climb that tree a little to your right,
to a nest of fledglings on the topmost branch
and permit myself to be devoured
by innocence, so vicious and so pure.

When he’d gone,
I saw that the little habitation he had made,
spun perfect as a snowflake in his mind,
was deformed by the things that it depended on,
so that the marvel of its design
became wayward and unbalanced.
And I thought of him reaching the nest up there,
to discover that the baby birds
had lost their innocence long ago
and flown into summer and its concerns.
And I wondered if he would return,
or disappointed go elsewhere,
to a world where love still has its wings,
the innocents he seems to need,
and the soft-souled ones he dies for.