The Marlboro prize for Poetry Winner - 1999

    In the building
where she is dying there are birds
in cages that are still, so convincingly,
birds, on fire
with dark
flumes of music. It matters:
the last thing the dying hear.

    We prayed all day
to a god in whom we could not believe;
not knowing how. All day

     those birds singing,
and not tentatively;
their feathers, small coinage
of the body, tipped
from the sills of their cages, drifting
to the floor. The wild iris

    by her bed
riding their remote and solemn brightness

  2

     and whatever gods there are
must love us fiercely
because here is a flower
that has excelled, so shamelessly,
and turned toward obedience
with its sex
exposed; each blowzy
stamen tongued with colour laid tight
to the petal, and like sex

    3

    they rescue only the moment.
Never mind
that being loved fiercely
guarantees her nothing. The iris

     4

    give up their viscid after-scurf of sex.
Such authority of decay. So much
like the smell of bodies after love.

     5

    All day
we watched her
fall away from prayer: stormlight
filtering, lunar and impartial,
through the still room; outside

     rain coming in
across the Mersey from Wales falling
on the small, sealed leaves of the evergreens,
and the birds, fuming into song
and answering, as they do.