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in a sheltered garden    in the business lounge the new state scientists invented for very hard things, men break into the heated pool they dip their toes into a dare and dream all night of drowning they look up the skirt of an escalator and see the skinless red muscles of the groin slide under their desk before sundown   men’s papers are square offices with revolving doors inside their folders labelled PIOUTA POA POOMA they boil the ocean into streams of sweating campus hire boys, bird-dogging the postman into a running bullet   in a sheltered garden they are spinning-off non-core competences: effective altruism, saying excuse me, holding doors open, greeting strangers, taking pills with water their plates are always full   somewhere they are bricking up  the small forgotten edges of the universe   let’s run the numbers off the loop let’s think of low-hanging fruit how apples provide colour, their shadow the threat of a back hand    raised to hit     testaments   sin crouches at cain’s door in the shape of a sickle the door handle is a fish pull it and deborah enters, swatting a wasp as a woman brings a king cream in a silver dish she hammers a tent-pin through his head   at the land of nod east of eden a child crawls into a cave of olives his brother is the shrunken bottle people used to take to war your daughter-in-law who loves you, who is more to you than seven sons  hangs a gold plate around her neck    two men hide under a flaxen roof and become windows to the prostitute’s conversion she hangs  crimson thread from their foreheads   boys dress in lamb skins and trick  their fathers into blessings over lentil stew an ostrich egg hangs over a green canopy, our inheritance  enter here cradle it in your hands     away in 1997   3 par 4 and the course stretches out into green across rumbled wooden bridges and manicured trees grasses tease the edge of weeds, wag the dog cracks chestnuts as swampy emerges from a network of underground tunnels he staples a public notice with a flying golf ball: pop bands branding ecstasy as a four-day week!  yellow flags wane half-mast in the breeze   along the bridle way london loops streets of halfidentical houses, a garden metal-pronged with a broken trampoline and power -washed patio there are lodges and round bushes, a princess counts stems of potted basil