Ephemeris

The sundial's shadowed to the moon
where it does not belong  —

I can hear a ticking in the dark
like a metronome —

A snow owl perched on the eaves
kills first with her eyes —

I want my grief to be pierced through
like that by time's talons —

But I was born for a very long day
where no shadow falls.

Phantom Fruit

I saw an orchard with my crystal eye,
glass globes ripening and colors bursting
where the light refracted, but it was a mind
orchard only, an ague plot come alive.

I brought you my fruit in a basket of words,
I hauled them up into the attic where
you lived among the shadows and the motes
and I let you feast on my great bounty.

What matter that it was only figment fruit,
as insubstantial as the peel of the air?
You knew it to be so. Even so, you still
parted the seeds from my words-made-flesh.

Great Expectations

The sky looks ill and angry. There’s menace
and machination in the clouds and thunder
grumbles all the way across the afternoon –
A pallid light succeeds the blush of flushed day
and scheming rains weep for darkness.
Gulls fleeing inland fight the circling, briny wind.
All is not well with this scene. A rainbow disappears
and there’s a winnowing at the frayed rim of the sea
where the dark and dawn are braided into one.

What is it the sea bequeaths to the shore?
A doleful music entering roots and rocks
that note by note beats out a green requiem.
The heat dulls and an anaesthetizing plague lulls
drowsy streams into consciousness of loss.
Disembodied thoughts find a fitting current
and then the limbs to haul their freight ashore:
The past prowls the present and chafes
what cannot be willed or worn away.

In pools of mesmerizing calm Narcissus gazes
into the very pits of seeing – his marbled eyes
glistening like the kaleidoscopic eyes of Argus
stare through crystal arcs of rainbow light.
They shine green then grey then moonlight silver.
This is all he knows of the world, a marsh
that barely spans the space a statue’s shadow
casts across a cobbled yard and the rodomontade
of cowards trading rumours in a shade.

Now is the time of night when the statues come alive
and move through mist – stone-faced, they glare
with a grief no history can assuage,
and this is the night of the plague when the school
for pestilence opens its cell doors and unleashes
its truant breed to make wanton mischief.
Something evanesces and looms in the fogged dark –
The outline of a thought breaks the surface of the calm
and guilt rises out of the element ‘tis cannibalized by.

Shame hangs over reflection like the sword
of Damocles. What ghosts the mind but the mind
loaded with itself like a vessel of darkness
floating through the dark gates of Erebus.
Uncertainty is hemmed in by the heart's opacity.
There are wolves in the woods beyond the tracks,
but in the bright precincts only echoes and ricochets
where hunters move among the alders and pollards
and moorhens cry where their howls used to be.

A plash as if an oar slapped into consciousness.
Time’s metronome taps atop a coffin-lid.
It’s always the same note that’s struck
and always the same ones come to applaud.
But why don’t they ever speak out?
Just once, why can’t they say something
Instead of always murmuring platitudes?
They nod and stare in unison into the void
and that’s how they waste obsequiously away.

What can save you for salvation and rescue you
from the dungeons of self? Impulsive pathos
or is it something more elegant, more capricious?
You look to the bruised and leaden sky for grace?
The voice of the dark speaks, but only of belief.
You can hear them whispering in the silences
between prayers of flashing blades
and lovers that were gutted by love.
The spectre of apostasy is everywhere.

All the clocks are stopped by the clock
of your barely beating, broken heart
and all your rites are cloistered in regret
as if guarded by Myrmidons of loss.
You withdraw behind eyebrows into the gloom
of a dark meditation and you cry acid tears –
A bird hits the glass where you weep
by the window and falls dead on the sill:
There is providence in the fall of a sparrow.

Nothing lingers in the jasmine-scented spaces
of the purple night but the lustrous stones
of your blue eyes washed to a dull grey.
A sumptuous stillness descends.
The moon is up and migratory shadows pass.
Everything’s at peace as if about to begin its end.
You know the end is near, you can feel it in your bones,
yet your heart is hardened and refractory
and still loathe to barter wonder for indignation?

ABSENCES ∼ Part XV

Lessness

Red sands shift along the ridge and the dunes eddy
and slide like avalanches down its slopes–
This is the pattern of the East, advance, retreat,
with the sun baking your brain inside your mind.
Across the slave distances the stones are worn rough
and you inhale their windblown dust. Isis blinks
and her sarcophagus sinks and in an instant
the desert floor is swept clear of everything but itself.
I wonder what you would make of all this, father.
Could I transport our love here and find an oasis to slake
your dying tongue, let it whisper and sigh as over the sea
I heard your cry in the emerald wind? I brought you
out here in my heart and now I find you everywhere,
in that Bedouin’s eyes, in this goatherd’s rheumy hands.
The time between us is not measured by sun or sand
and though I cannot read their signs I do know this,
it will soon be time to climb the air to reach you over there:
the light I have you have already lost, and the night you had
will soon enough be mine, so let us go and meet then
between the crescent moon and the already absent sun.

Broken Shadows

Have you been down that road, asked the shadow
 of the man and have you seen where my body’s been?

The shadow without a body was sent to that place
where darkness hammers each shadow out of space.

My life began on the same day that it ended, the day that I was murdered. I saw myself dead on an old stone, draped across it like a Dali shadow. I wondered how I even recognized it. I called out but could not hear. Would someone not come? No one came. Would day not come after night? Day did not come either. Would tears not fall? I waited and then I left my dead self alone on that table of stone. I walked and I walked as if walking somewhere, and at last I arrived, as if arriving somewhere.

The pleas all failed, and the cries did too. What does one call the vacuum where no one hears what is said because it is the dead who speak? I took the hourglass filled with the sand of my pounded bones and I turned it over and over in my mind. I thought it was my mind, but maybe it was my heart’s mind only, or maybe it was the Ouroboros of my mind consuming a dead heart I only thought was mine. This all happened in an instant in the darkness, except now the white sand began to glow blue or yellow. I don’t recall which.

Where did they all go, love’s voices? And why did all the breathing suddenly stop? I looked for condensed sighs on the pane. There were none. There were no words either, just shadows moving faintly through shadows, formless, disembodied amoebas of darkness merging, shifting, splitting, cells becoming the shape of an intention, but then vanishing again until nothing but the broken dark remained. ‘Stay dead’, they seemed to say.

My dead body there on an old stone. I saw it as if in a dream laid out on a quoit, as though to be dined on by crows and foul weather. Beyond was the sea and all around a purgatory of sad, grey rock. Home.

Then, suddenly, it happened, as if in the same instant, flocks of gulls swept across the sky and trailed the day behind them. Their whiteness drove off the crows. They wheeled above my body on the wind-swept capstone and just before dawn they dropped from the sky, millions of them, but what fell were words, a raining lexicon of letters crashing down like hail, battering my dead body, bursting in little explosions of light and sending shivers through the whole earth. As my life began, everything spelled of you.

All the words were you. And all the gulls in all the shores of light were you. The day that came was you too. And what made the sad rock bloom blue and yellow and red was you. Even the bittern and the swallows were you. You reached through my death and your hands found my brow. The heels of your hands found and quickened my pulse, they beckoned and cupped my butterfly life, and your hands finally released me. The day I died I was reborn because of you.

Croach Patrick

The climb cracks their soles
and casts the callous stones
of penance at their feet.

But what does a stack know
of fasts or broken bones
or damned souls in defeat?

____
* Click on the title.

Faminers

Always on the road
you meet them —
the ancient dead —

where crows stir
and old wounds
hatch new wings,

but was it for this
our history shut
History's door?