from Blackwater Quartet, selection 9

Metaphysical Graffiti

A cold morning decades gone
models this present dawn.
My features accommodate the half-light.

The veined silver of the glass is fogged.
I shave from memory,
plundering the past for impetus
squandered in the mirror’s flux.

The dead reside beyond this alchemy.

The razor at the throat perfects the years,
time and places traded for a life.
I cannot recover my lost longueurs,
the palm tree in the garden, ocean frontage,
the constellations’ carnival cortège.
The speaking parts are taken.

§

The winter sky is tangled in the trees,
a pewter fog among the branches.

On the strand
waders anchored in the tidal lees
occupy a higher ether lost to land—
overhead, a gull’s cut-paper profile,
grey on grey, the estuary a surreal mile
where the Blackwater River forgets the sea
to assume a new identity.

Summer’s relics, smacks in drydock
display a jagged ambience.
On this coast, we cultivate an independence
mirrored in the seaward rock.

§

Remembering West Palm,
the bougainvillaea’s impossible flowers’
oceancalm of colour nestled near the courtyard mango,
the psilocybin afternoons
a sentient kingdom, even now…
ground lapis sky, the summerhouse
sheltered from the heat,
clockwork storms each afternoon reinventing Eden.

The imitation woodgrain plastic shell
pledged syncopated love— reprise of Elvis
deciphered through the crackle.
The flyscreen sieved time to a trickle,
you at the stove, singing "Heartbreak Hotel,"
stirring peas.

Down coast on the Cape
the Apollo mission flexing into upper spheres—
we flew down in the Cessna, ate lunch
in the wing shade, listening to the launch
on radio, the gallery in tears:
that distant firework trail where dreams escape.

The threaded eye anticipates the stitch;
a ratcheting glint instructs the cloth— ordered thus
the turning worlds abide.
In digital streams the satellites ride,
death codes kick and whinny,
leap ages without landing.

The martyr’s bronze, the Hanged Man’s tree
in blossom— this is the habit of desire.

§

I saw my life
in a memory of water, my lucky star
adrift in river stanzas, planet rim fading,
ragged edge of atmosphere the banking plane reveals.

Rising water-shaped blue miles,
the frictionless clouds divide
and England,
crumpledpaper fields
along the twisted ribbon of the Thames,
awakes, the world reborn in our own lives.
Stubborn beauty, this is the high ground,
there is no other.

In water meadows by the Isis, on barges
lit with pinks and roses, a foil of potted herbs
cools the eye, blurs into the margins.
Holding hands, we strolled between the bridges
conjugating Latin verbs.

From no-where towns,
the trace of accent, the provincial gait…
the mannered metre’s bric-à-brac
was Auden’s, the realpolitik
of life beyond our lives: the war in Spain,
the smiling face of Chamberlain.

Expecting Beethoven, preferring Bach,
we settled for Goering’s coelacanthine bars,
the whine of Heinkels over London —
this could be Mars, a restless future
scripted in the smoke calligraphy, sparktrace
geometry of world’s end and no memory,
the mountain of our will resolved
in animal tumulus, fire and sacrifice.

§

Late autumn, a borrowed Galaxy
coaxed to Carolina for a reading,
returning to Lake Worth
and winter sun, I constructed my nostalgia
where future tenses ripen, a burnished
mock exotica, a dusty road, a house let furnished.

Why pine and fret?

Red dust roostertails
the big Ford trails in rust of dawn
redirect the universe.

What is given is given always, yet
nothing has been changed except the unreal,
as if nothing had been changed at all,
the brittle potpourri of planets strewn
carelessly across the room,
time’s gaudy wreckage underfoot.

The speaking parts are taken.

Walking high in peyote light,
seeing what was spoken
when red day broke on lives that break,
I return it to you now, the world
as we imagined it,
and as we said it was.