from Blackwater Quartet, selection 43

Nomad Frescos

The autumn coppered in the early frost,
and deepened north to Burlington, Vermont.
I thumbed the final forty, cold and lost.

Arriving after midnight to a gaunt
porch lantern light, the caretaker came down
and stoked the woodstove for the strayed savant.

I slept upstairs, a room of plain dressed stone
he said was Robert Frost’s a decade back:
New England metres in the maples’ roan.

I worked waiting tables, up at the crack
to clear the plates then rush to seminar,
the race downstream to clear my bivouac

and meet my tutor polishing his car,
his old Mercedes’ ornamental star.                

                            *

A heady week with Myra, heated bliss
and naked restless recklessness, hi-fi
Rolling Stones across Sympathy’sabyss;

from Swarthmore later, the exclusive, wry
reminder in the voice/guitar cassette
she posted with the note, ‘my scented thigh…’

I sank to her luxurious soubrette,
her role as wanton where the stoked hearth sparked
through playful frets of chorded etiquette
.
She parted to her separate world, parked
car idling under acers’ shocked revue
of palette reds that fell as she embarked.

I hitched in William Meredith’s Merc, due
south, to my Mason-Dixon rendezvous.

                             *

Virginia at first light, Newport News:
Navy crews on shore leave stand unsteady
outside the Navy bars, anchor tattoos

fixed sorely by the twisted flukes. The sea
off Hampton Roads supports the ensign sun.
A rolled-Havana token welcomes me.

My uncle’s house, an antebellum run
of rosy brick and seasoned joinery,
percolates in pine shade’s Dixie frisson.

Aunt Nita shelling crab for snacks, TV
for company, shucked pink succulents
in porcelain tureens: ‘it’s Kennedy…’

We stand in newsflash, sea-husk sacraments
a scattered spoil of settled arguments.

                             *

Approaching Carolina, where Nag’s Head’s
driftwood bonfires beckon, ocean winds drive
through lovers’ enterprise. The weather shreds

our voices— fluttered syllables arrive,
flayed gutturals coaxing heaved coitus,
your face a broken flame the winds revive.

I turn up at the station broke, my bus
late, cousin James waiting by the Greyhound.
He offers poems: a Jarrell omnibus.

‘He teaches here at Greensboro, been found
dead; taught, I mean. Maybe you heard. A car.’
I lean against the juke: a wailing sound

in stuttered neon saturates the bar,
the cold, hard light of each unquiet star.

                             *

Kentucky froze, dark at dawn, dark at dusk.
The coldest winter in a hundred years
left ice drifts deeper than our lives, wind’s tusk

along the rivers tearing loose the piers
secured to summer’s memory. I work,
roped to factories’ high steel, hemispheres

of blasted rust. The journeyman’s berserk
ballet concludes in drifting fog of paint,
the drifter incognito through the murk.

Money measures freedom by restraint,
the escape from wind chill’s bitter hours
and road signs ragged in flurries’ crossfire feint.

The Gulf road: skies cleared to steamy showers,
to Florida’s January flowers.

                             *

The tourists head south: winter sunshine, palms
above hibiscus, golf on tended greens,
the snowbirds lured to windward weather’s calms.

For me, another day, the same routines,
on Ocean Boulevard designer names
reflected in the chrome the chauffeur cleans:

I paint their world in muted yellows. Flames
of palest tangerine rejuvenate
the guest house by the pool. The jigsaw frames

of tenoned cypress wood articulate
the glazed expanse, landscaped into vistas
the wealthy preen to purposeful estate.

I smoke dope with Cuban gardeners, grass-
high sprinklers fanning rainbows in each pass.

                             *

The chair of lacquered-white rattan, high-back
cobra’s hood of woven cane, rises timeless
through leafy terracotta. Bric-à-brac

of species flora’s flowers effervesce
within the shuttered window’s habitat,
the colours native to this wilderness

uprooted, potted brightly on the mat.
I work in heat the slow fan melts and spreads
across the table, soaks the verses’ tat.

We lie naked on a sunburst quilt, threads
of perspiration gathered to a cloth
of paradise, unfolding to the reds

of bougainvillaea. The viney swathe
of deep address upturns a pulsing sloth.

                             *

Consider this: the life one led leads here.
The hammock slowly rocks in mango shade.
Among bell-shaped stems the hummingbirds veer

in thrumming purpose round these Everglade
environs. Drowsy sun, the sky’s doubloon
patina sheltering the renegade,

he anchors in the shanty cove, afternoon
dreamless. To believe one sees, to believe
one rises to the life beyond cartoon

horizons through the patterns we perceive,
the patterns of enamelled flight where each
repeats, repeats within the mind to leave

a witness trace, so vagrant icons teach
an iridescence hovers out of reach.