from Blackwater Quartet, selection 65

Adorning Her Throat,
a Ritual Helix of Stars and Worlds

Stick-rocket flashes and flat champagne

accompany the century’s last December,

rowdy to the closing bars of Auld Lang Syne.

We adjust our watches

to numerals manifest or fading.

In the cool green shoulders

of Venetian vases, in machines of liquid crystal,

hypnotic ratios appear, one life to another

and one time to another,

as though we were waiting for this.

The hours are not a destination,

a timetable corner-crimped

with departure and return. A heartbeat

lubricates the moment’s motion

and ghosts of past lives chase the pulse.

In the town, on Hawksmoor’s church,

pollution pits the gargoyle faces.

Here, heaven is limewashed stone

and rudimentary wings in low relief.

The Second Coming gutters in the nave.

Greenwich Mean Time scores the dawn.

On the Thames, a roaring sky

silhouettes the great wheel,

birth and death full-circle,

yet nothing moves except the earth.

This estuary bred mariners,

urgent to the quirk of longitude

untangling stars.

We sail these bangle parallels, by constellations

true love knots, rigs sturdy in the masts.

Centuries of museum hours

remain here with us,

sheltered by these colonnades,

cupped palms blown for warmth,

our scarves still flecked with festival dew.

Along the shore, the tide’s inconsequence

of creatures strolls, each a sworn familiar.

These stalking kindred mesmerise.

Remote, deliberate, they probe the silt,

patient for the random prize.