Nones
Lancaster
Avenue’s resident spinster
still
weathered winter
in
Victorian splendour, her hermitage a sprawl
of
walls and shingled spires within her snowy woods.
From
my window, looking out
towards
her estate, I watched a barn owl
soft
and silent, sailing out in evening
light,
its
shadow passing
faint
across the flurry fields.
From
my writing desk
I
could see the distant silhouettes – bare trees
against
pewter sky.
My
careful poems set-out, scratched through,
my
fingers stained from dip-pen ink,
a
cat’s-cradle of sonnets
suspended
the world, that world,
in
the winter of sixty-seven.
The
room was always cold, the quiet grief of the house
that
December my father died.
Across
the panes, a bib of ice
never
hid the view entirely: once seen, I knew
what
held, what threaded silences together.
I
thought more of Ruskin than the Beats; my sister
the
previous spring
secretly
married; Mother’s bedroom door was closed.
Thinking
back, it was the stillness I remember −
at
that time of year, at that hour
of
the afternoon, the dark coming early, the owl’s flight
finishing with a kill.
finishing with a kill.
I remember '67. I remember you then. Looking into your eyes was like peering over that keen slice of balance at the edge of a bottomless abyss, or what I've since come to think of as the event horizon of a black hole.
ReplyDeleteWhat horror you'd seen started back as evil mystery at the very edge between skin and everything .... reminding me of another one or your quips elsewhere on Lancaster Ave., something like, "the philosopher's last line of defense is his skin."
I was always a diver into those daring unknowns. You were then and are still my brother; despite all.