Poetry
An Evangelical Tone
I will cultivate a quiet voice,
a bleak and subdued phrasing—
slightly domesticated,
allowable indoors—
so I can break the news gently.
I will speak in the whisper
that constitutes gossip
(over tea and, perhaps, biscuits)
or a life-changing proposal.
Let this be a lover’s murmur
or an assassin’s merging
with background noises—close enough
to slip God’s knife underneath the skin.
Revenant
life, like smoke, curls through fingers—Eden Burning, "If I Go Up"
My favourite band disbanded seven years ago
(my family gone to Africa, my dear
friend dead, my first roommate expelled in shame
from college—altogether a lean year).
I typed "Eden Burning" in Yahoo Search
last week for no real reason and saw tales
of a reunion—one lone August show
and a new MP3 I could download.
Their songs in my collection long worn through
from days of listening over years, I had
lost who they were; fresh came guitars and groove
and tenor singing sweetly from the dead.
I am too young for this
bitter stinging shackle-burst of emotion
confronted from the outside by memory.
Love Together
I think I’m on an island,
like you, on a desert island,
on a sandy island with palm trees.
These two are prison islands
from which we make lots of telephone calls.
I see you’re awake on your island
in the sea-green, light-riddled morning.
I give you a welcoming phone call.
I know which buttons will reach you.
You laugh in the staticky distance.
I try this method for novelty—
scratch a love-note on ripped paper
and stuff it into a bottle
(or leave it on the kitchen table),
hoping it will bob to your beach.
You leap and fire stones at cocoanuts,
knocking them down to your level,
then hurling one into the strait.
The waves wash my supper ashore.
We split our meal open together,
toasting one another with the hulls.
Contact from island to island
seems to require mediation,
but I often lie on the sands,
watching you dance as the night’s dawn
bathes both you and your island
in our own individual moonbeam.
Left to my own Devices
for Darrell
Seven years on and memory slow to
gather when it’s called. You might think
guilt would gibber at me nights for
my forgetfulness. Odd that. I’ve
wondered too at my lighthearted
or at least unfazed acceptance
of the vacancy you left us.
Your long absence from my memory
takes the form of a hole roped-off.
Something old’s moved on or crumbled;
passersby glance quick compassion,
but I call back their attention—
“Best friend died. Feel sympathetic.
Move along”–and, facing outward
like police tape, relish novel
pain I claim. I haven’t crossed my
line myself to look at you in
years. The gap’s enough to honour.
Just now, Laura’s reading Beowulf.
That gets memory moving—my prof
Mrs. Roberts taught me Beowulf
one long-past September. She said
Anglo-Saxons called death comrade,
watched it lie beside their women,
let it romp with sons and axes.
I’d known no-one dead then but my
Grandpa in another time zone.
Next month, fog flocked down the highway,
slewed your car under a semi,
battered your face like a kitten’s
by the roadside. At your sunset
clouds rained gold dawn, I remember.
Absent you are, faceless, changeless.
Dreaming I remember you and
wake to cry for once and know the
gap as empty. All that’s left is
my remembrance not of you but
of me with you, ‘prenticed to your
skilful friendship, meek (your word), warm,
merry, holy in the holy
moments, strong in ways a woman
measures. What you were, I followed.
Perhaps my memory loss is symptom.
Perhaps I’m not the sort of person
now who’d take what you could give me.
Manhood’s burnt me older, milder,
tentative and more imperilled.
Years pull ropes down, bulldoze over
all the ways I should be grateful,
all the ways I still should follow.
Friend, I always flourished in your shadow.
On True Scholarship
I.
On first looking into Donald Davie
I feel I stand at the lip of a valley
green fields, red rocks, villages, a city,
a river running down to the sea.
I scramble down:
I’ve purchased a notebook, several
pens fat with ink,
field guides thick as my knees.
I will be here a long time.
I wander, aimed for aimlessness,
in poems spacious as plantations.
I stroll through places he loves and hates,
prowl his empty ringing cathedrals,
chat with his learned coterie of poets past and present.
I sit a while in his occasional meadows.
I stretch luxuriantly within his forms.
II.
I interview the people in his villages:
the dour woman at Penistone,
Juliet the bride of reason,
the mushroom-gatherers are
the first of many.
Some have kind things to say.
All feel misrepresented.
I find his wife’s door.
She comes out to me,
gestures my admiration toward the valley,
her belly heavy with his construction
her eyes shimmering from his tired, carefully-shaped tenderness.
I find his study, where he lives in his work,
the sun red off its windows.
It’s locked.
Perhaps he’s in the back, composing.
Perhaps he’s dead.
Perhaps he never lived here
and only thought he did.
I am lost for days in a garden of mythological figures—
Archilochus, Black Jack Pendennis, Queen Draga, Laodamia—
Plaster-cast creations frozen in significant motion,
their names and movements uncatalogued by my field guides.
I do not even go down the streets named for Russian poets.
I look instead in vain for other names
of my mind’s close kindred,
and other sites
where once I walked and found comfort.
All the flaws of the man’s thought and emotion and blindness are here.
No-one was meant to bear such scrutiny.
III.
No-one was meant to bear such scrutiny without grace—
my grace is this:
from straight metrical streets
odd-shaped out-crops of rock
a third-floor balcony slick with conversation
I reach for and glimpse the sea, remembering:
Boats dock here
Boats sail from here
There is commerce
Here with transcendence.
Many times I stroll
beachward down signposted streets
"Sea 1 mile, this way"
to wade lip-deep into the
water—inches from my eyes
and toward, and past, the sunset.
On my way back also, signposts welcome
angels, ideas, all who travel on the sea,
directing them to find a home, albeit for a night.
So the sea laps into the land.
So the land plunges into the sea.
Boundaries blur—
interpenetration—
all becomes rich and clear for an instant.
IV.
I compile my fact-finding paraphernalia
and clamber up the far crags.
Cross-legged, facing
the valley where I’d been
and the long plateau where I began,
at the last, I must tally my years here
in images that last an instant,
in images a child remembers
and can climb down into,
later.
Creation
Measureless miles mark its beginning
no secrets sounded Up soars new Time
wet as a hatchling working cold muscles
to unfold in foray his first season
first of all seasons His fell comrade
broad-shouldered Space from a sure footing
expands into space spanned through nothing
as home for Heavenborn hewn by the creator
vast beyond vision ere the void bore fruit
already old by age's birth
Lord who spawns lesser
Whose life resounds
down cold corridors coaxing attention
though told before time token here present
of space before space He must spare his people
from since-sullied kosmos
Soft lie his pastures
tempting travellers till we discover
the scars of heaven Scathed in majesty
the world awaits the ones He loves
the words near the centre (exercises in proximity)
It is true, what nietzsche said—
for things that matter
there are no words.
but there are words near those fundaments—
as guardrails
where young men and maidens
crane toward the danger
and the old drop their walkers
to grasp stand and see
as grandchildren—
derivative—
the old warmths diminished
but recognisable
as things done
pieces of
who is
Some days some words
spoken or heard
lift
like a voice that whispers
my name
in the distance
or footsteps
far off
yet approaching
God to be Reassured
Your words are welcome to me. They fall soft
As cheekbone turned toward my lips and the light,
A baby handed past my fears, a waft
Of loneliness in the assent of someone I invite.
Your words are cunning tools; they shift, shape, trim
And bulwark patterns of discourse. Bone curls
From bone, flesh falls away from flesh, then skin’s
Wrapped on. I flex my golden song beneath the world.
Your words fall silent here. With touch
They love; deep to the knotted strands of mind
They plunge, untwist a single thread. To such
Uncomplicated passion I respond in kind.
What I discern is that by which I live.
What You give me is always what I give.
This Good Year
You issue moments like grapes this good year,
suffuse them with pulp, weight, seeds, life, Your warm
life to be eaten under Your bright clear
sun, salvaged from and battered by Your storm.
You augur children in my wife’s love-laugh;
You settle on our clouded yard in doves
and hurricane debris. A sudden draft
prompts a wild walk in dark and pleasant groves.
This present beats insistently, like wings
at something solid, soars like thankful peace
unfurling in a friend’s once-tortured eyes.
Fruits of the moment glisten; see them sing
within the sunlight, clusters out of reach.
They call to me across broad beds of ice.
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