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Poetry
Three Poems
THE WORKS
When I look up from reading, the back gate has vanished.
In a skip in the lane stands a Christmas tree,
bare and brown. This is July, in howling sunshine,
a gale of light and dust when people are afraid
and call it anger. Marcus and Willa have sized up the space
and come tenderly bearing the new gate, a pale one
that if it had arms would cover its modesty.
They have a drill. The skip is fuming like a censer.
In Sciascia’s The Council of Egypt, Francesco Paolo Di Blasi
is brought, after torture, out through the sunblind yard.
His hair is white. His bare feet leak a greenish slime.
He is assisted to a waiting coach, and then to death.
On the final night, De Blasi turned to poetry
‘because he felt he could not, should not, write
the true and profound things stirring within him.
The concept of poetry then prevalent held
that poetry is lies. This is no longer true,
though poetry itself may have to disagree.’
When Willa pauses for a smoke, Marcus plays water
over the flagstones. Now they gleam. The two men laugh.
The rose has its sights on the trellis; the new arch
anticipates jasmine. Summer is passing again.
Francesco Paolo Di Blasi is dead and forgotten. Sciascia too
is gone, but not the book I opened many years ago
beside a fountain, sunstruck and baroque
and half in shade - a property from fiction
waiting for events to whisper evil from afar
or from a chamber just around that corner,
where the executioners assured De Blasi
that God hears every word including those of sparrows
as they fall like smuts of ash to drift across the square
and for a moment rise again on the impenitent sirocco.
There is no fountain here, but I can see
how water hangs like smoke above itself, then plunges
through the shade to drench the ardent mermaids
who are waiting, slick with life, or what resembles it.
BLACKTHORN BLOSSOM
March wind and rain, the sea all storm, and yet
Behind the dunes at Druridge Bay,
Star-white blossom on the blackthorn bush,
The Queen of Elfland’s lingerie.
THE SHORTEST DAY
Adrift in cloud, the moon
expands its cataract:
in this late world, darkness
is the rule. Remember
how when we were young
the task was inescapable:
to get the proper names by heart,
including all the goddesses
disposed of in the emptiness
where light had been and gone
and kept on going? After that
let strong despair usurp
a planetary chill, absolved
from love and death, the better
to possess you. See,
I’ve sat my life like Finals
set by monsters so the living
cannot pass, and when today
I summon you I find
you’re further off than memory,
your mind elsewhere, the smile
I saw as whimsical
unearthly now. Star-garlanded
for winter, Aphrodite sails
the frozen gulf of night, no more
attentive to my blinded stare
than any of her sisters
in the heavens care to be.