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.