Reluctance
So what if our ideal is shot with rust?
That the spoken breath is but a shake of dust?
Who cares if the piano’s a case of mere bone?
That the guitar pulls its oars like a telephone?
Let the rain laugh in sprints up the wall,
light all the gutters and dig out the gold.
See the evening dance and never get old:
there’s a woman singing through the leaves of fall.
The 6th Arrondissement
The 6th isn’t busy.
Six days since the attack,
and inside the Monoprix,
the aisles of life still reel along, refrigerated and stacked.
I drum my fingers on the green pine
and scan the shelves for a bottle of wine.
Not much has changed. When it rains,
the avenues still look like beautiful watery paintings
that I can’t quite name.
The flocks at bridges, bus stops, trams, and métro
show no sign of any social revolution
or even light discussion. Where do we go?
The thought stubs itself out
on a wall, as I recall the blank flat
of what it’s like to deck this light with black.
It feels like nothing. Not darkness, or death.
You don’t roll into another dimension.
You’re here to serve, on automation.
Feeding off the little sterile drips
of the everyday, eclipsed,
now and again, by a nail, or a tongue, or an eye, or a yes—
until the thing consumes you whole.
Meanwhile, back on the top floor, in the clash
of a bedsit, the stars close their hands.
Only a roll of thick tobacco,
strange and diaphanous,
creels through the ebony blind of her window.
A neighbour’s television,
monochrome, through the paper-white wall,
scrambles the sound of an advertisement for Rimmel.
Only this—
like a silent Japanese movie—
projects the mysterious.
The Waves
drag and clown,
undoing their journey’s
tour at the shoreline.
Hollow toys and springs,
stony flowers and crowns,
build to sailing cathedrals
that fail and fall on sand.
Dark-ruffled, their incarnation
seems to predict a better land.
Let the broken screws and bones
of these nautical messengers
carry their wisdom home:
That there’s nothing more disabling
than seeing tomorrow
clear as day,
for you’ll soon find
you were better off with the waves in motion—
your eyes concealed, your prospect blind.
The Departure
When Tuesday passed and took you with it,
possessions, not just people, seemed to notice.
Your hibernating, book-pressed flower
hardened its leaves to attention—
though your graded pencils noticed the most,
worn to a stub by the hand that had loved them.
Riderless, their dark gold ash hungered for form:
the spectral flakes of fishes, fruits, and water.
They appeared to ask where it was you’d got to,
half-expecting your figure bright across the lawn
any day now, the inspired crescendo drum
on the stairs: of your foot, finally, through the door.
Poppy
Its stained satin is heavy as the eyelids
of sad mothers in kitchens
and the objects they stare at,
at evenings.
An allotment of you,
buried, the earth pulling bodies
through the turf, a nettle—
near a branch of Co-op
or the nightclub, before you left.
Then joking, you never wake up
in time to hear delivery vans
moaning.
At each station,
one holds a crest
to their chest
like a flag
waved
at a football match:
a star in the throat,
a cross:
William
Robert
Rakesh
Duane
Soft veins of dull vinegar,
the riven earth’s pendant opiate,
dressing the land
like girlfriends
and jobs in supermarkets,
long telephone calls.|
In the secondary schools
of Manchester, Essex, Birmingham,
a soft light pecks
at the opened glass,
as corridors fill
with the new ricocheted sweetness
of laughing
students.