Monday 2 September 2024

Five Poems by Robert McCarthy





The Second Going

 

So to have perceived the chilly precincts

where the angels dwell,-- those heavenly bodies

pinwheeling, pell-mell, driven into

a gale Aeolian, the dark wind

that chivvies dusk in, that blackens the lake’s

mirror, leaching from leaves the day’s chromatics.

 

The view from the tower has granted the river

eyes. But time has soured in the violet

hour: breath in its wintery sleep grows foul,

catarrhal. Now, the thing in the tomb assays

a turn; gasps; awaits the annunciatory

hour,-- when the sun will bloom at the horizon

an explosion of white powder. 

                        And all the cocks crow treason.

 

One good crucifixion deserves another.

Who knows what nous might skyward leap, this time,

from the tomb’s black mouth? The second coming,

perhaps, of Pilate and Caiaphas, determined

to get it right at last (the order, I mean,--

good thief, blaspheming thief, and then Christ).

Gestas, mistaken for the Son of Man

in the middle, loosens hawsers or cables

or the hammered-in nails. Saves only one,

himself alone, stepping down from the cross,

debonaire, as if that time in the desert

had been his: 40 days, merely, of weight-loss.

“You will not be with me in my kingdom

this day, the next, or any other.”

One good crucifixion deserves another.

 

                                                         

Abandoned Strophes

 

I

Nettles and leaves, their breezed-aloft debris,

weave oracular acrostics, Delphic

prognostics; reports, perhaps, of what is

forthcoming; reports, perhaps, of obloquy,

or lapsed immunity, or lost cunning.

 

II

Sere leaves, brown, and birds-nests’ plunder, indite

upon mid-air a ludic scripture,

semaphore a fate inchoate, sky-writings

of the sibylline kind, messages

presumed perhaps divine, yet of what portent

many have opined, though none could ever offer

surety of signified, or sign.

 

III

The sky’s flotsam and clumped matter are like

encodings of the blind, are like Braille bumps

and scuffs that baffle fingertip construal.

Opaque dialectic, mystical gabble

conducted (barely audible) above

the sacred wood where root and branch assume

the back-slashed stance of I Ching accountancy,

of yarrow sticks their hexagramic texts.

 

IV

And are those faces in the trees, lurking,

half-hidden? Rackham identities,

where twigs have made eyes to see, lips that could

effect a kiss, or a seal affix

to legacies unnatural.

 

V

And everything there is to see is as

encircled by a sea, curiously

circuitous, whose waves lave the incumbent

shore as waters, grumbling down a drain, might

enforce a Coriolis Force, a gurgle-

shaped swirl, a rotation a-tilt and a-whirl,

drawing off, drawing down, down to the salty

salts of the ground, down to oblivion’s

alkalines, to the Golems of our common

clay, to our shorings-up against the day.

 

VI

So, this is the way that that will be;

this our kingdom sublunary—

lost, found, lost deliberately

again, this narrow verge between

sky and catastrophe, this dry-

land Sargasso Sea, this homestead

on the liminal, this entrepôt

of the irredeemable, our

self-ensorcelling hex and spell,

our intimation of mortality,

our fool-the-eye trompe l’oeil

taken as if for gospel.

 

 

Pathos and Bathos

 

The seven seas had been annulled.

The Aral silted over, traduced.

The Caspian half-erased, reduced

to salt hills adorning its former

border. The Black Sea’s in formal

mourning now. The Red Sea redder

from foaming much blood, so in that

regard like the Tiber.

Which leaves the Dead Sea,

ever that much deader, its tides

lolling their salt-loads to shore.

But then forgetting to relent,

retreat, pooling round instead

our stork-legs and feet

ridiculous, the water gluey

but somehow also sandpapery,

our rolled-up pants sloshed

in its brine-sticky backwash.

 

Are the seven seas now just a seven-

days’ wonder? Which we,

distractedly, wonder at, as we queue

up for this and that, for some

quickly superseded plunder,

awaiting our turns (impatiently)

to board, from the parking lot

of the company store,

the next availably empty

Ark.

 

 

For the Marriages of Dido and Helen

 

When they ask about you (and they will),

I shall nothing extenuate, but tell

how soothing were your lullabies, how

fetching your far-fetched alibis.

All your beautiful lies,

oh, how they ramified. . .

like Ovidian metamorphoses,

like Trojan stalking-horses. . .

 

Suttee of hearts! O you widows of desire!

 

Heard now only in ravens’ cries.

 

                            

Summer Afternoon

 

Sumer is icumen in;

singeth loud the cuckoo.

Summer thunder, rattling its f/x tin-

sheets,-- tin almost the sky’s colour,

or is it pewter now, maybe; puddled

metal in the swimming heat. And

that tune in your head looping

round and round: “All I’ve got’s this sunny

afternoon.” Or not even that

perhaps; as, extravagantly,

a bruised horizon descends: mauve,

chartreuse, clouds black as hell’s roof, enseaméd

with silver ore, fretted with forge sparks.

 

Summer thunder again, a chair

dragged across Thor’s floor, dragged again.

Chainsaws of vertical lightning.

Sumer is icumen in; but she’s

jejune, an unsophisticate

a country-wife dragging a chair

across the floor of an enormous

room. Your windows are city-smudged;

sky might be blue clouds, or smeary

something other: or smoke from a bellows?

or a small child mud-larking in puddles?

Summer’s music all tantaras

and smashed cymbals. (A chair dragged

repeatedly across a floor.)

 

And all the birds in Oxfordshire

and Gloucestershire sing tit-willow,

tit-willow, and the hayricks

and the haycocks are on fire there.

Sumer is icumen in. Summer

thunder. (Did your girlfriend drive off

in your car? Not that you had either.)

Summer thunder. Someone dragging

a chair across the sky’s floor.

(The unhappiness of Thor.)

Singeth loud the cuckoo. The sky

is a sunny black mistake. Tit-willow,

tit-willow. The sugar-addicted

mynah birds chase the breakfast

packets of Dominos. Singeth loud

the cuckoo. The air so thick

(with moisture) it must be swum through.

Heat lightning crackles; thunder dins

from roofs. And sumer is icumen

in. The rain it raineth every day,

tit-willow. And your heart still as empty

as your head. Sing willow, willow, will-o.






Robert McCarthy is a writer living in New York City. He prefers to use formal means to achieve lyric ends. Robert has published poetry in Orbis, The Alchemy Spoon and Dreich Magazine. His work has also appeared in Yours, Poetically and Neologism Poetry Journal; as well as in Words & Whispers, Celestite Poetry, Fahmidan Journal, Version(9), Madrigal, Ice Floe Press, PaddlerPress, Nymphs, Spare Parts, Halfway Down the Stairs, The Storms, Euphony Journal, and others. One of Robert’s poems, Wind From Nowhere, has been nominated for a 2022 Pushcart Prize.





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