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.
No comments:
Post a Comment