A Birthday for Peter
There once were bells
downriver in the night.
Did the ghosts of them toll
as you swept back
our simple winter’s
alabaster blue
etched on high
in swallowtails?
For you the first of days
is shorter than the rest
in the sun-dimmed world
where you kick and wriggle
like the shape we watched
in awe, the shadow
in your mother’s skin.
These twenty-three hours
of the doctored clock
echo her exultant shrieks,
naked, four-legged, muting
the sin scream to Eden
felt fleetly in this flesh of
flesh of my death
in the dark of June,
both-backed, shelled together
to the frigid moon-sweep,
to the flooded world,
to you, brave grit-gleam
in the prodigal night.
Once the bells pieced out
our primal sympathy,
the chanted waves
reticulate with grace.
We cannot see
the dark desirous water
in this silence.
We cannot see
for the city
and the levee
the low ship breasting
the splendid ooze
of our continent.
But there sail the cross trees,
one, two, three,
through the silence
of the steeples
in their sleep.
Catharsis
The red and yellow wrecker jerks its chrome
snout aside as we mount the final rise,
hooks a blue sedan in the reedy ditch,
pulls it from the nameless purple blossoms
as we coast into our valley, slowing
to see what sickness we’ve eluded now.
Ulysses’ ship is beached on the mind’s loom,
drawn out of the whirl of wanting to know.
E poi the corn beyond the moldered band
of blackberry, dogwood, hidden morel
rustles as ragged beards bent over oars
below stars at the bottom of the world.
The slow curve doubles, crosses saddled streams.
Cattle bow to sun shoots plump underfoot.
A red-tailed hawk processes in the curl
of turkey vultures turning in the light,
waiting to fan the faces of the dead.
The Magnet of Parnassus
“And every poet has some Muse from whom he is suspended, and by whom he is said to be possessed...” —Plato, Ion
I’d come down to leave the Sun
and sleep for once in the shade.
I crossed the meadow where the
orange-banded grasshoppers
clattered like magnolia leaves
down dry stream beds in the breeze.
Moonflowers’ lemon odour
flowed over the roots and woke
me. I heard the trout sipping
mayflies, stretched, and bent above
a gravel pool. From the depth
reflected rose an oak limb,
rippling like the light I’d seen
caressing the secret green
of spiracles. Deeper still
appeared, like beads swinging strung
upon a broken chain or
acrobats magnetic with
their magical act, faces
falling toward the blue darkness.
Closest rose my grandmother,
copying a Matisse, paint
in tendrils dripping slow arcs
ascending to the Spaniard’s
left palm scarred in the staring
shape of an eye. The other
etched out pigeons in the air.
They wheeled away applauding
Dickinson as Whitman held
her by the blinding ankles,
while above both in a whale
boat Artemisia spoke
with Socrates of corpses
en route to the Piraeus.
Dante heard them sailing past
and glared, ruffling his laurel
wreath and then remembering
Vergil’s political gaze.
Last a naked arm gave birth
to words that rained on the rest,
set in motion by that face
eternally turned from me
to the dark beyond images.
I stood and traced a way again
among the moonflowers, my hand
twitching imitations of that
blind hand moving in the deep.
Memento
You said that
this was where
you came
to remember
what it’s like,
to show yourself again
how good it feels to
hang the bright mechanics
of your life—
the way a shrike
impales a horny toad,
you said—
and skip along
the burning sands
and drift beyond
your way of being
in the world, away
from days and nights
and Sun’s dust,
away from above
and away from below,
away from yet to be
and having been.
You did not say
away from me.
You said the high tide
tempted you to see
the soul existed
not inside you
like a phantom
at the bellows
of your glands
but as the music
of your organism
drawn along
the cosmic dark
in the carnival
of the turning world.
You said you never saw
your mother step
into the water
and that you woke
to her shrieks from the shore
and swam for land,
certain you were drowning.
You said you wouldn’t mind
that tide like a deep breath
sipped across a cold blue beard
and that when all the rest was lost,
it, at least, would be there,
implacable and sunless and smiling.
I tried to say
that you were right
but
the seawater
silvering your skin
said the time
had not yet come.
Bernini
The dimples up her thigh are like
the ghosts of Pluto’s fingers
in the screaming, clawing marble
in the room across the ocean,
in the grove of pines
where afternoon is fading
the dark god sinks his hands
and feels his eye drawn out
like a drop about to fall
from the faucet, gathering itself
and stretching toward
the wet shining tiles,
feels his face stretched like
a balloon a child hugs
to her naked chest,
squeezing the colour from it
as her skin shows clearer, clearer,
less and less red until
she stands clutching the dark shreds
and spreads her hands
and then her arms
and stares in silence at the floor until
she laughs
as she looks up at you.
Daniel Fitzpatrick is the author of two novels and two poetry collections. He lives in New Orleans, where he edits a journal called Joie de Vivre.
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