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AN
AGE TURNS
High
wind at Whitsuntide and all week
living
is an aftermath: I haul
its
ashes. I never requested
an
out from the steep ducts of feeling.
All
knowledge is carnal, no cause lasts
sixty
years, a sealed wine dries. Nature,
they
say your beauty is in my mind.
Come
the next City they will dispense
with
us entirely, both. If I had
a
pistol I would oil it ten times
daily.
Outside, spits of dull spring rain
in
the ear, the petals from the crux
of
the tulip snap, and the greenhouse
can
do without me. I have
brought home
some
Chinese food, our privet has worms,
and
I am designing a doorway
against
intrusion, a monk’s cell, lit
by
a Mazda WAM pendant. It seems
the
hottest day is never the year’s
lightest
day. I have no heat either.
Mozart
reinterprets the grand scale
and
I am not sure I am happy
if
in some way his buffos touch parts
of
the sempiternal. Apes see
more
than
they need, reflections in water
and
the Aurora Borealis.
My
mother is propped in the tool shed
with
a cobweb of lace and brocades.
My
daughter writes crap for a part-work
on
Freud, finding herself with old men
and
despair. They have leached
the colour
from
family reserves. She looks
bad.
The
antique perspectives are staved in,
a
bombed-out cathedral. I would like
a
village just recently street-cleaned
by
summer rain, a place into which
all
distances hankered and ended;
where
the cockerel at morning would pull
its
cry out of three mildewed klaxons
with
no hint of churches or torment;
where
fauns every day would copulate
among
the beeches and cool bluebells;
where
no one played significant games
like
stud, patience, or consequences.
It’s
a shame Brunelleschi’s stoa
survives
as a blueprint to vex me:
a
simple arcade to walk round in.
Even
in my youth I was turned on
by
ruins, which was wrong, the grass keep
and
the shattered staircase, the corners,
open-air
and forbidden, the dark
inside.
Ossian, Beethoven, Turner
started
the disease, and all that fall
from
night thoughts to end-tapes in dustbins.
There’s
a flat after-century taste
in
my marrow bones. The
dislodged world
rolls
from God’s hand like a crucifix
from
a man’s hand dying. God is not
dead:
he may be not-yet, or nothing,
though
our own god, man’s, may be over,
drugged,
dragged and dredged out of Israel.
What’s
this that it is mindful? All
grass
invades.
My summerhouse has decayed.
It’s
cloudy. The sun’s our
nearest star.
If
music heals, recomposes, what
surgery
will follow this moist day
my
life’s undiagnosable smear?
A
book is a cemetery, Proust
averred,
and begged no questions on love.
Which,
I suppose, love, can be reckoned
to
muffle in my veins too like hoarse
discontinuous
rales of thunder
trapped
in time, shocks which carried me through
many
unsustained selves, sustaining
my
affair with things. It is children
I
recall most, though this pugging wind
scuttles
them into coigns of my mind
deprived
and fed by sea-cows. Shadows.
Love
rather overwhelms me. A sort
of
necessary empire, killer
of
its grovelling and great, blurred
template
of such things as law and chance,
(form
in chaos, purpose in the void?)
in
me tota ruens: Phaedra’s love,
or
like the antibiotics of
Jesus,
it ruins, it chokes me, like
Schönberg
from a Bluthner Boudoir grand
or
flowers in my Kedelv vase from Flygsfors.
I
renounce love, if love will let me.
My
skull dates, from carbon half-life loss,
between
Tiberius and the last
Sinn
Fein dynasty in Uganda.
A
name like Faust or Foster. My cat
gets
its eyes from Karnak. A new god
has
monopoly of circumstance.
Alan
Marshfield
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