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FAUSTUS
Rock,
city, in your after-fever sleep;
confide
your languages up to the night:
hospital
shifts no analyst could keep
forever
annotating out of sight.
Compose
them into legends and then steep
these
curious silences in which I write
in parables of love and hate
too complex to translate.
Your
rumour widens, my impatience grows,
while
lovers pause, blind generations come.
A
drunkard snores while blood-bright ecstasy flows
in
a murderer’s dream. History’s
scum
idles
down sewers to discompose
main
aquifers. These rumours
drum
when the neap stillness most is dead
impotence on my head.
The
carmine worm, anaemic maggot, rut
and
prosper in the dying aisle. I’ve
stood
an
age like this, watching the weather smut
the
sunken compost of the holy wood:
nature’s
fecundity.—But, I think, but
Oh
for unnatural genius I could
hew from these figures that ingrain
the aisles of my brain.
Figures
suggested by a sleeping town.
Numbers
extracted from tomorrow’s hope,
the
past’s embroidery and the winning frown
of
this tonight—a love with whom I cope
haphazardly,
a bitch who lets me drown
deep
fathoms into loss, who lets me grope
in shivering anxiety
to know her and be free.
For
I’ve deduced so far from untrue love
an
x and y, an angle and behaviour.
But
these do not engender fire enough
to
crisp discrepancies. I seem
to labour
in
a dark attic in frayed coat and cuff,
yet
I should share the bare wind’s discomposure—
as angry as a war god in a net,
not futile and in fret.
Deadlocked
my hands, tongue-tied the stammering;
this
question still recurs: respecting what
must
I now integrate their functioning—
voices
the Babel earth long time forgot,
those
Babels this night air is reckoning,
tongues
that won’t live and songs that will not rot,
the variable working of
the city’s hate and love?
Memories
rise. I’ve seen them, out
and in,
passing
the days with deck quoits and bushido.
I’ve
known seductions on the ottoman,
but
they went early. The better
times, the shadow
that
descends. The inspired
adrenaline
in
moonlight by a wharf. The
man whose tally-ho
was people happy at his call.
The man who killed them all.
Enigmas
like the congregated stars
for
which, like Greek and holy Jew, I’ve lent
too
much time to the figured seminars,
time
much too much to see my patience spent
in
strained hyperboles, through window bars
to
see Man’s blood stream through the firmament,
bathing the morning sun in gold,
beauty as cruel as old.
Substitute,
change sides, try one more theory.
The
lover and the murderer do not care,
rising
to dream the sullen dawn, to query
the
grim and lovely hoax; they walk in prayer.
But
I’m caged in by cloudy walls I’m weary
of
barking at for answer. Oh,
I would dare
to double what Prometheus stole,
but must I sell my soul?
Alan
Marshfield
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