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THE
POLITICAL PRISONER
Calabrian
autumn and late morning chill, and still
he
cannot excise what blistered in his brain
all
dawn until he woke: barefoot young woman, goat-faced,
handsome
as a goat, yesterday in the red courtyard.
Seen
yesterday in this country that shrinks when it rains.
Cannot
hate it for that. Restriction? So.
Sitting
at the one trattoria narrow in the wall
of
a tall house, sipping coffee, it is always coffee.
Laying,
to pass the day, his heart bare
to
the insinuating bores. Or
sitting on the hill alone,
blocking
the gauche littoral with gauging thumb.
All
exile is voluntary, the world’s a cage.
She
has untrained hips, a working girl’s, and her yard
has
red geraniums. And the
house she works in seems,
where
coincides a street-side with beachward window,
perforated,
knifed right through, filled with the sea.
For
sure not like the grey room he inhabits, reads all day in,
no
wardrobe, yet with the gilded coffee-cup he brought
from
the smoky north of danger, functional friends.
Tight
the doors and windows, as if trapping a void.
As
shut tight as the villas in the deserted land
of
memory’s childhood, the fig-tree hedges dead, the red soil barren,
where
he had played—with just a fence-splint was it?— in isolation.
That
goat face swung up, her crupper rude.
She was carrying water.
Remembering
her enough, he is glad to note, liberates from
the
desire that pounded him waking, then merely bickered.
Lover
of a foul old man she is; that is more than rumour.
Mountain
goat; timeless brutality; and a bit of tail
for
the village brawn, the gobbing corner Jacks
who
conspire small futures in the flaking square, yodel at grans.
It
is sad to know they have plucked the geranium
and
that he has not. Red
geranium. Though better
they have.
One
day he’ll leave and will have kept his faith,
no
flower’s red to mind but the grey north then;
start
a cell again; learn more about and extend
this
coma that stings, the innerness of freedom.
Alan
Marshfield
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