lady florists across the city tend to me
as if I’m their son, and not long-lost
but theirs forever and inviolate –
they let me mist the indoor arrangements
of cacti and I postulate as I spray –
sadness being so earnestly
recrudesced, what is it
if not the tragedy of tragedies
that memory finds the composition
of happiness so troubling, ice so wont
to phase change to nostalgia as to water
and finally to melancholy as to vapour
because, while we don’t celebrate
the passing of great sadness
we do shed quiet tears when happiness ends?
in all the poems overnight
composed without sanction, without
catharsis by my metronomic mind
this nauseating pathos was master
and as the twenty-third morning since
I left my home dawns, it visits me
but brighter and yet more reclusive
such that for hours I sit with chin in hand
and pen in mouth
and even when the pages start to fill
the words seem constrained
by feelings, left to fester unappreciated
now spiteful, now ebbing out malignant
and always perfectly wrong.
were I to reach the east coast
in such a state – kindle the woodstove
built at the centre of my borrowed yurt
listen to the breaths of the flames
and the breaths of the incoming waves
and the breaths of the outgoing tide
and the voices of those women on the beach
and the breaths, maybe the voices, of myself
long after the Quebec sun makes good
so wonderfully late, on its promised down-going
all of it would spirit me towards
actions thought of later as grave mistakes
and the point on the coast at which
my face would be most pelted by the winds
and ashed by the sand like faded chrome
that looks as though all the metals of the world
have been ground down to micro filaments
and left, softer than rabbit fur, to decay –
then the train would steam across
the cliff tops and I’d have boarded
and all the sleeper carriages would be
locked and economy dark
save for a few pale reading lights
dotted like channel buoys over black
seas and economy silent –
wind turbines would appear
near the famous precipice on the bay
where the rails are hardly metres
from the edge, and dizzied
by their spinning and the blinking
of their beacons, I would tumble
into the only spare seat
laid out by vertigo
and the full moon would enter –
a perfect double image at the corner
of the window, such that I’d need to shift
to confirm that the planet I was on
was indeed Earth, and the city
I was to live in, Ann Arbor –
and by that dumb structure’s firelight
and concurrently the flicker
of the candles in her new apartment
still without power, I would think of her
miles away and beside me equally
twitching with the drama of her dream
hair transformed overnight from black to blonde
like the colour of our half-shared hemisphere
and I would write tomes of poetry
in Gaspésie, fall asleep in Melbourne
only to sleep in meter like a madman
all for the sake of making tangible
the one relationship forever formless
middling incorrectly in that corridor
full of other errors born as happiness
a phlogiston I’d somehow like to safeguard
because memory has the most trouble with it
and for my memory to fail is for me to fail.
now, alone, I leave
the last of the flower-filled sanctuaries
heading east as far as Canada allows.
No comments:
Post a Comment