Bad classics
Sauntering along, the boy looks up and sees a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.
—Alexander Gilchrist
I wake to the grayest, maddening light.
Good morning. It is seven o’clock in London.
What comprises the night? What conducts
the dark? The thing
worries for the thing. The houseboats on the River Lea
waver brightly in the shallows. In Roydon, a swan thinks the lake,
which doves—O Fama!—plunge to meet. What does it mean
when the footbridge continues into the forever-
fit of shadows? And the meadows, purpled like nothing else.
The what-is in the marshes. And the pink sky, shattered over Lewisham!
In another part of the city, my friends
break their fasts together
in London’s late, caliginous wash.
We have Chinese food in the dark
and, in the distance, foxes
wear the voices of the dying.
It can’t be what it was. It can’t be
what it should. Like the hand that moves
the gate. Like the water
water moves—the trees giving way
to the place where the cliff breaches the mist
and my muses sputter at the edge. I wanted so much the highest river
and that single swan. I wanted the uncrying valley, white as white.
It could have been like this. It could have been
like this. It couldn’t. It could. And the blood bay horses grazing
as a schoolboy falls asleep beside me
and the train turns in the gloaming—
I said I wanted the clouds. I said I wanted
the dusk that isn’t dusk, but, instead, the thorny husk
of the thing that drives me. Madly, that shaking of the dust beneath the tracks
where a path leads to an alternate grove
and the metal un-beams itself and, yes, our incapacitable hearts—
If I were the lamb, I’d choose the block.
If I were the horse that rode with you, I’d ride with you.
I don’t know how to write for the God
in whose voice I can only hear
my own sullied desperation. We stop at an empty station, old child of the fog.
The snakes look over us, my coffee-sweet, my lost-now ravishing,
my shaking in the black. My friend, the fates knew from the start.
O how it shakes. The mud of which we’re made—O how it. The summer,
it tore me—O, this spring, how I.
Like the day, like the swan, like my sacral lungs
gagging for the smog
on the way to Peckham Rye. And the wild humming of Brockley Footpath
as we walk home beneath the huge, undefiable moon
and the terrors for which we were never prepared
fade into the night on the other side of the tunnel—
the dim-lovely, bitter, blank and powder, the dirt and whatever short
shreds of ourselves we lost among the hallows. Errant and unlit.
O how, howl, howling, my love that isn’t. Nunhead Cemetery
and my been-beaten chest. It was me all along. I don’t know.
When I got up to leave, I watched the curtains block the bastard light
until slowly, slowly, they forgot all about me,
glowing in the new day,
my shade against their blue, my back against his back.
