Cartouche
The Amish farmer dreams in Low German His hat sprouts chicken legs, bolting Zigzag through corn stubble, and he calls to the hat To come home, to the hatstand in the hall In his dream, he nestles the hat, the soft brim Brushed clean, the chicken legs after all Just a dream, a moment Of fretful sleep His soothing diphthongs soft as a Goethe couplet … Picasso’s women Splinter faces, breakglass spirits dissolving colour by colour Into sumptuous contours Pubic errata filleted, as though Animals in folded realities borrow faces from humans, bloom With names, rough cut gems Spoken in monologues preserved in linseed cages Speaking now the way dreadful dreams Direct the lightning … Monks keeping bees return to vaulted stone, syncing Doggerel harmonies to hive work, commonalities of heaven Excavated by choirs of haunted priests Conjured worlds disappear, freakish authenticity Of collapsing space-time, edgy Confessional debris Restless turning in bed, monstrous monotony impatient For light’s armistice … Fern unfurling, impresario flourishes Reliable as rain, my factory-parts poems, clockwork worlds, sprung Rhythm scandals, no Match for showboat tuck and roll … Labyrinthine engineering, fascist enzymes embedded In new laws against asylum and the Global South Crazy for our metropolitan ennui … The heating pipes knocking In the night, rootless echo orphan dreams The smokeless fuel of alimony, the car you used To move the body, the cocktail hour piano Everybody missing the good old days … Fetch synonyms for cloudbursts on the day of your funeral The smell of damp soil Down to the level of the Roman causeway, the grit Of archaeology between the teeth Fetch the secret names of the gods, fetch the clock On the wall of the abattoir … Memory, hothouse flower, shiny leaves swabbed For phantom residues, discreet, fleshy firework disguising Comets … Rhetoric easy as civilian casualties, bright as fires of drone strikes On the crèche Jigsaw borders pulped to fit the continental drift of loyalties And trembling stamen in the breeding labs The song in the barbed throat ratcheting patriots … A postage stamp demands fealty Mysterious liaisons, the dimensions of the room in your dreams, all Under notice of ransom What your wife saw in the shadows the day before your death To the authorities, her careful copperplate version, anon … Ceremonies of guitars, distracting From gangster governments banning sundials The subversion of timelines for curfews And ballots bought with blood Asymmetrical genders, semen patents And the sequencing of future tenses, a woman dancing In guitar-shaped shadows … A fountain of dolphins, stilled in stone, at mouth holes copper Tendrils marking intervals of minuet spray Valves and timers somewhere, fan-burst pumps, old Calculations, rainbow mist Earning its keep … Fretwork pylons ridge to ridge, umbilical To wind farms anchored offshore White horse breakers against ingot turbines The moon’s arcade, beyond the porch light The smell of mown hay … Eurasian Spoonbills in reedy fens, homesick For the Netherlands The breeding urge hardwired as far As these sleepy Norfolk wetlands Binoculars reel them in, migrations Of estuary instincts, most others Gone south For winter, yet these Off course, preferring early fogs to the Côte d'Azur’s balmy Intermezzo If this was a real poem, we would pump our Pedal organ as bonhomie exemplar To these windward brethren … The body, heavy with sleep, fixed in positions Wound round with dreams A bowl of Bohemian glass strung by chains From an ornate ceiling, the light Caught in fleeting madder and ultramarine and the chilled air From the open window An enchanted ladder, a magic lantern, boundaries Tested by a dawn that will not break Beyond this convalescence A mouth dry with crows, a woman Running down a path soaked with rain, a fever dream, cold-sweat flesh Shining in the half light My mother, her voice low, to the doctor whispering Will he live … A scene discarded by Dickens Perhaps People tapping barometers, rehearsing The disciplines of rain and heat Weather teased from dry straw stalks, storms Stirring to the whims of mercury, lightning hung from black Horizons like clematis on the trellis Images, common as summer showers Subtlety, however, requires finesse, a leisurely digression On climates, soliciting Future trends In the novel Of manners, for instance, the day the master of the house first notices The svelte au-pair ... Cloth remnants knotted Into flower shapes, popular with court ladies His luminescent dyes a secret coveted by rivals His potion palette, scratched into a scroll Looted at his death, neglected the catalyst binding light To light Known only to his daughter, her pet name translated as A sprig of tarragon ... Glum as a nightcap, as Proust would say And then the text, the letter, the loophole in love Or law, lost hope Recovered like a flower Thought extinct Along the bramble lane the scent And clown chromatics tucked Among plainer petals The souls of the dead, held In trees, stones, manifesting when a stranger Passes, the dead calling By name To be released From material objects, from low animal forms Trembling awake, the pilgrim recognition
Estil Pollock | Local Spirits
Contents | Mudlark No. 80 (2024)