Poems by Estill Pollock

Sirens

In Plato’s Republic, heaven
was theirs, golden rotations in a golden time

Ulysses knew the song, and in it
the promise of knowledge of all things

In the rope, in the sailor’s knot
made fast
against the frequency of everything he wanted

The sweet somnambulance ending on the rocks

Centuries after, the corpse of one
washed up along the shore, the face nearly human

Grey torso tapering to a faded iridescence

Strabo the geographer saw her tomb, noting
ceremonies in her memory included
youths vaulting, and races by torch light

Bring desire, they said, its urgency
and steep precision, bring memory and the promise of all things

In 1403, in the Netherlands, one appeared
through an opening in an earthen dyke

Her manner was confused, and she was without language

Later, she was taught to weave
and lived on there in Haarlem until she died

In January’s flat light, looking seaward
she called to salt, its deepest binding

Her voice 
many voices, cut-glass above tidal grasses
and the waves breaking

Three Descriptions of the Colour Red

Between baptism and the Outer Darkness
an impoverishment of time and species
commits to memory
the names of angels in their atomic solitude

Jorge Luis Borges, blind 
in Buenos Aires, considers the eternity of archetypes

He rolls the moonlight in his mouth
recalling childhood scenes

The gramophone—honeysuckle arias, melting hearts
and beyond the parlour, outside, relentless sun

Raw pampas—through the dust, gauchos
butchering meat

The universe is nostalgia, for the comforts of geometry 
in the portals of the poorest houses

For each 
lost second sunk past red horizons

The names drift past the fig trees of Buenos Aires
and the skeletons beneath streetlamps

And the smallness of the nightingale, across 
the sea of glass to Patmos

Comprehending 
Alpha and Omega, the scarlet beast, and fierce birds
devouring the flesh of captains

Names in Birth Order

We lived low-rent in Juárez, in faded rooms
in a tiredness of heat near 
the Avenue of the Virgin

Night coming and going 
on the stairs, the curtains there half-lifted 
to a moon outside pale and big as Mexico

Our lives were ordinary and obscure

A narcotic, infusing sameness

We prayed for cool breezes, for pardon, for
primary colours

When we died
we found the gods who visit
come for cockfights in the painted pit, not
ceremonies of forgiveness

The wager of a candle lit-both-ends, requires 
a sacrificial etiquette we never managed

We were the last of our line
with all you heard about us true, corrupt 
and unredeemed, the way the wind cuts through the fields 
dry with shadows
everywhere and nowhere

Slow circles of weather, of ghosts drifting drowsily
above the cremations

Estill Pollock’s publications include Constructing the Human (Poetry Salzburg) and the book cycle Relic Environments Trilogy (Cinnamon Press). His poetry collections in the Cartographic Projections of a Sphere series—Entropy, Time Signatures, Ark and Heathen Anthems—are published by Broadstone Books. The e-chapbooks And Then and Working Title are published by Mudlark. He lives in Norfolk, England.