TRANSFIGURATIONS

I

Look, who could be mistaken
in love for the coming man?
What else is there but falling,
what else enchantment surely
but a word to the wise? Look,
that could almost be my face
in the unspotted mirror.

Who, if I cried, would hear me
For lack of an answer here
this is how I see angels:
our drawn-out, hallowed bodies
as artful in their absence
as the miraculous voids
of a limewood vanitas.

II

One is astride, the other
panting now for some release,
arrival at the pin-prick
transaction of their business;
what a ride, what a favour
to the dark, and what hurry
to reach this vanishing-point!

Uccello cello cello
birdsong as dreaming aloud
against a heaven; painting
as a diagram of death;
and music as our vision
of time’s ending in the black
and knotted heart of the wood.

III

Thanks for nothing, thanks again
for the various despairs
of a modern appetite;
nothing to be afraid of,
nothing quite so of its time
as this cupidity writ
large in trillions and prayer:

Verklärte Nacht: betrayal
at a nicely judged remove:
as if our broken world could
turn away from reckoning,
all debts forgiven somehow
in the debauched coinage
of promises and regret.

IV

We are of course too canny
and too old now to be moved
or saved by such sob stories;
no, our preferred music is
the shrill, harrowing parley
of blue-notes calling the lost
each by their forgotten name.

Listen, as from a rostrum
we play this muttering trump
across meadows enfolded
and damp before hay harvest:
risen and recollected
poppies, blood-blisters, figures
upon a disturbing ground.

V

So, having seen off the dead
we turn about and face north;
hunters become the haunted
in their place, inheritors
beginning at last our own
departure from this room as
from another’s memory.

Unasked, our days become years
and years; we grow accustomed
to new styles of emptiness,
our flesh if not its focus
now assured of the long haul
from A to Z, from Garden
to Armagagageddon.

VI

It’s a bad house this evening:
hoots from the memory box,
my own appearances trashed
in the life-review. Should I
busk it nonetheless, applaud
these dramatis personae?
Should I run on, take a bow?

Best to keep the tape playing
just for laughs, until white noise
and video snow consume
the credits to my picture;
no edit or re-record
for this animated man:
this was as good as it got.

VII

Look, it needn’t happen here,
for I will negotiate
safe passage, binding clauses,
full and favourable terms;
for I will count the fretful
syncopations of my pulse;
for I will lift up mine eyes

Above the tree-line, up to
the ascendant zones of this
glittering, excessive white;
a body, chafing at its
last exposure to the air,
a mountain’s avalanches
pale before the brazen sun