Book Read Free

Rift of Light

Page 4

by William Logan


  benighted chalk-cliffed coasts,

  or empty bejeweled lakes.

  That steamy summer vision,

  bleached in indolence,

  admits a single intruder

  perched on a wire fence.

  Its drenched Tyrrhenian purples,

  spit-shined tawny browns,

  sharpened glints of silver

  trouble the pockmarked downs

  that barred the armored legions

  breasting the swampy marches

  until the border succumbed

  to a study of Roman arches.

  So civilization was dragged

  out of the sunburnt south—

  the pin-straight road, lead plumbing,

  a bird fit for Caesar’s mouth,

  and, after the fall of Rome,

  belonging in their way

  to a place they had once invaded,

  the invaders managed to stay.

  Dürer’s Stag Beetle

  Pincers erupt from its skull case,

  two Damascene blades

  sharpened for some Crusader,

  its armor plate enameled in black and brown,

  an à la mode tailored jacket

  just racked by Prada,

  though the belly resembles

  a computer mouse. Its legs, the spindly legs

  of the Paris dancing master,

  end in Rorschach blots

  or sad India-ink beads,

  like broken necklaces of Tahitian pearls.

  Ink spot, you are part of your sums,

  lowly Ding an sich

  in that rude philosophy

  available only to creatures that crawl.

  Not even the most patient bride

  would hold such a pose

  for more than five hundred years.

  Still, who complains about success in design?

  O beetle, ever now the hard-

  headed bachelor

  of the grass-lot realm, never

  to know the comforts and solicitations

  of the holy marital state

  or the afterlife

  promised to those who worship

  the trinity of abdomen, thorax, head,

  bless our belated nuptials,

  delayed past the date

  when wisdom could bow to love

  or grace in its grave time, then turn back to stone.

  Then, in the Trumpetings

  How necessary, meanwhile,

  the season of sun-spoilt skies, the rinse

  of confirming clouds, even when death

  awaits, the next day, the next.

  Venice in the Old Days

  i

  Mist rose from nothing, from the spent idea.

  Venice—the last Weberian fantasy,

  San Marco isolate, a pawned-off jewel

  amid the lowering century’s broken lights.

  The case was handsome, but the jewel fake.

  Women in towering costumes swarmed the noons,

  as if our period were an exclamation.

  Love is the archive of ordinary time.

  Thirty years on, what nags at memory?

  Confectioner’s snow spilled on ruined cloisters,

  a greasy film of water lagging the flagstones

  under the dove-gray skies of Italy.

  The Roman holidays were not meant for us—

  perhaps, in a way, they were not meant at all.

  ii

  The sunset scraped the gilt dome like a match.

  Nothing had lost the kink of purity.

  Scrabbling through the beach sand of Murano,

  you hauled up dribbling rubies, amethysts.

  We stalked reflections of the Risorgimento

  through pea-soup mudflats of the drained canal.

  The Catholic idea was genocide:

  kill everyone—let God sort out the rest.

  The phosphorescence on the churches blazed—

  no, just limelights touching the numinous.

  Two tourists, we lingered nightward, homeward, past

  palazzos peeling from their ocher skins.

  The vaporetto rocked in acid fog—

  what looked like brass to us might have been gold.

  The Venetian Dog

  Morning drew a damask curtain

  across the lagoon. A sketch

  would have offered more of the scene,

  those hours in Venice, when the powder

  tore off the Dolomites, a whitish haze

  blinding the edges of the paper.

  Weren’t we, too, drawn as if

  with blunt pencil into the empty margins,

  soon to be rubbed clean

  with bread crumbs? We stood in the museum

  off the Piazza San Marco,

  corn snow whipping the glass

  as you traced the scribble of a dog,

  done two or three centuries past

  in a moment of inattention

  while the artist sat at coffee

  and watched the crowd pass

  along the piazzetta—the scrawl

  no doubt forgotten,

  perhaps consigned to household trash

  used by a scullery maid to light the kitchen fire.

  Perhaps even the artist himself did not think

  the ragged beast worth preserving,

  though obviously someone had.

  Winter Before Winter

  At Cairo, the old established firm of Fever & Ague is still settling up its unfinished business.

  —Melville, The Confidence-Man

  The sky not uniform gray, but a splendor

  of chalky washes, some Prussian blue,

  smutty or smoky, where stray dots of starlings

  whip past like loose punctuation—

  the afternoon falters, as afternoons will,

  this season of late gestures,

  the hardness before true winter.

  Botticelli showed the same futility of the beautiful,

  caught, held, the merest

  stay against the inevitable, the way the first

  locust seems a mistake, but soon—

  in that way age runs through its petty defeats—

  the mobs clatter in the grain bin.

  There is that last pleasure, disease.

  Winter in Cloud

  Canaletto, Old Walton Bridge over the Thames

  Bean-shaped clouds steal winter’s laziness,

  the sketch of trees, bare rocks, pale ground below

  mare’s tails, feathers, the woolen lumps insolvent

  and brutish on the swirl of January.

  I studied their climbing orders—

  only in underpaint could they be stilled.

  No wonder I loved the artist’s frozen studies,

  hovering air on which the smudged and harnessed sky

  took shape like a dream of smoke, or soot

  spooled into drains. In Canaletto’s travels,

  he found the light of God, the English fire

  in cannonading peace dropped

  onto a matchstick bridge sawn from ivory.

  Beneath the blank sky standing in afterglow,

  that heaven would be savior of us all.

  On Hair as a Revolutionary Mode of Dress

  Each Brutus, each Cato, were none of them fops

  But all to a man wore Republican crops.

  —English song of 1794

  Our very looks are deciphered into disaffection, and we cannot move without treading on some political spring-gun.

  —Coleridge

  And so the powder was perforce abandoned
/>
  for hair au naturel, the gallows look

  serving a man as his revealing dress,

  the bare neck not necked to the wooden yoke,

  though stout informers lingered in doorways,

  took ear in every inn, stole a man’s letters,

  bribed the dull maid who flowered in his kitchen

  or the clown who spaded up his dying crop.

  Only the fop, the Crown’s man, the MP

  could pay the guinea tax that Pitt required

  on powder, become a Guinea Pig, which made

  fashion, for once, the badge of loyalty.

  A poor man wore his treasons in his hair.

  The barber took confession in his shears.

  The War

  We were the last, the very last, to know.

  It was a day like any other day.

  Soldiers arrived to take the Jews away.

  I saw the neighbor girl with her portmanteau.

  What is that thing that people think we owe?

  We witnessed scenes more brutal than Doré—

  we suffered, too, and sank to our knees to pray.

  Someone was first, but we were the last to know.

  A Cloudy Sunset in East Anglia

  A few glints subtracted the glassine skin

  of the crooked pond, like a hand mirror set

  on vacant lawns without regret

  and so eternally feminine,

  the shafts of antique light

  not so much the fallen columns of Tyre

  but a completeness cast into fire.

  We saw that ash could still ignite.

  They burned through the plane tree’s dowdy dress,

  the ordinary days, lively with nothingness.

  Night World

  The barbed-wire vines

  knot the azaleas

  in the DMZ

  of the border yard.

  Everywhere I find

  the sign of signs:

  the abandoned wreck

  of a cardinal’s nest,

  over-mortgaged,

  or underwater;

  the snout divots

  of armadillos,

  shy, unregistered aliens.

  The world’s another

  world at night,

  where the dream-scatter

  of day lunks about,

  preparing, preparing

  for nothing at all.

  The Troubles

  When the householder answered the tentative knock,

  he found this scrawny wild-eye of a youth on the step,

  ski mask in hand. The boy was dripping—

  bangs plastered down, clothes soaked in gasoline,

  reeking of the stuff—asking, “Would you be having

  a match there, mate? I have need of it.”

  When the old man shook his head,

  the boy said, “Aye. Ta, then.”

  He turned down the walk, a stream pooling in his footsteps.

  The teller added, “That boy was a bard, d’you see?

  That boy was poetry himself.”

  On Reading That the Ozone Is in Danger from Air Conditioning and Amphibious Life from Shampoo

  We, in the day when Earth was burning,

  The hour the oceans turned blood red,

  Ignored the obvious signs of warning

  And took our comforts and are dead.

  Head and Shoulders held the sky suspended;

  To Frigidaire we preferred to pray;

  What God abandoned, Walmart defended,

  And lost the world the American way.

  There Was

  Ohanessian’s world-history class,

  that grotto of tact

  where a millennium of war, disease,

  and natural disaster had been shrunk

  to the odd fact I could plunder

  for exams then murderously forget—

  the Tennis Court Oath, Teapot Dome,

  Charlemagne, the Diet of Worms,

  the Know-Nothings, Aethelred the Unready,

  most now by grace forgotten,

  until this afternoon’s dust-mote-driven air

  recalled the Piranesi figure

  of the tenth-grade classroom projector

  and that washed-out ratchety clip

  filmed on the steppes during the Revolution.

  A sepia line of men, raggedly dressed,

  only their black fleece hats

  identifying them as Cossacks,

  scruffy, half-starved, shuffled their feet

  and, almost as one, leapt back

  into a trench we could not see.

  Then a second line, a third,

  nothing altered but the faces

  of bewildered half-boys smiling shyly,

  seemingly almost flattered that this act,

  their last, was being recorded.

  One waggled his fingers in a modest wave.

  The hand-cranked camera, the acrobatic

  jumps worthy of Keaton, the crack

  of bullets in silence: no wonder the clutch

  of fifteen-year-olds, in that AP class

  of suburban young starters, burst

  into raucous laughter.

  Lt. Selkirk on the Weymouth

  off the coast of Africa

  They were not hard to tame, the feral goats.

  That rocky mount was hardly an island at all—

  I doubt all London is much larger—

  and soon the goats and I grew used to our lot.

  I had my favorites, or a string of favorites,

  because of course the beasts would die,

  or break a foreleg, or grow ill-tempered;

  and there is nothing like a goat for temper.

  But then the kids were so entertaining.

  Mary was my darling, dearest Mary.

  I would tease her with a parsnip,

  or what I named a parsnip—

  I’m still not sure what the warty thing was called.

  Many was the evening I took her by the fire,

  when I had combed for driftwood,

  some splinter of spar washed up or, once, two hatches

  I used to floor my “house” until the air grew chill.

  Mary was my wife those two long years!

  She started to cough one afternoon,

  and by dawn she was dead.

  Oh, how I mourned! I cut my arms

  with my dull knife. I cut and cut and let them bleed.

  At first I had been neat as a little maid,

  for what is a man when he cannot mind himself?

  For my business, I squatted behind a mottled dune,

  which I called the Dune of Sorrows;

  but it’s so hard to keep yourself beyond six months—

  to keep yourself, I mean, with no one about

  to appreciate the daily despair it takes,

  not even my precious Mary, whose habits

  were slatternly as some Bridewell wench.

  I would find her turds in my bed, like love tokens.

  I lamed her so she could not stray,

  though I was not her only husband, I knew.

  Later I lived with Mary’s daughter for a time.

  She was silky and affectionate,

  but I felt a brute. Who could have known

  that a grieving man who shat where he stood

  would have some compunction

  about incest with his goats? And yet I did.

  I restored my harem after that. I refused

  to take a single wife again, for what use

  is the Protestant’s marriage when his God

 
can murder the beloved out of whim?

  The goat is a most forgiving Christian—

  if you slaughter his mate, if you butcher her

  within his sight and roast her over a blazing fire,

  why, the next dawn he forgives you!

  And yet I felt ashamed. And yet I ate.

  I was lord of the cotton tree and palm.

  The goats owed fealty to me,

  for was I not Alexander the First, Alexander the Good?

  Had I not conquered those lands within a week,

  and did I not hold the sacred crown,

  carved of pimento wood?

  A sailor is but a sailor; a king is king forever,

  or a little longer, should his subjects be goats.

  I clothed myself in my own linens;

  but those I owned, those I had drawn from my cabin,

  were rags within two seasons.

  When my breeches fell away, I dreamed

  I was attacked by a native with a spear,

  a spear that proved a long iron-nail.

  I owned such a nail! And the nail

  was soon my needle, and the needle my seamstress,

  and my cloth my beloved goats.

  When I wanted a new knife, I made the beastly thing

  from barrel hoops, for a man may be a blacksmith

  if he heats well and hammers hard.

  I kept a stolen hammer in my trunk.

  What little food I had, I made a banquet—

  wild turnips and cabbages decorated

  my trencher, seasoned by the pepper berry.

  I learned to savor the fish, and fish I caught—

  aye, chimney sweepers and old wives,

  more fish than the moon could claim.

  For meat, there were my dear subjects,

  brought to refinement by the salt I dried

  from my acres of ocean, my infinite water-fields.

  I was a lord of water. Aye, and my realms

  bestowed upon me the ten-pound crawfish.

  I named each a King William and ate him up.

  I never learned to love the taste of rat,

  though I knew a mate who believed it

  more glorious than English beef

  if hung a few days and let grow gamy as mutton.

  The bead-eyed beasts used to set upon me

  of a night, gnawing at my feet, like cannibals.

 

‹ Prev