The music of much gentler times
proposes for my silence to recede:
still St. Narcissus and his gang of mimes
take evening promenades and starlight climbs,
upon the staircase of Vivaldi’s middle age,
an insolent Pierrot upon a crowded stage.
Is it betrayal to dismiss these times
of smoothed back hair and bended knees
and laughter haunted by the yellow star
upon so many sleeves?
Beyond the garden of lanterns and colonnades.
I cannot see the stairs in air,
the crystal cabinet, the poet’s room
nor the rose unfolding with a cry at night
(I have collared a vision of life).
The solitary flower I hold to blame,
deceptive its disguise as shame:
what etiquette is there in Keats’ lock of hair
so ribboned with the fragrance of a light perfume
yet neutral to the fragrance of the dangling blooms
in the garden of Adonis, drugged and dazed.
The forked tip of the hieroglyph
is thread and gold, is labyrinthine,
its ankle in the moon’s tipped cup
vanished round the corner where the wall rose up,
at the corner where a courtier in a boat of stone
confused as angel or as diabolic bone,
held in his eyes the obvious means
of braid and spiral run entwined.
There was seaweed in his hair and there was brine.
In the garden darkening with dreams.
Bright water and dark,
the oars whip the foam in pearls,
and music of much gentler days
floats on the river and, lingering, stays.
Linger, child born of desire,
a hothouse love exposed to mud and wind
and fire.
Brilliant water and water chill and dark
where shadows poise, gather, and furl
down towards the scissors snapping
underneath the world,
in the terraced sea, in a garden of dreams,
in the garden of the deathless sunburnt sea.