As he went out one evening,
to claim what had been promised him,
he had what some might call a ‘Kavanagh’
brought on by God knows what.
He stood stock still in nodding twilight,
then leaned against the shanking of the bridge
that hovers mildly, always mildly,
above the sedge-lined stream.
The sky behind the trees was turning
as he watched, from light to dark
and every shade another shade of blue.
The streets he’d walked along
still resonant with fading gold, made
paler as the streetlights banked
from dim to sickly, eyes unable
to resist, adjusting to the artifice
of striding headlong into black,
each memorized crack the sidewalk’s length
loading his temporary sightlessness
with a whistler’s quickened confidence
veering to the left and favoring the right.
Rare enough as joy is,
rarer still the vulnerable moment
when it stands before one, visible.
Happiness he knew of and approved;
contentedness had earned his biting dollar;
but the various words for tragedy
were summonses and jinx and salt over
shoulder, lip-wet finger tapping forehead,
urgency that time must stop.
A bold, black, fullstop
at the end of the run-on sentence.
An instant of joy then, its climax
imperceptible till the moment
it was gone and the desire,
hopeless and too human, of returning
to the pin and focus that might prolong
what was even now no more likely
to succumb to adoration
than smoke … on deck … of ship … at sea.
There was the stream below
in its soft turning, the spill
and run of water finding notes to play
like single bubbles among the pebbles’ simpler tones.
Another word for tranquil;
another word for light;
another word for stars or jade,
when what one needed was sun?
His common lust for order,
for mapping the remains,
had called him to the middle of this
bridge, with one reflection down below,
another staring back and made
of chattering leaves and sky as calm
as a painting of the sea,
with only the ripped curtains of
residual blindness and roaming night
to undercut the slur of distant
nightlife camped beyond the park,
where surely every window
and every bar stool offered
what he might presently yearn for,
though slutted in a posture
he might as easily abjure.
Spotty words make spotless phrases,
and not the other way around:
love’s proposals rise upon a worm,
not every germ coincident with filth.
If he were a better person
there’d be no end to Beauty.
But as he’s not, poor Beauty’s on the
clock, her deadline dumb as nature.
All this did Mr. Shadow see,
in increments of time like dagger thrusts,
with sand co-starring in its own cliché,
of guessing the number of grains to win
the homely unexpected prize.
And underneath the swarm of sand
a void building up a thirst,
a thimble dipping into ocean,
an awkward squad of hog-eyed brutes,
boaring the brush to a steam of
musk behind him, closing in,
their whispering a roar and clatter,
a mistress’s key tossed from
a speeding car to skitter
on the icy lake and spin to rest,
till dawn creaks off the crystal lid.
Shadow saw the early moon
peeking coy and chubby either side
the cathedral’s cruel-as-catprick spire,
Luna’s face cratered with self-abuse.
His theme was the arrangement
of his past, his various misdeeds
so swollen as to bridegroom the cathedral
for sheer size and silent menace.
Shadow saw them coming for him
and shut his eyes till they
slunk by, to cosh some docklands lookalike
and, passing round the stubbed serrated blade,
took, not so cleanly, yet another scalp.
The bridge was his again,
fat Luna buttering up the underslope
and sliding down for encore.
One might have bottled the park’s
distracted moods, its traps
in drunken pattern, landmarked
like an ancient battlefield,
the banner of a picnic blanket
stuffed sodden in the spillway’s caries-
ridden grin, canopy hoarding its hour
of cold drizzle for the break of day.
There is a rhyme in Kavanagh
that captures the little and the all,
the gaps in an amnesiac’s chronicle
wide enough to drive a dream through.
But the void which cancels difference
in a dream run down and stalled,
hangs midway spew and splendor
and teeters between flight and fall.
Time’s rhyme is space, its echo, death.
Which is what he saw, the how
and all the elegant endings ended
and a wisp the owl took in its mouth
and flew away with, the strength of the
bough unchancing any tremble his eye
might sight along anticipating,
ever ready to confess, deny, betray.
The moon crept like torture to the spire’s
tip, balancing its rump, balloonlike,
on Christ’s redemptive, strigate shiv,
coy and chubby now made whole.
As Shadow never lied to others
the things he saw he knew
he could not share, but only tip
by gram and kilo against the scale
thimbling his illusions of himself.
The arrogance of self-loathing spun
shining possibilities like sparks
over the decrepit state of his decrepit heart.
Bred into the irony that light
rots with its every glance, that much-
vaunted transparency is a suit of glass
only an angel or a fool would wear.
What’s best for you, thought Shadow
sadly, turns out to be eternal peace,
aspiring to silence as a state of grace,
however few were listening from the start.
Those virtues his virtues noted
were cobbled and random, a shuffled
deck yielding unintended mystery,
a patternlessness the code of which
artesianed out of sight and deep,
the shopping list of a compulsive biblioklept,
collared and relieved of his loot
while the pavement bounced him in its mirage.
Cerebral, subfusc, and still,
his virtues those of any well-kept
rodent, the anodyne qualities of his
self-love demoting that love to venial.
The stream ran black, though latticed
moonlight fingered it with afterpricks
of point and dazzle, and he listened
head down for what he didn’t wish
to name, there in the stillness
on a bridge he was now set free to cross,
knowing his silence was the murder
of a voice already at a loss.