(in memoriam Geoffrey Grigson, 1905-1985)
The koala hugs its tree and is a patriot.
The blue ripple of berries
scattering its wake
unrecorded save by dream.
In another port
the ship’s chaplain
bears down upon his molars. Quinine against fever,
adultery to offset depression.
A civilian, booted from a scarecrow colony,
points out the apricots and cream
upon the rattling tray
not unhappy at being poisoned.
Genteel pamphleteers,
misted in the opiate of orchids, the lilac drops
that afford safe passage through the suicide hours.
They frown their sister-frowns at the word outcast,
as though it had been uttered in their hearing
at some not-distant-enough juncture.
They have learned their American from
Whitman and Lanier. And we believe them,
the floral variety of their phrasing at odds
with samovar and mosquito net.
Partridge and Paycock
and stress gone playful,
with gentlemen by the name of
Burnett and Morganfield
brightening the furnace where
the nautical highway turned to ditch.
Lay the table, Evelyn, lay the trap, Ronald,
a faux-blond melancholy trips the piano
in its sleepwalk, and we are left to clap
one-handed.
Sun’s hard up,
darkness given the slip,
chirping sailors
awake for hours.
From primitive to sunstone,
from seamarks to city, and all the gape between,
in sanitary bypass. A winking, watchdog jungle-land
or the Sargasso wrecked upon its ten thousand isles.
Lizard green and parrot blue, stitched with froth
which gasses out its rot.
No star, seen, and seen again some other night, murmurs
down its rumored attributes of peace and goodwill.
The cinematic oarsman pulls towards the beach,
its silk mirage of tanned pavilions, his face
to the sea, his back to the white sand,
the snowblind stun and stain,
the creep of echoing shade.