(in memoriam Lawrence Durrell, 1912-1990)
Anarchists, Egyptologists, a school of dentistry
and a brothel painted blue.
There was a time when knowing the city well
was not cause for hesitation,
no lowering of the voice accompanied the archival
delivery. Description followed anecdote
and no failure vexed the guiding face.
Ragged ikons, yellowed bones, sacred odds and ends
now laid to leisure beneath foreign eyes, no longer
objects of worship.
This age cannot be spoken of, or remaining children
risk the orphanage.
Silence leads to memory loss or myth: a walled city
in a desert deep as ocean,
snow falling down for decades, out of a stone-gray
landlocked sky.
The neutral details pepper-dot the index card,
stapled like neuroses
beside the donation box. A Latin footnote to make
the rosebuds gape.
Descending from the Cyrillic thicket the sudden hic
and sunt like planks wrenched off
to warp in the sea’s black mutter. A dog-paddle
carries one no nearer
the now unimaginable shore though how would one know,
only sunspots overhead?
The black alphabet hordes upon the water,
the odd Greek wave
not long left blue. And thus a shrine, safe in the
terrain-shift of dream.
To the letterless scholar it might be said to represent
monotheism at its pagan best.
And to the never-anointed priest perhaps the site
of sacrifice and terrible joy.
While for the timid tomb-robber what would it mean
but sex and gluttony
and a curse to carry into the many-mirrored maze
of all his future lives?
Catlike in sun, dream-tourists doze beside the swift broad
river. At the shrine’s very heart,
contained within a red box bestarred with silver points
is the head of a king,
removed from its body some centuries past,
on an island
just over the scrawled bruise of the horizon,
itself proud possessor
of a separate shrine, housing this same king’s
hands, liver, and heart.
Doze like a cat on a wintry sill till a stranger calls
from behind a screen of reeds.
You have been here before, then? Dog-paddling,
treble-tongued dreamer,
drawing attention from those who should not
be disturbed.
How the sky looks pale with no sun to hang from it.
And how the blind hours hurry along to nowhere.