A spade strikes the coffin.
Up through stale air, spilt
glowworms coiling, to wake from
the septic twilight of organic
dreams, brightness tutored by habitual
ignorance, smooth vegetable contours,
flakes lit and falling in
the flushed contract, egged with
blood, antennae of sorrow. Impressed
to servile emulation, guttering candles
provoke a strict withering, fig tree
priesthood adorning baroque and heady
tombs, a sweating metaphysical disease,
stench of scrotum and flask.
Foreigners bring new darkness to
ancient horrors, paradise shuddering to
dust under keeled, keening winds.
Tuscany bred an apocalypse of
ruins: hymns to the sun
from cottage bedrooms. Blue eyes
foretold fabliaux, rustic, in stone.
Peasants struck out blindly to
immolate cultured accents, rearrange the
polite madness that oppressed them,
leeched. Fresh fields of metaphor
plotted and abandoned, shorn of
meaning by a gravel’s realm
of bones, brooding dowry underfoot.
Basked, where was no redemption:
loitered below windows, the oyster-
vendors hung in his verses,
her beauty tainted thereby, seen
in the best light of
his arms, their overt nakedness.
They made lies like commerce
profit all around, Catholic betrayals,
a life of crime and
piety, a tale: German, French,
a European trek. Childe Harold
slipping in her dream beneath
the water, inland sea exhausted
with birds.
‘1800 to 1873’.