It is already autumn on the upper floors
of the Charitable Home for Indigents.
On the porch and narrow balconies which face the sea,
summer’s fade hangs on, dry widower at the wet end of the wedding feast.
A peninsula lies in the calm sea, some miles from Tarragona
and Marina del Sur, where the house sleeps on the dunes.
On the upper floors the windows have been nailed open
and stripped of their stark utilitarian blinds.
The wards are no longer recognizable as such,
regressing to the airy many-windowed emptiness of one huge room.
Earlier in the dream this room was crowded
with professional men and women, washing the walls and floor.
With diligent and scrubbed assurance erasing every year of pain,
of contemplative leisure, of occasional modest joy,
removing the house to a world of impassivity, indifference,
and pastured, bland dignity.
Revisionists (notorious for their humorlessness)
are gambling on a predictable, forgetful populace.
And those that remember? There is always exile
or blinding or cross-limb amputation or any one of a million bureaucratic skills
with which to calcify their dottiness,
their splendid inability to be convinced.
The history of the house is one of contamination,
fume-rich corridors no cleansing can deodorize.
There is, in the end, no assurance or reassurance,
only the faith one keeps or breaks with oneself.
The catalogue of perversions, atrocities, and seductions
is what remains to hold back the tide of anonymity.
But not without breeding the greater evil of uniform plea
and persuasion: My sins are all I have to keep me proud.
In a corner of the house (in cellar? attic? no, near a balcony, just inside the hall),
lies the fragment of a haunted tapestry.
It is the raped removal from what now hangs
in the modest shrine forested near the Tomb of the Unknown Skeptic,
though why it was unraveled, by whom, and when,
is now the speculation of an addled mouse.
Still, mystery has risen more than once
from what was trivial, when known.
The class of weaving is neither rich nor poor,
though very human, often savage,
as crudity tapers into brilliance,
or boredom threads the slow illogical ramble of medieval vice.
To dwell upon it is to arbitrate and madden,
for these depicted creatures have no frame,
and what consistency there is devolves to
simple, alien, life.
Surely there was more than one needler at this admirable mess,
at least one of whom was ornithologically astute,
the other seemingly half-blind
(childhood victim of a vicious budgerigar?)
There, in the southeast portion of the compass-paneled rag,
a recognizable goldfinch, and above it, brooding,
a bladder with claws and paddles,
‘bird’ only to some saintly cubist idiot.
Careers, contrivances, and beer hall tricks
have stuffed the emptiness, supposing bigotry or shame,
Masonic heresy or iconoclasm once ripped
a three by seven inch hole.
(No pleasure-baiting Reformation moth?
No sluttish flame? No weather-rot?)
No one remains who might see through
the quaint, degraded mystery.
And what cannot now be seen is this:
four bird-motifs, quite self-enclosed,
and where the border frays, a hint
of hoof, of paw, of horn,
of tapered, Chloe-white thigh.
Unicorn, lion, lady.