The view is better in the spring,
the concierge remarked without his asking,
although I can’t remember that far back
nor imagine that far forward.
The steps curve up and out of sight,
and a stone’s throw from the summit,
a nest of fallen powerlines serves as barricade,
as convenient interruption.
A good place to stop and play the wistful
tourist, and so he pauses to let the ghost
of middle age creep slyly past,
visible in its silver outline for a shadowbeat
against the shrubbery leaning cliffside
out and away. He waves aside a bad thought
gnatting tip-toe at his eyes, remembering
how well this place invites surrender.
He half-expects to find, would even welcome
the terror of finding, the once-Great God Pan,
tossing nearby in all his diminished glory;
eyes perhaps moled with the pale scum
of cataract but halved by orgasm’s heavy lids,
and winking out evil like a casual fever.
Mosquitoes haze round him with their cloudy dance,
their burr as high as tin, as if to nag and gloat:
All things must pass away, but We remain.
His lungs expand to hold the air’s thin burn,
a consciousness of something still, and large,
enclosing every minor movement of his voyage.
A promise of moonglow in the dark blue flowers,
knit and vined at each ascending ell,
and flies as green as emeralds, beading
the breast-smooth body of a small dead bird.
Love, but not love, and not yet,
the lighthouse looming up and overhead,
its collar rusted into flat red whorls,
a red precision his vocabulary
wrestles with, fails to name, letting go
to drop away, distracted by a gang
of toy gulls circling the chalk-white cap
on invisible spokes.
He’s brought nothing he intended, but when
asked by the morbid concierge,
he’ll admit her wisdom in everything
and thank her busybody’s liberal spite.
Nothing in particular. What he’s looking for,
that is. No eclipse is scheduled,
no moonlight swim, no drunken truths
whispering to a risen shout and the
gamble of his hand, extended, touching.
He walked through fire once,
was rewarded for his madness
with her body, her pride, her shadow.
Would she remember him, if she were here?
He likes to think she wouldn’t, although
he seized each gift she offered and held
it close enough to see her suffer.
He’s not morose by nature, his fury
like a fairy-tale Princess in a coma,
watching through glass eyes as those
whose loyalty he never doubted, line up
for violation, sneezing like schoolboys
on a snow-swept parade ground.
In his dreams he pilots them away to safety.
But here, on a crippled cliff tormented
by the northern seas, the riddle of the
lighthouse mocking the drowned boys
entangled in their parachutes, he cannot
lift a hand, not even to threaten the
harmless ghosts fouling the shrubbery,
the mosquitoes landing like piety and vengeance.
There was a time nostalgia bowed before him,
and lust was a never-empty cup of wine.
They traded sins as if it were a children’s game,
revealed each darkness as if Advent
were departure, as if Bruegel, Bosch, and
Caravaggio were rolled into one.
He would have slit her throat or had his slit
and all for pleasure and the sadness
they could crawl inside forever.
A calmer voice than theirs went in
the mirror murmuring and went out
again when winter light slid suggestion
to command, underlining, with a
blood-red nail, first this word and
then that word, each obscenity like a
pearl clipped at the wrist,
the ankle, the spine, the nape.
The razor isn’t either/or.
The razor’s what he catches his breath upon;
the tingle, then the numbness,
a bauble of invented memory to lift
his heart, strengthen him from limp
to stride, the final climb to the top of the
steps, all disguises dropped at the edge
of the lighthouse lawn. Nostalgia,
faithful liar, be here his reliable guide.