I. Thomas Wyat In The Tower
In the aftermath of days and nights
of concentrated, deliberate damage,
when humility has settled like the stunted light
of a minor sun on a landscape now drained
to a quiet, a manageable dimension,
the intensity of any given instant
is no longer to be trusted.
The grain, the germ, the glimpse
of a somersaulting universe:
once so completely, so restlessly contained
in the time an eyelash might bat;
those once-common seams of gold,
of a shadow’s coalescence to a small
and beckoning mouth now seems
as remote as religion, an almost-innocence
forever veiled and remembered,
if at all, only as sinister beauty,
fading against a clearly outlined row of trees.
Nihil’s subtle stand-ins, zero’s leitmotif of silence.
The cure has been taken and the process,
contract cancelled only by the animal amnesty of death,
has entered his veins, his bones,
there is a taste in his mouth that nothing
can now suppress.
He accepts, without irony,
an entire galaxy of truisms as old as any
that has ever taken whispered flight
in a firelit cave of huddled pioneers.
It takes a spell of chosen slavery
to expose the abysmal edge
on which the free man stands.
Disciples of the Dark One
can never know that shadowy kingdom
so well as the apostate whose scars
are a map of pain and pity,
ranging from the trivial to the catastrophic,
bordered with muscle and mist,
with memory’s death-deep river
unwinding beyond the final turn.
Stripped naked he moves from one
didactic stairstep to the next,
a theological summa of lost control,
a martyrology of kisses, clips and cries,
piling up in his white wake.
Darkness is behind him, the horizon ahead
that fixed row of trees.
Any day he will be asked to speak the names
and he knows already, the rage of
mental debate notwithstanding,
that he will plead forgetfulness.
It is the least he can do,
having done so little,
having done too much.
Let amnesia be the paladin of the expedient choice.
To fall is disaster,
to dive, the transmutation
of wretchedness into glory.
II. Brought Low
Brought low by a reading of Aubrey’s Lives
he’d set aside some time for brooding.
The echoes of familiar voices
rang their hysterical changes on duty
as a special room in hell.
He was sick of his tics and worn out from waiting for Her.
No stories he could make up would improve
upon the imagined worst.
His impatience waned or, rather,
twinkled weak as embers in a slim bed of powder,
flicked down carelessly by that certain someone
who couldn’t draw a straight line.
He’d have thought the tiles needed washing
until She pressed her hand against them
and the comparison of Her emphatic knuckle lines,
the dirt under Her fingernails,
revealed the panels as faultlessly clean,
smooth as cream.
The tablecloth was pictorially backwards
and the roly-poly elephant, beset by crows,
was either a baby or a stunt.
Theme music presents itself at this point
but in a shy, an almost stupid way,
an unaware hum not meant to be overheard.
The sounds of boredom, the whispers of lassitude
settle into rivalry.
An ice cube pops and farts
and turns over in its bowl of water.
Its fellows crowd it into comfortable shame.
One of the crows precipitates into a fly,
shivering over the gray curl of the elephant’s stylized trunk.
Outside, in those limitless places
where shade is revoked,
there is an edge to the glare
that scrambles and diverts attention,
translates into miles of cloudless weight,
flattening out whatever sound makes it up
past rustle, past sigh, past yawn.
In a freezing season several palaces over
a graph or two might spider their net
with proof of why that is.
But for now daydream impersonates brainstorm.
Allow the circuit a hint of narrow,
but brocade the stopping posts,
make intent look twice.
A purple word moans on the bed
of a yellow phrase, and Doubt’s pretty face
shines back from everywhere,
gulling into silence her many servants,
her more-than-many would-be lovers.
If Ms. Doubt is also, titles granted by the plural fistful,
honorary Principessa of Trouble and Idleness,
of obsession that comes and goes
and settles to an inconclusive nap,
then he is, in blandness and humility,
brought low into Her service.
III. All That Glitters
However easy it was to lapse
into the shock of pure observation,
and believable as it was to cite those satellite
outbursts and starchart ejaculations
as ever deeper credit in the kitty
of brutal honesty, the nag lingered
that they would grow
into a state of mutual boredom.
Nightly obscenities might easily merge
with the mundane dishing out of pet peeves,
the irritant of an egg too swiftly poached
throwing perspective out the cracked porthole.
To ensure the illusion of honesty then,
the choice must divinely present itself,
whispering ‘it’s time now, it’s time’,
the choice of embarking on a sequence of lies
which would seam from transparency
to gauze to a manifest shrouding,
an Achilles-shield of glittering sequins.
The sweep and torrent of these yet-
unwhispered fabrications made their heads swim.
It was necessary that they inch
towards consent in something spectacularly
outremer, a something as dark
as they believed, or wanted
to believe, the other deserved.
The resources crowded in for dutiful culling.
They assembled an elite corpus
of darkness, framed by the most
forbidden of secret books,
fleshed on the jade-green bones
of an index of condemned dreams.
IV. The Road To Hell
By the first week of November
the city had grown wintry,
the shortening days dense with gray light,
the white stone sky no more than
a hundred feet above their heads.
Summer had been the time for low farce,
for falling into brief alliances
for shallow pleasure’s sake.
Early fall had been the time
for dangerous play and casual violence,
for moments of mutual introspection
marked by a cello of sorrow
which neither one of them could explain.
And so, by the third or fifth day
of November, they had resolved to be
more orderly in their wildness,
less vulnerable to accusations
of unpredictability, less imperial
in their explorations of each other:
in short, to fall in love again.
They vowed bare-breasted honesty,
both knowing that drops and flecks
of truth would never come to light,
not in a million summers
made golden with hints of coming fall.