“I would have gone back,” the voice
full of shells, gravel, liquid washing
stones, back meaning lost island
or calendar, a thing rigged
with bones unbending, unfolding past
the hard symmetry of clocks,
vertebrae of thought moving now
in real time, home a word hollow
as the bone of birds—tody, cling cling,
gaulin, euphonia—“That dream was over.”
Such oneiric geometry, “The Blue Room”
built by Miles, his horn a grail from which
you sup the saudade of marine might-have-been
never-will-be, embouchure unthought,
no better than Vidia for leaving.
So we leave, skein of shadows,
silent psalms for how our scourge
was beauty, home; brightboys fleeing
the estate for another on that other
island, jolted by the freight of shame.
Mas Hall, thanks for the company
on the volte-face voyage, stingy-brim
on which we sailed, migration of monarch butterflies.
Landfall at Port of Avonmouth in a scene
from Hardy, landfall at Tilbury Dock
to step off the caravel in white gloves,
stout ties, leave to remain vagrant.
Lonely Oxonians together,
oak hatch of the Bod we’d shade,
then off to All Souls to cram
for mods, toiling in Codrington
we leaf through Thistlewood.
And so we are marked. Is it Marx
or Douglass with that beard? Bound
to become Judas-Brutus, blood
diamonds paid us in arrears to try
the line of Hopkins, Auden, Eliot, Donne.
Evensong at New Chapel to ease
the medieval weight of failure in the refrain
of white robes, one brown seraph alone:
“O hear us when we cry to Thee
for those in peril on the sea.”
’Gainst the towers most colored I feel,
dear Stuart, in these duds, our hide,
sub fusc aeternum. You grasp browning leaflets
on the stump; O betraying beauty of brown:
bankra, Barbancourt, Venetian ducats, dhalpuri,
khaki, Gauguin. Remember the strange fog a night
on Broad St. as if below Friedrich’s Wanderer?
But, as you taught, who more Wanderer than we,
the evicted on the victor’s turf, playing the past,
loss a force centripetal? All praise
to your mind a sextant, darklit as Diwali.
You bless our kin severance. How I wish
to forget your sister strapped to the sugar mill,
charged with spoiling the color scheme:
sedition. Ah, compay, even leaves of the croton
sprout from our eyes. There is no going back.
Thinking translucence you say, “Bend the stick,”
different than Lenin or United Fruit. The rank of Bombay
mangoes exceeds all migrations. The lignum vitae
insists on itself. Navel string toughens to twine
with the rhizome, portal in the ground.
1932-2014
—with Kara Springer’s “Repositioned Objects, I,” primer on wood.
Copyright © 2018 by Christian Campbell. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 3, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.