“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.