The Sunday Archive

Blues for new lovers

Above the midnight the invisible bird of day looks down.
MAX ERNST: Beyond Painting

   1
The day washed out
& now the black
moves in. Lolling tongue
of night that dribbles
against the window like a
shut-out animal. Persistent
softness of the rain, of
narrow branches
that drift across the
iron roof ...
                  & other
branches. The shape of them
reflected on the window
until the wind
brushes them away. Ephemeral
chinese paintings beside
& beneath & around which
the animal stalks. Is now
resting, paws thrust out,
like twin rivers.

   2
Inside,
apart from it,
we
also
rest.

This is all
too immediate, too
violent
to be devoured. Dis-
solved. Resurrected
as memory, some time,
times later.

If it had
continuity, a certain
pattern perhaps, we might
follow it, return to it
as one returns to a
melody, faintly
remembered.

                        & all this
night, shards, charred
fragments of music
would fall as flowers
fall, the colour
drained out.

   3
Your voice seems endless: &
carries my, after the moment,
shattered
body
      like an ambulance.
                              Black
journeys that I come out of
with the movements of a
drowning man, gasping for air.
Words crowd like birds
round the broken water.

   4
That you should go
so gracefully
through this room
is incredible.
That you should have
such poise, such
presentation in this new
setting, with the

black light behind you
is likewise. A rare
event.

         Before, as we
lay, matched & matchless,
your face was pitted
with black shadows.
                              Have I
instilled you with this
new beauty? Or are you
suffused with dreams, the
disproportionate magic
of the gods?

   5
The rain has
stopped now:
                        & my thoughts
move away with its drift,
with the wind, down
through the pine trees.

You, too, are distant.
& silent. Have
stopped moving & now
sit, abstracted, in a
corner chair where your body
glistens eerily before
my eyes.

            Have you
recovered? or learnt
where you are?
                        Your thoughts
& how you gather them. Like
flowers. Placed
in the vase
your fingers make.
                  The
new
      set of responses. Not
grace. Or beauty. Not new
skills, but a rearrangement
of them. A
reformation.

   6
& now your fingers
find me. & graze my skin.
In the soft light
form flickering shadow-patterns
that you move through. Towards
me. Gliding like a boat
caught in the tide's
drift.
         & as you slowly
lower yourself, the night pauses.
White lilies glint. Trains
howl in the distant forest.

            The land
outside
is a mountain
                  of mad moonlight.

1967