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The Clock-Tower
1.
Things go no more inward than this
towards the body. The pale tower rises
beyond the twigs. No, it does not
rise; there is nothing of the verb in it.
Even the body lies where it has fallen
like a fouled bandage. Nor is it
even the tower itself matters—pale,
pale blues, grays, ochres and pinks,
and a semi-tone darker the twigs and leaves.
Inward towards the buried stuff: fastened
under the edges with a line of rusty
tacks, the red-and-white striped oilcloth
covered the table so liquidly that
the grain of the wood showed through,
and through a brown frayed tear crumbs
had gotten under, roughening the surface
so raised spots of red had rubbed off.
The twigs: it is morning, it is mist,
it is all adjective. It is a nicety
of tones, colors, tricks of perspective;
yet we must indeed ask: Are there indeed
trees? A city tower grossly magnified
by a November mist? And are these things
arranged for a significance in the leaves'
interstices, in the crust of the greened
bark, in the dewed grass? It is everybody
else's turn to make and do, and there
is no knowing if those men with the sabres
jerking their horses up over the ridge,
are of the same landscape or are happening
in the same language even. What is most lost
comes loudest: the crack in the breadboard
was filled with dark snot; the playroom
smelled of celluloid dolls; my father,
in his thirties like me, sat in a shallow
bath, rubbing the good clean dirt from his back.
2.
Inward, outward; where there is no movement
there can be no direction. In this vision—
in all its adjectivity— there is no truth, no
decision of an up-held or an out-held hand. You,
first wife, you know me: the dust-colored hoverer
behind every closet door, the bad smell of age.
Who is that out there under the jeweled branches,
in his cape and top-hat? I do not know him.
I do not understand his eyes lifted to that
drizzled cyclorama, to that filmy tower. He
rests on the scabbed tree-trunk a hand that—
in the small, champagned hours—cupped a magical
breast. “Breast,” he tells me. I do not know him.
When the room has screamed to the hubristic
soundlessness of blast-off, then there is
dark where—even as my fingers rest light as
insects on the table's rim—planets chime
and twitter out of what is so nearly silence.
Across every polished surface your profile
glides, shadowed by my lifted hand, and
in the purple wake of your veil my cufflinks
glint. Listen. I cannot move. Each syllable
clucks out of my teeth like an unwritten
suicide note. I love, and remain alive; a voice
that belonged to a body that was all I would
ever have to believe my own, I say it is
dawn here now—this is a talent we all have,
to make it so—, and I am saying before I go:
Be there, where the park elms re-echo the shots
of a hundred half-lit duels, where wounds
flower grandiloquent under a hundred damp jabots,
where nobody knows who falls, who walks away.
This is the setting: wet grass, silhouetted
foliage, a mist that envelops perhaps our waiting
carriages, and the clock-tower. How else
but by infatuating pastels can this be poem?
   
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