Transposing our bodies
in grey light to the island
graveyard, we
were aware (as many
who make this water journey
are not) that intervals
of stillness and silence
are music between times
solid enough,
among mist and the marsh bird’s
calling, to sustain
a man’s weight, a cathedral’s
centuries of shifting
from the right knee to the left.
The Campanile
ticks, a metronome
conducting the wavelets
on past lines-of-washing
tenements that hang
on a breath. The dead keep
an ear to the ground,
have time to grow accustomed
to the beat. Our senses
cannot support
such whiteness as the dome
of heaven breathes into
existence. Music gives it
colour and key,
it flows and is blue
if the day is, black,
or at night a piano-roll
punched with light and tumbling
sonatas. We stay among the dead,
observing how the twentieth century
favours the odd
conjunction and has made
strange bedfellows. (Not all of us
would rejoice at the last trump
to discover we’d been laid
by Diaghalev.) The parting
bell tolls over us,
end those who can, and we
among them, re-embark.
The weather’s shifted
ground so many times
in minutes, it might be
magic or miracle and you the day’s
composer as you are
the century’s, though at home among
immortals. We go back
the long way via the dead
silence of the Arsenal, its boom
raised, its big guns open
-mouthed before the town.
I talk to a Negro kid
from New Jersey, thinking of what
my travellers cheques will buy
(which also work
by numbers) whoever stole them
from me — not Fame, not Love; and how
we put out crumbs to catch
birds and such scraps
of sky as are filled with
a singing; and what like Love
is not to be caught
by intent, the longer breath
of late works. A city
wades out of the dark
towards us. Our boat
falls still, steadies a moment,
then rides
in among the watery monuments.
