Melanie this is the motorway we always drove
then and now the fields and towns at rest
falling away in darkness on both sides.
To the west a circuit of lights around a distant hill
rising as if beyond the sea sounds the history
of families made quiet under a spreading sky
Or in that house they might have out lived youth
before all their choirs went under the waves,
face down in the wet garden when time stopped.
It was always this road, up and down the country,
always the blinding cartography in endless parallel
missing the point of where we go.
I think this interior light travels with us,
your face looking forward as the music wanders
the dark enfolding road we leave behind.
*
Arrhythmic mouth opens and wordless speaks
electric buttons random firing, circuit shot
down amongst the dead men, out behind
the dark and dirty, crowded door – Anacreon.
It’s about the size of a man flat on the ground,
hidden in the garden, and hardly seals a vacuum now;
we need trees here for the birds to perform from
and there should be consideration of the robin.
Chipping at the window, augorous, aggressive and bonny,
will you do your wings down bury me in mulch
song and dance backward routine to rain black streets?
Take the fires of hell on your breast for us,
slice up winter into strips of transparent sky,
catch light-bearing breath on the sounding screen.
*
When I wrote The Red and Yellow Book
events interrupted the writing dream,
a marriage, the mighty book, a death;
a series made indiscrete, bloody and personal.
In that line my own relations gone like smoke,
across the white fields as if from nowhere
my girls turned into young women
like beautiful possibilities in the world.
Hands move over piano keys, a song lifts
and we’re undone in that moment,
the music runs on, green days spinning,
there’s no standing aside and we’re speechless.
Somewhere around here all the imagery is abandoned,
stubborn, it litters the ground, and I see you step around it.
Copyright © Kelvin Corcoran, 2010. First published by Longbarrow Press.
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