Sea-Blue Aubade

Dawn - or is it sea-blue - fills the square.
Two in a room asleep with that window.
And dark thinning inside the view.
And human breathing.
And freedom in the room like a thin gray floating.
And doctrine.
And other kinds of shine rising off the edges of things -
as if the daylight were a doctor arriving,
each thing needing to be seen ...
Soon the sunlight
will want to be changed.
Will want to be caught up in the weavings of freedom.
To be caught up in the wide net and made to have edges -
light coming in, so acidly, with the strength of wind or an ox ...
Outside, slowly, the grapes seem fatter.
The cat moves its tail once in sleep.
The silence is largest wherever an eye falls.
Somebody's glance smokes through the blues until they start to
pppppppppppppppppppppppppppp feel ...?
But it is all chalky.
All asleep, all unalive.
An icy thing, even in its fluency,
the tree, the stone heroically built up into a wall,
each stone in the mind of its mason, elsewhere, asleep,
the cat in the sleep of its owner, the purple light, muscular,
more days, more nights, more roads, shouts, flowers,
all making towards what pebbled shore,
each changing place with that which went before -
and forwards, forwards, how it all contends,
across the crookedness to be itself, to be at last, the crown,
the jeweled asterisk that stops that very moment still,
the place the parallels, the cruelties, do, for just a fraction
ppppppppppppppp of a pebbled instant,
meet - (save that to die I leave my love alone) -
possibly rain oncoming - on the sidewalk down below
could it be steps, or is it just the clock? -
does it arrive and dissipate? -
no, it splatters like
thousands of thoughts,
replacing all the listening -
sea of ideas - so blue -
although you can hear something like cuts in the blue -
and one can feel how the boat feels -
all of the freedom swirling and slapping round the keel, the here,
foaming round, as feelings - and still the pitch of the dawn
grasping at transparence, as if something like an hour were
ppppppppppppppppppppppppppp trying
to plash in, and make, and make ...? what would it make? -
and in the suddenly awakening one:
an upwards glance, one take - a main-mast starting up -
sails glimpsing about, quick rules and suppositions - coalescings -
and then the single sturdier open gaze cast up: a stare: a fear:
why is father lashed to it?
why is mother singing?


From THE ERRANCY (Ecco Press, 1997)