Epistemology: Cosmic Buffet
At dawn, shuttered
eyes blow open
when I think of you
I think of every impossible thing
and its sweetness, of vision, of occlusion
the scent of earth’s full cauldron
boiling with herbs, cooled
with lemon and quicklime
its bay and rosemary steam
drapes in mist the
supplicant body of night, an
odalisque black as all Nubia against
velvet cushions of infinity
leaned back lolling in a thong of skysilk
feline with her secret smile
and white sandals of stars.
I clerk your nightly office,
moon of dreams, and sigh
when you pass, trailing a memory
smile of what could never be.
Then, the butcher’s day returns
and the unspeakable lowing
sounds of life passing
through the bandages.
I think of the blind wrinkled
tortoise of each day dragging
it's shell toward night, the jolting rocket
voyages to the center of the psyche
unremitting in their toll,
of bell sounds of foreign
lovesongs in the street
bronzing over the cenotaphs
of what will never be recovered
folly’s coin that will never be remitted
in full; lack, that will never be acquitted
yet salvation creamed on toast
is served here
at this time
daily.
November 2011
The poem above was inspired in part by this passage below by Lawrence Durrell, who was a big favorite of mine when I was young. It’s taken unaltered except by the enjambment of spacing and a few ellipses, from Justine, the first book of his four volume hymn to love, sex, sorrow and the eponymous Egyptian city known as the Alexandria Quartet. You could pick almost any page for this exercise, as the whole thing is shot through with poetic prose. This is from the beginning chapters:
Six o' clock...This
is the hour least easy to bear,
when from my balcony
I catch an unexpected glimpse of her
walking idly toward the town in
her white sandals,
still half asleep.
The city unwrinkles
like an old tortoise and peers about it.
For a moment it relinquishes
the torn rags of the flesh
while from some alley by the slaughter-house
above the moans and screams of the cattle
comes the nasal chipping of
a Damascus love song;
shrill quartertones,
like a sinus
being ground to powder.
Now tired men throw back
the shutters of their balconies
and step blinking into the pale hot light
etiolated flowers of
afternoons spent in anguish, tossing
upon ugly beds,
bandaged by dreams.
I have become one
of these poor clerks of
the conscience…
~Lawrence Durrell, Justine
