Night comes and the clenching of teeth.
Gone the ricercare of the birds.
A baroque sky of shell and pearl
gives way to one of dark silk.
Do you remember the man in the brown suit,
sipping his coffee in a shop by the front,
wandering with seven faces in the century’s mirrors,
now fêted in the bars along the sea?
In his verses the sea breathed,
the sea of the sweeping sleeve,
the sea sipping at the land,
the sea washing as an afterthought.
Inscrutable as a cat with the tail of a mouse
still hanging at the corner of its mouth,
he made known the little charades of home,
each smoking ancient grudge.
Among loud minds he walked like a blind person
while the moon muddied her tides with rage.
When he spoke it snowed in our bones.
We were exiles lost in the sky.
Our distant talk was a dull concussion of blunders.
Finally we succumbed to the canons of dull health.
How the gods of wood and stream
suffer from being known.
We were little clots under the stars,
our faces agog with the sun’s last glow.
We sat over backgammon while he braved the void,
his face pitted with meteor thoughts.
In his verses the sea breathed,
sea lapping the spit in little seething rushes,
hesitant, followed by digressions,
lapsing in an immense, perjured stillness.
Sirens fill the electric night.
Dawn clings to the air like silk.
We talk to each other through our books.
And in the morning the city is still there.
Martin TURNER
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/atlantic-memoir/
