Now November carries its fiery shards

 across the high-tide of night, there

                                                     the green players dance `round infernos on the shores

                                                     I tell you, I must confess it all to the luminous page

                                                     that I am haunted by your eyes,

                                                     that my reticent rage is tempered in your cool embrace

                                                     as we dance. You, whom I never met in the flesh

                                                     the intimate double whose tracks I trace,

                                                     fractured smile in mirrors hinting

                                                     our proud lines drawn to a lapis point

                                                     turn away in elliptical retreat, these

                                                      scraps of history flung far and wide, an integration

                                                     disintegration of images in the eye

                                                     dissonant and clear in the inner ear.

 

And November drapes its dark shroud

                                                     across the low-tide of light, here

                                                     the grey players kick the kindling for sparks

                                                      I tell you I can't tell you

                                                     what you must know in other ways,

                                                     to feel it ascend through the heart-cage

                                                     each glittering word passing through the tight throat

                                                      and clenched teeth to calm the clamouring eyes,

                                                      I tell you my legs aren't my own

                                                     that walk the slow march of state,

                                                     and at the blind execution of this expiatory rite

                                                     my image has not my true hands or face,

                                                     and then the light imprisoned in an incubus of words

                                                      and each night the moon reclaims a little more.

 

Then I would invoke the stray chords I hear

                                                      like a distant landfall or dawn

                                                     like memories clouding temperate eyes, there

                                                      beyond the moon-shadowed embrace of deathly dancers

                                                     swaying in the penitent night, here

                                                     winter trees raise their black arms limned in light

                                                     stripped, reaching for another life:

                                                     Unversed youth hath not finer cause than this

                                                     to give life return from death's bitter bliss.

 

 

                                                     DMcB