Karl O'Hanlon

The day glared, breathless: an eye socket. Clouds barely shifted, and the opal sky was sheared into dry-dazzling millions. Yet fall in, the sky, it did not. The mail did not go undelivered, dogs were walked; lovers fell savagely out of and in love, and all between. Seven concussed days, his draft longhand swaying like supple pillars of gray flame, erasures; in the long nights his desk lamp revealed the window streaked with chalk sweated off the fen, which was England. Once Ribera’s Jacob, now Jerome, Ugg-booted at the piano, “The Irishe Dumpe” from the Fitzwilliam Virginal hindered by the little lion kneading his lap. Later, the papers howling of guignol ambush would milk his delighting spleen as the rectory self-veiled in evensong and dusk. Somewhere over an inexpressive sea of rain-sleek tiles, the contemptible perfection of gardens, perhaps up from the weird moonlike muteness of the Black Country’s broken kilns and felt absences, it came winging. He died without dread or pain. A sour storm rides the Levant, rinsing the domeless yellow streets. On the steep road to Worms Ash the coverts take the tincture of foxgloves, where the shade of Housman, deadly-formal kink still running through him, fidgets among the cinder-like moths. Hill makes his way to Pisgah.