Mark McMorris

.            .             .          .            . Before the astronomer's table a circle with a demon inside demons with wings of a bat (Before the astronomer's table) overhead like an armada of ships .            .             .          .            . Time of the weed, time of bramble along the bank of a canal muddy with old newspaper close-held surface to write on to dance as with desire black letters where roads meet .            .             .          .            . Tonight in the city, only the chains make soft noises like bells only the dogs are awake the fences lean over to scrape their elbows on stone and broken glass

I thought to write an elegy as  reply to your questions to pitch the word as far forward like a dolphin out of the sea over a threshold, to behold the land as practical and green as this table, a space to write and walk into like a kitchen hearing the conjuct vowels what does a reader suppose if not the promise of a text the ultimate form at the end of a chain of forms infinite summed to a singular value the elegy as a place to begin.

The evening empty as a convex coconut split down the seam: not that it can be filled. The evening empty as a gourd that twists on an iron thread: the rough skin of the sphere. .            .          .            .           . Not that there was a spoken word to recall the moment of seeing the short span when the clocks ceased to revolve and hands met in jest or benediction time of the vortex into which hibiscus and almond trees strayed and windows made of aluminum. The stars are suddenly remote candescent petals night throws above the yard, the beautiful things. .             .          .            .           . The great house is a hotel and a museum of victory how some lived at the epoch of planters and governors visible in the paintings the armchairs and gilded glass articulate artifacts and floors polished by daylight in a country of green hills and water wheels and wagons and sun coming out after a rain the labor is hidden that built the house long ago, and ploughed the land to make it bear fruit .             .          .            .           . In British poetry, gentle woodland creatures gaze at the hermit with marble eyes lit from within. A single bird defends the song. Among the pines draped with snow from the whole land only a secret footfall teases the senses awake like white breath on white canvas. Ideal forms crowd the auditorium. The sky deepens on the surface of a lake, in a cradle of stars. A coppice of isolated birch trees climbs the mountainside to touch the moon's scar, benevolent witness washed of color and fragmentary illuminating the village below. .             .          .            .           . In New World poetry, an invisible river runs this way and that. A car(t) eases on a bumpy track over small hills and into shallows. The world is a tangle of leaves. Towards sundown a driver gets out and pushes into the forest, drawn by a noise he cannot identify: perhaps the hiss of water below. It's only the river on its way. Ideal forms crowd the auditorium things present and things past scattered beneath the poinciana. The car heads into higher country then out into space where fields suddenly lie down beneath the seer cattle pastures and agricultural lands that have always been there watched over by the great house from its hilltop, like a sentinel. .             .          .            .           . In British poetry, the forms of desire darken with the change of seasons: green leaves once they fade and turn gold and fall to earth, and make a carpet in the forest, awaiting the rain. For each season has its sonata. Silence and sound in balance belong to the decline of autumn. In winter the notes are fewer. Silence comes into its kingdom crown of the father, who departs. The world of white prepares to conquer the earth with silence. .             .          .            .           . In British poetry, articulate hues speak as they are visible to the mind audible colors played on a piano primary sounds in an empty forest. And then above a lake, the moon in motion suspended like a dancer as the music temporarily ceases depriving her body of its rhythm. .             .          .            .           . Ideal forms crowd the auditorium. The light of day starts to fade and a mist settles in the valleys. The great house is lit from within. .             .          .            .           . As they were, in other windows you want to see their ghosts the slaves, like black posts staggered through the fields. You want to make a picture that shows the strange overlords at intervals watch the misery of torsos laboring to plant and harvest the seas of sugar. .             .          .            .           . The green beds of sugar cane extend from here to the hills. Bright heads grazed by the light of paradise become its negative. .             .          .            .           . In time, would the land irritate us as it must have irritated the masters the tropical caress of the air unavoidable getting up each day to see once more the rolling green hills and cattle ponds tranquil in the valleys, the horses collected at the water trough, content to stand or to walk over the grass. A comely scene worthy of an oil painting (fruit trees dappled with sunlight). They have escaped from seasons into the monotony of a terrible beauty. (Who is speaking?) .             .          .            .           . Away from the coast the car passes through a shadowy green world of tropical syntax ragged slopes and curves. .             .          .            .           . What then was promised by the evening lights that spangled about the hills? .             .          .            .           . Endless tall grasses, a landscape composed of variations on a color. The after-image of elliptical forms transparent as the cry of a seagull. .             .          .            .           . A tablet of scripted exclamations: there, a poinciana with pink blossoms overhangs the road, there a scrawl of fighting tendrils, an indigo grammar of petals offering illumination to fan-shaped pristine hieroglyphs waving to greener punctuations of banana trees and mango, a tangle of writing over writing closed to further interventions. Visible palimpsest of a book without letters the tangle of leaves has no secret key and cannot be deciphered, wordless monads travelling contours of silence. .             .          .            .           . Mimesis touches the world with an imperceptible tenderness, only hardly like wind an Aeolian harp. .             .          .            .           . There is a point when the sky pivots to face the dawn, to face the dark side of personality, that of a sensible man recanting the mysteries he embraced as a youth, when the angels spoke to him and he ran towards them with arms wide open across a field, beneath the painted stars. .             .          .            .           . Say that the world is a drinking glass containing things of the life and language and say that a poet wakes up one morning thinking of capturing for the future those petals inside that glass, broken vowels. A vase of orchids stands on a kitchen table. Not that it is abstract, or a luminous symbol, nonetheless it is an algebra of forces, like the equations of space-time, which rule outside the mental universe. As if an image should leave its mirror behind (the thing of which it is but a ghost) like bodiless speech, and yet sensuous, in the way a dream can leave its mark on the dreamer— Esse est percipi, so speaketh the Law. Wind begins to touch an Aeolian harp. The great house is a place of articulation word calls to other words, in transit. Compelled by the beauty of flowers the mind creates a space for other things. .             .          .            .           . (By British I mean Romantic idealist.) Warm night descends like a cloak. The whistle of tree frogs supplies a melody, and crickets invisible to the moon begin their Parliament. The birds sleep with their young. The air is otherwise still.