Laurits Andersen Ring, Road in the Village of Baldersbrønde (Winter Day), 1912. Oil on Canvas. 120 × 93 cm. Courtesy of The National Gallery, London.
DUBLIN BEFORE HOURS
The hotel belonged
to Bono, the guidebook
claimed. Our windows gave
onto the Liffey, where we saw
not a single boat. The muddy
river seemed to have lost
all movement, as if
the Oireachtas had passed a law
banning from the waters
barge, seabird, swimmer,
and the inconvenient fish.
Always slick with memory,
cobbled streets led back
to the tumble-down remains
of a medieval church
down a hollow, up whose steps
an old woman climbed to say,
”Yous dahn’t weshta go
dawn dere. De lads,
day’re shootin’ ahp.”
GOOD BAD WEATHER
Tin-rattle of thunder offstage,
susurrus of the garden’s
whisper of audience, then hard
slant-rain like the arrows of Kurosawa—
or Satchel Paige pitching sidearm.
Foretaste of fall!
Horse-chestnut blight browning
the avenues, democracy
in the air—no one votes for winter,
but winter comes. The seasons,
thin-lipped, are eager to get on with it.
The day scribbles a line in a notebook,
blots it out, writes it again.
FOSSIL
Neither the half-hearted yellow of old lace,
nor the moldy ocher of a lemon too long
in the crisper, more the foxed yellow-brown
of French mustard with a touch of mushroom
pink or London fog, the ammonite heavier
than lead was composed of grains that cell
by cell replaced this neighbor of octopus,
more distantly the chambered nautilus,
old veterans of the Devonian. Hardy
as cockroach, surviving extinctions
in the Permian and Triassic before meeting
its Waterloo, this ancient, surfaced
by the retreating tide, falling from cliff face,
produced no more than a twinge of mourning,
so many deaths go unremarked,
so many friends absent as age catches up.
Still, sitting on the Underground
across from a seven-year-old reading King Lear,
I thought of King Richard’s bones
beneath the car park in Leicester,
another play ending in tears.
This chambered predator meanwhile lay
on the kitchen table, awaiting some exercise
beyond memento mori, reminder
of how quickly things outlive, not usefulness,
but memory—the traveler may pass
through Bosworth Field, most probably
at Fenn Lane Farm, with scarcely an itch
at the useless deaths, scoundrels
replaced by other scoundrels, lucky,
indeed, to be cast in a minor part.
Some violence waits to be named.
LATE LIGHT
Birdsong of uncertain sort. The pall
of storm hanging as smoky clouds
vanish toward the horizon.
Each branch in the garden limned
with fool’s gold, the dormer windows
light up like a row of tents.
The sun has passed through solstice,
the calendar fluttering too rapidly.
RAIL BY EARLY TWILIGHT
So small, the trees, finger-sized
foliage on the HO line. Mottled clouds
flattened like batik or suds dispersing.
The brown fields had been grubbed up,
ploughed, laid to winter wheat,
leaving a few crows in residence.
In a shorn field, a lone tree
still in leaf, pierced by light, passed,
no bigger than a thumbprint. The whole
was laid out by a minor Impressionist—
stripped hedges like miniature ruined abbeys,
clannish, divided. Against copses,
the mossy roofs of abandoned farms
rose like lichened boulders. Down the line,
a disused quarry sank into a hill like a divot.
Through twilight a pigeon beat its retreat.
JAW JAW
The jawbone fetched
from the tidemark,
too large for ram,
darkened with age
and the black substrate
of the Thames,
cracked, pitted,
smoothed like coal
tumbled into the grate,
ready to surrender
the banked heat
lain down leaf by leaf
in swamp forests
of the Carboniferous—
this huge shard
of a local cow
two centuries dead
took wounded flight.
VAN EYCK BY HIMSELF
Als Ich Kan, 1433
The turban squats upon his head
like red cabbage leaves,
his pinched expression that of a man
whose toes are gnawed by rats.
The portrait was laid down on oak.
The eyes, bloodshot from having
stared too long, remain suspicious,
a merchant’s, or a thief’s, or just a painter’s
bored with the view. The face rises
from the grim light of the crepuscular,
light of cabbage, root vegetable, worm.
He will go pinchmouthed into the dark,
face rumpled and watermarked, tired
of the mirror. The hat has swallowed
a gaggle of angels with bloody wings.
ODE TO MOODINESS
Regret came in quiet dominions
and chose to stay. You sat huddled,
mug clutched in your hands,
hot-water bottle at your feet, as if waiting
for the driver and horse-drawn sleigh.
As a child I rode in a rumble seat,
Hudson Bay blanket on my lap,
December air a slap in the face.
Spinsterish snowfall marked another dawn,
slate roofs etched like frosted glass.
Another country, sixty years later,
the body, like the mouth, is greedy
for spring without knowing
if spring will come.
MADONNA OF THE BACK BAR
New Haven, 1970
Her face powdered in afterlight,
the crepuscular glow hid in plain sight.
Steel-colored slate eroded the edges,
the sediment so much history laid down on pages
thin as typing paper. She drank cocktails
sprouting umbrellas. Her belly rebelled
against her will, a ripeness that betrayed all.
Then life was a crossbow bolt—or a dress ball—
and ambition a moth on a 100-watt bulb, burned
to a crisp. How rare is incandescence earned?
THE DAY AFTER
Snow year, rich year.
—Old saying
Snow is the repayment of sin.
—Old saying
Snowfall, early. Flakes of detergent
drift down slopes of air.
The flurry might have been called
inhabited had the light not died inside.
Across the street, a rough snowman totters,
parsnip for nose, jam lids for eyes,
mouth just a scar across the chin.
All too human, he needs a fig leaf—
cheerful in deformity, poor fellow,
made by the committee that botched the camel.
He’s the non-violent one on the block.
The only armor age requires is just this side of love.
❂
WILLIAM LOGAN’s most recent book of poems is Rift of Light (Penguin, 2017). His new book of criticism, Broken Ground: Poetry and the Demon of History, was published last spring by Columbia University Press.