Ulysses Burning

This room is the darkened theatre. Through the glass
The white veranda frames the stage
Like a proscenium. Garden, street and beach,
River and mountain, layer on layer, reach
Out to the backdrop of the sky
Before which all must pass that has to pass.

The river with its diamond-crusted gloss:
A Petri dish of gel in which
A culture of the sun is flourishing.
On the mountain, which aspires to Monet, cling
Veiled glares, some squeegee smears of cloud.
A creeper on the trellis hangs across

The wall of water, mountain, sky, as though
Its tendrils twined through them, as their
Confection oozes through the lattice squares.
Far out, one lone vermilion sailboard flares,
A soul whose punishment’s to flee
The bliss he’s riding on, who seems to slow

The vagrant eye to focus, or pulse on
The shuttered eyelid’s blindness, less
Impelled to motion by the wind’s weak force
Than by some fanciful odylic source;
Or simply, like a solar panel
Prompted with light, pushed by the moving sun.

I look. The people I take in take in
The view they partly constitute.
What here can last the longest? The mountain slopes
Vanish behind the glaze like fading hopes,
Lapsed concentration. The river burns
Away to a vapour. Prickings of a pin,

The glitter points are whiting out my sight.
Two couples amble by, and sun,
Firing the women’s dresses, rouses me.
Like spirits out of Dante’s Comedy
The walking flames sway past, their forms
Wrapped in a fabric of ignited light

Within which step their shadows. As they glide,
They still cling to the view, and I
To them, while brilliant day devours us, body
And sight. And though desire would make them tardy,
They must proceed towards the frame
And disappear as on a pushing tide.

On the river’s silver terrace ride remote
Translucent sails of wind-slow yachts,
Combusting in this last declension of
The sun, in motion scarcely seen to move,
Like more of Dante’s walking flames,
Ulysses burning, statically afloat.

The Secret Life of Books

(Author’s reading)

They have their stratagems too, though they can’t move.
They know their parts.
Like invalids long reconciled
To stillness, they do their work through others.
They have turned the world
To their own account by the twisting of hearts.

What do they have to say and how do they say it?
In the library
At night, or the sun room with its one
Curled thriller by the window, something
Is going on,
You may suspect, that you don’t know of. Yet they

Need you. The time comes when you pick one up,
You who scoff
At determinism, the selfish gene.
Why this one? Look, already the blurb
Is drawing in
Some further text. The second paragraph

Calls for an atlas or a gazetteer;
That poem, spare
As a dead leaf’s skeleton, coaxes
Your lexicon. Through you they speak
As through the sexes
A script is passed that lovers never hear.

They have you. In the end they have written you,
By the intrusion
Of their account of the world, so when
You come to think, to tell, to do,
You’re caught between
Quotation marks, your heart’s beat an allusion.