Memoranda

1


There is a city you abstain from visiting,

A pilgrimage you delay,

It would mean too much to you,

A truth from which you might never recover.


You and your memories,

Secret certificates of humanity,

Torn-up treasure maps full of imaginary isles,

Do you presume to master the future?


Connoisseur of disasters,

I relish the fatal conjunction of planets,

The syllables of nemesis.


2


John came, offering water,

And Jesus came, offering fire.

And I walked between them

And walked on.


To see the fires of Pentecost

In an English village,

And pray, pray for redemption,

To endure the rigour

Of exaltation,

Joy demanding compassion,

To recognize the whole

By the smallest part,

And the part by the whole,

To take the sacrament

On one’s tongue,

To celebrate without cease,

Never failing in courage,

To be the bridegroom

Walking up the lane.


3


“Women,” he said,

“They’re all pink inside,”

And frowned into his glass.


Gold-mining the darkness of her eyes,

I discovered California again.

I made her a statue in my mind,

Then smashed it into pieces.


4

In fear of masks and broken hinges,

In fear of doors impossible to open,

I look for lost friends under bridges

And stitch the sky with smiles.


Warm bread from the murderer’s oven!

Unknowing is a mouthful of snow.

The lean gods in their eyries

Play dice with discontinued stars.


Who sews mailbags for alien gaolers?

Who hides up his mother’s sleeve?

The lonely drover on a mountain road

Measures out death step by step.


5


I was born, so they tell me, I don’t remember. It must have been a day like any other.

I recall the odd thing, of course: learning to tie my shoelaces, to balance on a bicycle…atmospheres…

So many knots in time!

This moment I anticipate sensation, ideas, acts.

The pendulum oscillates,

The child on the swing

Cries out, thrilled, into the wind.

I exist

With my tenth-of-a-second brainwave,

My one-second cardiac rhythm,

My six-second respiratory cycle,

My twenty-four hours of dead-and-alive.

Megaliths’ and sundials’ shadows,

The monastic candle’s cascading wax,

Hourglass and clepsydra,

Are all in the caveman’s notched bone-clock,

Lines, circles and lines…


6

I examine the knobbles on treebark ,the patterns of waterblobs on the bathroom floor, the crenellations of a seashell…


Moments of my life

That tenderly break me,

To show the inside,

Red and wild.