Letters to Kai

2.

 

            e solo, in parte, vidi ’l Saladino.

                        Dante, Inferno, Canto 4, 129

 

The dead weight of spotless sky.

How hell made light of us.

Traffic we’ve dodged.

 

I offer this list and a chair.

Let’s sit on the porch then

and talk this day into being.

 

Then I’ll take to that couch,

as I’d imagined, affording no stillness,

no fabric to speak of.

 

The galaxies spin and spiral about

that point where all gazes met.

Dizzy thoughts borne on a breeze.

 

Were they all we ever meant?

Did I picture a dry unmown lawn beneath

a pale lunar fingernail scratching heaven?

 

 

            30 July 2024

 

 

4.

 

                                                Re James

 

Take your draught and let the tide have you.

Hear how the orchestra of silence

made dreadful noise through this wedge in time.

 

It works on the hunch that things we do

to stitch and mend the tears are as constant as

the chorus of a million cicadas on a summer’s day

 

audible only once they’ve ceased.

They come as little thoughts

making it known that once more

 

each being goes into the breach

for which it was made.

You’ll embrace then

 

a superfluous peace.

And so the pen glides

in the way that only you professed.

 

 

            30 August 2024

 

 

6.

 

I should like to see three fresh faces, if I could.

A woman with long plaited hair and studious glasses

posing in front of old books with their special scent of dry dusty wood.

The pen and paper before her exist solely for their looks.

“I don’t care what you think”, she says. “I can listen to Chopin’s Nocturnes.

Arrau, Ashkenazy, Rubenstein. Whichever I want.”

She orders No. 16 in E-Flat Major for its mood of

patient work, achievements, late shifts, with gentle thrill.

“He lets me down in the finest possible manner.

For you, the aim cannot be the same:

the ending will be someplace else,

somewhere perhaps more tangible.”

 

A man looks back at her with the studied, almost supercilious, gaze of an author

wondering what her game is and whether she plays to win.

His brown hair is unbelievably tidy.

“I play no instrument”, he says.

“My keyboard used to be a pen, but now I just dictate.”

His brown eyes belie a blue gene.

Her blue eyes hold him attentively at a distance.

“Once the work is done, the rest”, he says, “is a playful tip-toe

across elevated stepping-stones irregularly set above wet rocks.”

The way is found for them thus

they have nowhere to go.

 

            8 September 2024

 

8.

 

Must we go back to that murky pond I dreamed of long ago?

a place to which I’ve been pointing all this time

where nothing’s so elusive you cannot feel it

and rocks don’t resist water.

 

The flinty arrow of sorrow is embedded in its target now

(the consequence of flight and bloody accusation)

yet I see nothing in her face if not new light.

 

After all, she guided me one day – just once –

to reunite us through a fog.

And so the stone was never in the way.

 

We figure out over and over again

the meaning of our currencies

and value of our words.

 

Am I really back then?

back to imagining the dark lady

who speaks in even tones,

steps lightly on my back.

 

            14 October 2024

 

 

10.

 

Ha! How could we not turn grey now

as slate carved and polished like waves

rolling in upon themselves?

 

How could we wade in there anyway,

when they’ve broken too many times,

as days closed down, and nights warmed up?

 

Two thirds of our ways along

that path I found myself again

among those same old shadows,

 

once more beneath those trees I loved,

so plain, but the way ahead obscured.

The slate roof above these arts

 

keeps elements out and spirits in,

but that black hole deep inside our galaxy

draws all, releases nought.

 

Those in the know say there’s no coming back from that,

until one tells us they’ve never been

so happy.

 

            10 November 2024

 

12.

 

“ricorditi di me, che son la Pia:

Siena mi fe’, disfecemi Maremma”

                                    Dante, Purgatorio, Canto V, 133–34

 

 

Milk may mean as much as blood.

The nomads drank them both,

and never forgot a slight.

 

But Pia, ultimate girl next door,

always said the right things

and danced to all his tunes;

 

never forgot that her dowry was but one

string of gems, one sequence of words,

one whole cosmos,

 

one toxin on the brain.

Betrayal becomes them – jealousy’s in their blood –

these men on horseback, quick to despatch their fears.

 

Tell us, Maremma, how two become one, but always invite a third

person or shade bringing in their wake

so many misdeeds.

 

Tell us how you never know what shape she’ll take

when Fortune visits us, like a star,

or a grudge, or a blade.

 

So when we get back to the world, ending our arduous way,

memory, mother of poetry, knows that we will look back,

always casting shadows.

 

 

20 November 2024