Although the blessing of horses
to Saint Florus and Saint Laurus
promised something, a stretch, from the road,
the calico balloon met the sky like John the Baptist—
above one’s head hung not the spring.
The tulips became shorter and more abrupt,
the hill had grown taller and drawn in;
books that snaked across the floor vapoured
with the terseness of parable,
engines pounded hotly.
Knives and forks on the terrace took on
a green hue, gatherings à quatre
made their nests high over the gangway
into a voyage on the round nape of the wave
just a station up the line.
Down by Brest Station the redolent express
departed into golden marshland and hillside
nurtured in silver—journeys became possible
to diamond forests, the river too
learned what it was to be renamed.
To put it more gently, I shall work my way
through to him, I shall break myself
for the last time, bewilderedly retracing
my steps and indried thoughts
like a hundred blinding photographs.
I understood him as an outline, a contour,
a cast-off skin whose bandages would slacken,
whose youth was marked
by the dawning town that too often
became different, or nothing.
His alter ego, You Will Remain,
hid behind the claret-coloured walls of the cool
and clean museum. Farewell to loving
anything, I carried him away with me
from the boulevard into my life.
It was the middle sister who was the main
object of his interest—that was how
he operated—charred pears at the Café Grec,
her five-petalled gaze an ornate lock,
and little in the way of extra snow.
He finally seduces her, and in that instant falls
genuinely in love with her. Then
his mistress Camilla turns up
like a blood-spotted card.
(She lives next to the theatre.)
He privately dedicated his sultry, summery
collection to Natasha, but she did not keep
his letters, and after his death her letters
to him were handed back to her.
(She has herself since died.)
He came from the depths of lyrical space,
alias the summer on the one hand,
to this mustering point, this profusion of lilac lustre,
this home in the autumn borne along
on its own words as though upon a raft.
And the town that is now performing itself,
since she had replaced the whole blackened town,
stone by stone, surrounded by fir saplings,
whoever you are, this town is your own invention,
and what, the duty of something unthinkable, went on there.
A tank cleared up the street like a forest cutting
once and for all, the drawing room over three winters
merged into one, was allowed to freeze up,
with venomous courtesy the first government decrees
made them remove their hats.
Everything disposed one to work, polite
social occasions were so few. The skittish
mannerisms of his backbone flute were unpolished,
like oars at rest. Still to him a schoolgirl,
she intended signing on as a nurse.
And she was as good as her word.
They paid her in gold to pass through this atmosphere
of fierce, abstracted, chaotic frost,
of dirty sea and narrow beach by the rail
halt on the winter mail route.
But still mountains unlived by anyone.
Noise of a revving motorcycle flooded
the key buildings. October would be withdrawn
into even deeper depths, its frozen
motionless energy a puzzle to the two of them.
I’ve appointed your meeting with me in a novel,
my brother in the fifth season of the year,
something more than a thousand pages long.
Having breathed its falsehoods for over ten years
I shall not manage this spring.
Yesterday I began struggling through
the dense shrubbery of your book, your sweeping,
winged script, the aristocratic burr
of your French speech. But nor did I pour away
the ink with which I wrote of famine.
Your book sounds its mating call, turns its ten
windmills in a huge wave of love. Splinters
of its lines fly apart and become caught
in ordinary drops—your voice is more mine
than yours, more aspen than birch.
I stopped reading on the second page
where my family crystallized like stored water,
biographically glittering, deprived of Europe. Unshaken
by the changes down the street, all the elements
of the confusion are in him true.