Meditações - the short span when the clocks ceased to revolve

The Great House in Various Light

The evening empty as a convex

coconut split down the seam:

not that it can be filled.

 

The evening empty as a gourd

that twists on an iron thread:

the rough skin of the sphere.

 

.            .          .            .           .    

 

Not that there was a spoken word

to recall the moment of seeing

the short span when the clocks

ceased to revolve and hands

met in jest or benediction

time of the vortex into which

hibiscus and almond trees strayed

and windows made of aluminum.

 

The stars are suddenly remote

candescent petals night throws

above the yard, the beautiful things.

 

.             .          .            .           .

 

The great house is a hotel

and a museum of victory

 

how some lived at the epoch

of planters and governors

 

visible in the paintings

the armchairs and gilded glass

 

articulate artifacts

and floors polished by daylight

 

in a country of green hills

and water wheels and wagons

 

and sun coming out after a rain

the labor is hidden that built

 

the house long ago, and ploughed

the land to make it bear fruit

 

.             .          .            .           .

 

In British poetry, gentle woodland

creatures gaze at the hermit

with marble eyes lit from within.

A single bird defends the song.

Among the pines draped with snow

from the whole land only a secret

footfall teases the senses awake

like white breath on white canvas.

 

Ideal forms crowd the auditorium.

The sky deepens on the surface

of a lake, in a cradle of stars.

A coppice of isolated birch trees

climbs the mountainside to touch

the moon's scar, benevolent witness

washed of color and fragmentary

illuminating the village below.

 

.             .          .            .           .

 

In New World poetry, an invisible

river runs this way and that.

A car(t) eases on a bumpy track

over small hills and into shallows.

The world is a tangle of leaves.

Towards sundown a driver gets out

and pushes into the forest, drawn

by a noise he cannot identify:

perhaps the hiss of water below.

It's only the river on its way.

 

Ideal forms crowd the auditorium

things present and things past

scattered beneath the poinciana.

The car heads into higher country

then out into space where fields

suddenly lie down beneath the seer

cattle pastures and agricultural lands

that have always been there

watched over by the great house

from its hilltop, like a sentinel.

 

.             .          .            .           .

 

In British poetry, the forms

of desire darken with the change

of seasons: green leaves once

they fade and turn gold and fall

to earth, and make a carpet

in the forest, awaiting the rain.

 

For each season has its sonata.

Silence and sound in balance

belong to the decline of autumn.

In winter the notes are fewer.

Silence comes into its kingdom

crown of the father, who departs.

 

The world of white prepares

to conquer the earth with silence.

 

.             .          .            .           .

 

In British poetry, articulate hues

speak as they are visible to the mind

audible colors played on a piano

primary sounds in an empty forest.

 

And then above a lake, the moon

in motion suspended like a dancer

as the music temporarily ceases

depriving her body of its rhythm.

 

.             .          .            .           .

 

Ideal forms crowd the auditorium.

The light of day starts to fade

and a mist settles in the valleys.

The great house is lit from within.

 

.             .          .            .           .

 

As they were, in other windows

you want to see their ghosts

the slaves, like black posts

staggered through the fields.

You want to make a picture

that shows the strange overlords

at intervals watch the misery

of torsos laboring to plant

and harvest the seas of sugar.

 

.             .          .            .           .

 

The green beds of sugar cane

extend from here to the hills.

 

Bright heads grazed by the light

of paradise become its negative.

 

.             .          .            .           .

 

In time, would the land irritate us

as it must have irritated the masters

the tropical caress of the air unavoidable

getting up each day to see once more

the rolling green hills and cattle ponds

tranquil in the valleys, the horses

collected at the water trough, content

to stand or to walk over the grass.

 

A comely scene worthy of an oil painting

(fruit trees dappled with sunlight).

 

They have escaped from seasons

into the monotony of a terrible beauty.

 

(Who is speaking?)

 

.             .          .            .           .

 

Away from the coast

the car passes through

a shadowy green world

of tropical syntax

ragged slopes and curves.

 

.             .          .            .           .

 

What then was promised by the evening

lights that spangled about the hills?

 

.             .          .            .           .

 

Endless tall grasses, a landscape

composed of variations on a color.

 

The after-image of elliptical forms

transparent as the cry of a seagull.

 

.             .          .            .           .

 

A tablet of scripted exclamations:

 

there, a poinciana with pink blossoms

overhangs the road, there a scrawl

of fighting tendrils, an indigo grammar

of petals offering illumination

to fan-shaped pristine hieroglyphs

waving to greener punctuations

of banana trees and mango, a tangle

of writing over writing closed

to further interventions. Visible

palimpsest of a book without letters

the tangle of leaves has no secret key

and cannot be deciphered, wordless

monads travelling contours of silence.

 

.             .          .            .           .

 

Mimesis touches the world

with an imperceptible

tenderness, only hardly

like wind an Aeolian harp.

 

.             .          .            .           .

 

There is a point when the sky pivots

to face the dawn, to face the dark side

of personality, that of a sensible man

recanting the mysteries he embraced

as a youth, when the angels spoke to him

and he ran towards them with arms wide open

across a field, beneath the painted stars.

 

.             .          .            .           .

 

Say that the world is a drinking glass

containing things of the life and language

and say that a poet wakes up one morning

thinking of capturing for the future

those petals inside that glass, broken vowels.

 

A vase of orchids stands on a kitchen table.

Not that it is abstract, or a luminous

symbol, nonetheless it is an algebra

of forces, like the equations of space-time,

which rule outside the mental universe.

 

 As if an image should leave its mirror behind

(the thing of which it is but a ghost)

like bodiless speech, and yet sensuous, in the way

a dream can leave its mark on the dreamer—

Esse est percipi, so speaketh the Law.

 

Wind begins to touch an Aeolian harp.

The great house is a place of articulation

word calls to other words, in transit.

Compelled by the beauty of flowers

the mind creates a space for other things.

 

.             .          .            .           .

 

(By British I mean Romantic idealist.)

 

Warm night descends

like a cloak. The whistle

of tree frogs supplies

a melody, and crickets

invisible to the moon

begin their Parliament.

 

The birds sleep with their young.

The air is otherwise still.

Mark McMorris, "The Great House in Various Light" from The Book of Landings. Copyright © 2016 by Mark McMorris. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.