Blasons

I woke up in the middle of the night
because there was a noise. I vaguely heard
rustling, as if pages were being turned.
In the half-darkness (light was filtering in
from streetlamps affixed to the façade
of the building across the street) I saw
a book as massive as a cinder block
on my desk. It was open to a page
where, even from my pillow, I could see
ciphers within illuminated scrolls.

Ciphers within illuminated scrolls
of paisley on the summer draperies
drawn on a dormant window facing mine
were, in the penumbra, visible.
You could open the window, said a voice
which might have been a child’s, except I knew
it was my sister’s, distorting my own,
a mirror facing a grimacing child.
The streetlamp caught, irrelevant detail
a scimitar of scar across her chest.

A scimitar of scar across her chest
identified the outbound voyager
(if only for the annals of the scar)
waiting for the southbound five-o’clock train.
It was Pentecost and the trains ran late.
A pyramid of canvas suitcases
was guarded by a brindled mongrel with
the white harness of a Seeing Eye dog.
Had the blind man gone for cigarettes?
Dog, woman, man, someone is in disguise.

Dog, woman, man, someone is in disguise
masked in a carnival of departure.
Winged and illuminated from within,
the season hangs heavy from the branches.
A crowd gathered on the station platform
around the suitcases. Unguarded bags
have not contained manuscripts or foundlings
since Oscar Wilde was sent to Reading Gaol.
The woman in dark glasses asked herself
if every shrouded object were suspect.

If every shrouded object were suspect
the tower sheeted for a year in white
waxed sailcloth would menace the avenue.
The martyr’s flop of bodies between sheets
does after all suggest that little death
but to whom exactly, who might have felt
ungratified after orgasm, regret
that a small fizzle of the nerves was not
epiphany. Elusiveness provokes
suspicion of the hooded clitoris.

Suspicion of the hooded clitoris
which has no conscience but which rarely lies
suggests implies remembers this or that:
her skirt spread out, astride his thighs surprised
into multiple climaxes. Eighteen,
the girl is not in love, the girl is in
a fable about curiosity.
The moral of the fable has perhaps
to do with what keys into memory:
prime numbers, rhymes, gunpowder synapses.

Prime numbers, rhymes, gunpowder synapses,
genera and species of herbaceous
plants, case endings of Greek nouns, breeds of
working dogs, three psalms in two languages
constitute the mnemonic furniture,
redemptive pastimes, of the desperate
or the recidivist insomniac.
The traveler whose train is late recites
multiplication tables to delay
not coming, but going unwelcomed home.

Not coming but going unwelcomed home
from somewhere imagination was piqued
to somewhere that would flatten it, tense on
the quai, extended like a leitmotif,
the sister of the writer, in her dark
glasses and a cap which covered her shaved
head (bared, out of place as an open fly),
remarked that waiting attenuates time
and the boredom which precedes the train gave
an illusion of immortality.

An illusion of immortality
in gestures which become quotidian:
being in the same place at the same time
daily, or once a season, once a year.
A haircut in the second week of May;
in December, the pelvic sonogram.
Twenty-six years ago, her mother died.
At ten in the morning at the café
the waitress with the ponytail arrives
for the lunch service and the afternoon.

For the lunch service and the afternoon
coffee to be served, there must be water,
cups, tables upright, only traffic noise,
the adrenaline of recollection.
The train pulls to the platform in sunlight;
the woman in the cap, dark glasses, black
shirt, shoulders her bag and climbs aboard
as do others. At the station café
arrivals and departures are discussed.
And was it called Spring Wind? Or Summer Rain?

And is it called Spring Wind, or Summer Rain
when sonic booms shatter kitchen windows
and present tense subverts a narrative’s
deliberately aleatoric
motion? A row of vintage buses parked
near the entrance to the covered market;
police in short-sleeved summer uniforms
divert traffic. Someone is making a film.
Here and Then are remembered Here and Now
while a veil dissimulates Now and There.

While a veil dissimulates Now and There
as if it were a woman’s censored face
here, the quotidian opens its eyes
on the disorder of the room it turned
from at midnight, face to a cool pillow.
Another boring day in paradise
disintegrating into a heat wave
beneath an imperturbable blue sky.
Nothing was confirmed but a question when
I woke up in the middle of the night.