persona

 

persona  

 

Imago has found himself of late uncertain

believes his person has reverted to a persona

appropriated   it has become a front

a certain Imago having appeared

a cameo role   in certain dubious poems …

 

Imago remembers his self

its location somewhere in his chest

the solar plexus or thereabouts and how it moved

but did not seem to change   to a position

somewhere just behind his eyes   staring out of himself

 

through the mask of his skull

from the monkey in the mirror

his homunculus   somewhat smaller

somewhat younger   somehow truer to itself

somehow more loyal to itself    

 

and the betrayal      

canvas

 

canvas  

 

I do not have the words for this

this … this …

a scream would give the sound

I’m aiming for   a real scream

I can imagine it    this scream

only as a more violent form

of the silence I am trying to break

 

I can feel the glass behind which

I am locked resonating bending

with the pressure        shattering

I can sense the shards and splinters

so sharp I can picture the scratches and cuts

the spatter pattern on the tympanic membrane  

only to become a sky scarred with cloud

a blood-red sunset in bright acrylics

drying slowly  

in the forest

 

in the forest  

 

a glimpse of a deer fleeting

through trees and undergrowth

the fleeing muscular panic   the flow

of music   the syncopation of branches

snapping   the fear and feared   there

and gone   in a car park   a shopping centre

in the x-ray of a bone

 

stopping somewhere

hidden   eyes gleaming

nostrils flaring   snorting

breathing   a heart beating

decrescendo   a violin   a piano

on a patio   a desk in an office

an armchair in a place called home

 

still   birdsong   laughter

the play of light on leaves

voices   a choir

acknowledging a stranger

sotto voce    in the forest

the head bending

the tongue lapping at water

 

licking at stone

translation

translation 

 

when his mother died Imago felt the death of a language

of which he was now the only speaker left 

 

his sister had to translate what her mother had meant

by refusing a funeral   her approach gentle heuristic

 

leaving him to sift the content of telephone calls

the visits on her birthdays   the odd letter

 

and into the past   the unremembered remembered

memories painted by numbers by sentiment by irony

 

the hermeneutics of the inarticulate the needy

of the narrative knife scarring a life dissecting the said

 

which he attempted to discuss with his wife

in the language which obtained when he spoke to her of family matters

 

by the living   of the dead

dodo

Dodo  

 

imagine the last dodo   confounded

the whispered croak in its throat

a whimper as it runs for cover

to shelter and shiver

beneath a tambalacoque tree

 

a loneliness only the dying

only the hunted know

 

each one of us

a personal extinction

does the world grieve for this one bird?

did God?

 

to be remembered   to become

a negative overexposed

too much light

too much light

 

an absence felt in someone else’s life 

performance

performance   

 

this performance of self was slipping away

a loose scarf falling from her shoulders

her hands flapping and fearful   useless

and in these final scenes

when everything   everything   was sliding away

she had never been closer to what it meant to be

to what it meant to be her   not to be her 

the lights about to go out   the curtain to fall

and the audience awed by the performance

the standing ovation   the rain    the flowers

 

in the carpark a slight impatience

platitudes   performance

the need for something solid   something graspable

 

the stage the theatre in darkness   

the scarf on the floor left behind  

a darker shadow   irretrievable 

arrhythmia

 

arrhythmia 

 

he listens

the piano in a Górecki song

the understated sympathy

those passages where a note

at a time

is quietly quoted

the dripping tap of his humanity

in a symphony of things ineffable being uttered

 

he exists mostly in the spaces

between the strikes of the key

waiting   with a kind of insistence

on the beating of his heart

that up or down on the staves of a ladder

unsure whether he is the piano or the pianist

link: Gorecki, Sorrowful Songs