An Apparitional Summer Drizzle

Painting by Connie Tom


AN APPARITIONAL SUMMER DRIZZLE


The summer drizzle’s
Raindrops,
Tiny,
Translucent hemispheres
Wobbled on
My old,
Time-creased eyelids.

My eyes are cold,
A blue-bruise cold.

This chill, unreal,
A bodily chill, an anachronism.
No flesh left
To feel the cold kiss of water.
My senses are gone.

I have no eyelids,
I have no eyes.
I have no orchids.
I have only bones.

I cannot recall who I was,
What was my name.

Was my name, Troilus.
I was not Aeneas, for I
Would have never left Dido
To pursuit a lie, the State.
What was my name:
Orestes, Orpheus, Oscar,

Orozco, Ovid, Octavius,

Charles Olson.

Could my name have been
Federico,
The name that sounded so strange
To García Lorca.

Or Plato, Marcus Aurelius,
Andrew Marvell, Blaise Pascal,
Or Gilgamesh.

Perhaps, my name
Was Tom, or Frank, or Charles,
Or Duane.

I have no ears, only holes
In a skull,
But I hear a loud voice,
A frantic, agitated voice,
A voice shouting from behind bars,
The bars
Segment her face into fragments,
My mad sister
Rants about the dangers of gifts,
A horse made of wood.

I see Venus, a boy struggles
Out of her embrace
To kill a wild boar,
Venus is being murdered
As reported by Swinburne
By a Galilean. Or is she
Being murdered by
Double-entry bookkeeping.
I see a sylvan god with hooves
For feet playing an ivory flute.
He has seaweed hair, starfish hands.
Each toe is an octopus.
I see all this, but I have no eyes.
I only have
Empty eye sockets
In a cracked skull.

Where is Cressid? Where is Diomed?

My bones are browning,
Brown, green-spotted,
Amoeba-shaped, constantly changing.
I see sandpipers on a shoreline
Scurrying away from the foam
That tips the incoming waves.
I recall a line from a Robert Lowell letter:
“Elizabeth Bishop is about to visit
Here for two days…..the dog
Must be sent away
Because of her asthma.”
I see insects with lavender eyes,
Wire-thin amber legs,
Writing in red, poems
On the empty spaces
Of the holes that were
Once my ears.
A short sentence from Jacques Derrida
Comes into my mind,
Or whatever it is that makes
The dead have thoughts,
“I live as if it were possible.”

I asked without speaking, I asked
Something that passed,
“Are you, Heurtebise, if so,
Where is Jean Cocteau.”
“Perhaps, you are Beatrice,
Dante is probably somewhere
In a white rose.”

“There are no white roses here,”
She answered and disappeared.


Duane Locke

Posted over on Ditch Poetry