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| artwork by David Boyle |
Discreet Romance
The cathedral waves a bell Like a handkerchief To a new warmth In a blue ordained sky.
People wiggle like puppies Across Munster Platz With their arms full of windows, Houses watch bicyclists Bump over cobblestones.
Tramways reach out Green across bridges With a come hither stare From bank to bank.
The streets have begun To manufacture early Spring.
Yet down below, In the Rhine’s misted throat A smell of feather and steel Claims all at once A flow and a stillness:
Lorelei’s embrace Of life and death, And time’s desuetude Through her fluvial hair.
A chapel at an alley’s end Blinkered with cypresses, Gone mute, floats silver By grace of cloudlets And an allegory breeze.
Feel death beside you Clinging to a scent of secrecy,
That you too, may rise Above the clamor Like this flower-box city And evaporate Into a synod of spirit.
High Places
Antwerp wears grey felt to play winter. Close by, the mercury swing of the sea responds to the city’s merchant ardor, laps through alleys and squares. At the train station, billowed with Monet steam, Antwerp does not wonder at me, nor am I startled by the engineered rotations of pickpockets, trains and clock innards, and their nimble tricks, turned cosmic for these star-driven eyes. I dive into the daguerreotypes of streets harnessed with gold, whetted by prosperity. Where fog errs, detachment proves seductive. Gavroche minces hearts for fun, invoking delights of pain. Fomented by the Scheldt River mist, superstition raises dampness to a mood of remembrance. The bone structure of tall facades has twilight enclaves, garrets of mystery: Nordlich, del norte, septentrional Where love is an absence, a draft of angelism throughout. The body is forced to evaporate in ways it is unused to, up to slippery places of lost and found,
to under the gables, sigils of eternity, while below, a passerby stirs a cold pang of abandon. |
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