San Sepolcro
There is in San Sepolcro’s dowdy stones
a special slot accepting coins which have no weight
I mean Italian lira made of aluminium,
The Empire’s weight is carried in the slender fasces
shown bright upon their face, a modicum
of cash, absent beauty, too, in a dearth of mass –
Once filled, the slot, its vacant maw unshut,
digests, and whirs, and worries forth a ‘tick’
and issues forth, until the power is cut
>From an orifice unseen, its curt and obscene
valorization of an Augustinean time
cut into subsegments of a Newtonian machine.
Jesus stares forth: my mother’s favorite work of art:
the light in which He’s seen itself is green,
as ironic as dull Lal, as honest as an adult mart
Selling peep-Christ, marking minutes of eternity
sans bump and grind, and neither dark nor bright,
His act, continuing, avoids parochial poverty,
Gains money changers’ gazes; once the night
returns (tempo expirata) , tourist incredulity
gives charity for Charity: thus, ‘let there be light’.
The Pool, 1996
There was a pool in which the tide would wash
from clear to cloudy to settling stillness:
Memory itself was figured in the froth,
Desfigured with emotion’s fullness,
Refigured in a calculus of loss and hope,
Prefigured in remembered coldness.
Remembered tasted water tastes remote,
the taste of Lethe’s water now refreshed,
abstracted from dilution to compote.
Fifteen years: her face seems strangely fresh
selected on my mental TV screen
washed synaptically by display refresh
Internally imaged within my brain;
those days were lost, not lost enough;
the loss retained even now breeds specific pain.
The specific sunny afternoon was abrupt
in sex and also separation
which followed next, both permanent and tough,
Her choice. Time makes pain an institution,
a special area internal, a special pool
maintaining secrets bets on certain retribution.
Nothing happens. Or is memory’s tool
forgetfulness ? The water’s texture might
obcess a lover, whiner, thinker, fool.
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