In memory of Burhan Tufail
White
Spirit
The sky neither blue
nor black is the colour of longing.
An ageing half-moon lies on its back over the city
without company of stars.
She as always
she, though deader than a bone and deader
even than the earths dust or its flint, never having lived,
is falling, passing away.
The pearl light above
the park and the buildings standing back
is steady, unexpendable, like something beyond hope,
lasting after hope is past,
as the sand settled
below the wall on the Thamess shore
weighs in the hand like stone, being all stone is endlessly ground
in the anger of time
at all what once
was brick or stone supported or contained,
whose tearless weight remains. How much of that was light or joy
in the dry years falling down?
They lived as muddy
water clinging in the heavy grains.
Look, she has made the museum, the ended woman whose arm
takes the child now for ever,
not old, not so very
old so old she was never young,
living if barely alive, dead and living in sepia,
as also in a new flesh,
a mode of the void
thats yet to make the museums. The moon
sends its ray on the just and the unjust, soaking them through
with abrasive dust of grief,
sweeping blood off
the roofs, coating with silver gelatine,
exposing the rafters that crack in our heads, a quick sound
in the middle of the night.
You keep coming into
my mind in an ancient white dress
which you dont have, stepping lightly down between the rafters
without company of stars.
Youll say
its not you and not your dress, wrapped in your blue coat.
I know this longing is nothing new, is the same I knew
at first, and will at the last,
which was that muscatellish
fume already fine enough
for spirits to drink, and now is an eau de vie distilled
in copper coils of elflocks.
I can knock back
another slug, as grandpa would have said,
to your bright eyes, made about as pure as tongue can take
it.
Next time round its white spirit,
no longer fit. The
same one all along, as at the first
and in the end, longing for a breath, and another breath,
a breath, then no more longing.
John
Gibbens
Back
to the present
|