Free Zone Journals by Charles Wright Page A

effortless late September days
As sycamore leaves
tack down the unresisting air
Onto the fire-knots of late roses
Still pumping their petals of flame
up from the English loam,
And I suddenly recognize
The difference between the spirit and flesh
is finite, and slowly transgressable …
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    (October)
    â€”October everywhere out of the sunlight
Onto the China jade of the blowing fields
Of Kensington Gardens—
or else come down like wet lint
Over the Avon, soaking the glass.
It swivels my eyes that work me for grief and affliction
And pink my spirit, it guides my hand.
Fulke Greville lies in his stone boat in the church of St. Mary
In Warwickshire, not rippling the cold
Which clings like water drops to what was his face
On the other side of the light.
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    His kinsmen, Lords of the Bear and the Ragged Staff,
lie scattered around him,

Hermetically sealed in stone,
Who was friend to Elizabeth R and Sir Philip Sidney, ghost
In his own room now,
all passions heeled.
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    This afternoon I came up
Out of his Warwick dungeon
into the slow swish of the English rain,
Its bead curtain and lengths of chain
Strangely consoling after the iron artifacts
Hanging below like rib cages
and lungs in the torturous gloom.
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    The castle seemed to encircle me with its stone wings
And all of it lift
slightly at once, then settle back
As though the wind had died
That blows continuously under our feet
Holding up everything, then started again,
and what had sunk was risen,
I don’t know, at least to where it began …
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    â€”October’s a kind time,
The rain lying like loose bandages over the ground,
The white bounty of mushrooms thrusting their flesh up,
The comforting slide of darkness
edging like deep water
Back through the afternoon.
The sycamore trees in Lennox Gardens crisp and spray
In the wind, our discontent,
like Orpheus, singing elsewhere,
Charon, in slow motion, poling his empty boat

Cross-current, over the dark water
Into the different music of London traffic,
the coin still clenched in his teeth
The other side of the Thames …
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    Back in the Gardens, it’s tag end of a skitterish day,
October 17, Sir Philip dead
397 years today,
I watch the stiff papers scudding across the lawn,
Leaves heaped to vindicate speedily
The offices of the end,
dogs nosing the moist-eared edges of things,
Noticing gradually
A larger darkness inching up through the dark
Like grass, that means to cover us all.
Across the way, the yellow moths of the window lights
Break from their blue cocoons.
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    â€”The trees stay green longer here, lacking
The clubbing frost that stuns them to glory.
Their leaves lie in limes and tans
Flocking the grass, vaguely pre-Cubist to me,
And blurred, without my glasses, arranged
In an almost-pattern of colors across the yard,
The same colors Cézanne once used in the same way
So often down in Provence.
He died there today
Seventy-seven years ago, October 22, the fields and houses and trees
Still these colors and pure arrangements
Oozing out of the earth, dropping out of the sky
in memory of him each year
Everywhere, north and south …

He never painted the moon.
Never romantic enough,
he saw what he saw in a white light.
Still, I remember it there, hanging like a doubloon
Over Puyricard, outside Aix, some fifteen years ago,
Godfrey and I in our yellow suits
vamping the landscape
Along the canal, first in its half, then two weeks later its full dress.
It’s here now, powdering through the trees
as cars go by, and drunks sing in the street.
The blue light from a TV swarms at the windowpanes
In one of the Dutch Georgians across the way.
He made us see differently, where the hooks fit, and the eyes go …
Nothing is ever finished.
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    â€”Up from the basement flat at 43A,
up past the Greek college,
Across Walton to Ovington Gardens
Then over to Brompton Road
And across,
left to the Oratory and right
Up under the chestnut trees to Ennismore Mews,
Up past the gardens and