Free Zone Journals by Charles Wright Page B

Prince’s Gate
Across the main road and Rotten Row,
bicycle track
And long grass down to the Serpentine,
Ducks on the water, geese on the water, the paired swans
Imperious and the gulls
neat on the slick edges,
Then backtrack and a right turn
To the west, across the road and into Kensington Gardens

And out to the chestnut and beech grove
As the dogs go by
and the Punks noodle along
In their chrome stud belts and Technicolor hair.
    Â 
    What breeze-bristled cities the trees are,
Their lights snatched off and on,
streets cluttered with leaves.
The sky is scrubbed to a delft blue
in the present tense,
Segueing into gray and a future pearl.
    Â 
    I’m stuck here, unwilling to trace my steps back,
The month running down like a love affair
inexorably to its close,
Sunday, October 30, Pound’s birthday ninety-eight years ago,
Everything lidded with gray, unporridgy clouds now,
Smooth as a slice of tin
or a flat rock in the street.
Like a bouffant hairdo of steel wool,
The limbs of a leafless chestnut tree are back-combed by the wind.
The English mind, he said, the cold soup of the English mind.
At Pisa it all came back
in a different light
In the wind-sear and sun-sear of the death cages,
Remembering Christmases in the country, the names
Of dead friends in the Tuscan twilight
building and disappearing across the sky.
Cold soup, cold soup,
Longwater color of pewter,
late grass green neon.
    Â 
    â€”Short Riff for John Keats on His 188th Birthday
    Â 
    Hopkins thought your verse abandoned itself
To an enervating luxury,
a life of impressions
In fairyland, life of a dreamer,
And lacking the manly virtues of active thought.
    Â 
    Born on All Hallows’ Eve, what other early interest
Can one assume,
that single, arterial drop of blood
On the clean sheet dispelling for good
a subsequent second,
Little black light magnet, imagination’s Buddha …
    Â 
    (November)
    â€”A Traveler between life and death …
Where is that line between sleep and sleep,
That line like a wind over water
Rippling toward shore,
appearing and disappearing
In wind-rise and wind-falter—
That line between rain and sleet,
between leaf-bronze and leaf-drop-
    Â 
    That line where the river stops and the lake begins,
Where the black blackens
and light comes out of the light …
    Â 
    Stone circle at Castlerigg,
Cumbrian, Paleolithic chancel
Against the November mist and vault,

Mouth-mark of the invisible, air become breath
And ecclesiastical smoke …
    Â 
    Crows, like strings of black Christmas-tree lights, burn in the bare
trees,
And silver Y moths—though soon to die—appear at dusk,
    Â 
    The night coming down, a dark snow
Piecemeal and hard across the moors
like the ashes of Paradise
3500 years ago,
Helvellyn and Thirlmere
Sluicing to charcoal down-valley, water and earth
    Â 
    And air all bleared to the same color, an indiscriminate estuary
Shoaling into the landscape, nobody here but me
Unspooling to nothingness,
line after line after latched, untraceable line …
    Â 
    â€”November pares us like green apples,
circling under our skins
In long, unbroken spirals until
We are sweet flesh for the elements
surprised by the wind’s shear
Curling down from the north of Wales
Like Occam’s edge to Steeple Aston and Oxfordshire.
    Â 
    â€œWorst time of the year,” he said,
“leaves everywhere
And fresh cold to shiver your very seeds.
I’ve burned two piles already, Saturday morning yet”—
This in the Norman churchyard,

Gray flake and flame in a hushed mound on Delia Johnson,
God Knows His Own,
    Â 
    Lead lines in the arteries for the first time, magpies
Hustling their double notes
steadily, like oars in an oarlock,
Beechwoods and whitehorns, hawthorn and mountain ash
All burning down to bare ricks
Against the dropdraft of cold as winter circles and moves in …
    Â 
    â€”Chelsea Embankment, 5 p.m.: Whistler pastels squished
Down the fluted water, orange,
Tamarind,