En Echelon
[A windswept hill above a port.
Large gun emplacement. First
lights of evening. Harbour master
old, shorter, fixed face. Daughter
young, taller, mobile face.]
Counting the vessels into home,
wind sings in the rifling. "Burning time.
Daughters, teach me to wait.'
Too well before delete she said
"They aren't us" which he knew.
"Now list me in your harbour arms."
The penitent one windburnt to sense
heard words scooped out to sea,
imagined always to the right.
"I'll calibrate the hours of sun
each day you went. What's strange
is not begun in you. When there were fires
we moved and quickly. Don't forget
that owing to us. Braid showing
at our collars marks us for these fights,
is not put off. I took to water after that,
headlands, drainage, towers, redoubts
clothed beyond reason like a dutch,
wanting only the parts given back
as fitting home. As now,
not asking much, you could demur
at something, not give up
at speech grown strange in air.
this medium that drags us to our sense."
"No air would give us that, no speech
deleted pause. We are not sagas, scrolls,
laws are renewed in breaking, found
again inside the wrist but for
the finder true, even to capacity
of print's chambered burning:
for all I know enraged on a harbour wall.
Tyneside toughened glass spins back
the loan's reflex, ask for that much-
the dancing master's warmer in the hall
and self-taught. He doffs his cloak,
snuffs the attendant's false candle, folds
a smile of the voyaging tropic to the cold.
Countless printless footless times.
And now I demur we're nothing,
particles dumped in ranks
an audience free to leave,
we have our chancy vehicles. I'd have
you speak all this in a play, to know
your one side is a dreamed half-fall
into the medium you say sustains you."
Page(s) 42-43
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