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Colin Sutherill

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The Rhymer

He’s forged a faery out of old bolts, sub-frames,
junked stuff caked with pasts, caresses,
fierce retractions, greasy with the DNA
of death, dismemberment, spilt sperm, ingress

of rain. He’s called it Helen or Ophelia, Rose,
some name; its split tubes, rusted metals,
long since metamorphosed
to a pale one, garlanded with wild herbs, petals.

He sees her, filmy-eyed, lids tinctured perse,
fair hair fined back from off a marble brow
and she will conjure lyric hours for him, powers
of enchantment. Now

she whores him, has him, entertains him long,
the evening graced by candles, smiles,
Moet et Chandon, airs by Bach and songs:
Paper Moon and Stardust, Angel Eyes.

Can it be well, in thrall to such a one,
denizen of airy, far elsewhere?
And will he, cobwebbed in his twilit transposition,
come to, half-crazed, upon the seventh faery year?

Or has he passed for ever to the mist-pearled
dawns, the poised geometries: Elphame,
evoked by many grainy playbacks of a girl,
an A-reg Ford, then sundry griefs redone

in postcard sepia, the pre-remembered land
and source of love and all remembered airs,
of cadences that rise and rise and
fall with too much loveliness almost to bear?

 

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