John Sugden
Gabriele d’Annunzio at Gardone. Lake Garda.
The landscape hesitates, lake, mountain, forests,
the deck, sea-shrouded, lachrymose under a fat sky.
A flag is hoisted for penance; a captain on his sinking ship,
as syllables pace the day, the yardarm alive with Elmo’s fire.
A pause to rinse hands in contemplation, the sanctus
bell echoing his head. So God exists, aposteriori,
as the white touch of water reads
the shoreline, reaching out like a funeral knell.
The landscape hesitates.
*
The filial river’s public face thins the secret root
of rock, running the life line of alluvium.
The lake hints convergence on its
slow bottoming; the water, acidic, cramped,
as live cargoes of dust and bone, attune
to a slow death of afternoon,
detonation in late Autumn.
A mass is sung te deum laudamus,
the sound muffling the screams of the faithful,
the hollow ring of the carpenter’s mallet.
*
And even water has need of him,
a balm for dry yearnings, and such oblivion,
a second death in his own magnificence,
a shedding of immortality.
*
The twelve stations
are etched in drypoint,
shaded to give clarity,
to cool the reforming of souls
whose contrition saves them from hell
without being troubled by doubt.
*
He wipes the dew from windows,
nostrils flared, breathed, believed,
forever, always;
the land browns, dead blown, empty.
Page(s) 110
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