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Alexander Hutchison

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Climacteric

 

This time something threatens to give way entirely:
Ridgepole, roof-beam, whatever you imagine as lasting
This time will fail to remember words that fell so bright
and fast about we found no shelter but the storm itself.

Burning branches in stoves and stalls, juniper burning
And the place thick with the smell of it. Star-bane;
Lesion in the thew of space.

Even the confidence of God at knell of the hardest season
Withers and rots away.

These purposes splinter in a rented room;
Intention, surface, prospect before, behind
Is all some thriftless illusion
Drawn down in a trough of queer air.

I can guess at it – tailing, diminished,
Acknowledge a thread of worn profit,
Even an infection slowly taken –

Nature scourged by sequent effects:
No lamp of bronze, no drum
At the cross-tree –

Appetite
And intelligence and little else:
Blood loop on a dry beaten run.

 

Page(s) 172-173

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