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AFTERNOON SONG & OTHER
POEMS
By
Dominic James
Afternoon Song
You there in your old, cold country
Do you think of me
As a bay in North Sicily,
Or rumpled bedroom flooded with heat and light
(From which you cannot keep out
a small cry in the night)
Hot despite all slats and flats of your
Shuttered North doors that can hardly withdraw
All the heat of the day,
At least you can park all your secrets in shade
Until evening takes some heat from your blushes,
Your burns and the drops of your foolish, salt tears
Pilgrim Station
Pilgrim Station, the Jordan by moonlight,
We were playing cards on the lively banks
While our riverboats tugged at their moorings
Like tethered horses anxious to be off
And ride the spate of the earlier storm;
Frothy waves reflected high scudding cloud
And the rivers’ surge was drowning out talk,
Down from John the Baptist’s House of Sadness
It carried palms around the Promised Land
To a salty finish on the Dead Sea shore,
Man, you should have seen those holy rollers;
Everything was drawn along by the storm
Or - more accurately - its aftermath;
It was the best time that we’ve had in years.
Rain and Shine
It was raining tonight in Marrakech
although in town noise I heard not a drop:
still don’t, reflecting on a tumbler of water
how before today’s rain a small herd of sheep
grazed at my door - I heard them pretty well:
their pleasant cropping and trotting black feet
and white lambs playing at the roots of palms;
their shepherd picked up a rock to steer them
without a splash or stroke or sound. Unseen,
his flock’s gathering was to me at first rain,
rain composed on the horizon’s dumb shore,
where flashes of lightning lit sullen cloud -
how, as I watched, though I heard no thunder,
in a rain-dashed sky the sun re-emerged.
Give me Summer
Give me Summer:
All his lies are promises,
Everything that’s good is sour,
Time was on our hands
And we rubbed it out.
Give me Summer,
His garden’s an escape route
With paths of laden vine,
Combining scent of basil leaves
With honeysuckle, woodbine.
Give me Summer,
His table wide and salad bowl
When sparrows skim the hedgerow,
Laurels glint like spear tips
And the nettle’s stingless.
Give me Summer,
Summer in the warming breeze
When he’s hung out to dry,
For his end is my beginning:
Bring me love and happiness,
Give me Summer
On his knees
And pull down the blind.
I shall own his haunted shadow,
I shall make it mine.
Victim of a silent dream
Late at night a freight train rumbles
far away and disturbs only
the sanctuary of my pillow
for I am awake to night sounds
and lie among my tender bruises:
a cold eye fixed upon his roses’
shadows, planted on the wall,
they nod as if they paid for me,
I kiss the rope burns on my wrist,
the blue spot on my forearm,
I am a victim of violence
nestled in these railway sleepers,
embedded in a constant track
between two stations, love and hate,
or hate and love. He doesn’t know
if I am truly his alone:
was my rescue late or timely?
He doesn’t know my timetable,
that the lover plays the villain
and he must tie me to the rack
out-stretched between these steel ribbons,
before he helps me onto the platform
of my final destination:
Love, should I meet him sideways on?
With a man there’s always something.
Hero
She's hunting through a mist that settled
On memory now drink has come
And all’s dismay at sober evenings,
Was there ever one sweet thing for always
In her puddle mud of history?
She’s left her garden a muddle head,
Nudging by in her blindness
She scratches at her friends and lovers -
Or the remnants she has of them.
Following her ragged shoreline
Hero waits for the coming dawn
To split the cover of night.
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