A Poet Reflects

Here are my gifts:    smudges of bud,
A blame of lime.    Everything your remember crowds
Away.  Stubble memory,
The wallpaper peeling its leaves.    Fog.    Fog
In the attic; this pod of black milk.    Anymore,

Only a road like August approaches.

Sometimes the drawers of the earth close;
Sometimes our stories keep on and on.    So listen—

Leave no address.    Fold your clothes into a little
Island.    Kiss the hinges goodbye.    Sand the fire.    Bitch
About time.    Hymn away this reliquary fever.

—David St. John, lines from “Elegy” in The Shore (Houghton Mifflin, 1980)

He stood at the altar of absolute light

Holding up a priceless Renaissance lute
Carved of rosewood & maple
Its mouth a necklace of precisely tooled roses

Their petals trembling & blackening slightly
At their edges as he sang
& every song recalled those rows of fallen arbors

Framing another lost         hellish note of the sublime

—David St. John, excerpt from “Fleurs Mystiques” in The Red Leaves of Night (Harper Flamingo, 1999)

Theodoor Rombouts, black & white rendering of A Lute Player, 1629                                                                                                                                     

XL.

Shattered, shattered, shattered.  There are so many ways
To break the vessel, sometimes no single way will do.  Of course,
There are those who’ll happily do it for you: ball-peen & crowbar, lace & kiss.
Whatever was in there—water or soul or silence—now here seems so little
To miss.  The pieces have fallen like leaves in the circumference
Of rain, the debris of glass or ceramic or rare porcelain—it doesn’t matter;
The vessel is only the shape to be recalled as what once one was …
The shape & semblance & the taste of rain.  The shape to be shattered, shifted
& sifted again & again … The soul or water or silence refrains from staining
The page, this page, with the blood of any name.  If peace is distant, at least
Night seems close at hand. That mist of lavender in the air is the scent,
The fragrance, of the lamp lit in the widow’s window as the ship
Turns at the jetty’s end; the single ghost on deck—even at this distance of waves
& brine—seems lost in that cloud of remorse burning in the window, burning
All the way from her misery to his faint & salty skin.

—David St. John, from The Face: A Novella in Verse (Harper, 2004)

“It may be that places exist in order that memory itself has a home.” —David St. John

The Unsayable, the Unknowable & You

Lately, only three things really interest me—
The unsayable, the unknowable & you.

The colors of the morning edge in a little
Here, as a backdrop to the towers of the Loire;

Ash white limbs languish above the river’s muted reds,
Its blazing lace of late-summer’s light, that

Holy figure.  Around us—swirling—those grains of
Rumor, pearls of salt kissed from an open palm …

Each night suggests the fortunes of the moon,
The way our room remains requited by desire.

My prize: A night alone (again) and you, tracing
This brocade of sweat along your amber shoulder.

Let’s weave together the dawn’s superior light—
A script of bodies inscribed by the summer’s night.

—David St. John, from The Red Leaves of Night: Poems (Harper Flamingo, 1999)

Not a Man

I am not a man who generally
Loves the grace of summer quiet

I prefer the sneer of winter
& the grit of ash smeared upon the air

But when you stood on the veranda
Of the old farmhouse as the night breezes played

Over the folded pleats of that snowy nightgown
I could believe the heavenly owl

Crying in the distance was only moments away
From his desperate descent & sublime happiness

Opening his wings above that silver streak of purpose
Moonlight had swollen into a special prey.

—David St. John, from The Red Leaves of Night, (Harper Flamingo, 1999).

Artwork: Moonlight Hunter by Martin Ridley

XVII.  Summer Abstract

The little yellow vowels rose out of our mouths
Like knots in the river current, like sudden blotches

On a sketchbook, Sallow, the words.  Octaves
of orange light finger, today, the sequence of postures

You perform: turn, wake, & rise.  There is nothing
Left for us to deflect in what we say.  Instead, we

Pull ourselves up by the customary braids of day,
Though your hair seemed more urgent this morning, its

Usual halo not so fixed & obstrusive.  You know, if
You breathe a little more slowly, even your hair (so

Translucent & red lately) will wave in the near
Twilight just like a flag, I mean a real one; I mean

A real silken nervous flag.

—David St. John, section from “Nocturnes & Aubades,” in The Red Leaves of Night (Harper Flamingo, 1999).

X. Another Stranger

A lot of life is simply furniture,
Isn’t it?  I mean, we stumble into & around

Almost all of the most important things
That happen to us.  All of this philosophical

Urgency telling us to direct our energies—
Moral & artistic, etc.—is beyond the silly, since those

Pretensions evaporate the moment our glazed eyes
Begin to clear.  Besides, I liked the surprise

Of bumping into you accidentally like that, the wine
Shivering in your hand, the night sky listing, rapt

With whispers, a whole future assembling, the abandoned
Room kissed awake by the steps of a stranger.

—David St. John, section from “Nocturnes & Aubades,” in The Red Leaves of Night (Harper Flamingo, 1999).