Two Poems

James McCorkle

Hobart and William Smith Colleges

 

Combustion of Early Summer

 

The elation of the past is over, the news tells us,
Suggesting it was there to begin with
Or recoverable, like a heavy ore or a shipwreck.

 

But on closer inspection, the past buzzes around us,
A conversation in another room we thought dormant,
Soon its occupants will crash through the door

 

Wearing green sequin blouses that remind us of mermaids,
The ones seen years ago in waterless tanks among dried starfish
And draped nets, waving to us from a place free of storms.

 

You wonder about other places, less advertised,
If another design had not been accomplished
That drew upon a new notion of heaven.

 

Cushioned by the afternoon’s orchid heat,
Enveloping us with implied betrayals–
It is possible, the narrator might be whispering–

 

There we might be unfurling like sails,
Never going taut, the wind pulls us over the water,
Whole populations streaming over reefs with marlin and sailfish.

 

Stories that make us up, until we are bankrupt,
And we wonder who these people are claiming their pound
Of flesh off our backs, pushing us into the dusty crowd.

 

We are trapped in the same voices we’ve known for years,
Words drop among the glowing debris of streets–
Which are yours or mine, what was said or when, unknown.

 

Sorting things out, nothing really fits:
The puzzle of mountains with pieces from a regatta,
We have pieces from other lives,

 

The difficulty is to remember them, hoping
Caligula or Curie do not figure
As the locking piece, the keyhole, the knob.

 

Dreams stare back at us, a coiled snake
Leading us deeper into houses or along streets
To a harbor whose palms have rotted, the furniture staved-in.

 

Along the shore the dead talk with us–they are the waves
And the salvage-birds, the jackals that swarm
Through the old hotels and in the weedy temples.

 

These sidereal landscapes compound: for a moment
You are there, in the mullein-heat of ruins, before we lose sight
Of the landscape, the dream chopped to a memory

 

At other times, there are sections we dimly remember:
Another bay’s cerulean expanse tips into the sky,
Scattered sails tack for an unseen buoy.

 

The regatta holds its shape, like dreams that continue after
waking,
The city fills out for us again, with its seepage-stained
Water-towers and the pigeon-clutter of roofs.

 

In the dense exhaust of afternoon, we move in and out of shadows
Along Houston Street, as though bathing in ink
And then washing clean of all traces,

 

The remaining light is so strong our white shirts
Blanch the photographs of all tone: were you to the left,
Or is that someone else strayed into the frame?

 

The shield of light expands over the imagined horizons,
Everything fills itself with all else,
That anything could be no longer interests.

 

The traffic lights change like dominoes falling,
All the way up town as we move each to another,
A roundel where passion is only in the figure.

 

Everything said spirals to a period,
A rose that has dried almost to blackness,
Its scent a window left open long ago.

 

We slide to this point perspectives chart,
Infinite movement allowed only one course,
What was meant to happens remains off stage,

 

So much for the pavane we whirled into;
Sticking your tongue out, crossing your eyes, you spin
Across stage, into the water-meadows abutting tank-farms.

 

The stage goes black, the curtains tear,
Children are sent in to rip the floorboards up
For firewood, pigeons circle out of the cracked vault.

 

Returning dripping with sedge and reeds,
Tannic perfume soaks your clothes: no one can describe
Your departure or arrival, yet we all have ideas.

 

Momentary grace or seduction?–no one knows
Your reasons for taking up with us, perhaps the loneliness
Of watching cities turn more fatal and rapturous

 

Each epoch slides into the next and claims its dead:
What is the cost of all this, what has been put aside
To keep the body tandem to the sulphur-lit city.

 

When you spun into your volute, there was a dazzle of sails:
I saw you spinning on the round stones of a harbor,
The howling from below the ground stopped.

 

The first bodies were temples crowded with space,
With different voices you spun through them,
Until the howling started again, and the bull slammed the walls

 

Deep below us, mired in its own demands:
We talk to the dead, now that the fields far inland
Are burning up and our history is seen as strings
Of small blunders, the sky emptied of its regattas.

 

---

 

The Love of My Life

 

Out of practice, all that is left is theory,
The sun has risen hours ago, but the day
Hangs like a dream whose edges will be skirted
In collaboration with gravity. The clouds will lift
Is all the radio omens, the stage is left
For newcomers, the bureau cluttered with the weeks’s
Unforgiving letters and bills. And theory,

 

An elaboration of what is gone, is not an explanation,
But the fine ribs lifted from fossil
Sediments, glistening and senseless
Unless understood by what followed, if anything.
And there they are, all twenty-six, sternum side-up,
The wind catching rags and paper shreds in them,
The day trudges on, the traffic caught like hair

 

On the bathroom floor; suburbia not far past
The bridges. What a day this has turned into
We exclaim, for once, getting it off
Our chests. Somewhere each of us has left a corpse,
Or many, honeyed or scattered by birds.
While we talk, I too am a diminishing figure,
Sitting next to you, then in another room, and at last

 

Across the river, on the other side of the city,
Walking backwards into what must be only theory
Of what comes to happen. Discussed later
Over dinner, the higher forms of life, the cooperative
Societies of animal species–blue whales and mountain gorillas–
While we have learned the practice of severing
And the routes marking separation: this is

 

The practice, the plan of every city. In this plan
Someone dragging shimmering cages of ribs already
Nears you. On pellets of ice, in the store window
Before you, swordfish arch their black leather trunks
Around mounds of pink shrimp and mirrored cuts of salmon.
The avenue is packed and steaming cold: which one
Is he, nearing you with his theories and criminal good looks?