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Chapter From A European Novel
The bombardment stops,
and out we troop
to the tables under
the trees
where we spend our days
and wine is poured into glasses,
still ringing in the ruined street.
How
few of us are left
to enjoy the arrival of Spring.
The old faces are gone from the parks,
the hotels are deserted,
full
only of rooms we dare not enter.
I think of Asa in his rubber lung
reaching out to press
the tube between his
fingers,
smiling at our pathetic resilience.
And I remember Wilma slicing her wrists
beneath the table
as her
stupid husband shuffled his feet.
But the sun revives the memories
of what used to be,
and we all sit down
to
a bitter meal while Coltman,
that old lush,
pours himself the last of the wine.
Eschatology
In
the beginning
the exhalation of breath,
the germinal act,
the move from stasis to volition,
from silence to the
music of life,
from formlessness to the grand design.
Then come the rains,
the machine in motion,
an act of
time
in the first season of all things.
In that first dawn
the voice of the ocean,
the metamorphosis of dream
into word,
the creator looking at creation,
the life and death of giants.
Metaphor shivers in the cave
of
her awakening,
comforts her simple child
as its fingers trace
the shape of fear
on the smoky walls.
Dreaming,
she foresees
the dominion of the virus,
the empire of the ant,
the end arriving
with a shift in the axis,
hot
rain falling
on a boiling sea.
Insignificance
You are that point
on the horizon
where
nobody glances
where nobody feels at home.
When you speak,
when you wave your arms
at the universe
there
is laughter from the darkness.
There is no word known
can break this circle
of insignificance.
When you
invent a word
it will blow away
on the breeze
like any old silk scarf.
Copyright
© Derrick Buttress, 2006
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