Triptych
BY CARL DENTON
1
Almost four years ago, late January,
strolling through slush, the unseasonable warmth,
through snow, past courtyard lamps
with seasons in their stomachs, passing like gallstones.
Tell me what you think
about those places
lit up by orbs under our feet, like canvases
for days and nights of etching and of smoothing.
The light spread over meadows on the snow
by an implacable knife, the air’s cargo.
Museum lanterns turning skins to ash
and a cow hung from the ceiling, entrails out,
for people to take pictures.
The moon’s bright faces stuck on saffron sky
over dark cobblestones, where I saw you, out one evening.
And every message passes into the market,
and the wine keeps us moving.
On and on
along that surface, we walk till we don’t see it,
static in color, and the surface
still only surface, nothing but surface.
And you walk and I follow, and there,
isn’t there something you were going to say?
What were you going to say to me?
2
One night, the tan glow
in buds of branches, such a bleak March,
by the riverbank where you and I
met those two women squatting low and talking
of better air in Corsica,
mountain paths and beaches,
of golden nights in Corsica,
by slow bands in the algal floes, in spring.
And later, again, our group there, treading
through bluish pools dreamt of as kelly green,
all slush from top to bottom, cold,
the opalescent churn,
“like walking on rain.”
The sight
of you after four years there, watching, and
again your tone of voice.
Unreal, unmoving person.
And then
a day, a night, another dream, spring.
3
That year
the rain came down all evening, no, I can’t
explain how thick it was, the rain came down all evening,
and then all winter long the house was freezing,
morning and evening, afternoon the house was freezing.
One month, passed through the museum, found a crowd
around a landscape, this time
a greenish vista strewn with hills,
embalming hills,
“O wide America,”
taking a corpse molded in grass,
a corpse like glabrous rock,
with rough strokes of topsoil, and a rainbow crossing.
Skies in ludicrous foundation until I see.
Mixing up land and river water, and then trickling
to you along a thousand schistous brooks.
But if the snow dislodges,
let floods line all the willow trees with mud,
let the world mix with itself into my head,
one fine evening, one fine morning.