What follows & entertaining
by Chris Hutchinson
[ poetry - february 05 ]
What follows
The past is the immovable shadow
you stand upon - the last blade of sun slanting in
west of autumn, west of each memory rewritten, condensed
to a few lines on loss, originating from a silence beyond
where schoolchildren, clamorous as a catastrophe of bells,
announce the unquestioning delight of themselves.
Childhood is never
about dreaming; dreaming
is everything that follows, how a body’s soft delineations
stroked by an ever-retreating source of light
become slippery and smooth as colourless
beads of water skating the tightrope-taut nerve
of your inwardly opening eye -
and how what
follows conspires to fall
away the moment the sky opens the fist of its gaze
and voices of children and rain come to sing the silent
measure of your monotonous stride - this frail music
heard only in passing, like the whispered phrases
of someone not in love with you but with their own
beautiful, isolate
pursuit.
entertaining
Tonight, friends come
with masks of coloured smoke,
butter-tongued admonishments,
promises punctuated with the sucking of breath,
winks like flies drawn to sweet liquid,
smiles brilliant as knives left out in October moonlight
and an assortment of feelings preciously bright as those
lacquered knick-knack miniatures designed to comfort
the elderly in their provisional rooms - all of which
adds-up in the final, sensuous equation
to the
compulsive-in-you’s weird abundance,
you-the-hedonist’s ignoble excess.
Then, after dinner and too
many drinks, curling up like a fiddlehead,
bowing your skull to the pyramid of your knees, you make
a speech to your invisible compatriots: tightly shutting
your eyes as if to choose your sins,
you recite:
My friends, we must
never make known
what we know: that any attempt at viewing life
as a series of connected events is either naïve
or ill-conceived, and in any case
doomed -
Alas, the theatrical atmosphere
will too easily encapsulate the meaning
of your words. In fact, unblinking as a furnace
the limelight will eat through the stage and everything
you meant to say will rush into this vacuous pit faster
than your ability to lift your head and acknowledge the looks
scrawled like drunken calligraphy across the brows of your guests.
And so, with
everyone anxiously expecting you
to improvise, to grin like a martyr at dawn, to jest,
the evening ends
in ill-health
and
fashionable ruin.
