What Language Did The evening was the same as any other. I came out and stood on the step. The suburb was closed in the weather of an early spring and the shallow tips of washed-out yellows of narcissi resisted dusk. And crocuses and snowdrops. I stood there and felt the melancholy of growing older n such a season, when all I could be certain of was simply in this time of fragrance and refrain, whatever else might flower before the fruit, and be renewed, I would not. Not again. A car splashed by in the twilight. Peat smoke stayed in the windless air overhead and I might have missed : a presence. Suddenly. In the very place where I would stand in other dusks, and look to pick out my child from the distance, was a shepherdess, her smile cracked, her arm injured from the mantelpieces and pastorals where she posed with her crook. Then I turned and saw in the spaces of the night sky constellations appear, one by one, over roof-tops and houses, and Cassiopeia trapped: stabbed where her thigh met her groin and her hand her glittering wrist, with the pin-point of a star. And by the road where rain made standing pools of water underneath cherry trees, and blossoms swam on their images, was a mermaid with invented tresses, her breasts printed with the salt of it and all the desolation of the North Sea in her face. I went nearer. They were disappearing. Dusk had turned to night but in the air - did I imagine it? - a voice was saying: This is what language did to us. Here is the wound, the silence, the wretchedness of tides and hillsides and stars where we languish in a grammar of sighs, in the high-minded search for euphony, in the midnight rhetoric of poesie. We cannot sweat here. Our skin is icy. We cannot breed here. Our wombs are empty. Help us to escape youth and beauty. Write us out of the poem. Make us human in cadences of change and mortal pain and words we can grow old and die in. |