After Midnight

for Merrill Gilfillan

Two-headed monsters, ghouls, torrents of human blood,

and fearful astronomical happenings

Brasses, charcoal drawings, carvings in ivory and wood,

fireworks, burning hair, chloroform, banknotes

Brown rabbits, tailor's dummies, photographs, calipers,

rubber stamps, dismantled cameras, postcards

Boxes of matches, half-smoked cigars, fountain pens,

bottles of ink and glue, tubes of oil paint, lighter fluid

Partially filled notebooks, a stopwatch,

green candles, a Chinese screen, knives and forks

Battered shoes, rolls of black electrical tape, a flashlight,

small stacks of cardboard, dead light bulbs, a scalpel

A scattering of costume jewelry, a tin whistle, a hammer,

a deck of cards missing the aces, a hand mirror, a radio

The details depend on who's telling the story,

a quay in a forgotten city, three archival folders

The peripatetic game we pass through, moving silently away,

the quarry beyond the olive grove, the vineyards spoiled by a frost in late May

Stacks of letters, ill-starred commercial ventures,

a line length equivalent to three strides across a balcony

Sequestered in a displacement provisionally assumed,

detached details lurking in potential ambush

Hidden political meaning in the mode of dress,

scientific procedures, control of strategic territory

Topography and poetics, the inflection of a few dactyls,

a severance, solitude, scenarios, under a Mediterranean sky

Preparatory fragments described in retrospect,

the very name of the place a few yards beyond the body

Without a fixed destination, as a matter of form,

bargaining notations, mnemonic targets, omerta

A third signature, distraction's forward gaze,

pale abbreviations, the limits of a compass tum

Assertion is within the exclusion and without the inclusion,

I can remember neither the lament it prompted nor its novelty

There are no false alarms, no after-effects honorably offered,

no obscure etymologies, arias, no discernible debt

A type font peculiar to negotiations, constant measurement,

a block of salt, spilled shapes, blank inlays, a German wife

Rain shadows, red seeds, the heft of blue serge,

no want of material display, the game continues

Misled by thought, refractive, invisible commotion, eye for one,

only panorama, muled from place to place, interrogated

Calm assurance, disappearance, 2 then 3 tempered by scrutiny,

some possibly all, else are surrounding pools, trees, broken statues

No description, vertices, rational, tolerant, serene,

an elaborate edge reflected in surface, newness, newness

Nine stones, pi's torsion, even if suggests memory, repeated tangents,

remembered out of their frames, 2 drifting into a 3rd

The bird flies the angle it has been given to see who is coming,

mathematics released from the things it realizes, a contradiction of lights.

Fear mating the calm and gray with eagerness,

see nothing, taste nothing, say nothing, turned to stone

Contenting synonyms, contesting libraries, making do,

bare methods the further product of an instance

Quills, spiders, weeds, sunlight, domes, congruent expansions,

a spectrum, white not absence behind the whole thing

A lot of people in your position, set in the distance comparable to exclusion,

see the dialogue as a series of half-triumphs

The word shows a little archaic, singing, dancing, playing instruments,

you read what has been liberated, what has been puzzled out of spare formalities

Better now than in the Sunday papers, spoken for the first time,

in the noise of changing songs and dialects, the new pause

The distance from the thunder to the lightning, sealed in the reply,

serves as a reasonable substitute, an upturned glance

All sorts of attractions, nothing guaranteed, open, windy spaces,

the insinuating look of skepticism exhausted by the assurance of many secrets

The self which is life, and the self that is not,

long hours about the idea, no thought of ever reaching its goal

Poete courageux, critique courageux, homme courageux,

you are still here, I will restore what belongs to you

Influence and speculation reduced to the arguable, the exact wording

of the resolution will be worked out by disinterested parties for a fee

The sharp edge and smooth surface where you cannot go,

forbearance and its distant purpose bring doubts and watery rhythms

The crisis in your fingers and throat,

a white mist hanging over the trees in the park

No, I said, it wasn't an unreasonable hour,

you and I could begin again for the last time

I don't believe this detail figures in any other version,

this detail, it's an evolutionary step, the casualty of a resolution

To say I have retained virtually no memory of it would be to lie,

within as without, provided the latter involves a certain cruelty

Conventional, however grotesque, our heads roll,

according to the degrees of concentration

The Dioscuri, italianuccio, this is merely a suggestion,

A subjective impression, there's no way of verifying it

An enchanted island, the hum of shadowy penitents,

a shape that could have resembled anything deprived of repose

A man goes into a room, there are no windows, no doors,

how does he get out-the same way he got in

As many wiles as anticipations, a flirtatious life,

distracted, he whistles, a conversation, putting your face to the window

All inner darkness, a malaise of anticipation,

eye mediates eye, audible pleasures born of confinement

Another self, true as an instrument, a departure for a symptom,

or a series of antecedents and sequels, nothing but unmastered forms

What mixtures, what diffusions, abstract sensations, ceremonies,

reproaches, or only old denials, old supplications

Just now from that capacious window and its view of the pine forest

lit by a small shrewd light in the hall, nails filed under nails

It should be obvious you are now hearing the reach of the wall,

outside: clockwise in the room, inside: counterclockwise from the room

One more body one less suspect, you hear the echo,

under a high peaked roof where the animals look for people

An objective analysis reported to the subconscious, music,

can such a thing be, in which I sing can such a thing be

After all means nothing's closer than we thought,

as far as the wall, the ear pressed to the wall, than we thought

A perimeter of contagion, false information, nothing earns entry,

at the same time, and at the same time: the light returns

But there is no answer since I am here, better you were,

circling under water, removed from the cited page

Ropemates, here's your favorite chair, the lions could care less,

a landscape to be duplicated, a government to be planned, words

The maker's signature: I know I should do what I have done

another bottle of wine difficult to open, bring water, bring more wine

We are walking from room to room, meeting sound,

or is it music from the radio picking its way through the afternoon

Thrown shadows from which I quote: names are the

consequence of things,

a new riddle without time or honor-pure attribution, etwas filzig

The benefit of the doubt comes with suspicious benediction,

this report contains no reliable evidence obtained from informants

If I bring a ladder to the window I can see to the south and the east,

point-to-point, what is indeterminate begins in the middle distance

Bricks, oak beams, cobble, lath, sheets of hammered tin, debris,

the rotating earth translates the view, secures the distance necessary

On a different level, a deliberate loss of information, mute probability,

stepping backwards, as if just awakening, no sense of deferral, stunned

The certainty of physical contact burdens every activity, finding the words,

in proportion to knowing the words, a category of sequence regardless of fact

Failure hinged to privacy hinged to the limits of calculation,

the iconography of the site is a proliferation of rejected attainments

Individuals, no empathy, no ethos, but these were attainments,

earned by taking your own or someone else's memory and dissolving it in aspiration

Lines of sight merge with an undisclosed context, commensurate,

unraveling the heard from the disclosed, the seen from the revealed

But from which assumed identity to begin, one sustaining the other,

one dividing the other, exposure keeps them aloof

Companions at the shadow's edges, the place of calculations,

no map, no air, no easy way out

August-September, 2003