Читать книгу Now You Care - Di Brandt - Страница 8

after Alain Robbe-Grillet

Curses on she who asked to be

ordinary

among painted plates and cups

and bits of jam left on spoons,

willing to forget

fire flashing through

silver sheeted clouds,

her forehead bleeding,

her ragged torn heart.

In prison we ate rats after drying them in the sun. Every night God visited us in our cells, soothing or frightening us with his velvet hands and invisible dark sword.

Even now I could leap

off any shining parapet

at high noon

into the Devil’s arms

in search of that fire,

were it not for the garden warbler

nesting in the rhododendron,

pink and scarlet blossomed

under the Castle Walk,

the bluebells blazing

beside the sycamore.

The water at the bottom

of the well

remembers Queen Victoria,

Sir Wallace, and the numbers

of the dead.

Here in this red rock

overhanging the sweet path

tremble the memories

of cave dwellers,

shuddering their easy

ecstasy.

I cannot compute it.

Even on the windiest days,

the chorus of ancestors

full throated among the trees,

bits of severed limbs

float through the room,

the blue plastic thermos

in the window promises

black tea and landmines

halfway across the world.

The surface keeps slipping, Alain.

Somewhere deep inside us

the centre holds.

Say it is so, Chinua,

say it is so.