COLE SWENSEN

Five Poems

They Were Warned
 
 
 
Often they were warned by light—a nun in Essex, c. 700, who said             lamps the size of rooms
who said my hands             0have turned to suns             and another who saw            a torch erase
 
 
a face in perfect peace           0and know            0that the body grows               tlighter than the sky
behind it         0that also opens          0into a plate of day.          All these were ways of saying death
 
 
is something that comes to you as I might come to you                          00as I so often do, slipping
an arm around you                       thinking not of the gesture               but of what I'm about to say

Gravesend
 
 
 
My ended grove                 my threaded shriek                 [drawn along
by swans straining at the same.                      lDid you fall off the edge
 
 
and which?               home carved from an egg                 ltlas if a little
 
 
trap door slowly spread through every room                 iever this ready
the dead are hauling                            l a circus behind them in flames
 

There Was Nothing
 
 
 
There was nothing in the grave. They cracked it open
and only the newspaper.
 
The grave came back. He stirred his tea with a finger
and glanced at the news.
 
There are no graves in Gravesend, which is of course
logical. And overflowed with it—
 
The relation of water to the dead
 
in which we washed our hands
 
in its liminal spaces—bridges, rivers,
shore upon shore and shoreline unfurling
the shadow around a person
 
was a shroud unwound and the tiny thing flying.
 
 

Kent
 
 
 
In the grounds of Bayham Abbey            in a garden designed by Repton
a procession of monks just about dusk      or just after darkness has fallen
go walking.
 
Or there was no sadness, but a simple fold in time.
 
One must be for others a reason to live.
 
Often, it is said, the presence of a ghost is signaled by illogical cold.
 
Lord Halifax noted it when investigating “the Laughing Man of Wrotham,” who strode
into his brother's room and murdered him                 again and again
 
to the horror of the maid who, a century later, wedged a chair against the door and00000000000000000000watched him disappear.
 
There is no cure              
 
for anything, and that cough you have, Madam, once
 
there was a fire every Friday the 13th, and once there was a death
that seemed to deserve it, but that was an illusion. Once there was a
death, but that was illusory, too.  And all over Kent, someone is still
heading up the stairs, lighting the way with a match.
 

Miss Jéromette and the Clergyman
 
 
 
Wilkie Collins had a brother                       laccompanied                          tby a tall column of mist
had loved only once                      ttthe gesture at the throat                     las she, the mirror of his
 
 
love will come back                         0for him, it was a simple story                                  [a woman
encountered in a garden                       a garden, the summer of night                          tthe foreign
 
 
edge on her speech pulled him in                and on we go                tto her murder, then a woman
will know                     how wrong she has been                 and still walk to the station             ago