Castle Poetry

An Entanglement

We stopped abruptly
on an explosive sigh and a plume of smoke
rising from the blooms ahead.
A startled flock had wheeled,
exotic and iridescent, and disappeared
in jigsaw jags, those pieces slotted back 
in place under a calm, tumid 
horizon.

A being uncertain in his posture
and automatic in his strides
emerged where the ferns had parted
from the depths. The ground was open,
the hard earth a dead concrete
after centuries of intense
orange heat and the glare of a last
lone star.

I watched as he dusted his lapels,
and getting close could smell 
the gunsmoke in his hair. He said
he was not in his right body
but was searching out its name, 
in a place where chiselled stone was soft
and intangible, no more
than a monument wreathed in vines.

I asked what he meant, and got only
mad raving claims as to the things
he’d stumbled on, or the things
he knew, or the things he’d done.
He’d heard songs forged under
the hammer blows of virgin births.
Had read signs written in moving
liquids, and in solids turned to plasma.

His dead friends were with him always,
in an eternal flight from the false depths
crafted in mirrors. Now though the stars
had drifted apart. He couldn’t understand
the scales underpinning their music. 
He’d searched for the body he’d lost,
but doubted it was here, in a world
whose melodies it wasn’t possible to know.

He longed, he said, for the lupine cries
and the slant forests clumped under
the battlements of home, which I told him 
had gone, vanished. He noted 
there was sterile beauty in the seared
perfectibility we had made, but his
clock was perpendicular to ours
and so was the time it measured off.

He turned back. The pose was struck.
Miraculously, the soft silver of spring
sunshine melted the humidity. As farewell
he said he owed his life to the imperfection
of a universe less travelled than our own, 
in whose vectors I had crossed the wrong way. 
For as the ferns folded around him that was our only
crossed point of existence.

*

Peter Cowlam’s latest novel That Was Hugo Blythe MP is published by AN Editions. His latest collection of poetry, Ghosts in the Machine, consists of poems in English appearing alongside their translations into Italian. Translations by the distinguished translator Angela D’Ambra, and published by CentreHouse Press.

petercowlam.info | centrehousepress.co.uk

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