Your Sunday Poem

From “Selected Poems 1969 – 2005” by David Harsent, originally in “A Bird’s Idea of Flight.”

The Archivist

I found him, as they said I would, walled-up
by tree-calf and buckram.
Anglepoise, lectern, stool,
stylus, dividers . . . He crouched
in a funnel of ivory light;
I heard the creak of vellum,
then my own breathing, then his – a rich
cackle of tar rising
in either lung. He sifted the arcane,
part-chanted, part-sung –
dates and times as usual, the usual rhymes
but also the way a name might sometimes become divisible by number.

‘Your children admire you. Worse than that,
your wives kept back
all the old stuff you thought you’d thrown away.
Your parents loved you in their secret selves.
Because you hated them they lean
towards you to apologize.’ He clicked
his tongue: ‘There’s little more to learn, but why
did you come to me? You could have got
this much and more from any girl
with a pack of cards, a gift-
shop crystal and a borrowed shawl.’

As he bent back to trawl
the page, I heard a rustle like something
stirring a fall of leaves, and a worm
came out of his head, a thin
filament, breaking the skin
of the waxy crescent
just behind his ear, nosing the air
for the hint of burning
back along the stack.
‘You have wasted your life.
I can’t give news of the journey
you want to undertake,
but everything here says pointless,
ill-advised; look for yourself . . .’ He was cupping
a mirror; I saw my image flow
from the glass to the sieve of his fingers.
He spread his hands: ‘What else . . .?
What else do you want to know?’

Your Sunday Poem

This from David Harsent, appearing in the August 10 & 17 2009 New Yorker. Harsent’s book, “Selected Poems 1969 -2005” is just waiting for you at your local bookstore.

GHOSTS

They bring with them a coldness, as tradition demands,
and a light, dry odor of rot
much like worm in wood, and bring a chorus of cries

to fill the air as if it were birdsong, and bring in the their open hands
tokens of themselves, a letter, a snapshot,
and bring some trace of their point of departure, a smudge

on a shoe, a stain on the sleeve, and bring the disguise
they lived under, stitched with their names,
hoping you’ll give them the nod, hoping you’ll recognize

something, perhaps, of the old times, the fun and games,
while they shuffle up as if they stood on the edge
of night so a nudge would tip them over, and bring

a dew of death that settles on picture frames,
on pelmets, on clothes in the closet, on books,
on your eyelash, to make a prism through which you get

a broken image of what must be a stage set
of the Peaceable Kingdom, a front
for that place you only ever find in dreams,

its undrinkable rivers, its scrubland of snarls and hooks,
horizons gone askew,
beasts hamstrung and walking on their hocks,

and bring their long-lost hopes, which they lay at your feet
then stand back, stand apart,
hairless, soft-skinned, their eyes bright blue

like the eyes of the newborn, and bearing a look
of matchless sorrow, as would, for sure,
stop the heart of whoever it is they take you for.