Renewal

(from Mallarmé)

 

Sadly, the sickly spring has seen off winter,
Winter, season of calm art, lucid winter,
And in my Being where bad blood presides,
Impotence stretches itself in a languid yawn.

Out from the twilight cooling beneath my skullcap
Gripped by a band of iron as by a tomb,
I wander, after a dream both vague and pleasing,
To fields where the rising sap-scape struts its stuff

Then I tumble, sick of the perfumed saplings, weary,
Digging my dream a grave with my only teeth,
Crunching the earth in heat with its thrown-up lilacs

I wait, foundering, wondering will boredom lift now . . .
-- but the sky laughs over the hedgerow and the awakening
Of so many birds into flower, mobbing the sun.

---

First published, in an earlier version, in Shearsman magazine, second series, no.29, 1996.

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