Poyem (vi)

If there is saving-power it is in transports
of respite, of temporary truce between
world and oneself, oneself and other selves:
eros and agon both at bay, the moment
standing open like the Wye’s flood-plains’
flint-stillness glazing out across the hedgerows,
sempiternal.

I picture us again walking together
to Brampton Abbotts, me expatiating
on time and cosmic love as one unfolding
forecast in Messiaen’s Turangalîla
Symphony, by which I was much taken
and still am. I may very well have been on
broadcast-only.

Perhaps not sempiternal. Waters drain.
Things are in process, as would I have been
at sixteen, although obstinately patterned
after my own imago. It is hard
to learn not one thing from another’s kindness -
a signal failure of the adolescent
of the species.

Here there are waters rising, not in stillness
but in excited spate, like Messaien
jamming the Grand Orgue with stacked harmonics.
Of time and cosmic love I am uncertain;
agon and eros both with me contend,
flashing tremendous teeth, vaulting the sundered
flood defences.