Tell me how the days went down.
I remember the chimes at home— in those days
we lived nearly under the steeple of St. Paul's.
I remember a bell that could be heard for miles,
and it shook the earth.

That diva note drifts through the new Jerusalem,
serenades our present state.
Grime degrades the sculpted stone sprawled
lionlike on the pedestal, ash of lost causes,
pretty patterns in a sari-whorl of sky.

The past is far enough. It is yesterday and now,
the rockinghorse rhythm of the day,
cornflower blue for the sparrow as it spires,
sprung from invisible fashionings of air
rent with that rocketing.

How shall half a century answer? A driven life
without tomorrows, the spill of sacrifice through time,
every Jesus needs a Judas, every Judas
a knotted rope: how else coax April
from the chilly coverts?

I am mindful of the weather. The boil of clouds
invites events into our lives — rain, arrow winds
off German Bight, the gales
succulent with sea salt and storm tides'
greedy scoop of beach and cliff.

Near Clacton, a Junkers dumping bombs
against dwindling fuel, the near-miss
then a parade of quiet shops unlucky—
the Hurricanes scramble to the radar,
riddle tail-fin swastikas above cold green seas.

A fishing smack hauls up the bodies,
the pilot, twenty-two, from Hamburg,
in the wreckage the snapshot blonde
dragged down with the others: whose girl,
whose wife commiserates with corpses?

That same beach now— trippers wade and paddle,
windbreak canes and cardigans; perhaps we won.
We note in the margins the brassplate rigour,
our finest hour replete with carpark passes.
Is it really fifty years and now tomorrow?

The flyers are buried in yew shade, easy
with the English dead, among limestone slips
with Georgian dates of death and birth,
hand in hand with parish saints
to serve and suffer without complaint.

When we were children, time slipped away
in the cricket dark, under heavy scent of earth,
summer, and late to bed.
The plane tree sloughed its curl of bark
for ships that sailed the millpond lanes.

Time the river, sentiment of perspective,
time the failed foothold, peacock plans
disappearing on the current—
how shall we serve, and what defend
when knaves are shuffled with suited kings?

Zigzag gables connect the houses.
The Thames is matted in our hair, Ganges
a cupped palm, China's gold-weight bangle
and the Mississippi's tangle of upstream life
streams down, a psalm of ooze, a tune less debonair.

I row into the wreckage, through the scum of oil
a face, a boy's face and the body rolls and sinks,
coy to meet the grapnels. It is my own face.
This fisher life is charged, cast
along a coveted anonymity.

All those years, balanced on my own reflection,
a reality poised on briefest light, sky
painted on water and firefly stars
dripping from the oars, time we teased
from nothing, remains unknown.

Again the hook, the catch-net keep
where broad trees overhang the banks:
tell me how the days went down. The anchor's pull
on painted planks proves the limit of the deep,
a satin deadcalm stuttering with rain.

 

Copyright © Estill Pollock, 2003

Estill Pollock has recently completed the trilogy Decorative Initials for a Book of Hours. His first collection, Constructing the Human, which is the opening movement, was published in 2001 by Poetry Salzburg Press; it is followed by Theories of Fugue and Tsunami Muses, selections from which are forthcoming from Flarestack Publications in 2003 and 2004. American by nationality, he lives in Essex.