In Normandy There is a Cluster of Old Castles

In Normandy there is a cluster of old castles
well away from the shore-a fantastic disguise,
they are like shadows in a barn,
but deeper, and softer,
drifting onto the landscape like soft dust
along beam and rafter.

From here
she thought of traveling to Eden
(since the moon itself is closer than Europe
used to be)
and so she moved lightly above a great world atlas
where seas pulsed and wrinkled
into troughs of slick green,
rising again to peaks of foaming spray
along the yellow painted edge
of South America.
The Norwegian freighter from her
dream of February
lay close to the shore (it was white and perfect)
young red-cheeked men worked on her deck,
leaning
with practice against the wind.
Inland,
where painted yellow merged with green
there was the mourning sound of birds: within
poor houses built into the slopes of hills
men and women woke and made their way
down the muddy and sometimes grassy slopes,
not seeing
the sea and the shore in the dazzling morning, nor
remembering
the sweeping, blinding colors of evening.

A Song: This is the Real Count Dracula

1
“Someday, we’ll be together,”
you’ll wear your black dress suit,
waltzing on the polished floor,
Together, we’ll be together,
Ever since that day now,
Some day we’ll be together
in the room on Mysterioso Street,
‘Neath the chapel in the moonlight,
Together.

We’ll hang around a while in the honey,
in the syrup of acacia, we’ll be
both sides of the coin, oh! someday,
we’ll be together,
without a trace of any trace,
we’ll have a love and someday,
we’ll be together.

2
When cowboys become a dynasty,
someday, my moon my love,
oh some day,
tell me something like
someday
no automatic shut-off
as I tap music from your
Spartan clasp oh honey,
my darling dictionary
oh prairie,
and oh! my waterfall, my sonnet,
my elongated poem, my main in-
gredient,

My Spartan,
my evergreen
my repeated concerto of honey
my season, my important message,
my last survivor, my birth and
my baptism
my certificate of sleeping here tonight,
my post office box my flesh
my trace of the original,
Someday, we’ll be together.

3
You are my manuscript my government
my anticipation of New Zealand of
Mozambique,
you are my capital, my favorite story,
my assistant in my flight to the moon,
you are my Gary Indiana my considerations,
I write now to tell you
you are the star of the show and the sky,
and the game,
a star that doesn’t have to speak
you are a spinning wheel
a real electric wheel with special sparks and
colors, you are the Senate and a little of
Australia
you are a fist fight, my love
you are something very big
and someday we’ll be together.

Awake at Five

The coarse cry of the crows
Issues out of night-gray air & sky,
A competing cacophony of early morning.
Downstairs the old clock ticks
And water drips from the tub’s tap
(My head erratically ticks-
Its pendulum’s gone bonkers.)
My brain leaks cells, they simply
Disappear,
And no place in all this world can I buy it
A washer.

The Play for Harold Pinter

Someone has swept the stage. (The matinee
had left a residue of coats, and lovers.)
She had grown weary of
the cigarette in Shakespeare’s hand,
the puzzle of daughters.

Harold,
a renaissance man of the family room,
asleep, and splendid,
Had never encountered the clarity of dreams.
Awakening
he sipped from her glass, and rested her head,
her blond hair appreciated in the sense of difference
but soon became mysterious and
half-acquainted,
like a program suddenly switched off
by a small child.

A conundrum of simplicity
and wearing her hair short in the new manner,
she went up the stairs, dreamily,
as though she were in a play
she trailed her fingers along the railing:
(she was written inverse
as yet not interpreted, but admired.)

He encountered alone, then,
a homecoming of disturbed eyes, and meanings,
smoke rose
from within the fire, alarming
with darkening thick skeins like twisted silk;
here was a kind of complexity
that philosophers ponder.

In the Shank of the Evening

The doctor who raced me to the boat
sits in his great blue Chevrolet.
I remain decorous and do not smile.

A girl in a red coat passes. She
is drinking orangeade. Meanwhile,
like a showy collie who stretches out
by the fire to be photographed, Night
throws herself down in front of us.
We look at her.
It is true, she is beautiful

The girl in the red coat wears a white beret.
She has finished her orangeade, she
ignores the stars.
In large letters is a message:
HANDS
OFF THE
GATES.

How imperious! I rush to the gates
but knowing how the Mother Superior
at the convent school
would raise her eyebrows at my act
of public defiance, I stop.
I touch the bottom of the gate
with my left foot.

No one notices except the doctor
in his great blue Chevrolet.
As we ride along together we sing
“Au clair de lune, mon ami Pierrot.”
I am glad I studied French with the nuns.

The Transatlantic Flight of the Angel of Death

1
Odor of lemon odor of pain
and the transatlantic flight of the Angel Death.
Odor of remembrances, now, your gift of tongues
flushed face, shining intense eyes.
The orange odor of childhood: tiger lilies,
like you, gorgeously freckled, dusted with pollen,
(you plunged through swamps to gather lilies.)

Odor of remembrances, and all our quick farewells,
season of families, my eyes
the same as yours my brother.
Your brick house, solid as history books,
bought in that little season when we were young,
the vigorous ivy flicking bright new tongues
over the bank as it coveted grass, consuming,
still there. Consuming.
(And painted lattice green beneath the porch.)

Our children teasing, embracing,
riotous at being cousins:
Our childhood was a mother’s death, a fading face
of changed memory, unnatural odor of coffins
bearing father, then mother.

2
I can’t do much more of this long distance traveling
pretending I am on a solid road of earth: I know
I move across tempestuous fragile air: am thrust
through clouds of death, thorough undependable atmosphere.
From out these clouds, a voice: the movie will begin,
as though nothing has happened,
as though you have not died like a stone
dropped into water, died
as I rose in a Paris room, ran water, dressed:
looked in a mirror that was not my own.
How was it that I could not bear your great
abused old poet’s heart break!
inside the hollow of your heaving chest
freckled, still, like a child’s?

Old boisterous brother, violent, tender, profane,
charging the swamps for lilies, cursing the slime,
flourishing flowers in your upraised fist: good-by.

Everyone leaves us finally, or we leave them,
like clouds that scatter in an impersonal sky:
like words spoken in a dream
where no one hears real words or knows real love.
And yes, the day I left a blue Jay’s feathers fell,
drifting onto the calm grass omens of blue
I could not read, then. Here
We all read magazines and drink, pretend we’re made of
flesh substantial indestructible bone.
but you and I have been spirits, always, unseen,
moving through intimate worlds of air and light,
our direct thoughts colliding like angels.
There are still plaid shirts and smiles
of others’ existences, but their silver watches
tell them a false time: they nuzzle
insecure comforts of tea and jam, or wine,
more wine.

3
Old women and men move up along the aisle,
Girls in blue scares are ignorant and gay,
but as for you, you know . . .

EXIT the red sign says. I might open the door and leap,
my skirts billowing. Sucked out, I yet might gloriously fly
for one triumphant instant before I fall apart.
But I am strapped into this seat and darkness falls,
weeping across the whole of the Atlantic Ocean.
The artificial movie now begins,
the artificial life, again.
I wish I could have made that gesture for you,
falling the way feathers fell from the mimosa tree:
instead, they serve a plastic tray of food
perfectly laid out in little niches,
like saints whose flesh I now consume.

A Daydream Suggested by a Professor’s Remark

I am the Duchess of Luria,
I have blue eyes.
The Duke wears yellow silk garters
and a look of surprise.

His father is old, and a lecher,
the Queen works a tapestry
of a great and ugly unicorn
devouring me.

I Am a Rough Copy of the Seventies

I am a rough copy of the seventies,
a smash-up of half the world’s lights:
I am a bleeding figure run down on a bicycle
by an alternate feed of cars that do not care.
I am the lady of the little magazines, a
blue Volkswagen; I am peace.
On antennaes my flags fly.
I am everyone’s prisoner and prisoner of my-
self. Here is an ordinary man in cap and badge
who seeks me with a black flashlight.
He stands in front of me. “Search and destroy”
is like a scarf about his throat.
For now I am invisible, and safe.

A Short Poem

It’s February.
There is a Christmas tree
in the field across the way:
the strength of shoulders
on the back of the chair,
your yesterday’s shirt
in the corner of my bedroom,
new and fresh
it was not there before,
and in the dim light
my old mirror shows my face young.

Once, Finishing Coffee at a Counter

Once
finishing coffee at a counter, I looked up.
Nothing is ever lost, they tell us,
brass foot of her bed,
fringed velvet carpet, black and green
mirrors on the sidewalk after heavy rain
. “Pay the cashier.”
A toothpick in his mouth
(since gone up in smoke, it is part of the universe)
Fortunate she died, the doctor said,
oval face. frame
transparent, lighter now
not lingering
“Beside the Shalimar”
John McCormack Little Town
in the Auld County Down,
as you would not want her paralyzed
Victrola’s dark veneer
finely lined glazed
like an earthenware platter in a second hand shop.

Once finishing coffee at a counter, I looked up.

I Long to Know

I long to know Where it is that you have really gone.
Does the sky keep souls hidden in
All that blue, like the Sunday paper puzzles
Of childhood?
Should I search for your outline in the air?
Or are you much more than
Six feet under the ground,
Not needing to breathe, a miracle man,
Tunneling?

Do you travel above mountains,
Stopping to look down at where I am?
Or have you forgotten everything,
Content at stone,
Do you rest, without memory,
Without the bother of having eyes?

© Copyright 2017 Estate of Catherine Murray