THE LORDS AND COMMONS OF SUMMER Poem by Ishion Hutchinson

1

I circled half-mad a dead azalea scent that framed
my room; I licked anointed oil off a sardine tin,

opened Being and Time, perplexed myself, then picked up
and blew a clay bird whistle, silence came scratching,

the same way it did at the funeral of Heidegger,
when no silence came.



2

When my boy-self played séance in the Spanish
needles, havocking the bees, their bronze staining

my shanks, rain pistils sprung out of the earth and buried
glass splinters under my clothesline. Vivaldi and tangerine

below the early winter moon minting its double
over the city axled down in the buried sea's lilac

silver trimming my window wick with the fierce,
fast and low rustle of lions out of a russeted ice floe.



3

A furnace in my father's voice; I prayed for the coal-stove's
roses, a cruise ship lit like a castle

on fire in the harbour we never walked;
father and son, father drifting down the ferned hell his shanty shone, where,

inside, in my head, the lamp was the lamp.
The market, the park, the library not a soul

but grandmother's morning wash lifting towards heaven,
her flapping winding sheets; the barrister sun punished my sister, I stared at my hand

in a book, the horizon declined in my mouth, a hawk's scream tied all the hills together.
My little earth-shaker, visored in placenta, wonder of

wonders, tremulous in amniotic
shield, ensoulled already, father in the veritable

night, without house or harbour,
soon sea in a voice will harrow

a scorpion's blaze in me, to the marrow.



4

At night birds hammered my unborn
child's heart, each strike bringing bones

and spine to glow, her lungs pestled
loud as the sea I was raised a sea anemone

among women who cursed their hearts
out, soured themselves, never-brides,

into veranda shades, talcum and tea moistened
their quivering jaws, prophetic without prophecy.

Anvil-black, gleaming garlic nubs, the pageant arrived with sails unfurled
from Colchis and I rejoiced like a broken

asylum, to see burning sand grains, skittering ice;
shekels clapped in my chest, I smashed my head against a lightbulb

and light sprinkled my hair; I rejoiced, a poui
tree hit by the sun in the room, a man, a man.



5

The sky is loaded with ore, the mountains
the mountains are lingering on the threshold,

luminous with the valley's pollution. A late transport
shimmers, and I shimmer, too: this is one of the holy cities of America;

holy banks, mortuaries, holy cafés a golden angel
descends in the middle of three javelining spires.

Then I see poised, wraithlike, in the snow,
on the sifted avenue, muscles released from chiaroscuro,

a herd of darkness gathering to passage unto Shiloh,
where the Lord of Summer lives, kindling a coal fire.