But he who lived to tell watched one far roof,
Sun-gilt, its rays of light like spears of rye.
Gehenna was a land he knew in youth.
He smelled the chestnuts roasting in braziers scenting sky.
Now because the Prince of Darkness rose,
Skirted shop fronts, cut across the park,
The dustmen sweeping gutters with a hose
Could show an easy way to do hard work.
Terror in wait at the corner makes concrete
Whatever vagary touches on the way.
Eyes worked plummets through the somber street,
Looking into the faces of the day,
Looked for all the days time seduced.
Were these the eyes of Brueghel, eyes of Proust?
I cannot say what horsemen passed me by
Nor why the windy fields play muffled drums,
When sprigs in slants of light preoccupy
And my thinking is a wren that pecks at crumbs,
But recall one night when headlights from a car
Awakened the wild parsley in a ditch,
And over the tops of cedar-trees a star
Flared out, but the heavens sparkled, all as rich-
Such times as worlds are emptied with a twist:
The face that should have listened frowned instead.
Times when the world says Go, you will not be missed,
Send vision settling, dust-motes, in the head,
And one may see, as in cleared air, a bough,
The aspect of a road, a weed-field's domes-
Such things the simplest moments might allow.
And when he looked up over the cobblestones,
The
hills,
the monstrous hills of his fate, grew shy.
Tomorrow lay along a spear of rye.
Claire McAllister
