David Adès
The House I BuiltAnd if the house I built
gave shelter to you briefly, however briefly, when you came and cried about your spurned heart, buried your words in my ears unseeing, and if sometimes I warmed you with my fire when all you knew was ash, and you did not notice the warmth and spoke on with a furrow between your eyes, and if my hands never landed upon your skin, never spoke their speech, their shy longing, and if our eyes gazed out the open windows and the roof was nothing but sky, and if we never grazed each other’s lips except with laughter and with smiles, and if we harvested hours on a bench at the Botanical Gardens, bathed in birdsong and sunlight, and spoke not just to one another but to the secret chambers in our hearts, was this not briefly, however briefly, a house of love? |
To You, the Reader of This Poem ☊Now that you are here,
now that you have turned aside for a moment from all the other parts of your life (their keening, their calling) and given this page your eyes, whilst elsewhere the endless ritual of activity goes on -- lovers tender in each other's arms, students at their books, cooks at their kitchens, patients drowsy in their hospital beds -- ask yourself what you have gained and what you have lost, how your memories and your thoughts have changed since you began reading these lines, how different you are now from whom you were before, as I am different at the end of this poem to the man who began with an empty page. |
Carrying the Living, Carrying the Dead
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1.
He has become so adept at hiding he has disappeared from himself, hidden away in a place so secret he cannot find the way out. Some days he makes an effort so hard it is visible: unkempt, bloated, affecting an attentive ear, but for all that his gaze is unfocussed and he slips away again to where nothing is asked of him, to where he need ask nothing of himself. 2. Who knew? I like to think that had I known I would have done something, something uncertain but sincere, something no doubt ineffective if only a gesture: her fall of dark hair, wise brown eyes, slender hands, quiet, engaging speech all holding within them a chrysalis, wondering always and only when it would open. 3. In retrospect we can see his face as a mask, we can see the flashing blade of his humor as a defense -- but that’s all that is left now: hindsight, memory, images of him receding.
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4.
Who needs prisons when we are so expert at imprisoning ourselves, when we are our own guards inside high walled compounds, not letting ourselves out to breathe the air, unable to see the scattered petals of joy falling in drifts around our feet, keeping order, locking turmoil away in solitary, the stench of sweat and fear on our skins? It’s a rearguard action, a holding pattern that can hold for years, decades before turmoil seeps out, tendrils of it, a long hungry lick. Our grip slackens, the guard drops and turmoil is bursting, havoc in its famished mouth. 5. So many deaths I carry within me, so many goodbyes I never said. We rarely choose our farewells, we rarely know when the moments come. I am not ready to bury these deaths yet: they must live in me a while so I can let their weights diminish, whilst I make room for their absences in the sprawling house of my grief. 6. Why so much sadness in your poems my mother wants to know. She would prefer joy without sadness. How can she not yet know they are siblings, twins perhaps, inseparable, living in the same house in adjoining rooms where the walls are thin and each knows always what the other is doing? There is no joy without sadness, no sadness without joy. |
In the Fifty-Seventh Year of My SleepIn the fifty-seventh year of my sleep
I try to wake, to wake, to rouse myself as if from an endless dream. My thoughts are a forest I wander in, dense, yet full of shafts of light, my bed up high in a tree house. The river below whispers and gurgles every day through the years, gentle lullabies, fierce and untamed songs. In this forest of my thoughts the sky, open, ever changing, is a wide consolation. A bugle blows somewhere beyond the trees, a call to wake, to wake, to rouse myself. Silence is a vessel containing all the words I have spoken, words floating within, words not adhering to its edges. In the fifty-seventh year of my sleep I want to rise, I want to go deeper. I want to break the vessel of my words over the sky, I want them to shower the forest like a sudden rainstorm. The sky’s wide consolation has no favorites, plays day and night on its canvas. The river soothes, even as it speaks in impenetrable tongues. In my bed up high in a tree house I try to wake, to wake, to rouse myself in the fifty-seventh year of my sleep. |
RemainsDigging in the ruins
of my past, scattered everywhere about, I found your name, I found the place where I buried you so many years ago, the earth still fresh, the memory raw. Before I could turn away, a bony arm reached from the ground, clasped my shirt and drew me near, drew tears from my eyes, filled my mouth with dirt. GinNo tonic for me:
the djinn would not oblige my wishes after three.
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