Mr Punch Looks Good in Black

Quicklime in the pit, that’s more his style.
But comes to lay his wreath with all the rest.
Lilies, of course;
the flower of voided passion.

His lumpy shadow flickers on and off
between avenues of stone angels.
Their mossy hair, their weathered vestments, fly
in the fierce, dry wind. Their eyes
stare into the sun.

Long after the largo has ended, he feels
the notes in his skull.
They chime along his spine.
These are the burnt days of July, the world
gathered under glass, a smell of tinder.
Columns of birds rise from the silt of rivers.
Each hot midday
he downs a bottle and prays for a quiet mind.

Is Punch a killer? Nights alone in the house
leave him shaken and sick.
Prowlers pad the blistered alleyways;
lean and angry, their nerves strung tight,
they own the streets and carve out what they want.
He seems to hear
her voice, a murmur, almost out of earshot
in one of the rooms where her things still lie about.

Less and less the days come back to him -
diminishing, musical. Less and less
the combers of the nearby, blank Atlantic
hold powers to sooth or snare him in their rhythms.
Our Sins, Our Monument. He stumbles through clumps
of eelgrass: sand and the tumbled refuse of the sea,
threads of carbon
racing in his veins. Suppose
we could find our place with the living.
Whisky-blind, he thinks the sea is ice:
so flat, blue-green, and burning, like the sky.
Churchbells sound in the depths;
the shockwave of their round
booms above his head and swells
over his cry and the endless din of gulls.