Bravo

i.m. JP

Down the middle of our street’s a table
where odds and evens might meet
and its cloth is the skirt of the night-duty nurse
or an altar prepared for a feast.

It’s midnight but it’s not that scary
when you’ve been in the woods
as often as we have, and it’s tranquil.

This is not the darkness you think it is —
see how vision deepens: dashboard dials,
rain on a kerb stone, the blurred heart
of a bird in flight, icebergs everywhere.

On the night-table, sugar in infinite detail,
sweetmeats, silver in the shape of a prayer,
something from every house in the road.

Fear nothing. It is not over yet.
Soon we will have a whole city of light.

Lima

In Europe the interior has become a genre
in its own right, light from outside streaming
like silver in through the windows of merchants,
the whole world held like linen before the press.

At the workshops the telescope’s perfected
(a device to allow one to see one’s
enemies or count coins from a long way off),
the ships, the idols, the distant city of mist.

In the lens-grinder’s glass they are all one.
The map-maker’s work is also complete,
El Teatro del Todo el Mundo: the mountains,
the scourges, the large crowds out on the streets.

Mike

Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place
where you stand is holy
(Joshua 5:15)

Surgeon, maybe clockmaker: as a child
they’d marvelled at his touch with butterflies
and woodlice, as if he loved the world,
its bones and feathers, better than himself.

In the diary they found photos. Him splitting
the rock with lightning, standing like a minder
on mountain tops, a paratrooper fully armed —
the sword, the secret name, the word of God.

There too his sketches for the wings:
viridian humming-bird, the mallard’s sheen,
a lawn in June, the perilous emerald sea.

Verde que te quiero verde. The book of life,
the earth. His hands which never trembled.
His burning hours. It isn’t about me.

The Longest Day

i.m. NPD

The stonework’s vault from the pull of the crypt
    in the tallest cathedral in Europe,
the topmost stone in the bridge’s fan,
    the waist of a diamond, a sea-eagle’s span

or you at fifteen, poised on the high board,
    arms toward heaven in what might be prayer
or praise to the sun and what you can dare
    before the slow-curving dive to the cold

at the foot of the cliff or pier, that day
    at the height of summer, exactly half-way.