Poetry from The Literary Review
Providence
GEOFFREY O'BRIEN
|
He built a poem
In such curious wise That the reader might bury things Among the words of its lines Just as the provident traveler Puts bread into a pouch Or a child slides under floorboards The image ripped from a forbidden book. What the reader hid Lay imperceptible under the surface Like a weapons cache planted in the desert By the harbingers of an invading army. The sand looked exactly like sand. The blue leaked blue continuously. The poem appeared to be the formal description Of an ancient and disheveled garden Whose patterns of irrigation Congealed at a more recent date Into abstract vinelike loops Sporadically torn or blotted. It was never clear if the hole In the lower right corner of the stanza Was the remnant of a tomb door Or the path to the picnic area. The words only said: "It dampens, And just as fringes hang from a branch The response of an apostate servant Rattles in the cavelike morning." Years later the astonished reader Opens to the forgotten page And recoils from the still-visible Contour of a painful slash He had blotted formerly Against the refrain that contained “vines.” In place of what was written (“Cork's odorous fetch” or “the split altar”) He studies as if under duress the map Of a wound complete with nerves and ornaments Exact as when the poet teased it From the wallpaper of a vacated room.
|
