Jack Hindley

Autumn (The Heron’s Flea Remembers)

Alone aside the fluid midnight pitch of Isis

Quite alone, in greying grace and gestures still, suspending

in the chaste moon’s glow a hungry Artemis’s kiss

To cortisone the thrum of thoughts countless and unending

 

Binds our divers counsels, glib as prey not ripped apart

and little touched as tragic in that reiving gullets pass

By envied recollection, too ambivalent an art

Wherein we’ll part each time more darkly through the glass.

 

On what cataracts of blindness stands this our timeless law

forgetting to endure the passage of this barren shore,

Where the river once froze over and tracers torched the night

while Lear still reaches Dover in his globe’s dim light.

 

Those pornographic imaginings hitched with history

That fixed so many faces fast yet leaves you free to flee

And fracture – as though intensity outweighed coherence.

It is an avalanche of other men’s remembrance

 

That breaks Endymion asleeps enchanted child yearning

Wakes what will not be eased but like the ceaseless sea spurning

The shore anew, with each remorseless crash restores us

To the astounded innocence of our loss

 

So Alone I watch you Heron watch this river that is sea

Selene’s silent shepherd of its blank fecundity

Faithful without the durance that contemns these memories

Fallen dying leaves alive between the barren trees.