The Muffled Drum
drawing
by Sarah Longlands
Index of titles and beginnings
The
muffled drum
Night falls on roads. / Goads that force the
travel / are repeated often / and unsparingly. Ends / are never
reached. / Sounds the muffled drum.
The old man The furze upon the
heath; / the image half gone; / time is short: / one expects
a context. / and there is none.
Night A world where nothing stands prime / in the four
o'clock awakening;
Person and Place Some small settlement,
/ a place that has a local name / mispronounced elsewhere. /
should you leave, those syllables will be your voice:
The
Crossing No sense of coming
home / in the shore approach; / no figure on the weathered brow
/ to gauge a distance, // the slow swell regular beneath the
keel / the freeboard high.
The
Meeting If we shall meet upon
the road / it must be at the end of speech, / no talk of origins
in mid-day heat / nor within the shadiness of trees. // Two men
weary / of the dust of roads
The house beyond the pines He stood at the door,
looking in, / the day's heat behind him, / giving the account
of his journey, / to his back the monumental pines
The Horizon From over the horizon
at the brink of night / there comes a steady wind. / It flows
outwards from a foreign land / to fan the face cold.
Were
the world a paraphrase upon an unclear text Were the world a paraphrase
upon an unclear text / it would be written on the person that
I am / and all the glossing actions of a day / mirrored on the
need for journeying
Morning Star The stance unanchored
/ at the waters' edge, / the figure drawing in the line / hand
under hand. / bringing to the mirror's face / the weight unseen/
Days Salt-water borne; / salinity of blood / and of
image in the eye. // Day / from night
Laocoön advised by his sons The wide vessel of
the age, profundity of time / filled to the unstable day, when
the clay / must break. A man shall walk out on the sand / before
the tideless sea
Days past Days past are gone, / but hard pressures select
remains / when days are gone.
Crazy
Jane
Limits are made / from this side; / the doorstep
/ the edge of the encounter
The figures The figures / have
a stance; / their feet / are solid on the ground / the mist behind
them; / the sky above them; / the winter round them; / the hunger
in them.
An eye, a hand An eye / a hand / stretched
/ to the past / the key / of speech / in pasts / as dark / as
this / as dark / in pasts / of speech / the key / to the past
/ stretched / a hand / an eye.
five of these poems are presented here: click on the underlined titles