ECHOES OF FACES, DEPORTED WATERCOLOURS OF SOUND

ECHOES OF FACES, DEPORTED WATERCOLOURS OF SOUND

Echoes of faces, deported watercolours of sound

in the humid air tonight. Everybody gone.

Silence pending in a morgue of cars. The band

dismantled. The fire hydrants waiting

to be donated like heart transplants flatlining

like hot radiators in low rent tropical apartments

too greasy to make love in as the enamel buttercups

melt into pools of rancid butter the flies lap from.

Eerie Martian light of the tungsten lamp posts

dulling the more authoritative greens

of the leaves cloying the view from upstairs windows,

soiled by looking upon the world,

than the innocence that toyed with the eyes of the wise

in the spring before the flowers began

to take themselves for granted and the violet petunias

starting running like imperious blood down the sides

of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon

that once bloomed for love but now

are muncipally maintained for the tourists.

You can feel the plants ripening like muscles

in the broth of the swamps, brooding in the cauldrons

of a witching hour demanding the blood sacrifice

of the King of the Waxing Year. The apportioning

of his flesh to the exotic fertility of the fields.

The woods an abattoir of cattle-prodding mosquitoes,

better to sit immobile inside and explore

the coma of July like a missing link in the foodchain,

thinking in heat just a way of grouting in the chinks

between the bricks of starmud that have been

baking all day in the kilns of the sun

like the front steps of a temple to the hymen

of the new moon in Virgo pole dancing in the dark.

The light of the stars as viscous as the silver trails

of the snails the world sticks to like fridge magnets

and gum, smeared on the lens of an astigmatic atmosphere

letting the mystic details of their foregone

lumens of enlightenment sweat for themselves.

Estranged doorways and a diffident malevolence

in the air that flows like lava and volcanic spume

over the Pompey of people sleeping in this small town

as if some mass murder had been committed

and nobody was surprised enough to care, hell

closer to their bodies than heaven to their hearts.

PATRICK WHITE