The Village
The villagers here have a single theme. Really, it

is quite wearing, all these variations on the

strain of insufficiency. Why should I care?
But until my train comes I am stuck here. At the pension

I take my meals on trays up to my rooms, which causes

laughter between the manager and her daughter, who
otherwise aren’t on speaking terms. The cars are

decorated for a wedding and the battleships bite

their little bits of sky from the horizon, quarrying
the blue. Along the sea walk a track joins

one town to another and halfway in between, lined

with cedars, is the cemetery. The old men play at cards 
all afternoon and kick the cobbled stones horribly

laced by tiny spray faced cats. I think that

I will take up smoking, if only to light
the air with sparks, each swallowing its

little bit of oxygen and its little bit of dark.  
 The Bathers
Beneath the broken heavy hills by the shapeless sparking sea

the odd unerotic angles of nude bathers, pink and bungled,

float on the landscape like lights, like balloons, like migraines.

Scalded shoulders and knees, florid heads and aspirant

bellies, goosepimpled, bulging over marks left by tight

removed suits; their tender feet stumble on the rocks crafted

by the ocean into axes and agents of blunt trauma.

They fit as neatly here as a cheque in an envelope, and in

their small devotions, awkwardly applying sunscreen

or spilling a towel across the harsh pebbled beach, they

are consistent with one another as disappointment and hope.

 

 Dialectic
Top-heavy small brown birds nod in

the pine trees like clocks: tick squawk.
The mountains are heaped up around

like infamy. I am beginning to believe 
in silence as a worthwhile project.

Something I tried so hard to be talked 
out of. But this place is very persuasive,

with its apt unkindness, its chalk hills, its sea.  The church 
bells ring things that are not the hour.

Someone performs some service. But look, 
there is burning, the reflection intensifies

the light. Not here, not here, is where we go in.