Mark Prince

Three Poems

Arpeggio
i.m. Bill Lynch

It circulates out of a place
of longer days, rooms of luxurious breadth
in which I’m being measured for a bespoke suit.
Its source is still on the tip of my tongue.
It soundtracks a vortex of exhausted cars, stalked fruit
and plumed factory chimneys:
the pattern on a plate, a fish-eyed kaleidoscope’s

symmetries. It loops before middle C
resolves an aerial sweep of the geometric city
as futurism, not vertigo. Cloud mass grisailles
what it shadows. Anxious women puff on cigarettes
under awnings, in office doorways,
while children scamper, out of breath, from black-and-white
to colour, as though fleeing a catastrophe.

Perhaps it has something to do with an evening last week,
sub-zero and falling, I stepped off a bus
to flout the day’s imminent foreclosure.
Crimped glass the colour of pee
blurred the glow of wattage off black-lacquered stairs
up to a room vivid with neons,
disowning the outdoors, but investing

three sash windows with a white luminescence
although all the snow was gone by then.
I could have stayed forever, tired as I was.
Sun pinwheeled through foliage,
sparrows cocked their heads
and greyhounds swung their muzzles into woods
that were no more than the wood they were painted on,

a depthlessness offset by the preternatural clarity of the windows.
The place they inhabited was all the room was not
but testified to. Solemn
as ancient Egyptian cats, they were executed
with an economy I would call Japanese. The glaze
beading a painted vase might have triggered the scale’s ascent
to where it lost its thread, like that day’s end,

to mist, exhaust fumes, the patter of feet
under trees strung with Christmas lights no one has taken down.
A typist working late in a room along the corridor.
The slovenly rap of branches whipping on a bus
that dawdles as it picks up speed.
Someone descending the staircase, braced for cold,
resigned to what’s next.

 

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