Poem
Trevor Joyce
ELEGY OF THE SHUT MIRROR
ELEGY OF THE SHUT MIRROR
ELEGY OF THE SHUT MIRROR
Inside rooms I’ve never seenan old man beats himself
at chess, the moon recurs
as a white dove in a child’s dream,
a virgin leaves the glass
and, turning the light, retires;
as the mirror broods on itself.
Though the sun burns still through a vacant sky
frost thickens on the gates
and the moon grows up in the poplar's shade.
A girl waits, lonely, on the bridge.
can I tell her of remote roads
where love, not knowing the shock of loss,
has atrophied, and no-one sees
how, at the desolate junctions
the monuments of the old dead bleed
with the green ichors of bronze;
or there are streets,
icy now where pools contract,
where I have heard the ringing footfalls of a child
who will remember evenings
charged with light, fever
of strange games played
in the falling of the oblique sun;
the private hurt of times and words
not uttered yet.
And shall I tell the destitute
how I have found their misery
like the wardrobe of a suicide, where I
the living, recognize
only the faded linens, the frayed cloth,
the torn letters in an inside pocket,
extracts from an unintelligible
and unfinished history;
or tell the old of aging
and the inevitable death.
with dusk the rain comes;
the ice loosens and the expanding locks
respond and open. such time impedes
the passage of another fall
that drags through lengthening nights
into the season of its bitter end.
© 2001, Trevor Joyce
From: with the first dream of fire they hunt the cold
Publisher: New Writers’ Press and Shearsman Books, Dublin and Exeter
From: with the first dream of fire they hunt the cold
Publisher: New Writers’ Press and Shearsman Books, Dublin and Exeter
Poems
Poems of Trevor Joyce
Close
ELEGY OF THE SHUT MIRROR
Inside rooms I’ve never seenan old man beats himself
at chess, the moon recurs
as a white dove in a child’s dream,
a virgin leaves the glass
and, turning the light, retires;
as the mirror broods on itself.
Though the sun burns still through a vacant sky
frost thickens on the gates
and the moon grows up in the poplar's shade.
A girl waits, lonely, on the bridge.
can I tell her of remote roads
where love, not knowing the shock of loss,
has atrophied, and no-one sees
how, at the desolate junctions
the monuments of the old dead bleed
with the green ichors of bronze;
or there are streets,
icy now where pools contract,
where I have heard the ringing footfalls of a child
who will remember evenings
charged with light, fever
of strange games played
in the falling of the oblique sun;
the private hurt of times and words
not uttered yet.
And shall I tell the destitute
how I have found their misery
like the wardrobe of a suicide, where I
the living, recognize
only the faded linens, the frayed cloth,
the torn letters in an inside pocket,
extracts from an unintelligible
and unfinished history;
or tell the old of aging
and the inevitable death.
with dusk the rain comes;
the ice loosens and the expanding locks
respond and open. such time impedes
the passage of another fall
that drags through lengthening nights
into the season of its bitter end.
From: with the first dream of fire they hunt the cold
ELEGY OF THE SHUT MIRROR
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