Memories

Vallfogona del Ripollés, Thomas Helm. 2020.

1

Memories,
Coiling round the mind like water snakes,
Poisonous and medicinal.

Perhaps to be sure of death you need to understand the steps
That led you there, the delusions
That made life happen.

I confess, I am a distant ghost.
My hermitage is the snow-capped cloud.
I drift in wind and sift through time,
Haunted, never haunting.

Beyond me, a future raindrop speaks.

2

Raindrops are promises of future life, not just relentless change, greening arid lands paralysed by grief, by climate crisis, by motion.

3

There is a lost city among us.
Nobody travels there for longer than a moment.
It is the pure world if not of innocence
then reconciliation, the mighty rumour of another life.  

It’s more a secret space than a city,
absorbing fruitless boredom,
dissatisfied will, peopled with
medicines, and fiery symbols,
a space returning,
where streets are made of water,
purified and resurrected.

It shies from shallow mines and oil fields
the diamond factories of a desert.
To reach it, align disparate points of being,
complete the comic circle, whose interior is death.
Its taverns and public squares, sunken deep
into the sparkling contours of our longing,
merge with song.
Often forgotten.
The highways leading there are overrun
by guilty river gods of the blood,
by frightened hoards, by money.

I shall try to be more precise,
though no single image comes to mind.
I have only tensions resolving into melody,
an imperfect patchwork of symbols, descriptions of joy,
truth that is water-stained.

Even spring must bow before desire.
Those glorious revivals snatched
By disappointment, or fatigue;
to say nothing of the killings.
As I remember, no less
than four genocides began in April;
as the Rwandans, the Cambodians, the Armenians and the Jews
fell together
in the fabled hour of the flower’s bloom.       

Perhaps I intimate a city without desire;
But such a place is inconceivable.
Only ceremonious priests
deny the blood and the rhythm of the earth.
            Can innocence endure
the screaming thunderclaps of tragedy and stupidity?           

Everyone has seen a trace of this perfect land.
            Many go in quest of it,
though often end up circling themselves.

Some recall the city was never lost,
Merely hidden,
Sleeping in the tides.