The drum

The year is empty.

The season's turn has tipped the calendar

and drained its days onto the floor,

a disregarded derangement of arithmetic underfoot,

sliding over each other like greased acetates,

leaving an empty box for a child to play with,

its compartments waiting for new specimens,

and he drums loudly on the box with a stick

until everyone tires of the nuisance he is causing

in these bleak abandoned interstitial days of winter,

and he goes out into the woods

and collects the things

that will occupy him during the coming year,

and fills the box with all the joys to come.

Outside time passes. The Sun’s declination

recoils from the edge of eternal night:

apocalypse averted once again,

as the pulse and throb of time continues.

The ivy tightens on the oak, and stems stiffen

as the soil pumps the light of the new year

into limbs and leaves as Spring begins,

but there is a drum beneath the earth that sounds in silence,

and on the stillest Summer days, insistently, imperceptibly,

its address summons us away from the heat and light.

Its beat iterates concealed and silent, hidden in cold clay.

It throbs like the palpitations of an eye in deep dreaming.

The midnight mirk sleeps sleeved in sunlight at noon

and its beat keeps time in the glistening of our trance.

                                                               

Late July. The light sags, exhausted by months of heat.

More tardy echoes tell of a change in the air, and unseen,

alteration infiltrates the leaves, preparing to emerge

and fully commit itself in the chameleon days of Autumn,

breathing in the chilled, brittle air of suicide weather.

Chill changes coil secretly in sap, and Winter,

the sexton season of the year, sharpens his tools

makes their edges ready, stacks them in the fossor's yard,

then rests an elbow upon the handle of a spade,

waiting for his work to begin in earnest.

The Sun thrusts shafts of declining light through the window

onto a square of paint on the wall, blistered by time.

Caught by a draft, the paint flakes peel and fall,

drifting and diving through their elaborate aerial dance

before gently coming to rest on the floor.

In the calm shadows a red thread is tugged from a vein

pulsing through an outstretched wrist, unravelling

in the gradually cooling water of a slowly overflowing bath,

taps left half open,

and spirals out one last time as the red hot heart unwinds

diffuses, and settles into a darkening colloid cushion

on which the bather rests,

and through which he eventually sinks

into a dim and sunless place,

where the world is struck dumb,

like a planchet waiting for its impression,

before it is made to sing by the hammer,

or like a taut bone-beaten drum-hide

stiff and still, stretched upon a frame,

until drummed with vigour,

if not rhythm or accuracy,

a halting and sporadic beat,

struck by a beggar, deaf and blind,

who, although seeming so, is not mad,

and insists on playing in the corner

of some dark and doorless howff,

with no way in and no way out,

no windows, and the only light

a pale yellow tallow glimmer of uncertain source

in the sealed sepulchral gloom

and all echoes are swallowed whole by the damp air

leaving a bare sequence of thuds

unadorned by reverberation

as the beggar furiously waves about a bone

taken from some Sassenach’s shin,

brandishes it and beats it on the drum

until eventually, by chance,

it breaks upon the rim,

and silence or applause

both sound the same to him.

Dance as you may, dance if you can,

for in your grave you surely stand,

and some day that deaf blind beggar

will come and take your shin bone in his hand.

Then leave a hollow coffin for new roots to invade,

an empty box for another child to fill

with the spoils of the year to come

once your dance is done.