John Doyle

​April 2009

Autumn’s apocalypse left us little.
Our salvation should be the heart –
thirty-four years and counting without vacation,
lungs unlikely to clock off for a cigarette break,
reckless, stone-knit and hollow disciples
who unknit their futures from me
while I ask a beautiful-face man
standing by a bus-stop
where Saturday could possibly end – or even better, begin.
Only he, I see, knows of hearts
more sacred.
I wrote a song for him today.
Now let me find that music,
let me praise that machine and its evergreens – forty-seven years without a vacation.

Melhor o diabo conhecido que o diabo desconhecido.
– Portuguese Proverb

As a supersonic satellite that took him
soaring into bedsits stinking the sun from an Algarve vista,
as a weekend sedated in these Sundays we get, when we leave home to learn how sneaky rain
can be, to follow us like a fox that follows moonlight,
as a man not known for reason or self, or being, as that rain
equally shapeless and trance-like soaring over that Algarve blotch some of them called sunlight,
others called groovy and mystical – but no-one thought calling a medic might help.
All these variables could hardly be expected.
And so it was
– Unexpectedly –
A page 8 adjective that limits damage a dragon chase can do –
to a pride of lions, known in discreet
Sunday chatter – hoarding page 12 –
as this mudslide unexpectedly coursed through him,
our dear little boy, his dear l’il patch of mud, bitter to a touch,
sinking him deep in death, this fox eager to tame its dear old moon.
These variables – all expectedly so.

The water is eternity.
A reddened evening soothes to its calm,
from stones
spread like speech
in the mouth of innocence –
in the glittered noise of future voice.
The water is eternity –
we, by default – its adjutants