Teaching Yates in the Autumn and Other Poems

By Thomas Page

Teaching Yates in the Autumn

Like the bachelor swan
I sit at my monitor to a sea of blank profiles 
That are five-and-twenty
I go over the lyric of a man in his autumn who grew to hate his motherland-
The sixtieth swan—
Floating in his Charon’s raft across the Irish Sea—
With his pen in his graying hand penning the year of tears of the melting snow
Lost in his own ivory tower mumbling about perfumed ghosts—
The ghosts of love never— 
Did you know swans mate for life? 
“What is life then?” 
Yates may ask
“A cool summer looking away at the 10 o’clock dusk; 
Summer everlasting?
What then the winter?”
This is the winter of our discontent.

Hoarfrost

The hoarfrost dusts the fauna cloaked this morn’. 

Mourn, the chlorophyll lost in the winter 
Sun sparkling over the ice specks on my car
Driving into the January dawn 
Blinding my oblong’d eyes refracted glass
Framed in Prussian blue falling off my nose 
Marked red by the chill in the frosty air. 

The hoarfrost melts away like gamma rays. 

Swelter

My room is a sauna—
 The heart of the sun. 
 Sweat paints my back 
 As if crushed by shells 
 Adorned a torn king’s shroud 
 Pierced by a goth’s spear 
 Bleeds the blood blue oxidizing
 Turning it all a deadly wet. 

 My mouth’s a desert 
 Full of rocks and scorpions 
 Stabbing salt into my throat 
 A cough in a sandstorm 
 Waiting to drown my lungs in the ascent 
 Of the abyss’ reflection.  

Les Mariés

What testament can I offer— 
A Sappho speaking of Penelope— 
To you both in the dog-dayed-summer of your love?  
 
The couples of my study all fall into the pit  
Which the pendulum of odious intent swipes— 
The slaughtered calf without its lamplight.  
 
There is no plot of a breeze over a pasture  
Croziered by the bucolic shepherd and shepherdess— 
The ramblings of urbane poets lost in the city.  
 
Love, it seems, is as distant as a star to the naked eye  
Glimmering the burning gasses into the dark matter of space to the artist— 
Making castles out of the sand.  
 
What testament I do offer— 
A lyre to a crown— 
To you both is to start each day anew.  
 
Don’t let the rust of yesterday erode the pasture beneath your feet  
Or the rain eat away at the valley 
Which you have spent time creating.  
 
Let the idyll carry you both  
Into the paradise of your design— 
A design together.