Jeff Clark

 

ST. NEMELE

Who hovers above me now,
in a black coat, the table lit
as if by a tenebrist?
Whose mane glints
as if slicked
with pomade not pitch?

Who isn't tincture of pine
but of pall and cyst
Whose eyes are holes
not spangles in a hall.
Nemele, I wander around
embracing waists of trees

who won't speak,
who don't attend to atonalities.
When I lied after noon
like the one half of a brothel pair,
you opened your gown
and in there

in bleary still
I saw an anvil
then a
then a unwell
— what ? — in an evil antedawn
In the evening you opened your gown —

Nemele, you must have gone.
Why now phantoms, why now gauze,
nori-green fins, dead swans ?
Why someone in a yellow dusk
with piece outslung
at one end of Pont-Neuf ?

Have you gone
darkward, or where
the white mare —

Who hovers above me now
pricks in manifold forms