Friday
Oct212011
The Conservator Dreams ~ by David Alcock
October 21, 2011 at 1:30AM
The Conservator Dreams
Stained-glass: a spider's web of cames and colour
brittle mosaics of the holy family;
suspended on my silks, I scuttled, penduled,
a hanged man dancing in a throat of song,
scraping the cancered frass from rotten mullions,
the clerestory, triforium and choir
light, dark and mystery surrounding me,
spinning slowly within my swirling sheets,
my dream-chaff clipped about my sleepless head,
as tears split the light - a thousand leaves
of bright grisaille rush past, their colour stripped,
kaleidoscopic, monochrome, exhaling
a turbulence of postage stamps awhirl
in frantic quest for tattered, unsent letters:
the dummy rings the chisel's striking tooth,
cutting back to stone that chimes the shank.
Published in Antiphon, Winter 2012
Stained-glass: a spider's web of cames and colour
brittle mosaics of the holy family;
suspended on my silks, I scuttled, penduled,
a hanged man dancing in a throat of song,
scraping the cancered frass from rotten mullions,
the clerestory, triforium and choir
light, dark and mystery surrounding me,
spinning slowly within my swirling sheets,
my dream-chaff clipped about my sleepless head,
as tears split the light - a thousand leaves
of bright grisaille rush past, their colour stripped,
kaleidoscopic, monochrome, exhaling
a turbulence of postage stamps awhirl
in frantic quest for tattered, unsent letters:
the dummy rings the chisel's striking tooth,
cutting back to stone that chimes the shank.
Published in Antiphon, Winter 2012
Reader Comments (4)
Stunning. Really fine work. My head is spinning with the beauty of the language, the clarity of the images and the deftness of the allusions. Will try to come back with a more critical eye, but for now just pure enjoyment for me.
B.
Ditto Brian's comment.
This poem keeps getting better and better. I thought you couldn't top 'the clerestory, trifolium and choir' but then you did, again and again.
Last stanza is exquisite.
David, definitely glistening language, but the pile gets murky. The 'thousand leaves'... 'rush past' nothing in particular? The last couplet, while the sound peals, is too dense for this reader. Given the other notes, I'm missing something.
Beautiful language, but a bit too obscure in parts for me to follow, especially towards the end...