The Idea of John Bercow at Key West
(After Wallace Stevens)
Translated there from a blustering sea
Where the waves rise into anger and fall
Into panic, a tidal morass
Of lunged air and green-leather bladderwrack,
Where fear is the lady and hate is her song.
The dolphin, the leatherback, both are gone.
There from the sandbanks of oak-panelled noise,
A referendum’s unpleasant surprise,
To the sighs the unmetaphorical
Ocean denies, through me. There he goes.
Off he pops. And just above the tropics,
God-like-zilla, barnacled, he rises.
The man who wrestles order from ordure
Stands tall above this southern pin of light,
Presses his feet through the roofs of houses,
An Englishman doing what Englishmen do.
Squat. Not here. Sandcastles all along the beach.
Oh dear John. Or dare, John, or-dur, or DUH.
Squash. Squash. The sandcastles fall one by one
As an old-man/child lopes along a stretch.
It’s not you, John, but something in your skin.
I’m in here too, man. We’re both ghosts as our sun
Completes its epic fail, we walk conjoined
Between the rusty links of driftwood in
The darkness of this frankless, guilt-charged vale.
The very idea, sir. A very idea.
A very sky. A very song. A sea.
Key West is translated into Hong Kong.
The makers are changing, look north, look south,
Where the body’s physiognomies
Refuse to stay tied down, our heavenly bodies,
Political; see what the satellite
Strains to see through clouds of diffusing light,
The DNA, twisting, theoretical,
Of history dividing, subdividing
Those points X and Y into eternity.
I’ve not said what I meant to say.
There is no he or she or sea but hate and fear.
Oh! Pale John Bercow, tell me, if you know,
Is every moment such a bow in time
Where all the tight material of now
Loops into past and future crimes
And contains the means to let them go?
Wood Bee Poet 