We publish below a poem by Mark Wilson, which first appeared in issue 3 of The Black Herald (September 2012), then was published in his collection Passio (2013).
Cantus in Memory of James Wilson
(after Arvo Pärt)
1.
To belatedly crank up the apparatus
of lament, to fashion a
doppelgänger-mass after hours
and worthy of your innate
perfectionism in absentia is part of
the very entropy
of endgame.
Your wild expenditure of
discontent at the end was, to
say the least,
burdensome.
A gravity of admittance like the
lodestar thrust out of its
inconceivable orbit to plummet
the lift-shaft of experience just for a
share of the pitiless laurels is not
up for debate on
the open-forum.
Petulantly Parnassian you
smouldered in a cascade of implicit
grace-notes
until the fall.
Sheol cradles you now to her
amorphous nipple, intravenously
force-feeding you the liquor of
Lethe. For, although you slumber in
the Valley of the Bees, not even the
resplendent carillon of a
thousand cathedrals will bring you to
your inscrutable senses;
all asphodel-cushioned.
To share an identical branding, that
self-same Anathemata's always a
blessed curse. Connotation’s
birthmark assailed you too and must
have prevailed somewhere saga-deep in
the sallow scriptorium of your
final confessional.
Nano-seconds that must have
leaped impressively their glissando
of echolalia, flame-tongue,
misericordia.
Lowlands are positively ashen now
in the gloaming. After the auto-da-fe,
after the lapse: your so-called
‘assurance-lack’.
Meanwhile you've dissipated through
some metaphysical fire-curtain:
surreptitious, incognito,
as if into the
holy-of-holies.
2.
Tintinnabuli
resonating
throughout
Sheol-Coma
I want out
Who wants out?
Lamentate:
‘laments for the
living’ not
the undead
pomegranate-
aroma tracing
the moribund
airwaves
threnodies
come unbroken
yet still a
murmurous
susurrus
challenges the
unhallowed
ear-duct
revelation’s
merely tissue
unveiling
inexplicable
maranathas
after all that
the unspeakable
Word’s only
le mot juste
after all that
the right word
is the Logos in
all its rightly
ordered
dissonance
3.
So what is left after all that
sermonising, deconstruction,
post-mortemising is over?
Music, you say, hanging on to
arpeggio, division, the weft
crochet and minims. A wrought
pavane might see us both through
purgatory or, nevertheless, provide
more than just a passing muzak
of ‘sad, angry consolation’.
In these shopping malls of retribution.
Airport coffee-lounges are for
slow-dying in.
Still the hieroglyph cypher to open
the embrasured portal above your
mound reveals its
concealment.
Chapels-of-rest are the exquisite
edifices of our arrivals and
departures. I know that now
just from looking at your
sepulchral composure.
Still, you have outdone me.
And no chance
in time, in space
to come abreast.
Mark Wilson has published four poetry collections: Quartet For the End of Time, Passio (Editions du Zaporogue, 2011 & 2013), The Angel of History and Illuminations (Leaky Boot Press, 2013 & 2016). He is also the author of a verse-drama, One Eucalyptus Seed, about the arrest and incarceration of Ezra Pound after World War Two. His poems and articles have appeared in The Black Herald, The Shop, 3:AM Magazine, International Times, The Fiend, Epignosis Quarterly, Dodging the Rain, The Ekphrastic Review and Le Zaporogue.