John A. Griffin
from Stations Against Ruins

I

We arrived at evening in a garden named Gethsemane,
and there in one corner above a torpid pool,
where a fountain used to gurgle,
but now lies stagnant with clotted algae,
a swarm of moths circled and glowed
beside a bouquet of night bloomers – the phlox
opened its vanilla throat and drank
the drunken moths who reeled and fluttered
in dizzying luminescent arcs; pink clusters
cracked open their globes and the musky air
was showered with snowy pollen and limned
with the spiralling traces of the insects’ eyes.

II

Fireflies wove haloes round the pinwheels
where dowaynes danced their sexy masques.
The nenuphars averted their eyes and trembled
with false modesty where you came kitted in robes
and followed by your adepts – magnolias cupped
their petals to receive the dripping honey of your tears.
You wept because the marques were set.
The passion fruit was sunken and dry and the ways
of sorrow already led beyond the precincts
of the walled arboretum: whatever moved now
moved regardless of the sly peculations
of the night butterflies and their selenic frenzy.

III

You hesitated at the garden gate – A quiet
balmed the narthex where a rat was and slunk away,
and the hyacinths stunk of the blood of betrayal –
Rest and be soothed, my child, before you walk that way,
and let the humus beneath the grass heal your soles,
never mind the bats that have come lured
by the Mach Bands spinning off the fluted fronds –
they seek only the pap of distended leaves and then to go to
massaging the night with their sonars:
the Night Court has picked up their cues and issued
its verdict. What’s done is done. The call
of the laughing owl makes you stumble and fall.

 

 

Author's Note: This poem owes its title to the line from “The Waste Land,” “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” It is based rather loosely on Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Saga, and so the Stations of the Cross correspond roughly [and profanely] to her thirteen Houses of Mont Nuit. There’s also allusions to the Megilloth, or those exegeses by rabbis of the Song of Solomon, Ruth, Ecclesiastes, Esther, and Lamentations.

 

NB: The full version of this poem originally appeared at the author's blog, Odradek.

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