Tim Keane
Last Song of the Reed Flute
for Federico García Lorca
first outlines, like cut outs on a paper sea
then the traces coalesce on the water’s surface,
chiaroscuro in the ripples
horse-shaped shadows in the fertile lake near the forest-edge
and then a word-tuning unicorns and cyclops
the image as compound object-act
the motive is surrender
to the unseen agency
the words
on the water’s surface, as if an eel were surfacing
and identity only emergence
the pen’s strategy
makes paper and ink consubstantial
as the lowing of frogs
or the muzzle of bees
and then the flute song rounds and sounds the lake’s diameter
frail filtering upward
bass notes from the reed flute,
groundwater too, as if the topsoil
pushes up the hot breeze that rattles the cattails
the jasmine chorus, a stallion’s whinny,
a sage’s lament,
Preciosa and the wind
ripple across the lake’s littoral zone
*
now, there are corporal prayers for glass roosters
and carnal hosannas flavored by nectarines
and a ruby-gilled soprano struck dumb by the force of stars
aqueous stones, celestial shells, like curious Venus, risen late
in autumn midnight,
the word goes down––and also up––a fettered spectrum
word, carved-out, pulp-like, cupped, a pomegranate’s yield
word, yellow, like a Chinese scholar’s robe
word, green-blue, painted syllables like Tahitian fish
and these insinuations feed the nerves
the never-ending reflections of quiet things
*
like to be, graduated into music:
tinny cymbals, tambourine quakes,
a clatter and crisp pattering, like rain on the first
garden
promiscuous images toward counter-verse,
rise from his lips, signed by air, spelled out in gitano
present, and unparalleled
nature in a suite nature in a letter
and nature in a lake,
mossy, a recess, mirror-like, or marble
notes that can never lapse into reveille or lullaby
even when a signal torch draws near
and hooves, the galloping, the general
who uses straps to bind
bare flesh to gloved police, law, the code of pure denotation
and knowing price
by ignoring value and demanding use by quashing promise
how long until
that boot-clad crush
and dismal fact, and steel force, studded by practical metrics
kicks in the door
and rapes every source of private song?
*
chant for the winter moon, the opening lotus, the littoral zone
chant so as to slip into images
as if into cold sheets in a torrid summer
for dying peace drives love ahead if its decease:
fornicate, in the white delirium of cloistered lights
accrue progeny from metaphor and truth
and negate the drill and neuter the trigger
while troops tie their horses to the nearby trunks
*
they tear weeds from the wedding of manure and sun
and interrogate the evening till it bleeds
they sodomize the moon, and throttle the innocent midwife, drain the lake-bed
and smash the reed-flute in two,
and torture the solstice, drown it like a captured spy,
hoisting canisters, they dump petrol in the lake
set fire to the water (rage coerces and converts
profanation into fuel
and then puts that fire in charge of the capital)
*
the water flames, blazes, and the serpentine general
blindfolds the poet
and names him––on three––one of the despised maricas de todo el mundo
and––on four––the goons cackle and aim
and––on five––gun him down like a lame mutt,
his body plashing
writhing in a bleeding pool
the rifle-kick and blasting echo sends birds
scurrying from the sanctuary
*
the last song of the reed flute siphons nothing from the earth
and mirrors sun and moon in equal measure
as his arms open wide in a blood-caked mire
still, he mutters a staccato rosary and sees the lotus flower open
one last time
and sees the broken flute, driftwood on a smoldering lake,
while a dragonfly lifts transparent wings
and his shadow glides into the watercourse.
