Dylan Willoughby

Praecipe

i

What is wrought and what is ruin?

Trust what is woven, broken

This synod consecrates the riven

Rivered in its colloquy | light’s frisson

Requiem for fragile song

ii

A disappearance of light, or a blindness

iii

Sacring bell burst out of emptiness

Cruciate rock glint, raven’s sanctus

Decipher a liminal path

Gossamer shroud, faint cerement

To turn back is to turn to stone bless

The dead

iv

What contains and what is vessel?

Cleave to kissed crust, ragged traversal

Not down into, but to stars

Preludes Fragiles

(For Calum Carmichael)

i

Whose succor dying death is

Along corpse-roads the copses

Sway in the wind’s own lyke-way

Requiem the shattered clay

ii

Night-lipped the map catches fire

Gallows the drubbed tongues / choir

The miserare of clast

Gospel the heaved flesh’s last

iii

The road wrecks pinion and bone

Fugitives clasped soul and stone

Who hauls the body’s tamped flames

Knows remaining from remains

Dusk at St. Mark’s, As Seen From Dunkin’ Donuts

The spire silhouettes a fire

The dark stamen of a flame

Its anther fringed by whorls

Of browning oranges

Isn’t this happening enough?

I ask myself and slurp

My coffee.

This is my salon

Des refusés, no one’s refused.

Its windows offer cheaper views.

Saying the words is the

Prayer, a homeless man

Preaches. The prayer is

The saying. He’s burnished

By dusk too. The words

And the light are his home,

He says, but we all know

That’s not right.

Outside

They’re wrapping up a TV

Shoot, leaving fake snow

And ice before the church.

People trudge and laugh at

This summer blizzard, snowball

Fights erupt before the quick thaw.

I think of Avedon’s shot of Auden,

Peering through the squall, hands

Tucked into his overcoat, looking

At us – here – as the dusk does its burying

-- Dylan Willoughby (appeared in Agenda (UK) and Verse Daily)

Annwn

Here, I happened upon the afterworld

Creviced behind Ffynone falls

As I wandered alongside the Dulas

A specter from the before life

You met me there, nonchalant as the dead

Can sometimes be, you startled me

With a stillness we don’t yet possess

And I didn’t recognize you

I thought you might bargain for an exchange

Another year in my shoes

While I got to see what I was in for

But you weren’t hungry for this place

Haunting’s something the living invent,

You said, no need to reminisce

About betrayals and loss and loss

How I longed to see you again, I said

You were cool but not unkind in your goodbye

I closed my eyes before you left,

Not wanting to remember you vanishing

Twice. I stood by the broken pool.

-- Dylan Willoughby

published in Agenda (UK) and MacDowell Colony Newsletter,
Written at MacDowell Colony

Hiraeth (At St. Woolos Hospital, Newport)

A flare-up of lupus, a black tongue

As if burnt by some dormant fire that sprung

From the embers, a last-gasping flame

That scorched then sputtered as it overcame

The last of you (the you less three stones).

Your skin draped loosely over frail bones,

You sipped a tepid cup of tea

From a straw, whispered “Abergavenny”:

I remembered that summer ramble

In the dimpled mountains, you’d scrambled

In high heels up Llanfoist path,

Seventy then, and you weren’t out of breath.

Hard to reconcile that you with this

The parched lips that give a brittle kiss.

No one says what the doctor thinks,

We stare at the half-drunk nutrition drinks

Like a makeshift graveyard on your tray

That word – grave – cannot be wished away

As I hope inwardly for grace

To soften the earth’s hungry, brute embrace

“I’m walking to Llanbradach tonight,”

You say, but death your only lamplight

Cuts a different thoroughfare

Boulevard of shades, turnpike to nowhere

Your body will rest at Gelligaer

Your flame no longer quenched by this air

The priest will talk of paradise

As something you longed for, as if that might suffice.

-- Dylan Willoughby (appeared in Shenandoah and Stand (UK)