A somewhat convex dark or coloured hand-mirror, used to
concentrate the features of the landscape in subdued tones.
‘Grey walked about everywhere with that pretty toy, the claude glass,
in his hand, making the beautiful forms of the lanscape compose in its luscious chiaroscuro.' Gosse(1882)
[...]
For he has always loved that ancient darkness
where the flat rocks glide like Japanese tables
where he can remove clothes
and lie with moonlight on the day's heat
hardened in stone, drowning
in this star blanket this sky
like a giant trout
conscious how the heaven
careens over him
as he moves in back fields
kissing the limbs of trees
or placing ear on stone which rocks him
and then stands to watch the house
in its oasis of light
And he know something is happening there to him
solitary while he spreads his arms
and holds everything that is slipping away together.
[...]
now in this brilliant darkness where
grass has lost its colour and it's all
fucking Yeats and moonlight, he knows
this colourless grass is making his bare feet green
for it is the hour of magic
which no matter what sadness
leaves him grinning.
At certain hours of the night
ducks are nothing but landscape
just voices breaking as they nightmare.
The weasel wears their blood
home like a scarf,
cows drain over the horizon
and the dark
vegetable hum onward underground
[...]
Drunkenness opens his arms like a gate
and over the car invisible insects
ascend out of the beams like meteorite
crushed dust of the moon
...he waits for the magic star called Lorca.
[...]
This is the hour
when dead men sit
and write each other.
This is the hour for sudden journeying.
[...]
the crickets like small pins
begin to tack down
the black canvas of this night,
begin to talk their hesitant
gnarled epigrams to each other
across the room.
Creak and echo.
Creak and echo. With absolute clarity
he knows where he is.
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