How unreal to know you those fifty years ago,
Your shambling red-faced innocence as you waltzed
Her round the yard, her hard

None of us sitting home alone
On a dull, rainy evening
Thinks of the nude male body

Coffee: the tightening at the heart,
The wreath of ice, like thorns
Arranged there to give pleasure,

It was late in the year
and forests were burning a long way off
the day the smoke arrived, almost unperceived.

The river tows its dreams,
consigned to the dim edge of existence,
reciting dull epics to desolate piers.

At the center of so much counterpoint
sleep is impossible, and the garden is crushed
into something like a pill the night will swallow.

The page no longer lies flat, it blinks and rises.
The words assume green or yellow vestments,
and officiously obstruct the way forward

Into sunlight they marched,
into dog day, into no saints day,
and were cut down.

Your logic frightens me, Mandela,
Your logic frightens me. Those years
Of dreams, of time accelerated in

What was it?
Something became lodged in the machine.
That was it. Which inflection could not cure.