TURRIS EBURNEA
But strange that I was not told
That the brain can hold
In a tiny ivory cell
God's heaven and hell.
-
Oscar Wilde, “Roses and Rue” (1885)
False
dreams emerge from the gate of sawn ivory
and
slink around the fishponds of Heshbon.
The
door I shut upon myself so carefully contrived
as
to be an invisible hairline crack from outside.
Tier
on tier, fine traceries and arabesques,
Cymbidium
orchids sprout from hollowed Mastodon teeth
fluted
baluster columns, orioles, and nested polyhedra,
spiral
shells, flying buttresses like spider’s legs
or
curving like tusks of time, fretted rafters, delicate carvings
of
medieval saints and ancient gods
chryselephantine
or tinted with Tyrian murex,
spires
and minarets with white chess-piece finials,
Narwhal
unicorn, and the shoulder of Pelops.
I
have climbed the smooth, white, spiralling staircase
fashioned
from butter-mellow piano keys
to
the top of this scrimshawed Babel
to
isolate myself in the fretted lotus
chamber
while outside tides of shit,
tsunamis
of merde, surge and beat
on
the bone-pale, stainless walls.
Seated
in a throne carved in Murshidabad
I
dwell alone with sun and moon, and Wi-Fi.
I
am sitting in the middle of the upper air
where
there used to be untilled nothing.
I
am looking down on you from luminous heights
scented
with myrrh and aloes and cassia.
Outside
the rose window
gargoyles
the colour of fresh cream slowly circle
along
the parapet to keep the whole
glorious,
frivolous impossibility balanced, pausing
only
to snatch the occasional dove from the air.
Never
such mystery, such a degree of contemplative,
glacial
solitude like unto the self.
Imagine!
Such
is the capriciousness of art
that
air changes to ivory,
forgetting
the azure empire
that
once surrounded us forever in every direction
(no
elephants were harmed
in
the making of this tower).
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