DIALECTIC
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Top-heavy small brown birds nod in
the pine trees like clocks: tick squawk.
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The mountains are heaped up around
like infamy. I am beginning to believe
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in silence as a worthwhile project.
Something I tried so hard to be talked
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out of. But this place is very persuasive,
with its apt unkindness, its chalk hills, its
sea. The church
bells ring things that are not the hour.
Someone performs some service. But look,
there is burning, the reflection intensifies
the light. Not here, not here, is where we go in.
During my time in Croatia, walking daily to the neighbouring village and beyond, I encountered places described in the myths of metamorphosis I was studying then. I also confronted the obvious scars of the recent war. These scars were visible as bullet holes in stone walls, crumbling, abandoned resorts, struggling businesses and the care with which strangers met one another in markets and trains. What was said, in such encounters, mattered much less than the manner of the speaker; everywhere, people were anxious to declare themselves, through posture, expression and tone, friends.
This poem projects the violence of the past and the impulse to make amends onto the landscape.
'Dialectic' also contends with the same personal and collective griefs and history as 'The Village' and 'The Bathers'. In this moment, the speaker of the poem is closer to the moment of annihilation and reward exile, solitude, mortality and the eroded landscape promise.
Originally published in Cordite Poetry Review 60: Silence
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