ROGER MURPHY: BRONZE BLUES

Perseus with the Head of Medusa, Photograph Dimitris Kamaras. Wikimedia Commons

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Bronze Blues

Thoughts of yesterday
Suspend the blue cornfields
Above my head.

I walk carefully across the sky
Feeling I might fall in
At any moment.

I lie down on Brittas’ strand
Where the sea meets the spume
And slide just above the tiny lacerating shells

Seaweed laps around my neck
Brown bladders
All leather and jelly.

Looking into the frothy water
I smell the brine
Rise towards my face
And splash into my open mouth.
The metallic taste of unrinsed salad.

Circe’s sussurating sand emits
A symphony of silent sound.

Standing, cuban heels elevate my view
Leaving squared depressions in the sand
Filling up with bronze rain.

The rain-lashed loggia
Where Perseus holds out Medusa’s head
Grasping the writhing serpents
Stands above me.

From underneath his triumphant foot
The bursting blood floods out
Across the Signoria in a single pour.

Benevenuto Cellini
Wows the crowd. Voices
Raised in sudden acclamation.

A fretful half-hidden Cosimo
Watches the unveiling
From a Palazzo window
Biting his fingernails to the quick.
The salt taste of slanting rain
Dripping from the harpe
Splashes my face
As I angle to the driving winter rain.

On Brittas’s strand, the Irish child feels
500 years of Florentine warp and weft
Wet his unprotected body
And soak his shoes with sea rain

The bronze stands inert.
Perseus looks down at me
Along his belly – still avoiding all gaze.

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Two hundred years before the gorgon
Froze the multitude
Beatrice crossed the rough, grey stone blocks of the piazza.
Near the marketplace where tourists now
Buy leather goods and touch the porcellino’s
Smooth and shiny snout.

Perseus never knew all this,
Nor yet the Irish boy of Brittas Bay
Who looks up into his un-seeing eyes

Yet here did Dante see and speak to Beatrice.
She prefiguring all.

I am part of then and part of now
And part of every time
Like some hand-wound, heart wound
Antikythera mechanism
Telescoping time –
The antique eroded smooth,
The present and what will come.
A continuum that runs
Throughout the universe.
A phaistos disk undecipherable
But continuing to spin.

Only one second separates us all.
Entropy crumbles, corrodes,
But some repeating instinct like
A repeating insect beats out
A rainwall ostinato.

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Roger Murphy is a poet born in Dublin in 1955, raised in England from age one. Gifted at music, he chose instead to build his father’s publishing design business into an international venture. His lifelong passion for writing was formally honed when he earned a Creative Writing degree from Birkbeck College. He lives in Surrey with his wife, Patricia. he has published in Ars Notoria (The Art of the Noteworthy) and recently coordinated and participated in an event in the International Colloquium of Poetry and Philosophy.