Field in Summer, and: Dialogue by a City Wall, and: Opening the shutters

Field in Summer

I had a simple childhood,
A mother and father to take care of me,
no war at my doorstep.

Stones
sang canticles in my mouth
as darkness rose.

Love, love where are they gone?
Father, mother, ink dark stars,
singing stones.

Dialogue by a City Wall

He. I need to smell you.
Come near the window, the city hovers there.

I want to be sure you're not a girl made of clouds
with only a wound for a mouth.

She. You gave me a book.
You touched the red ink

You said: Look, that's my name.
Why did you tremble when you gave me that book?

He. I know you already and it's not from any place.
You're the woman whose scent has driven me mad.

I steer through pages packed with syllables and cannot find you.
Tell me your name, come let me write you.

She. The instruments of war
are buried under water.

Incense wafts from the curtained rooms.
A tall tree makes a fountain.

On the leaves of the tree
outside your wall it is written:

I am Sita and Iphegenia, Demeter and Draupadi.
I am not fit for burning.

Opening the shutters

The faux windows are delectable
They were painted with a fine brush
Onto seventeenth-century stucco

A maid in a striped blue dress
Is hauling the shutters open
One by one in a serenade so still

I barely hear it.
She props up the shutters,
each on its metal pole

smooths down her dress
pleats well below the knees,
ardent stripes on a pale blue field.

I watch her from the crystalline
shadow of two trees
osmanthus fragrans or sweet olive

and euonymous europaeus
also known as fortuni, tree of good fortune.
In my grandmother's garden

there were other sorts of tree
whose fragrance first forgotten
return in dream to the sound

of a hand at a shutter's rim,
of tapping a palmyra fan
at the brink of a lagoon.

So to accumulate in noonday heat
through the commonest turning
chords of music

even in excessive sunlight
which is what this northern hilltop
brings in late summer

the hours, diaphanous, winged,
laden with heat, churning
time past and to come,

the burning heart not to be cast aside,
and what we recognise as suffering
at its own unspeakable pitch

inching ever closer.
Through open shutters
we glimpse familiar figures

a man and woman and a child
their faces cupped in mist.
How can I know

that in someone else's kitchen
she will take a knife
first to the child, then to herself?

I cannot bear what she has done
I stare at the open shutters
weeping, as the maid

with a luminous flourish
and for reasons entirely her own
casts open the long door to the villa,

a corridor ringed with light,
at its very end
a Chinese jar still turning.

On its surface centuries ago
An unknown hand painted
a woman in a long robe

gold hemmed with alizarin,
behind her another woman
and another

the very last
holding a boy by the hand,
leading him into darkness.