“A Night With Henry James” and “The Making of an Old Season”

by Nattie O’Sheggzy

“A NIGHT WITH HENRY JAMES”

I know I must have offended some god

The colour of which I cannot discern

With these sleep-drought eyes

Stretched taut with the brows

Furrowed and swimming in endless

Wakefulness

Sweeter than the chocolate dream

Or the icings sitting atop the cake mountain.

Lest I forsake the gentle stings of moderna

On my sour nerves as I war with darkness

Spreading its phalanges round my neck,

I leap wildly at the amputated joy

Night brings the dozing birds

Unfurling their wings in the nests.

Then immersed in Henry James’s

Daisy Miller as he weaves tales

Exotic in their grandiosity and finesse

Till the break of dawn I stroll on my back

From one edge of the bed

To the other farther end in limitless

Hither and thither

He paints a world with clouds in its eyes

And a cloudy prejudice with the lush

Of colours sheening from the skin

Of your back and not the quality

Of the content of your brain

When Winterbourne

In love’s winter

Sees no love

In daisies.

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“THE MAKING OF AN OLD SEASON”

The pitchfork of the old fiend sinks deeper

About two smouldering stubs of firewood

Ashes of hays flutter in the greying hair of the reaper

Dancing plumes from the underwood

I see me in the blades of the brown leaves

Melted away with the tongues of the fire

Fodder for the moon-fed horses’ heaves

Arrayed in painful love of prickly brier

Twelve months wheezing away in a few seconds

Loam brimming with misty rivers meandering

Mangled in coughing and sneezing rounds

Silt shivers in a ceaseless philandering

Like a forage I am cured in the sun

Burnishing the bale from under the earth

Setting the beams on the winter overdone

Loosely tied lin bondage round the girth

Like a glee I am a mouthful for the ruminants

The bitter curd they can’t puke or swallow

And remnants of the dying year’s covenants

Left in the timeless tides of reason to wallow

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