Still Life (A Dream) Poem by Michael Maxwell Steer

Rookeries caw in the leafless trees
as I walk up the avenue
holding my dauter's rescued puppy.
A row of fantastic houses rears up,

a street set in the middle of nowhere,
with church-like gables and studio windows,
a jumbled 17thC townscape,
apparently uninhabited.

I'm in a Belgian fin de siècle
painting of meticulous silence,
little pools of urban lamplight
in the twilight countryside.

Round the back a green quadrangle,
the houses institutionalized,
but in one corner an arcade
of altars from the age of faith,

breaking the public buildings' surface,
with a feminine wound, their painted
stonework, fitted together at right angles.
Oratory or museum?

With a single light breath ghosts appear.
A second, with greater effort, colours
their translucent faces faintly.
A third, with heavy concentration,

begins to populate this campus
with people's normal interactions.
A final exhausting focused wish
seals the scene's autonomous life.


22/09/2009