The Peacock at Alderton

Nothing to tell why I cannot write

in re Nobody; nobody to narrate this

latter acknowledgement: the self that counts

words to a line, accountable survivor

pain-wedged, pinioned in the cleft trunk,

less petty than a sprite, poisonous as Ariel

to Prospero's own knowledge. In my room

a vase of peacock feathers. I will attempt

to describe them, as if for evidence

on which a life depends. Except for the eyes

they are threadbare, the threads hanging

as from a luminate tough weed in February.

But those eyes—like a Greek letter,

omega, fossiled in an Indian shawl;

like a shaved cross section of living tissue,

the edge metallic blue, the core of jet,

the white of the eye in fact closer to beige,

the whole encircled with a black-fringed green.

The peacock roosts alone on a Scots pine

at the garden end, in blustery twilight

his lambent cloak stark as a warlock's cape,

the maharajah-bird that scavenges

close by the stone-troughed, stone-terraced, stone-ensurfed

Suffolk shoreline; at times displays his scream.