Contents

1.Isoline 1:Words for A Creation : Plazer

2.Isobar: Three Breton Homages

Homage to Tristan Corbiere.

Homage to Max Jacob

Homage to Saint Pol-Roux

3.Isobar: Witnessed Earth.

Gesualdo at Gesu Nuovo.

Milarepa at Mapang

Ossuna at Salcedo

Sibelius at Japrvenpaa

Lakhsmi Bai and Virangani Jhalkari At Jhansi

4. Decibar: Achaens

The Death of Helen

Iphigenia

5. Isobar: A Map of Storms

Massebiel

The Oyster- Beds, Cancale

At Saint-Seine sur Vingeanne

At Semur en Auxois

6. Isobar: The Tendering

At Castle Fogarty

At Walditch

At Wells Next the Sea

At Walsingham

At Olney

7. Isobar: Tallow Testaments

Winter Prayer, Pantasaph

Earine’s Oak

A Devonshire House Idyll.

Home Park.

8. Isobar: The House on the Island.

The House on the Island.1- 9

9. Isoline 2: Sure Tremors

Sanctuary

10. Decibar: At The Heart of the Eye

A Treatise of Light 1-15

Music for Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast 1- 40

Isobar : Charred Voices

Music for Schools

The Raising

A Middlesborough Qincunx

The Museum in the Snow

Revisiting

11. Isobar: Working Back

In the Avici Hells

Adam’s Prayer

Aisling’s Dolls

Working Back

12. Centobar: Pastoral Landscapes after a Storm.

On The Ox’s Back

The White Crane

13. Isoline 3: Irreplaceable Stem

Lines Written after Stendhal

14. Isobar: Taken as Read

Counterfeit

Legend

On the District Line

15. Isobar: Against the Martyrs

Against the Martyrs 1-8

16.Isobar : Movie

Transcript 1-6

Stills 1-3

17. Vigintibar: Closedown

Nunc Dimittis

Closedown


Isoline 1:

Words for a Creation


Plazer

David, why not Chris and I and Hugh,
be thrilled and breeze-bent navigators,
across all seas, the season’s regulators,
weather bosses of all before our view?

We need a good sorcerer to grant us
our women too, Jude, Katie and Clare
Elizabeth and Leona, should we dare,
to get aboard a barge that’s amorous,

then we could talk about, well...love.
That might get the girls to listen.
How happy just to sail and rove

at last, but happier to let love glisten,
and in loving, let loose the dove,
that, for once, the Thames will christen.


Isobar

Three Breton Homages


1.Homage To Tristan Corbière.

In the shape of a boat,
wooden walls worship Him;
Our Lord, the fisherman,
who matured in the pith
of the apple tree's nave.
You were His gall, a sorb
outside the wrinkled bark.
A sponge of bitter words
put to the mouth of the
dead one, its rank moisture
seething from resigned mud.
Helplessly, He swirled it
foul, round a timber tongue.
A pained, matronal smile
splits the face of Saint Anne,
mother of motherhood,
dug out from the dark that
fermented amber light.

Words burn at the brogue mouth
of this slow beacon - land.
Candles mourn tallow saints.
Pale flames mirrored,
in gold reliquaries
burn for a creation,
or are snuffed in slow draughts.
Sparrows nest in coppice arks,
under a leaden sky.
A yawl bobs on the Rance
among the masts of yachts,
a basket in the reeds.
Sponges breathe the dry air.
Bread-crumb pale, or blood-red,
they suckle coastal stones.
A low mass at dawn and
witnessed on the shore by
the fishing-boats returned
and He has quenched
the dust in our words:
your thirst, forgetting,
my thirst, remembering:
both slaked in His Word.


2.Homage To Max Jacob

Sightseers, we cross the river.
Yet, here, we find
no memory, deprived of light
by your whitened page;

but your roses were red
that surged in the breeze.

For we are not
the crew of Ulysses.
Instead we are enthralled
by siren windsurf-girls
set to capsize in brochured seas.

On shore-bound graves,
white roses tremble.

Your red-lipped
acrobats whose cold
tightroped glances,
left you bereft,
have kept their lissom balances,
white legs misted under feather tulle.

Now, where you played among brats home from school,
we come to pick sunlight from the stories of your city.

Peevishly, our children follow.
Toy horses nuzzle my daughters lips.
They amble
where my son lets loose
the race
of plastic beasts he musters.

Yet in the bright market where traders laze,
white lilies of the valley lie bound in bundles.

You were not there to meet us,
where your foster-faith assembles.
It is you we follow over Jordan,
that floods in ash-muddied streams,
while an empty train lumbers
with tearful windows to Drancy.
You are the heresiarch of love, yet
we have the comfort of your dreams no more.

White rose, red rose, it is not as it seems.
Both draw song-books of the dead into their scope.

You are the great
baboon of hope,
whose empty cage
is watched by a tearful child
who gave his last bread for you
to come out with your terrible lope.


3. Homage To St. Pol Roux

Blood smudges my son's knee,
cut on a shoreline rock.

Dry milk from my daughter's
empty bottle smears her cheek.

My children are hungry.
I pretend we can eat the land.

As a chord of blazed wheat,
with bees, tipsy with energy,

that let each flaxen mouthful spill over us
and onto the trumpeting flowers.

Already past, coeval-browned,
we walk below the Breton sun.

A child in both hands,
I hear the bell of rusted prayer

faith still summons me to.
We are as passive

as the blue convolvulus:
like pupils blinking through the day.

Sheep munch casually
at the thin grass, like tourists

among ancient stones.
Yet whom did the flowers' forbears see?

This place was once the hour-garden
of a poet’s slaughter.

The sun shone then as now
over drunken Stormtroopers

who held smoking machine-guns
and shone on a white-haired, old dreamer

stretched on the ground
by the home he defended,

vivid with a youth of blood,
while his daughter looked on,

in the horror of wet time,
drying into local piety;

dreamers, we still defend the rights
of this place, on a walk before breakfast.

I can take my children home,
while blood of the murdered,

and the milk of his music
dry in his silent grave.


Isobar

Witnessed Earth


Gesualdo At Gesu' Nuovo
Naples; 1611.Good
Friday Nocturnes.

Maria's eyes harden and I am left
mortal, betrayed by deathless memory.
My lackey's listen, until shadows lift
while those I love, ponder my butchery.

Left alone to drink an acid sorrow
which hastens untimely rheums, not death,
I am patterned only in tomorrow
sounding the diapason of my debt.

Sorrow's double damask was rent to tassels.
Love's larcenists, they clasped fear at my steps.
Lord grant me the stupor of my vassals;
my royalty torn apart by its adepts.

Tasselled, my stone sweats blood within.
Caraffa leaps for my throat.
He grips me with guilt, choaks me with sin.
On beauty's dead pelt he cracks his red joke.

Within, my discordant voices whine.
They sing out of sour notoriety.
I am beaten down, a shriven vine,
The saved are loud with felicity.

Mock, I pray you. Banish my iniquity.
Staves of vengeance are made my relicts.
Guilt is an insecure tonality.
Each day its scales descant new edicts.

Iniquity lures her last joy to my sense
My wife lies hidden at my accord.
They drank shallow here and I sent them hence
that their wishes should sound as voiceless chords

Senseless, my keys tell where they hide.
Yet I cling on you, not mine, yet lost. Before
I flensed you clean of treachery my brides,
my false note plucked you still. Maria...Leonore...


Milarepa At Lake Mapang
I yield to them, my lordly teachers,
I ask that they bring peace to seekers.
Look at this man, such idleness:
Yet see within, much restlessnes
If, on endless uncreated sites,
in pure elation, I build heights,
have I the time to build a home?

Since in reality's twilight zone,
I cut loose pain's feral thongs,
I have no time to plough furlongs.

Since at the gate of high wholeness
I wrestle with devils of selfishness
what time have I to strike an enemy?

If out of reach from earth's ambiguity
I crave a beatific wedding-night
what time have I for carnal sight?

If in the ruling of my body,
I raise up widsom as my baby,
have I the time to take in kids?

Since under joy-shaped, human lids
I store priceless wisdom and the real
what time have I to save for a meal?

Since on the scarps of endless truth.
I rear the wild horse of self-reproof
what time have I to tend poor sheep?

If out of the flesh and bone heap
I mould the sacred reliquary,
Have I the time for holy imagery?

If on the peak of my triple heart
I kindle the ghee-flame to impart

chaste light, have I the time to offer fire?

Since, in the shrine of joy's changeless mire
I bring ceaseless offering to the icon of calm mind.
I have no time for prayer of formal kind.

If on the page of distilled intellect
I trace letters desire would reject,
I have no time for holy pictures.

Since in the brain-bowl that the world perjures
I crush the opium of passion's clutter,
have I the time to churn my butter?

Since in the close retreat that seeks good ends,
I welcome thirsting ghosts and gods and titans as my friends
animals and men and all inhabitants of hell.

What time havae I to welcome relatives as well?
If, with old guides and teachers, I take on the poundage
of their thoughts I have no time for toiling age.

If in the mountain hut's isolation.
I achieve my goal which is illumination,
what time have I for exhaustion's drowse?

Since from the shell-lips of my triad mouths,
I pray the song of thought and ecstasy,
I have not time for the speech of lethargy.


Ossuna At Salcedo.

Above, under Norte, lies Pastrana.
By the night star's hour hand,
twenty leagues past us, Guadalajara
sleeps in the breve of the Matin bell's clang.

I keep midnight's rule, two hours in prayer,
by fingering the charm Francesca wore.
holding the virgin Mary sinless is my dare,
a greater creature for the Son she bore.

A novice I knew once fell in a trance
at the sight of a cock that beat its wings
before crowing. In nature a greater stance
fully swells with the folly of high things.

After Nones, I recall drawing water with Ortiz
and scanned the hills rather that probe his silence.
I fear that carnal negligence he pleads
will burst his pitcher's passive semblance.

We draw diverse draughts from one girl's glance.
Though I thought her blessed with rare grace, the shadow
of Ximenes begins to haunt her spirit's dance.
I pray the captive is awake, for my lamp is shallow.

In recollection of my beaten Lord
I await my own abandon to His will.
Outwardly I gather notes for the bored
bretheren who lie here in a dry swill.

Within it is with her circling moths
I fly, with Los Alumbrados, thralled
to the pulverising flame of the lost,
but I write for an unborn soul He called.

I claim He can touch souls without consent
in the parchment of my meditation
obliged to wander from my theme, that moment
I knew it was Francesca I felt bound to mention.

I dare to claim that Mary rose into the skies
A gift given so singly could not show man's blight
I shall forget my apostate's alluring eyes
and think only of my book, my unborn baby's sight.

as it lies awake in human darkness to assuage
the pain of an unknown hunger whose void
it cannot fill. Soon this law-bound age
will fade, yet my book will not be destroyed

by the inquisitive flame. From this dry home
its words will travel in the loaded carts
to Ortosa, Madrid, Salamanca, Rome,
to suckle the strategy of prayer that is my art.

I have kept my rule and now I burn her charm
keeping the secret of my concupiscence within,
hoping passion keeps the Church from harm
and legal rage and, yet, cast out my traitor, sin.


Sibelius At Jarvenpaa


"The long silence...
lies in a complex of
reasons; first and
foremost, a heightened
sense of self-
criticism"

R. Layton

The old man always takes his morning walk
wearing a Homburg and carrying a cane.
He totters forwards to the forest's edge,
and stares ahead, watched over from the house.
Perhaps he thinks back twenty years before
when he had thought here of the old belief.

And he had put the sheets of a song in
the shallow drawer which rattled in his hands.

He spoke to birch trees, asking them for wood
to lay the hull to start the boat for God.
They answered in the voice of Aino
they had only wood of beds for lovers.
Then he spoke to fir trees and asked them too
for the wood he wanted. They answered him
in his father's voice they had only wood
for coffins that the dead could lie upon.
He came to where an old oak stood and asked
for wood. It answered in his own flat voice,
even though its trunk was churned with worms;
it had the wood, if he could find the spell
to shape the boat. He must have had the old
trunk felled and cleared twenty years ago.

and the old man opened the hot stove door
to burn a crumpled symphony to ash.

Later he had dreamed he shot swan's necks
while drunk with Mussorgski in St Petersburg.
In Spring he dreamed he hunted lungs of stags
to Ein Heldenleben in Augsburg,
across orchestra stalls while Strauss counted time
He dreamed of the tongues of Russian cranes
and with Prokofiev, he killed a flight of them.
Through twenty summers he hung up a hundred
words, but never dreamed the words to make God's boat.
Then suddenly he thought of Arhippa,
the singer, who lay dead beneath the earth.
Now his chin was weighted down by podsoil
His whitened bristles were clumps of birch.
His shoulders were fluted with rigid pines.
He had dug for twenty years, not finding him.
Then his men retired, leaving him alone.

Perhaps Aino doesn't see him from the window
as he stumbles and his foot breaks
into a worn, snow-covered rabbit hole.
It falls into Arhippa's mouth.
and his breath burns through to his knee.
From the edge of the forest it looks
as if the old man is doubled over
as he wrestles a forge from the dead man's breath
No-one sees him hammer a long blade
and dig it deep in Arhippa's mouth.
The dead man's jaws cut through its iron
cladding but cannot spit out its hard steel
edge that makes the wounded earth tremble
The land crackles as charcoal falls
into Arhippa's cheeks and iron shards
into his lungs. Arhippa roars "Quit my mouth!"
and the old man's boat is finished
As he walks back along the path to the villa,
perhaps the old man gives it no more thought,
mentions the cranes seemed to say goodbye to him.

And he takes out the yellowing song
from where it lies in the flat drawer

He might hear now how Arhippa sang,
at the sight of an old man's boat
sliding down a pathway of birches
and over a causeway of pines.
In the afternoon after a silent lunch
he falls dead and the telegraph hums
to Helsinki The halls are silenced
by the guest conductor from England.
Aino covers the old man's hollow face.


Lakhsmi Bai and Virangani Jhalkari At Jhansi

The charred double doors to the Jhansi
British hospital are opened. People stand.
The Rani, in burial clothes, brought out,
by station staff officers, in remand.
She had become the freedom fighters’
mission force against foreign footholds.
She passes crowds as her story unfolds.

That self-possessed, dead glance appears rapt
and attentive to her Lords. Her smiling lips
deceive even herself, as she slips
between her two God-brothers. Her eclipse
joins their divinity and personhood,
while subalterns stack arid sandalwood.

The pungent fumes of paraffin-soaked fuel
blind the gathered crowd of mission johnnies
and the fire itself, burning to overrule
the searing sun, seems to slacken the breeze.
A Hundu Goddess has found release
to tear the navels out of British officers,
European brutes, without guns, or reserves.

Their forgotten blood dissolves in the Straits.
Now the ex-equerry to the Duke of Cambridge,
pays homage to her courage.She illuminates
useful illusions that can conveniently abridge
all conflict and be put to rest with shortage
scattering of boiled sweets. While justified
in himself, the General grasps an unsure honour.

He fells worlds with urbane whimsy, seeking
immanent testament from a dead peasant girl.
The district superintendants, bark at the British
other ranks that they keep their distance.
Children hurl abuse.Ram's pearls,
won in a day of breaking old weapons,
enter the flames unflinching in response.


Decibar :
Acheaens


The Death Of Helen


Thick flutes moaning low, slouch their way to Therapne,
The Royal Bell hums with accomplices
through the weight of air.
Dinner at shabby Mycenai
was always half an hour late,
allowing for tardy Aerope.
The sundials and clocks conformed.
Wellington's spoils from Knossos
or Talavera were becalmed
in a seedy, salt dog routine.
An empire spread by piracy
from a rocky mound on the
Argive plain. Its brine-scum spat
curses on Cretan armadas,
misted up in the fires
of sneak raids on Pylos.
To placate oil-painted Gods,
libations were poured
from porcelain Coronation bowls.
Palace protocol celebrated
horses trained at Lambourne,
wheel-thrown pottery,
shaft-grave devotions,
the Book of Common Prayer
and the protection
of water supplies.
Risen from Cycladic piety
and Helladic rationalism,
their choirs chanted hearthstone awe
to divert from Minoan
popery, Egyptian saints
and Hittitie faschism.
Yet, Hanoverians, they kept quarters
in Hohenzollern Troas
with the Saxe-Coburgs
and holidayed in Ugarit with
the Mecklenburg-Strelitzes.

A thin frame figure in Balmain black, impeccably
fragile, inspects the hollow inside the hive-shaped vault.

Atreus, close-cropped and
bearded, paraded his cowed family
on the blue-bowed
Dreadnoughts at Spithead.
The children of warriors wore
stockings tight over knees,
Eton collars, starched and
clean shoes unmuddied nad
the chlamys pockets sown.
Paris always grasped his
right wrist in his left hand.
While flag-waving Dorians
were kept out of earshot
of Aerope's heavy accents.
Atreus perferred all things
Trojan, his Berlin cousins,
Hindenberg rather than Nestor,
traditional cooking, domestic
time-tables and languid children
who feared him as he had feared
Grandma Thetis and Aunt Eris
with her old fashioned pendants
so rashly thrown to new-born Paris.
Yet he kept their amphoras now as they
had stood there then for Duke Perseus.

The tholos, facing East, at Frogmore lies under glistening rain.
Dense bells toll softly, sunk in low nimbostratus.

Paris had grown beyond Atreus' wrathful hand.
His nurse, a licensed helot, twisted
and pinched the hero's arm
that the sobbing child
could be dismissed back
into her jealous care.
The 'sardine' at Osborne
had his head held by midshipmen,
under a sash-window,soaked in red ink.
"Just to remember the martyred Cadmus."
Later, at Delphi, every stater
had to be accounted for,
despite his tutor's pleas.
While on the front line
at Thebes, Sir Frederick Maude
thanked Father Zeus for his going.
At Castle Belvedere, the switchboard
vitoed calls from Athena Dudley Ward
and Hera, Lady Thelma Furness.
The golden apple cart upset
the water clocks. Half an hour late,
Atreus' catafalque was interred
under the eyes of the new mulitiude.
Beaverbrook's ideal monarchy
invented an Ionic print
for the suburban literate.
An Homeric, oral King halts
by pattern-book shanty towns
crowding the perimeter of
the citadel. He transacts with
bronze-smiths, hoers, bath pourers
and craftsmen in depressed Boeotia.

Two rolls on a snaredrum then the silence of a taut minute.
Her already mythic face appears behind the palace window.

In Philistine Baltimore
old-line, Southern Titans
tutted at Leda's nuptials
to Teakle Thestius Warfield,
a sickly scion of new
Olympian millionaires.
They bought a stolen ring
from a pawnshop full of clocks
"What a lot of time
has passsed by here,"
quipped Alice Montague. On Blue-Ridge summit
the gold-beaked Episcopalian
saw his downy, white child born.
Then time sold out
for the auctioneer King.
Leda consorted with Tyndareus,
the son of Levantine
war-looters and squatters.
In a boarding house
in respectable Biddle St.
she kept her daughter
impeccable in a home-made
trousseau while she coldly
played with clay dolls,
Astor and Vanderbilt.
Names unheard of among
the smug, moneyed orders
of Chesapeake Bay.
At the Thesmophoria,
her unpretty charm brought
Lieutenant Winfield Theseus
Spencer Jnr. The magnet
of his gold stripes
lured her to Attic Pensacola
Bondswife to his bottle,
she took the trade route
to Syria, lived as a card-sharp
and cast horoscopes
in the trading stations,
for Jew-hating, Missouri sailors.
Menelaus took her back to Athens.
Aunt Bessie Aethra in attendance
I,Earnest Simpson, stalwart of ships,
who, felt for you more deeply
than anyone, am I not unknown?

Helen emerges into stark sunlight and the mourners move
onwards through stone precincts to the Lion Gate.

On grave-hoard vases and glossy
magazines, their story grows frequent
while Agamemnon checks his chariot-
tablets in the archives, flash-bulbs
pop their sonorous glamour of
stiquette, house-parties on
borrowed yachts, dinners and
night-club gatherings.
Paris steals a bride from
Spartan Baltimore. Words
begin their augury. Marlowe's
tough-guy immortality for
bible-belt consumption
in Vogue, of McCall's and
shifted to a new distribution
in Lacedaemon by Hearst's rising
Euipideans of the New York
Journal. A Spartan queen,
an averagely sensual divinity
for Doric readers to blend
with theogonic fantasies
screened in Ur and Hollywood.
Expelled to Europe
"Upon a single thought...."
consummated in sad Tiryns,
they lost the Mycenaean houses
by entail, became house guests
of the Rothschild's in dank Enzesfeld

She stoops to read an inscription "I, Menelaus, who lit the fire...."
while the carriers of an empty bier pretend exertions the weight of hair

Stony Troy was their love-place.
They climbed Berchtesgarten
after an hour's wait
for Paris to plot statecraft
with Sarpedon over the common
Hittite threat. Outside, she could not hear
their talk and was told
no more, except that Paris
should rule Mycenae in revenge
for Ribbenthrop's disgrace. Queen Aerope,
Agamemnon, Calchas, Odysseus,
he hated them all and agreed a code
should Troy triumph. Then they were
escorted by dual destroyers
from Priam's Vichy and Dolon's Spain
to cut an arcing wake through
the night Atlantic. She watched
him sworn in as Governor of Leuche,
wearing the fatigues of Achilles.
Under the satrapy of Dorians
he was made to muster troops
at Valley Forge, the Duchess
whispering the names of the
raw-throated G.I.s ached to speak
inside the wooden alliance.
Elsewhere it was a dream
romance,in Ilium, in Egypt,
while Menelaus or Paris,
bought the drinks, Deiphobus
bought it himself; always
that punctual nemesis, the oblique thud
of suicidal departure in
the billiard room or
the spreadeagled gawguff
of barbiturate overdose,
unsolved murder, fires
and unrest among
hitherto placed inhabitants.

Tired flute girls resume their threnody. Tested for
a route by one who would never know if they kept it.

They reign elsewhere in popular habit.
while excavators uncover thicknesses of
military ash at Troy 7a in defence of
Achilles' 'New Deal' and the Athenian Welfare State.
Yet Schliemann's Goethean labourers
unearth the hard treasures of this dream.
out of the dry gravel came Vuitton chests
the property of travellers and Suzy tholia,
the headwear of exiles. Then under rusting broaches,
the eponymous body, bound in fascia bands,
under deep-gathered shirt-belts chistles
a statue of shadows and light.
The smile beginning to play friendship
wide jaws, blue eyes a prominent nose
but her hands were large and acquisitive,
her collar bones obtrusive. Her hair
was first a construct of Minoan curls,
in twelve-year old flowing ribbons,
then a short, Achaean, Cleo de Merode cut
changed again to a later Vernon Castle
style and eagle brows, kept in place
always by Alexandre. That phenotypic
figure with an emotional precision
ochred under varnished black on vases.
in a Mainbocher peplos with
pouching wool and belt or
in her Foric chiton,
bodice pins hemming the overlap.
Hers was the age of visible dress
expensive meals, lustrations
to human gods, in Spry wall paintings
piano music by Noel Coward
the Argive chariot and Beaton's
geometric ware and the Queen Mother's
gift of old Bronze-age jewellery,
a costly time by-passed.

She sleeps, now and the mourners have been paid off
until they should needed to keen a forgotten ruler.

It was for that cloud the cordite reeked,
the steel ships burnt. The cities inflamed
to the core. It was for the odour of Givenchy
and dry sables that the young men screamed
in their cockpits under summer skies of
immaculate blue. It was for golden masks,
Cartier pendants, daggers, carved gravestones
amber from Egypt and luxuries from Palm Beach.
that landing craft struck the shores
and scholars were silenced
and painters hands fell still.
Tanks blazed in the desert
for a Doric chiton billowing,
empty, in the scorching breeze;
for nothing more than the white steam rising
through the fingers of a dead man's hand
on a jeep's twisted radiator
sculpted as Callas might bow
or Pavlova dance and Dietrich pose.
While genocide proved unpreventable
and of those who died
few had cared to cast a ballot sheet.
In distant Pylos, a nurse
swings the consort of monarchs
into her chair as light tightens her hair
on a scalp as emaciated
as her childhood dolls of clay.

At Royal Windsor mausoleum
the mantled mourners will pass
the bier in single file, each with
a right arm threaded
in her partner's left.
Hands clasped, they will listen
for the toll's obsession

and will chant the office of hirelings for the dead.


Iphigenia

I am stone-heart,
great, great, great grand-daughter
of William. Was it William? Yes.
Colonel of the Hampshire Militia,
who taught his fellow officer
and divulger of secrets, Edward Gibbon
to drill, drink and philander in defense
of staunch Sussex against France
and Romish superstition. I...
I am Iphigenia. Yes, Unity...
great, great,great grand-daughter of ...
William fellow of Gibbon, whose
ivory-bound history inspired Carlyle
who, by him, slew Myrtilus Grote
and Thirlwall in revenge for Hypatia.
From William. No... William... begat
Henry, drowned with all hands on H.M.S. York,
his ship, in the Dogger fog. I am Bobo,
that same great, great, grand-daughter
of Henry Reveley, cuckold,
attaché to the British legations
in Florence and later Frankfurt
curse of Rome and Manning.
I am Boud, great grand-daughter of
Henry, friend of Swinburne,
grand-daughter to Bertram,
loather of Jews, teller of Japanses tales,
creator of the London parks,
whose eddying swirl
of Rhododendrums and polygonum
still resist the rationing Royal shears
at Sandringham.
He was a gossip of Whistler's
spoiler of country houses,
who won Clementine Ogilvie,
Lord Airlie's daughter as his bride.
From her, he, Atreus, begot my father,
Baron Agamemnon... Sorry... Yes,
David, estate seller, fighter of Boers.
My mother, Clytemnestra...,
Sydney Bowles was daughter of Thomas,
master mariner of Aldbrough, M.P.
and member of the Committee of Public accounts.

Yes, I am that same Bobo,
who stood beside the darkening
storm where restless winds
stirred the Burgenland orchards.
My father sacrificed me
for the sake of Troy or was it... Troy?
- or so they thought - to fate
in the land-locked English Park in Munich.
Churchill, my mother's cousin,
had assembled his fleets in the Channel,
seeking to crown the Achaeans
in triumph over Sarpedon, Hirohito's Troy.
proud Sarpedon's just concerns
for Austria nad Czechoslovakia
penned his fleets in port and drove
him to inquire by telegram of me.
Julius Streicher pronounced;
"Churchill, ruler of Westminster tea-rooms,
you shall see no more till fate
receive your daughter
Valkyrie's blood in sacrifice.
Once long ago you swore to fate,
bringer of light, the loveliest creature
born within twelve months,
your own wife, Sydney had a child
born in Swastica, Scythia's log cabin
where, frustrated with the dearth of gold,
this gift of loveliness came instead."

Yet they sacrificed on a false pretext.
They stole me from my mother,
claiming I was to find
a husband, Janos... Yes... Sarpedon himself.
I witnessed this curse as I watched
Bournhill cottage blaze, yellow, from the garden
as servants blundered to and fro.
I saw Atreus die, a thin bright, saffron face,
I am Boud, his great grand-daughter
A shock of white hair stood on end
in a vast dim room with the blinds down.
If you don't believe me, think I'm mad,
ask the huntress, fate, what curse she has imposed
upon the Semites or on Rome
when she tied up all the allies
Chamberlain, Daladier, appeasers all,
in Portsmouth, the Nore, Spithead nad St Nazaire.
Yes, I am that same Bobo,
I will tell you, you can never hear fate.
when I was at school.
I told the head teacher of Bushey…
The rumour goes that Farv., No. Uncle Churchill
cursing us for not keeping in line.
struggled through turnips, and tough stubble
until his foot disturbed a hare; 'Loo! After it'
Lurcher and whippet were slipped in the winter frost
and sped after the doubling, twisting hare.
That day it was caught,
shrieking in the impaling mouths,
its legs quivering in agony.
He gave it to me to carry and he swore.
"Wasn't that a beautiful sight!" he said and leaned
on his thumbstick while his hounds drew breath.

Wherefore the daughter of necessity,
...Sorry... Yes
in fell wrath stayed the army
that in quittance for the hare
my father should slay his own child
at the altar in the English Park,
'Decca, Diana á l'autel conduisez la victime.'
That day I held myself high,
fired a shot into the grass
and another in my right temple.
Bony of brain as the bullet proved.
Fate snatched me from death
I felt only pain, hoist like my pet,
tethered outside the church at Swinbrook,
goatlike, on the stone fountain.
My best clothes wrapped around me
to keep me from doing worse.
It meant leaving him to Eva Braun,
no, Eriphile...No...I love her fate, her place.
Berlin shall be her prize.
Churchill got a poisoned dog
in place of me. I am stone-heart.
My poor Rebel. "Wherefore with pain
and much constraint and sore urging
of his backward will,"
Hardly! Farv yeilded. I was brought
on a stretcher to the Munich hospital,
where the priestesses cursed me
for the mortal sin of suicide.
Think of what happened in Munich.
The S.S. and The Luftwaffe sent cards
and in the pain I was my father standing
beside some black-robed nuns who told me
I was sinner, a Defier of Hubris.
Again and again they questioned,
those Nazi nuns. Did you think it a sin
to die by your own hand?
All the spectators, standing by
crying or taking photographs, or,
like, the little boy and his mother
who held me kneeling abjectly on the floor.
It didn't do me any good
with the blood still flowing from my temple.
I didn't realise my father's arm
not to my wedding but to a political incest,
struck down by a father who did not understand
the need of a race to realise its identity.
you aren't one of those who would
be cruel are you? Yes, I am that same Bobo.
To this small extent we must be
masters of your destinies.
At least I think I am the one
who must believe this
We did not ask to be born. If our lives
become tragic or unbearable,
we have the right to die.
Heinz who was national defence discovered
his mother's parents were both Jewish
and wanted to shoot himself and should have done.
All Farv and Churchill wanted
was to get the war started.
Their army chaplains and priests turn aside
the purpose of your life and call it fear.
What I loved were heroes,
great judgements like Hieronymous Bosch.
I worship Diana and her life "vudz"

I went on to Berne, through the channel's
bright air, to this Taurean country,
a low lying island off Attlee's Crimea.
Rain glistens in the grass, falls from the bracken
and oats stir, restless, in the home field,
where the ruined chapel stands. No... Sorry... Yes
Out of the wreck which was
my father's house, rusting trophies.
The house, Inchkenneth. No! Inchkenneth,
the cottage and a statue of Diana,
the huntress, the rest is only unfriendly horses
in the green meadow between the garden wall
and the fringing trees.
On the beach the dark tide floods
through the cliffs.

He is coming now,
my sisters, on the night train to Oban
where he will catch the steamer to Mull.
He has Sarpedon's portrait signed.
Brought to my realm of grey and black
red limestone basalt and mackerel granite.
Once I dreamed in Burma... Tom... No Orestes... Yes?
was not dead... I am become a worshipper here,
a planner of funerals, a singer of hymns,
"Mummy, am I mad?" "Why of course, stone heart."
My memory is weak, out of respect for necessity
Here where socialists win runner's victories
for the speed of bureaucratic bungling,
ruling a barbaric people by false custom.
I wait I could kill those who wanted me dead
but I dream...

Yes, I am that Bobo,
My private school religion made for blasphemy.
"A garden plot. God wot rot!"
I spurned Confirmation, think of the church
down the road at Swinford with all our
animals. When I was young Murv used to let me play
outside on my own, but brought me in
in time for 'God save the King'
then I would run out again, especially
if Joan had come to stay. No... No.
I am Boud, great grand-daughter of Atreus.
My God was always my country, the farmlands, parks
Though even then it was a disrespectful patriotism.
My familiar, who always did the mischief
I was blamed for, was Madam with a long face
and heavy lidded eyes. Now she has the form of fate.
Under the shadows of high wind-tossed trees
in the age-old leafage of this consecrated dale
it is as if I cross the doorway to her church.

Yes, I am that same Bobo,
As in Gulliver's Travels, my country has been
broken down by people chattering the talking
around its giant limbs. Moral courage is my ideal, simple,
un-Christian, uncomplicated by chastity
or marriage and to maintian the values of my set.
Never go beyond the bounds of your fate.
I revisited the school to tell them the same,
but first I had to remove my party badge;
my Swastika signed with his name.
Now beside the unfriendly sea
out of the ruin that was my father's house.
My mother's goats, the horses of Hellas,
crop the green meadows between the garden wall
and the fringe of trees. Now I am here
and my father elsewhere, where the dark
tide floods under the rocks.
no I am stone-heart. No... sorry... Bobo's sorry

We will take the night train to Oban
and stay over with the trophies of fate,
my badge, his photograph, the picture of Hannibal.
I shall return with Orestes.
"Tom...Tom...No. I'm coming..."


Isobar:
A Map of Storms
Massebielle

Out of the rain's deliberation
the town's hills huddle in devotion.
Their silence will will outlast
the cautious night, will hold fast
against the river's rising pitch.
This pilgrim storm keeps the rich
at package prayer, as flash-bulbs brighten
on the wheelchair-bound, whose faces tighten.
They file past the glassed-off source
past rocks worn plastic-smooth by the course
of pleading hands, or lips that kiss.
Massed candles flicker and hiss.

Tearful, screwed up cherubim
are making the wicks grow dim.
Here prayerful hands woo anger
from youth's energy and danger.
Smoke-blackened, the tallow is scarred.
Great clouds billow as barred
rainfall queries the echoing precincts,
yields in silence on the hillside and sinks.
The river cuts into the basilicas’
cold house crushed by its mass,
varnished by the misty glow
of neon-lights intensified to show
the great soaked carapace homes
of toil-hardened, gnarled copper domes
The skit-Jew statues on the calvary of pleas
witness to atrocities
that hang before our time
as praying men and women stand in line
to enter baths, lit by a blue lamp,
that force an image of another camp

Do not go there little one.
in whose eyes such gladness shone.
Do not go there, for you are brave
down to the pagan cave,
to the litters of the typhoid dead.
Do not leave your father to die by an empty bed
Mosaic popes stare
in an empty piety where
the piped stream's tetany
weeps a brass litany.
Why stray by the river, little one,
when your mother sought clothes to put upon
your tiny shape to drive out cold.
Run to your father to have you to hold.
The kiosks are ablaze with currencies,
the pale white lustre of brittle rosaries
and the chrome mirroring cloudy heavens, nacreous.
The cheap is made to replicate the precious
and is made a liar as medals are made to entice
and counterfeit a deathless price.

Why lead us to this place, little dove
why leave your jail of love?
Thunder bellows in the air
at you and those for whom you care.
Come back from the riverside, little one
Lead us to the hungry room and to God's Son
come back from the river, back from the mire
with tinder and bone to light the evening's fire,
where your tough pure face can smile
on a cunning cleric's hardened guile.
The town is scattered now, that stills
a wound, the muscle of the darkened hills.


The Oyster Parks, Cancale

We arrived at slack tide water
witnessing the tide's turn
and the sellers going home.
Only the grey clutches of young
in the wire baskets
told of the local trade,
row after row, developed as far as
potential allowed and then left
to acquire a taste for the sea and survival
Unnoticed at first, the tide began
to swell, filling the concrete beds
one after another. Each spillage of brine
a sudden annulment
along a level course.
The tides flowed in until
each oblong pond was covered
then it vanished from sight
under the flat sea.
Slowly the tides are turning on us.
Each minute splashes its shiver of oblivion
into the day's concern
The second's drop into the pool of the hour
with perfect circularity, rolling out to take in
families and take away
generations from their culture-beds.
Season after season each achievement
is separately annuled, each hunted down
to vanish for ever from natural light
under the straight timelessness.

We left to go and try our luck
with primitives in tow
among the tourist front's Creperies
As the flow filled inwards
to the cliff's edge to bring the offering of
nothingness
to the open arms of Christ,
a statue on the hill.


At Saint Seine Sur Vingeanne.
i.m.Maurice Blondel (1861-1949)

His purple dragonflies still shimmer
along the river's reed-charged bed.
Now he is dead and yet his house is still astir,
to hunters, dogs and his cultured tread.

No more that deft motion of his kid-skin glove,
sealing letters to poets and divines
and those that warmed his apprehensive wife to love.
They are all now stamped with lettered spines.

He was the only one to die.
Others lingered in their blaze of printed fires,
or sang their fantasies until the lie
grew brilliant and duped its liars.

All else still lives on, is strong;
Nazis still smash his bureau open
to seize the names of those to whom,
he sent his book that proved might wrong.

A blind man at his death.
He lit up his own darkness,
on an injured God's last breath;
limits grasped, we surely possess.

A dirt track leads away to Teize
where recovered hope is waited on,
so poorly by those who have their say
as carers and sufferers, whom others shun. .

While he lies buried in the South,
guarding a Jewish colleague in recluse
from Vichyois talk of youpins in his house.
The first and last to defend Dreyfus.

We sit here by the slow Vingeanne
lovers and dreamers in intimacy,
thinking of the Church his thought began
when we were still in infancy.

At Semur En Auxois

As if the dove I see to-day in Semur
in a place like this, a fortress town,
in the depth below the bridge,
down by the low,muddy bank;
as if where it takes flight and races
to where I stand high on the bridge,
thinking of definitions for hope,
and then this fire-light bird.
passes me by, struggles for the towers
of the town’s looming walls
but confusing my horizons
to fly, not to the turrets,
but upwards again,
as if, above the whole domain,
it drew the simple distance
between a soul
and its first breath beyond..


Isobar
The Tendering
At Castle Fogarty

Morning, the jars have spilt over,
throwing a brew of light
through thistles that crowd the window.
We gather oak logs;
the Ard-ri trumpet our clienthood
through their twisted knots.

It is a cloud of whiskery smoke
Why did we live here?
Only to live out a short summer
in the ruins of a lingering ascendancy;
whose sareting overruns with our household;
only to stay inebriate
with my family among strangeness,
prodigious with differences.

My father at peace round the wooden
cable-spool table, reads Roth,
lists odds for the Thurles dogs,
while ,above, in the musty servants quarters,
I read French Catholic metaphysics on a table
that slid through the window
as exactly as the wooden staircase
would admit no other furniture
than a straw bed.

At night, walls cave in, or ceilings
bellyflop to the floor with a thunder
of obstinate conscience that sets bats
wheeling above my torchlight,
thrust from obscurity
by that same decay that subsidised
their concealment. My little sister is content,
lighting fires to dry out centuries of
of mouldy court reports.

Paired, final, before first parenthood.
A six-month calf lodged itself
in the door of the walled garden
and I lacked the courage to pull it free,
The castle's owner,
a mild-mannered Sheffield man
emerged to lead him off
embarrassed at my qualms.


At Walditch

Anna found it
by the dogrose,
heavy with rain.
She’d sprinkled water
on the bird’s corpse,
a life- wearied redwing.
My daughter gave it sorell.
She left when it rained. I saw
flecks on the
window pane where we slept,
man and wife.
Later , we went to the beach,
under the sun’s drug.
Returned,we buried the bird
before she could find it,
and fibbed about its life.
Later, we felt guilty
when she played
in the cemetery
by the church.
She wasn’t kidded,
“God sends another birdie.
If He makes it again,
it’s the same, silly.”
We had slept,
man and wife,
unhappy.
Later, as I watched
the soot-swirled
organon
of the starlings’ moot,
I found,
I could not refute
my daughter’s argument
and wished
for sorrell, rain
and an end to the particular.


At Wells-Next-the Sea

The wild geese lumber in from across the East Hills.
and beach combing children draw back from low -tide pools
Summer's sea spills inshore where a lord once walled
away the maws of a storm's energy and hauled
back meadow grass from marram and sea spit.

He broadened and widened his ancestral view.
His Corsican pinewood grew to the sky’s limit
He wanted a Claude or a Poussin bought
from Albani to catch fire in his engineers’ hands
until at twilight his will was obeyed
in the gold ball he owned as it trailed
a line of light in homage across the creek.

Then death dangled the lord’s rings on his fingerbones.
And the pool silted up under the contradictory mud.
Day after day, less barley carts trundled to the quay,
the spillage of years from a country of golden fields.
In the cottages the wives and children of seamen
paused in the narrow lanes and by walled stairs
to consider the dictating skies, while unstable boats
trawled cold, glistening whelks from the giddy creeks.

Twice the sea hammered, masterless into the grit of the land
Then the fishing failed and the back lanes grew quiet.
The bedstead rooms of fishermen were closed
on wives and love and death and birth.
New mortar healed the breached walls
and the town took on new wariness
to shifts beyond the shore-line of the coast.

And yet the pace of men would quicken
at the sound of the gun fired in urgency.
Even in the graveyard, a coffin would be left,
unburied, while pallbearers ran for the boat
and entered the terrible water
to save any life except their own.
No pictured landscape can claim to own
the sense, or colour of that free price.

At Walsingham

i.m. T.S.Eliot
i.m. Robert Lowell

Your lady stands
on false promontaries.
Why loath the Spirit’s swynk
outside home comforts?
These wracks still drag
to the sleepy rhythms of those
who did not take off their shoes.

Grant me, tellers of dry democracy,
to sing the bitter plaint
that rues the place’s wrongs.
Let me walk barefoot
the remaining mile
and sing the sweetest hymns.

The pattern of the past is now
not in the now of easy sea-death,
not the eternal moment,
but the moment of eternity.

Where your Lady sat becomes
times’ puppet in the sea
of literary gods who feast
on the unknowable fat
of Ahab’s whalebone books.

You hurl torn vines
into the whirlpool of lore
where the flotsam
of drowned patricians
root for academic idols
that profane the Lady’s way.

Calvary's cross still stands
in the rubble of Bethlehem
to bless all blasphemies.

The canopy is large enough
to meet with my true love.

There is no beauty now
no loveliness except
in expectation, no gate
except where gates are none.

Hers is dark beauty, hidden
until the fire is durable,
on the hedgerow and the stream
from which I will not turm
as penitents without our shoes,
we walk this mile together.


At Olney

Past the ragged oaks we drive
in this pre-summer sunlight.
Each is barely green,
like a valid argument
hesitantly expressed.

The town bustles to a boot-sale,
transistors, walkmans and
a local haul of videos
are crowded, glistening
on the creaking boards.

Opposite the car-park
in a tall house
there is a room left
as the poet deserted it,
locked on Sunday.

I can only stare inside
at the still exactitude
of his private voice.
From outside the little world
is silent, deviant, strange.

Yet from within, the vision
asks for the room's text
that passes as the river
spills through the lock
and carries to the church
some craziness
brought into the stalls
to redeem its growth.


Isobar:
Tallow Testaments


Winter Prayer at Midnight, Pantasaph.

The light elves
have quitted the kitchen.
Brown bugs drop down from the shelves.

Darker than twilight,
they come to raid our rights,
then free-fall, stunned by the white

baptismal,
brilliant conti-board,
which cuts down the carapaced horde.

The crass sprites
have packed the air with fear.
Superstition works overtime on nights.

They botch
touch-down, pack the air with fear,
Hardy's doom fly, or Frost's death-watch.

A tungsten-cloak,
by the beacon-bright window
open to dispel my smoke.

which I draw, numb,
as noxious as the thrall
of Frances Thompson's laudanum.

He came here,
once, to dry out his drug
and lost himself in words always unclear.

Clare sleeps upstairs
heeding a lightness,
and a loneliness that scares

my dark-
haired daughter, who might wake
As Alice Meynell came here, to mark

a wakefulness,
as did another who did not
share her view on holiness.

Coventry Patmore,
lyrical, dapper and straight
as trim as a Colonel and as much a bore

Lean and lost,
Baron Corno raked the leaves
from the graveyard under frost.

While distantly
pine trees stack their pliant might
against a sudden gust from the lea

of St Beuno’s
and you, you and you
and you, my girls of the snows.

witness my words
and my prayer, faithful Trinity
that love’s voice still be heard.

It is time
to turn off the light.
I turn to the stair to climb

and tell church grims
to go back to their wells
where only darkness brims.


Earine's Oak, A Fantasy Dreamed by a Whitbread Heiress
Incarcerated in Normansfield Hospital for Being Pregnant.

To shift weight from the arch
to the tendon of my heel
spans the badger's lifetime.
Springs have come and winters
gone by, long since,
while I have stirred
the fibres in my grainy neck.
Time beyond growth,
each season's sap has trickled
its water-clock through my veins.
Each drop becomes a heart-beat,
moments the craving for those
who will come tomorrow.
Yet only hollow days
will come to wind me tighter
in this whitened bole.
How many autumns have shrunk me
since the day my mother
smashed the claret glass?
Whatever hope it was I brought
across the spinney
and took down lanes to Laurel
has long since warped
to dust inside my bones.
I awed to be whole
and graft life to the lustre
of my untaught shape,
yet sobbing, clung to him
in the stupor of infancy.
About my limbs, the xylem
sets apart my gowns.
Wood now shields
my stiff and horny back.
I am become a broken lock
wakened by a useless key.
I am generations of pithy blindness
shut away with simple friends
who know my comfort
in an exacting sloth
of measured loss.
When did the bark beetle stir,
or another's hand fail to rouse
an expectation in my throat?
When did I last turn the lacquered knob
that led into Papa's room?
Can I still see the varnished cases,
Latin words engraved on polished brass?
Can I still remember the names
I used to list for him?
When once I was his only friend
let in to play there.
Hour by hour, as indigo
spattered the starch in his cuffs
with the hue of money.
Then he would pick me up
with promises of milk and curds,
honey from the bees.
All my waking thoughts
which once I nurtured
through the bitter desks
and hungered parsings
of the school room.
I found their tincture,
as early hours touched
the threadbare curtains
of Laurel's lodge
with Pangbourne's dawn.
Then I told him how
my breasts had risen
and his furtive eyes untold my
of nakedness I had not guessed at.
That night I dreamed
of father's prints,of urshins,
Bawson's cubs, Salamis Aethiops,
picking my jackets,
drooling pale spittles of pink
about the bedclothes.
I woke, wished him gone,
loved him and he became
the axe that split me in here,
at the snap of his half-hunter
in the hall as past my dizzy
brothers, I was led out,
while servants were bringing lamps
to the drawing room.
I have no memory, a shadow faded
into the pattern of wood.
Only the cries of birds
now centuries outside, still thrill
the winter silence of my stay.
Yet pain still breathes its day and night.
Hourly the spiricles perspire confinement,
the thrust that summoned every spasm
of my guilty frame in flooding gulps;
my splintered sleep and the pity, ebbing
for my heavy one, whose helpless cries
they bricked off from my touch.
Into the fleece of timber
my carnal shape is flattened
and weft by the batterings
which seasoned me,
winnowed to a solid safety.
Yet, within, I am greatened
by the heartwood mass,
my jaws prized open
in a captive howl.
Yet this place is never still.
Water, or the choaking press
of boughs tell me of animals
nibbling my wounds.
My brain cells breed
with a spanning girth,
my legs with a heavy strength,
grown dense with the hardening rind of age
No-one comes by here
long enough to know
my breasts are suckled ceaselessly
by the biting, silent bole
Forty times and forty times again, my hair
has swaddled my compost child,
for whom my arms are poised in blackness.
Until the day I moisten, crumble,
empty the circle of my arms and fall.
For I am cleased, my stay no longer stales
and I wait for arms to pull me up
and Papa tender for my smile.


A Devonshire House Idyll 1799 :
Still From An Untitled Fiction


"If we are to have a prevailing religion,
let us have one that is cool and indifferent..."
William Lamb to his mother, Lady Melbourne.c.1800


Lady Elizabeth Forster in her silken boudoir,
softened in late winter by the shine of candles
pauses to skim a letter from Lady Melbourne's lad.
“There is nothing to be heard of in this house
but study though there is much idleness.
we did lessons ten hours the first day
nine hours from a lumbering philosopher
a silly stupid Mathematician who tumbles
me out of bed at eight.
Millar himself is a little, jolly dog
and the fellow as sharp as ever I saw.
During the whole of the day we are seldom
out of the house more than one hour.
…All the ladies here are poxed with an itch
for philosophy. William quotes poetry to
them all day, but do not think
he has made an impression.”
The murmering of evening
guests at cards came
from the library in the still air,
“One fellow who had been in France
since the revolution thinks himself
were Plato and Aristotle together.”
William answered the supercilious man
that the fellow knows nothing and thinks
that nobody knows anything anywhere else.”
She turned on her belly
and pulled her legs towards her
to concentrate and muttered. Is that all?
what about these ideas that
the social classes should not mix?
Recalling occasions when
William Lamb had courted her,
followed her, flattered her
and made love to her here.
She took out a paper spill
from her copy of La Nouvelle Heloise.
with the letter addressed to Coppet
on the nonsense of that man, Godwin
about being guided by reason alone.
and began to stratch a note.
There was a knock at the door.

She dashed from the sofa to the consol table
her still vigorous body, youthful,
still pretty in the candlelight
She sat up, the chiffon night-gown
falling from her arms,
her brown hair uncoiling from its pins,
to pull the inverted ‘v’-shape into a ‘u’.
a servant annonced that
William and Frederick
had arrived back from Glasgow.

The woman dressed alone.
Then she sat, her fine features
under shifting light of diamonds,
like a swarm of fireflies.
then, ahead, the brass handle
turned.

Would he stay?

Millars and Godwins,
refuted not on on paper,
but between the sheets.


Home Park
1.
You can imagine it, some sixth-day tapestry,
where a Renaissance Adam nominates creation,
shamelessly, for wild wolves bound at his side,
become a man, a lord, a knight who rides his lands
his liveried servants in embroidered doublets
bark orders to rougher locals who move offpage in tribes,
led by the Saxon dead into the forest margins.

While to the sound of viols a circular dance
kicks off in the ballroom and the sound of dice
rattles from the polished floor of the chapel gallery.
The old palings breached by foul peasants,
the sound of hammer-blows across the fog-bound heath
waken the babies of farm-labourers, or their freehold peers,
while worm-eaten monks process them into the mists.

And the palisade is erected to a clamour of violence.
The oak-beams are jointed and pulleyed to the skies.
Deft architectes, whom the people take for clergymen
deem the walls shall run with a Neo-Classic rectitude.
The way that ways that were habitual history fell into disuse
was not commented on. The court had come to the see the diggers.
shift the Taplow-gravel, draining the springs into the clay,
and the old pumps had run dry and rusted by the years’ end..

By day the smoke of fires had slowed down bird- nesting.
Accustomed to a king's hunt as a feudal grudge,
but not to icy winters without kindle wood,.
Knight’s Templars climbed out of the river
and told them there was fuel in the black marshes.
At night the revelling ladies stopped by the great bed,
threw flowers, the posset was drunk and the sealing
hand shadowed in relief the alabaster map of life
and the estate trembled at new tillage, a legal seeding
driven against dry soil to carry on succession.

In summer under hazy clouds the scaffolding was raised
to sink great posts on to a lockable gate that servants
would share closed and adorned with
the wires of elegant Tissou-fronded swans,
after the dispossessing bustle of carriages upon a grand drive
Though even Monarchs had to wait for the gnarled gardeners
to turn the cold keys on their gate.

This first day was with the school, my guts replete,
with Tizer, damp sandwiches and sherbet fountains.
After awesome corridors of unchanged linen,
we were shown round by weeping Tudor girl-ghosts,
whom we promised we would save.
After the glint of serviced musketry
in corridors of manic,starey portraits,
of whom the cleaner were more dead,
we ran off with the corded ware kids
into the gardens to look at the park
and the clumsy, ancient carp
that could vanish like text-book zeppelins.
A child could feel their force,
as statued adults sensed a dying.

2.
It is morning and a Stuart prince tightens the sash
to state a case for ownership, that the freeholders in
the narrow riverside lanes might breathe on to the panes,
despite the help of threadbare cardinals singing catalogues.
His manicured hand, expensive with knotted rings
strokes the haunches of his bride; this time
to the alloyed clamour of horns and the trained
innocence of Henry Lawe’s choristers.
A produce, a harvest is listed,
owned, preferred and detailed in a secretary’s script.

Cromwell stares out across the deer park
weary with theology, reading Milton
and the need for greater cover.

The great house is lacerated, ditched, be-headed.
Wren talks hurriedly to builders in the Hampton
pub and reaches for a full tankard.
Then pulling on his shoulder takes the carriage
to London, while the courtyards and garden walls
become elaborate and unscaleable, perfect
in proportion, while the knot-garden withers and is
re-planted by an empiricist hand. The palace hunches on
the land and guards the river-a pill-box, primed.

The wet nurses squabble in the fetid bedrooms.
The buxom flowerbeds and orchards blush their colour,
are fenced off again to the loss of a history
of access, which only hanged armies know.
The fearful king cups his hands in farewell
on a Catholic wife who disapproves and crosses herself.
Van Dyke coughs awaiting the king to resume his posture
Bradshaw refuses to allow the king to speak.
The waters are closed in strict circulation,
dangerous new rivers creep to flood unlicensed life,
choking the springs from the land.

A Georgian king leaves his carriage
and addresses a oak tree which
at last says its mind. The palings
have rotted in this damp, alluvial river-bed.
Shoemakers in Hampton
were unwilling to leave the world worse
than they found it in Evelyn or Pepys
and invest in semi-detached suburban houses.

The shoemakers open the passage
for visitors in crowds on Chestnut Sunday,
the Bank holiday special from Upton Park.
Tubercular dads, giddy children
and swaddled nuns, the dispossession is complete.

The group photograph freezes at
the long silence after the V2 purr has stopped.
Even the fishes stop, gudgeon, pope, perch,
roach and tench are still in the tense current:
the old smell death, the young sense power.
While my English teacher discourses loudly
on Petrarch and human destiny
to me and my first girlfriend,
even the painted want to know
where the end will fall.


Isobar

The House On The Island


1.The Road to the Bridge

The sea lay ribbed and chopped by a gusting wind.
The grey furrows planed off by a breeze,
leaving seaspit shavings tossed into the channel currents
and sucked into the under tow.

Over the silent, turf-clad mountains, the cloud banks
glided against the sun, to throw boulder-
shadows onto the moors, that crept slowly across the bay,
casting a dial from old, roundstone houses.

On the shore, shoals of needle mullet fry
sped under bladder-wrack.
A crab scuttled from a crack in the sea bed
to vanish back with its prey,
leaving a cloud of muddy sand
at the clear high-tide.


2. A Call to the Hospital

Scattered across the afternoon sky,
the summer stars were
set to be clear and complete.
A wind had come up from the sea,
that stood to move the clouds.

Maire had gone once into the hospital
in Dublin, her leg with the gangrene.
Joe had gone to phone them:
"Could you send on the leg?"
This was all done far from Bray Head.

Sean drove down to the bridge,
then across to the mainland
He drove up the road to Kilmare;
where the parcel should be found.

A Commer van skidded on the gritty surface.
Eamon O'Boyle rubbed his eyes deep with his
finger and thumb. He never heard the crash.


3. The Quayside.

The sea lay smooth; weed choaked bays
mirrored Betelgeuse, or Bootes
beside moored dingies and yachts.

Dew was gathering in the hair
of the girls going home from the Disco

In the port on the eastern shore,
a trawler lay rotting. Its bridge
and bows, no more than a skeleton,
hulk, the gashes
flashed eerie lights, revealing
the dark glitter of the sea
through their sides.

Ned Blake remembered the rowers
in the seine-boat regatta, leaving the mark
after the shot from the shore.

Six by six the seine boats
once plied their way across the bay.
The crowds had once been big.
Once each town had a boat in.
How many times had he taken the trick?


4. Churchgoing: Morning.

A slow mist had covered
the moorland mountains.
Their peaks
breaking through the haze,
while the cows
still lay below.

At the church porch, tough skinned men
stood cross-armed, packed into the space,
listening to the voice, from within,
pleading devotion to the sacred heart

At the turn of the tide the glassy shrimps,
scudded to pursue the water fleas.
In the channels the dark hulksof mullet
snapped at flies on the weed-glazed surface.

The house wives shook their heads at
the news of the accident.

Bereavement not withstanding,
the rush to the door after
communion was the same.
The men in black suits
stood under the tree
in the churchyard,
while the women walked home.

Doug Callaghan stood immobile,
but erect by the side of the road,
easing his weight onto the sticks
hs gripped with a huge, but palsied hand.

He watched the grey road,
waiting for his lift.

The blue-painted bell on the church hung still
while horses played in the fields by the road.
From the rubbish dump the first wisps
of a fire had begun to drift over the car-park.

The roads were empty.

5. Late Morning, The General Store.

The palm trees and the sallies in the hedgerows
shivered and rocked under a breeze from the west.
In the churchyard, a painted stone showed
the place where the limb should be buried.

Ned Blake's store was empty of ice-cream
and washing powder that Sunday.

The Victorian terrace of old Engineers’ houses,
lorded the mainland channel.

Eamon’s body was brought in at midday
while the church rang out the angelus.

Callagham still stood by the roadside,
while the shadow-line from the barn
crept towards inert boats
and knew it was too late.

At least he could see.


6.Afternoon, the Bridge

Under the bridge, huge swathes of weed
trailed and distended in the glameous depths.

At low tide the crackle of dun-coloured wrack
at intervals across the strand.

Children found the delivery-man
asleep at the wheel in the garage driveway
unable to get off the island.

A thick almost leisurely rumble of thunder
accompanied the flapping, trailing edge
of the cloud's shadow, pointing, then covering
the littered stones of empty bothies
on the empty mountain. From the moor's
heather stains, to creep slowly across
the bay below.


7. The Mountain Road

Pat Kelly, fresh-faced, took a lift with a flick
of his quick thumb from a battered Toyota
on the otherside road,
his football boots crammed
into a torn, plastic bag.

The sun was beginning to throw an orange column
onto the estuary mud, flickering and changing
its form to the curl of the clouds

Doug Callagham stood under the shadow
of the barn, his eyes no longer watching the road

The accident had blocked the main road
during the night hours. No
traffic had been able to move
along the white roads

Fresia and hawthorn dotted the hedgerows.

The rabbits’ white brunts
were barely visible in the dusk.

The Toyota passed Doug Callaghan

“I’m going the other way.”

“Will you take me back? It’s too late now.”

Oyster-catchers and sandpipers
strutted and tapped their beaks
in the iron blue pools
in the rust - red and orange rocks


8.The Mainland

The Toyota was the first car
to get through.
It passed the stream where
the big O'Boyle mansion lay
a huge red rust stain
in the shape of a boat-hut
spread out on the rock beach
nagged the coastline.

On an outcrop. a seal was being
chased by a terrier. Its hollow bark,
echoing against the ruined walls.

On the road the cars were stopping
behind the herd coming in for milking.
The bull's thick red and white, matted hair
highlighted the farmer’s girl’s long
bare legs, as white as celandine stalks.
Her skinny form in calm control.

9.St. Brigid’s Cottages.

The summer stars were scattered in the night;
gull-smashed limpets lay on the gray beach.
The wind from the sea turned colder, tapping
the rattling wires tight to the station reach.

Doug had sat by the window,
wondering if Maire
would ever come back,
his hand trembling as he lit the white surface.
of the firelighter under the crumpled
paper bag and torn soap packet,
turf and dried fuschia
he had piled on the hearth-stone.

He added the kindling
as the fire lit up the room.

Doug remembered the night
of the great storm,
when the mackeral had sheltered in
port, their flourescent gills crowding
the water with dotted lights.

He listened as the priest’s
heavy foot crunched in the path.

He let him in with a brusque gesture

“Another grave to be dug , next to the leg.”

Why did Moira want it next to that eejit?

and the whole house empty now.


Isoline 2

Sure Tremors


Sanctuary

Naked, free and unashamed with the tree
still trembling at such brusque cropping.
Why did that dread Gardener busy
himself so much with your finding ?

Only after the mock trial, speeches sounding odd,
the fitting of prison clothes did tears
begin to roll. Sorry victims of an angry God
just looking for excuses, noting fears

Yet after the expulsion and the rise
of survival notes, the lad returned
alone and measured the bloodied tree for size:
its broken branch, the wounded Word.

Back in that garden now the hand
that will not touch Him, touches land.


Decibar

At the Heart of the Eye.
A Treatise of Light

"Da amantem et sentit quod dico."

A Treatise of Light 1.

A word is within us, awaiting entrance,
while, elsewhere, light falls on our shoulders,
We print each other bare, in thorough trance.

Once, at play in our nakedness, a glance
frosted the page. In a flash our elders
legacy was read. Become shamed lodgers,
we dug earth for our inheritance.

We touch, but never again in winter light.
Mental acts never yield sure payment
to excavate a passage from our plight.

We live, are strong in our fulfillment,
yet never risk a chill, nor feel delight
enough to change that dumb inside, our blight.


A Treatise of Light 2

Sincere, we make love better unaccomplished.
Footballers hear no praise, nor sanction
any thrill, until their goal's established,
but no sure score can rule our union.

Now you stir to prove the need I published.
Yet tactless in my storybook attention,
it is now your nothingness I taste, wished
from concrete flesh to kill abstraction.

Our joy is not an aim so finished,
nor are we bared for one to be sole champion
but, naked, breast no tape, to win no burnished
trophy save a secret say in love's convention.

Your heartbeat burns its image on my mind
and pulls me from the dream, now flame-consigned.


A Treatise of Light 3

Snow-blind to each other's features, so crushed
under low pressure troughs of touch.
Isobar of shifting sensibilities, modal, our trust
lies unstirred. We lie nearer, try to clutch

against that cold light. Whiteness tossed
on the blankets, on the bedroom floor, such
scenes from Flemish winters, evenly embossed
above the curtains. Have we lost so much?

The ceilings blind us. We are only light,
or the shimmer of waves. Its vibration
spins the hazard memory. So, white,

we freeze ourselves into a still creation.
So, cold, we pale into a fall. So, slight,
we cannot stem this flood of inner sight.


A Treasise of Light 4.

We grasp only theory, as an unknown ghost
might haunt in a house, namelessly bearing
unchronicled reference, while uncaring
tourists ignore an immaterial host.
The act forgiven, but the vision lost, we boast
of indexing oblivion to the tale we are sharing.
We hold both sides of the question, pairing
only to conjugate. We part as a contrary signpost
joined in each dream's separate place.
When we seek our ease, in sounder sleep,
eac hdefines the other in one embrace.
To our critics who claim we are a heap,
we answer with our hands that daily trace
the truth; spectres both, we're face to face.


A Treatise of Light 5

We taste for it still, blinding ourselves
from indifference to vision.
Our neighbourhood mornings, smooth on the shelves
white, close, measured with precision.
Each mute moment questions our pallid shells.
Wanting love from your gender, I make petition,
as an envious refugee, whose hope never quells.
Gaudy, sublime, I raise issues without repetition.
Yet, passerines, we needn't go South for kisses.
Winter or Summer, our season is ripe.
We study our instincts of intimate misses.
Our appetites distract us from hype.
We are at one as playing children
will never go home until they're bidden.


A Treatise of Light 6.

What the hour has left of the suddeness
of naked skins, caught in a sure tremor
of touch, is matter enough to remember.
We are tutors to things turned from dryness.

In the ash, warmth still claims its restiveness.
Look to the burns, to the blackened tear
for signs of passion. Tender soot is sear,
for temperate climes, so moist with ripeness.

What did we do, what did we have long ago
in those joyous days whose taste we still thirst?
We will take the day as once it was first.
Times antipodeans whose home is below.

Yet what the day mandates, we could once debate
and what the Lord commands, we could once create.


A Treatise of Light 7.

In the heart of the quick eye, I plead
on the strength of a casual hour.
To the iris of your knowing seed
light leads its rays of power.

Seeking, we savour all our need
as if we kissed all oblivion sour.
Finding, we lose and then succeed
and sleep, unsought in a double bower.

The beams of silent stars,
having an unfixed light
vainly complete with our scars,
in the heart of the night.

We bid on the hand of boundless space
the living risk that is our grace.


A Treatise of Light 8.

Asleep, we pass each other by, as strangers,
but, unaware, we are more proximate.
One in forgetfulness, our angers
turn from each other so insensate;
create a drought whose dust engenders
rest which death alone can imitate

our nakedness and hostage state.
Hoist on Petrarch's tumbril, while for labour
we must turn to one another, consummate.
Apart from perinatal weight, we savour
what binds us to this child not yet incarnate.
We cannot live as one, save through their saviour.
None triumphs in love without a loss,
a blossom written off under first fruit's gloss


A Treatise of Light 9.

A first light filters through flapping lace
within the window frame's fixed white.
Somewhere a bird auditions, keeping pace
yet not taken up, furls again for night.
Beside me in Summer nakedness you grace
my gravity. I claim King Winter's right
to protest your slumber, I kiss your face.
My lips articulate their silent plight.
While passivity strengthens your case,
I smooth the breathing contour of your height.
A pre-dawn gust has stirred your slack embrace,
strokes the down on your bare lips, so slight.

A stronger dawn brings back the songbird,
day and hope in an earth that's deeper stirred.


A Treatise on Light 10

To-day our heroes choak on fictions.
Unsure of our lore, Don Juan wakes to find
he's spurned for being of the doubting kind.
Tristan and partner take safe precautions.

Eloise and Abelard hold joint positions
in a smart city parish, putting out of mind
old celibate vows and bid the chaste unwind.
Jocasta moves in while no-one signs petitions

in a healthy neighbourhood, before her
began, was aborted without obstacle.
Ashamed and clothed, we await admonishing.


A Treasise on Light 11.

I too hate what you fear most,
yet I lie by you unwishing its concealment.
I love that private room, the lost
east wing to which the mind is bidden.

Here the imaged affliction can boast
its worth in tragic entanglements
with the Beast's other self, that ghost
now unhaunting a fictive inheritance.

It pays fees to violence whose host
is love, no guest, but fear's sub-tenant.
You fear the game of dominance

the swearing fists in dream
having as their vow a provenance
of all we have, yet do not own and crave, oblivious.


A Treatise on Light 12.

We sold cheap honesty in hearty sales,
glibly confessed in those easy markets
how our failures were taken up, while gales
of honour greeted our blaring trumpets.

We must have had our depths if all else failed.
We crave the truth to cover where we faked it.
Alone in darkness we wooed the Lord with wails
"Here we are God, come and save us . We deserve it."

Then shame came true and left us breathless
cast into self-regard that gave no face
to face and unguessed hollow, a speciousness.
What dragged us into this floodlit place?

What did You touch that something false should cease,
that love should have so sure, such small increase?


Treatise on Light 13.

We blind ourselves with vision, yet starve esteem.
As famine can be worse for storing grain.
Despair sits out our proper love. We drain,
ourselves down, as drought by a bore-hole scheme,
might be assuaged. Should we plumb depths that seem
to promise moisture ? So why do we refrain
from tender talk of our love's past domain?
Time should feed our hunger, flesh the dream.

Love looks for ecstasy and, remembered,
keeps its focus, but stacked hours still bleed grief.
History is a snailshell kept afterward
to show pain stolen by a timeshare thief.
Truth connects truth, even though dismembered,
as dry beds quicken under rain's relief.


Treatise on Light 14


A word is within us awaiting entrance
yet, we make love better unaccomplished,
snow-blind to our features. So abolished,
we grasp theory, as unknown ghosts entrance
our taste for pleasure, still, blinding our chance.
What the hour left of suddeness, finished
in the heart, the quick eye has demolished.
Asleep we pass each other by in trance;
until first light filters through flapping lace
and heroes choke on fiction's subtle boast
I too hate that routine thrill you fear most.
We sell cheap honesty in hearty solace
and blind ourselves out, till its deafening ,
yet a new word is within us, awaiting.


Isobar
Music for Cocteau's Belle et la Bête


1.Overture; The archery contest.

The muscled arm bends to tauten
the scope of a sinew, to release
the power of naked skin aroused again
that the bolt find its lease and yet the force
is yielded to tenderness, is deflected
from the loved one. Those whose care
ease the passage of a message,
though wordless, to its hearer.
The message lives the truth
of ecstasies. She, beauty,
always more precise,
her reactions quicker to match,
or steal, the lover’s restlessness,
seizes him and keep him from sleep.


2. The Sisters Go to the Concert. Fugue

The house is staked out. Its ghosts are rumbled
by agent intellects whose fanatic
hearts would convert phantoms to a humbled
light.With invites in hand the sisters walk the antique
maze and tear out unblessed thought. Now jumbled
fear blinds their hearts and frosts their climacteric.
The tender dance-cards chill and the crumbled
hour evaporates in work's hissed static.
The brothers of birth wear health-care crutches,
led out to vans by Hitchcock-maddened birds
and subconscious chimaeras fled from hutches.
Their procreation blown, beauty stumbles outwards
to the echo of flashbulbs, fine touches,
showing the world's last lovers to the nerds.

3. The Merchant’s Visit, the Beast dreams of Beauty: passacaglia.

You tell me what I am. I dream you.
Image of ravaged loveliness, my blasphemy.
You ask who I am. I hate you.
Overrun, abolished, or stored in alchemy,
that abstract sense is still retrieved anew
to love: plastic, one, sublime and holy
while crossly I lumber in, to view
fanatic shrines of awesome veniality.

Half a lifetime's consent, sharing in dreams
training hourly on love’s rhetoric
has limbered me up for schemes
of such dynamics, studied, lethargic,
that I cannot be distinguished more
Chaos is my habit and love, my lore.


4. First Fruits.The Merchant in the Dark Forest, Adagio

Lethe-wards, time’s plucked fruits,
we cannot live up to each other
on our own, as a favour that suits.
We cannot breathe as one. Shan’t bother
to hold each other’s personhood aloft.
Age carries, skin to skin, like rot.
Times sweet odours make us soft.
It’s better to be lost than be forgot.


5. The Castle at Night: largo

The house is rancous with left-overs:
spent sticker-backs and torn toy-boxes,
with out-lived roles as classroom movers;
those delicate toys, snapped Goldilockses
crushed under adult shoes, blind in the dark.
Junked dust-jackets give mute assent
to titles lost, or stolen, since the ark,
spineless images and the opulent,
chrome cages of birthday creatures
dead, escaped or otherwise dispatched.
Our messy livelihood will yet endure
like a thrilling record-cover detached,
from memory’s dust, that like manure,
wedges dully in grooves, deep scratched..

6. The Statues, minuet: Ante Lucem

Daylight breathes in the dusty warehouse
of our bedroom while we keep this
secret hour before the seizure of
our private lives by stupid business.
There is so little time, save for rough
tactics, such as, when whole towns are flooded,
the undrowned, cherish random household items,
and carry them up to higher, dryer ground,
while unremembered valuables are soaked,
currency mashed up and cash-tills soaped
to flush in the flash tides.
What have we brought
for pleasure, now dawn seeps in on peace we hoard?
Have we time to sort the rubbish from what counts?
You sleep so deliberately, it seems
to cancel the lessening of our lives that
minutes witness to and opportunity ducks down.
Where could we have gone? What could we have done?
What husk was ours that we should end up here,
strangers to our own credentials, pure forgers
of our lives? We are hardened to hard routines.
To see our own futility disgraces
self-esteem, that traitor confidence
we need to conduct our own trial
before the bonehead tribunal of work.
Were they so wrong, those grave dissenters,
who closed down concerts and the theatre,
like statued hands pulling curtains
from the stage to intimidate the crowd?
Images drug our craving to be real,
but elsewhere, always a cruel front-line,
stops us reaching idiot, raw reality
which all our fictions serve to stimulate.
Even the body’s pleasure stings,
with random, sensual flotsam,
rescued from the drowning hour
until daylight rises, in which we make to live.

7. The Merchant Returns, Gavotte.

You only hope, or sleep.
The cost of your futures
yields no concrete return.
Visits to expensive houses,
that intimate closeness
to the wealth sensation,
can still provoke pain:
our own children playing
on the long, slow, green lawns,
clattering through summer
corridors of empty
mansions and the estate
agent impatient to
leave, having learnt our place
in the well-known world. is
unsellable. Or the
sale of glossy tourist
highs, where we found ourselves
starvelings in a big, strong
picture-book world shining
of the high places’ cult.
Where had we been? Elsewhere
Is not that smiling, play?
Where we found it ourselves.
Sometimes is the tenor
of heart. I place my hand
on fleeting certainties;
your slept head, half-hidden
in the pillowed darkness
of this warm night, where, lost,
we lose hold, gaining loss.

8. Family Quarrel, Nativity: Badinage

Lying in on holiday, we listen
for alarms to prove our comfort to-day.
Distant observers, but unbeholden,
we look for frostlight to preview love's stay.
Inattentive, we hoard imperfection.
To come round takes account of past replay:
the gravity of pleasure's disproportion,
unequal to its task. It is Christmas Day.
This time the fragile feast of new-creating
comes by again, without a passionate snow,
or stable-scenes to discount heart-searching.
The house lurches with friends, who will not go.
We rise, rowdy with a peace that re-enacts
through Him, our prefixed, unaffected climax.

9. A Dawn Ride to the Castle. Landler,

First light filters through the trailing lace,
in front of the window frame's fixed pallor
through vibratile curtains winds twist
before the day’s fixed white.
Somewhere a bird auditions for some list
and, uncalled, stops and furls again for night.

Beside me, you sleep in summer-nakedness.
My wakefulness becomes King Winter,
to your cute slumber.
My lips articulate an empty thrall,
while passiveness has stilled
the high leafage of your squall,
a pre-dawn gust
shakes the slack veil,
stirs the down on your midriff,
and rougueish, you move
to the full fanfares.
Blackbird and the muted sunlight
tighten your grasp
on my less-cold
hand, to assert its hold,
and pluck a snow drop
for your flower-laced heart.


10.Beauty’s Entry to the Beast’s Palace: duet

Our bodies lie in naked silence,
that meditation of the skin.
Light, a historical novelist,
warms us, then in near-sleep,
gives in to autobiography.
Your absence clothes me,
as the past has clothed me.

I am a razor-sharp Titto Gobbi.
Shocks from the real will reveal
us in the sudden coma,
to each curer, or carer.
Your voice is Rosa Ponselle
“Vocal gold, with luscious
lower and middle tones
dark, rich and ductile.”
and Callas “brilliant in
the upper register.”
I think of you as Norma,
or the time when you liked to run,
or swim, that unheld effort
with others there too,
despite its being only you.
La Traviata, your graphic image,
that modelled silence,
or La Gioconda,
in juristic shame
all hubris, strip-searched:
a vagrant, you now arrive,
cleaned up.

I will be silent now.
Speech is a second-hand clothing
nakedness, a natural chaos.
Singing the Don, Elvira,
my hands pace outside.
as Ernani, I kiss you
and force you to wake,
Arturo unites us,
taking the best of the roses
without encore.

11. The Mirror: Fugue

The blunt dart, that hisses from stopped rage
on the shaft of a creaking bow
thuds into the aortal root of the rose tree.
Loveless woman, you pray by altars of chique.
You look into my eyes while I feign the idiot
and smile at this sleep-worn man.
Out of a thousand, out of the crowd of fakes,
I place my hand against your stony ice
to segregate this purblind loveliness
this was the heart that gave out blood
Who can wound iron valves?
and yet it enters there to dissent in the
office of distainfulness.
A tender girl inexperienced in the heart's betrayal
would not suffer a love so great.
and so you turn, tied to a wound
that melts your honey from
from your baring, back to your birth, the
ties that hold you are your own instincts
a thousand knots wound about your past.

12. The Swoon: Sarabande

Caught in love, my instintictual
arm and wrist rising to the
stimulus of a mobile force.
Hand speaks to eye as its skin
touches your shoulder.
You are clothed, as your perfume
edges the air.
I render your nakedness figurative,
an abstract created from your closeness
as silence closes on silence and water
moulds with water. You are personhood
all relation, no creature apart.


13. The Return to the Chamber, Chorus

Reachable, I kiss you to feel that saline
taste of tears, your face full of humour
and that self-conscious half pout on your lips.
It is your willed arousal that summons ecstasy.
The tread of a dancer in sensuous virtue,
or the tap of a wooden stick against
a stern drum head, that swelling
resonance so capable, so dangerous.

14. The Beast’s Kiss: Toccata

Why am I here a maker of sounds?
I lift you from fabric as the first harp
laid aside to give birth to the virginal.
Pliancy, now plucked and accurate,
shapes a toccata. We discover instinct
is sharper than reason.

15. The First Conversation at Dinner: Duet

Dialogue becomes an argument,
a clavichord and the silence
become hispid with our breath,
as the darkness claims the snow.
Now on the frost sheets,
my figured bass still reaches for precision
as a mass of riotous hair in your frontage
can still be shaped precisely.


16. The First Request to Return: Fanfare

That summoning view of the
merchant ship under slow sail
in the harbour:old
prints of esturary towns,
low countries Hanseatic.
I know you will not return.

17. The Evening Visits: Nachtlied

Warehouses foreshadow exploitation.
yet it is the pilot boat that guides us.
Your pleasure anticipates the river
bore as a boat keeps abreast of its waves.
this we have parlayed and yet
the empowerment is still in the
assertion of a need I howled for first.

When you come into my castle
I expect you to be haunted
only by my ghost.

18. The Questions at Night: Chaconne

We are exposed, a felonous,
barebacked complicity.
What is nudity ?A word reserved
for danger and.exposure.
You a culprit to my colonial
dominance, confronting need.
We arrive at love’s Botany Bay ,
exploiting its disclaim our figures shared
in darkness, pretending it is home.

19. The Quest in the Corridors: Voluntary

My forcefulness grows unsure,
an idiot thumping on the keys of a
Bechstein drawing a tense tremour
in your viol space. Strung with sinews,
we twist, unsure, concealing preferences.
You lift your frame to counter my
heaviness of inherited weight.
Unsure, you cover yourself against a
ghostly cold, an imagined climate.
Beauty revealed in servility is like love
stolen, with only the case,
left for the first person,
“s” hisses away, the fabled snake,
already lost.

20. The farewell with Smoking Hands: Nocturne.

That tutting with your quick movement of the nape.
I settle for secrecy. A hidden naturalist,
waiting to best observe love’s calm ecology.
Only the burning can expose me.
When love’s contours are wide apart,
the gradient is slight. I will let you go
to re-inhabit my lonely mind.

21. The Beast Inquires of the Mirror ,Toccata

You cannot be undiscovered
at every expedition.
Our world has rounded on its self
and all projections read the same surface.
Desire speaks as a vulnerable hand
reaching for the thread in the labyrinth
of our pleasure-making,
leading Orpheus from the rear.
And yet we berth here.
Again so familiar,
now in this landscape.
Femality,
the formal assertion
of your sex, does not mimic
the patriarchy of the beasts.


22. The Guiltiness of the Beasts’ Burden: Bourrée

Soon the tide will turn
and we will drift apart
the packet boat lost to
the harbour in a printed storm .
You stand trim and alert by the
trammels of vacuous violence;
like the slave rings
you showed me once on
the harbour front at Liverpool,
or moody on the Riva dei Schiavi in Venice,
or dusty, dessicated
woodwork screens
in the Topkapi harem
were we walked
looking for a place
to be alone from our guide.

Somewhere
on the shelves of memory
a broken touch tokens
a ritornello.

23. The Sickness of the Beast: Andante.

You guide the prow towards
that delicate seafront and the
clumsy dreadnought
glides into the lock to rise
with your encircling power.
Our fire, our transportation
become virtuoso
flight a above the storms
so equal in time.
Our wings burn in duple measure,
where the time cannot be divided,
written on the bar.
We cry, as if in fear of grief.
New creatures in concert with our joy.


24. Beauty’s Return: In nomine

I love you as the empty flute
thrills to a silent breath.
I love as precious metal flows
firey from the smelting works
to the mould.
A case of brittle steel
broken open to reveal
the fixed form of cherishing
persuasive personhood.
To seek you is to understand
I have found you.
To find you, know
I hold nothing here
that breathing moist
with sweat and folly
does not already assert.
Its distance, its equal dignity
re-invents a partnership
of pleasure each time.
I love you in the
name of a theorist
unfolding a discovery,
or a homecomer
extinguishing the light
that led him to his door.


25. In the Bedroom: Serenade, idee fixe:

Outside hoar-misted windows,
the children search what they can
from winter's codicil snows
to make a remnant snowman.

Once a harvest of cold grain,
missiles, heedless of hurt, and slides
had spoiled that pure damask.
Now in shredded lace, age hides.

We lie within, ill at ease
to love's hazard offerings.
The children guard what they've seized
from daylight's threat returning.
I touch your thigh. Re-gatherers of taste,
why should not new tenderness make haste?

26. Discourse on the Terrace :Gigue

Beauty is always of the body.
Pythagoreans divide your time
and teach you day and night
divide your pitch
into shadow and light
that doubles and distances
the harmony.
To ascend into your high glare
of sound is always tense.
Strength, force and weight
divide from your shape
and silence is broken
by distant, whispered chaos. .
The sophists counter your skin
and dress you in the body’s rhetoric,
of personal hours.
Plato withdraws your perfect body
from the crowd, led by blind Eros.
You are Kalos, “of whom all men
seek the reality"

To show you in the Western theatres
Plotinust the ringmaster sets up
his shadowplay of minutes.
While bound, bent Aristotle
follows on in the triumph of love.
and curses the seconds
of the Golden Mean, that tragedy
depend on our character.


27. The Beasts’Flocks Come to Drink

Once a monster of man and mind
of anima and animosity
had ravaged our pure domain.
Now the border’s open .
that fearful exiles might drink
again from their home trough.

28. Beauty Hides as a Statue. Folk Dance.

On the measured wall, a broad-shouldered
girl, never before so naked, live, inward,
in the light erasure of a pencil sketch.
A charcoal line of dancers sways to stretch
sardanas on the paper afternoon.

Outside, a square is laid out, opportune,
with wooden benches, coloured paper flags,
crepe, poster-paint scenery and circus-tags.
Now the driving rain charges the gutters.
Little grey lizards skulk under shutters.
My children witness the unmasking of clowns,
swollen sawdust and rain-torn, cardboard crowns.
The acrobats have run to save their uniforms.
Only the war memorial conforms,
a young wife fused to a granite plinth.
Greasepaint runs red from the make-up lint,
yet, as we watch, the rain keeps spinning
a mist of lace on the widow's fixed mourning,
splashing white and crystal upon bygones
throwing from all sides of her robe of bronze,
a lithe, scudding bridal veil of water
Though caravans are shut, rain will not leave her.
The last paint souses through the drain's choaked grid,
yet sequins of pure gauze flare,so lively, so vibrant, liquid
jugglers that swerve and stagger about the death-girl.
My children dance around her drenching swirl,
duck her showery life and shriek with joy
She misleads them like a wilful tomboy

Then we remember the young statue's face
and return to the Art Gallery,
and to the sketch, to that inside place.

29. In the Temple: Adagio


In the museé, space has shelved time.
Those framed dreams by Maillol,
have given nothing to chance
and make beauty in her own universe,
her matronal privacy recreated,
elsewhere in the sharp light
of a pencil sketch,
the arrow of love’s delight

30.The Sisters Expose the Prince as a False Magician; polka:

This seedy magician comes on stage.
Beside him you curtsey in lithe homage.
You flash those gilded, sequinned tights
that radiate allure before the lights.
Spots halo your lamé charm so brilliant;
the conjuror's suited assistant.
The youngest of a cell of nine,
show-biz people from an exiled line
Expelled from your convent for kissing at Mass,
you lived on the streets of Montparnasse.
The audience, we fix on your donain,
losing hold of what we held mundane.
Carnations and flappign love-birds
burst from screwn paper and words.
Then you stand concealed to copy down
some random text from critics of renown
to palm it into a secret, sugered well
for him to steal, inspired, and to fortell.
Grace's destined urn is naturally switched
to force a trick on the profane bewitched.
Those knots of reason fall away for art.
The trick is measured, part for part.
Beast’s moral style and universla law
put you beneath his transcendental saw.
The master sweats and stamps and twirls his wand.
Yet all eyes turn to you, the sight beyond.
His poem is the set -up, not the trick.
You vanish in his hollow box so slick.
A viewless, doorless versifier , a penetralia
which you have made your place, Thalia.
You bare your heart to the thrust of knives
yet Beast’s aim falls short, his eye contrives
to scan our pit and puts you away, chaste,
enclosed, purely Platonic. Yet, bare-faced,
to-day, you claim your liberation.
He opens on an empty machination.
Seemingly confused, he searches the crowd
and finds a flirt and calls her out loud.
To a drumroll and a cymbal clash;
his planted lover in a crimson sash
is summoned loudly upwards, to be applauded;
she is yourself; you replicated.
While you re-appear, the blushful tearful chick
we start to applaud first thinking it a sucker trick.
Every conjuror creates his muse,
stagestruck, she stillls the gallery's boos
Stabbed in the dark, hers, the red heartacke,
a fool's fake ace crimped for the break.
He leaves you clearing a blacked-out stage
of paper, magic book and futile rage.

30.The Beast and Beauty Escape: Nautilus Chamber Music

Sea-shell century, each chamber of waste
seals a dry decade in nacreous shame.
The dead implore us from airless cavities
through sutured testaments
that we forgive their impasses.
While in the body's whorl
we graze on the minute's detritus
Each verse and response
of the drying tide
alerts us to seek darker crevices,
making survival a form of commitment.
Peace at low water
exposes our rasping speech.
Fixed definition
distributes the littoral feed
which we analyse through flexible snouts.
whose wastage thickens
the columellar management
that orders our slug-heart happiness.
We live as smoothly as we like
permanently attached to worn surfaces.
While, symbols of fertility,
we scatter shelless young
seek to be wound immortally against
the vicious spiral of boom and collapse
that weaves the spindle - shaft of wealth.
Snd on the splash zone, glaucously mortal.
we strain our last salt-spit,
listening for voices
that sing the galaxy
to turn to us perhaps, though
disappointment could hardens
the taste of tears into a chiton mask,
filling our empty depths with the musty whisper
of the shore's regress.

31.The Sister’s Watch their Finery Turn to Dust.

Just any common wastland
where vile antics and fake saints
twang and trapse in a seedy band,
crazier yet behind their eerie paints

They shriek, a minor theme in major key
'how love pleads and life is luckless.
They don't give a damn about hilarity
another rancous chant wind’s darkness

In the dusky noonshine
The birds have no time for dreams
and the fountains continue to whine
an ecstasy of cold marble seams.

32 The New Prince’s Love Song:Canzone

If I told you without lies
the sygmoid curve
of your smooth thighs
moves me to serve
each whim in your eyes,
You would only swerve
away in surprise,
or lose your nerve
and blink at their size

If I told you without guile
the cardioid roll
of your quick smile
pulls to the pole
my passion’s dial
you would only say you stole
if from a poster’s style,
or lose it to control
my words, become a trial.

If I told you without hope
that for the cycle of your breasts.
I have become your perfect dope,
you would tell me I'm obsessed
with anything that's got my slope,
or mutter you should've guessed
I’d find excuse to grope,
beside they won't be messed.
It's time you learned to cope

If I told you that with no attire
the parable of your shape
has for its moral something higher,
you would only play the ape
and fidget the electric fire.
or rubbish hyperbole and gape
at such absurdity. I'm a liar
though, I made the jape
to enter your ellipses with desire.

33.The First Sister Leaves the Prince’s House: Scherzo

...et fraude visam agere sua ipsam
peremptom [esse] mercede

Titi Livi, Ab Urbe Conditur I.X.1.9.

In Post-War night, to liberate not slaughter,
a Governor's seige-skinny daughter
climbs the man-made door to shift its cold steel bolt.
Silently it opens, without a single jolt.
Blue-stockinged, a consecrated virgin
with fair hair bobbed to her temple's margin,
she sways on the portal. Her camouflaging cloak
sails flexible to hardened ground, a broken yoke.
Her shift's white brilliance lays bare her sex
and treachery. Softer than her fear expects,
the Sabines' bare-sheathed pace of entry
exites in her a greater glamour than desultory
copper coils, bracelets from the Sabines' quarters.
She finds an alibi in fetching sacred waters,
leaps down to take the bowl in front of armoured men,
who jeer, "So you betrayed your own for our love then?"
which spurs her to charge the bargained toll
for entry to her father's Capitol
to get their stolen women back at mortal risk.
"Give me what you now carry on your arms. Be brisk."
She turns and shouts to the sleeping city,
"Look they are defenceless. Have no pity!"
With a Sabine cynicism, the men hurl their shields
coils, and sheaths, at her unsuspecting form that yields.
Below the brutal weight of war's protections
and under piled progesterone precautions.

34. The Sisters Turn into Hags ; Fugue

Flared nostrils, tough warts, a rouge
of roughened skin, thick hair and brows.
They are beauties by subterfugue
that minute difference between the vows
yielded by design become unvulnerably huge
and therefore harsh. Permanence, too, cows
shapeliness that must be vulnerable, a stooge
freshnessness that makes no transitory wows,
that breaks out in a field of warts, Scrooge-
cable hair and a bulbous face, that allows
they are monsters, simplicter, a smoodge
beauty in taste’s exile, or statelessness that bows
to the contentedness of passport-carrying fraus
that worsens the scandal as the story cow-tows.

37. Beauty Finds the Beast on the Beach of Love: salsa

Everyone here has as new shape to cut,
another profile to throw against
the sun, to squeeze unyeilding
gut into new contours of naked fun.
The work-injured newcomers put aside caution
to unpeel a guilty white scum, while
confessing devotion to a grape-nut,
once their angels of lightness should beckon
them unto the sands and the beach hut.

As melanin images thicken
lascivious brown searing down
despite the shade of pines .
legs, shoulders and flanks
reaveal their confidences
in the inquisitive heat.
While friendship makes the heart light,
laughter and beach songs
rouse the exhausted through the night.

Yet here everything rides to the horizon.
A motor boat crosses the afternoon sun
and its rays pick out the deck-struts
to pour through the heavy witness of the glass
and pose such a bare skeleton to the meridian.
The children on the diving platform
are melted to distant maquettes,
while their laughter fades to the thin edge,
a sharply grown silence, backed by breeze:
our peelings elves mock their escapers.
Everything in you is ground to the bone,
to the distilled white of the museum,
smelling of spirit and beastly ozone.

38. The Rejected Prince Remembers Beauty:capriccio

Wrapped in a fifties overcoat,
dark-haired and pale, a war-child,
the finisher of other children's games,
you are leaving your friends
in the wet, empty silence
of an orphanage garden,
for a mother you know you must love.

They have cut your dark hair short,
wrapped in a gaberdine overcoat.

I am talking to you
the night of your school review,
a skit on Hamlet....Backstage
you exchange stage-hand denims
for Gertrude's brown taffeta,
to swap text, for text,
bare, back-spacing.
You tell me not to look
and do not know if I do.

She is probably somewhere now,
wanting to know if I did.


39. The False Prince Releases Beauty: Lament

It’s time I let you go home,
now my wintery downpour
swells and floods this loam.
Love's form becomes an eyesore,
shows up my balding bone.

What use was I to you
or the rooms I put you in?
While in pop boudoirs, too
you starved your body thin.
Go, chess piece, who
checked the winter king.

40. Beauty and The Beast in Love: Adagio asai.

In the body’s silence, stripped of words,
a muteness, as if we were alone
to ready ourselves for dress.
Wolf-wild, worn -wise, we regret comfort:
the pelt unpeeled, the appeal unfelt,
under the arc-lights of gender,
we are what we dreamed,
what we forgot ,what we were not.
Athletes strip too, to break the bounds
that space contains. Lovers are naked
to contest memory.Our tongues are weary
of fabled ecstasy. Life searches you
more keenly than any guard:
the people more unfathoming in joy
than earnestness.


Isobar:Charred Voices


Music for Schools

Silence after a bruised and shaming break,
back in the soggy safety of straws and sweat
and I sat in fear, feeling my fingers ache
from stubborn writing I could not get.
Air- tongues rasped of Salzburg, "but first let's make
a treble clef." Then Mozart's sang from the set,
Molto Allegro; breaking through awake
as if I were alone. Crackling voices snapped to upset
my fun. "Write down each note as I sing it. Take
turns to check your partner's work." Mine was wrong yet
my bullies did it all with no mistake.
as if to day, "We can do this too, you dozy wet!"
I broke my pencil. My hand began to shake,
bruised to learn that runts louse up in all they get.


The Raising

Once as a child his coat was put on him
and he was taken out,
Away from the torpor of indoor safety.
They started to walk
and he straining on ahead, alive, pulled them
onwards to sights
his parents had known every day in this place,
but still wanting to go
to master the customs of streets, broken objects
and the accents of space.
A purpose spoke from all those artifacts.
Behind every touch
his vocation droned too loud to need the Word.

Prone, he heard no voice from outside the heavy house
his clay lay stored in.
Long ago the breathless mound of remaindered
muscle, tendons, flesh,
when it last moved, had still forgotten the goal
of that infant walk.
Only the tread had never ended. His dispossession
was the common loss,
was his ear's death to sound, his eye's to sight
the death of touch in the skin
were they all behind it, plotting
to bring the man
to pine for the place where he never was?


The Day of the Innocents

To think of one as small and as silent as her, why?
Why do I think of the classroom, where Annie would be brought?

She would wait outside the door,
not even touching the buttons of her coat
until a person in a hurry met those sharp, blue eyes
and took her hands to them one by one.
After this her teachers
couldn't find the words to say
what she would have done, had no-one been there
to stop her shredding every page she found
to stop her breaking every plastic shape,
before those sparkling eyes.

Why do I remember the tears
when her mother's came into the room alone?
And then the doctors frantic with failure
beating her tiny chest and driving breath
into those greying lips
to raise her slackened lungs

After the panic of the wrong ambulance crew
after the urgent uselessness of autopsies,
you'd think she hadn't left the place at all,
as she had come so barely.
It took ten years to teach her
her mother’s name and the name
her mother once named her.

Because there is nothing to remember,
I have learned to remember nothing.


A Middlesborough Quincunx.

Once, he heard children's voices from the Asylum.
Alone, in the yard one Christmas.
They were placeless, in bedtime riot,
The same as their own,
but eerily elsewhere, out in the night.

In the park a deep stream flowed dark,
under an ornate bridge.
Yet only the white swan could play there.
In the museum, a panther glowered,
ebony and ivory inside a glass case.

From his window, even under distant rain,
he could see the Cook memorial.
In the Thornley-Walkers’ car, he passed it,
a sunlit pin above the moors,
crowning the Cleveland tapistry.

At school, he loathed the strident care of nuns.
He puzzled at the prayer-worn picture
of a solemn child with wounded hands and feet.
While the holy family smiled officially.
Low tide exposed the yellow ribs of rotting barges.

Another night he heard beasts bellow of murder.
A fire was fraying the Asylum farm.
Its virile violence tearing at the night.
Smelling charred voices,
he dreamt of a ruined place, haunted, on the hills.


The Museum in the Snow.

Once still snow fell on the museum grounds.
We tramped Clark's shoeprints to the doorway,
mimicking its fiction of sculptured fossils.
The main hall was a railway station,
but a cathedral too, with animal saints.
Studious drones hymned the argument by Design,
while Paley and Owen checked their watches
for the coming of naked, hairless man.

There was a battered case of humming birds
whose peeling paint we always recongnised.
The snow outside the leaded windows,
on petrified trees in the muffled park,
threw chastened light onto its chilly glass
and enlivened their frozen, time-vacuumed flight.
A hawk's head was reflected in the pane.
I thought real fear stared for a moment
from those tiny eyes of brittle glass.

We ran off then upstairs, past dust-grimed walls
to find a fixed lesson of framed flowers
faded to crushed purple or fainter crimson.
There all was paper-dry, or had a thirsty stem.
Through another door we saw fat fishes,
devoutly drink insipid immortality
in pure, transparent, sealed up jars,
but teachers pulled us from the Spirit house.

We met blind children, punching Braille
and touching the elephant's hairy skin
until the guard called, "Don't touch. Don't touch, there!"
The books they had were heavy with cleverness.


Revisiting

I look through
classroom panes
as children cuss
at rugby
on the mist-
sodden field.

School gave no
prizes for
tenderness,
as giving
trees a name
means rubbing
barks, unless
someone hads
the time to
wait for leaves.

Who could name
such striplings
from their pith?
Ours is a time
of brittle bark
and leaves
forbidden
to fall.


Centobar:

Working Back


In The Avici Hells


From dark to dark the truck years flash
beneath the minute's yardlight.
Age trundles its commerce
down Derv-stained tarmac where tracks fire
from axon into axon, its reflective image.
We spend our passion in the climb for peaks
which are unreachable in sensuous light.
Sodium days pale from yellow to poster-red,
while shame's throwaway razors shrive our throats.
of contingent growth. Day by day we enter
the Western doorway, looking for where the heat is,
conventionally ablaze. Careering,
we look for openings in the inner heaven.
We arrive there and they close.
The pens of correction rain down red
on the white sheets of examinable space.
to emasculate sorrow into silence and print
a view, a life, a number, a place.
Elsewhere, the wooden Arhats smile their
perfunctory sublime, knowing we are too heavy to burn.
our flames flare up from failure's wastage
as desire undoes our ecstasy to re-emerge in pain.
We run ahead to get back from getting out;
which is all a question of the right way,
of getting the words to the conning-tower right,
of telling street lights from runways in the dark.
Lungs persist in the fire and breath takes strength
fro mfurnaces. Words never make an end of anything.
and cannot help us down to earth in this air-bus.
We wake to find ourselves in charge of . Can lifetime's
searchlights finger our space in the skies? Do we throttle
back to deliver what will merely be the next near-miss?


Adam's Prayer

Under his own shadow,
landforms cool of that clamouring light.

Your form again in the hospital wards,
darkness cast on an empty bed.

He envied the stones their silence.
He watched their surfaces for breath.

Angular, a sleeping child
is caught in the door's narrowing ray.

He felt first pain winnowing his blood
mocking a mute perfection with strange thirst.

A pink doll falls suddenly from a shelf
to the stopped concern of encroaching staff.

He roared, enraged and passage-birds
flew into the white air with clanging panic.

Light seethes behind the blind
picking out an unhungering bulk
in your once-personal shape.


Aisling's Dolls

Dumped bathmates, her dense-bodied babies lie
in dull speechlessness, the hue of mustard.
Their fleecy, nylon hairdos stranded on dry
enamel snow. Those brows unpuckered
by concern solid ears that do not try
to listen. As if buffed eyes ever stirred
to seek out a first designer or high
purposiveness. They are uncalled, unfestered
by God. Their pert eyelids cannot cry
even for dud hopes. In their void, we're absurd,
have minds, hands, choice and sense and yet defy
our nullity and hunger to be heard.
Images of God, even in sleep, they do not lie.
not to endure, yet to be sure, they do not die.


Working Back

I go through routines of closure;
the language of endings, suffixing the day
with the plural of habit, the regret
of past tense, or a gerund reprieve,
from being a button
at the fingertip of another's ambition.
I switch off those inaccessible lights,
by arguing back the logic of flexes
until I fumble for the sockets
in the dark. - like a childhood memory
of the T.V., stereo and processor
back to the one power point,
to disable some nameless danger
behind the sense's technic reach.
Now it is dark; stetching to pull down the window
I see boughs sway. Branches trace back
to the centre where the wind probes
for some future unrooting.
I think back to the time when hope was
a little child, his precious toy destroyed at school
returning tearfully home to his dad
for some magic repair.


Isobar:

Pastoral Landscapes after a Storm


On the Ox's Back.

An hour before the chief wife's
baby boy was born, a perfect white ox
was calved. Mwene said he would call
the ox ,Ubongopa, and place the boy on its back.

1. Mwene

The boy's was named Kamaga
and he grew up on the ox's back,
indifferent to nights,
when the water became ice,
and guarded his father's kraal.

Each day he said;

'Wake up Ubongopa.'
The sun has risen up
into the morning skies.”

And when it
rose with the boy
on its back Kamaga said;

“Let us go out now
it is time to start
Tell all the cattle
that understand
how new the day is
and how sweet the grass is
with the fresh day’s dew.”

Obongopa bellowed; the cattle staggered to gorge
the pastureland until the late afternoonThen Kamaga said;

“Let us go back to the kraal.
The sun is sinking down
Seen the leopard slinks
sharp is its hunger
eager its instinct to fight
Through the tall grass he silently stalks
come everyone, its time for our dreams
it is time for our sleep.”

And the cattle went back to the kraal,
while the sun began to sleep, unfolding
a huge red blanket across the wide sky
and a the gates closed, Kamago
ate his supper on Ubongopa's back
while the early stars upon hled in the sky
and said:

Go to sleep now, my herd
Go to sleep until the dawnlight
is woken by the morning rooster's call.
In the cold night the dew begins to fall.
At daybreak, sweet grass will call.

So Kamago grew into manhood

2. Mtetwa

One moonless night, men broke into the kraal,
to drive out the cattle with thin lances,
but the cattle did not stir for four nights.
on the fifth they tied a lit bundle
of sticks to their tails
but still the cattle did not wake up
while the western instruments shattered in the men’s hands.

On the sixth night the same thing happened,
but each kept a flintlock intact.
Kamaga heard their leader whisper.
The boy on the ox is the one who has done this
and they brought their flintlocks near
and said 'Tell the cattle to move or you'll
die on that white ox of yours”
Kamago slowly spoke;

“Let us go out now
It is time
Tell all the cattle
That they should know
the day is new
The grass is sweet
with morning dew
we're going where we've never been
Captured by thieves we've never seen.”

The white ox bellowed urgently, but
softly into the dark.
and the cattle went out through the gate
The leader growled

You must come too,
on your fine ox, or my men will kill you.”

Kamago replied calmly.

No-one can stab me
I cannot die
Stab me, break your bayonets.
I'll still come with you
no matter how far
and with me, Ubangopa,
We're going where we've never been
captured by thieves we haven't seen

3. Difaquane

When morning came,
the tribe noticed the boy and his ox were gone
and the wise man said to the chief:
'Kamoga, the future king has become a man.
He has stolen away the cattle
while the people slept,
Hence he has accomplished
the law of the tribe

"Make a feast,
prepare the beer,
we must rejoice."
and they did,
but darkness fell again
and still he did not return
and the tribe began to fear.


4. Mfecane

They had taken Kamaga
to the chief of the next tribe
The men said "We cannot
kill these bewitched cattle,
kill the white ox, and
Kamaga will have no power.
The chief answered;
we will get him down to hte pround
and ordered Kamaga
to lead the cattle into a knoal
Ubangapa, lead the cattle in
to where the chief says
we're going where we're rereteen
captured by thieves we've never seen

The boy ignored the chief's command
to come down to the ground, saying:
'I live up here
You live down there
My feet have never touched the ground
The chief ordered him down again
This time he did, saying
'Ubngopa, I am getting down
To walk upon the ground, the earth,
Having lived upon your sturdy back
Ever since the day of my birth
We're going to where we're never been seen
Captured by thieves we've never seen

5. Maburu.

The took him to a shanty town house
He could see stars in the roof
and when they brought him food he cried:
Take it away, for I cannot eat my food on the ground
only on the back of my white ox Ubongopa
And he spat upon the ground
in his disgust and the people ran into the nearby hills.
taking all their cattle with them
for the spittle grew and grew
A voice from inside said;
You are as strong as this mountain
your spittle can make a fountain
To make their clouds pour out their rain
with thunder and lightening again and again
The sky darkened and a river of rain fell
in the place where the village was, nowhere else
The people in the mountains saw the strom
lit blood and the thunder-shaken earth
they considered Kamage drowned
and all his cattle.
Yet when the sun came out again
water still flowed from their houses
but the herds of Kanaga stood motionless
as if nothing had happened

"I told you he was magic,"
shouted the brigand's chief
The magic is in the white ox.
Kill the ox and his power is gone.
He told the men to kill the ox
Then he stabbed at the ox with his assegai

Yet the villages drew breath as it bounced off
and hit the thrower drawing blood from his arms.
Then the chief grabbed Kamaga
Tell the ox it must die,
otherwise you will die
Then Kamaga said;
Ubongopa, your death is due
as sudden as the rainstorm
but you will feel nothing, nothing
Soon we will meet again
We're going where we've never been
captured by thieves we've never seen


6. Nonquase

They killed the white ox and skinned it,
they cut its meat into pieces.
A fire was make for the meat to be eaten.
The chief declared each should go down
and wash in hte river to wash
the evil spirits from our bodies
Kamaga reverantly spread out the meat
on the white ox-skin, stood up and
intered.
Wake up Ubangopa
wake up and get up
The sun has arisen
in the light of dawn
Then the ox stood up
and Kamaga intored
we shall go forth
now is the time
to go to the hills
through the valleys
where the moss
is freshened by the dew.

7. Makgowa

Kamaga led the people on Ubongopa
through the gate, but hte villagers stopped them
and shrieked:
Kill the child, kill the lead soldiers
Kamaga intired again:
Ubongapa, stand still,
there is no need to run
Now it is the time for conflict
It is the hour of assegai
Some will live on. Some will die now.

8. Volksraad

Now the chief ordered the boy to get down.
He got down and bravely went towards the soldiers.
The soldiers threw their spears
which arched and struck the ground
before Kamaga.
The fearful soldiers retrieved them
and tried again. The same thing happened
but now the soldiers retired in fear.

9. Broederbond

Kamaga entered
Now all of you are going to die
and took a spear from the ground.
and threw it at the chief who fell dead.
as did his followers.
Kumaga struck the body with the spear's butt
and all the followers except the chief, stood up again
in fear except the chief
who stood as if to throw his spear again
The boy spat on the ground. His
spittle massed to form a termite's den
through which a voice echoes.

As mighty as the nearby mountains
as strong as the sunlit peaks
Throw the assegai at the primitive warrior.
The spear passed through the air
and hit the chief in hte foot
with the but of the spear. Kamaga
struck the corpse of each dead man
but not the chief who lay where he fell

All the people gathered round Kamaga
they sang together
you are our leader
We are your people
You must command us
We must obey
From this time onwards
From this minute on

10. Mukurob

Kamaga invested control over all the people
in the tree tribes and took over theri cattle
which he led seated on Ubongapa
He then sent a letter telling his father
that he was alive and wanted to come home
His father would not believe him
and replied:

'Send me an ox that was stolen with you
on the night you disappeared - come back to me
my lost son, your people are waiting.
When I die you will be leader and I
have chosen a beautiful bride for you
Ubingani's daughter, Umakual's son,”

Kamaga came riding on the white ox
followed by the people of the three tribes
and their cattle. As he approached
he chanted.

Let us go back to the kraal.
The sun is going down.
The leopard will soon be creeping
lusting for conflict.
greedy for cattle.

The White Crane
August Ninth 1945

It was hard going through the wards as they were already burning. On the way I was asked for water, death, mothers The rain ceased and an evening mist began to settle on the ground.The region was burning and grew redder into the night.The people going up the hill grew less.Some climbed only to paradise. I found my way home, to find my wife and three daughters running out to meet me.Little Yamamotu came out slowly, his head and hands bandaged. That night I got him to smile,as I picked up the little book and read to him.

“In Gyotoku, a peasant family
had a single son, Chutaro.
He spent his time
between paddy fields,
for a handful of rice
and the forest, gathering
an armful of timber.
Obedient and diligent,
he was constantly
ragged, yet never failed
to show kindness
to passing travellers.
Chutaro, toiled alone
in his old parent's
paddy fields, scavenged
and grew up in silence
and tender vision.
and would never kill,
despite an earful
from his local lord’s voice
cursing him each time
he turned a deer from
its trap or a bird
from the nets.

One day he rescued
a wounded white crane,
as snow-tinged
as the Eastern Pearl,
from a tree.
He removed it
and took it home
Chutaro went out the next day
to release the bird
deep in the woods.

Then, for a handful
of rice and a
bundle of timber
he went back to work.

One evening
as he came home
from the woods,
his mother
ran out to meet him
and told him
a beautiful girl
had come
with a large bundle
as if she had come
from far away.
When Chutaro
reached home.”

My son sleeps.I am afraid for him.

August Tenth

Professor Kataoka was struck down in the Out-Patients clinic.
I saw them bring him in on a bicycle-drawn cart in the evening.
He will not eat or drink. He is weak. His face is loamy-brown.
His mental state is clearly changed.
He wants to go home. In an even voice, he mouths senseless drivel.


“Tanaka, my father deceived us,
nagged by the ghosts of the empty house,
he told me he danced quicksteps with the beautiful
Yoshiko. It was New Year’s day. She amazed him with her memories
of a Buddhist funeral in Tokyo twelve years before.
He told me the moon was bone-white that night.
He boasted she plaited her legs around him,
kissed him gently to a shellac blues number.
He called her a stricken creature, wounded by the fear
of strangling which her father’s father
apparently induced by raping her at twelve
before passing her onto her stepfather at sixteen.”

I examined my son’s burns.The burned areas were the neck, entire back, right forearm and back of the hand, but it was less than one third the body’s surface. He should not die. I was grateful his face was not burned. Reading to him calms him down and helps him sleep.

“He saw she
had not left
the doorstep
The lovely girl
'Are you Chutaro,
she asked when
he came up to him.
"Yes", he said
"Can I help
you in anyway?

"I have been here
since daybreak"
she said, plainly
and without
any further explanation.
Chutaro, bewildered
and entranced,
invited her in.”

The professor had no choice but to spend the night in the hut. He goes on raving. He tried to eat some rice-balls we had cooked in the open air over a fire.We can only buy food from local farmers. The guards will not let us take the military food. I listen to his nonsense..

“She had dumped a
Manchu husband
husband in Tokyo
to adventure with an MP
until broke with her needs,
he went back home.
Tanaka was a commoner,
a drawer of rice and wood
and she, the daughter of an Iron-
Prince and the Emperor's intimate.”

I have given him heart stimulating drugs

My son was lying with his whole body in the tatami room. He was sorry for the worry he had caused. He talked about how the disaster had happened and the terrible white flash. I calmed him down and told him how brave he had been. I found the place in the scorched book and read to him again.

“After they had eaten,
Chutaro was shocked
when she asked him
if she were worthy
to marry him.
His anxious parents
explained they had
no money
and could not
find the enough
to marry their son
to her.”
She replied
"A good heart,
not riches
make for
a happy life.
Let me stay
and I will work
at anything
you ask
Chutano,
speechless,
could only
nod agreement.
“My name
is faithful
Kamachi,”
she added.”

My son must have been wearing a cap when the explosion happened. The exposed portion of the back of his head was burned bare, as if it had been shaved.

I stayed overnight at the Shisaku house. At night, despite the glow of fires, we felt safe for the first time.

August Eleventh

I went to the University the next day with a neighbour.. We took a short cut over the railway tracks. The Professor’s condition is unchanged evcept that he constantly wants to go home.He tells me more about his father.

“The next day Tanaka went back to work
for the Special Service Organ
His secretary ran out to meet him
to say a beautiful girl was waiting for him
She had borrowed one hundred and sixty dollars
and more during the days,
as if camped on his doorstep.
I rememered what he said about her
The girl wore a grey and black kimono.
Her long necked head
was crowned with bobbed black hair
and three combs
one red and two, on either temple, white.
Her eyes were bright,
though her lips wer pale
and she was his debtor,
which dissolved his caste inhibitions.”


I found it difficult to get home, as the casualties were building up and medical supplies were running out. At last I managed to get the staff to ration the remaining guaze, iodine and lint and went off duty.

It seems Seichi had been on the second floor of the Mitshubishi factory. He was sketching a drawing when the the lightning flash exploded. Then the whole building shook as if in a earthquake. The room began to collapse and he had run out. He seemed in high spirits, though and said he wanted to hear the rest of the story.


“They married
and Chutaro
took to the paddy fields
and the woods again.
though he
hurried home
sooner,
to be with his bride.
As she worked
hard all day,
his parents
never uttered
a dissenting
word

There are parts too blackened to read. I make them up to let my son sleep.

The lovely girl
wore a grey
and black kimono,
slim as an aspen,
her long necked head
was crowned
with bobbed black hair
and three exquisite combs
one red and two,
on either temple, white.
Her eyes were bright,
though her lips wer pale.

August Twelfth

Going back to the hospital I took a short cut. The bridge over Urakami had broken and I could not cross. As I crossed by a dislodged girder I saw the bodies of people in the water. They must have gone to the river to drink. They were all naked, as if stripped of their clothes. There were corpses crowded by the river’s edge. When I got there the Professor’s condition had worsened. He wanted to tell me about his father as if it was an urgent message.

"She told him You are a giant of a man
and I am small in every part"
She said, remembering how his boots
had scuffed the dense floor.
Passing them long and shiny over the bed
she made love vigorously
and he loved her smooth firm muscular legs.”

I was saddened that this was the only matter he could discuss. The Professor was known to be a sensuous man and had many affairs.

The house we lived in was four kilometers northwest of the hypocentre from which it was hidden by a hill. From the porch you could see a paddy field, a little stream in a valley opposite the hill. At the moment of the explosion. I was in my office in the university hospital.My youngest son must have been at a lecture in the medical school. my mother was working in thevestibule. My wife, Sumiko was in the tatami room.Choko and Reiko were sitting on th porch chatting with their legs dangling over the edge.


My son lies in the tatami room. His face is growing darker, but his wounds are second degree without pus. He wants me to go on reading.

One day
when he came
back from
the woods,
Kutaro said,
"You work all day
in the paddy fields
and the woods
and all you get
is a handful of rice
and an armload
of timber,
I am a good weaver,
stay at home
and let me
earn us a living
She took down
her bundle,
painfully,
for her shoulder
often hurt her
and sent
Chutaro
to town to
buy a loom.”

August Thirteenth

Back in the University, the Professor’s condition caused us alarm. He was convulsing. I gave him an injection. It was anti- tetanus serum. I noticed the nurses used glowing charcoal and a tin of boiling water to sterilise it. I gave half intravenously and half subcutaneously. If anything it made him more delirious.

She was the one who asked
"Can I help in any way"
realising he was a spy.

“I have been here since daybreak.”

At home that night my son is breathing heavily.
I read though I do not know whether he hears me or not.

When Chutaro
brought these
things back from town,
Kamachi wove
from morning
until the evening
This she did for
three long years
and grew pale,
and thin, wan,
wearied and limp
with the feat,
on the last day
of the third year,

Faithful Komachi
carried down the cloth…

I tiptoe out of the room.

August Fourteenth

The professor continuously
requests liquor.

Do you know that rogue
wrote cheques on the Service Organ's
"plot fund" and sent her to learn English
He could tell by the wanton
unfocused look in her eyes
that he was not her only lover.

My son’s lower parts escaped injury but with a sharp demarcation between his burnt back and his legs. He is getting no better. In a low hoarse voice he apologises for letting me down. I tell him not to worry. He smiles and whispers “Komachi.”

“One evening,
at the end of the third year
she carried down
a tinted length of cloth
from the attic.
Chutaro and
his parents
were astounded
yet Kumachi
could hardly stand,
so tired in fact
that she had
to lie down.”

It wearies him to listen. Have I lost both my sons?

August Fifteenth

The direction of the wind has changed. A fresh breeze blows up the mountain. The terrain was full of wounded trying to shelter from the shower. In the konan south garden, I came acroos a man with a gash from a Nihonto blade. It seems he had been involved in a row about rice rations. Today the police were trying to move us on, as they said the Americans had
landed. I had to treat him.Then I made my way to the university.

The professor was dying. His face was dark red. This did not stop him going on.

It was that professor
Itagake, of house ghosts.
who summoned him to Muckden,
all he could think of brooding on dismissal for fraud
on the luxurious train.
"We want to use the boy emperor
as a puppet head of state in Manchukuo:
a facade of independence” he later explained
to Tanaka in the ante room at the palace.
“Buy me Chinese agitators
to distract the league from Manchukuo.”

At home my son was causing concern to my daughter and my family. His burn wounds are giving out a black secretion. He was anxious to know his family was there. I took the book and read to the whole family.

In a weak voice she asked
Chutaro for her
leather purse
and took two yen
from it.
"Go now and
don't stop travelling
until
you have spent
both these coins. Only
then sell the cloth.
In that way
you will get
the most money."
Chutaro was sorry
to leave
his ill wife.
He journeyed
for a long time,
but had not
even spent
the first coin
when he showed
the cloth
in a distant market.
"It is as
warm
as a living thing"
the merchant
exclaimed
but Chutaro
made his excuses
and went on his way.
In the next town
he was offered
four thousand
pieces of gold,
but he still had
one gold piece left
At the next town
a merchant offered
eight thousand pieces
At the next
he was greeted
by servants who
took him
to their master
who examined the cloth
and offered 10,000.
Chataro refused,
then the merchant
offered 20.000.
He still had
one piece left
Yet this time
Chutaro gave in
and returned
from the town
burdened
with the weight
of gold

My daughers began to cry. I stopped them so as not to upset the eldest son.

August Sixteenth

I took the splintered, trash-scattered path through ruined buildings that was usual commuter journey to my work. Inside I treated a nurse who had a gash on her face. I sutured it carefully. Then I went into the Professor’s room. I knew the Professor was a drinker. I wanted to reduce his pain, but there had been more thefts from the clinic and there was no more morphene. I gave him diluted alcohol, but he spasmed when he drank it. The same happened when I used a tube. He pulled it out. “Thanks, but it won’t work. I must tell you this.”

Given money to clear his debts
Tanaka gave the girl six thousand dollars
she went into the night
disguised as a thug half
to bribe the Chinese working for
the Three Friends Factory
and half to her favourite street gang.

In the narrow. misty creek,
two Nichiren priests and three disciples
of the Tayoko Buddhist temple
banging gongs and shouting the Sutra
when they were set upon by thugs.
So badly that the priests died.

At home, my son lay in a weaker state. He was sorry to have died so young. He told me if he was reincarnated he would be avenged on the Americans. In time of war the death of civilians must be seen as like that of soldiers.

I read on and he smiled.

After a difficult journey
he was welcomed
by Komachi and showed her
a large coffer.
In there are
20,000 pieces of gold
I have counted
every one of them."
The old couple
were astounded
at the sum
Kumachi
looked disappointed
and said
"You still had
one gold piece
before you
sold the cloth?"
If you h d
spent it first,
you would have
had more
Then she shrugged
her shoulders
and said
"Oh well it's enough
to last us for ever"

Chutaro soon
became a rich merchant
with a big house in Nagasaki.
Komachi looked after
the old couple
and Chutaro's son.
Both worked hard
and lived happily
Yet the old mother
kept nagging Komachi
"If you were a good wife
you would weave
another length of cloth,"
but Komachi was
fearful,
"We do not need
the money"
"You’re idle, that's all”
snapped her mother-in-law.
At length,
Komachi agreed,
though Chutaro
tried to disuade her.

Again the loom was set up,
"Three years shall
pass said Kamachi,
"leave me when I weave
And so every day,
she went to the attic
where the loom
had been set up
carefully
closed the door
and stayed
until nightfall
Immediately
her face
became haggard
her body thin
and her cheeks pale

The old woman
accused her of
starving on purpose
"No other weaver
makes such
a mystery of it"

One summer morning
she crept up the stairs
to the room
from which
the sound of the loom
could be heard
and knelt at the door.
quietly
she slid it back ,
through
the crack
she could see the loom.
A great white crane
stood before it
plucking feathers
from its beautiful arms
as it wove.
The crane
spotted the old woman
uttered a cry of pain
and flew out of the window.
He saw a brilliant flash.

Chutaro heard the cry
and came running
and that evening
laid a white crane in
a deep grave in the garden.

I do not know at what point my son died, but it was not long after noon, when his voice weakened and his cyanitic face grew completely still. A neighbour let me cremate his body on a nearby hill. An orderly carried his body on his back. As he burned, I grieved for his short life.

August Seventeenth

I kept the Professor under close observation. He was breathing irregularly and eventually died that evening. It seems he had stood to say goodbye to his staff, then collapsed. An orderly told me how the dying man had asked him to write down the nonsense he was ranting about.

A Japanese attack
burnt down the factory
when the Chinese parties arrived.
Two were killed and two wounded
for the Japanese.
That evening she asked Tanaka eating.
if she were worthy enough to marry him.

Then next day the girl
found a dockside meeting in progress
led by Tanaka urging them to ask
for an expedition force to invade China
and protect them… They never attacked us!
Tanaka and the girl attacked our own men.

I ignored his disloyal ravings. Some of my colleagues had worked in Muckden.

Later I went over to the shell of the university to find out what had happened to my son. We found the lecture hall. Some mounds of human ashes were piled before the seats in the auditorium. There was scrap of blue serge student’s uniform lying on the floor. We knew it was his.

I cannot remember how many bodies we burned that night.


Isoline3: Irreplaceable Stem


Lines Written After Stendhal.

The branch, wrenched from the tree
is nondescript only from the violence
met out to it. Tears seep from the
mine duct.
Mourning justifies the mourner
not the mourned.
"Crystallnacht" meansonly one thing,
even in Salzburg.
How lovable in memory
the irreplaceable stem
from the God-called root.
that has passed
so entirely away.


Isobar: Taken as Read


Counterfeit

Alceo Dossena's
stone cliché was classic,
till experts proved how slick
the sleight behind it was.

An age of prurience
allowed an Attic nude
her place beside the prude.
Such fond indulgence!

We know a truth more sly.
It was our discovery
laid bare his forgery,
that naked skins can lie.


Legend

The Reich of Forsythia
has tumbled the suburb.
Tawdry saffron affronts
its ordered hallway.

The brilliant coins ring down
on the hard, clean counters.
The ticket-clerks did not see
in the mustard rush-hour gas

It threatens red almond tress
with a shower of sulphur.
Potted oblivion tempts
its peace-trading, bankrupts

Housewives snap elastic waists
but the grooms have gone
and downstairs their deaf aupairs
rinse empty vases.

The scrawled desks thunder down
on the chatter of children,
but the teacher did not wait.
The young colour their deserts.

Filling cabinets close sheer
on the yellow law scripts,
but were judged as read
when flowers decked the dock.

The glinting coffin lids snap tight
on divine formalities,
but the race was never fair
Wreaths thud on the just unseen.


On The District Line

Smoke from an autumn bonfire,
so grey it chalks the night
with its soft attention,
its prayer of aged love.
It rises like puja wisps
above ash-white tapers,
from the house-mandeer.
Resinous, it burns, incensed,
from a polished brazier.
It is a slide, pointed, to the crown,
drowning in leaden seas.
A brassy badge from the past,
setting as the sun, alone so still
through the racing window.
Thurifer of routine office
worker secretary, tired,
dormant on the seat
you extinguish to grey
your thurifer head
to dare a white brittle line
against the unsaving night,
while the carriage
sways on through suburbs lights.


Isobar:
Against the Martyrs


1. Porch (The Fall)

For Leona Medlin

In the image of violence made,
We ate fear daily, died enthralled
by its nurturing urge, obeyed
our death to the real dreams called.

We left, unbargaining, while Medias swayed
for our bartered loveliness. It stalled
once love tasted limits, left bells unpaid
of passion, an issueless ecstasy, mauled

by an earth that numbers its darkness.
A tiring climax paces its torpor
As a child in pre-growth cannot guess
at dispossessing stupor.

Found, love looks for random ecstasy.
Sought, it grasps a surer fantasy.


2. Baptistry (Cain and Abel)

For Hugh Epstein

A rough, strange child who never spoke
still shadowed him, after the hissing fruits...
and a midden of ashes on his hands...woodsmoke
in the air, stinging, searing the eye's roots.

Yet the child followed him to dote
upon his trail in the valley of brutes
He would see him with the ribs of a goat
playing, or eating its raw meat, but mute.

In torment, at last he turned on the wain
Why eat of your cousins? You too are beast.
and slapped the child that it feel the pain

and see the raw flush of blood. He ceased
and never moved again, lay plain
on unnatural earth. The other fled, released.


3. Nave (Judith)

For Carol Gaudion

A woman followed by a blade of light.
She sleeps alone, believing in her strength.
Often she lay still at quiet midnight
and hunched over, uncovered her bare length

She fears that flash of foreign sword, (so slight
a stroke that severed mentality's index)
to confer an unknown purpose on her sight.
Pain took over flight.She loved its power to annexe

a transformation where the treachery of children
could not go; where the chattering ceased
no longer to betray her, hour by infantile hour when

the volley sounded finally, she was released,
an echo in the trees no longer mocking
along the river's bright borders to the King.


4. Chancel (Hell)

For James Lindesay

The law nad order men have had their day.
This fixed display of criminal deserts
unfolds its symmetry of penal hurts,
while the moved, unhoping move away.

The faces of the damned show no dismay.
Gymnasts of fear they have unbalanced dread.
Acrobats of shame, they state their case instead
and lessen the law's hold upon their day.

Seen again, their faces are familiar.
Those emblems of deterrence make too free,
with demons of theological decree.
by breaking the law the dead get it easier.

They are the just, keeping their purity,
witnessing a fixed humanity.


5. East Window (Death of Saul)

For Elizabeth Holmes

Those meticulous descriptions from memory,
each sequenced charitable,carfully recounted.
The note thought over, terse, declamatory.
Then they went right over the top, undoubted.

Often in bed, sometimes a chair, usually
an overdose, some prefer to be more quickly dead.
It is our unique ceremony,
our culture's little devotion, no more said.

Death retreats from the clinics, in the wards
and we worship its antique form.
In awesome silence risk nothing on words.

Friends become adult, children ride the storm
for this noble killing is at large
to make them orphans in a local charge.


6. North Transept (St Sebastian)

For David Winzer

Bare, swooning forms are glued to static highs.
Gluttons for atonement, their bonded goods
are exposed to worshippers in pious hoods
hidden among low naves to hide their sighs.

Stripped alterers, their sacrament of thighs
for universal exultation broods
to lure the Lord of vengeance from his moods.
with a captivating hue of naked lies.

Thralled in their perfect mirrors, they seek
an inviolate ecstasy removed
from sacrifice, yet on revenge's peak.

They have legalised self-love, reproved
dear voices of transformation that speak
in silence now of punishment proved.


7. North Aisle. (The Massacre of the Innocents)

For Elizabeth James

How helpless are the good. They loll under knives,
ease themselves between drawn swords
and under massed hatchets, or under boards,
are crushed like toothpaste before angels arrive.

How earnest are the bad! A woodsman strives
with industrial rhythm. Killers struggle to their arts
with mystic contemplation in their hearts,
while soldiers pause to speak to earnest wives.

To the celebration of vacuity they come all rapt
to pray for vacillation and ineptitude.
They are weak, too weak for beatitude.

All urging, wanting, whimpering is not apt
enough for those little worms so odd
to woo down to earth a weakened God


8. Bell Tower (Sodom And Gomorrah)

To Cahal Dallat

The ice-seared grape-skin yields a dry fire
to the throat, full-bodied and perfect.
The marketed impersonal fetches a heady mire.
The betrayal issues in a solid object.

but you ask about sanctions. Where is the spire
where jouissance, now the surpliced hands reject
the organic nostalgia of the mire
and slacken on the bolts that lose effect?

You seek a husbandry and a filling crop,
actual emotion to address the word,
the drams of the real, motivated awe to stop

rebellion on the very grounds that hold the herd.
Live for fear you need an exorcism and never drop
the urgency, the thrall of freedom, now become absurd.


Isobar:

Movie


1.Transcript

"Suppose one of them were let loose?”
Plato.

Crime

“There's nothing in it, that is really nothing and perhaps absolutely nothing.” Dostoevsky

The floor was strewn with the detritus of faith
and the Republic's citizens' fixed stance.
Only one void, the others still in place.
Yet by a frenzied hunch, Corporal Substance

knew all was not as it should be, grimaced
and threw aside his Private, Doubt's insistent
for the fire would have to be replaced
behind the curtain wall. "Some accident!"

he bellowed up the road. Brutish stone and wood
came up against fellows unable to lecture.
Out from the cave came laughter in the mood
of students without shadows. More obscure

than before, enjoying their detention
at one of the ends of civilisation.

Suspect

"Did you not put to death Socrates the sophist, fellow citizens, because he was shown to have been the teacher of Critias, one of the Thirty who overthrew the democracy?"Aeschines

Round. High. Dark. Oval. Hominid.
Slight. Normal. Chronic. Mesomorph.
Utilitarian. Flaccid.
White. Narrow. Fit. Non Dwarf.

None so far. Unknown. Normal.
Well-ballanced. Rhesus plus. Devout.
Yes. Long. Average. Several.
Two. Early. Only child. Without.

Lied when asked about human destiny..
Non-verbal. Sane. No alibi.
Fixed. None. Bright. Alternates.

Inconsistent view, but shy
or scared of body/mind debates
Dry. fallen.Never known to cry.


Arrest

"No one else could gain admittance here, because this entrance was meant solely for you. I am now going to shut it." Kafka

An open space, resembling a metaphor, or so
for loneliness, despair, absent mindedness and so on.
A man wearing a huge, grey coat comes out and so
throws a large rock onto the ground and so on.

Walks round it impatiently and departs and so
a man wearing a huge grey coat comes out and so on,
throws another rock at the ground and so
throws the last large rock onto the pile and yet

Private Act, accompanied by General Potency perhapes
rummage slowly, pull out a hand and yet,
place a handcuff round the wrist, the other on Act, perhaps.

Potence becons Act to pull and yet,
Act cannot move nad a man wearing, perhapes
a huge grey coat and takes and so on...


Trial

"If there's no meaning in it," said the King, "that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we needn't try to find any." Lewis Carroll

Lord Justice O'Pine called the accused in rem
The vicious Regress once brought up, somehow
by Privates Act and Attribute solved the problem
and posed the problem as a solution any how.
The charge by state theorists maintained.
was of theft of theory from our culture.
A scuffle ensued within sound judicature;
The defence in good will was to plead
that Regress being abstract never did the deed.
The plaintiff made his case conversely
to show the ruination so perversely
wrought upon students and upon staff
that he appeared on philosophy's behalf
O'Pine in summing up defined that neither
could ever disappear nor could appear.
On the other hand the prisoner had stolen
light from the greatest Academic cavern
yet had no burns to show that he's been underhand.
The same could not be said at first hand.
At which he gave the jury their dismissal
and sent both lawyers his epistle.

Sentence

Judge “Of course he's guilty. That isn't the point” W.K. Graham (dram.A.A. Milne)

You have been found guilty
of the theft of a priceless
illusion
from the Western cultural
inheritance
This is uncommon and
abominable crime
for which only the maximum
penalty is suited.
The sentence of this court
is the same as any other
where the predicate
hangs on the subject.
Bound by your own words,
it all hangs on the evidence
and the evidence against you
is strong enough to bear you.
You are admittedly
an abstraction
but from here you will
be taken to an abstract extreme
of logical space and
as abstraction depends on abstraction
there hung on what ever
conditional counts
as the hanging
participle
and on the types
in your vicious circle.

The Appeal

‘I know’d what ’ud come ’o this here mode ’o doin’ bisness.
Oh Sammy, Sammy, vy worn’t there a alleybi!’Dickens

The appeal was self-evident,
as was the glamour and the fame.
The truth like light, is always bent:
the way it swings, always a shame.


2. Stills


1. The Swamp Thing

Commando:”Sorry, Bruno. It's every man for himself; God against all.”

So maybe something just went wrong.
The rescue came unstuck and took too long.

She lay down, wet, upon a hollow rock.
Numb from exhaustion, or from shock.

While the thing, confused all was not over,
shied from acting the amphibious lover.

The thrill of capture and the dive
upset it now it found itself alive.

So what her peachy, uncensored skin;
or he, his fine, iridescent fin?

They knew it was their finest hour
to depart this slimy bower.

He, glaucous, to the abstract air;
she, so elegant, to instinct's flair


2. The Time Machine

Hartdegen: “You're forgetting one thing. What if?”


Fleeing the Morlock's doomed city
the narrator slips. His lethargy's the pity.

His love has gone ahead of him
into an Arcadian groves so dim.

He has his price. The cannibals lack his fire.
While that mahcine rots away in a mire.

In time they will catch him in their snares.
So he ran out of time, who cares?


3. The Hit

Willie; I'm not scared.
Braddock: You gotta be.
Willie: Why? Cause everyone else is?


Earnest Reason, opening another road,
expounds beneath the viewfinder's sights
Herr Anger taps his earphones for the code
that signals time to put out the leader's lights.
Meanwhile Miss Psyche lies
behind false premisses, used as barns,
which Anger takes over for the spies.
He has put her, trussed in ancient yarns,
and in a contrary mood to General Goode.
Hidden as free Will, he knows he is no fool
not quite, an opposite to Anger, but he could.
control the Agents, Self and Rule
who step up from the foundations
in a circular tactic, a valid feature.
to prove intent, but spare interpretations.
Goode wants in to proposition Psyche.
Self wants all the action. Rule alone
abandons Reason and Anger hits his zone.


Isobar : Closedown


Nunc Dimittis

Blood-soaked Graf Bismarck
drew steel from the Rhur
Lister, old Lamarck,
Dunant and Pasteur
marched out of the ark
to campaign for cure.

Dukes in the Kinsky
weighed out each bet,
while Lobatchevsky
prevented upset.
Chance had its ruler
in Leonid Euler.

Chomsky and Weaver,
for the State Department,
worked like the beaver
on their argument
that Skinner's receiver
was a lousy deceiver.

Brute power has begot
a self-dealing hand.
Now peacetime forgot,
how to be underhand.
Human progress has a plot:
supply demands our lot.


Closedown


The reporters and starlets fade out,
bounced from their photon screening thing.
They can't beat what the show's all about,
live on the scene of nothing.

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 15.12.2009

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