Feasts of November

Contents

1. Twelve Hours from a Secular Year


2. Feasts of November


3. Planctus


4. The Deploration.


5. At Collioure: Cantus Firmus for David


Twelve Hours From A Secular Year


Twelve Hours From A Secular Year
1. Epiphany
When I reached that date, its doorway was already broached
by a term of snowfall, boredom and unread books.
Elsewhere, I later read, newsmen and “grunts” were leaving
their Mekong bunkers to watch Forty Sevens
fire tracers into the Twelfth Night.
News waited for me in the high, angry heavens.
For Four Corps, at least, that night there was breath on their lips.
The past, intactile, even to Unesco gifts, was the Cimabue Christ
oil-scarred, so alone under skies of ice, in the urgency of new birth.
The past grew grey-skinned with a hue of lunar dust
and Surveyor Seven was only one of the old year’s
bright shots which eddied about.
In the Serengeti, miles were enclosed
to make a zoo of migrations.
The Longleat Lions basked in the thin sunlight,
watched by motorists’ wives in animal skins.
According to St James, the persecuted Elder,
I could, perhaps, have met at the church of Smyrna,
in Suberewhon, the old Canon Simeon Masefield,
plodding to the pulpit, his arm clutching for the light
to focus on Your perinatal Word.
Elsewhere it seems, the Coleman lantern burned minimum light.
For me it came from the alarm clock’s silent dial.
We had all reached the feast at the worst time
for leaving inadvertent offerings, Rhodesian Players’ Gold,
Haight-Ashbury joss sticks and my ointment
for staphyloccocus in the bathroom, foretelling fiascoes.
From Hué, a disc jockey might have cradled
his gifts over the still air. Grey figures on a censored screen.
Whatever the discs were, Bobby Gentry or Sandy Shaw
would have crackled, sounded the same
as my thirty threes or forty fives.
The age bellowed seismic havoc through Sicilian sirens.
In my Aunt’s Missal, the woman gathered up her child to run,
lighter, to the landfills.
While I poured out cornflakes and missed the bus to school.


2. Presentation.

Alone, the year-woman stayed in wastes
even Joseph Banks had no use for,
while the brute days feigned a pause in its pursuit.
I walked along the footpath to school
and listened to the others sing Down Ampney
while I waited outside assembly.
That morning, I had crossed the Chertsey Road where
a fellow-pupil’s dead hand lay under tarpaulin;
a Moped death, yet the body was deserted.
I had given up Maths and Latin. He had given up life.
I found the prayer to hydra in the Biology lab
too tedious to repeat to each of its heads.
Laws of pressure and the Bunsen burner
were too sure for the natural attention
of the soul to remember.
While on Hill D eight eight one North,
an eighteen year old boy
was the only prisoner reported taken.
The year was on its knees already,
but its fires had mauled Hobart.
In Nelson Road, St Edmund's of Sardis
had risen, renewed, in the village of Boyle and Suckling,
a mission from Vermont shrugged off
by the cavalier National Front.
Not for me the Reverend Sassoon's
eighty years and no tomorrow.

Whatever bloomed in bowls or crept by council snow
dumps was gone too soon to bother with.
The Second Offensive came in the glossy
dispatches of Time Magazine.
I tore out colour photos and painted flares,
and the night in the Art room at lunch time.
While on Fridays or at the Lamb and Flag
poets, academic or sober, clearly intoned
sequences of provincial decay or squeaked
of the High Psyche.
I took the District Line home to Richmond
and, from there, I usually walked; Canon
Simeon Eliot O.M., a hydra of poetry under pressure
from his dissociated heads.

3. Annunciation

The year left it then, to April’s windy Ides in their leporine madness
to whisper in the human child intended for us.
The Queen's mercy was not granted to convicts in Salisbury.
No-one thought of talking about it at the Current Affairs Society.
The year came back in the thunder of wings
from the breaker's yard and the parking lot.
While beasts withered from foot and mouth brought over
by lamb from the Apartheid Cape
and the Financial Times upset itself on the brink
of the dissolving gold pool.
On the screen, at Khe Sanh, came under steady fire
from an M Sixty, then silence. Then the soldiers
came running from the tents like schoolboys, then silence.
Reports said they heard a wailing like a woman's,
the sound, a word they all knew.
"Put that fucker away" rapped a lieutenant
if Michael Herr was right in Esquire.
"Put. That. Fucker. Away, "droned a sergeant.
Then came the orange flare of an M. Seventy Nine, then, silence
"Get some...man did you see that."
Chris was not in the same form as me that year,
but we met and talked in the Sixth Form hut.
He had been reading "The Interpretation of Dreams"
and I wanted to understand Frege, read him hurriedly
and passed on to Jenkins’ biography of Asquith
found it easier to read on the green lawn in Walton.
In the Year-Woman’s bones, the Word child grew,
and this was the feast the world again accepted.
God had planned a woman’s womb with a life beyond this place.
The school was built on fields the Twining family
had once owned. Sometimes it was good just to
stay out under the old trees which bordered
the fence, imagining lawns with Arcadian does
and the wives of tea-makers
in Home County visions, while Kenyan Asians
took the bus from Heathrow to Southhall
and Colonial lions came home to die.


4. Lent
What had I tasted I could renounce? I thought of the Thursday I sat
and watched announcers rasp satellite reports of a death
in Memphis. Why had it happened now, in the month
of the stubby H.B. pencil with its red paint flaked at the edges?
I had done no homework for two years and held a pen
only for slack obscurities in private diction. I scrawled
those thin sheets my father used for reports with dreams
that could not propagate the language of the tribe.
Why had Erymanthine Hobsbaum taken his oscillating biro
to the woman whose poems spoke of someone
who threatened children with a dark well?
"I came to hear a poem, not your hang ups.
What you need is a good lay."
Ruth Pitter’s eyes spoke a reserved frenzy. I muttered
something about beauty, mentioned Sebastian im Traum
and later wondered what I was defending, as the States rioted.
In St Margaret's of Pergamum where I was at Mass,
not the old wooden hall, another Canon, Father Merton
fumbled with the light switch.
"What am I gonna do?"Esquire’s report told me.
"But dig it. Am I gonna turn n'take them guns aroun’
on my own people. Shit. This war gets old."
shouted the black staff sergeant from Alabama

Norman Hidden launched
a competition in memory of King. I wrote
notes in pencil on the back of his notice
on the history of slavery and left it
with application forms from the Anti-university
of London and half-finished translations of Trakl.
beside my bed. Elsewhere Lyushins,
MiGs and Delphins strafed Onitsha, and Whitehall
gagged itself with the purity of its linen.
While dazed liberals were plucked
from the water cannon in Chicago.


5. Easter
Bonhoeffer quotes Huxley on shame;
he had an interest
in the care of shoes.
Shoelaces should be tied
with the ease that one can praise God.
and scuffed uppers
among the wrong people is a paradigm of guilt,
Behold the man. Put that fucker out!
At Nanterre students stuck up photographs
of plain-clothed policemen mingling with faculty members
and defended Cohn Bendit against the riot police.
Text books, desks and shoes were thrown
and the students won. 1,200 of them took over the large
lecture hall.
Two correspondents found an eight-week old corpse
in an American jeep at Languei.
Its skin was drawn
back, stiff as a kipper, its teeth bared.
They brought it
down to Graves Registration.
The helicopter blew off Augean flies
'Look, Jesus, he's got on our uniform'
'That ain't no
American, that's a fucking gook"
You take off your daily shoes.
"Paris? I dunno, son, why not? I mean
they ain't gonna hold them in Hanoi now
are they?”
I left footprints of the hours,
in the smart aisles of St Mary’s College, Thyatira


6. Corpus Christi

Esquire told of GIs who once supported
Robert Kennedy for his youth,
“He was er ..young.”
turning to vote for “Wallace, I guess.”

The sun unwinds a yellow thread across
the Richmond vineyard,
to shine on, past the workers, dead, in Sochaux
and Gilles Tautin, a schoolboy, dead, the day before at
Flins.
I wrote my A level answer on Andromaque,
thinking of the Sixth Form hut where its passion might be applied
and wrote of Othello in Jungian terms; Albedo and Nigredo smoothly
In the afternoon in Room Fifteen I think
I presented the same tropisms for Poetry Appreciation,
Hamburger's Trakl being the only model I had,
Holderlin being unreadable and Stravinsky composed
too much, both Chris and I wanted him to stop.
After the Sixth Form party, to which I returned late
from an interview at Warwick.
I crept up the stairs, each new creak
a betrayal to the parental watch.
In the art room at dinner time I would
scrape out pastel imitation of Arshile Gorky.
Aragon would not cast off the party
which had strapped him up.
and Herbert Read was dead
before he could decide he was a Situationist
and before I had read his first books.
And a voice on a voice unwedged the shouting,
the radio was a blackening, Stymphalian crow.
In a season where all had come alive in a flame,
Only the dead were being prayed for at Laodicea, St Francis de Sales,
while in the Music room, the only boy in the Music Appreciation Club.
I listened to the opus one hundred and eleven,
unaware of Long John Baldry, loping slowly
down to the Eel Pie Island Hotel.


7. Visitation
The city of the Year reaches its suburb
at St Theodore’s, Ephesus.
and in the Woman’s bones was the Word child,
with Ottaviani its lapsed vision.
The crows had
flown back to peck at burnt leaves in the dawn light.
The representatives of Prague’s
Hope; it’s hopeful and its hopeless
Spring were in conference at Cierna,
warning of reactionary forces,
while tanks maneuvred like bulls, on the borders.
Through the post came
invitations to meetings of Slant and the prospectus
of the Anti-University.
In Sheed and Ward's
offices in Maiden land and in the Caledonian Road,
they met
to talk of the May Day manifests, what I spoke of I cannot
remember.
While in Earls Court, Mc Beth and Booth
lamented the death of Peter, the cat.
At home I read about the crowds outside Apple.

The Beatles had almost taken over Twickenham studios.
In Dorking, my brother did not, did not, for once, buy Abbey Road.
I saw him, carried off by Colonial uncles.
In Cromwell Place,
I clutched my copy of The Phenomenon of Men
and vowed that the future would be centrated
on a place that would have no time for me.
Wearing
second hand trousers, I thought about a job and sent
off to Normansfield Hospital, was interviewed and went.
The year opened its other hand then,
we were all separated:
no longer in one place.


8. Transfiguration

The banners unfolded their everlasting mystery
to the Newsmen at Uppsala,
or as Gertrude von Le Fort
would have it, “your knees are your wings”
which was
unhelpful to the prone.
We went along the M Four and turned off
at Egypt and came back that way.
Nothing fell that day.
It was the day my results came through
which I opened and told no-one of.
I put them on the mantelpiece before we left.
Mallarmés were no better.
My brother had come up from Dorking
(Was it good to be here?)
Here at Burnham Beeches
we could have carved three stone urns,
one for Mallarmé, one for Gray
and 'pour votre chère morte Second November,
eighteen seventy seven'
Mr Jeremy, the French Teacher, with the chrism of prophecy;
"all I can make of that is it’s about a dead woman”
The Missal lay on the threshold as the
wind stirred The Sacred Heart, Teddington,
in the Philadelphia Vineyard and the world.
From the dust he raises the mighty.
From misery he raises the rich to
the childless wife he gives
Djerassi’s weight of flowers.
That year was the last of childhood,
solitary, on the threshold.
It was the push off.
It was nearly autumn
and down among the dead fantastic roots, no doubt
the thinning foliage would relieve us all.
An Octet of unpretended love, fading out
so soon there was silence before applause.
The dead also lay in Mexico,
before the steps, in the Square, young men, girls,
what had they received
as they got out of bed on that last day?
What was I, but an issueless dupe of thought?
Inside, on our return, the evening light drew
the fir tree’s shape in silver point on the mantelpiece.
We were all so casual, a family ebbing into separateness.
While Baathists exported mares to France,
Your child was growing
and I attended the Vespers of my dream.


9. The Exaltation

The crows were waiting for the seeds to fruit again
The child was growing, was strong. The sunlight struck the
hallway as the my sister opened the Advent calendar.
In Derry the P.D. were struck down by the B Specials
Already the gun-men were on the streets.
A man ran through the rain
and into a pub and told a student
to put his hands up in the lavatory.
His trousers fell down and he stuttered
"I'm P.D." "OK, Boyo. Just checking.”
And I went on going to the Kingston Road
where the old men sat indoors during the rain
who had never spoken in their lives.
On my off-days, I would sift the archives
of the Teilhard Association. The Director
invited me to tea and said, before Patrick Moore
came on. "Those who have no intellect cannot
be allowed to live. What can they give to complexity consciousness?”
GI’s held a peace march in San Francesco
and I watched the crowds gather in London
from the front room in Whitton, wondering if so
many could share the same dream,
while the papers showed Yves St Laurent
beltless mini-dresses and Churchill jockeys
boycotted Penny Ann Early’s ambitions.
and the people of Hanoi spent a quiet day looking at the skies.


10. The Dedication
The month grounded over many while I tended the witless,
lost to the concerns of the Teilhardian mind.
At Burntollet trust had been shelved,
then shattered, bruited from the truncheons,
Nixon become President and the school held
its fortieth Presentation;
the choir sang L'lize Jane
and the orchestra played the Water Music.
My results were
printed in the booklet.
Chris got into Birmingham.
And I stood by in the library where
I had discovered Berenson and touched the book,
not wanting to let go.
Not having words to express
my private shame.
Later Cyril Cusack opened the school fete
and wondered , bored around the playing fields,
raising his
eyebrows to everyone he met, like a farmer
among his cattle.
Who will speak of peace to the
fearful asleep?


11. Advent

Mary and her child learn their path alone,
O Wisdom.
They will overcome the winter’s shielding days
O Lordship.
I took the train to the hillside, to San Antonio Abad
O Keys.
The crown was held up there among the old women
who came silently to church and spoke the liturgy in Spanish,
O Emmanuel.
Against
the foes who gathered since my weaning.
I took the train
on the lines that ran from Whitton to Barcelona,
via Victoria, Port Bou and Mataró.
I watched when in the
warm ochre distance a stood girl tall and slate black
by a well in Catalonia.
I flew from the aeropuerto
and watched the Island dance in its light below
me like a jewel signed by the sea
and wintered with
an Ex G.I. from Manhattan the rejected lone man and did not visit Graves,
whom I
brought with me to read,
and sought safety and help.
Then I left, in his debt for apples,
with Apollo Eight
still in its heavens.

12. Christmas

The Jews could come back to Spain
and women voted in Swiss elections.
I hoped we would all be together for Christmas.
I followed the year to the hillside as the crow
flew up to pull the thorns over a wretched font
in the ruined places of Prague, Chicago, Paris, Mexico…
Remembering the American’s dog
that found me in a ditch that morning
and guarded me until I woke
and I knew I had befriended Cerberus,
despite my feet raised from birth
by Lewis Mumford’s Antean suburb.


Feasts of November


Prelude: Hallowtide.
1. Mischief Night
Late autumn, you and I witnessed the life-loss
in gold and red and in
the impassive blue that spanned the Hampton Court sky.
We had taken charge
of each other’s bodies, unaware of their silence, for unsound clothing
dressed us too false

to find the selves life bared so naked
as raw joy struck pleasure’ s riddle.
and we had forgotten the year-end greenness, forgotten an
oak tree stood
here as worlds fell, thick,
its chain of branches unfurling
a secret tow of sap.

The tallow texts at Douai and here are flowing inwards lighting the spill of faith
to heal the spill of forced faith’s blood.

On the way home, lads push Miggy Night
to celebrate ending, perhaps a half-term,
with a thematic firework, unaware of complicity
in a past of casual hate.

We stir, young and yet fear-wise, no shock, but a chord sounds on the spinet,

we saw silent in an afternoon bedchamber.
So now we love a freer God, it’s time to reconcile the hurt
sincerity wrested from our love
that caught us lovers unawares.


2. Hallowe’en

Now I know why old ghosts.
retire on Punkie Night.
They quit tied lodgings.
Memories thrown in
with hard myths become tiresome
and flimsy spirits prefer
to wander this dirty
and quiet stretch of time,
away from the celebrity of terror.
Lingering mists, heavy dews,
schoolboy’s squibs conceal
the suspect personhood
of spectres.
When they glide to your door,
that November entrance,
the gruesome, masked and
even more endearing children,
it is a sign you are a trusted
neighbour, a focus for local tongues.
The kids are more fearful
of their tricks
and more grateful
of their treated pockets than
their faces allow.
They too will retreat, the ghosts
of their own futures.
Elsewhere,
in the stubble of burnt fields,
guided by the setting Pleiades
you learn this would be
the better time to teach
your baby children
the stars burn for them.
Sycamore, plane, the pale leathery
dun of child-raided,
tattered horse-chestnuts,
their leaves falling faster now, backdrop
the routines of repairing doors,
of home-making, the vicarious
alarm-clock and its come on
to labour and spent returns
every night and all.
This day
brings Keats and Vermeer.
A woman at the Ruckers clavecijn
weighs the gold chord
of these mind-travelled men.
One traces in heavy water:
the other has his estate
wound up by Leewenhoek,
inventing wise microscopy
to focus on the artists’ minute wealth
and on humanity’s
and Christ receive your souls.

Chapter One: Ashvin
1. All Saints

Novem-
buried again, again that earth-worn silence seeps
in with unseen gold-crests from seas grown taciturn
with news of those who have not made it back
from Coronel, Bougainville, Walcheren;
Mass is an evening obligation
in un-feasting Protestant lands,
though England once had
a thousand churches
called All Saints.

While in the bare garden, in Highbury, a wren disappears,
like a virile leaf into a holly bush .
A robin dares the fence –top,
its call more fearful,
territorial.

Nov
embers dying on the first note of a fabled saint, Benignus,
benighted, buried in the books that rise to the pitch of All Saints
in Rome. Agrippa`s Rotonda is bought from Phocas
for Mary of the Saints: Pius the Twelfth`s
sun dancing in winter.

Mary’s stars scud from a kernal of fire tinged with a ruddiness not their own
towards the endless procession, Vega, Polaris, Capella,
high in the night sky. Diwa wicks that flare in the coconut oil,
one bluish, the other yellow,
undying to
us

at the speed of their own extinction.
Raised from the dust,
the lowly ones
raised from misery, the poor
how distant
they are,

the stars pinned on a black ground
of unseen joy.
I cannot be Boileau, or Harsdörfer,
born purifiers of their inheritance. I have no languages; Ezra Pound,
a mixer of new palates was born in a Puritan warehouse,
his to explore. Rootless English Catholicism
has only the dying blooms
on the grafts of converts.

Lord dig out more folds of clay
and
we
will name them ourselves,
from the homo enigmaticus fossil record.
This time our voice saints are heard, in the frosted skies,
Victoria de los Angeles, Emma Albani first cried to-day ; where are they gone,
the Countess Almavivas? When singers die, their voices
replay more plangent, more pleading,
or is it just the static dust ?

In a day more dry than usual, the tiny migrants have flown,
the redstart and the warblers gone South, but for the
lingering swallows in the Sussex barns
and their hazard families.

Theirs is the new,
whispered in the blood;
Magellan`s Estrecho de Todos los Santos,
Ansel Adam`s first shot of Moonrise over Hernandez, New Mexico,
first bomb attack, hand grenades dropped on Turks
from an Italian Taube monoplane,
the revenge of the passenger dove:
first female breast photographed:
no rival to Canova’s hot stone.
Rachmaninov sets sail for New York
and flaring out for nearly a hundred and fifty years-
the Cape Lookout lighthouse,
rows of light,
welcoming back from the dark,
every few seconds
for nineteen
miles out
to sea.


2.All Souls
i. m. Odysseus Elytis

El Dia de los Muertos
and across Europe
South America and the Islands,
seeds of fire from the necropolises,
and in India, a candle by an open door
that love’s light knows where to enter.
The wind can drive South West
from Iceland, bringing dry conditions,
or you hear of floods.
In England, Church Commissioners
draft Pastoral Schemes, declaring
the Holy Sepulcre redundant
in Warminghurst and
elsewhere too, we hope.

These graves had an untidy look.
where we played as children and thus
unending among the ended.
Out-built from Twickenham town,
now circled by it, beside the old school
where I narrowly dodged civilization.
Sing with John Blow’s buried tongues
in the inaccessible dust
from the month`s darkness
to the season`s, from
the doorstep to
the doorstep:
Bikini dust, ashes, crumbs
under the seals of grief.
The annulled
recovered from
remembered metal,
re-crystalled in the puja
of judging fire that is love enough
to unite strong histories :
annealed.
And here the brick
loosens where cold ivy
pries and the grasses
thin and the lichen spreads.
“...late of this parish...”
This was my thirtieth visit
to Gurney’s upright November
to Thomas` dirty land:
the place of the single thrush
and the odour
of Binyon`s burning leaves.

The antique towns
cannot rebuild it:
the past is the ruin of love,
yet its courage keeps sharper
than crumbled stone.
We are broken to mites.
Like lost coins,
we are worn to silence.
You were a voice.
that was heard here.
I make an effort
to love that peace of yours,
like a Sunday,
to take out
all memories of you
and put them out to view.
3. Tertio Nonas Novembris
SS Martin da Porres ,Winifred

to Frances and Wilfrid Greaney

In Highgate the trees are still. I cannot remember whom
it is I bring along that day.
As we look for George Eliot and keep finding Marx.
It was the late Sixties and the ground was worn thin with the shoes of politics.
Marx was the leaden echo,
ricocheting through the German Autumn
and the hard illusions of the young. Somewhere in Santo Dominga, Lima,
the Saint will have left his pestle for another to mix cures.
He will have left the chesed of his poultices,
his knives, his bandages; that others should look for miracles
and finding, keep his fire, should make their hearts burn
with the heat of a supernova
and pour your gold on the wounds of judgement’s ruin: love`s ruin.
Holiness was the echo
on that hillside in Flint
with Margaret Beaufort`s shrine and the cold clear water rising up.
It was the girl I loved I brought along, the stones of a community around.
We looked for hard facts and smelled
wine`s bouquet from its mossy river bed, its glissando passage
fresh as honey from a primal swarm.
I remember you both and the bond of your love.
That too was metal from the heat of suns
from the purifying fire,
like perjured Sita dancing the flames.

We were an all –youth team then,
parents and a child,

In Highgate the trees are still above a leadened head.
In Holywell the trees are still
above a spring that flows on a clear bed.


4.Pridie Nonas, Novembris
Allegro ma non troppo e serioso . i m. Wilfred Owen
In from the dark,
your speech, chiselled sharp
under the Surrey sky,
a leaden frieze.
The waning light
can frugally present
even the brambles,
our faulty, hispid bodies,
prickly with shame,
yet sweet on the lips,
though not so red.
Sweet as the briar-berries,
we raided from the hedge,
ripe behind their thorns
which warded off your hand’s
lingering finger-store.
You asked how I picked them.
I said the barb implies the fruit.
First find its point,
as the lumbering nerve
quickens to match
and then evade
the theory wound
to be rid of the hurt.
In from the exile dark,
we brought the berries
with edges so clear.
The fruit is in the care.
Our cheeks stained
with blue sweetness,
out of, o, out of
the breaking of fear.


Chapter Two: Ides
5. Bonfire Night

All poisons seethe in the moist,
high-pressured air,
craving mercy.
Samhain haunts the Kalends,
the solstice of the insane.
It is time for fertility fires
and the running of cattle at night.
Their bones alight on the bonfire.
We are up against the warp
and woof of the earth.
Feasts so deep in the phylum,
we perform them like laws of mind.
A dark side and a light side
to the valley of time:
fire, betrayal, tension, bigotry:
this was the Bloedmonath
of the Saxons, of honour and slaughter:
before the tunnel of darkness
and the blind uncertainty of famine.

A time for reverses:
Monteagle turns in Catesby,
Lincoln dismisses McClellan,
Gentle Prince Ludwig deposes
Otto the Mad in Bavaria,
Foreman KOs Moore

It was compulsory to celebrate
King James`s deliverance
in the memory of my grandfather.
The prevailing Puritanical gusts bear
the flaring trophies of hate,
Catherine wheels, Roman candles,
burning Popes, tarred barrels
and the chants that echoed back
to bullied poverty

A penny loaf to feed the Pope
A farthing o' cheese to choke him.
A pint of beer to rinse it down.
A faggot of sticks to burn him.

And yet the air is older, the mad squibs
punctuate the dense air
their reports
a hidden chord of words we hear, but cannot say.
a quibus “By what word?“

The Catholic culprits seemed to want capture.
Burn him in a tub of tar.
Burn him like a blazing star.
Burn his body from his head.


November was always for the opening of power.
Even now the polished procession
and deliberate debate are debilitating, mythic,
a “plot“ in ancient Greek.

A time for victories:
Akbar`s Panipat,
King William’s Brixham,
Frederick’s Rossbach
Montgomery`s Alamein

A time for power change.
The Holy Roman Empire
is a crumpled map
in Voltaire`s pocket
Cyprus becomes British,
Poland, a Kingdom.

A time for boundary violence
Colonel la Balme killed
by Little Turtle at Eel River,
Nat Turner sentenced to hang,
Three hundred Santee Sioux
sentenced to hang in Minnesota,
Five Workers representatives
dead, twenty seven wounded
as the Verona drew
into dock from Seattle,
Susan B. Anthony fined for voting.

On the TVs in the living-room
the heats for blue-flaring Miss World.
Those bikini somatypes:
the muscled viscerotonic,
the somatonic fat,
and the skinny cerebrotone.
All summed up between the flares
the solstice of the sensuous.
A cattle run to renew fertility, yet this age
has beaten back the fear of breeding
to trapped Gonadotropinland.
The giantess, mulier gigas
is the phenomenal present:
“her breasts as if ripe with eternal
milk pointed to the sky,
her lithe legs still glazed
with the sea salt of origin,”
the love-body washes up
away from Eden,
with the obese,
the wasted and the mad.

Hans Sachs intones
Cloverland, his country,
whose people know it well
three lazy miles behind Christmas.

It rains, and Cloverland drowns
under Sint-Felixvloed .
The city of Reimerswaal.
and eighteen villages swept away.
below the solitary tower of Kortgene
to become Verdronken Land ,
a salt marsh where mussel beds grow

Then we'll say ol' Pope is dead.
Hip hip hoorah!
Hip hip hoorah hoorah!


6.Octavo Idus, Novembris
Adagio Cantabile i.m. Louis Racine

To meet you I have woken in a John Clare
weatherscape. So, don’t come to my door. You know
I won`t hear you. The self has only one,
unlike the shuttering heart.

After pale sun, white sky and mist, blind, I look out
on Highbury back gardens. Don´t wait in the scruffy bushes.
Out of the limits of my thought, you know I won`t see you.
Habits of mind are more

distant than miles, or years. I know who you are
and what you want to tell me about.

“The sons of the famous struggle against their fathers
Shy animals grow bold in the fog.
Boileau’s comment “since the world
was world it never saw a great poet,
son of a great poet,” was said to keep
tradition unsullied. He knew my father.”

Winds from nowhere gust. His voice fades.
”I lost my son
In an earthquake when I thought him safe in Cadiz
from Lisbon, Verdronken,”

I tell him I had read about it.
A quake so big even Europe`s resident
agnostics were chattering. Kant could never leave the shake alone.
Richter hit the keys at magnitude nine epicentred on the Atlantic
south west of Cape St Vincent

sixty to one hundred thousand dead

Pigeons, crows and pedestrians
become fugitives in Highbury.

Don`t look in through the windows:
You know I won`t open them.
Mine is the landscape of your past.
You must have felt that creeping guilt

“From my vain father whose stubborn Jansenism I tried to unravel.
If there is a God his grace is universal.
Our lives would be ours to waste and His to heal.
Or as I wrote “Hearts makes their wrongdoing
and run out on the good they want”.

“I could not be rid of his memory
my father that Seigneur God,
stealing my grandson’s life in revenge
for my debunking his fateful deity.”
In the awe of the nightbeam
where the timed-out dead enter from the dust,
he speaks again.
“That Baroque parrot,
the God of counter-reform,
pestered by his attributes.
Endless know all,
bully-boy with all the answers.
The great are feeble
in their other aspects”

Then you seem to linger.
As after the lightest snows little birds dare our garden
sensing instinctual ghosts of caring hands,
unwanted bread, jetty sloes.
Late sunlight, tiny tortoiseshells
mediate unpunctual Buddlieia
before the frost-sleep.

7. Septimo Idus
Canone a la seconda i.m.Hannah Szenes.

“Now the calloused hours have feasted,
is the match I struck still blessed?”

I show you the boy from the past who leads the people to a smoking hole,
where they see a strange stone and the Landvoigt ordering them
to carry it to the church. Where the Emperor Maximilian
sees a good foundation for his war and has it chained:
“Lest it decide to wander,” as if to tell those village fools. “This is learning.”

“Now that death has turned my fingers to wood,
is my flame still blessed in this heart
time`s lead has opened?

I show you the starved,
Women`s Regiment , defending the Winter Palace
the only ones to return fire when the crowd called history
was slipping through. I show you the men deserting,
who steal the women`s coats for disguise, as if to tell
those darlings. “This is war.”

“Now that the breath dries in the mouth
is the heart my courage ended still blessed?”

You show me your flight, the night-time leap,
your heart panting as you land and hide,
the only mission ever sent to fight for the Jews.
You show me the paces you take in your cell.

Yet those you wanted rescued were safe
and thought you crazy and sing your songs,
as if to tell the dead “This is your comfort now.”

Now that the crowds refuse our history,
blessed is your burning match.

I show you my daughter, a sleepy baby.
who has to be induced and will not wake.

I see your eyes, like everything brave, so natural and clear.

I hold my child as she focuses hers. As they drain her lungs and as she cries
as hot as any meteor ripping to the earth.
Her dice-throw into my life
burns as sharp as your charred match and I share with you her human prayer
as if to tell your testing absence,
“Now I thank you for the coat of peace you left.”

8. Sexto Idus
Canone a la Terza i.m. John Milton

Clarus, friend to Paulinus:
his arms and legs lie in the grave,
but his mind dances with the stars.
And a thousand years later,
the Commissars in St Petersberg give power to Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin.
Do they dance death’s trepak under the same stars?
Pleiades, those blue-blushed stepping stones to the universe and the Hyades,
raining tears for a lost brother. Twenty years on, FD Roosevelt
announces the Civil Works Administration for four million unemployed.
Those workers sweeping ice-stormed roads, where do they Charlston now?
Once armies fought in Prague. Do they take
the pas menu on the White Mountain?
In Viet Nam, can you dance, dance, dance
to the Red, White and Blue?
Cortes opens Tenochtitlan to pre-tourists.
with the Bodleian, the Bronx Zoo, and Die Ewige Jude in Munich .
"Jewish dress was a warning against racial defilement”
In Belzec on the Shoa earth, arms and legs lie in the trenches.
Vega, Polaris, Capella,
high in the night sky,
leap with the flames, the filaments , the tzitzit,
against halachah black.
Clarus, friend to Paulinus:
his arms and legs lie in the grave,
but his mind dances with the stars.
And I, friend to Milton, his limbs lying in his bier,
leap with his sovereign mind, a Ludlow Coranto, among recusants that nightly dance.


Chapter Three: Martinmas


9. Quinto Idus
Fughetta i.m.Guillaume Apollinaire
A gift of big houses to God,
should omit the finer plumbing,
built on Roman foundations.
The Lateran, bless the place,
is too big for God, yet has hardly
living room enough for its wealthy
ghosts, which is what
you get to be once your
tomb has to justify its space
and weary of tourists,
who want the sound of broken glass,
announcing the shoa
of Europe.
Der achtzehnte Brumaire
"Hegel comments somewhere
that all the great events and people
in the history of the world happen twice.
He omitted to say
the first sighting is tragedy
the second, comic.”
There are no ghosts of poets.
Who could afford their pay?
I remember the rue Apollinaire
by St Germain des Prés,
an easy walk from the
Gilberts’ flat in Paris
in those now unheard-of,
honeyed days
before Nanterre.
Poets make their own myths
out of their going.
I say. I say. I say.
who was that Emperor
I saw you with last century?
The crowds shouting,
“A bas Guillaume,”
from day to night
to his mourners,
as his funeral procession
almost lost its way
to Père Lachaise and
had to wait for Ginsberg
and the end of the Berlin wall.
My notebook was empty and lies
still empty to-day.
The unwritten notebook
in the Hotel Chelsea
that Dylan Thomas left
reminds me of the woman
who invited me to lunch
in the flat next door,
holding an empty bowl,
to ask me what a litre
might look like.


10. Quarto Idus

Marcia funebre sulla morte d’un Eroe
Being child-minded, once, in Wolverhampton, a boy next door
whose hands alone could reach the top of the fence,
shouted a crocodile was eating the shoppers
in the High Street.
The power
of myth
is to inspire fear.
The Rimbaud fable has him brought out of the darkest jungle
with his leg beside him, instead of the truth
of his sister, Isabelle’s care. Luther’s saintly disobedience,
instead of the murder tracts that inspired the Christian
in Hitler to commemorate the birthday of the Protestant
with death
on the Höhe
Strasse
in Leipzig and elsewhere on the Via Regia.
such as Berlin where die ewige Busoni marathoned his Piano Concerto.
They go back a long way, those local chests of lore.
Pope Leo on the road to Attila was transformed into a giant
wielding a fiery sword, instead of the pragmatic
exchange
of gold
for Rome.
Nothing is nearer still
than the heartbeat under the left nipple
that day when a crocodilian slid through the humanless
Kimmeridgian silt to savage my mother and other housewives
of the Midlands sea. Its stone fangs set to tear the strapless cotton gingham
to ribbons and leave me helpless behind a garden fence that smelled
of creosote and had fingers on it.


11.Remembrance Day

i.m. Yannis Ritsos
Compiègne ; the armistice carriage
looked seedy and old when we visited
and smelled of the sweat of desperation.
Mini-skirted poppy girls had reminded us
the dead do not exist except in prayer.
Dostoevsky’s “rancid fingering of self”
in Turgenev’s fine phrase does not
bring them any closer, nor does
Kierkegaard’s God-seen individual.
A day for keeping quiet
to huddle with unknown warriors,
under the weight of one
and half thousand years of treaties,
from Carnutum to Long Binh.
Those who spoke out did not last
Michael Foot’s Donkey Jacket,
Piłsudski’s dissected brain,
Ian Smith’s de facto flag,
Sir John Kerr’s Balmain
thirty pieces of silver
belong in a museum
of political disgrace along
with the ropes that hanged
Nat Turner, Ned Kelly,
the Haymarket martyrs
and Wesley Everett, who?
I learned the art of being invisible.
alone we travel
alone to love, to faith
and death.
…
It doesn’t work.

Can I come with you?

At an early age in Middlesborough,
when I arrived late at school and
was only found at Noon
in the hallway having practiced
non-existence for three hours.
My teacher found me at last
“I never knew you were here”
It wasn’t the first time I admired
her certainty.
Meanwhile the veterans will
still march past the Cenotaph
never without a war to recollect.
Just as the people in Knightlow Hill gather
to give wrothsilver, or be fined, or give
a white bull red in nose and ears,
until we do not know they are there
under the crumbling light
of Tycho Brahe’s star

Will you come with me?
12. St Martin’s Day
Dead winter, past cold light and into the frosts of the street, that winter I was thirsty, for myself, a struck match, hungry to breathe fire. It was the first time I took a train alone to my fourth school more than a month into the term, my Twelfth November. There were bushes over growing between the station wall
and the railway bridge.
Most were winter dead, but the black bryony still had its fruit, a dangerous medicine for a dangerous year with vast spider webs diamond heavy in a strange sunlight. I had evaded the annual migration rites of the eleven plus on grounds of a late summer birth.
Demotion did not happen,
so I was sent to Twickenham, to pass a failure evasion drifted in the wet breeze, like a Nazi dream of Madagascar. Each day two girls would climb into the compartment. Twins of sorts, they wore white canvas coats and were seventeen, Eta and Gamma Virginis. Like two little silver moths with the Y marks,
masked for the frost, autographa gamma.
They took one case
to school and shared it. They peeled a friendship for me in crumpled Bunty mags, TV Comics, stockings their mother didn’t want them wearing “don’t look”. I imagined them in costumes, one was a New World nun who expired under Bishops of boredom, neat with a quick smile and spider hands, the other, a Home Counties novelist slow and messy, with a golfing husband and the look
of a healer who knew all her spells would go wrong, except the one in her eyes. They wrote me down in the double entry of their hearts
and woke a silver why in mine.


Chapter Four Ludi Plebei
13. St Brice’s Day:
i.m. Olga Bergholz

England’s Eden: US fantasy.
“Travelling south on the Route Seventy Four
bound for the City. Fourteen kilometres
down, my white Honda Civic
left the road, travelled on grass and caught
a concrete culvert. It was found in a ditch,
I, slumped over behind the steering wheel
just south of Crescent. The documents
I took from the Hub Cafe with me, a brown
manila folder and a large notebook, gone.”

Whitton, light fog, the coalite found frosted in the hatch.
I carried its sugary liquorice into the kitchen.
The bent form of the Berwick swans, travelling south,
flying in across the pale sky to Ashford sandpit,
where later, that day, I fished with frozen hands.
Mallarme’s Showman came out of the jetty
and white refuse hung in the trees.
They have wings that curve more than the mute
and have flown from Russia, Olga Bergholz,
one of the pin up girls, with Sophia Parzak,
Anna Akhmatova, and Irena Odoyevtseva,
from the ravaged statues they came across in
the City called out, called Leningrad.
Their home was the Summer Park , the ringed,
the pas de quatre, the writers, the wrung, the wronged,
docile in English speaking hands, mocked
and marked and marketed now they are dead.
It is now they have gone, the dead girl poets
and now the dead girl reformer.
Le Maitre set them singing in the circus tent of literature.
The past is now a future phenomenon.
You wiggle their dead jaws to mouth words,
or give a script to Meryl Streep.
Once they lived and deserved more happiness
than printed words can give.
We cannot redeem poets, or reformers, their grief.
This is why Dante kicks us when translating.
Traduttore, traditore? in his Platonic high.
Our words are our suffering, our passion
and no theory can swop itself for the pure
tap root from the torn twig that is speech.
Does the past owe us allegiance and not we the past?
Must it answer our enquiries and not probe us?
Only a little raising up will do.
And our critics will rock on their heels.
and exclaim how each bears your mark,
the noble creature Une Femme d’autrefois.
the illusion we can get back to Eden
a theology of secular nostalgia
in the eyes that consume their singing.
starring the New Beatrices .
We will reveal the lover-poet, the wife-poet,
the widow-poet, the girl-poet to our eyes,
undressed on the platform of now.
We will tell Silkwood jokes in the shower scenes.
And the New Critic will mark her, swear to follow
and will want justice from a list of iniquities,
while the Plebeian mob intone to Juno “t’ appal the Trojans”
Ethelred’s hired killers stab at foreign Gunhilde
Bloedmonath, in Gunnersbury, when knives are to be found.
The Lord Mayor’s crowds will swear to Great Gogmagog.
Winstanley’s lighthouse swells for humanity.
The swans are marked with the City’s knives: pas de quatre.
Bogside girl, Soweto girl, Kirovskiy girl, Bow girl,
the listeners they never met.
and now the Crescent City girl, the journalist she never met.
All the bloody Sundays, bloody weekdays long,
Bloody Mondays, Bloody Wednesdays, Bloody Thursdays,
Bloody Fridays, Bloody Saturdays
and you will swear after the mardi gras brush off,
Tuesday was a good day until it turned Depression Black.
Travelling south on the Route Seventy Four
bound for the City that scrubbed her scarlet.
The swans will soon vanish at the Christmas bell
and no fish bit. At least this secret month
puts us on whisper-terms with life:
Zurndorfer’s law, November is the ghost of time.

14 Equorum Probatio

Flags unfurl for a Prince
while Jason’s brood,
the pheasant poults from Phasis,
drink dew at dawn.
The Roman horseguards march
down the monarchist alleyways.
It is winter in the Royal Park.
The flags drape the catafalque
of Justinian, his Code burying
for a millennium and a half
the roots of Christianity
in the Memra of Israel.

Would the power of the strong
had lasted and Uncle Arthur’s voice
still proclaimed news from the seventh floor
mahogany of Marconi House?
We can still obey in sleep.
Maybe we can think out of here?
Leibniz’s mills turned on themselves,
until the logician and the dreamer
argued their existenz to silence.
Napoleon rides into
Jena with a Corsican straddle.
The penniless writer beds his landlady
aufhebung to the moment of Right.
Hegel smiles, a charming man
despite his bald patch and his bags.
Dead this day of cholera,
he cringes in the philosopher’s waiting room,
Stan Laurel to Europe’s Oliver
“Well, here's another nice mess
you've gotten me into."
Maybe the heart will get us through.
Heinkel H.E. one, one, ones
dropped marker flares pinpointed
by X Gerät broadcast beams.
By eight, the Cathedral was blazing
with the city’s heart.
Hallowed by the ghosts
of Luftflotte drei incendiaries,
I prayed there as a student
under Epstein’s Michael,
Piper’s window, Sutherland’s Catholic,
prototypic Christ
and Britten’s pacific Requiem.
Germany had a new verb,
for the moment, Koventrieren.
Maybe we can have a lucid moment
when the stone thrown
by a boy from St Martin’s
in Middlesborough
didn’t hit me.
Eight hundred bodies
in the London Road cemetery,
and others weren’t sent out in boxes.
Lech Walesa’s prison cell
and the shot that raked
Ploycarpa Salvarietta’s body
were only Absolutely
historical developments.
Add days spent in torpid failure
and we reach Lyell’s layers again.
Lord dig out more folds of clay.
It is winter in the Royal Park,
a scrapbook of a wedding
for a Princess ages in the frost
of the year’s attic.

Time to get out more,
take the fingers off the piano.
Rachmaninov pockets his notebook,
Oriental sketch, unfinished
and plans his move to Helsinki.


15. Sichi Go San
i.m. Marianne Moore

Glued, thousand-year candy clutched in the hands of dressed up children at the Meiji shrines
melts away its snow and blood for the growing of hair on little boy’s shaven pates.
Kinder get the day off on the Kahlenberg for Sancti Leopoldi quem Innocentius Papae Octavus
in Sanctorum numerorum adscripserit.
Suckled on a bandage of lies, the lippy feast of liberated slaves becomes friable.
In Terracina the shaven heads of the freed, took the pileus, the ex-slaves hat
from Feronia on raw skulls. Cave a signatem.

Now the Madonnina di Monte Leano will grant you one. If you’re lucky.
Priests kept votive slaves. The proposition of the free
aged three, five, seven, whenever,
depends for its strength on correspondence with the facts. Facts are inconvenient
and liable to breakage.
Atlanta burnt, but the slaves had to free themselves. Sherman left for the sea.
Himmler marched gays and gypsies to the camps, yet IBM made his punchcards.

In Washington protesters marched against death, yet Melville’s bombs
injured nineteen, opening the hold for the Unabomber’s smoking parcel.
It is a day of the feasting kings, Rubino took aim at Leopold of the Congo,
just to prove himself an anarchist,
Brazil trumpeted a republic,
yet held fast to its slaves .

Outside in Highbury, the Victorian brick is bandaged in fog, and history sleeps in the smog of its glory.
The first day of the Russian winter fast; a liberation from the slavery to sin.
And the children at seven, her first obi, the silk sash worn
with the kimono and gentle pride.
At five he is given his first hakama with long sweets, white and red, the colours of a long life,
the little turtle and the tall crane.

A liberation from liberators;
As fact is to the lie,
so the corpse is to the fly.
-“all rawness” if you like. If by genuine you mean the truth,
then I will allow you still
to be interested in poetry

16. El Santo Nino de la Guardia

Headressed, the white bridal pride of the girls
shimmers on the benches at the front in the church.
The taste of that old melody on the tenor throats
and the mouths of the faithful, resonates
on the polished marble floor.
All is finer than my experience can tell.
The little child in the shrine of branches
has the look of a child-god, a god
of perfect love, of the violence of the question,
of the authority of torture, the racked breath
and the humiliation of ordinary truth.
white silk breathes on the floor,
bare marble throbs to the singing
of pure voices. The people
of this ordinary town
assemble to pray a lie.
the truth trembles
with the screams of Benito Garcia
the converse, confessed
to child-murder burnt with
Pedro de Arbués burnt in Avila
in the just fires.
Yet this is my church,
my communion,
despite the white walls,
despite the language.
In this most Christian of towns,
I give Ivan’s ticket to safety
back to Dostoevsky,
whose appointment
for execution was to-day,
that he should give it back to Job.
It is enough , Marina,
that Jews be Jews
to save the poets.
"Imia tvoe," the name ‘Blok’ lifts like bird.
when Blok’s Twelve march down this street
and claim to take the murdered from their past.
The bridal liars will laugh louder than
at a dished in Quixote.
Hollowed be your name, literary God.
To think this month
could have been called Tiberit,
but the old misery
feared his children
running out of months
and the dynasty of time.
He need never have worried.
Even time can’t cure Roman fervor
of Bar Kokhba’s curse.


17. Day Zero
If the root was not whole, how could the number be? They were in every place we looked, that late autumn, the crane-flies. They were creatures from a landscape of time that had forgotten them, massing for some doomed exodus from the school playing fields to the promised insect reservation. There in Day Zero, it would be some average Bronze age morning when someone started to write and someone invented the hour to help count what still wasn’t there, or to stop that irritating new wheel, perhaps, despite their cuneiform wedges and the shadows cast on Noon Universal Time.

It was Scaliger, bored by his Poitou camp duties decided to re-invent time by adding the 15 Roman Law years to the 19 lunar years and the 28 solar years then turned up to that bronze age January morning and called it Julian zero after his father, having traced the mathematics of the hour to coincide on this remote landscape of number.
And Zero lived among them and they did not know and Big Fly Zero began to eat into time. Released from Scaliger’s timebox, it attacked and ate its way through to eighteen fifty eight and Orsini was shot by Louis Naploeon, Mendelssohn’s wedding march became a license for musical anarchism. Tchaikovsky was accused of the marais des cygnes massacre.
Darwin and Wallace personally said they saw God naturally rearing finches to select.
The Lutine bell was dropped into the Sterling sea. Queen Victoria told President Buchanan
to shut up over the transatlantic cable. Denver was abolished. Mountaineers descended the Eiger for the first time since the bronze age and Big Ben fell out of its perfidious tower. Cape lions were vermin before the Day was trapped by Astronomers to become

Verdronken Land , from which the crane-flies spontaneously
germinated out of spent matches and rusty nails. They had come to warn against the folly of State learning, to counsel patience and give up the squalid struggle for dignity. They squashed themselves on my Maths homework with their straight wings laid on the abdomen. The books drowned in the of swell of powers that shifted blood-red, blood-red for the students dead, in Prague, betrayed by Halifax’s bell in the solitary tower of Westminster, for the students at Athens Polytechnic when the AMX 32 tank came crashing through the gates while I was still a student and in Prague later, while I painted the walls of Radnor Gardens and considered schooling for my children.

The Cloverland of my Grammar School, drowned in surds
If the root was not whole, how could the number be? I heeded the crane-flies, read Catholic books in Scripture lessons. Rootless, I joined Hugh in Lincoln, Hilda in Whitby, recognised Elisabeth of Hungary as my Queen, left surds and my life unsimplified.


Chapter Five:The Kalends
18. Night Window
Canone a la Sesta. i.m. Paul Eluard
1. Exposition
Jammed, the window is open to the night sky.

The mirror we bought at Camden Market
stands against the wall in the attic
bedroom on the Lower Mortlake Road.
The March Cosmopolitan,
on the raffia chair, Gia Carangi,
reflected in the glass.

I will not write your word,
though I repeat your name,
Eugène Grendel.

Venus, low in the sunset,
Mars rising in Leo, the silver fingers
of rare Leonids index themselves.

From the gut of winter loss,
Licinius’ feast of the sun.
became, instead, a day to dedicate
the tomb of St Peter,
beside the circus where
the Roman crowd
bellowed for a Jew’s death.

The light of the Genii,
of the Circus at night,
Mercury of the Proust crater
and on the moon, the Daguerre,
the sad immortals of the race
whose light masks death.
A piano glitters on the ear.

The martins have all gone now,
leaving the sparrows in their nests.

I will not write your word,
despite your songs I know,
Eugène Grindel

2. Episode 1

First entry

We can build a church in the night sky.
Music will feed us crumbs of loss.
It is the tunic of the Lord,
the seamless gown,
which was not rent,
despite the dice throw.

Answer

“Therefore, of the one and only Church
there is one body and one head,
not two heads like a monster “
and can we remember those
who were faithful to Israel
and whom the Blood Libel betrayed-
even with one head , a monster?

It is winter and the martins have gone.
Our shrine is a borrowed nest.

Second Entry

Come into the night sky .
The Sun now sets so early
that we can see the constellations,
Vinteuil’s, or Ravel’s, or Saint-Saen’s
Septet; Ursa Major; visible at night
with the plough and the seven stars.
The Lord makes ‘ayish, Kesil
the sign of winter, Kimah,
by the Moon, and the constellations
of the southern sky;
a dry muted trumpet .
The Lord does huge and unsearchable
things, and wonderful things without number.
Music wreathes its trail of voices.
and turns to enter the day of making,
a day for dedicating,
to see the summer triangle,
that sign in the night of a stranger.


Answer

Come into the night sky

The Soviet sky above Eastern Galicia,
according to the Ribbentrop-Molotov telescope
November, Nineteen Forty Two.
and the people from the shadows,
crowding in to Lviv, the counter subject,
refugees fleeing eastward from
Nazi-occupied Europe.
under Deneb, the Einsatzgruppen
under Vega, the Einsatzgruppen
under Altair, the Nachtigall battalion of
free Ukrainians in German uniform.

Second Entry

The Sun is now sets so early that
we can still see
the Pogrom constellations, which is why
some make a God of its loss.


Answer

The Nazi sky above Eastern Galicia
ayish, Kesil, the sign of winter, Kimah
Thanks to your art, we see the dead now.
Petlura Days with stars fading to nothingness,
after being marched to the Jewish
cemetery or to the prison on
Łąckiego street and the Ghetto,
Lyra, the first group entry,
then the selections,
“action under the bridge"
fetching sul ponticello
the elderly and sick.

I will not write your word,
despite the pain of never knowing you,
Eugene Grindel.


3. Episode 2

First entry

Aquila, the banner of the eagle
under which enter the
Aktion Reinhard lorries
-left in the evening sky –
and it is the brightest star in
each of these constellations
that make up the summer triangle.

I will not write your word,
though I stood by your grave,
Eugène Grendel

Answer

Though these constellations
were directly overhead in the summer,
they are low down now in the west,
ducking under the western horizon
at around Nine pm, but they are still ideal
for late afternoon, or early evening observing.
the star that forms the head of Cygnus,
or Orpheus, is called Albireo,
centuries after the extinction of the fire
Therefore, of the one and only Church
there is one body and one head,
not two heads like a monster.

I will not write your word
on verdicts that whispered
of night when it was day,
Eugene Grindel.
.

Counter-Subject

First entry

Fifteen thousand Jews
were taken to the Klepariv
railway station and deported to the Belzec
extermination camp, each one its special radiance,
a blue and golden double star
that is a beautiful sight through a small telescope.
Notice Cygnus is flying directly downwards,
how many Jews were also forced
to work for the Wehrmacht
and the ghetto's German administration,
especially in the nearby Janowska labor camp.
On June the Twenty Fourth and Twenty Fifth
Nineteen Forty Two, two thousand
Jews were taken to the labor camp;
only one hundred and twenty
were used for forced labor,
and all of the others were shot.
Notice Cygnus, or Orpheus,
is flying directly downwards
head-first into the western horizon.,
a glissando runs to plucked chords.

I will not write the word
on a bullet trace that copied it,
Eugène Grendel.


Answer

High in the east, is the quick, recognisable,
W-shape of the constellation Cassiopeia;
the women waiting behind the barbed wire,
some smiling gently at an armed guard
whose face we cannot see.
Many who were not deported, including
local orphans and hospital in-patients,
were shot.
Below Cassiopeia is Perseus,
while all the stars are pin sharp,

the music, Vinteuil’s, or Beethoven’s
withers to the bass. The martins too are silent.
On September 1, 1942, the Gestapo
hanged the head of Lviv’s Judenrat
dangling down like a belt
and members of the ghetto's Jewish police force.

I will not write your word,
though I still hear your voice,
Eugène Grendel


Answer

About sixty five thousand Jews stayed.
Winter approached with no warmth or water,
leading to typhus. To the left of Albireo is the
Dumbbell Nebula, the left over
remnant of a star that, swelled out to form a
nebula, left over, some one thousand five hundred years ago.
that gave up shining under Justinian’s hate.

I will not write your word that wrote these graves,
Eugène Grendel


4. Middle Entry

Episode One

First entry

Marcel, sleuthing time without an editor,
“Grâce à l’art, au lieu de voir
un seul monde, le nôtre, nous le voyons
se multiplier, et autant
qu’il y a d’artistes originau.”

The violin rises on a distant note.

Answer

Between January fifth to the seventh, nineteen forty three,
another fifteen to twenty thousand Jews and
as many worlds, including the last members
of the Judenrat, were shot outside of the town.
The red supergiant star to the top left is Betelgeuse,
and to the bottom right is the white hot star Rigel.
“After the extinction of the fire,
it still sends a special radiance.”
And finally, we have beautiful Orion.
In the middle of both is Orion's belt of three bright stars.
Further killings of thousands occurred ,
star-spores, throughout nineteen forty three.


Second Entry

The subject returns finding its entry blocked.
Hanging down from the belt is a dagger
of three fainter stars,
at the centre of which is Orion's nebulae –
a cloud of gas and dust where new stars are forming,
the key modulated out of recognition.
The Orion nebula is easily visible to the unaided eye,
To the right of the W-shape, is the Andromeda Galaxy.
The hundred thousand million stars
that make up the Andromeda galaxy
are what allow us to see it over such a vast distance.
It is the most distant object
that can be seen, with Jacob’s staff pointing to the unaided eye
an eerie two point two five million light-years away.

Episode Two

First Entry

Looking to the east, you can see Orion
rising from nine pm, meaning that winter is here.
Mirphak is visible at the top-right,
in the constellation of Perseus.
In the constellation of Auriga
to the bottom left is the bright star Capella.
Below Perseus is Taurus,
with the beautiful orphan
cluster of stars called the Pléiades.

‘Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only,
our own, we see that world multiply itself
and we have at our disposal as many worlds
as there are original artists’


Answer

Also known as the seven sisters
seven stars are just about visible
to the unaided eye.
The Pleiades are about the same
size in the sky as the full Moon.
In fact, the Moon is not too far
away from the Pleiades
on twenty third and twenty fourth of November.

6. Stretto and Coda

” It is the tunic of the Lord,
the seamless gown,
which was not rent,
despite the dice throw’
followed by a cello note.

“Worlds more different from those
that revolve in infinite space,
worlds which centuries
after the extinction of the fire from
which their light first emanated send us
still each one its special radiance,
whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer.”

Have you the might to show the galaxies?

The planet Mars, the only planet that is affable
and is a wonderful sight to see ,
another treat for small telescope owners.


In the March Cosmopolitan,
the Soviet sky above Eastern Galicia,
her layered hair, those sad, brown eyes,
you walk the suburbs of time,
Gia Carangi, elle défunte, nue.

This is a rare opportunity to see a comet
with the unaided eye.

By the time the Soviet Red Army
entered Lviv, on July Twenty Sixth
Nineteen Forty Four,
only two hundred to three hundred
Jews remained,
in a small telescope throughout the winter.


Boniface proclaims the borders
of salvation, wider than Proust’s,
or Mallarmé’s original artists,
a solitary note on the oboe.

“Therefore, of the one and only Church
there is one body and one head,
not two heads like a monster; that is,
Christ and the Vicar of Christ,
Peter and the successor of Peter,
since the Lord speaking to Peter
Himself said: 'Feed my sheep'
meaning, my sheep in general,
not these, nor those in particular,
whence we understand
that He entrusted all to Peter.”

And we made His legacy
a tabernacle of hate.
Maritain’s web of contempt
he spun with Maurras
narrowing it to a museum case
of arcane lore, even the sleep-walkers
knew more of You than they.
The one-headed leech
that bled your word I cannot write

It is the tunic of the Lord,
the seamless gown,
which was not rent,
despite the dice throw
and we can remember those
who were faithful to Israel.
Under the winter triangle,
the Pre-Dog, the Dog and Betelgeuse.

He who made the seven Pleiades
and the seven main stars of Orion
and changes deep darkness
into morning, who also darkens day into night,
who calls for the waters of the sea
and pours them out on the surface of the earth.
The window, jammed open to the winter night
and the bare room empty of death.
in the mirror we believe in,
in the suburbs of loveliness:

the Lord is His name, the seamless night
that abolishes the dice-throw.

19.Depositio Sanctae Elizabeth

Schubert, Notturno played by the Janowska Orchestra, Lviv.

Kidneys, the renes searched by God
vanish in glissando flames:
in Janowska, the workers reported
the clavicle was the hardest part to burn.
On the fingerboard
of fire, muscles, pizzicato,
the spinal chord and contorted,
shoulder-blades fuse to the rib-cage
diaphragm. The heart and viscera
are long marched to tailpiece ash.
Yet this place is no go
to the flames, to be discarded, the bronchia
the core, thoracic, all for a fine, so-
stubborn, once-uttered word,
that a No-one heard.

20. UNICEF Children’s Day

Low Jupiter, the sky father set in the South West
over Thornaby, an hour after the sun.
My father turned up a page in the Eagle Annual
to teach me longer words
and I found the year’s mime again, the place
with the grey-stippled field mouse nesting
on its ball of comfort balanced and bound
to a stalk of wheat. Later under Venus,
I went outside to the backyard
and heard the children from the orphanage,
their voices indistinct in the cold night air
and I felt the awe of them, those fighters
for laughter, when the stars were already distant,
and time mummed before me, a smiling stranger,
who overtook me unless I followed.
Until that night, the siren sounded
at an unpracticed time.
Its urgent, mad sadness haunted me
and the year and the day had fled.
I would not let my parents leave the bedroom,
and knew in my blood that
there was a split in the mirror
of things kept safe that neither could see,
as it came apart in my hands.
My mother opened the curtains
through which I saw a fat tongue of flame
slobbering the farm outside
and shooting hot seeds
into an unseen wind that
swayed with burnt hate.
Those children’s voices
were seared under a dark smudge
that was their killing.
I was sat downstairs
with a glass of milk
I did not want as I knew
I would wet the bed.
knowing how to do
the take away sum
of silence after danger.

Later my father, always
the wise exorcist
of magic and fear,
took me to the farm
to show me no children died.
Yet I could see the look
in the farmer’s eyes
that told of his dear
bellowing brutes;
a word remembered,
“hibernation”, its sense
scattered on singed straw.


21. Presentation

Moist seas still warm up the winds from Iceland, reaching these splintered coasts from south west,
over the bed and breakfasts and hotels of St Mary’s Island, Tresco and Bryher.
Rainstorms are teased into gales.
On the Cairngorms rime thickens on the radio masts, then thaws. The east winds breach the seas’ pelts
bringing snow to Kent and Sussex. The nation clutches at its goods.
Ben and Anna regard our snowman as mere eccentricity compared to Morph, or Farthing Wood
in this old house we’ve moved into.

Those pictures of the child Mary: Titian’s little aristocrat in blue silk,
that was on the wall outside my father’s office.
The Très Riche Heures in Chantilly,
showed me the shape of sinlessness ;
the tiny form so awed, so small against the stone, Gothic skeleton.
In this old house...

No Jewish girl was ever offered up to the temple.
Lies we tell to grip the truth we cannot see.
Procopius, Justinian’s toady, tells us of what was to be a new temple and a new rock.
“In Jerusalem he dedicated to the Mother of God a shrine, the Nea…
Thus the church is partly based
on living rock and partly carried in the air
by a great extension, added to the hill by the Emperor's might.”
Shahrbaraz’s Sassanid Persians,
were helped by the Jews to tear the church down.
Things so precious we grip them till they break.
Her temple was the Word of her womb. On the Madaba mosaic she is Theotokos, the Woman of the
Apocalypse, her stars too old even to be new,
her body too new for time, presented to the world, a shadowless girl.
The Nea wronged this old Maccabaean House.
This feast was brought to Rome by Sistine Sixtus, yet Paul the Sixth
celebrated this Eastern passion for pure, private silence.

A near-silent wind, the whispering of long-tailed tits, ganging up with the blues and greats,
passes through the branches of Kew Gardens. That Saturday I stood by the road, having watched the
seagulls, sitting on the goalposts in Old Deer Park, all facing South into the wind, waiting for the Brent
Geese eleven. The winds have gone north. Sadness is a tearstain on a graph where love maps fear.
I have come into this garden of trees, that the day might catch you here, Our Lady of the plane trees, the
oaks, the willows and the ash that still keep old leaves in winter and the spires of hornbeams in the ruined Twickenham Baths, gilding deathless branches,
with the goodness, the unrisk of our nature:
mother of love without misgovernance.

Dead in the blizzard on Ben McDuhe, six girls and a boy who should not have ventured.
I remember the snow at St Mary’s years before, a tall girl stepping from the Aula
to the Car Park; her hair thick, smoky black and her skin, new fallen snow;
she slipped on the ice in front of me, when I should have caught her, the ice-crystals melting

on her blue mini-skirt, freezing rain on her tights. At my dim apology she limped away, breathless,
bleeding, collected her soggy notes;
things too precious to dare hold onto and which we lose.

22. Decima Kalendas: St Cecilia’s
Schubert, the B-Flat Trio
“Partly on Sensation partly on thought.”
Keats- Letter to Bailey
I. Allegro
No, your black swan was a conceptual one
about prediction, or induction.
A garden lady in the Roman sun
should translate such attention.

At Peace in St Brides they sang again and sighed.
At choral morning services played on a sacred premise.
A clergyman’s sermon lulled peace to abide,
‘pleasing and practicable to be joyful with gladness,
to serve and to express this’ musical tide.

Then to the viols and the voices of Lassus,
Palestrina, Gibbons, the sound swells wide.
Music too at the White House, Stravinsky,
Stern, Casals and Serkin, pipe-bands, jazz.

II.Andante un poco mosso...

Break his bands of sleep asunder
bam sh sh bam bam sh sh shy bam
rouse him like a peal of thunder
bam sh sh bam bam sh sh shy bam

For one brief, shining moment, don't let it be forgot
bam sh sh bam bam sh sh shy bam
That once there was a spot that was known as Camelot
bam sh sh bam bam sh sh shy bam

We'll never say goodbye. Bam-sh-baam.
Bamp-sha-bamp ... He'll never make me cry Bamp
whoo-eee whoo.. Bam-sh-boom Every time we kiss goodnight
Twelve thirty five... Klfm Radio broke into The Chiffons
Feels so good to hold him tight.


and any barmaid can be a star made
if she dances with or without a fan.
Doris Day at one thirty six and a few seconds
broken in to by an ABC radio man

After the rubrics, the CBS feed
played Barber's Adagio at the wrong speed.
Who eee woo wee ee woo wee
After a few seconds of silence,


Jackson repeated the news:

Then Beethoven's Pastoral was used,

Bamp bamp bamp sh bam sh sh sh

Jackson repeated the news,

followed by "The Star Spangled Banner”
bam sh bam bam sh shy
When our cause isn’t just, then must we conquer?
bam sh sh bam bam sh sh shy bam

III. Scherzo

Dogory Kirke collapsed in his bedroom outside Oxford
“for a few golden moments the natural and the supernatural,
...fused into that... they would have had before the Fall “
and what would Lewis have said
about Arthur Sullivan’s hackneyed chord?

At Llano in the Mojave, far from Handel or Purcell,
unable to say words his wife could tell,
Huxley wrote "LSD, a hundred,
micrograms, intramuscular."

His wife injected him at eleven forty five
and gave another two hours later.
At five twenty one p m Aldous Huxley was at rest
“After silence, that which comes nearest
to expressing the inexpressible is music.”

On the Huxley Variations’ arithmetic

Stravinsky ;“Music is not always ‘to like’:
music is also for something
much more important than ‘to like’
and his strings sounding
like ”the sprinkling of fine glass.”

Kennedy died minutes after two, or quicker.
Stravinsky’s mezzo or baritone
fades and fires between the tritone
Mi contra fa diabolus est in musica

and the perfect fifth on three clarinets,
like witnesses to a mute forest of instruments.
Let music, speak, not words, nor wisdom too,
the seal on the Kunzite stone at a cost to rue,
the President could never give the girl he loved true.

IV.Rondo
On Cecilia’s dead body a single digit yet.
It is enough to play a silent set.

My brother was in the queue
to be With the Beatles. I thought it dim.
They’d really got a hold on him
In their new songs, I heard a strange

repetition of phrase
when pitch and tone weren’t one
Why send? Why care?
Why fuss? Did they sing or did they sigh?

The sequences were ambivalent
What they were they were,
what they were fated to become
depended on us
recording their chords
how we chose to hear
decided its meaning.

V. Finale (Uncut)

Victoria de Los Angeles, Emma Albani those St Marguerites
where are they gone, Albani whom Gounod treats;
Los Angeles, whom he draws down?

Daughters, you grow in my shadow.
I run away from your play
until you no longer need its deed
black-blazered kids as formal as the crow.

What can I say as I defray,
the heed of your feed.
The demolition site of speech
thunders to the screech

of venial cat gut on mortal wood.
Nothing ever thought could
mill, could still the heart.
That only what has never been will be in vain.


23. Nono Kalendis Decembris, Clementide.
Sonata Appassionata i.m. Paul Celan
Only the hardiest lichens still covered the trees, now sulphur dioxide wreathed from the polluted sky. From about half past ten in the evening until about half past twelve Somewhere I saw a fractured stem frozen by a raindrop. The sodium glare blurrred the road signs where I had walked. Finished rains, a stain of patina insulated the motorway’s arterial spasm. There was nowhere to go. Over this riverscape cloud banks rolled to the tow of cold fronts that seeped in to empty warmth. With inshore winds colder than usual, the rain drew over the land to Europe, over housing estates, depots, yards, town- centres, building sites, argon lit airports, sub-stations, moorlands.
Sometimes I gazed at the clouds over Twickenham and thought about my children and waited for growth, rather than diminishment. At sometime I thought of myself, exhausted, trying to find a way out of the stigma that had fixed my cravings.
This was the flooded suburb of faith that lay deep below the meniscus of weariness with the unjustly slain, who blundered into the stretches of the crazed, whose songs wavered with the grief of exile and of their friend’s betrayal. This was the Gondaropinland of wasted sensuality, of a girl called Niemand asleep and shivering dreams of her abuse on the frost of her skin. This the Cloverland of the routinised, of the air-crash dead with nowhere to go. I had come from the markets of sense, without goods of value, having sold away wonder to fill a hunger I had caught from Parties and Councils who kneaded yes into no and dissolved assent in the acid of denial.
Milton’s spectre carried the world’s copies of his Areopagitas of bigotry in a sack called night. Darwin paced the streets looking for how the sad adapt their tears in the mist called oblivion. Pascal scraped at the ashes of his fire at the God of anger, the God of power, the God of violence, not of the philosophers. Mabillon strained at coded songs in the dark called love. Clement the Unexistent trailed by sleepwalking followers stared up at a slowly fading light from a room above.
At some time the old had been chilled by dreams of authority from those who had gone. Sightless alone in a room filled with sunlight, a bomber still hears his commander order him to drop incendiaries on distant unknown cities and an old broker hears of deals that will bring back the dead. At some time in the closed factories that follow Lenz’ law and the piety of the arc lamps, the massive hollow that is still to be emptied of mastering wounded speech will only leave a brittle framework of afflicted silence.
I place it on your grave in the Thiais Cemetery. How sad it is to hope.


6.Caterntide
24. Brumalia
Pristine, I cannot find the preface Cervantes did not want to write, nor the portrait Don Juan de Jauregui did not want to give of him.
Don’t begin
with how Sterne was begot and the house clock that could never be wound without his mother’s thoughts of some other things and with the sagacious Locke.
Don’t mention
Spinoza’s unknown bodily mechanism and of the many things his somnambulists did in their sleep and the poem about spring, the overcoat, forgotten and how warmth nudges the earth.
Things that happen do not make a creed of must.
It is winter
and the wine has come for Brumalia, Brumaire c’est fini; the Beaujolais Villages from Rome and Byzantium arrives by parachute drop to the Staines Road Off-Licence.
Human time
means what can only be felt exists, a wine without bitterness that must be drunk soon with its text of mild banana and peardrop; massive silence
unbroken,

and the rain, re-fruiting the past on stems of reserve. This island place, the ‘I’, the eye-land’s muscled history fires the landscape. The ‘aye’ lies there inert, a lying fibre, scattered in the Berkshire mud.
Broken bricks
from the building site, a scaffolded waste, like an unfinished place of worship; Beaker Folk, or Corded Ware , found too late for a comeback, too urbane for mystery.
The unwritten Preface
of the present, that unknown mechanism of history that keeps us sleepwalking into the future. Most of what has happened is now as empty as a portrait of an hour. Dan Cooper, the Norjak man leaps into its freedom of nowhere.
The eye-site was built
on the place of Woodley Park. I took the track that was the old estate’s access from Earley Station when the four, six twos my brother modelled still breathed past. Rainfall always bogged me down, trying that short cut to the College. I hated the road past the Huntley and Palmer’s tin factory and the Bus Station.
It would still be a long time,
before I saw “Winchcombe” Hall of Residence and the playing fields. My trousers would be sodden with mud which I trailed to the hostel room, where I would write about what I had not lived through on sheets of tatty yellow paper my father brought from his clinic.
Elsewhere,
trainee teachers with bare midriffs and bowler hats foraged widely on sex, Newcastle Brown, Afghan black and Players Number Six to the drone of Leonard Cohen;
mud and massive silence
that night. The page of Rahner left unfinished in Whitton and before me a week of uncreation, by-passing the stares of well-debated girls. It was the year of the sweater skirt, the PE girls in micros, the humanities kids in standard minis, ‘kneesie’ young lecturers, drama students in midis and battle jackets all sleepwalking into the bare future.
Maxis were for hysteria at tedious
noisy balls, or discos and the science students wore trousers that flapped with chunky shoes. Did the lab rules make them always cover their bums?
the emptiness
of the letter-rack where you met the shy, friendly ones wanting letters and union meetings where everyone wore trench-coats, even though the heating was on.
I had left an offering
in my shoe prints on the half-built, private estate, that the God of St Edmund’s arsey ,Nelson Road , be not just a weekend eye -land. Inert, the sceptical mud got onto the maps, on Rahner’s page about being being anything not nothing, on the church across the piggery field,
next weekend:
My father in his chair cutting short my talk of the “supernatural existential” until the results of the two thirty at Lingfield trash the day’s accumulator, while my sister sings “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” to the radio.
Berkshire rain,
mild, unseen and persistent on a dimmed landscape of orchards, brick stacks and unchosen Gods, the eye-deus, the ‘I’dear, the ‘I’ deal. Surely by now, now the flares have faded, that God of the scaffolds has been built? Surely by now, the bright-skied shortcut I took is a street. In the clay, in the breath of encroached fields, in the present that is everything that is, lies the forgetfulness, the waste of ripeness, that crumbles at the poke of fingering history. Yet here up-track in icy Twickenham, a Golem ‘I’ still lumbers across that building site, a noctambulant, following a dated map for a fresher unbelief.
I cannot
find another copy of ‘The Origin of Species’ the librarian would not let me take out from the library when I was eleven.
Don’t begin
with later I read Ulrike Meinhof. It was on a postcard that fell out of a German novel I was reading.She had other thoughts then.
Don’t mention to Maldoror now black as pitch night comes you can’t breathe under water even if you’re non-insane. Each boarding soul knows, you cannot rely on Celan’s sharks.
Things that must happen still do not make a creed.
It is winter
in St Edmund’s R.C., the Priests now wear red for the Vietnam Martyrs and the wine has come for Brumalia; without bitterness, it must be drunk.

25. St Catherine’s Day

Qaddish, that earthen wheel,
a mythic saint and real prayer.
You cannot pray to the real Hypatia
whose wounds still bleed.
Les Catherinrettes vont coiffer
sainte Catherine at the corner
of the Petits Carreaux and Clery,
while gales head for the Channel,
the jet stream poised
to sink the White ship
with its undertow of anarchy
drowned William and Richard, Otheur, Richard of Avanches, Geoffrey, Matilda and Lucia,
to gust
through the South coast
past the sectarian ruins
of St Catherine’s light,Ventnor,
and London at a hundred
and twenty miles per hour,
shattering lives and roof slates,
through Coringa, India, veering
a hundred and thirty degrees through time, a verdronken port and thirty thousand dead,

sending twisters through
a passage of years
at Heber Springs, Arkansas,
that killed seventy six,
freezing in the Appalachians
and West Virginia,
three hundred and
twenty three dead in the snow.
In the next room
of the chronicle,
typhoon Nina has stolen a thousand and thirty six in the Philippines.

From the silk sheets
of Gondatrophin-bedland,
young Poniatowski
wakes after the service
of the Empress’ white breeches.
Later he beds virgin Poland.
Dragged off by the treachery
of dukes, he defines a future Cloverland. Milk drowns its honey,

while off Sidi Barani, HMS Barham
rolls over and blows up
from top-heavy shells
to be kept censored
until D Day,
though birthday girl
Helen Duncan
séances the truth,
to be tried
as a witch and
banged up in Holloway.
And the dead
how they get in everywhere!
Bathhurst cudgelled. The Cheyenne
children lie in blood
that flows
until the Union
cashes in their ghost cries,
witnessed by the Dartford dead from the V 2 and the Mirabal sisters qualify too.

Trying to think back the hours in a day
brings the apple tree my younger brother
broke his arm on when a branch gave
as he swung on it.
Months later I unearthed the branch in the compost heap.
Over the winter it had grown white fleshy roots
and gripped the mulch so hard the soil hit my face
as I pulled on it.
Its kingdom claimed.


That silent energy, tree and arm,
brother and earth.
and maybe we need to finish here
as Kennedy is interred
in a graveyard of soldiers
on his son’s birthday.


Chapter Six Nativity Fast
26.Thanksgiving
Radnor Gardens,
Cortot’s fingers open the world:
it is the snow étude,
sown indoors,
flickering by the fire I set.
In the papers,
the Glenn Gould film’s review.
We would not have stayed in Thrace
with Aristophanes
had this country not been so covered with snow
and the rivers ice-bound at the time Lewis Carroll
brought out his underground tragedy here;
I read to my daughter.
It was the time I fell in with Ireton,
a bearded local Puritan Africaans,
with Rupert’s Times Wine Club-glass in hand
at my forefather’s Putney debates;
truth to tell he loved De Rure Albion
to such excess his graffiti. “Mosaic Brits are cool”
won him instant incomprehension.
Seedy Lewis, his son,
whom we made laureate,
pleaded with the establishment
to mobilise for
the defence of Madrid
while Russian tanks
of the Byelorussian
Military District from Stara
rolled in off the steamer Chicherin.
Orwell swore on his single egg
at Villa Simont there would be as many fighters as locusts.
As deadly as any war
Shall we go to the Treaty tasting?
The Roman Triumvirate smelling of greasepaint
They do not cross at Philippi, but will do so.
Then the fifty-year with a bouquet of delegates
to the Winter War from Finland,
or forty years mature with Aristophanes’
perfume of honey corked by the Hull note
from the Pearl Harbour Estate. The smell of engine oil
and a slow wake on the shore
as the carriers slip out of Hitokapu Bay.
And Dick O’Polis will have his market
a rusting reel of Casablanca, Sontag’s Aids story from the New Yorker,
one point five inches of rain from Guadalupe in one minute,
the rights to Ronald Regan’s autobiography,
the contents and the curse of Tut’s tomb,
a doorway into our times
along with the Brinks Mat gold bullion and
Ellen White’s last deception of Satan
the ladder Hauptmann did, or didn’t, use
to kidnap baby Lindbergh.
In Gondotropinland
Fur -wrapped film-stars
bring the Sacred Meal,
after the Macy temple of Dionysos
Oskhophoria parade.
Meat, bread, and
cellulose bravery brought
to the Twice-seven Children,
who will go down to Crete with Theseus.
"Eleleu! Iou! Iou!"
Ah they bene all yclad in clay
while off camera, Rachel Roberts
smashes through the kitchen window,
the sound of broken glass..
One bitter blast blewe all away


27. Christ the King
Istomin sounds out on
Tchaikowsky’s Novembr.
Shadowy bride,
after the blundering boy
with blinded eyes
thrusts the image of
some dark God ,
upon us.
We pass each other
by in sounder sleep.
We find bills daily,
or papers put in places
neither is accustomed to.
As if being two
means being neither
self nor other.
Such unawares
has depth, again,
a watchfulness refined
into blind thirsting.
I slip into ravine craving
from your snow-face
that reflection swears me to,
that winter-warmed nakedness
makes a habit of.
Apart, you tell me of
the feather kickings
of our boy of love,
(perhaps
the only one awake.)
We carry on a secret
wakefulness
all through the house
in unfamiliar places,
like this deliberate snowfall,
a hidden rule of love,
the ruler-boy,
making a hope of hollows.

28. Feast of the Miraculous Medal
November take flail,
let no ship sail.
The storm still rages, Eddystone
and Winstanley vanished,
the wind peaking
to two hundred miles an hour
in London.
The foxes were in their earths,
at peace from the hunters,
chomping hedgehog’s heads,
the catamount in its den,
chewing the bark-beetle
run from felled elms.
Novem
berried,
with the sweet Roman chestnut, bronze brown,
bramble-thorn and the beetle’s labyrinth brand-mark,
rose-hips and glowing quince.
Blackberry, dewberry
black bryony, glistening under the spider webs
spinnän, the spider vibrating to
Anton Rubinstein’s piano,
parodying Tchaikovsky.
Fenberry, crowberry
raspberry, I woke each day to take
dry books into a cold light
In the first frost the sap nodes
on the cherry tree in Constance Road froze solid
like marbles. At that time I loved the drift of movement
and the red-flecked leaves, the rain-soaked pavements
alive with water, rushing over the clogged drains
and the ice-cold sap that melted in my pocket.
How many times was I given that medal ?
It lay in the bottom of drawers,
with sacked farthings and buttons.
Its oval shape, like an insect’s single wing,
persisting, defying oblivion,
like the simple casks
in the Rue du Bac.
like the beam from a lighthouse,
the Pigeon Point Light,
still shining out to sea, despite
the Loma Prieta
tremors.


29.Noc listopadowa
With the urgency smelt of gunpowder,
Wyspiański’s costumed Gods declaim
the gallop of horse’s hooves on cobbles
and the imminence of death
in the November air: it was cold that night
in the Lazienski Park with the Sobieski Bridge
defended by Wisocki amd Schlegel.
The costumed hips poise
in the deadly air, summoned by Wadja:
betrayal is an erotic fault,
Pallas Grudzińska takes off her clothes
for Constantine, the Russian, to escape
dressed as a woman.
The Nikes’ of Samosthrace etcetera
take Emilia Plater’s costume
as a captain of the Lithuanian Infantry.
It all ends in death of course.
Gonadotropinland persists
in fetching breeches
and breech loaded rifles
that made aristocrats
into fetches of history.
And no one knows even today
on whose whim,
who betrayed whom.

To-day, pre-war, a divided heart
was mended by a surgeon
who vivisected dogs,
a deaf cardiologist and a
black carpenter, denied advancement:
the carpenter, a saint,
the surgeon, a genius
and the cardiologist,
a pioneer feminist.
Post-war, my heart
was wasting oxygen.
Because of them,
that grim-faced man,
Sir Russell Brock,
re-piped my organ
in Keats’ lazaret.

30. St Andrew’s Day
The great storms slacken
for fog and ice:
a pile up on the motor way, 1971, seven dead.
Radu Lupu opens the sound,
taught by Neuhaus,
watched by Mandelstamm.
Richter has the sound too nervous,
Beethoven: the Arietta
of the thirty-second Sonata,
half of thirty two. Diabelli’s waltz
is also thirty- two bars long
divided into fours, like the tree in Bushy Park.
Most songs fall into thirty two bars.
Bach’s thirty two are deduced from
two sixteen bar parts .
Do they measure just the tooth-holes
in our gaping skulls,
or the perfection of the crystals?
The Almavivas again,
their lovelorn music shifts to
the melancholic leisure
of brass bands.
George Lloyd, using cheap tickets
to tour English Cathedrals.
Maybe the November Cathedrals
are
a melody on the euphonium
for Columba in Iona,
Dunfermline for Margaret,
a Carol without words
on the trombone ,
Andante Grazioso in Lincoln, for Hugh
two Presto outbursts within
its progress for the apostle
in St Andrews,
his body brought from
the East on a full-sailed fishing myth.

The end, a Lloydian trumpet
like the
boys swearing
in the Eton Wall Game.
Macmillan and Orwell
should pronounce it,
“war game,”
played on Cloverland,
sign-posting the days
before the Christmas truce.


Planctus

Planctus
1.

“Everything looks so good from the windows.”Michael Horowicz

Their glory is scattered
across the high places,
lies butchered in board rooms and tower-block heights.
We hold up
heavy eyes, bleared,
to those heavier dead.
Sleep lies on our strings,
yet in the air and earth
they call us to strike up.
Our willing mouths
will launch,
the shifty
unshifting words.
Your sleep will lie against your hearts.
Your corpses lie against the edge of dust.


2.
“The poet is the most conscious point of the race at his time.”F.R. Leavis

They lie on their shields,
on Holden's memorial
preserved with all the principles. Their glory
crumbles with rust that rallying oil could not anoint.
They tell us praise their death,
that our song
rise to their corses
that it
suffer to lie.
From the blood
of Kent State,
from the fat
of Nanterre,
their weapons did not
flinch
but publish it not
in Houghton Street.


3.

“Poverty and starvation enrage us…only in a distant way, yet we are roused… to fury when … syllables like ‘fuck’…are made public.” Kenneth Tynan

How did they fall those helpers, noblest masters?
How did their weapons fail, those instruments of dissent
they trouble us too much?
But, ‘ay Lords’,
‘ain’t please you?’
we will sing, but place a dry condition
on our willing airs.
We will not
dream nor cry
when leaden maces swing
for our touching instruments.

Now you litter your titles above the lowly
from behind steel and glass, from offered lumber.
Even in death you teach us your dreams, you publish your lore.


4.

"If someone thinks that love and peace is a cliche that must have
been left behind in the Sixties, that's his problem.” John Lennon

Under a night sky, they stretch out their death.
They string out a tenuous story, form the summit heights,
from the media masts.

Our strings, my lord,
are their own condition,
a truth
function of themselves,
they speak of your pose
in hungry streets
in corridors of thirst,
the strings announce
your style,
for we have slept already and they will not hold us long.

Now your word is silent on these fields of wind.
Not even the dew, nor the air, can seep to your offices

Now crumpled on silk in the Amsterdam Hilton,
you call down to the singers to strike up, even you tell us,
but sing it not in Kampuchea.

5.
“The Beautiful People are non-violent anarchists, but I have been worrying about the way they dress.” Mary Quant

Deep in the ditch of their death, the little ones are naked,
the cold flowers bloom, not a flower sweet, but the tongues
trolled into the dust.
Now you call up to the remnants,
"O fellows come and sing
the last song of the night.
Is it plain enough?
The free maids do use it
that weave their bones with thread
(We call, "are you ready?”
“Ay prithee fellows sing.")
for their heads are lopped by fair
cruel roles, come away, death,
bloom, blind breasts.
Now the sisters of suburbia will gloat.
Even the girls on the green lawns rejoice,
but tell them not in the hostels of affliction.

6.
“There is no such thing as an innocent design. In the drive to sell, design is used to convince consumers that products are continually new and improved.” K. Jones


Daughters of liberation weep, for the mighty dead
who let you move easily in demin,
unpinned your jewels, they gave what you needed.

You had what you asked for:
you asked for everything because it was yours,
it was free
We call, "are you ready" ay, prithee fellows sing
Come away, come away
commodity,
come anatomy,
choose yourself,
own yourself,
Your choice in you ownings,
your earnings,
your yearnings
come victim, come pleasure
come away, death.
Your deaths are not yet the charnel bone,
their shapes and textures, tactile, palpable, still the consuming body.
are wasted away on shores,
Tell it Cannes, wear it with sweaters and strings
to blend with the calf-belts from Chloe
do not tell it to kids in cold Bermondsey.

7.

“Poetry is the one literary vocation that cannot be made into a career.” Michael Schmidt.

Deep is your grave, deeper than tears
where the hysterical clothed, the sweet untrusting
laugh, eat freedom meals, drone nursery rhymes.
squat.
Your death of parts, no-one so true
can wear it.
In sad cypress,
the victim's flowered their fists
in shrouds of white,
the lissom skins were bruised

How did the heroes fall? How did the incense,
flowers and rice turn to dust?
Tell it in Convent Garden, your corses black, but wooly,
with yew

8.

“All we demanded was our right to twinkle.” Marilyn Monroe

Loved and lovely, in death the look is still you.
Yew scatters the lying field, the yearning is consumed.

Lay me, O lay me
where snows pile up to rub out the streets,
that lead
to Westwood and the man that took
my nembutal hand from the phone at the last.


Not a friend,
not a friend greet.
Black is the sail
we send from our island villas,
our yew cuttings,
blend with the calf belts,
round our poor corse, soft dancing smocks
easy pants with capes of bloused bodices
black tights, but woolly
So there’s for thy no pains.
We take our pleasure in this song.
and payment shall be pleasure,
one time or another.

Laid by, the little ones are naked,
wooing the vicious to kindle anger
from their final tears. The eye is stilled,
but stares in anger, for the fairest
with gladness they were led along,
and slid along the ashes they have won.


9.

“Chickens come home to roost.” Malcolm X


From the depths, the heroes are vanished
on their height, Lords, listen to our cries

The poor souls sit by their sycamore,
sing their own song,
can sing no more to the heights.
The forhead against the knee cap,
salt tears, the smooth stone
and the green willow serves
for a crown
crowned out, given the blessing.
Tell it, tell it in the streets of Hackney
by the waters of Babylon
tell it in the prisons, and the houses
of the exiles; in the derelict sites and in the
garrets of the sick.
They are confined here, no time to fetch a gun.
Their songs will not leave our minds.


10.


“God is dead. Thank God.” Thomas Altitzer.

The song will not reach the heights,
and who could hear it with the charred ears
of the dead? Whose armour has not failed.

She called her love false,
the eye shifts for the itch,
only the tear can hope
where the brow and the lash are away.
Dose that bode weeping?
The mighty lords have picked
all the goods from the poor
and have mended the bad.

The Lords have frozen our depths,
the little ones have stolen our tears.
11.

“Let me read with open eyes the book my days are writing and learn.”Dag Hammarskjold.

They are alone up there, mighty in their fall.
They are together below us, deep in their pain

The fresh streams run by us but
cannot repeat our groans.
Our instruments are derelict
let no one blame us for ceasing to sing
for the Lords, their scorn we oppose.

Sing willow, sing axes,
we hang our heads
all at one side, unpinned in our
sadness.

You have hoarded the wounds,
and you have drained the able heart dry.


12.

“The future lies in plastic.” The Graduate script.

Deep in death's trench to founder,
stretched on the heights to moulder.

There is no man to sing,
come heavy sleep,
come gentle sleep,
close up the living light
that the last cannot heal,
nor the brow cover.
We know your ally,
death is not ours,
but the black might,
knows our rebel hearts.

We cannot befriend your defeat
your sweet wounds cannot lure us
to your sour graves.

And now the new song?
It is the old songs you want.
Do not sing of the innocent dead, the salted out,
of their aspirations, their curetage,
the Curetes dancing backwards
at the phallic cave.

Your hate has crumbled the mountain tops.
Your spite has hardened the depths

For the heights are boarded up
and the depths are flooded
Be still, be still
my bleeding, stricken strings
its my lute and not I that sleeps
my heart will never rest

Your love to us was more wonderful
than the love of an earthly thing

and the other died singing it.
we have much to do,
but it will not leave our mind.

Above us, the uniforms are discovered
that open on bones, not nakedness.


The Deploration

The Deploration
1.Preface
Out of the great window,
overlooking St. Dunstan’s Rd,
seven birds flew past,
wrested a space in the air,
then fluttered apart,
wanted cover, found none
and struck out further
to balance a flight become urgent,
flew upwards into the sun
looked for a place to set down,
found there was nowhere,
adjusted shocked muscles,
for a surer ground,
and, buffeted back:
their confusion scattered them,
as they tried to trim wings,
wheeled ,soared, turned into the wind,
grew fearful now and
circled again, panicked,
dug unto air, with loaded tendons
and left the sky.

No-one has seen them since.

Look for them now
in the landscape
of the hollow city.
We cannot break apart clouds
we never made.

No-one thought at the time.

Look for them now,
the lost;
born, borne and born away,
behind glittering glass,
an indetectable breach in the casual quiet,
we never heard.

No-one thought to look at the time.
Search for them, Lord,
in the sheeted winds,
which time has hardened
into wefts of ice,
in the breach
of the time-hold.

2. To the Dead
The lost man was a smiling friend,
ungainly amid beer, debts and laughter.
His friends still ask for him,
for his tread on the stair,
Beyond the window,
the dove does not ask.
The dove cannot bear him up,
where the crows bear down.
Frightened into the clouds
by the breach,
indetectable,
in the swell of the wind.
Go after him then
in the place of time,
in the lost place,
Lord, the just one,
just one,
the jesting one,
the testing one.
3. The offering
Did we have time to search?
Maybe in the parks,
or where the swings hung still,
or where the trolley tree
hung with blood and drugs
Who came, when, as a child,
he called in the dark?
Now he is voiceless,
in our dark.
Now he is motionless
he cannot walk away from fear.
Did the drip feed frame bear him up,
the white witnesses that write
each day to the skies,
to note a cry in the wind.
I used to come straight from work
full of the echo of children’s voices
I was too far away at the time.
to understand how he had
mastered his sadness: the girlfriend
whose intimacy meant nothing now.
His father and brother’s
helpless love and witness.
look for it.
He spoke as if his dying
were an embarrassment
to be considered lightly.
See if it carries
a sign from the lost.
Look out for the crows
that will make for
his proper goodness.
That our natural strength
will bear him up.
Look in the place for the darkness
for the wounds
we call affliction
which were made for him,
tell him to look in the dark
Which the lord made
for the field of sheets
where he lay
for the crows that wait
Who has seen him here.
Only the lord,
the only one, the lonely one
He is yours lord,
the lorded,
the lauded,
the hoarded.
3. Corpus
On the night he disappeared,
we could no longer hold him up.
His weight is still printed in our arms.
Look for the lost one
among the birds.
The robin that waits in the garden.
Did they carry him away ,the white clothed ones.
Did they carry him to the orchard
where the crows are gathering?
Why did the Lord not hold him back?
I would have come
as he whispered in the cold
“Take me out of the wind”
the wind you have to hold, lord,
as we cannot hold him any more
I never heard where they had hidden him.
look for him this time
where the robin left its trace in the day.
The wonder of a man;
his learning eyes
his strengthening limbs
we had come to call
him as our own.
They took me aside
to check that my name
was on the list of those
he wanted to see.
The leaves spin
from the trees,
the tongues of earth
call for him on the air
The waiting places
an apple once firm in our grip.
Go after him, lord,
where the shadows of trees
hide his going.
You gave us this life, lord,
a man grown tattered
with pain, a man, limping
with the death that let him down,
his notebooks still open,
where his mind danced
in our fight of words,
in our circle of unseen arms
before the birds sent him down.
Lord the mover, the unmoved,
the unmoving,

4. To the Living
Frightened into the sky
into the blue break
In the bed
you had made in the skies,
you explained how much
On the bed of stone he lay
his blood bespread.
You made our clay,
where death dealt lovers
mortal hurt.
Look for him in the hallways
that have only shadows now.
He came to find a share,
where his quick words held us.
I came too late to help
him where he fell into
a sleep he could
not come back from.
Pray for him, the desiring
to the Sire, the desired,
the undesiring.

5.What shape of bird,
what species
flew from the thorn
that grew in his flesh?
Yes, we will follow it ,
one that broke from the others,
wheeling and crying
to vanish into
dumbfounded clouds.
Comb the skies then,
comb the hollows
where the Lord has
sundered a tomb from himself.
We honour the feat
for the fear
of his distance.
and you
whom I have seen amused
by the smallest detail
in a clumsy narrative
and you whose
kindness was as sure as
your quick protest,
whose words would soften
at the first breath
of a chance personal wound.
He would tap the plastic case
that held morphine,
to tell us he could hear
but would no longer speak.
You led us in your
monologue of pain,
like a thorn branch
shivering in a copse.

Who came when he
he whispered his fear to the walls?
When he raised his hands
to rummage our distracted offerings?
His eyes were already too weak
to see the flight outside his window.
Quickly find him now
in the due of our dew,
in the dew of our goodness,
urgent one,
His tears are dried to dust,
the salted wastes, blown over.
We are strong enough to find him, Lord.
It was the thorn that turned to stone.
panicked by the cloud.
All be-shèd, all be-shèd,
his blood on the spine
of the hypodermic barb,
the swings still in the park.
For the one that broke free
who has seen him since?
since the weight of his absence
loaded us?
Where the thorn could not be found in stone.

We wait where the crows wait.
Lord give us breath enough
to time our timing.
Take away our natures,
lest your path wear out our feet.
You too sleep in our created night.
While we sift the air
for warmth, for the flailing
air of wings.

You will search for one we lost,
while we sleep
and the crows still perch,
you, the hole,
the whole,
the holy.
6. Spirit Prayer
Our tongues dried, sheeted in our throats,
wadded with grief.
the place hung with purple
sugar paper, peeled over windows,
paled by daylight,
too practised on the voices of lovelessness.
Was it the bird took off?
You called to the wind
to stay its course.
as we lay asleep.
I held him in my arms Lord,
as my peaceful friends
read him Blake.
I pulled the sheets up
to keep him warm.
He was ours Lord.
You gave us your peace lord,
the gifts we cannot keep
bound in a bundle,
of clay.
I remembered his long, slow walk
and clownish grin.
While the crows slack their wings,
Only the silent one, the seeing one,
the unseen, unsigned, un-scene.


7.Memorial
He comes as a fighter to take on the crows.
and saw the world of him knew naught,
bearing a tube with blood be spread
never so white since the first dawn’s said.
He saw the thorn had blossomed
in the house of a saddened heart.
a caring, nonchalant companion.
He comes as a sweet solitary
who has no wife in the world
and cannot tell us who took him away
and lies under his shield.
Look for him, Lord,
the placeless,
the
face-less,
the
faithless.

At Collioure,
Cantus Firmus for David
The tern alighting on the mast
will stir, estimate its distance
and falling, rant of its forced fast.
The sun too shimmers in Overlord France
and let ’s taste juniper pet als, « Tu al lasses? »
sings the café chanteuse, in the failing light.
Shine out upon the blackened was h, impasse
of sight. Maybe the headland might
resist our deletion in peaceful flight.

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 25.06.2010

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