Contents


Passages

Passages 3
At Llanwrst 6
During Sleep 7
The Meadow Mill, Holywell 9
Holywell, Night 16
Near Clayton West, Hymnus 18
At Robin’s Orchard, Kingsbridge 23
At Aira Force, Ullswater 26
Charmouth Beach 31
At Chingford 34
Salt Grass, Lymington Spit 37
At Annascaul 40
Wicklow, The Sally Gap 46
Gaillimnh 48
Arran 52
At Castle Minard 53


Nuptial

Nuptial 56
Communicantes 58
A Ballad of My Lady in the Light 64
A Ballad of the Thief 68
A Chanson of the House 72
A Chanson of Her Pleasure 75
A Chanson of the Flower 76
A Chanson of Her Blessing 78
Stupra 81
Confessio Amantis 84
Biographia Literaria 86
Site 89

The Terror

The Terror 98
Song of the Ascents 102
Doxology 104
To a Sister in Tonacatepeque 106
In Care 108
The Garden in November 110
The Caretakers118
Encounter Day 124
The Gift 125
Lyndhurst Avenue 126
Prayer Before Yesterday 129
Castle Fundament 132

Fuga Ligata

Exposition (‘Cello Valenti; the drawing in Nova 198?) 137
Free part (Sean Smith and the musicians of the Fleadh Ceoil, August 1979,
Listowel) 139
Middle Entry (Lakshmi Shankar Raga, Maiha Garana, March 28th 1980) 142
Stretto (Noriko Ohara, ‘Girl’ in Second Dance to Japanese Music. Scottish Ballet June 15th 1980) 144
Coda (Sergiu Chelebidache LSO, April 18th 1980, Debussy;Iberia.) 147


Passages


Passages

Together with me remember
the sky at Thoissey.
We gathered light,
where vines had been pruned
to sleeping wrists
and the Count bargained for our vision.
We lost
and paid him our eyes.
At night,
we found St Bénigne
who had haggled back our sight.

With me recall
the cornfield in Orkney,
which parted as the Summer wind
surged from the moor.
There we found field voles
which walked across our fingers
and the Earl parlayed for our feel.
We lost
and paid him our hands.
At night,
we found the Selkie
who had cheated back our touch.

Together with me remember
the road to Aclare
where the winter gushed
from pumps under living elms.
There we guddled hearts
from the stream that ran through our room.
And the Bailiff played us for our words.
We lost
and paid with our tongues.
At night,
we met the Sidhe
who had stolen back our speech.

Together with me forget
the tarmac streets
where we queue for growth.
The clerk files away our lives.
We win
and take his coins.
At night,
we walk the arc-lit yards.
Blind, we feel each other.
Dumb, we feel each other.
Numb, we feel for each other,
waiting for giants
who will not come.

At Lanwrst

It is too late now.
In white, astride her hunter
a girl has cantered from the hills.
Autumn seeps downstream.
Edgily, the year’s axe
cuts the air.

It is late now,
yet light still hallows the hill range.
We look up.
The girl has bound poppies
to her crupper.
The season doubts our sleep.

It is too late now.
The girl rides down the streets
to a darkened house,
while we trail sleeping feet
up wooded valleys
whose rotten boles
dull our steps.


During Sleep

Snows thicken
on breasted hills
to pile a dross
that weighs on
sleepers’ breath
and hides pathways
worn into loss.
At dawn the tracks
are difficult.
As heaven once lay
within slack sheets;
unread, unfathomed.
Too near at hand
to state their absence,
which is the cost
of the God-man’s love.
Too far away
to be reached alone,
which is the gift
of the Father’s strength.
The wakened will
trade in sunlight
and speak unheard
until hearts melt within
to leave the crest untouched
while the snow beneath
has vanished.


The Meadow Mill, Holywell.

This was the last
place left
for the mill-girl to move in,

as just at times,
the man who stands
knows it and stops his search

for the stride he
needs to
balance his own, for he lets her

float past him,
bored to whiteness,
a hard, shrivelled root,

which Brownian
movements
can shift every limb of, as
she was so light,
closing
her empty mouth on work which

her drowned hands still
reach for
to fill a taste, a hunger

for a warm coin
sought from
fathering wheelpits, which roll

the powdered years
where water
cannot lap and spume breaks down

now that the wind
lessens
to still the entire surface

and spread out a
sheet
of green, matronal deepness, which

promised the man
that some
sense would be grasped here, but the
carp spits out
cold coin
and leaves it to sink, traceless.

save for glazed mud-
bubbles
and purplish weed-mats, seething

where he cannot
touch it
again, as never speaking
the peering man
will not
follow the edge, where, bloodless,

her eyes whitened
in the
pitch-black race which swirled her form

now that she had nudged
or brushed
against weightless death, now, such

depossession
had crushed
her flooded, hollow lungs

which lay far down
below
the rusted sluice, whose iron

turned her skin cold
before
it left her nothing to say

when she wanted
to sing
her history, the standing

man waits for,
for her
day-shift to begin, for the

space on her truck-
docket
to fill with her mark, yet he

leaves this place now
and goes
as everyone would do

in his place, as
finding
her sense would leave so little left.


Holywell, Night

Demolition sites, ripped bare
from the rock-face.
A man and a woman
were waiting to regain the road.
They tried to remember the track
that ran through vanished back-yards
to the fields.
Snow, ice, night-time and striplings
met them, charred by clearances,
as they followed the old tramway.
They climb up now
the neighbourhood has sunk back
to its natured frame.
Spent minings, a spring, pumping
a glut of fast water downhill.
Their going became effortless
Now the thaw allowed it,
Yet the higher ground was deadly.
They slid on uneven stones.
A fox’s cough, unsettled them,
harder to understand now,
and the way back harder still .
Only a hard freeze, or a new map
could have helped them.
Then, stubborn Heart,
You let Your hostages go.


Near Clayton West, Hymnus

A splintered sense has chilled
Your enunciate word.
We have caught You
in lungs of ice, where
the air has hardened fiats
on wintering birches,
where the catch of breath
has wreathed alveolate twigs
with spoken rime.
Deeper, now and deeper,
the snows of speech pile
silence on hidden throats.
In white tetany,
Your litany is sealed
along honeycombed
coppices, crystal paths
and hoar-haired hedgerows.
You have laid heavy hands
on an actless land.
Bronchiolate branches
bear up dull trophies of mass and silence.

Numbed in leaden rigour,
a dead fox stiffens,
where You found it again
to bless it in whiteness
and followed Your search
where the pool’s pelt is
smashed by a vole’s entrance.
You wait for life’s return.
Death is a surface tenure.
It is earth’s affair,
which opens onto You.
You give winter its trespass
to surpass the bounds
which hold our mortal blood.
It makes an end to the defeated,
sown in salt, to initiate longing
in the texture of bread.
New lambs lick loam and chide
the land’s frozen teats.
The leas are dense in frozen
stilllness that speaks
for their formal being.

When the land’s hearth
forces a tear in the hard earth,
the whitened body
that images Yours
will bleed moisture,
swelling grief, whose coal
will melt Your Word.
The wild grass will thrust
through crusted lips of soil
Then we shall have lost You
Speech cannot take the earth
as its mediate path.
Nor can air part a way.
The land will relax
into an exacter loss.
We will have lost You
and will have remembered
what we sought, sensing
the dignity of the gull
in an empty sky
and the vole’s last limp
to its nest and fear
the passions that vanish
with snows and the year.


At Robin’s Orchard, Kingsbridge.

Estuary birds,
you have stolen children’s voices,
to warn us
this place is not ours.

Your call is not deep.
It is easy to lounge elsewhere.
Our voices are not high.
It is easy to be mute.

Under the sun, it is fine to lounge,
in skins of light with eyes of day,
where the holly flakes
and the apple trees are still unripe.

You cry.
We lie
in the spaces
in the light,
where it is easy to live.

At night, you cannot steal the silence.
At night, there is nowhere to fly.
You cower.
We sleep.

At night our skins are sore.
You sleep and we lie awake.

Estuary birds,
you trim the scales against us
to warn us we cannot stay.

Were we not grown,
we could turn into birds;
our claws tear at linen,
breathe hot air uneasily,
itchy with covert feathers,
spreading on our shoulder blades
and live on in this place.
It is not day.
At night it is harder to lounge.

Were you not lost,
it would be fine to lounge on.
You could steal our shapes,
grow proud, soulless limbs
thicken crops into rib-bones,
stumble heavy from branches
unheeding the famine of the holly,
or the fullness of the apple.

Day and night it is hard to lounge.
You flutter.
We stir.

At Aira-Force, Ullswater

1.
You, the wild,
moor-wandering wind,
the scarps have lifted you off
to slacken your hold
on chisels that stripped the sun
and quickened this tense pool.
Still the place smoulders
where we dug, each into each.
Still the diggings weigh heavier than us
It is a fearcloud. We did not see it.
Eddies and wavelets go under the dark.


2.
Drifting wrecks, the derelict clouds,
you clot the sunlight
to stem its flow to the lake.
Still her eyes glisten, where you thought
to be blind.
Still the brook chatters where we wanted
the Word unsaid.
It is a tear. It needed the light.
Unseen ripples prompt the wave.


3.
You the stonied,
massed tower of rage,
the silent, hard-browed self.
Empty air has opened the frame
and you shatter
gleaming hinges wrought in peace.
Still the fragments stir
where they clung to stay.
Still they heal in the place,
they wanted to wound.
It is a minute. It reaches to suckle our fingers.
Currents and whirlpools scour the thinning shade.

4.
Body of my beloved,
you, the patterned of joy.
Sensual shape, you move in broken beams.
Your shuttered room is not a keep.
You turn your arms in cluttered skies
Still the pool darkens where we thirst for sun.
Still the drop trembles,
where it cannot be seen.
It is a trickle. Soon it will cut in the face.
Slowly the undertow flows to blinded shores.


5.
You, the babbling one,
the enlivened stream.
You drown her lashes.
A slow, great eye is covered
by separate lids
and each beats for the warmthstead.
Still the gold of willow-leaves
glints under cilial coppice-bars.
Still fundi of alder buds.lay bare our unfilled hollows.
It is your gaze. It will spill with flowers.
Dead shapes mingle in the tide of noon.


6.
Caved under ridges
you, the tongued,
the wakener of throats.
You, the loosened,
you put a blind hand into fear.
and you, the hearth of words,
you mould us in the manshape.
Still each dapple is in the light.
Still each wave is dappled in the water.
It is our breath. It is in the wind. It clears the gathered fear.
The water burns. The sunshafts flow. The wind finds speech.


Charmouth Beach

All day we husbanded our children’s awe,
while the midsummer waves pushed flotsam,
employable to sea-spit fingers on the shore.
Sifted, hauled, then heaped on altars of sand,
become gifts to a lord of excitement,
so much driftwood, sea-carnage, twisted stone.
minted a coinage that spume never spent.

Then, as I stood by the brittle river-mouth,
I saw an elver thrust its torque of ribbon
against the current’s force, a thing uncouth
beside that splintered shingle, come up from
the cervix of the channel, which welled under
the waves’ living glaze, stretching, vast, down
past hispid fringes of dead-mans finger.

and, away past land,to the fells and vens
of the ocean’s Sargasso heart.
from such matronal depths, a journey lay open
in which that throbbing lace barely took part.
Only from those shales of dry adulthood
would my thirsting w eye perceive a fine loss.
Seen, then gone, I sought a second, or a shoal.

Our success was to stay on a sound foreland.
and envisage a second enlivening.
By late afternoon, we had split rocks by hand.
Fissures parted to bare only a fossil offering
to the air. By then we knew our gifts were surpassed
and we waited for the second elver,
now that the first was woven to our past


At Chingford

In the clearing, a stealthy jay surveyed us.
Polished black beetles crawled for the puff-balls
beneath drying tree-barks in Chingford.
What was this place that I should think of time?
Acorns slowly tilted reddened cobs to the sky.
Under the fern-floor’s cover, squirrels rustled
by sapling ash-trees, which quivered of their visit.
My thoughts were held on God’s perfect thought,
while spiders staggered by sunlit hoof-prints,
hollowed from clay in rain and baked in warmth,
We noticed the ash was moving in on standard oak.
His perfect knowledge cannot think of ignorance.
I put my arm around your shoulder, while
a ladybird started to climb on a stem of meadow grass.
His timelessness too is surely unaware of us, unless all time
is illusion, that futile prayer of intellectuals.
The jay had followed us into the woods,
Now he started on an un- firm branch and vanished.
Heavy in comfort, we lay in the ochre sun,
while the ladybird gripped its varnished tube and mounted.
Yet time must be real for faults to be forgiven.
Across your cheek the sunlight trimmed its course.
A sound from close by stirred you, held you still.
We heard a shrill piping from the base of a bush.
Yet for us and the ladybird, if time is real,
God’s knowledge of us must be imperfect.
You followed the sound and stopped by blackberries,
where a nest of infant robins craned their fire of yellow beaks,
They took us for providers to their hungering crops.
How can he know our time-slaked day, or feel our past?
Yet at His word, His acts we crane our necks.
with hungry mouths expecting His provision.
The mother robin tried to lead us off,
feigning the pretence of a nest elsewhere.
We took the path away from the clearing.
Then the jay returned and I thought of the ladybird,
climbing its vast trunk of grass.
Would the Lord lead my thoughts away from doubt
and let me climb, as the Robin diverts its predators.
The earthly path wound on ahead of us.
to the meadow where children were flying kites
Perhaps, he knows them too. Their kites might
not be seen in time, but falling and flying
at once, seen on a field of uncountable options.
By now the ladybird will have reached the top
and the robin would have fed its brood.
Spiders would be re-spinning webs,
yet God might see them now, as one,
might see us as we left the woods,
might still see the jay as it guarded our exit.

Salt Grass, Lymington Spit

Their stringy stalks bind up
the shifting marsh.
Each stem shelters pasture
in pithy roots,
whose paps will suckle land.
They will not give.
Nothing can displace them
in metaphor,
or transplant their meaning.
Since Viking fear
awed at marram grass, its hand
has haulmed seas,
whose storms would have seized all,
for its dead depths.
had grass not been to slight
to merit rage.
The raving tide will glut
all life that breathes.
Yet after violence,
glumes foster scars
and husband sanity.
There is no pain
or shame, whose shore
does not again,
harbour a frugal dignity,
or remembrance
of strength, which, once sought for,
will not again grasp grains
and found an entire field,
gripped by still threads
from the jagged edge of waste.

At Annascaul

Nights, dumb sea-trout sense, without sight,
the feed of cold fear in the tow of the creek.
We lay on our backs in the valley Albion trod,
in Spillane’s field, under canvas volleyed by gales.
He comes , a giant, with a bronze-head, swimming
slowly to shore to scatter his causeway of hate
to the cloud-clothed heights.

Cries from a larynx of hate, punched the peat-girl
to a frenzy that shocked stone. While Albion slept
under Plunkett’s tree, our ears were not tuned
to the tongues of fable. Our ears could not catch
the hunger for dread, which urged on
the ice-sweating fish to gorge at the wolf-rock.
We lay with the rubble of Lady Dunboyne’s
bothies beneath us.

She runs where the giant’s foot has kicked against the land.
Frosts, in the embittered air, as gaunt fish hang
in the brackish swim, still to come in from the seas,
to swill their hulks into the river’s trench.
Our snouts could not smell the drift of burning,
our ears could not hear the hiss of the Tudor
arrows singing compline to their mark.

The giant’s arm pulls at the turf of her smock,
which tumbles to mud. Numb at the river’s edge,
Aobheall raises a thickening mist, not deep enough
for the pillar of Carrigblagher, which fills her hollow
as it falls. Seeing the land lies bare, the giant wields
a fixed blade of law and severs her hams, which
bleed to the sea, down the path of his footsteps,
where we slept under canvas.

The girl turns into ground as wolves howl
for the rotten acorns, the honey dry on stones
and the salt in her tears. At the giant’s knee,
they cut a furrowed trace across her thighs.
Her eyes speak of hollows, speak the bare bracken.
We came by the river that ran past Stella’s bower.
Our ears could not hear the skirl of her grief,
backs flattened to the rocks,
as stiff as a cottager’s yard.

Under a faltering moon, the fishes glide.
where red stones are bleached in its light.
Struck to the barren lands, the Liadan sinks,
where the stilled lake lies before her,
senseless of the drone in the muscle of her cheek
rallying Cuchullain from Benoskee
to run eastwards at her last scream
ramming a shoulder of land
that has the grey fish to turn, rolling cold eyes
in the changed light sieved through the stream.

Splintered in Cuchullain’s heart,
the hills become Cumeen.
He totters under the nerve-hail, falls
at the thunder of bones in the dark.
Where a wind shakes the blackberries,
leans where the wild grass is stirred
by the whiteboy’s breath
that ceases on the tautened hemp
with an oath that stills the reeds by the stream,
we lay on the ferns on the valley’s brushwood.

Skins are dragged, screaming over rocks,
where the trickle of cuttings widens
to flow endless and feed the cold lake.
Wounded flesh shrinks into rock
where blood peals from the fissures.
The giant’s torso stiffens as Cuchullain’s
missles stack, pile upon pile
in the giant’s Bath-terrace belly.
We lay on Spenser’s plough fields,
under the awe of a blight in the clouds.

The Lissadell girl dies of consumption,
at the hero’s last breath, his arm stretched out.
Our hands opened only to the fire of our fathers,
yet the giant’s last rage has fractured his strength
in a rush of black slabs beneath a pale sky.
Torn from the sea, the rock-clouds lumber
to flood out the stars in the haze.
We lay on our backs on John Maxwell’s trench

Skul, the maiden, lost in black waters
when Cuchullain, the last, fell through the jaws
of his country in gale of defeat. His last roar
winnows three bodies into sand.
We lay under light rains, deaf to the creatures,
which smell for the thrall, for the frenzy
of the last wolf shot, the last priest hanged
and the land’s head of hair
that will not turn grey to placate
the earthen lust of Eimher’s lament,
whose skirl our ears were never tuned for.


Wicklow, the Sally Gap.

Gorse-clad scarps reserve a drought, filled
with emptiness, deeper than their height.

The hollows have discovered their mass,
where failing plantations lose their grip.

Each new birch sprouts from a family,
wasted by young shadows, which have walked off.

What they sought, the absent, is unknown,
is, in any case, forgotten here.

The bare book broke open its spine, wrenched
the saplings, buried in the dumb soil.

Its billowing pages could not contain
its stories, shattered against stone years.

Successive prunings did not lighten
the piled up weight of fervent handfuls,

before remnant grafts could suckle sap.
Here, the loss alone grows touchable,

for woods could still stir rumours abroad
yet whispered faces cannot align

with transplant grandchildren, recovered,
friendless, from barren wanderings.

Each dead tree’s syllable casts a shade,
clearer than the living voice;

the references split.


Gaillimnh

Dicit eis Jesus, “Implicit hydrias aqua.

”

Sunset and the river’s patter
whisper to the sea.
A dark red ball,
the yolk of a herring gull,
settles low over a derelict tower.

Sunstrands rake us, as we walk
by a lichened sea-wall,
here, among stone houses,
neither the just nor the unjust
could throw down.

The dimming flares filter
behind voices of the river now
and now of boys with their priest,
at football.

Here at the narrow point
of a deserted lookout,
which the sun, a host,
has raised in elevation,
as the city fills with its light,
crows rise to remember
the courage of the dead.

I turn at the touch of your hair,
a smoky, eel-trap black.
You pull it back,
furled round the Corrib’s arms.

Daylight ends in circlets
Here in this crumbling stone,
flaring so late,
as the river argues with the night,
we beg the Lord to fill the cellars
and close our arms
around each other’s wine.
We drink and burn
in darkness, as the city falls.


Arran

The trout’s red gill,
the arch of the sun,
which burns each filament
down to the skirteen’s wick.
The light burns and
the trees burn,
as flame to the wick.
Your hair, unloosening,
is a pleated mass.
Loosened,
your trailing hair,
smokes black,
wrapped around the granite port

I speak of warmth.
I am the fire
become an orange ball.
You do not listen.
I burn on you.
You hold your head near
to concur on your silence
and you burn on
the strands of my heart.


At Castle Minard

Will-hindered one, you, wearied of heather,
remember the dusk-mellowed
brow, the rain-folded cliffs we climbed,
the fern-encrusted sky we shouldered.

The shore's haul and shore had called us
enthrall our thirsting eyes
and left us lost in its clutch, footless
in a grey thrall of stones

Then they unhatched, hammering the sand
in a welter of water and rock,
washed by waves which sliced
smooth under their lumbering piles.

Numbed near night, our limbs ran down
from the sea, to scan our sounding life.
We left it to take the lane home,
hearing the havoc of wings as we walked. 


Nuptial


Nuptial

Your skin is a land of autumn,
under a sad régime.
Your eyes are those of a rebel,
whose mirth has been outlawed.
Your contours are tender fields
awed by prayers of sunlight,
whose crops have not yet opened.
into the riot of their gold.
Your brows have the colour of branches
which shield their blushing fruit.
Each shoulder bears a shadow
where the autocrat has placed his arms.
Your breasts are populations
ready to swell in local joy, against
the terror of the satrap’s heart.
Your head is bowed to the burden
of its ruler’s melancholy parks,
where the tresses of your hair
are smoking fires,
which burn forbidden leaves.
Your hips are the ripeness
of a landscape, swelling
at the fire of your cheeks.
Your thighs are the fruiting hillsides,
which promise a harvest of love
and the fear of a tyrant torn
asunder at the sign of your joy.


Communicantes

1.
By this way,
you left us pure where we lay.
Anointed
in the warmth that had us wrapped.
You heal us
no more from fresh fear. In dust
You leave us.
We weep for the breath of the sender.
We call out,
in coupled restlessness, shout.

2.
By this road
you tend no more to our rose.
Only sleep
can comfort the absence we seek.
Side by side
we lie. One who, unknown, chides
the other’s
needs, which, without meaning melt.
You leave us
to equal each other’s warmth.

3.
By this way,
the other, who, unsaying
has been wound
in words that glibly tore
her sworn rose,
in the hidden garden that grows.
Dawn may find
our hushed embracing kind,
side by side
-close in slumber outside mind.

4.
By this road
dark clouds mass to balance stone.
In the storm,
her sworn rose is ripped by thorns.
New blindness
makes a whole of heaviness.
written whole
our names are hollowed, told.
Hallowed breath
can utter them cleft.

5.
By this way,
why do You lead us away?
New blindness
of our skins cannot contrive
smooth grammars,
which shield the day’s glamours.
Kindly You
feed us the taste of wastage
which fills us
in the hollow leaves we share.


6.
By this road
is the path of drifting snow.
Why do you
tear us from our suit?
Night cautions
a stupor of buoyant thoughts.
Eyes at dawn
will thrill at our nakedness
Why do you
breathe on our passion’s view?

7.
By this way,
where trackless, You pass. We stray.
We sieve clouds,
where, flightless, your love abounds.
Eyes at dawn
could not mourn the still spaces,
where soundless,
where there is no air. You bless
in kindness
that flays our orphaned senses.

8.
By this road
You cut down to our bone.
We clutch pain
at the stripped wounds closed eyelids.
Yet rainfall
washes at each turn our
standing stones,
written whole from mud that massed,
where soundless,
the Sender’s breath mends our depths.


A Ballad of My Lady in the Light.

Sister of rivers, you weep
and streams burst their banks.
Mistress of winds, you search
and weathervanes spin.
Keeper of paths, you walk
and roads are laid bare.
Befriender of breath, you sing
and every wall is tumbled.

We were alone. We were passing on fires,
but I kindled smoke’s thickness.
You said, “It sours my lips.”

I wept
and you crossed the stream’s borders.
I searched
and you scattered rust in my heart.
I walked
and you led me to ditches.
My tongue could never sing
and you let the stones freeze.

We were together, making ready a land,
but I cleared a burnt hollow.
You said, “I am fairer than that.”

I wept
and you dislodged the stepping stones.
I searched
and you thralled the compasses.
My arms could never swing
and you chilled the dew.

We were curing, bathing a wounded mouth,
but I held it still.
You said “Why comfort its silence?”
My eyes were never clear
and you immersed them in the night.

We were covered, hovered over by massive wings,
but I dug into the earth.
You said “My branches have leafed.”
“Do not look on the cheek for sorrow,”
you said, “The springline is purer.”
We opened them up and we wept.
“Do not listen in the heart for the need.”
You said, “The winds are wanting.”
We steered by our trust and we searched,
“Do not feel in the arm for the will.”
You summoned snow for our tracks and we walked.
“Do not taste in the mouth for the coal.”
you said, “Our words are not strangers here.”
You loosen the stones and we sing.

A Ballad of the Thief

It’s nearly day right now,
here, in the house of breath you gave me,
but the dawn
has been dismantled. You tell me that hours
have gone missing and you
search alone
for daylight that was once
ours to own.

Friends warned us of thieves.
This one must be clever, though,
shadow-loves,
a cover for crooks , would be blown by the breeze,
but the wind has been stilled and trees came out to
support doves.
Only the branches uphold a strange leafage,
looking like gloves.

So silent a thief,
the knife would have sickened at
every ruse.
The crowbar would have blushed at the window frames.
How was my fortune counted so well?
What I had to lose
I never knew, until you told me it was lumber
and had no use.

Over there, it’s evening
in the brooding den I gave you.
I knock
and laughter dies in the brick. I look for lips I say were stolen
and I find your glancing eyes under cornered words.
You mock,
The rooms seem emptier and you never stir, except to admit my shadow,
turn the lock.

A thief, like no other.
Your house would have shuddered, but
It settled
a debt with the clay. That pious hammer
must be bruised by the glass. Sincere fingers
nettled
at the touch of a felon’s gear, would clench white,
metalled.

In the daylight house
you gave me. From the doormat to the yard
of you to me,
the place is glutted with the loot of no more.
An alchemy
reversed? What happened to the years we made shine?
To the glances we fused with a glass blower’s throw?
Whose infamy?

I know where the thief hangs out.
A dove sleeps in those branching hands. That house lies still
in the clay .
Where are the lips that cured the restless shadows?
Where are the mornings we took from the skies?
Make to-day
a time to unbare the discontented one,
I say.

It is now I will catch you
with a red-handed nail, and a polished lash.
With a gloved fist
to plunder together the house of ourselves
and if the neighbourhood watch
should insist,
we’ll make examples of ourselves
now we’ve kissed.


A Chanson of the House

Who stole the fruit tree’s secret?
Crows have gone there,
but only to peck at the flesh.
They could not steal,
whose beaks are never dry.

Who rusted the gate at its hinges?
Hawks have flown through there,
but only to claw at the wood.
They could not close it,
whose claws are not blunt.

Who tangled the path to the orchard?
Owls have shrieked by there,
but only to tell of their prey.
They could not tangle it,
whose crops are not bare.

Who sullied the footprint, which lay in the dust?
Sparrows hopped by there
but only to bathe in the earth.
They would not sully it,
whose wings are not wet.

Who pelted the windows with tears?
No other bird has come by this house.
Only the crows,
who spoke of His flesh.
Only the hawks,
who spoke of His blood.
Only the owls,
who spoke of His death.
Only the sparrows,
who spoke of His thirst.
He does not want the fruit we betrayed.
Let your mouth be moist.
He does not want the gate we closed.
Let your hands stir.
He does not need the pathway we lost.
Let your body yearn.
He does not want the dust we scattered.
Let your eyes thaw.


A Chanson of Her Pleasure

In a stupor of seasons you go down the path.
You leave me to loosen the taps of the year.
In shops of the tongue, such cunning concerns,
they sell you short words from hungering shelves.
You weigh up the wastage with arms that are strained.
I store them away in the drifts of the hours.
The bailiffs arrive to call in their loans
from the boards of the flesh they claim their rebate.
You kneel on the floor to show them the minutes
you grew in the silence. They argue, then take them and go.
You open up boxes of minutes we dried. You spill them.
I lose them in hands that my anger has numbed.
Heavy of eyelids, you cook in my tears.
I stir in seconds which burst from their shells.
We swallow the hours and their spillage of speech,
yet we leaf from a shoot of the future we ate.


A Chanson of the Flower

Do not tell me of sadness
in the tear that was never shed.

Do not tell me of parting
in the smile that was never given.

Do not tell me of the cold
in warmth no body took from another.

Do not tell me of hunger
in the touch that never soothed.

Do not tell me of thirst
in the kiss that never touched.

Speak only of the stone
you mistook for a flower

and I shall tell you
how it trembles for the sunlight still.


A Chanson of Her Blessing

After
the untouching
has bared our closeness;

you
and the blind minute
fends
the silence.
Do not think,
go;
the moles seek
the same ends as larks;
to curse the surface.

After
the dryness
has rained in our mouths;

you,
and the stillness
is
a lost thing.
Do not go,
hold;
the feat is to define blessing;
a flight dug
into air.

After
the emptying
weighs on our hearts;

you,
and the mould
will burst open.
Do not hold,
speak;
the hope awaits
another, who digs out

where we have buried our song.


Stupra

Smitten into the flesh
with the terrible violence
of negligent years,
of their precipitate
tunnelling,
a bodyshape
names itself,
numbs itself
into the gullible now.

Dull sockets, confused,
the lovers’ twined arms
shrug an aimless reflex,
fire muscles into emptiness.
He cannot touch the other,
the ex-
sister, the visitor.
Her famine insists.
she cannot breathe on the surface
of his image,
a palpable stoneshape,
come stumbling, come rolling in
from the other door.
a foundling,
a crystal, overcast.
Two severed hands
refused,
they palpitate
groping for loose eyes.
Nimble insistence
of the light,
it throws into shadow
both surfaces
which are guarded
by a split thought-shape,
impersonating
a flicker of concern.
A hidden head
infused,
holds a jug
of prayer,
where He has
dropped a changeless key
and slakes
the thirst of both
with an unfathomed
mouth.

Confessio Amantis

I “wolde go the middel weie
And wryte a bok betwen the tweie,
Somwhat of lust, somewhat of lore... “
Gower, Prologue.

It is too late,
for he was in a hurry to write
and you had gone
walking where flowers reached emptiness.

He was rushing
to be alone, to brood above the page.
You had set off,
mapless, where roads led from land that had lost its story.

He wanted to
tell how it was, that this was how it was.
You had gone
wandering where roads curled into the night.

He tried to gave
away all he ever thought to say,
yet you went out
to empty daily voices into floorless rooms.

He was anxious
to be somewhere
and you had found him
a place to rest where sleep was a stem floating in a lost marsh.

He was tired, but
in a rush to sleep,
while you had gone,
seeking the power of flight in extinct birds.

He was impatient
to be still, to stop the authority closing down years,
when you had gone
to chatter down neighbourhoods of time.

He was waiting
fro what doing to be undone,
while you had gone
to return by paths of fiction.

He is waiting
to be done with the undoing
and you have come
to unlock my door you came through.

Biographia Literaria

In proper style
our movement grows
to influence
receptive clay.
Our bodies have
revised the night
and merged their aims.
On speechless lips,
you frame conceits,
which speak of dreams
that memory
has filed away
for fetching touch
to issue new.
We print our works
on surfaces
of vanished joy
I smooth way
the daydrift prose
which clings to
your palimpsest thighs
on skin that is
ample to write
how we drafted
our dated limbs.
Text beside text,
originals
in stark array.
We are set out.
Editors of
an authentic
composition.
Our whispered word
can conjugate
a sentence where
two subjects rule.
Obscure diction
is our pleasure.
Two senses are
read into one.
Nothing checks
the metric flow
that in our veins
we know by heart
None can imitate
our fancied forms
of dual
imagination
and of no repute at all.


The Site

A man reads
and waits
by refuse tips,
writes nightly
and waits for loneliness.
He goes out
each day with a shovel
to dig up
buried cellars, which none
has heard of,
built by a hand
that wants man,
but holds only airy clay.

Habitat after habitat
has shut down.
The ecology is blinded,
behind boards.
A girl goes out with him.
He tells her
of the cellars he seeks.
She listens
and dreams
of ripened fields.
When he talks
of a living estate,
she listens.

Her eyes tell
of the land she has stored,
of the land
she will gather for him,
when he rests,
but he does not ask her.

One evening,
a hungry man comes,
who longs to be let in
and they feed him.
The visitor tells
the digging man,
whom it was who
hired him to send
him out each day
to dig out the earth
of refuse tips.
The visitor tells
the man he knows
where the cellars
are he seeks.
The man wakes
the tired girl
who listens.
At night
they take him out
to show him
where he digs.
The visitor
shows the man
where the cellars are.
They are so deep
and so long,
the man grows
angry and leaves.
She listens.
The visitor
and the girl
embrace, then part.
She promises
she will stay
with the man.
Later, she
wakes up
and turns back
the man’s clothes
and waits for him
to go out again
to the refuse- tips.
She sees that
more habitats
have closed.
She waits for him
to shrug his shoulders
and dig for the cellars
built by a hand
that has healed
the air and watches
for those who
can make clay thirst.


The Terror


The Terror

Starved thieves from middens, they gathered in crowds.
They waited by gates to listen, to crave.
They longed for the just, whose windows closed fast on the night,
whose jugs brimmed over with milk from the law
and listened for hearts which beat in their keyholes.
They gathered in crowds and stretched out dry fingers
to those who lived on in a land called no more.

They craved for their booty, for the dreams
they would own when they unlaced the fattened
and stretched back their fingers that tautened on bolts.
They longed for the day they would roll them and roll them
over the lawn that would spill with white skins.
From morning to evening, they waited, they gathered.

Cold thieves at dawn, they gathered by gates
that held fattened hearts, waiting on for the night.
for the safety of darkness, for the night-time
closed fast on their words, for the dogs,
in the darkness, unleashed on the lawns.

Steeped in fat justice, fat milk in their hearts,
The just call out. They call to each other, “Lie naked.
Lie naked under the law. We shall not sleep long.”
From nightfall to morning, their windows shut fast
on the thieves who lie stripped of the word.

Starved thieves at noon-time, they splintered the gates,
for the skins of the fattened, who lay under damask.
At noontime they shattered the windows to run
through the rooms of those who lay still.
In the noontide they rolled them onto the lawn
and found they were naked, unlaced and stripped thin.

Mute thieves at noonday, they reached for the milk,
for the jugs that stood brimming
with words of the law, to swallow the dreams
that spattered their whiteness on sheets
that were empty, on purple rolled on the lawn.

They tried to sleep on, to sleep on in the darkness
in a house of smashed windows, awakened at nightime
by the law of the dogs unleashed on the lawns.
Still thieves of morning, they swallowed the quick lime.
They swallowed the milk of those who slept on,
whose skins lay unlaced on the road that led out,
that led out where the dogs licked their necks,
by the gates they had splintered.

They retched on the booty of those who lay
out in the middens. They snapped off the fingers
from bolts that were fixed to cool down their mouths
that blistered with lime.

Cold thieves of wanting they craved and they called.
They crawled for the heartbeat that ceased in the lock.
They craved for the moisture that dried on the bolt.
They called for the taste in the milk of the law
whose jugs were all brimming with lime.

They gripped burning stomachs, wasted with milk
from the law of the dogs. They craved for the just ones
to give them to give them the keys for the milk
and show them the jugs of the law.
They stretched out dry fingers
for gates where they waited and went down the road
that led out to a land called no more.


Song of the Ascents

1.
His children, Lord, sleep fitfully.
They cough on fumes from oils
he burns on altars of tarmac.

Yet who tends Eden, now?
Your garden must be strawy
with the grass of beforehand.
Air and blood, Lord,
burn in his lungs.
He wants only an alternate field crop,
such as the young, self-cloned.


2.
In the ash altitudes, his jets
burn off their holocaust
of ripe Archean memory
with a tremor that tramples
the place of your great name
and unsettles the mortar of his house.

3.
Yet You bar him
from healing his barrenness.
Your stubble, Lord, could be burned.
Those great brambles, massed
over the lopped boles
of your famous orchards
could be fired for his profit,
earth and life, Lord, yield him a return.
He wants Your life-product and its waste.

4.
Sublime in a dry sky
his high creations
mingle an acid rain
which strips the forests
and wears smooth the stone
of statued virgins, whose faces
he never knew.
Yet You ward him off
Your sterile place,
when he could cast out
its abiding branches.
His sacrifices bargain with any master.
He prays to the featureless saints
for the husbandry of Eden
to work on primal seeds.
He’ll buy you out square, Lord
that pastures should green his brand.


Doxology

Now the song thrush forages its hour
and the glory has sounded
against what is holy.

Against the muddied,
the earth-drowned,
word-wound finger
that will not leave the wound,
but stems the water
and, embarrassed,
does not scatter its drops,
except to the wind
to unwind its breath,
but leaves the blood
to trail its path
outside wrappings
folded in waste.

Elsewhere, the cobwebs
have held
the dew
and the glory has shone
to mirror
the residue,
a silver trail,
clothed in a leaden tear
that crams the cavity
and pays the remnant its due.

Fear is
and the song has eaten its first Word.


To A Sister in Tonacatepeque

The gunshot exalts through the spheres,
but sings across the seas
how its home was made
in your breathstead.

In springtime,
its shattered Word will flower
with a whiteness
your hair will never own.

Speak of us down here,
with the man whose hair is always dark,
of your last hunger
that was never assuaged.

Your hand grips the leafage of silence.
Your awestruck eyes will never be covered,
while sunlit executioners
master the language they teach to the skies.


In Care

It is a silence you give;
the tongue tautened on broken edges ,
which you wrap white in the minutes.
You need a nervous door,
closed tight,
tight as the skin of a fist over knuckles,
or a muscled wall
that grips the stomach back
from the prayer of the rib cage.

It is a thin strip we wind
round a raw wound that flinches
at each stuttered hour you grasp.
You need fear’s cunning
to cut,
to cut out those who run from door to door,
or an impulse of severed hands to pull
on the shoulders, cancelling flight.
It is a blanket of fault
we issue you, while autumn forages
a far, blue sky from the hedgerows,
which you pelt with pebbles
to sow,
to sow torn spaces in a sky of stares.
You need a cold stone,
or a shell of eyelids
to give for the fugitive eye.

It is the night you wait for,
which you dig at and dig at with a blade of air,
scar upon scar to dislodge the sap.
You need a graft of pride
on a stem,
a stem of violence we have planted,
or a blind verderer to lend it growth
and show to a place where
wintering animals grow restless in sleep.


The Garden in November

1.
After heavy
fruit has fallen,
their bruises
brown
and soften
in the warmth.
Before putrescence
sears them,
hoard.
Leave none to
fester and to
end
its fall.

2.
Slugs attend,
yet are not seen to.
Hearts weigh out
frailty,
yet do not
restore.
This is no
month for defences.
Your vindications
have
exhausted
all.

3.
This season
is no time
to burn witch-
hazel.
Pricked
wax forms inflict
more culpable
identity.
Guilt fosters
its slimy
safety.
Slugs slide towards
its
luscious juice
from the garden wall.


4.
Seek out those
who mock you.
Leave plans
undone
for prejudice to work on.
Their wrecks exhort
the intent
and
not the act.
The open wound
balks
acquittal’s gall.


5.
Store your pages
in the dry.
Presumptious
moisture
will soon drown,
a despair of sunlight
soon
fracture
the loam.
Unwatered soils
will prosper
under the
solstice stall.


6.
Death is guilt
made visible
and life
is fault
bartered on
markets of time.
Empty this month
and stockpile its fruit
for redemption
in Him
whose life can
still redden
a last leaf, unbrushed
by our efforts,
left at
the threshold
of humility’s thrall.

7.
Only a lawn
picked clean
of strength
can hold
to last laws,
can keep the last tear shed
for an empty
trans-
action.
Before the
air-frosts’
braggart hoars
chill
the loitering sun
of Martinmas
and blur its last call.

The Caretakers

We screwed the whole thing up.
They say it’s because we sought only rationality
and loafed around sharpening conceptual tools
in the bicycle-sheds, having only
the tattered, messy edges of our speech to share.

Right from the start,
they told us we’d wasted our chances.
In First Year, Herr Geist
had pleaded with us
that the key to the Absolute
was there to be filched
from the laboratory technician,
even if it meant going the whole way
to GBH and we were placed bottom of the class
for the irrational defence of ownership rights.

History was slowly revised
in the Second to allow the school
a major part in all the civilisations
and we were nagged by the Year Master
for lacking competitiveness,
having been observed watching
the hopeful Amazons of the Third
more for the delicacy of their legs,
than counting the distance
they could throw their deadly javelins.

The study of Literature
was identified with life,
which, as books were easier to store,
was taken from the shelf.
A Victorian syllabus
claimed the emotional lives
of our clever girlfriends
and we lost them to the ATC.

Obedient we watched
the Social Studies Department
wrest us as vulnerable offspring
from our failing parents
and sign us over to the mother care Fifth,
increasing the ranks that
swelled already from the test tubes in the Bio Labs.

The A Level Geography set
kept us on as extras, as they were
constructing a map
more accurate than the real neighbourhood
and needed ground work
on such co-ordinates as the smell of fags,
the incidence of heartbreak
and the frequency of bus stops.

We weren’t invited to Speech Day
and never saw the Social Contract
signed by the Head between the forces of order
and those of excellence,
which relieved us, as we
were under counselling on the question
of traditional sovereignty.
having reported the Victrix Ludorum
for taking drugs.
In handcuffs, she was led away before the whole school, by a young
constable to whom we had slipped Hume’s Essay
on the dubiousness of original contract,
after her winning dive
at the swimming gala.

While the Head, unseen, scrambled his wits
looking for a model answer
in Constitutional History to get her back.
The crisis worsened, leaving the Education Officer
levitated in ecstasy above the Town Hall
while the Leavers’ Year renounced
the sexual wilderness
and were translated miraculously
with Rococo cherubs
to simultaneous provincial universities.

We screwed the whole thing up,
while the Careers Master gave us a helpful tip,
by shooting himself during our simulated dole interview.
Now we keep the old buildings warm,
as the Authority still has to decide
whether the fine for their demolition would be
offset by the green belt grant, or the ribbon development
seen as a cover up tied in with the airport apron.


To help them, we get a licensed high every day
on the custards of the past,
wishing ourselves back to the beginning
teaching our masters
how to leave our speech just as it was
when we first brought it to them.

Encounter Day
To Geoffrey Rayner

A skylark launched itself into its pulsing swim-feed
and tadpoles trembled through weed-bright streams.
On the brittle sea-front,
we had spent a weekend
among the sullen, urban wounded.

In the nights, those children, asleep, would dip a deep brush
into the spattered jam-jars of their pride
to daub a still page,
yet kept crouching ears
outside with the grassy wind.

Maybe their shorelines lacked a ghoul, or an ogre,
we’d read them and they wanted either in,
shadowless or soughing,
that it might stir the lumber of their sight,
and put us out, that they remake the world.

The Gift
A singular magpie, seen through a door ajar,
scuds back from the sap-wet bough
to the hand that issued it.

In the hollow of a charge
that has emptied its live hour,
His dove overcomes the omen.

He issued us a dumb life.
Our tongues will not interrupt,
the silence of its sign.

He opens a door. He shuts it.
Each day issued anew.
We shall speak of it no more.

Lyndhurst Avenue

Your children, a coeval
foursome of eyes
are unmuddied, brown as the river
runs over a settled bed,
overhung by brows
of ripening ash.
We have come in
to their den of smiles.

We hear how our scattered
generation
unsettles its exile.

The time plant has not yet blossomed
and for its coming,
you keep a tousled garden,
as if for departure.

Cut down the weeds in there.
Don’t close the uncertain page
on an unstarted season.
Not yet,
our grafts will take time
and their tips reach out in the dark
to the minuted one,
within in you, minute,
a mute co-equal.
Don’t throw away the stocks
you have no need of,
prayer-casting one.

We reach out in the dark
for a child’s peace and new will,
housewife of the hourly, untouched snows.
You.


Prayer Before Yesterday

Hidden one, no,
you cannot test our closeness.
You lie under another’s cradlehood,
hearing our words as inarticulate thunder.
Here you have only reasoned discomfort to wait for
and if you dream, may it be unskilled
that the voice you somehow crave
may call you home.

Still one, no,
you cannot speak by touch.
You lie in a mist of sights and smells,
walled in another’s ribs.
We cannot heal the broken country you wait for
and if you hope, may it be an open one
that even a harsh word
may call you home.

Lost one, no,
you cannot find
your hidden heart, out of sight
under the battens of another’s strength.
Here we cannot speak your case
and if you pray may it be awkward
that the voice of friendship
will call you home.

Silent one, no,
you are safer here
despite the gate of risk
that guards your moulding,
under another’s skin.
Here we only have a cluttered home
and if you smile, may it be firm
that even cold hindrances will call you home.

Strange one,
you cannot know us,
though another flinches to your kick.
You lie in a pond of growth
and if you love may you fumble
towards its unjust gifts
that the havoc you wait to wrestle with
will call you home.


Castle Fundament

Need its stones tell any more?
The heights, those dry, drained
Department of Ontology ramparts,
where all has been found and is in place,
is in time for being as it was.
And is found well-placed to assuage
the low suspicion
that once it was not so.
New earths have been dug,
to satisfy a doubt that it never was.

Hence the advisory silence;
pass by, conforming graduate mind,
the cromlech assumptions, standing stone arguments,
rollright conventions, judgements upstanding
need only the briefest word
to keep the informed at bay.
The height, too, is understood
to reflect the lesser dimensions of the past.


The games of the tongue have been played
and the specialist field defined.
The quantifiers have bounded
each variable cry.
The enclosure has been cleared
of existential vermin
by snares whih snap shut
with a universal gleam of syntax.
Sir Mens has inherited his grounds;
those qualified attend
and are graded in feudal silence.

He holds a shop-girl in a
shallower enchantment,
wishing a roof in being
that is no longer there.
A couple, attentive, cannot
teach their child the words for fire,
holding bare palms to a hearth
that cannot burn.
The unemployed in this place
fear its inactive silence,
pulling on doors that neither open nor close.
Camping children still in their Slumberdown
blankets, stand sleep-entranced
by a cordoned bed.
A miner’s widow judges the beams
with eyes of fear and cannot draw
the pension for resignation.
Schoolgirls, under the matching glamour
of Jean Machine blue,
follow the stair case that leads into a wall.
Only the homeless who cannot afford
to live in this textbook of chiselled stone
are out of reach to his reason


Fuga Ligata


Fuga Ligata

1. Exposition

(‘Cello Valenti; the drawing in Nova 198?)

An absence slides upon
a surface which you leave frosted, blank.
You scuff her edges into measured sight
to carry her shape into a vernacular room.

A surface glides upon forgetfulness,
an absence, which you free her from.
You stroke a charring rain
to catch life on a mesh.

Now her room is shaped into discovery.
Unaware, she would fade again.
Yet aroused by a knowing hand,
she stipulates this still reform of emptiness.

An intimate, she answers to the specious nude
with coherent nakedness.
Her person precisions a stippled space
to carry friendship on the stance

of an ice-field made huge
and simple
with her human
articulation.

2. Free Part

(

To Sean Smith and the musicians of the Fleadh Ceoil, August 1979,
Listowel)

Poirt Dubalta

The skirling drones
the uilléan intones,
the edge of the flute
and the bodhrán mute
lift to savour
the air’s flavour.
Grief’s the burden
of the stepping men.
Pain, the song
of hungering long.
The fiddle’s scuff
on the surface rough
sounds in the air,
my loved-one’s quair.


Poirt Sigil

Unsaid presence,
stating absence
is music’s sap,
arcing the gap
between this flight
and past blight.
Now the tripping
fields are stippling
joy and fear
in one span clear.


3. Poirt Luascaigh

Owl and lark
fear the dark.
It must so.
Each furlough
has its ghosts,
whose dread hosts
haunt worker
and shirker.
Hounds will bay
dawn of day.
Hounds will bark,
hollowing dark.

The stone
alone
attests
these deaths.
The blade
is played
to waste
the place,
a wand
now fond,
the word
unheard.
The dance
a stance
laid down
on sound.


3. Middle Entry

( To Lakshmi Shankar Raga, Maiha Garana, March 28th 1980)

1. Alaap.

Túmri rhythms
quake with a dread
lightness and the room
is stilled.
Shabdabrahman,
swaps the cosmos
for sound.
Nada Brahma,
this cosmos now.
The wiring relaxes.
The beams settle in.
Cisterns are crooning
in a sea of breath,
the drone of whose body
counts the night hours
alone.

2. Asthai

Each tendril of her voice
buds and lays bare
impossible fantasy.
Deeper within,
the tabla’s pulse
sinks down, to rouse up
waters, whispering
from the wall-less cellars.


3.Sanchari

Quickened
to the stairs,
the torrent’s
spate threshes
against her voice,
exalts its fruits
to drive
blind sharks
that smell
for timid fish
from human lungs.

4. Abhoga

She stops;
to leave no
silt on
silenced sound.


4.Stretto.

(Noriko Ohara‘Girl’ in Second Dance to Japanese Music. Scottish Ballet June 15th 1980)

In the direction of lights,
her limbs rattle the space
with a tremor,
that is the moth’s.

Against a black page, her feet
cut off the dark to print
a silverpoint line that
is not the fault

of contact, but of the thought-touch,
which by implication,
hovers by the barres
that are the heart’s.

Her muscles speak beyond the feat
as the sea’s surge seeks to annul
the shore that gives it birth.;
that is her ambition,

erect in a cross-shape,
and so against the thrall
of timorous mind,
that is the prayer of her hand.

the smoothness lending its surface
to journey, not a path. Her limbs chant
of a loving
that has forgotten

her torpid thigh, the aching tendon,
that is the fetch,
the antagonist
of an effort.

Whose sculpted waste
cannot tell the body’s limit
that is the phrase
on the skin of her speech.

from whose interface she emerges slack
showing the wound of action,
in the care
to be craved.

5. Coda.

(Sergiu Chelebidache LSO, April 18th 1980, Debussy ;Iberia

.)

You have raised sleeping giants
to build the heights straight,
where the light has been confused
between the clouds and the snows.

Kingdom of summer borders,
you are taught to sing.
All the unsought troubadours
will smile from the map.

You will open your palms now
to douse the voices.
The drowsy builders will be
shown the way down.

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 31.07.2010

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