Towards A History

Of The Seasons


Poems 1991-97

Quitting

My sin, my crime, my blasphemy, my joy, I ponder broken-heartedness alone.
The cat in my garden with a pine-cone toy unconscious in the sunlight, basks to the drone
of pollen - plastered bees. The dance-routines of Summer play and replay before my eyes.
I nurse a bloodied pride, as boys in their teens
go over wounds from sport, wincing at tries unmade, or catches fudged. I have chucked
an income, to moonlight with hardened
dreamers.
Though broke, I have outrun the guard dogs,bucked
the Gods of an asylum for holy conjurors
and, pen in hand, dream on to dull their murmurs.  


Winter Dark
Serving Notice

To do nothing at all was once
the biggest prize when we were kids.
Old-age rakes only wastage in its place.
The dry-leaves of illness, or unemployment
pile up, papery and futile, in a slow bonfire;
for slack-tides' hell is that you
cannot quit what's being acted;
that nerve-ache, leeching tit-for-tat
the personal 'I' must fight between
the 'you' of self-esteem and failure 'it'.
How certainly that sharp, cliff - edge falls clear,
a numbing kind of architecture.
Between my diary's flunked short-listings,
how clean my bone emerges from the buzz of flies.

It’s Too Late Now

It’s too late now.
Winter dark
has hardened the heart
and I am far from you.
The silent house
stores only the night
and emptiness.
I’ve nothing
to give you
should you come
except the emptiness of one
who sees only in the light
of a fixed beam.

The Spirit’s hour is lonely.
To keep Your appointment,
I follow rainy, suburban roads
in the shuttered dawn.
You are always ahead
at the landfill of affliction,
when I arrive too late
with all Your secrets buried away
and far from being alone.


Living Room

A burnt omelette, old sweet corn and dishes
stacked at random in the grease-rimed sink.
The children shrill about T.V. wishes.
My daughter cannot thread a needle. Each blink
upsets the thread's frayed edge sideways.
I police them to bed; “face, teeth, lights out”,
having first heard my youngest trace the lettered maze.
Patient with her at her stress, I want to shout.

I go downstairs, conscious of a sadness,
Velasquez or El Greco could not catch
in a portrait of the poet with attendant mess,
because the artists had models to match.
Each riddle made of fame spells unique,
a needle for word-threads’ deft hide and seek.


Testimonial

I type post, date and place.
I know there’s no insight
yielded by that brutal solace,
backed up against the night,
the byre of gut self-hatred
that told me not to love, took
no opportunity to shed
culpable shock, set that look
of hardened, private fear.
To be tolerant of personal
timidity and hold only dear
the chance of survival
is to see in the world a theatre of shame
and my fellows as the company of blame.


Loyalties.
I take a call I do not want. I find I'm talking to a girl with a Humberside burr. She listens, to me explain
the job wasn’t meant to last.
I'm thankful for being beyond
both my borders:
those of birth and accident.
A South Eastern man, I find she's sympathetic about my job prospects, will take a vocal pledge on credit, my credit... I visualise remembered tides
breaking on the past at Saltburn. Our voices, like waves on a pebble shore, slipping into silence around the smooth surface of money and its resistance to any dream. She scores the
sea-level of my youth,
my trade, my house...
In the strata of my speech,
I am loyal to the lias of Northern voices. They still emerge at low tide, under a darker hue of lethargy. Or maybe I just want my words to be the right ones. She slips into sympathy... as she might to a friend,
because the sea level
of trust accents the risk of hope.


Antiennes for A Brief Season

FOOL.--You say personal happiness is the sole aim of man.
PHILOSOPHER.--Then it is.
F.--But this is much disputed.
PH.--There is much personal happiness in disputation.
Ambrose Bierce, Brief Seasons of Intellectual Dissipation
 

1. St Flora's Day. Last autumn's leaves are powdered past remember. Their fresh green offspring still abound, except for yellow patches mimicking September sunlight dappled on the moistened ground. As yet this pair of migrant greys, vermin to this City parkland's fading belt have not been rumbled by those juridic strays whose local claws could tear their pelt. In such false peace one harvests plenty from the tuck-shop refuse of the schools and stores it, while the other acts as sentry. This couple's cautious, cagey entry tells me winter will not turn them into fools. Like me, fear labours that the larder be not empty.

2. Ascension

A dry, dusty day in Kensington,
the pneumatic drills were busy
with percussion and repercussions
on the shattered paving stones.
Yet there were mouths open,
to breathe, to shout.
The boys in the Vaughan Chapel
had been singing Byrd and Tallis.
The descant rose slowly
to the stationary cupboards.
Instruments take over from voices:
In nomine...

On the station platform,
those with trains to catch, or miss,
vanished or lingered
in the thirsty day:
a buff-haired mother,
too warm now in her grey coat,
despite the wet morning,
lippy at her little boy
on the platform edge,
a builder in dungarees,
licks his lips,
ending his shift,
without a pint,
two girls in minis,
black tights and square jackets,
from the Employment
do their lips.
The young man from
a sheltered workshop
walks precisely,
until he jack-knifes,
with his head to his boots.
The new-painted benches
are marked off
with plastic banners.
Without his iconed seat
he cannot rest, tries to pull
the webbing off,
yet knows he cannot
and bites his hand.

A train comes
and they are all gone.
Over windless air
a taped announcement
mouths of destinations
a Guardian Angel
to an empty platform.
Instruments take over from voices:
In nomine...

3. Ss.Peter and Paul.

Our patent leather dully treads the boards. Suspicious soles pace down the wooden floors, which grate, as morbid as the death-beetle, or the weight on an undertaker's trestle. The joists are groaning for one facing Homer, unseen, a centre-forward now offside, a dreamer. They rasp for the female lead-role, now undone, lost in the script of quadratics, wanting the sun. They creak for the scientist examined in fiction and for the poet in a maths examination, that defeats all inspiration. While from the stair, that age has shined with time, the past Heads stare in rapt enthrallment to the Renaissance all-rounder who, now a Golem, stalks these floors, as hope's confounder.
4.Our Lady of Sorrows. Here white-shirted pupils sit at desks in the humid air. The Mother of Mercy fixes a stony stare from the painted wall. Her child has taken over all her looks. He is a manly version of her solitary genes. The children write in silence, taking their existence from the question page. The Word is not their words. Their brows assume a printed look. No-one can prove they got it wrong, or guess they are alive. Yet how they want to be forgiven anonymity; but know, that only He can get full marks, for simply being who He is
unless they face the terrible complexity
of becoming who He is
and take over all from love
and so be nameless now.

5.Advent.

It is almost cold enough for snow. The Masters have gone for their statutory break. They keep to the Old Timetable and leave the place unruled. An audience, the children, lines the fence to watch the passers-by. they laugh and shout at vagrants from Shepherd's Bush and a young mother, almost due. They know there is a change in the air and wait for a new order that will send them weary, home.
6.Epiphany. Becalmed in winter the trees are still. Sunlight and cloud view and review the faded tarpauline on a garage roof, seen through a school-room window. While a distant plane scatters and re-scatters icy poison in the sky. You can tell it's a toy from how it glints. Faded sweet-wrappers shine with a patina wrought from a quitting and unquitting sun a tell-tale, fraught, farewell, from oldest, sweetest wishes and decaying roots. You can tell they're treasure, from the fact they're still in place. The soundscape suddenly stills, almost ghostly as nothing's there and the women passing and repassing so primly bare in tennis white from the private courts shiver, then seek warmth, in each others' embrace. You can tell they see us
as they choose another route.
We confer on Gospels,
look at maps of Holy Lands.
The boys trace a winter journey
from textbook photographs,
you can tell it's Bethlehem from the plastic snow.


7.Epitaphium, F.Hayek

The falling shadow of an autumn leaf
joins the precision of its shape
to its yellowed original and lies beneath
as it touches an unlit landscape.
The death of a dreaming, sceptical man,
joins with the voices in another room,
repeating history as only historians can
to make a fixed pattern of his loom.

 


Pre-Spring Frost

Winter at Snape

You rang me in this little schoolhouse
I rented in February to live a little
in the way I know I never can.
I chop spare wood and stay
with a line of writing until I’m done.
Yesterday the snow on the daffodils
broke the crocus leaves and edged
bare blackberry bushes.
The radio crackled of flooding at Aldburgh.
Over the phone you said you did not want
to disturb my pastoral peace. I said I did.
I walked to the end of the yard,
as iced worm-casts crumbled underfoot,
to stare at a field, green with young wheat.
Later, two pheasants broke from a stubble field
and peered into the blue to fix the cursor of a skylark.
The estuary shore was filling up,
like an old man’s sideburn.
On the high ground at Snape,
I saw a naked landscape and a coppice
in still-winter loveliness that hollowed
a shape to existence
and to further disturb my peace,
in the real breath of cold, I whispered
how much I missed you.


Boats on the Alde, Snape

Ash Wednesday, the buds
were pale candle flames
on the wicks of the hedges.
I rode the bike to the Maltings
and stared out at high tide.
There was nothing simpler
than those barges.
We understand them
only because of air and water.
Only because of love
and the stupid
could I understand
what I had left that morning,
a daughter with her mother.

Later, I remembered those barges
after I chopped wood
and a good fire grew
that roared of the wind and the sea.

The form of my love:
we search for what
the seeking has ignored,
nothing simpler.


At Snape

All morning starved thrushes and fieldfare have pecked at dry, stale crusts I put out in the ice - crisp air. February-pale, an unseen sun warms up the gusts of young South Easterlies and its ripening glare ignites the tinderwood clouds. The rain adjusts to a finer drizzle, while my set fire begins to flare inside the cobwebbed grate. A single rabbit mistrusts my unhunting stare, so stiff at the window and beats it back up to the Churchyard where bob-tailed gravestones show his local family has worked hard to honeycomb the griefs of long ago into an earthen, furry guard and breed new life in desiccated woe. Birds on pre-spring frost-watch puff-up braver as Suffolk light downloads its hourly hue across the hedgerows. Inside, the graver voices of young singers brew a cold, clear dew that teems in the inward house, a quaver on the frosty mist, wrenching pain to view and prising up a half-sunk thought; that as life quickens in this sensible earth, subtle with shadow-shrews, unseen, uncaught, fear and self - hatred still block my mirth, while all things living are lilting of birth. Those fractured ice-limbs from a web that I had sought to fix, like a curator of self-esteem in dearth of funds, labelling away each slight. I have fought too long to force a view that had no means to earn its keep when self-assembly shrines for greed were being asked for. It's better now to learn the text of one's own history. I feel the need no longer to purgate my failure to discern the great solution, only to train each awkward weed to purify its leaf. Blue-tits chatter by a milk-churn. I throw old drafts to the back of my fiery grate. No witness is so blind its pain cannot create.

Snape, Morning

The spring birds’ call
has grown more daring
by my window.
Suffolk light changes
hour by hour.
On the radio
a girls’ choir sings
in unison,
their voices
falling and fading
in the frosted air.
Day to day
the earth grows stronger,
farms warmth
from returning sunrays.
All things living are singing now.
Broken English shape of God,
founder of friendship, hear
our life and shoulder this birth,
this co-eternal growth.
Each grain of bread I put out
has been picked clean
from the muddy grass
and You have numbered us.


The Old Schoolhouse, Snape.
There is a journey into oneself that is also a journey away, from the familiar. It is a centre we cannot touch, like childhood, lost, yet everywhere, concealed by casual delays to one's expectations, such as the lumbering tractors in front, grim with grey, thick mud, that slow me down as I take my bike downhill into the village . There is a discovery of selfhood in the clamour of others, too; an adult edge we cannot touch vanishing shadily, an encounter with awesomeness in the most routine events, as a long -silent 'cello in an attic might vibrate within at every sound in the history of the school below. Sweating back up the hill on a clear road, swaying on soaked tarmac, seeking balance, then stopping, breathless, by the kerb, I notice the blue, Suffolk light begin to thin out to an Eastern darkness, foregrounding the bare tangle of trees that grows around the Old Schoolhouse. Yet this evening could be a dawn, the dusk undeciphered by another, in a photograph, perhaps. Vision is a yield from our failing, not from the surplus of our dares.
Gromford, The Fields

It must still be light now,
though clouds and the night
confuse the view.
In the place of night,
rain runs out of time.
Like a secret grieving,
it is too private,
even for intimacy, perhaps.
Night rain strokes the gravel
and varnishes the pebbles.
In the half-light
you cannot tell a broken stone
from a diamond,
or a living heart.

Under the daylight,
our faults, like useless keys,
are easy to test and throw away.
Locked out at night,
you must look
somewhere inside
where valuables are kept.


Snape, the Schoolroom, night.

We do not belong
to our own stories.
We cannot always
see ourselves
in pictures
others make of us,
Like granite
tors, intruding
upon on the levelling fields;
metamorphic,
As laurels they become
a viewpoint
only our littleness justifies.
I remember once
making for France
after a rotten term,
I climbed aboard
the Maidstone bus.
and saw a girl's auburn hair
catch fire in the twilight
orange of the setting sun.
Yet I never spoke to her,
perhaps because I thought
I did not belong in her story,
like voices heard on this radio,
as you tune, forgetting
we are not even in our own.

Now we look for a way
of untangling each other
from each other.
To restore ourselves
entails re-writing against
the images made by others
and to read each other’s pain.
 


Histoire De L'Atalier.

1. The Toils

Opportunist love,
and yet we rise and part,
as hard cash demands.
Trying to predict
our pain,
we find we have
no time.
Just as the simulated
accident
had to be cancelled,
as all the ambulances
were on real alert...

2. A Season in the Trellis Sector

The damned have moved into a garden-centre,
to store unsown grain in sacks to dry.
and let ivy grow so the living cannot enter:
our saplings heeled in for the sun to fry.

Cuspid, heavy- bellied and ripe, a theatre
for young shoots to fail their first try
and budding groves, to acquire a greater
shade where our greasepaint bodies lie.

A trellis still careers above our heads
to descend the path where marrows stretch
and love that led us will not leave the beds

and lies in pensioned peat and funded vetch.
No wonder red hot pokers bring us dread
in plastic urns still aching though love’s dead.

3. Contours

You'd be the first to tell me fourteen years together is no great feat.
Two days ago on the beach at Cassis sunlight played on your shoulder and I noticed you had been playing court again to those artist friends of yours. Pablo Tiempo making a trip across the mountain from Vauvenargues perhaps, or Paul Mois re-touching and touching you up, in the French way, under the broad daylight. They are obsessed with you drawing and sketching under the eyes for a lifetime. An Odalisque to them, your beauty only has to think itself to one who waits. and as a resident, puts in no bill for paints.

4 Beached

Where do you want to go,
now the picnic’s over
and the children have taken the scraps,
leaving tooth-pocked
leftovers to insult our pride?

The beach is immortal with escape:
sun, sand and sex
suit blander consciences.
We need a thicker barrier to the glare
slapped on our Catholic skins.


The local party is quit of ravers,
who’ve run off for ecstasy
elsewhere in the secular city,
for which they have the only map
and the market for morality.

5. Pace Egg

The Easter-Eggs
broken into
with child-like fingers
that look for sweetness.
Light salts the dark,
that examines
the endless, bounded
universe of oblivion.
Imperfection can
nurture growth,
the frost-worn, tap-root
blazes in the flower.
What we longed for,
an endless sweetness,
is broken into
to discover
unknown life.

6.Comedy

I reason with your not being here.
when the daylight
tumbles our far, half-empty near,
like saddened, unforgiving children
after a fight.

I argue your being into elsewhere
when the edgy moon
drops a baffle for Pierrot Lunaire
and his come and go tragedienne
and I am Pantaloon.

I hear you in the static hesitation
of my radio alarm,
become a one-hand calibration,
ready as ever to set it again,
sensing the end of calm.

I tap you in against the rhythm
of the morning train,
research the culture of our schism,
a rare, yet backward strain of Zen,
dissolving in the rain.

It’s all too close to go so far,
soon night falls again,
with the sky set against my star
and clouds crowd in their dark Amen,
on remote to ease my pain.

7. Richmond, Christmas 1995. The shrouded scullers are chilled into their tidal past. A mist is massing its debris of tousled tissue, closing the front door on the riverscape. While the bridge is left to rear up into tensed nothingness on a one-strand river, a looping caterpillar with its legs, plunging, purposefully nowhere. This could be home, too, were it not for the bailiff- weight of our future, holding the bridge to a bank of oblivion.

8.Threadbare life,
my suits worn thin
until the frayed edge
flaps above a tear.

Like a splintered plank,
announcing
the cellar’s dank.

I wear out in all
the moods of tense,
hoping I can vanish
before I’m bare.


 


Wintering, Paris

1. Place Beaubourg

A young man with
a made-up face,
like a child,
or a fairground clown,
acts out a mime.

The people who are queueing
to see the pictures
do not notice.
The pigeons
claim the square back
a sardonic outburst of applause
brings them to land
on him,
who has not finished
and he leaves
the brutes
to the brutes.

2. rue Quincampoix

It does not snow
here in winter any more.

The city has its own clothes.
These are warm times
and we become heated
to consume our interests.

The arpenteuses
don’t hang up
their linen any more
to tempt passers by
with imagined nakedness.

Yet the loss of whiteness
is difficult to place.

The history
of snow-flakes eddies
into a solid mass
a wall, or a floor
of brilliant, untouched,
matronal strength

A birth muscle,
hollowed on
species-being itself,
out of a hundred
feathered instants,
a city’s soft contractions.

3.Boulevard de Sevastopol

Only a little boy,
riding a white bicycle
with a t-shirt
still belongs here,
protected by cats
and the streets
he explores every day.

4. Bar

Pale-faced, I mutter
about my son,
remembering his mother
who left our sacrament.
Presents unopened
to another on our bed.

In my son’s heart, he says
it will always be Christmas

and never again will be in mine,
both whitened,
on the sheets of loss.

5. Meudon

I have not got
the book you brought
from Tarusa.
I cannot help
you carry food
from the market.
If you sign
it will be on the page
turned down
on hunger.


 


A History of Everyday Things in England


History of Everyday Things in England.

It was all over in a minute;
after the glittering tinkle
of shattered glass,
in the Guenevere mirror
a shot deconstructs
its sting of hate
through the air and he slumps,
a brown hole burnt
in the purple silk of his sash.

Smog-shrouded military cars
closed off any escape
through the Cadbury factory
and a rumoured attempt
to conceal a deadly weapon.

He was a gifted child, though,
brought up on the
Kay-Shuttleworth method.
He had perfected a new process
for smelting steel from bauxite.

He had been suspected by
the Frazerian Secret Services for
legend laundering over lengths of time,
despite laureate, monarchist support.
The sale of the Merlin plans,
to managers in Bayreuth
hidden under shallots,
his collaboration with Iseult Gonne’s
nationalism and Tristan Tzara’s anarchy
connections with the Kennedy advisers
and their flaring adultery
and his presence at round table talks
with Green Giant industries and apprentices
from Malory Towers were enough.
The shoot-to-kill anti -mythology
protocol of MI5 would have got him first,
had his criminal, but patriotic son
not taken civilian action,

Meanwhile out of the closed circuit cameras
Quixote in a Rukka-Lancelot jacket bikes off
while Gawain Giovanni enters the floodlights
to Baroque chords to make applauded
getaways by a redundant theological
trapdoor from nightly murder.


Middlesex

Old Bentleys and Fords ride the Great West Road,
while restored Art-Deco fascias glint
in the cloud- piled heights, blue as the woad,
of a summer sky. A cow’s mud footprint
dries in Pinner High Street where swains stint
and stags bellow in the re-enclosed corrals.
Boar and wolves quench their thirst as is their dint
at bull-rushed streams. Victorian high-souled morals
concealed behind the deep-green hue of azaleas and laurels.

Dryden’s portrait looks out across the lawn,
luminous with Pope, Swift and Walpole.
Model families with matching blue-skirts drawn
to calves, stroll for tea and teaching free for all
over Richmond Bridge and the Twickenham Toll
scrubbed clean of past, meritocratic grimes.
The great forest returns over the rubble of sprawl.
Barges slide past the clear river’s limes
and past re-turreted Tudor brick of former times.
Fehler! Keine gültige Verknüpfung. Lazy standards flap with authority
in a gusting, light, southern wind
Defence is vigilant. Alacrity
at Northolt, Hendon, so disciplined.
an armoured glint affirms the target’s pinned.
The U N lines in Epping and Laleham
record all violations with keen eyes skinned.
The South Mimms offensive ended at Ham
by the Middlesex Regiment, the stuff of a telegram.

Black smoke billows in a perfect arc
above true civic rows of poplar trees
that line each soaring smooth-grassed cedar park
Whitton House has been completed with its frieze
The aerial view catches Swakeleys.
Marble Hill, Osterley and Hampton rank
in the Hearth Tax rolls on fading leaves.
A museum farm stretches by Greenford bank
all the way to Southall Manor’s re-ploughed Doomsday shank

Parish Churches jab their staunch polity
to mark reception centres for wives
to be impregnated with quality
fine-balanced genes in wards behind railed drives..
The red electric train in time arrives
to bring in commuter- cloned Elaines
so few in handcuffs now as the drug contrives
to imitate consent. Now statues lose their chains
blind, white marble eyeballs stare under steady rains.


 
At Chickerell
Why come here?
The fields are harvestless
and the children poke around
unfamiliar rooms
with trashy,chrome
furniture.
In the resort town
only the redundant
hunger for purpose.

Sickles rust in the museums.
Torn clods of Dorset earth
still attached to their steel.
While at the factory whistle,
men go blundering about
on an untilled field
from a fresh-built site.

What did we look for?
the house of frugal brick
is unredeemable on its own.
My daughter cries for her toys.
Grumiaux's violin
strains with her sobs
at the G Major
adagio ma non troppo
K.516,rattling from my
battered Sony until
the meter coins run out.

I sit, obscured,
among the obscure.
In place of ourselves
at least another man
might lead us,
like an afterthought,
across the massive hillbrow
which lies opposite,
to prize this reach of the sea.

At Abbotsbury
We climb the hill to St Catherine’s Chapel.
A crow and a jackdaw soar on the wind.
Below the woods are rich with ripe apple.
and the fields spare with lynchets ploughs have thinned
from the flesh of the land. Let seas grapple
with boulders or skulls, stones or driftwood twinned
with the sky’s vague fixity, we amble
on an earthy path. Under the sun-skinned
firmament where winds thin to rubble
these vaulted shrines, let’s be undisciplined.
The shouldering hill saw no ship tumble
and so despite Reform, left stones still pinned.
We climb to be blessed by chance’s humble
hope that on faith and history, God grins.


In The Valley of the Bride

Only the lake is still alive.
The Bride is dammed
and swollen-eyed.
in a valley that has dried.

The cultivated bowers,
of wind-swept Dalhlias
and Bouganvillea towers.
fix death in flowers

We did not know
why a pathway led
to a lake’s drowned flow
fallen two fathoms below.

The great house is gutted.
the front, a still facade
where a Lordship strutted
and a scarp abutted.

The hammers were time at work,
not expecting visitors.
The floorless rooms’ dank murk
was ours in which to lurk.

History is more final than death.
We shimmer in the evening chill
It takes away more than our breath
before its voiding shibboleth.

At The Abbot’s Fish House, Meare

I can’t remember why we went there now.
At last we took the road that left that town
of Third Way wizards and seers in track suits,
the woman who believed her dogs Martians
which had to report back from the Tor
on Midsummer’s Day.
The landscape levelled
to become flatlands and late summer mists.
The vulnerable terrain brought home to me
how history’s dump shores up so little
what time unwraps and throws away.
After a turn in the road we came across
a converted Mediaeval barn.
I walked up the drive and knocked on the door
to the restless barking of unseen dogs.
A woman emerged and took us up a path.
She carried a brick in her hand, which
turned out to be a doorstop to my relief.
She handed out a heavy key, kept in a vase.

Three generations entered: my mother in law,
Clare and the three children: already ahead.
The Fisher’s House stood in open field.
a two-storied stone-built Gothic pile
with an outside staircase from the net rooms
to connect with the fisher’s living quarters.
From here the Abbot’s table was provided.
with chub, mottled pike, brown eels and white dace.
Maybe families were raised from a living
of tackle, hooks, rods, oars, nets and paternosters..
Barrels of red-tipped perch, rows of gudgeon,
lampreys, grayling and trout left daily for the monks
to obey the Rule. What we take as the stuff
of leisure was then a routine of work.

The absence of water struck old and young.
Where were the depths, the surface for the boats,
the generation of shoals, or the flood line?
Once there had been a lake here and fish-ponds,
but drainage schemes and enclosures dried the land.
Perhaps we came here to see life surprised.
Trade turned into pastime and toil upended:
a house before us now standing absurd
while others with all their sense are gone.


A Walsingham Purse
 

1.Ely

The first sight of the spire
from the winding A10
seems to be just one of the elms
in the distance,
straighter, darker,
but a part of this landscape too,
despite being older than its life
It is the Lord’s tree.

2. At Bale

Under my bedroom window,
where ragged brambles run,
hundred-year oak-trees grow
out of a hedgerow overrun
by thorns, first cut to bestow
a boundary for a Saxon's son

Beyond a field of wheat,
a coppice rings with song
warning finches to mate and eat,
in shadows, dark and long.
The darkness tells of our defeat
of gibbets that laid low the strong.

Three trees in a clear line,
resemble Golgotha's hill.
Yet which is the thief who can define
my hollow heart the Spirit tries to fill?
You I can still speak to, love of mine.
The others have gone under Your will.

Light breaks from silence
and sounds from the night.
The spirit's sheer transcendence
exposes me, a man too trite,
to hear Your Word's sheer innocence.
He fills an inner eye with unseen light,
which we bar with crosses for thirty pence.

3.The Flies

The rented cottage was infested by flies.
The bathroom was worst.
I killed as many as I could
with a clumsy towel.

Returning for a bath
I found the white tub
a snowy battlefield of fallen,
hairy corpses;
easy to purge the living:
hard to bury the even justly dead.

4.At the Tern Sanctuary, Brancaster.

The land is a stave of frugal hues,
a cloud’soaked sky merges
with a beach of buff-brown sand.
the oncoming tide raises
its lines of iris-blue and white,
littered with shells, scattered remnants
and gull-hunted sea graves.
The distant trees carry
the horizon’s scale
back to the sky’s leading note.
while the lower shore is tide-stained
and pocked with lug worm-casts.
which throw studded shadows
in the afternoon light.

Everything here accords,
with unmanned nature,
except the walking human figures
I left behind: twitchers, beachcombers,
or families out for the day:
each seeking its own ecology of happiness.

Come here to be alone,
I try to accept
I am part of this landscape.
Yet find I lack the instinct
to be properly myself.
that terns, alert among their nests,
the soap opera of the site
and oyster-catchers, perched,
or rolling in the summer air
possess in the whim of species

Yet there are habits I cannot change.
a stop-go idealism,
a faith that splutters
on the twined wick
that weaves a father,
lover, husband and son.
to a charred edge.
Yet how the other candles shine
as I hide among them;
school, church, neighbourhood,
work-mates from the tribe of light.

Not to pilfer norms,
I need that love
come from outside
and stay within
and want no other mark,
as the landscape’s originality
adapts the sun to its own style
and bird-life spawns
a radical unchanging.

5.The Seals at Blakeney Point

We had come the whole length of the spit.
Morston Quay passed by us, with masted yachts
strumming a crazy rhythm in the wind,
past the sandflats to follow the long passageway
of Corsican pines, fringing a smouldering sky
and then the Old Lifeboat Station loomed up
for us to circle past and over to the banks,
where they are lying there on their bellies,
or flopping sidewards to cast a glaucous eye
in wariness to our offshore life forms
crammed in a motorboat.

If we look the other way, past Morston Church and Wells,
that rising bank of shale and the seabirds mewing, endlessly
above the herds , it would be as if our kind had never been.
A quaternary world in symbiosis, gulls, sandpipers, seals
and shoals of saithe and sand eels under the waves:
a cloud of feathers above a landscape of fur.
We have emerged from this, but we are not its part.
Even a drowned child, fallen in a current
that can tumble whole wrecks to the Wash,
is more than the whole of nature, not for her bones,
but for the call made on her life that has no end.


6.Enarratio
“And I will sing of love come down”
Martin Smith

Lord, I am tired of your lovers.
They have taken away
the treasures from your house
to restore their beds.
Their holy spite blesses
the stones they hurl through
the windows of your image.
They take the girls in their bliss
onto their celibate mattresses.
They make a fine sand
of your quiet fields
to cover your Word
with sexy worship.
Your sacred wood
lies under the rubbish dumps.

Day is as long as night.
Sleep is as restless as waking,
until you come to my door.
and tell me how I failed
to secure your house of love.
Give me the strength
to do nothing till you do.

7.The Invited Guests

Come my loved ones,
Come my lovers,
come to my feast.

A little boy running
under the apple trees
enters as myself.
A baby, suckling
at her mother’s teats
develops in the tray as you.

We can eat later
we can eat together
answer each other’s voice.
and question ourselves.

Come my chosen.
Come my choicest
Come my bread’s yeast

Young lads and girls
strike up our notes
to annoy convention,
fear to be confronted,
jib silently while testing
the oxen of work and goods.

We can eat later
We can eat together

Our subtle arts
flow between us
from room to room
seeking a balance
between history and hysteria.
as our children’s
vineyard grows.

The grave-old adults
who sit heavy by the windows
turn to read us,
a later chapter
in our book.
Grown slower
we swear by the soil
in our hands.

We can eat later
We can eat together.
We eat less now
and our company
is enough for our
wrinkled lips.

Come my slightest
come my slighted,
come the least.

8.Canticle for Pia

The grave blue sky
is tassled with unharvested grain.

Creation is
sightless on the path of creature pain.

You are baby
to the ways of dying, yet sustain

a dignity
in viewless beauty without a stain.

My heart in rage
is a zoo on fire, no longer sane.

A captive beast,
I turn on my lover at loss again.

Tender heartshape,
end my acrid fear of death’s straight plain.

Turn with me now,
into fields where wild flowers scent the rain.


Towards a History of the Seasons.
 
We cannot write in the visitor’s book.
We are unfamiliar with recent
preoccupations, such as thermostats,
or butane for our cooking.
Mornings will harden the ground
with early hoarfrosts,
or roll in mist that hides
the looming scarps.
At such times we find
the maps we consult
are bleared, their minor roads
bloodshot and seasonal rivers
swollen, purpled and meandering.
We find ourselves hesitating
over the dimensions of Romanesque,
or Gothic ruins, observing
where we could pass through
where predecessors could not stand.
we are ill at ease in the river-valleys
where the smell of moist clay
and crisply fallen poplar leaves
recall a certain longing
for involvement on river banks.
Yet we move off quickly,
but efficiently to witness relics.
The dead lie, lifelike
and wax-lidded, their limbs
dry and Autumn sepia.
The feather-like flesh,
a sign of sanctity
and great humour as they cease
to depend upon the cold,
consecrated basilicas
they have bequeathed us,
or the dry, blackened hovels
where they spent their frugal lives.
Those who stare at us
when our backs are turned,
efficacious from gold caskets
are not there at all,
but merely hiding
below the flat lands,
low in the ponds, or buried
cellars of past houses where
we cannot fit ourselves.
Being children, their work,
or their vision are functions
of vulnerability: like silk
so rare, so shy, so complex,
demanding the cost
of so much natural life
that its luxury is
marred by parallel
embarrassment, a reluctance
to cling to the flesh.
We have become experts
in the exact whereabouts
of apparitions and in
the six-figure co-ordinates
of wilder limestone
landscape descriptions.
Our joys are not immediate,
but depend on questions of balance
as atmospheres and inert gases
can rapture the coldest steel,
once the intake of murdered
breath excels the space
we have been given to live in.
Finding the Beast’s castle
took no trouble at all, as we may already
have been characters in the story,
but in a hill-village of pebble
and mortar defences,
our role became too detached
and wine-drowsy for guessing Beauty.
We stumbled into significance
in the eyes of mayors and deputies
when all grew still, except for
the beautiful figure
on a war memorial,
come alive, massive
sensuous and ulterior
in the thick night,
with a lamp in her hand
searching for someone.
to show us, lesser phantoms of light
we too have a future to remember.

 
Maps for the Dead

1. Map

Rummaging in a sideboard
for a light bulb when our gîte
in the Maçonnais was blacked out,
I found an old map
of the Dix-Neuvième.
The scenic routes were missing
and two villages
seemed to have vanished.
Others must close earlier,
or are being deserted
under a modern viaduct.
The white blanks show us
the past does not exist,
though the lines show
we were their future
that did not exist.
We cannot scale
this ambiguity,
as Geographers
stretch the hides of continents
onto a hall of mirrors.
The place seems always here,
the dead are not,
though they have a useful map.


2. Legend for Lamartine

The view from inside to outside
will always be a metaphor
for subjectivity and a perfect place
for the fiction of the self.
I look out on a landscape
of a fading vineyard
that glows with Autumn’s
hard escape from poverty.
Lamartine bickers that
the classical view is best.
Yet it was the vineyard
ruined him, whose view
I see from this Mansard.

I read him now
as I would a neighbour
who insists past roads are there.
The page is his landscape
and I meet him in his fiction.


3. Lucina

A map, she stretched out on the world’s ward,
non-existent, to dam the river mouths
on the chart of the century, to be cancelled out
as too actual for cartographers
to store in the grid of grasp, so lean for growth.

The future brute screamed, skinned, from its mother’s
girdle of logical contours that ached.
with the burden of your exact falsity.
No footnotes or handbooks let the bursting
sentence in. No sequence Ramanujan
or Russell might recall divided
the wholeness of the concept. Blasphemy
wrestled to be born. An eminence ,
you stretched out Victorian geology
in cursive or copperplate detachment,
in the Dean’s Lodge. It was your aim
to hold the natural movement in.
and have the pregnant girl turn smooth
as the body of a church, an era or a text,
closed as the face of a revised universal clock
In the bed, the clever girl’s screams grew loud.
Rolls of cambric unravelled maddened yards
and forceps borrowed from the travellers’ hut,
lay unused in the smell of sweat and fear.
Unbirth proved yours was the right to births.

Until the midwife brought in the tabloids
that risked new theories were true for pence
and rogue theologians under Papal
monitae produced necklaces of notes.
And the secret of your hireling jealousy
was out.
The smell of burnings, exile
and embalming fluid on the corpse of lore
spread into the corridor as excited voices,
shouted of a giant child sprung from a
worn-out womb and of fatal outcomes refuted
and in revenge, necessity in flight,
the offices upturned, the shredders
shuddering, the memoires out on goddesses,
you scored the wearied midwife’s back
with brutal fur, that cancelled nakedness
and more, refined her framework to fit lost holes,
forgetting that friendship rules small places.

Night Log (Translated from Walter Delamare’s Silver)


A woman, so slow so silent,
under the night. The way she went
crossed the windows mapped on the floors
with bright squares across the corridors.
She went for the dog, obsessed,
chrome paint in her hand. Then she messed
the doves, at which threw the whole can.
Then the lab-mice drowned in the pan,
one passing a silver paint stool.
She even took the tin into the pool
and the silver fish floated dead.
Her skin seethed silver, her brain with lead

The Mossbawn Man

That puzzled frown, preserved for all...
You can guess his profession from
the noun-hoard they found in his imagery;
a dated meal in a leathery crop.

Its features, as if filled up
with lore, giving the lustre of life
to a thing so dead, Homer was a child...
Ink stains tell he is of the O - Level folk.

His hooded eyes conceal the loyalty
he brooded on to the mythic Empson
and the possibly - forged White Goddess
to be found in Graves as far as Majorca.

He has only the purse of the Catholic
village he never left, which can be deduced
from the diction of the books found on him.
(Though these may be of an earlier level)

It seems he wanted to say something
about red, from the haw buds found
still gripped in his knuckled scansion,
with its Hobsbaum discontinuity.

It seems he survived alone after
the extinction of his god,
by pretending to be a better heathen
than his traceless phenotypes.

His mouth affects taciturnity.
A clever ruse, it utterly conceals
that what could not be said
was never really thought at all.

Athlètes Maudites

Secure at the hub of your little world
the athlete is born so bored,
her manager swears your innocence,
fit for profit, the concern of gossip.
And the architects of purity and health
look down on this Queen Bee of strength.
In bread and honey wanted for the lips
they mixed the filthy steroids of the damned.
Then came the day when they plucked
it from her guts and tossed them in a plastic box.
Dry, beautiful and banned under an angel’s aegis
not once, but twice your nobility became
not laudanum’s, but an Olympic fund’s indignity.


The Flight

The State grows well. The forces grow subtle.
And yet they doubt the matter of our calm.
Stories of immigrant philosophers
and not state-aided moral education
led to our inclusion on the social list.
The services of power broke the fluids
and defective genes were found inside.
We left that morning. Now we stay away.
Some innocents may yet stand a chance.
The surface of our tickets for return
are scuffed, now, frayed and torn
and yet we keep them safe.


The Massacre

They too can sprawl,
like figures from
French Neo -classic paintings.
The mythic dead
are as dead as the real.

(coincident with the ritual
barbarity, or Razoir National,
imposed on those who doubted
the wisdom of the elders,
a scene from the holy past.)

Exposed and dying,
most lie still now.
Only the surviving
children still play
in the oblivion of hope.
The mothers have been
painted out with pethidine.

As always, only
the painters
ever saw real bodies
as it was their role
to create a new
reality.

Vallombres,
or
the Right to See Only What You Want.

1.Overture.

In the Rococo dome of the South side - altar,
a gold-mounted mirror depicts
Mrs Helen Forrest's rosy, ectomorph flanks
viewed from the sole angle of visibility,
as seen by the narrator alone,
a Nineteenth Century Metaphysical absolute
who stands incongruously
on the edge of a high plinth.
Herr Hans-Georg Wald, who is busily engaged
in drawing them, does not seem to be
aware of this tell-tale transcendental glimpse
of her hiding-place below the elbow-rest
of the elaborately-carved misericorde .
Boredom has led to his taking up the pencil
and sketch-pad of his youth before he turned to cartoons
in the Japanese market. Boredom, too, has led
to Mrs Forrest's peeling off her M&S khakis,
though the cool, marble floor on which she lies
is a welcome change from the humid,
pre-thunderstorm heat of this wooded river-valley
and its ornately-landscaped surrounds.
She gazes at the gilt on fading woodwork
and wrought iron, on the fussy altar-piece
and the suspended putti
motionless in the dry, still air.


2. Chapter One.

In the winter-garden, Marie-Elisabeth Dubois
and her sister, Soeur Céline-Thérèse
sit on a secluded bench, deep in conversation
about Brother Adolphe Dubois who renounced
his earthly pleasures, late, to retire to this place,
in the sole companionship of the narrator,
a retrospective friend who takes the form
of a Mannerist Angel in granite.
Adolphe lived as one among the order
of the Petits Plombiers De L'Eau Sacre Perpetuelle..
but died intestate in dix huit cents soixante quatorze.
His quest for eternal peace hastened by Haitian
wandering from the light in early youth.
The body of an unknown companion
from the climate of his youth has just been
interred beside him.
3.Prelude.

Surrounding the curtain-wall
the gendarmes sweat it out
silently in the stubborn sun.
The have barricaded the baroque entrance.
The heavy glint of Kalashnikovs
punctuates their heat-haze whisperings.
An R.T.F. commentator rattles dictated
realities into a Tandy.


4.Preface.

The children have had a riotous week of it.
The range the terraced gardens,
having become denizens of the spinneys
and the woods, where the auteur, an ancient sprite,
has climbed to the heights of the oldest plane
and looks down through tangled honeysuckle and hibiscus.
Their timing for meals is completely exact.
The troop in across the lawns to the refectory,
where they are fed beneath Fifteenth Century vaulting,
under the rule of silence, imposed
after the first day, riot of pidgin-Eurospeak
by Red- Cross volunteers who resent
the give-away feasts of hamburgers and chips
which the health-authorities have sanctioned.
The kids know they are here by accident
and intend a few more just to stretch it out.


5.Vorwort.

Next door, the Germans
have discovered the wine - cellar
beneath the Abbey lodgings
and claim it for the tourists.
The goblin of the grape squints
a ray of hope through a ruby-red glass
in recompense for their isolation.
The others have left them to it,
together with their raucous send up
of plainchant which carries in the still air.
The coach that brought them lies,
cleaned and serviced in the grand courtyard,
faced towards the gate
in impotent alertness.


6. First Movement.

Upstairs in the crowded dormitories,
under the strategic aegis of dead-eyed,
military busts, teenagers hold conferences
on mixed-visiting and escape.
They are ill at ease,
now that the dope has run out.
They gather in switching pairs
forming mirage-like groups-like rooks in winter,
depleting and gathering without reason.
The girls have that looked-over feeling.
The day-dream of playing in the woods,
like the youngsters. Some regard these events
as presaging some great shift
in ordinary destinies, sufficient to fire
the halbstarken against their father-figures. _


7. Cover-Illustration.

The wire-net post-card holder
in the Chapter-house entrance trembles
at each vibration of chasing children.
Black and white photographs
present Dalcroze and Montnessori
sublime; a cold perfection,
where, in chiselled white robes,
a uniformed instructor announces
the eternal message
of the unachieved in frosted chalk.
Seated in wooden benches,
¬the doomed, tubercular class
smiles in futile industry
white, too, in their boiled, ¬
calico pinafores and shirts.
They would have us belong
to their world, it having been
so short, so full of pain.


8. Introduction.

Back in the church, the recumbent effigies
of the Count of Ponthieu, mort
à Crecy en Ponthieu in Treize Cent Quarante Six
and his wife , a sturdy supervisor
of Cistercian intercession for her husband's soul,
are less content. The pert pink of English nudity
merges jauntily with the arrow-pitted
dead of Philip's arm, who lay on the Chapel floor,
soaking the floors with their massacred blood.
Though no-one notices, as their spectral forms –
are taken for comedians, rehearsing for this evening's
son-et-lumière, except the narrator,
assuming the privilege of viewing
sub specie eternitatis.


9.Part One.

This is not the viewpoint of Mr Nigel Forrest,
standing bleakly before the bronze rood- screen,
scanning the stalls for his missing wife,
whose want to be alone he finds an irritation,
now that events have permitted
a more Romantic interval
than a weekend would allow.
Artist and model freeze,
almost become light carvings themselves.
Liturgical dust adheres to Mrs Forrest's tensed,
sweaty haunches. The wooden panelling
takes on an orange-pink glow
in the shifting light.
Baron Schuff von Schuffenhoffen
chisels them into the wooden panelling,
in Viennese style side by side
with the Angevin wood
that gripped the water-logged chalk
amid vanishing alluvium.
Nigel's footsteps wanly sound
and fade ¬in retreat through the Porch.


10. Entrance Gate

In the Marsh-Gardens, a Japanese export-clerk
in studied casuals and his slim wife, Norika,
rapidly debate the declining merits
of his portable phone and resign themselves
to another morning of Tai Chi and meditation.
This does not prevent them fearing infection,
or whatever the threat is that holds them here.
Their children have joined in
with the Western gang, though not without
the token jeering that makes it difficult ¬
for them to sleep at nights. ¬
The ever - present emptiness
a being, a kami of the woods
perceives the quiet couple
as part of the universal whole
as the walk through the gateway.
Norika, in black boots, white socks, scarlet
stocking and a black jacket
sets a mirror by the pool ¬
to make her silent offering.,


11. First Subject

Mr and Mrs Wood have decided to stroll
the whole length of the inner curtain wall.
They have made a study of such features. ¬
They bicker about respective invasions of privacy
and wonder why the police
won't talk about what keeps them here.
They witness that poor man,
Mr Forrest come out of the chapel,
looking unkempt and distracted,
passing the pleasant French nun
and her sister who are talking
in the shade, so sensibly.


12. Avant-Propos.

Jean Boissard, actor and singer, adjusts his hair
in the Louis Quinze moen, looking glass
grimacing at his unsure luck in having
a captive audience. Sylvie Aboi, his partner, steals his solitary viewpoint
to check how her
wool-white hair-dye has lasted.
Pudgily sensual with a well-dieted,
commercial svelte. She reckons
the whole business might get
get them some space in France-Nord.
Their apprentice-dead, mostly dancers
from the local summer-school,
follow them in ketchup-stained
dormitory linen to rehearse in the stables,
simmering with concern for a rise or a revolt. Meanwhile, the pocked, silver - gilt Cupidon
on the pediment, eyes them with a droll squint,
mocking at how a crook fooled a rake. ‚


13.Act One.

On the parterre in the Formal Gardens
the Walds are having one of their recently-famous rows
united now on the terrace by the chevet.
Mr and Mrs Forrest can hear
their teutonic badinérie.
Though only Helen listens
Her doting husband knows no German.
She blushes deeply and awkwardly
that she is the subject of the row.
Frau Walde has been unflattering about the sketch.
It is good enough, though, for Frau Wald,
a stock pharmacist from Aachen
to advance across the Avenue
to the Forrests , in no mood for aesthetic doubt.


14. Advice to the Reader.

Darkness fills the river-valley,
crowding the woods with shadows.
Sudden cloud-cover from the North- East
lumbers in on the same breeze
that rustles the beeches and young oaks
which surround the estate.
A line of grey creeps along
the stonework of Le Jardin Blanc
until its Empire fountain is plunged in deep charcoal .
Rain whispers its cold rumour
soon men, women and children.
Figures run hazardously for cover.
The Forrests make for the Crypt.
While the Dubois sisters decoy
Frau Wald to lead her to the Outer Gardens.
Herr Wald runs for the Refectory
where a raucous version of the Dies Irae,
bursts out again in response to an explosion
of thunder, which breaks over the abbey
and grounds, in a rattling downpour.
An ancient Angevin couple break
from the roofless stables to the cloister
followed by the Valois dead, who reaching the dry, ¬
ditch their shouds and light up ebulliently,
mocking Sylvie's gutter invective.
Children thicken the ground
with playful immanence like cherubs
in the Mannerist ceilings.

15. Book One.

This time in the Garden of the Senses,
the Dubois sisters seize upon Frau Wald,
whose husband's drawings
they claim to find exquisite.
How life-like... they coo
and add a remark on how little refinement
is to be found among these chance acquaintances.
Flattered but checked in her pursuit, Frau Wald
glowers at the leaden entrance to the crypt,
where Helen, wearied, but opportunist enough
to exploit her husband's misinterpretation
of her blushes, as the renewal of love.
feels her way in the dark with two hands searching
for a tactile surety; one held ahead
in the clammy air; the other held in her husband's.


16.Volume One.

Helped by the teenagers
who have broken through
the curtain wall, and under cover of the rain
the gendarmes move in.
They corner the tourists in small groups
in the Refectory, the Cloisters and the Dormitories ¬
They lead them to the church
where the coach driver is pushed
into producing his list
Only the Dubois and the Japanese couple
are missing.


17. Induction.

They explain that one among them
is a terrorist and had laid charges to the coach. They had no choice
but to hold them up
the unknown assassin
then transferred them to the foundations
of the chateau.
Still leaving his traceless messages
to release the convicted saints of the Holy war.


18 Prologue.

A task-force enters the crypt with shovels.
They crouch wolf-like
in uniformed raincoats
reading the inscriptions
with regulation pencil torches.
They mass together by a vault
in a corner and begin to dig.
Above in the church
Marie-Clair Alain is giving an organ recital,
or rather Boismortier in period costume to a tape.
On another's fingers rich,
Romantic chords fill the heavy air,
in a marche funebre while a trilling on
the high registers wobbles the Caryatids.


19.Exposition

It is time to go.
The travellers return
to the coach cleansed of all explosions.
with a litany of forgiving
An ambulance has arrived
for the Japanese couple
so unfortunately inundated by freak weather.
Such a slipper place to find ourselves
in Therese and Celine are busy with the police,
they having noticed the Pre-Vatican II habits of one.
Their cousin's remains have come back to earth
while several thousand pounds of heroin
imported with him have been stacked
by the police on the high altar


20.Lead in.

The terrorist never showed up.
Some claimed the gendarme had fluffed it
and blown them all up save the Japanese
and buried them in the crypt.
Others that an English pair were found
half - naked in the crypt and had been released ¬
without charges, the Gendarme having
overlooked the question of resisting arrest.


21 First premise.

On his seat in the coach,
Nigel finds a brown, buff envelope.
Inside is a drawing of a naked woman
with a characteristic smile.
It is signed on the crotch.
Delighted he shows his wife
who laughs in descant.
While the Woods frown in disapproval
at such uxorious tastes.
In the silence of the gilded chapel
The ornate, sumptuous tabernacle
drips with a white rain-sodden paste
hanging from a Bishop's Crook.
The Holy Spirit, an elaborate,
overweight gold-leafed pigeon
suspended on a chord
begins to flutter its creaking wings.


Ionian Summer
 
1.Io

I am Io.
Yes my son lies
in the clinic ward,
Epaphus, twisting
with pain and anger.
"Why did you bring me here?
to go through all this?"
He says it
to scar me,
knowing the holiday
was my idea.
I am Io.
I am to decide
I am hardship,
pulverized to a transparent glass
in miniscule, passive drips
So small, I am chance itself.

Each issue must be probed,
tested,
weighed, repeated,
put down.

My quickened surface, English,
calms to a chill.
This morning while tourists crowd
on the scorching sands. My daughter and I
waited, sweltering for the bus to town
just to visit him and see him lie there, my boy
sulky and disconsolate,
while doctors guess and hint at his complaints
and he complains that we arrived too late.
I am Io, alone, since my husband's faint-
hearted number telling me that it was better
he left me, than be distant
and kidded himself in the same letter
that I agreed it's for the best.
The classic poor cow, eyed by all
by my relatives for signs of new affairs
Tomorrow once again I shall crawl
to the nurses and put on airs
insisting my son goes. There is nothing
wrong with him and we shall leave
this hell and once we're flying
forget this place of pain and closed-eyed believe,
that like my grey-blue ruthless
eyes, have depths of fear pursued groundless.
correct, khaki and black-blowsed,
quivers with a willowish
uncertainty.


He must know I cannot look on death.

2. The Gorgon Pediment


The sea stirs and sucks itself
into the shape of a writhing coil,
she meets an English woman, solitary
and invites her to a meal.
She gets her confessing how she walked out
on her husband and three kids
to find some meaning to her life
The which, of course, Medusa-will provide
a pretty folie á deux.
The other woman wakes in a marbled bedroom
staring straight at a deep blue sky,
with a sore skin remembering dangerous pleasure
and the need to lie in postcards home
and always that flinch of the light bulb
after a power cut
that is blown with the surge of love
while the sea searches with its fingers
for pure eyes, teeth, a glossy head
basaltic weaknesses,
careless of exploration
or of lines of fault.

3.In Medea's Cave

On the most distant beach
against the rock,
lies Medea, the witch-inside to-be
She is wearing flimsiest pink,
has a troubled face
but a supple,
well-proportioned figure
which she unrolls downwards
for the sun to bless.
with its great, burning fleece
She carries
a Tom Wolf paperback
and accompanied
by two swarthy
Argonauts lights up
a joint.
At home, the Serbian shells
have finished
and her home
is being re-lived in
by a well-dressed
professional family.
Her father,
impatient in Germany,
will have her back,
family-ties,
but not if this Jason
really was born
in New Jersey.
The thrill kindles
deep down in their eyes,
but both so afraid to touch
even though they have moved
together to make room
for the English family.
Both knowing so much,
but not how much
is staked


4. Drepanie

The island
in the shape of a scythe,
though today it would be
a discarded condom,
or a broken beach sandal
It would have been left
by Demeter, on her way
to appeal to Zeus,
Pater Potestas,
watching in the Auxerre Icast game
wearing only a vest
eating pasta in the video bar.

It was then I saw her,
the chaperone, chaperoned
by her tall, larger -limbed daughter.
She with an aged,
still-beautiful face, Milanese
walking along side
that shapely girl
impatient to get to the disco.
Her mother, wore white Lycra,
a mignon ivory,
while Proserpine
was draped
in a white shapeless shirt,
and Doc Martens.
She knows her bambino
is going to hell
on a regular basis
It gives her matronly
rule
a certain resignation
at cereal time,
and a flair
for the language of compromise.


5. Nausicaa

Here everyone plays the
Nausicaa game.
Bare-breasted beach babies
stare out
as Odysseus' of the
spreading waistline
and the colestrol warning
whales himself up from the waves.
A maiden and the maids,
at the splash zone
among the vegetation
of fig-trees, cypresses,
Venetian olives
broom and ilex.
The one-epic stand
had its finer moments,
but the dream slips away
in the effort to get
the man to leave
the hotel bedroom
knowing, deeply,
hatefully
that when the real heros come,
little Nausicaas say their bit
then stand by the pillar
while the rich and grateful
vanish uncoupling
in the western skies.

6.Pyrrhus of Epirus

Scop owls in the
Angevin fort.
A video blares into
the Ionian night
its eternal odours
of heroes, viciousness
and virtue

To-day, trying to find
a way round
the valley, I fell
forty feet
breaking a foot
and a leg
and had to be led
dazed, along the path
by a party of
concerned Romans
in Tibullan style
Along the path
a beautiful bolt of green fire,
a lizard scampering across me.
To-night, limping,
bandaged with a pole
made from a ship's oar
I lurch as chthonically
as that owl.
A young man from Corinth
stares at my foot
and looks troubled.
His outpost is well-established, though
tomorrow, if the owls are right,
I will not need crutches
as I was saved to see
that lizard.
Soon only the owls will
do any hunting
as I will not be safe.


7. Sea-battles


Either
there will be a sea-fight
tomorrow, or there will not.

They have Athens
to thank for this
mode of existence
They have
white-painted yachts enough,
and banana boats
to out number
either the Corinthians
or the Spartans
Even the Venetians
would be hard-pressed
with the calor-fed barbecues
of the tourist civilisation
Manfred, or the Ottomans
raiding for girls
on the night-time beaches,
fertility being the usual tactic
would be ignored in the toga-parties
and grow faint-hearted.
Imperial, gunboats
like the interests of history,
would be outran by speedboats
The Napoleonic ballroom
is doomed by sky divers,
the Fleet outstripped by wind-surfers.
Scuba-drivers playing
with torpedoes
and direct them home.
Mussolini's planes cannot
sortie with Nazis
as the hang-gliders
block their sight.
less sure a walkover
are ideological mines
still drifting in the Achanian channel.,
Macht ist recht
might still float up
in a seam of
orange, blue or yellow lilies
so sensitive to the feather light touch
of brutal infinity
as are the drowned from
H.M.S. Saumarez
sightseers only now
from the British Cemetery
what is not, could still be
that it was not proves nothing,
which is what 'might' adds up to.


8. In Roman Night


Six beds to a room we lie
To my right Cato Uticenses,
a German in fact
injured with his whole foot bound
and plastered
at nightfall, he paces himself
out of the ward
and makes a complicated international call
and leaves for Africa.

To my right on the after side,
Nero complains of a stomach ache.
He came into hospital
with suspected food-poisoning
and has been here since,
a prisoner of the drip,
a drip on a drip.
At first it was a rumour
of low red cells,
but the machine was at fault
Now, with one day left of
his tour, his songs must go unsung.
Tomorrow his flight leaves
but to-day they are offering him
his first meal in days.
Starved he eats carelessly.
While Suetonius, reading a tabloid,
waits to book his flight
To my left lies the young Strabo,
thinking Corfu a shitty place
He has done its geography
and its history.
Now the place is the pain
he suffers from.
Only the life of "Tom Jones"
and the thought of the stories
he can tell about Greek hospitals
to the second years at Lancing
have any interest at all.

Before me lies a bed
occupied by Cicero until he fled
Relying on Roman forgiveness,
he goes back to his villa
and his vines.
At the exact hour
he leaves, talking to himself
behind black, framed spectacles
(later they bring in Tiberius
with a head wound, self-inflicted
in the pleasure place)
He will need a transfusion
but there is no blood on the island.
So the tourist gather to give theirs
unscreened, but it was enough
to get back into action
until the battered head and arm give out.
On the left, across from me
lies the only soldier,
Antonius, a loser and a hero,
a blasphemer against
word of God and St Anthony
an office dictator who
has cracked three ribs
broken three bones in his leg
and his foot.

He smokes Egyptian cigarettes,
despite the warnings
in Greek, Hebrew and Latin.
Restless, he stalks
the wasted hours
in a battered
wheelchair, cursing
the scooter accident
that put him here
His girlfriend comes
from work each day
to solace him. Octavia
has a sensitive,
dark-haired weary beauty he ignores.
Until both lie up on the bed,
dreaming of Rome.

I lie in this full-throated
darkness of cicadas,
wave on wave in unison.

Pyrrhus of Epirus,
a stooge for dead Romans,
clinging to the Jupitar of Cassius
I listen to the chatter
of Roman privilege
and make a pagan
vow to he who has
sway over owls.
White Lanassa returns to Cassiope alone
thinking I have other concerns.
While in the shadows
a matron-girl, makes a bed
for a lager-lout,
with bronchial pneumonia.
She wipes his brow.
Antonius lights up,
a sulphur flame in the dark.
Frizzy haired,
dark and swallow thin,
the nurse extinguishes the light.
This is how I knew her,
Agios Kerkyra, the convent.
a brief light of pity
before Gladstone cleared out
the night-shift.

9. The Colossus of Kouloura


We sat in Durrell's garden,
under the vines of commerce
Pregnant, Helen stands before me
in profile and allows enough
of her supple figure to be seen
in her azure-blue costume
to offend the censure of fathers.
She has gone down
to bathe with the children.

At first she stayed at water's edge , next
to her husband, with a child,
Hermione between her legs,
looking down, as if raising
a domestic counter
to whatever argument
he put up for going it alone
on the dinghy, or the terrace-bar.

But his distant,
day-dream strategy
always worked
and he went off
to lie on the dinghy
lolling by the cherry tree.

So she returned with
what looked like a friend
and, of course,
the ever present American,
East Coast, Roman
they dined with them together.
She liked to gather people round
where she could preside
alertly unnoticed in the conversation.
"I know just what you mean
There used to be a very tall girl
at school - the head girl in fact
who always stooped - I suppose
it was self-confidence.
I never heard what became of her.
What?
O no, confidence is just what I need
to raise three children
That's why Manfred and I
were also able to do our
open university course.
“I think it's time
we went for a dip.
Would you like to come
with them now?"
The thin-faced
recognisably frissy hair
stepped reluctantly
off the verandah
to strip off her black dress
and pick her way
in a white swimsuit,
down to the rocky shores.
She looked at me
and I know she is an au pair,
or a servant to her
and that the woman is Helen,
daughter of Comnenos
a prisoner of her dowry.

Seated aslant a square table,
a grey-haired, blunt Midlands
entrepreneur, focuses his field glasses
on the only object of his mind
His huge white yacht,
The Philippe Eschinard
with an ugly conning tower
It should be the eve of Pentecost
“Et li jorz fu bels et desu
et li venz dolz et soes
et il laissant aler les voilis al vent.”
All to sack the cultured
in the name of
Villhardouin's mercantilism
The white launch ships anchor
and slips away to Istanbul.


9. Five Finger Study, the Villa Caterina


1.
We are naked for love
under the fixed glitter of Saturn
visible in the angle of
our half-closed jalousies.
Our eyes make out
the shapes of sex,
in the cicada darkness.
As athletes bared to minimise
resistance from the Maestros
cooling us. Runners pace in silent
dedication, a fixed attention
to the body's motions.
In the silence of this game of skin
I stir the carnal contours
of your back with a single finger.
2.
You lie frontal with your head to the window
shifting the sky to the mirror,
like a patient unclothed for a physician's
diagnostic, probing hands.
Your silence modulates to inhibition
sequences to a tense hope
of exhilaration, or its loss
a quick intake of clenched breath
which grows chromatic, staccato
heard in a speechless frame
that only fear greater than death
is the ear of the failure to love,
in naked silence too, we lie.
upon the cold white slabs of hate
and its deceptions, our limbs slackened
in the ultimate embarrassment of dolls.

3.
Today in a Xanadu of rocks
we swam, with wrasse and mullet
chafing at our cheek,
you always further out, so strong,
while I, eyes open underwater,
probe for precipices, for that
sudden shelving to forty feet,
or more that makes our effort
so puny, so endangered.
Those who cannot believe this
cannot see the depths.
Dreams too are silent. The tacit
dance of physical bodies to become
elemental, to climb out of depths
with clouds of foaming spray
that salt taste cleansed of sorrow,
having wandered on foot paths
heavy with the odour of lentisc,ilex,
Robinia, arbuteus, and olive, silver poplar,
sea-grass, cypresses and eucalyptus,
listening for the stir of
a bright lizard through the leafage,
or a rock thrush, blue and brilliant above.

4
We are hidden in the brush,
having come out of the sea.
to face our stripping.
Shame too has its silence,
an accusing finger, raised and pointed
to jab "where art thou?"
The notes slide towards the bass
despite the counterpoint of truth,
so low the piano wires vibration
stirs a dust smell, an acrid discord
that counters the perfumed day
Yet we lie, unspeaking, in the tallow dark
models, undressed, before the artist
who paints each feature anew.
Bidden not to speak and not to spoil
the truthful delineation of time,
in a self-portrait of the artist as a lover
we muscle against age and bones,
touching that word that, bare,
which we cannot bear and barely use.
We are touching touching silence itself
5.
Until those rhythms return from our beginning
a fixed tonality that every distant modulation cannot lose.
Our bodies stripped to act, we grow quick
to each other's time signature,
discovering again our wounds,
curing death by braving its reality
we moisten and dream, sighing now
with the risk, the dangerous excitement
of slaved secrecy.
Until each has opened a new door
into the others closed room,
to see the latent image
which the tactile trace lays bare
Complex, distant clouds still stir us
in the heats of love, the nudity of cure,
the melodic theme dying into a flattened
allusion, langorous, plain
rallantando to the bar line.

10. Signori

"A frank-faced man,
well attired", according to Bandiera.
He thought him a man of forty years,
though in feet he was forty seven.
"Very brown of skin with a vivacious eye
He wears a short, chestnut-coloured wig,
a bold distainful character.
He is full of the gift of the gab
and, as such, witty and learned".

You can meet him every day in Cassiope,
coming up from the port;
his undress is a little more
extreme than Venetian mores
would have allowed.

He arrived on motor-bike,
and took a room
above the fisherman's house.
She, of course, did all the talking
"Don't you remember me
I was a seven year old
girl when my mother took the room"

While the owner despaired
of finding a room at this short notice.
She puts her arm around
as if she were an old friend,
though the owner cannot remember her"
Eventually he gives in she gets
the room for them free,
bath that night and a meal
The next day he wants to move on
and chucks her, his shirt not
exactly ironed in the way
he wants. She is left alone
and almost sobs
on the waiter's shoulders,
while he, never remembering her
invents from doubt
a memory of cherishing
squeezes her shoulder
and lets her stay hating
Casanova types
until her mother sends the money.


11. Lear at Episcopis


He writes to Lady Waldegrave
from the shadow of Pantocrater
to the horse-chestnut walks of
of Strawberry Hill,

“There was an Old Man of Corfu...”
He wrote from Corfu town's Condi Terrace,
“this tittle tattle place...
We are all more or less swells as lives in it.”

“There is a man in a boat here
...who never knew what he should do...
under the window-who catches fish all
and every day with a long five-pronged fork..

Mrs Mac Farlane's female domestic
has fallen downstairs by
which precipitate act,
Mrs M's baby has been killed

so he rushed up and down
...picnic parties with
miserable scores of asses, male and female
...till the sun made him brown

a waistcoat and drawers being his dress.
Why should I not do the same?
That bewildered Old Man of Corfu.

that he is settled with his
matronly men servants
his animals, his Medeira, his claret
and his sketch books.

Later, he would write
“… I am now cut adrift, though
I cannot write the name without a pang.
...ginger-beer and claret and prawns..”

His head, heavy
in the afternoon
with a second bottle of wine.
sinks into historic sleep.


12. Scorpion Wall

The pirate can enter here too,
a shuffling by the rusted gate
and a leap for the new ditch
and he is in, glorying in the garden,
clumping up the path
with his stolen crutches.
He will marvel at the overgrown tree
observe the gentle scorpions of the wall
as generous as before.

Inside all is a shattered mess
of second-hand antiques.
While the quiet sun glows
at the British family
captured, by Linnaeus perhaps
the perfect genus, Albion.
colonial, ex-military, moneyed,
eccentric and so strangely left alone
to the delight of the eye.

Pyrrhus will not have it,
adds photographs, diagrams
and measures dimensions to compare
the text of "My Family..."
and concludes the villa is real,
but the music of the house
has not been heard in reality.
and they drive away listening to
Die Engführung on tape.

Meanwhile Phaecian Chiton
and Corinthian radula
strike deathblows,
the maxillas of Emperor wasps
chew into scriptured martyr-ants,
cockroach Crusaders clash
with a Byzantine firefly,
fair Khali Khartonou, the Venetian
is taken for Murat in his mandibles.
While a mercenary
German Count, the spotted toad
rushes a lacewing
to the surprise of Osmanli geckos
on the scorpion wall.

13. A Zacinto . A version from Foscolo

My frame shall never touch the holy shores
where these bare feet , as an infant, lay.
Zakinthos, I saw as in the wind you paused
in Greek seas, while Venus, a virgin made her way
to that leafy place. Her first smile still stores
ripeness in the soil, gives first love its sway
over shyness yet still the land abhors
to sing the poetry of a sailor's tragic stay
and fated exile. For carried on salt-stained oars
came Ulysses, handsome with famous fate,
to embrace his home, Ithaca of stones.
You will not own this exile. Words are my spores,
matronal earth, for destiny does not abate
and leaves a tearless gravestone for my bones.


Exequy For A Sad King
 

1. Repatriering

I never knew you,
neither in times
of popular joy,
nor in sorrow.
The only chance
I would be likely
to meet a king,
outside of history.
“His strength had ebbed away:
death’s token in his field-bright face.”

I glanced at the news
in Paris Soir to see
you had gone to find
the sun and died
alone before the sea.

Then I skimmed
how Paola and Albert
looked under gloss.

We had stopped
at an autoroute, Aire
du repos des Olives
lost outside some city,
Clare having sped
us from Calais.

There was talk of neglect,
The party was understaffed
and the queen trying
to phone from the yacht.

I had expected
the whole event
to be forgotten.
I blundered
into a mother with a child
at her breast.

I expected her
still to be there
when I looked back
to say sorry,
but she had gone.
Just as I blundered
into your lived life...

They brought
the coffin down
at Brussels airport
down the narrow steps,
its crucifix aflame
in the glare of flash bulbs
but you had gone
even from the arc-lights
of the public dream.

2.Begravelsesemusik

Your face like
a sensitive clown
stunned into print
on placards and screens
and the signs scrawled
with “Merci Sire:”
the syntax of
Trauermusik,
on slow horns.
You were
an obsolete symbol
of authority,
or some clever allusion
in a Modernist poem.
“Death’s sword had cut too deep:
the brave, happy warrior silenced.”

And yet
the crowd waited
three hours before
it began to move,
before the coffin
on the gun-carriage
pulled by an armoured car,
the papers called Le blindé
arrived in the grey palace
before the coffin,
like a display
in a shop-window:
More like an arrest
than a welcome.


3. Requiemmassa

The son of luckless man,
who put his vow
he would not have
the Swastika fly
above the Laeken Palace,
above his family,
only to be condemned
by his people.
You were the step-son of
an unwanted consort
and the mourner
of a beloved one.
You were supposed to be
like the brother
with a French haircut.
You were supposed to be rich,
answering to no-one and private.
“Now everywhere people were streaming
towards the cathedral, man, woman and child.”

On your first scout-camp
the pack waited for a prince
and found you were already
waiting with them.

4. Laatste riten.

There was no place
in the world for
fools like you any more.
You were not supposed
to die alone,
before loved ones
reached you.
Your watch carried on
Fabiola’s wrist,
the habit of a nurse
tracing a faint pulse.
The tourists were taken up
in the mute piety of flowers,
summer-clothed,
bewildered mourners,
bare-legged among the people
who could only
gather in an empty place.
and mutter about
of journalists’ denials,
about Lumumba
and your stolen sword
carried beyond your reach.
A man who never fought
honoured as a soldier.
A man with no scholarship
honoured as a man of fame.
The armoured car arrived
for his medals
and decorations first
before the second left
empty, to the airport,
for his body.

5. Uitvaarten

The flowers were
piled so high
under the Brussel’s
sun of ninety three,
it took water cannon
to dowse them.
You died before
the new world
could help you.
You died
before the Hutu
hundreds piled
across the Rusumo
Bridge while as many
floated beneath.
You died before
the human shield
of Russian civilians
in Grozny were
buried under
the rubble of
bombardment.
We judge things
differently now.
The children thrown out,
then shot before
they reached the water
under the bridge
over the Drina in Visěgrad.
There was no place for you,
among those weeping
who did not know you,
so they let the glinting
Roman cavalcade of motor-bikes
roll the first cortege
through the gates.
and the cavalry
dig their hooves
on melting asphalt.


6. Vaarwel

Always the first
and always the last:
it was the first time
a mourning consort
wore white,
the first to have
the Magnificat sung.
At that time
the last Catholic King.
In the Palais Royal,
the crown bier lined
with grey, not black.
Eight men of the Army:
the last Catholic King.
Medical Corps
carried the mahogany
catafalque.
Farewells from
standard bearers
from unknown forces,
the clairon
sounded de laatste post.
The bells of the
Cathedral intoned,
their hum, hung on the air,
the other churches
alert with sound
boomed across the city..
A twenty-one gun salute
scourged the air
and the procession
moved off, away from
an old century
making drama
of the ordinary
for a new time;
even moving on
some kind heartache,
a scruffy schoolchild
beginning his holidays
meeting his mates,
a newly-met couple,
kissing in a bar
unsure, watching
what each other does,
the old man tuning
his radio for the results.


7 Innerlijk leven.

You decided
independence,
from the double shadow
of Africa, yet praised
the honour of
ancestral murderers
and listened
to Lumumba’s tirade
on the Congo
of your fathers’
in bewilderment.
You were out of
Your depths among
the killers of the spirit.
You were not supposed,
to be rich
and feel it was
poverty to you
in the dry silence
you called your faith.
You were not supposed
to think being a ruler
a weakness.
You expected
the pain of others,
to harm you.
You expected
to be saddened
by solitary happiness.
You expected to grieve
the misery of the people.
You said wanted to be saved
from yourself.
You were not supposed
to carry the
baying press
with your abdication
for a day
so that the Abortion Act
was not signed
by you, and became a icon
of illiberal contravention
in the minds of
newspaper readers,
“now life and the body
have come to naught.”

You said you
wanted to know less
to know God more,
which was not
what I expected
from manikin royals
who are supposed
to keep diaries
about polo.

8. Sepiaportretten

The curse of premature rule
ran in your family,
as did death by accident.
Your grandfather
struck his head
climbing
in the Ardennes
and your father,
who shared English exile
with him after German
troops bogged down in the Yser,
became a reluctant King.
Your mother
was called, Princesse des Neiges
just because of a white coat she wore
when she came to be married,
to cannons and bells
the first couple to kiss
in public beforehand:
a shy, sudden, astonishing smile.
She suckled her own children
and died on holiday
at Kussnacht in Rigi
as she turned
to point out a detail
on the map to Leopold
who swerved.
Severed from the car
she lay in a field of blood
with the king raving, “Astrid!”
and was buried in Laeken
to cannon and tolling bells,
a helper lost.
He remarried in captivity
with your family
driven across Germany
Treves, Coblenz, Erfurt, Weimar...
“They waited for night
and crossed the Rhine.”


9. Verrader koning

...Dresden, to Schloss Hirstein on the Elbe,
then Stroble in Austria.
After fighting with his troops,
Leopold had surrendered
Churchill, Reynaud and Spaak
denounced him as a traitor
who stank of welcome, not arrest.
The charge was dropped,
but the people dropped
the king and you stepped
into history with fingers upraised
to swear allegiance
in an ill-fitting uniform.
Now for the passing
of her Lord, a woman
among women,
forever burdened
with fresh sorrow.

10. Huwelijksdag

Cardinal Siri took a
suite to himself.
The future king of Spain
had a row under the eves,
Fabiola brought her family,
exiled after Franco
from the Calle Zurbano
with its plane trees,
to windswept Brussels
and you not knowing what to do
with your long sword
in the secular Hotel de Ville,
turned to your father,
who nodded when you got it right
Four corteges
of royal families, diplomats
and sovereigns
preceded you.
a Mercedes to the civil ceremony
coaches to the church
Green and black curtains
flapped behind charcoal braziers
in the unsheltered cathedral.
“She entered the Minster
with her train of ladies.”
The step children of Argenteuil
and the in-laws of Luxembourg
carried the long train.
Her white silk woven at Rocafort
in Catalonia, decolleté bateau
to her shoulders, white and slim
her body fasted within the Balenciaga
dress that made history of her slenderness.
Thought of in Madrid made in Paris
You kept smelling salts
in your gloves in case she fainted.
They stood before the Cross.

At two o’clock you left
with her for the Palais Royal
and were not supposed
to appear at the balcony
an hour later
as the couple had lost
the cards for the banquet
and princes and sovereigns
scrambled
to identify each other.

11. Echtgenote

Named out of Wiseman
or the Martyrologium,
a pianist with
long, fine hands
she knew exile
and sudden
accidental death.
“Mother don’t talk of a man
I will live free of a hero’s love.”
You met her
at the Spanish
Queen Victoria’s house.
outside Lausanne
and you sought
on the Costa Brava
having lost her father,
she would not leave Spain.
as you sought her in Lourdes
and Bishops and fanatics chased her.
using pseudonyms
until finally she said this time
“Yes and I won’t look back.”
What wrong has he done?
Afterwards she told
John the Twenty Third
she had lost her first child
and miscarried many others,
lost her sister and her mother
and never bore
a successor for you.
expected to be a mother
with a child at her breast,
and now you had gone.
When eight hundred people
were invited on their anniversary
to celebrate twenty five
years of marriage,
she came in mourning clothes,
for her sister
and a smile that lived virtue
and the promise of a kingdom.

12. Werkingskoning

It wasn’t up to you.
Lourdes, Garabandal,
Paray le Monial,
Beauraing, Banneaux,
you, prayed at them all.
You respected fanatics
and respected the learned.
You threw an old army helmet
off the head of a statue
of our lady you had seen
desecrated.
You never joined any group.
You were
more solitary than
any monk.
This was your progress,
not the gawky, exposed,
young man with glasses
shadowed by De Gaulle,
or in the genial return
visit to Nixon
at the White House,
You made disciples of
Senghor, Camara,
Kadar, Brezniev,
Varese, Le Corbusier,
even Popes.
“When they brought a lawsuit,
Justice was done.”
You preferred
verbal reports
to reading,
a simple desk,
a familiar manner,
a sense of fun.

13. Erfenis

You left equality
Between Flemish
and Walloon
which has left
them bickering.
You left a federal structure,
which has left
the people
a new insecurity.
You left a new focus
after the loss
of Africa,
which left
a focus on Europe
and a lessening
of your own
authority,
the evil of forebears
stripped by Conan Doyle,
Twain, Casement and Conrad
seeping into your languages
like the dark blood
of the murdered
on the ironed sheets
of official histories,
despite your revenues
for the needy.

14. Begrafenis

Thousands watched
on screens
in the Grande Place,
a congress of sovereigns
reached the cathedral
while Alpha jets
flew past under
the slight-clouded sky
to see the great
“B” the flowers
made outside the palace.
Only the Royal Family
And twenty monarchs
Went with the remains
which had to be
fitted in the gangway
of the plane from Spain
to the Laeken crypt.
The people
scattered to buy
evening newspapers,
a little boy had a
pink and white bouquet
as he sat
on his father’s shoulders.
“Night came to an end.
The queen came out
of the Cathedral”
to get into the Mercedes
and the crowd was still
behind the barriers.
“Never so much silence
among so many.”


A Project on Winter


Canticle for a Peacemaker

The white world on the blue
is beginning to fade on my helmet.
The incident that started it all
took place yesterday.
I read your faxed memorandum
“That the forces insist
the town surrenders.”

Then the shelling started
a day after we told them
the people had laid down their arms.
The town was full of refugees
and yet I remember
it was a clear, sunny day
and hundreds were dead or dying
as the explosions struck the school.
A surgeon stayed thirty six hours
operating in a church hall.
He told me of a blinded boy
whose eyes he could not save.
Then we were told
to declare the town safe.
We arranged for the withdrawal
and made no protest
when the shells began to fall
on the football ground.
No trial was arranged.
No guilt assigned
As I said I am considering
resignation, or a transfer,
unless you can answer a question

We arrested one person
from the town, whom
the forces accused of
concealing arms.
He had that awesome,
passive quietness
you once said fools use
to make them brave.

The forces claimed
we had supplied him weapons
but we had to say
even in the strange heat
of blood fresh on concrete
we refused him them.
as you said they might
provoke attacks

They shot him for
provoking the whole attack,
though he was not in the town
when the shells began to fall.

You told me not to resist
as it might provoke attacks

As his cronies were putting his
bloodied copse into a body bag,
you told me you measured a tremor
on the Richter Scale,
but not to tell them
as it might provoke attacks.

I received a delegation
asking for custody of the body.

When we got back to the hotel
I found it safe. Next door
you could see through the floors
they dead lay carefully in their beds
and the living were extracting
anything with a human look.

We took away
someone’s mother who was
having visions of history
and did not explain
whose side she was on.

I include this in my report
as everything is now back to normal.
I would like you to answer my question,
every time I ask, you just laugh
and change the subject.

You say the actions of both people
are morally equivalent,
yet we have no definitions here,
like a new truth
you haven’t issued yet.

What is the truth?


In Etaples

A sky, a child’s jam-jar, a toy
filled with brilliant blue,
which paper has laced with white,
the climate that is the colour of joy
and its substance, a hue
squeezed, palpable, from a brush of sight.

At Tours

L’odeur de l’horizon de toutes parts,
Cendre, Yves Bonnefoy, La Maison Natale

The levelling river
buts its energy
against the stone bridge.

A woman crosses
the rue Nationale,
arm turned in a cowled dash.

The buildings
massed under rain,
spit memories:

where once was
reality burnt out
by incendiary fires.

A young man
without a faith
slips from the age.

in a rush to return
through crystal night
from medicine.

The city stands
for an absence,
the half-torn cloak

burnt already
in the skies
a schoolboy

ignores to dream
of resurrection
into life.

Let the city waste,
that bears these names
and does not bare them.


Candlemas, 1998

i.m. Karla Faye Tucker

In West London,
the wakening
whirr of a traffic
helicopter,
winnows
the harvest
of the clouds.

It is morning
in Texas,
while I sleep
through midnight’s
silent cycle of revenge
when nothing is left
to further shame
and whatever fell,
whatever dew of sorrow,
will never dry.


A Canticle for Job

You have come to hold on to what you can lose.
The self is a mail- order toy that cheats
on its delivery and runs to choke.
Nothing we know adds up except to zero
and even the Void, or Nirvana stales
such Academic hypotheses beguile
the text-book outlook. Nonsense costs the same.
No wonder Boddhisatva is bejewelled
to tantalise with such absurdity.
Circumstance is a cunning habitat.
It impresses only dawn-dirty sheets.
Friendship slackens like our clothes
and character is a compass needle
charged to the loadstone of social fear.
Loneliness is an allergy to trust.
Time does not come into it at all.
It ticks, or buzzes, strikes or chimes
like an insect house with a sugar spill.
The loss of time is as timely as its gain.
Once we measured growth against a wall
now full-grown we measure the way down.
Yet if the mountain-self is so impossible,
how come everyone else is up here too?
If this love of yours is difficult to grasp
why do I cling onto it for life itself?
To pray is to renew a season ticket
as I need to bring identity to buy.


The Project on Winter

Your limp school bag
is breached of paint-flecked pencils
biros without tops, frayed textbooks,
fallen open on photos of volcanoes,
chemical equations, flow-charts
of community -work , vitamins , or heat
For your winter project,
you have coloured in pictures
of woodland animals in hibernation,
deep in cut-away, crayoned havens.
which with flute tunes and diaries
are strewn across the floor.

Late-houred and stupid,
I pile them back into your bag,
but stop when I see
your winter project drawing
of swallows flecked on
exercise book lines
as telephone wires.

I regret my anger at your
bunkering the bathroom.
my fear of your elsewhere nights
and mirth at your changes.
You have turned from
fledgling to swallow
and for your project


gather for the season’s shift.

Riddle

Air- bounded water is my place,
Xenophobic to the space.
One beast of many beasts.
Life finds needs
on my feathered beads.
Tethered to evolve
lonely, I dissolve.

Homage To Jacqueline Pascal

It was not the letter from her brother,
but watching her servant cut onions.
with such attentive ease made her decide.
She put it out of mind, as the moist white pile
hoarded the sunlight. She smiled. A whim
all the better for her servant’s bemusement
that mere foliage should bring her mistress joy,
yet afterwards she re-read its fine script.
“This is a talent for which God wants no account ,
for humbleness and silence are the lot of your sex.”
Her father had died two months ago. One whom she had
protected from Richelieu through her verse and charm.
Only Blaise was stopping her from professing
the vocation she had wanted since she had heard St Cyr
on the irrresistibility of grace
and the call to perfection in the dead Lord.
whose blasphemy she knew had saved her.
Her mother was lost before she could
remember her face. It was her father and Blaise
taught her to read and write, to calculate
and compose her songs and lyrics.
Gilberte was happy in her husband’s Perier clan
It was not the letter but her heart
that made her loathe its brutal tone.
“You ought to hate this talent and the others
which is perhaps the reason why the world
holds you back for it wishes to reap what it has sown.”

Taller than Pascal,
slim, well-shaped,
she carried herself well,
graceful and un-shy,
her hair almost chestnut,
full and fashionable.
Her temples shaped like
sculpted beads, her forehead
high as a pediment:
eyebrows quick, intelligent,
arched and thin,
with her deep-set eyes
fire-bright and mobile
cheeks like the inner curve
of a gold lamp console.
Her nose, like his,
too long, but shaped enough,
a medium mouth
bemusedly full and pale.

Her brother will not let her leave
Each day the silent debate
re-opens: the time for mourning
father has come to an end
and she must go to Port Royal.
She knows his weaknesses
Even as a child she had learned
to fear, his quiet, cold moods,
the sudden illnesses,
his irritable un earned
violence, a strategy to destroy
independence of thought
in those who knew him.
Yet she sees fear in those
clever, domineering eyes.

Once she had been poet and heroine.
She had put on Scudery
for Richelieu and asked, with others,
for her father to be discharged
from his debts, a classical Salome,
kneeling before a Christian Herod.

If she recoiled within when those worldly
lips consented, like a bee drunk on the pollen,
of his own power and pleasure.
She would be heroine, but not the poet
of her vocation, despite Corneille.

When she heard the sound of his return
in the hallway, she knew she had the cue
for her announcement. He would hurt
as a child is hurt. helpless and angry.
this man incapable of friendship except
with gamblers, natural philosophers,
priests and mathematicians.
was to lose his only close companion.

Later that night, hearing him cry,
She tried to comprehend
the mystery of sundered friendship.
and the gusts of grace on humans
gibbeted on the iron curse of sin.
She remembered he had
not touched his soup.

She knew she had to be where
she could not pick up a pen,
except in service of edifying prose.
Her freedom now, a pleasure no longer
but the Lord’s pleasure, His pleasure
denying pleasure as unpleasant necessity.

By her fasting
and her austerities
which caused her to
move stiffly.
Sometimes
slowing down
her energies
to a complete stop
to carry on
suddenly breathless
and pressured,
no longer so warm,
so self-assured.

She remembered that night in Clermont
an owl screeched in the woods,
long and low. From her window
she saw its plastic and measured flight
and drew breath at the stratagems
of the earth that breeds the owl
and breeds its victims.
at how His cruel will alone
can fix his love.
Can make and amend our end.
Tomorrow she told herself,
“I leave for Port Royal.”


Christmas ; Ten Triolets, A Carol, Two Hymns and A Chant
 

1.A fair, young girl
says a mother’s prayer
where fog and mists swirl.
A fair, young girl,
where snow and ice curl
for her child, thread-bare;
a fair young girl,
for her child, thread-bare.

2.He comes so still
into our split night,
The world waits to kill.
He comes so still,
our void to fill.
A child without might.
he comes so still
A child without might

3.Walking so slowly
you wouldn’t believe it,
to a place so lowly
Walking so slowly
a couple so holy.
We couldn’t receive it.
Walking so slowly,
we couldn’t receive it.

4.A maiden’s form
has been taken whole,
a face so warm,
a maiden’s form
creates the norm:
his saving role.
A maiden’s form
his saving role.

5.Helpless you come
to our cave of shame.
The earth is too dumb.
Helpless you come.
The earth is too numb
to grasp Your aim.
Helpless you come
to grasp Your aim.

6.Others will walk here,
even in the dark,
despite the chill of fear.
Others will walk here
to shed a tear,
to find His ark
Others will walk here,
to find His ark

7.What else can I do?
Now the skies have torn
and all is seen as true.
What else can I do?
but follow You
where love is born
What else can I do?
where love is born.

8.Your Word comes back.
to make the world its own
and find the hidden track.
Your Word comes back
to comfort our lack,
a promise we have known.
Your word comes back
a promise we have known.

9.No ecstasy of nature
brought such joy.
No clever culture,
no ecstasy of nature
no school of nuture
brought this sacred boy
No ecstasy of nature
brought this sacred boy.


10. He opens a door
on a mother and child.
As promised before,
He opens a door
to sunder the law,
though we are beguiled.
He opens a door,
though we are beguiled


Hymn

Father, I ask You
by all that is true,
that all may be one,
as I am your Son.

You are the heeded
you are the needed,
you are the jewel
in love’s well-wrought rule. (Chorus)

No love stronger,
no union greater,
than now to perish
my friends to cherish.

From this last border,
I send my order
to love as I love,
as love from above.

Do my will and know
that love’s light will grow.
I am your lover.
I am no other.

Show through your Spirit,
all shall inherit
all are invited
all are united.

For God loved the earth
so much it was worth
the loss of His Son,
so that all be one.

Now speak Christ’s power,
the fruit of His hour.
Love is the flower
that never tastes sour.

So the world may know,
You sent signs below,
as the Father sends me.
Those who taste will see

it is life they eat
new life for themselves,
as the grain of wheat
is where God indwells..

Carol

Christ-child, we welcome you to us.
We welcome you back to our homeless hearts.

Mother, we comfort your sorrow:
we comfort the sadness the old man foretold.

Christ-child we want you to smile now,
we want you to smile with your soft, tiny mouth.

Mother we ask you to hold him:
now you have swaddled his cold, naked form.

Christ-child we know you are fragile,
yet we know that the nebulas burn for you.

Mother we ask you to trust us
as God trusted you with this shelter of love.

Christ child we know you are speechless,
teach us your silence to hear your word.

Hymn

We sing out to you Lord,
in Spirit one,
for Christ within is word
Your Son, our host, our guest.

In Christ’s living water
we are made whole:
the soul’s fresh laughter,
our type, our seed, our breath.

We are Christ’s’ listeners,
whose speech builds our Church
and makes us his missioners,
his voice, his feet, his hands.

Christ is our holy one
whose call we hear today
in Him all fear is gone,
our hope, our creed, our passion.

Chant

Where the lustful pull down
the smoke from skies.

Pull down, pull down.

for prayer dies with them
in the field of beasts,

with them, with them.

God’s ecstasy endures
a triple nothingness.

endures, endures

In the voices’ hunger
for hatred and rage,

hunger, hunger

Make God your passion
and exile your heart:

passion, passion

and in the field of light.
make a true parish

of light, of light.


Equilux
 

1. Prevarications

Work still claims its appetite
to feed on self-esteem.
It throws us the cut of love
to chew on and exercise

canine salivation by wraith alone,
lest we relapse into active obesity.
I had cut the week, claiming
a skin infection, having lost,

as usual, to the Arts Council
muses, and flailed submissions.
The Apollonine patricians
plead simple boredom

to spend time in other people’s houses
and make a Duino out of sick-leave.
The lament this season
being the death of paternalism

with you, the new professional girl,
gullible to a father-figure.
You snap into regulation iceberg,
once the kissing ceases to be


less economic with reality
and offer lifts to the neighbours,
reading Einstein to fill time
in the Western corridor.

Heathrow fills with bric à brac
While from behind a facile
hoarding, a shy man
patrols with an armalite.

You are nervous at the check-in,
with staff on overtime,
checking to see if
I am in the blue book,

obsessed with bugging
and the odour of explosives.
An impatience creeps in
even among the waxworks.

We settle to watch
the business flyers
take their lounge.
The women shoulder

the awkward curve
that bottoms out
too slowly and hardens to
cellulite uncertainty.


The men handle
only the deals
that dreams
are paid on.

3. Flight

Cautious, out of town development
in Weybridge, or Staines
gives way to an Arctic wind, stumbling over
the South Downs, the houses like

rolling stock from a derailed goods train,
golf courses, sand- pocked and empty,
we ponder the unhappiness of the flesh,
its love affairs, its expensive cars,

its overdrafts and bitchings
too petty to remember,
too cruel to forget,
while we look down on ferry boats

like boxes making towards Havant,
and cloudbanks flocking the Channel
following on cold fronts
further up the shore.

Each cotton fluff glowing
white as burning wool
in the sun of equinox.
to insulate the Bay of Biscay
I listen to Callas, sleepwalking Bellini
while you flick through a glossy
that features “How pornography
saved my marriage.”

Then darkness fell
and our plane, toy-tiny
found a gap in the clouds
to land at Santiago.


4. Galicia

Between the pine-trees
and the hills,
the airport is empty,
growing dark.

Outside, Rosalia Castro’s
“imponente silencio”
is carried through
the stiffened glass.

It is all still here,
marble and gloss,
frozen into public serenity.
while stunted oak trees

gather on picture window
hillsides, like children for a fight,
We are almost alone
in a palace of arrival

and return with new fear,
waiting among polish
and disappoint
with suspect’s photographs

displayed like icons
to the saints of the ETA
who shot Blanco.
stricken in the ecstasy

of multiple identities.
We are checked off
and checked on
labelled for security and night.


6. Vuelo de noche

Under our feet now
a black sheet of sky.,
shields out,
torn and pocked
by village lights,
forest-fires and
the heart-beat
of navigation lights.
The chatter of the English
on tour, Beatrix Potter
in Spain, evangelising only
for animal liberation.
Suddenly,
we remember
we are going somewhere
to act out the husk
of togetherness
and want to pretend
we don’t pretend.

7.Seville.

Night holds hands
with shadows
in a garden
of engineered dreams.
Pavilions float
by the mud
that channels the mystery
of unforeseen sadness.
We wander past
the amorous young,
scattered with oranges
thick coats and darkness.

It is pre-carnival spring.
Cold, pure air processes
from the Guadalquivir,
as we circle
the Church’s territory,
Giralda and basilica,
bounded by Roman columns
and iron clamps and claims.

We eat in the arched
Mozarabic baths
among the people
of Bunuel,
grave bourgeois clans
in pleated skirts
and black trousers.
while the new girls
on “La Movida”
tinkle in denims
and donkey -jackets.
knock-kneed and elegant
outside the bars,
while the boys play
with their bikes and guitars.
The Socialist Monarchy
is in another retreat
as the hoardings shout.

8. Hotel

The English at breakfast,
prim, matronly hair
bobs in the uncertainty
of girls’ school accents
and what is Renaissance,
while bearded men, billow
pullovers and waistcoats.
The world blabs or blubbers
out of fading Evelyn Waugh
paperbacks, the conversation
a thin plasma of Players smoke
dares to ask for kippers
and reports the bomb-scare
in North London
to resume the sought-after
excuse of continental rest.

Acceptable topics,
the weather, where to eat,
whether the Spanish work,
the coach driver,
the nice young guide,
where the Spanish work.

Unacceptable topics,
Catholicism,
the Leeds’ couples
boring daughter
“They only brought her
along to help her out”
and the election.

9. Alcazar

In the Alcazar,
grotesqueries
of Bourbons,
pigeon-chested,
Poe-browed.
The drunken trees
lean against Arabic brick,
studded with thorns.

Inez is putting out
jamon, berengeras
con queso and I too,
praise love’s counterweight

in ham and aubergines
with cheese, should
fit Inez not stay here,
Baltasar del Alcazar

Not city, but a world,
a ship on the Atlantic,
crewed by Leonore , Susanna,
Carmen and Leonora.

escaping all the
blind seducers
the penis-hearted
stagey lovers.

Herrera’s Spain
is a rotten corpse
its fame is dwarfed
by real demons

the poets meet
to be led away
by the pulse
of soft hands.

10.Ecija

The towers blaze under a springtime sun
Sanchez de Badajoz in his madness
cannot feel the glare,
imagines Troy, Constantinople ,

Jerusalem, Baby lon,
do not burn as brightly
as his tear-stained heart.
Children are rehearsing

in a theatre that casts
its sound over me,
a real shadow on
my burning fear.


11.Cordova
The old city comes into view
across the river, ink
from Cedron, Tiber and the Euphrates,
poured on parchment.
We are turned alive
into the pages of vanished time.

Leila, Ruth, Beatrice
each hands the book to the other,
until it crosses the river,
a chrism, poured out on their mingled tresses.
Islands and weirs under a spring sun,
corded together with thick gravid waters,
It has gathered the antonymic Roman arch
and the Gongora monument,

Dumash, friend of Sa’adia Gaon
and Hasdai ibn Shaprut,
who speak only the pure language of God,
coax the words which
are literal about our love
into the shafts of sunlight.
Yet the Karaites,
forcing the day to walk
between silence and shadow,
covered with leather and
snapping shutters,
push us apart and bid us not to sleep,
for it is time to enjoy good wine,
while the taste of myrrh, aloes,
pomegranates, dates and grapes
lingers with the fragrance,
of lilies and henna.

Come into this garden now.
Our hearts are finished with pain
The catches the gentle meniscus
with its restless fire.
All is at peace now,
here in the last
unprinted chapter of the guidebook.
Here in the unseeable
jewel-house in the primal monument
You and I will cross floors of marble
that glisten like slate in unending rain.
We will walk down corridors
which look out on
doves resting in palm trees
It will be peaceful
under this brilliant sun
and my hand speaks its homage
to the nakedness of your heart.
We will close mahogany doors
on the galleries of our lost friends.

12.The Roman arch

Cordova brought me,
Nero took me
Lucan’s father in law
still sings the plain song
that wrestles the snakes
of death and feasting.
The mosque

Two enigmas
the darkness cannot solve
and morning light
unpuzzles, you and me.

The blood we
shed when
shielding a wound
is best unspent.

Death has its
open wound
more routinely
incurable.

13. The Cathedral

Towers and high walls
of history and rule,
of cunning and rudeness,
the great river flows on.

It is a master of fine sands,
even though it gives
no gift of gold.
The hill rises steeply,

the plains green with crops
It is heaven and sunlight shines
on the landscape
of Gongora’s, which
summons up past power
and the written word

Did he forget the ruins
the rivers Genil and Dauro
irrigate and cool
did he ever see these walls,

these towers and
these rivers again
Your hills and plain.
Your land, your Spain
and yet whose flower?

14.The Synagogue

The place is your wearied girl
with its shattered walls
mere mosaic, a broken rose

I think of
a saddened heart
and walk out
with these walls
my body now.


15.Passing a Carnival, Carmona.

The girls poised
before the church,
their bronze limbs
already a wonder of love.

Their languorous backs
and wired wings
open up their sex
like ripe chrysalises.

They look at you
without shame,
or love, as gentle
as a guitar that

scatters a tremolo,
a toque in their smooth
breasts and soothes
with unknown peace.

They are infants
of love’s hunger
who cry, uncertain,
unseen, in the arms

of a chance future.
They are the
theory of life
and you, male dunce

for once
its smiling,
tolerated
proof.


16.Return

The taxi on the A4 Highway
is a spectre of the night,
looking for its grave
with only its skull to lose.

You kiss your teeth
at the cheap hotel’s
unnecessary bill.
I turn from holiday

omnivorousness
back to the bloodthirst
of work and the darkness.
The light is equal between us.

It makes you beautiful.
While I grow heavy
with the sadness of poets
you have no time for.

Night has changed
places with day
in the almanac
that is the history

of our love. Time’s kiss
is the only one left
I’m sure of
and so it goes on

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 14.11.2010

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