Rites of Tenure
Poems 1965-7

1

The Walk
Their footsteps stir the ashen path.
The children walk along the avenues
and across the brooding quietness of the lawns.
Tired and confused, they slowly wander.
Their bored faces bathed in the sunlight
make all seem enclosed in a still edge of torpor.
Their voices disturb the emptiness of the park,
jarring the muteness of sculptured temples.
Their faces are speckled by flickering tesserae,
fired out of shadows from untrusting trees
against the bare, white sky. In the clear water
myriads of fishes sparkle, their traces dying and rising
but the water breaks; a splash! As they flick pebbles
at the stream and watch the fishes flit away.
The children seem entranced, as if
the pines told a mystery and left them troubled.
Then someone jeers (now what has hurt them?)
Some are silent and apart. A stillness has fallen
round the edges of the pool.
They stop to question its surface.
Against a cold edge of stone, a thousand bodies
of sticklebacks worn to death.
Their minute, twisted eyes stare into the grey void.


Four Stills from the History of Michael

1.
He sits there, a stop watch in his hands,
It could be anything
to his eyes,
where categories were never born.
He doesn’t care, yet flinches now and then
to dent its glinting, metal covers
Unnoticed,
he will destroy it piece by piece.

This, apart from tantrums,
will be all
his achievements for to-day.

And all is paralysis.
the granite born along
by glaciers,
until abandoned
by matronal ice.
He is deposited,
a foundling stone.
He sits there alone.

2.
In his body’s bastion,
a child has burnt himself
to empty skin.
Only a withered carapace is left,
a house of charred, dangling nerves.
What did the walls guard against?
Each crack is plastered up,
each fracture stuffed
with rotten matter.
The random light’s least,
grasping entry is anathema.
The adversary never came.
His still centre fears nothing
serves no-one.
There is nothing now,
behind the barriers.
Once he spoke to himself
in a mirror,
seeing the only image
he could admit.
He has sat too long
in his body’s bastion.

3.
The estate is anxious,
though poisoned,
it possesses life.
A seasonal scrub twitches
a living on its arbitrary surface.
Here, a stunted tree,
and again dry grass in dry canals,
which has twisted its tongue
to lick sporadic moisture
from the dust.

Yet the bedrock is disruptive.
Something restless,
nurses fire
to mark a death,
to keep a clutch on life.

Once he shouted “No”
and stamped his feet
and a brief shower of rain fell
as if he had made it so.
He sits in his body’s rust.
The estate is anxious.

4.
A child’s eye cannot trust.
has not learned to fear,
is seared by too vivid light.
Love burns the retinal edge.
The vibratile sphere
is shaded by penumbras,
which fear alone can cast.
He sits alone, a fearless quarry
and waits in an estate
of dry canals.
and slowly, slowly
the metallic hours
are shredded in his hands.
Before love’s light,
a child’s eye, paralysis.

Girl with a Recorder

Never the same as the others,
never keeping up,
she was merely herself alone.
Her teachers, parents, and the others
were liberally proud
that they had placed her
among her friends, her age group.

The little ones
gave a scant, urbane concern
for their stranger.
On tactical occasions,
some of them would use her
to underline
the differences, the strangeness
they had begun to realise
they envied.

Later,
it was not he same.
they did not wish to nudge
quiescent fears
and then the years threw them apart

Contained in offices, trains, marriages
they all searched for her,
found nothing,
save recurring anxieties
and images
of a limping head
playing her recorder
down all the lanes of caring,
homeward with the dying sky.


Occupiers
i.m. Dasie Ashcroft

Frozen morning;
I start to cross
the snow-thick common
with a message for
the people in the house.
The land’s face is chilled
by the thrall of the solstice
and will not relax.
Will anything move
in this soundless space?
Whatever might speak
will not do so.
I go on, treading stiff turf,
my footsteps sounding
in a shuttered world
where all is dumb
save the wind’s cut tongue
rasping in a mute mouth.
Such are the external actions
of a temporary worker
in a pre-college year.

Yet here I am,
occupying a role
I cannot grasp.
Behind me in bracken,
a brown bird stirs
exploding clouds
of powdered snow
from dead willow-herb.
Whom does it snoop for?
What scripts its flight
from these thick curtains
of sleeping, silent white?
Old houses brood
on fictional realities.
Stories told by children
haunt them in old age,
an Ethel Monticute
rears at the window,
“Her fair hair done on top
and lilac eyes.”

Have I blundered into
sheeted props
that lie unused,
their true aims masked?
An early bird
flits from a wall
to the park gates.
You, a witness
come to seek proof?
Mr Salteena,
“rather bent in the middle
but with nice, long legs.”
Well here I am,
which character am I?
or you. I have a tongue
but no part to say.
I cannot scan your
quiet line.

Come to the Edwardian lodge
I walk through
two ruined gate posts,
while birds of prey
perch under old roofs.
Do they dream of swallows
now nightingales?
This house seems cursed.
Yet I do not belong
to any history.
No small portion
flows in my veins.
Lord Clincham’s garden
lies in ruins.
Obliterated,
all has been annulled.
Winter’s white teeth
have scavenged
the sun’s carrion.
It has broken
the fountain’s rim
and has sunk the pool
deep in the mud.
Still sounds seep
through the crumbled
yellow walls and tendrils
from a ruined willow
are matted with dead
convolvulus covering
a window’s silted eye.

I walk where tawny owls
sleep under old roofs.
Burnt out, the summer house
has been abolished.
Its wooden slats
are chipped and broken.
The snow’s peacock eyes
stare sullenly through the spaces
to the window.
The air-frost broods
for the bulbs
of the bluebells.
The old king is dead.
(wearing a small and costly crown
and the queen not up to much.)
I see a bird of prey soar
above the garden wall.
Imagined fauna,
nightingale and swallow,
they guard the ruined willow.
Do you hold them, Terue
in your gamekeeper’s
gloved hands ?
Is this Ethel’s luggage?

I knock at the white double-door,
not knowing the events
I will intiate.
The sound echoes harshly
in the porch.
Two women have come
into the dawn.
My swallow and nightingale
you have them in your hand.
Together they appeal
by the door.
the first, who opens it,
does not speak.
Miss Minnit.
the other does not fear.
Viewed by the dumb bird
the swallow talks softly;
“Not a gentleman,
but it does not matter.”
They do not become you, Tereu,
the grief shall be ended,
no thief of life.
“Part of him bounces about
in hollow kettles.
part hisses on spits.
The parlour runs down with gore.”

Am I the final person
come to quieten the alarms?
I say my lines.
a more gullible Fortinbras,
deliver my
quotidian enquiries
and depart ,
gathering remaining proerties,
broken on my heels. “Blushing dark red
a Bernard Clark
in a bowler hat.
All is terminated.
I leave the women
standing on the edge of dawn
and turn back towards the common.
The wind is warmer now
and the soil slinks
in slushy pools.
High above the house
my sparrow hawk still hovers,
Tereu! Have you come to haunt
this closed up theatre
whose props are revealed
under melting moiré?
My nightingale scuds
beneath the willowherb.
The hawk did not have to come.
Chattering birds renew
their calls from far and wide
that the day’s only visiter
should fail to release
these captive hearts.
The afternoon’s tapestry is woven;
Spring will come and go
like an old school exercise book
become too impersonal out of maturity
to be worth possession.


Women Playing

Nothing seemed suspect,
neither the blaze of embankment elms
nor silver-brown chatter of river-light
gave evidence for concern.

Except the day,
poking a face in spite and whimsy
through the clouds like a forgotten god.

A bonfire burned excesses
of late suburban foliage.
The smoke trailed upwards
sole sacrament of a casual Cain.

My train passed two women, playing tennis,
unaware of public eyes,
their unsuspecting moments a kind of privilege
to my transported sight.

They faced each other
matched minds and muscles,
playing gently where the wind cannot surge,
where the sun wakes livening the eye

and seemed to roll towards them,
suspended in a timeless vacuole of seeing.
Woman to woman, caught like black-shadow birds,
twirling alone in astonished space.
ssession.

In the Snow, Man and Woman.

to Susan Berry

By the black silence
of the beech tree,
they stood alone,
in the snow-held light.

She was talking
and the man
seemed to know her
utterly.

Each muscle and hope
he observed;
her auburn hair,
lighter than the tree,

dark with the contrast
of the close, red sun.
He could not understand
this warmth; tried to speak.

He could trust the raw pain
of her kisses, as if lost in him,
but lost to himself,
he could not find her,

could not burn passion
into words.
In the logic of their silences,
they parted.


Pitysae


Xa Atalaissa

A black cloud gathered
over the bay’s green mountain.
Hannibal’s island lay still
in the blind current of the waves.

Here Semitic schemes were forged
and blood flowed downwards
in silent tresses
through seas of shattered speech.

Invaders came from this gentle land,
a little boy limping with his father’s sword.
Then came the painted boats on the tide
and the blood ran from women and men,
seeped downwards into an island womb.

Still the blood seeps,
sown into the land,
though banners decay
and marchers’ footfall fades.
This island’s soft, vernal eye
did not see the shadows
of Nazi bayonets
against Piraean walls.

Nor did the sea tranced olive trees
hear the shooting on the hills.
as dutiful hate swept and reswept
these burning rocks;
only felt the undertow,
the vicious pull and return

of waves ungentle in their depths
and stones of men resentful
of their hidden death.
The heart of the land endures,
the women in the full gold glare
of summer’s passion,
cooling to blackened age
in the waste.


Portinatx

Why does the sun not fall down from the sky?
The white sands burn
their useless anger into night.
Why does the sun not fall?
become neurotic,
be riddled with the liberal doubt
on its authority to shine?

And the yet the weak came through the storm
to the magician’s island:
Elissa who beguiled the founder of power;
Helen, a convict of her myth,
Miranda, reverent before the form of man
and Paul, a prisoner of the Word.

The women are standing
naked in the sun, onestripped,
guilty, onebare, voluptuous,
another unclothed, true,
and remain like rocks
on the night time beach,
to hear the sands whisper
against consoling wind

and crushing all finality,
the sea’s slow thunder breaks
until the sun fail:
conscience, passion, truth
each cuts an invisible creek
that God’s silence has hidden
among the stars and sand.


Las Salinas

A fluttering ghost,
the wing’s white shock of guilt
cracks open the framing dark.

Night’s eye is burning
behind the forehead of the trees.

The moon has split its skull,
a flame across the salt lakes,
which glisten like children’s voices,
fading into futures.


Las Virgen De Las Nievas

Each day you leave
your parents' farm
as dawn catches fire.

Black - shawled women
enter the shadowed church
from shore-lined cottages.

You ride past them
with sparkling wheels
spinning on the sand.

You turn your eyes away
from the white-washed
graveyard on the hill.

Your tight shorts submit
unclad legs, an exposed freedom,
to the snow-ghosts on high.


Es Vedra.

Rigid in flint psychosis,
the numb eye of rock
stares out in random blindness
at the sky's pale nakedness of blue,
dying to far wisps of meridian white.

The still, warm air
observes the magma's
burnt out silence,
sustains the tawny rubble of the shore,
concealing within mists
the grey fist of mountain.

Vast with rupture ,
it threatens with featureless hate.
Frail, upon the shore, we stand alone,
treading the igneous armour beneath the surf
the bone rock of forgotten ancestry.

And savage with thrusting force,
the gannets' screeching verticils
invade the timid balance of the mind,
a manic sybil echoing to other shores of madness


Things of Ignorance
 


To Those Who Live After Us

(Francois Montcorbier to Posterity)

God has the crudest wit.
The armourer’s maid
has gone after that priest
while I roll in the gutter
and smell of my sweat.

I do not like her man.
He has a big, ugly face.
A dying heifer could improve
the grit of his accent.

His hands were made to till soil
You’d better not come near me.
Monseigneur, or I’ll put you in
the only trough you could not
be called upon to grovel in.


Christmas 1968.


At Middlesbrough

Middlesbrough was always wet and February.
You got soaked when you had to cross
the puddle eyed, asphalt playground
to the Junior latrines, out of bounds to me;
and the teacher never thought I’d dare.

Yet it was worth it, making a call
just after playtime was best of all.
To be on your own in a place
where bigger boys made me fall.

Once I ran there to find the bullies
had truanted too. I felt their fists
but blurted out I was seven please
and they were generous for once.
over exact and tribal differences.

As they trooped out seditiously;
the moment thrilled me; those years
were mine; no-one else could be me.
I never lived myself like that again;
the fact remembered, but the joy unfelt.


The Duck’s Egg

The mallard’s were nesting under
the willow trees that year.
They could see them as the summer sun
shone on the embankment stream.

They could see the duck’s eggs
over the steel-grey rails.
One day they climbed over
the bridge of red bricks,
the victors, with their sandals
soused in the squelching reeds.

They were the centre of a universe
that year and its life, their plunder
its mystery, their quest.

The eggs were warm
against their thighs,
as they lied to the railway guard
and ran off down the road.

He read in his books
about the planet called life,
suspended in a sea of white,
punctured its ends
with a pin of grey steel
and blew the wet innards
out of its marble belly.

The yolk dried up
under the sun.
He never told them
the smooth egg
became a skeleton,
crushed to nothingness,
despite his care.

Palmarsh

Here I knew the house was living.
Here I could stand on roofs of sight,
holding ungrown hands to the sky.
Now each day a gentle donkey
came down the path beside the house.
As if to bear the sun from faraway hills
a lamp for the sea between his ears.

The magpies conspired above the snows
and down the path to the sea
the sun’s pointed rays lit up
my way to the waves.
Gunshots from the firing ranges
did not trouble my sheltered games.
I had no need for further rules
as we played in our boundaried world

No, we did not walk past those stones;
my father, my brother and I,
did not touch on the point of bullets,
had not heard of sea defences
to shore up against a seeping doubt.

We practiced our writing,
when the cold froze the garden.
We stood on the table by the wireless
making empty speeches.
Then faceless voices brought
grey men out of the snow
who carried toy tanks
through doorways of pain’

A people from an unknown country
were sitting still in their history.
And we followed the sun no more
towards the sands, the sound of gunshot
between the houses and the sea.


The Lake

Rinsed with the soft
attentions of the midday sun,
the wood absorbed our trudge
on brown, dull bracken
and the breath of torpor
as we walked.

We could not find the lake
and were climbing trees,
but could not penetrate
the gathering dark of the tops

Suddenly one of us
took a strange path
and the lake lay before us,
stumbled upon, unplanned.

Trying to steal a part of never,
is part of never finding it again.

The Children’s Crusade

There were no soldier ghosts to rise within
that hall, so safe in anti-academic mouths;
no visions of De Toqueville, Camus or Koestler.
No doubt, the books and the ideals nestled
on shelves, in minds, in other worlds of care,
though speeches continued and postures sprawled;
we couldn’t mention Dubcek as the CP had the vote.

It was a sudden midnight whim.
After the tedium of card vote debate
none wished to return to bare hostel rooms.
We were too many blokes, but with beer enough.
Not knowing the way, Barney, at the wheel,
did his lurching turn at the roundabout,
leaving the sterile white wonder of halls
far behind us in the night, heading first
for the bleakness of the moors , then
someone decided for the sea.

The beach was black and cold, a bare expanse
of mud and protoplasm, rancid with weed.
On the sea front hotels were silently
hidden in the albumen of neon lights.
It ran to blurs and unseen Irish waves.
A jetty sank down to estuary flats,
brooded on by rotten, wind-swept shelters
We stood there feeling perspicuous, joking.
There was no further we could go

The cry was heard against the charred sky-line
Someone had slipped. All I could remember
was the sudden sight, a girl spread-eagled
in the mud. It was the merest fall,
but no-one wanted to touch her,
no-one wanted the contagion
of her mud on the few clothes
they had brought with them.
From head to foot she was black
with stinking sand and oil. She went
from one to the other in her sodden dress.
Feeling wooden, I never knew how
she cleaned herself up, how love ever thrived.


Diaphany

The sun’s fire flashes
from the crow’s trailing wing,
dragging in the surf
of April soils,
raked to ochre distances.

The larches rush down
to the river,
where grey pelts of cloud
collect a burning wall,
split by far, blue fissures.

We have such unsure grasp
and only breathed immanence
holds these houses together.
A bough, like a gibbet,
suspends His pain
to the witnessing estate,
which fades to the sound
of musty trumpets,
battered by the crowd
and the flight
from the curse, our decay.


Epiclesis

Scorch, black ripper wind,
scorch the exiled rock
beneath the gentle
fraud of the snowdrifts
and fill the chatter
of the spaces with
a psychopath’s howl
of frenzied fearing.

Our world’s flesh is scarred,
pitted with conflict.
the tendon’s failure
breaks the personal
flame to sinking dust.
The eyes, the eyes’ fire
fails against memory’s
curse of dying strength.

As deep as God’s skull
lies the strangled warmth
in the heart of cities.
Within, the silence
of torpid corridors
and the warm air
crush release.

My clouds are poor,
yet witness hope,
like hunched prisoners.
whose houses invite their ghosts,
exciting tremors,
a soliciting of the moon.
Take flight, bird of wonder
the white brush of wings
takes flight, strikes
the palpitating air.

Take flight to the frames
The timbers of my house
stand on guilty foundations
No window’s light falls
without the form
of broken selves,
ambivalent cross,
the ironc flesh
spreads out a shadow
on the sounding floor.

At Mattishall

The sun burns slowly through husks of cloud
dispersing night as tide thins eel-mud in tributary channels
before the wash of light delineating cirrhus heights
skinned with high flames of dawn.

The ground lies unused. The still soil broken
by clusters of dock-weed and scrub. A line of elms
ends before my window at the shadow of a brick-pile,
unused and still on the building-site next door.

A shrike flits from a bough with a grimy slug.
The house was once an inn for pilgrims and revellers.
fearing Tudor wealth and the power of the witch.
From this window the road leads to Walsingham.

They concern me now, the dead, in tapestry
of story from which the red bird flew.
Within the house a girl and her mother sleep.
Their guest, I stay here, a defender of the moment

The sure sun trumpets at last from the clouds
to stir the stream of day. Brief light
is for huntsmen or recusants already gone.
While sparrows chatter on the soft edge of a breeze.

Think well of those who stayed here.
Sleepers, watchers and travellers,
guarding their fears before going on
to seek indulgences and cross wide estuaries.


Dystopia
1.
In a disenchanted hour,
I saw myself in waters of stillness
and saw that I was dead.

They will never understand.

They had woken me during the night
coming with cries of hysteria,
walking like rag-cloth dolls,
the ghosts of suicides.
I could not hear what their voices said.
They had gone by morning,
had left the roads and the gardens desolate.
There were no candles to snuff,
no lights to turn off.
and the rain sank down
by the sodden pink of the roses
creeping by the window latch.

They will never understand.

My family’s piano is silent
and the sunlit dust
settles invisibly on the floor.

The words are debased,
mere sounds through the dead air.
The old assurances are effete.
Others live here now.
They will never learn.
2.
In the burnt season,
I dreamt a landscape of rain.
there a ravaged garden
of eucalyptus, acanthus
and giant ferns lay
bloated and tangled.
It was an acidic dawn,
its atmosphere coloured
with bitter hues.
The innocent had taken
to the predatory life
while those who knew
they murdered hid
in the shade of the bushes.


Warmetod

The gigacenturies stretch out their
boredom to chiliastic bathos.
Glowing clouds of gas and stars
collide, crack and mourn
the solar system’s plasmic hyperdeath.

Here the undertow of consciousness
evades its progeny. Chronos vainly
reaches for the Alka-Seltzer
(He suffers from earthquakes now and then)
and ice packs uncover Islington
that aged women might die there.

Tethys has come up in the world
that Hilary and Tensing should approach.
ours was an undistinguished birth
until we tired of stone,
no lasting membrane of creation.

We, the most absurd of pilgrims
coming from a frozen millennium
and travelling to ecocide,
seeking directions from bored,
urbane abstractions, the good,
perfection, wickedness or mind,
seated on immortal, academic lawns
in absolute, immutable deckchairs.

The angles have tired of the Judgement
They read over the lists and slouch,
exhausted on the bronze-bound tomes.
The rusting trumpets are stacked
against the earth’s corners.
Putti play dice and conduct
the visitors from Limbo
round the full eschatologies.

Metaphysical travellers
on a brief escape from being,
discrete, we hold our breath
to check for an ulcer in the Milky Way
white barium stretching
in a stomach of silences


In Kew Gardens.

The dark, red light
of the holm-oak's shade
gives pity to the shoots beneath.

They do not know
of leaves that mitigate
the summer's scorching rays.

My delight is that, speechless,
I should mirror to the silences
the syntax of my seeing.

My being here transmuted
by the limits of saying,
to a pantomime

of impossible hope.
The magic lantern shines
images of fulfillment

to the eyes of childhood
within the wood of logic.


15/4/71


Motets


Motets

1.
If only this living could become
something realer;
like sudden fires of change,
or shouted anger in the streets;
this tearing and stretching
on the tendons of feeling
without the flex of response;
the search behind tired, bored smiles
for a movement,
not like the dead wing-beat
of our birds, travelling the mapped-out line,
rooted in the rock-cloud’s law.

More a communing
to touch the flesh-shrug of newness,
seeing the stair turn,
or the window’s light
as growth in plant strands
of the mind’s awakening.

or the book floating somewhere
at the edge of vision.

2.
I see myself reflected
in the great night beyond my window.

All is dark and the sound
of falling rain is filling the silence.
Somewhere a girl is singing,
soft sounds vibrating
through her body
become this building.

No.
Now she has stopped
and the rain is alone in its patter.

I cannot enter
the darkness of others thoughts.
cannot trust the imagined motive,
or think in harmony
with presumed desires.

I am alone without calculation
before the night. 


3.
I do not know.
I drift.
Yes, pretend the pattern works,
yet lack the sense of trying;
the skill of trust.

I would waste,
rather than give in
to mediocrity,
or the darkness
without the toys
of sureness by me.

A thrush peers forward
from an unsure bough.
I would leave
the white walls
of this house.
I stay behind,
yet not for lack of a road.


4.
I fill your ash-tray
with the burnt ends
of my cigarettes
and your mind
with the stubbed ends
of my words.
The tray can be
cleaned; no ash remaining,
but my words,
where are they now?
Down in the darkness perhaps,
but not lost.
Even though I might
be lost with my ashes
in the chaos of our
random access world.

5. Four Thirty, The Silence.

The children’s voices sear the ground,
splinter with shard iron.
The house my eyes are building
out of the silence

My times are empty
and the spaces
are in flight
from the brutal flame
that grows,
a sapling curiosity
rising from your curving eye.

6.
(To Renata Stombrowska)

The room grows smaller
and the light burns perspicuously.

I imagine this is the last,
fear-stricken outpost
against the insurrection
of the night.

Here we seem to rock
in the cradle of our loneliness,
not knowing our end,
we try to share our joys

and find
the things of ignorance intrude
and love, are you not our light?
If the tungsten element
cannot bear it,
so much less our flesh.


7.
In a room
a poem
is quietly
reading itself.

In a room
a poem
is scooping out
the space from a box

on which it rests
signifying an intention
which can never be understood.

perhaps the box
is emptier than before.
In a poem
the box breathes its last
to a stupefied room.

8.
Consider this sphere.
No matter the inexhaustible silence.

No matter,
the black cells of conscience creep,
like a great steel angel’s tread,
pushing deep at the air.
which buries me.
The law of its beak scars the sky.
and pylons, ganglions
from Tycho Brahe’ s machine
have snared the houses,
have cut deep
the clay air I breathe.

9.
Study in Mid Life.

Hair dark, hemmed in,
swept back by absolutist combs
against Capability’s saws.
Flesh, Meissen,
certifying isolation
against Wedgewood’s advice.
Words, an autocrat’s repertoire,
against Dr Johnson’s definitions.
Smiles,
those of a poor clown
against Grimaldi’s tips.
Skin,
shadows painted out
with Sistine, Papal care,
against Reynold’s adages.
Eyes, full of rage,
dark and silent,
with Blake’s consent.

10.
Girl with a puzzle

She sits detached
from a circle of friends.
Unfinished sketches
of afternoon light
feature the crumpled coat
she wears.

To direct a troubled brow
at this unassertive toy
compasses her world,
struggling to set a silver bead
in a plastic mandala;

to set a stubborn self
on dry land,
from a sea of rival certainties.


11.
She wore a ring indicating nothing.
It sparkled in the sunlight,
blue for her depthless heart
and surrounded with white pearls,
like crowding worshippers.
One of them has been dislodged
Is it wise to join their religion?


12.
Summer Bonfire

Affective shore,
breathe your primal air of life.
The order of the flesh
acknowledges these lines of origin;
sun of the waves,
surge your spitting points of fire.
People, dogs and voices
burn upon the air.
Night falls among the pines.
The burrows grow dark.
Warm mists procreate their screens
before dull shadows of granite
on the glistening wetness of the sands;
a russet flame caught
in the dry fern’s verve.


13.

The Auburn Days.

The grey clouds haunt
the myth of the loved one.
At times the sun
has shone in fullness
on the land of our hopes,
has plucked threads of light
from our spaces.

But the clouds still haunt.
the great clouds hide
the coming days.
When will the rain
fill our lake of cracking earth?
and the fires of release bring laughter
to the swirl of events
that buries our breath
in man-made mountains
of seeping fear.

The flight of the auburn-haired girl
is hidden from the watch of day,
yet the night might whisper its joy
and we wait in unsure expectation
of the falcon’s stirring cry,
revealing the dawn
above the crowding firs.

14.
Enueg

Desireless. I feel the loss
of the mud-swamped grasses,
glutted with sustenance; no growth
can sprout from excess.
And so no cutting wind
can bring fresh insight
to the fading irony
of being two.
as we stand together
on a mapped, unnoticed hill.
The eye is sated
from a midden of seeing
and the living flood
ungently carries uprooted failure
to the time of drowning.

15.
The winter light picks out,
the cold serenity, reserved and silent
of the withered grass.

And how gently the beeches raise
bare arms to the sun returning.

The light is sparse
and lies as dormant as the shoots,
hiding in last summer’s
charred growth.

We walk across the mud,
as starlings fly
behind the columns of the larches
and into the dawn’s unknowable fire.

It is another you live for.
A flock of redwing
fly upwards from the copse
and you gaze in wonder on the dawning love,
yet turn away, not hearing the muted horn,
the first brief thunder
of the spring’s life conflagration.


16.

Back, hold now back
your troubled rush.
Here the soft eyes
are timid, dark
and as fresh, the round,
frost whiteness
of her rich limbs
to compare.

But this is no
sure growth.
Impatiently
your spring has struck
the frozen ground.
The frightened shoots
fear and wildly fly
the sun’s rage
of water, melting ice
and flooding fear.

Relinquish then,
the unwise flame
and let her go.
Her you have invaded
and her scared heart
is grown ungentle
in your shadow.
This pressing dawn,
the insight goaded.

17.
And yet again the sun has come,
has come to warm
this loving eye of life,
the spinning ball of nature’s other face.
The seed has died.
The rains have wept
into the soil
And here where once
the earth lay still,
wrapped in the blindness
of cold tarpaulin,
everywhere the leaves
show venerance.
life hurtled, sun humbled
and the years of summer
dance onwards
into the dying nebulas of freedom.
18.
How I love your blazing pride
the white-heat shimmer
of a mind gone searching
for the world’s fullest day.

The unbalanced cry in your eyes
is a blast of passion,
making a strength within me, which I cannot mask,
nor dare retreat to shadows
to the dead crevasses of silence,
or vestigial smiles.

And I would know the universe
you come to tell me of.
the rush of voices like the storm
implodes my spirit’s vacuole.


19.Vacuum
20/10/72

There is no air.
I breathe my silences,
Here there is no pressure;
nothing intrudes.
The heavy I oppresses me.
All is dry;
the fluid in the nerve
has died.
I touch my nothingness.
All is dead
in a random access world.
The molecules cannot touch
across the distances.
I confront a certainty of one.

Light one;
you are heavy.
Approaching one,
you part the fusion
of my world
Burning one,
you split my elements.
The opposites fly
within me.

And yet
a drop condenses
on the glass.
Will it ,
shivering,
stay?

20. 17/10/72
I Fear You

I fear you,
I hate you,
Dry sun of flesh.
My mouth
is dry hatred,
as I bite,
lick,
draw blood
to inundate
my sterile ponds.
I fear you.

I hate you,
tactile probers,
my hands
investigate
your body's town’
like an assault force,
occupying.
Sunsurge
that thunders
from reservoirs
of brain-blood,
I hate you.

I fear you,
fear the crab of fire
that crawls
across the dual beaches
of your skin,
fear the torrent of hair
you give me.
The fire,
fierce lips of rain.
The fire,
death in the unwritten bone.
The fire.

Drowning,
I pull at these roots
for air.
I fear you.
The smell
from your hair is of rain.
It burns to woodsmoke.
I hate you,
hate your aloneself.

Angry with tears,
twin planets.
storm-hidden,
I hate you.
The fire,
I love you
aloneself,
I fear you.

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 13.11.2010

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Widmung:
To Chris Villars