Saigon Boulevard
Saigon in the summer of 1965,
Our ship, the Vietnam,
On her last voyage up-river before the war closed in
Docked on a colonial waterfront
Crowded with Jeeps and military equipment.
The Americans, it was said,
Were paying a year's wages a month
To anyone speaking English.
The ship sailed that night.
Hustling up into town
Looking for the work contact,
We found the address in a tropical downpour,
The door open,
Walking unannounced
Into a room full of money,
Ten or fifteen tables, stacked with bank notes,
A fan turning in the ceiling,
Alarmed Vietnamese office workers,
And a white man, shouting,
With a gun in his hand.
Along the street
He came panting after us
Full of apologies, assurances,
Desperate for staff, anyone,
We were hired.
Saigon Boulevard
In diaphanous light
The pavement steaming
Pink stucco peeling from the walls
The balcony ironwork
Warm with rust
A long straight road
Down to the darkness of the river.
That summer we were both in free-fall.
I had no money
My friend was on the run from the Draft
We were circling the flames of a war zone
In Hawaiian shirts and beach sandals.
There are times
When to be present
Is to walk in the past,
Slightly out of focus in old footage,
The Jeep making a U turn in the street,
Conscripts in olive drab battle fatigues
Queuing with obsolete weapons
To climb into vintage trucks
And two figures
Quite out of place,
On the way from California to India.
He came running through the traffic at us
From the transports on the other side of the road
Yelling my friend's name,
Grabbed his shirt in both hands
And pushed him backwards hard with his fists
Furiously angry.
He's maybe twenty pounds lighter
But he's shoving at him
As if he would force him
Through the wall of the nightmare
Back onto some beach they both knew
In Santa Barbara or Monterey.
They trade explanations.
He's pouring out
A tirade of cliches:
"WE'RE DYING, MAN!" and "HELL"
And "GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE, MAN!"
Dialogue from a bad movie,
And it's embarrassing,
Like someone screaming the details
Of their terminal illness in your face,
His repellent angular head jerking,
And suddenly....
The grenade blast,
The shrapnel embedded in the wall
The pigeons scattering in panic
While you look in amazement
At the blood pumping out
At your stupidity
And the soldier
Climbing into the truck across the road
Not looking back.
I don't think we discussed it.
The ship dropped down river
Sometime after midnight,
In complete darkness,
No lights on the banks,
Into the skirts of Typhoon Rose
The kind of seas
That seem to lift you off your feet on the crests
And crush you into the deck in the troughs
The whole vessel shuddering and rattling.
May 2012
Note: Typhoon Rose is in the meteorological records for the first week
in September 1965.
Excerpt from an American soldier's war diary dated September 3rd:
"Early today a grenade was tossed into an Ordinance Repair Shop right
smack in the middle of Saigon near the Rex, wounding one GI. Then the
one tossed on our roof tonight, wounding none but scaring 10......Harry
says he is ready to go either back to the field or go home- Saigon bothers
him. He says if the VC don't get you with a grenade, the taxis will get you
while you're crossing a street!"
This poem is for Ray, who chose not to fight but was afraid of nothing.
Chance and Necessity
World without purpose
Cascade of outcomes
Unpredictable, flowing
Not from intelligence
But towards it. Intelligence itself
A confluence of chance.
This world,
The friction between chance and necessity
Igniting a fire
That burns its own ashes,
The atmosphere that sustains life
Is the debris of living processes,
Flame feeding flame,
The bee, its eye and neural networks
Shaping the colours and scents of plants,
This world, this garden of contingency
Reaching its fruit into our hands.
May 2012
In the Valley of the Moon
The moon
Was filling the whole wooded valley,
Nearly touching both sides,
In the heat of the day.
It was so big
It took half an hour
To walk through the forest beneath it
To the lowest part of the sphere
Just above the trees.
It cast no shadow
And seemed to be shining with a warm light
Absorbed from the sun.
The air was bright under it
And the birds were singing.
I climbed up to the treeline
Level with its equator
And came out into real sunlight,
The great curvature of its side
So close
I was able to hit it with a stone
Raising a puff of dust
That settled slowly back to the lunar surface,
While the stone fell down to earth,
And when I picked it up
It had become almost weightless
And blew off my hand in the wind.
By the time I reached the ridge
The sun had set
And I took shelter among the rocks.
I awoke to a roaring sound.
The moon was rising
And a huge volume of displaced air
Was pouring back into the valley
Tearing at the trees,
Vortices of leaves and debris
Twisting uphill towards me
And I crouched with my back to them
As they came showering past.
Then, quite suddenly,
It went very quiet
And the moon was low in the sky
Already distant
Moving away over the far hills.
April 2012
A Way Still Open
The compass spins
And all directions are a return.
From up here the full extent of the isle is visible,
The old rock-falls, the angles,
The steep blue air,
The vine slopes
And wooded gorges,
And you can see
That to embark on life
Is to build a road into the past.
Time
The thread of time
Running through my hand
The bull, roaring from below,
Even in the light of day
On this hot road,
The drawn-out skein of time
Curved taut in the wind
The sheen on it
Time.
We leave behind us
A trace of emptiness
Always there
Under the pines
On the hill above the old stone track,
Where I turned back to the sea
From a road untraveled:
A movement in the light
And a way still open
Climbing up through the trees.
April 2012
An Idyll on a Summer Evening
A newspaper cutting
From the Frankfurter Allgemeine.
A picture of three young men
Standing outside the Jazz Haus
In Frankfurt, in 1964.
One was an American saxophonist
Who played with Charles Mingus.
Born a few years before me,
He died in Vienna twenty years ago.
The other, a German,
Was later involved with Baader-Meinhoff
And the Red Army Faction.
I have my back to the camera.
A woman is holding a baby at an open window
On the first floor overhead.
There is no story.
The caption reads:
"An idyll on a summer evening."
This fragile scrap of newsprint
Seems perfectly to have preserved
The innocent sunlight of that moment.
It is as if I can hear the music of Clifford Brown
Coming from the record player in the bar,
Taste the cheap German cigarette I am smoking.
But the baby at the window
Would be nearly fifty years old by now.
March 2012
Bassae
A steep rocky combe
In the mountains of Arcadia
A small corner of a landscape
Lit with the strange eclipsed light of memory,
A group of old stone-terraced fields,
Thick with ripe barley,
Steps down to a tree
That reaches out over a drop.
No other human sign
Only the vanishing footpath,
Perhaps the distant clink of a bell,
One of those places
You turned back from.
I retraced my steps
Up to the ruins of the Doric temple
That stood at the head of the valley
And waited out a long afternoon and evening
In the great silent building
With only the wind for company,
After dark
Lying with hip and shoulder
Comfortable in warm hollows
Worn in the Sanctuary pavement.
I awoke far into the night,
The temple seeming to float in the sky
The friendly stars moving among the columns
And over the lintels,
And then slept again immediately.
No other memories remain.
February 2012.
Tiresias
I Tiresias,
Sitting below the wall
Among the potsherds,
Know the exact limits of myself,
Feel the slow procession of the stars
Scratch against my skin.
The tragic discourse of the birds
Stops my ears,
I am invaded,
My ribs have become a cage
Of frantic birds.
They exit through my eyes
And I am blind
Fly out of my mouth
And I am dumb
My tongue
Is a red bird.
My womb is fertile
It is a fountain
Or a flame.
My breasts are ripe
My navel sucks in souls
There is a smile on my lips
I am the dryad
Of an ancient tree.
I Tiresias,
Old man beneath the stars
Sleeping among the potsherds
Below the wall
Dream at will
Knowing both the beginning and the end.
February 2012
Paris Late November 1962
When I recall it now
It's like a film from that time
Shot in black and white.
A houseboat on the Quai D'Orsay
The last leaves are falling,
Outside it is misty and cold
A kind of purity.
I walked along the river
Towards St. Germain
In the late afternoon
The streets nearly empty.
Unreal city
City full of dreams.
In the bar of the Beat Hotel
I sat down alone.
The evening closed in
No one else came or went
I thought, for sure the ghost of Rimbaud
Walks the street outside
Baudelaire stares from the shadows
With his murderer's eyes.
I crossed the bridge
And walked past Notre Dame
The square in front of the cathedral
Completely deserted.
Now, after so many years,
I can still feel the emptiness of the place
Remember the smell of coal smoke
And the silence.
What lingers most of all
Is the silence.
February 2012
Logos
Saigon in the summer of 1965,
Our ship, the Vietnam,
On her last voyage up-river before the war closed in
Docked on a colonial waterfront
Crowded with Jeeps and military equipment.
The Americans, it was said,
Were paying a year's wages a month
To anyone speaking English.
The ship sailed that night.
Hustling up into town
Looking for the work contact,
We found the address in a tropical downpour,
The door open,
Walking unannounced
Into a room full of money,
Ten or fifteen tables, stacked with bank notes,
A fan turning in the ceiling,
Alarmed Vietnamese office workers,
And a white man, shouting,
With a gun in his hand.
Along the street
He came panting after us
Full of apologies, assurances,
Desperate for staff, anyone,
We were hired.
Saigon Boulevard
In diaphanous light
The pavement steaming
Pink stucco peeling from the walls
The balcony ironwork
Warm with rust
A long straight road
Down to the darkness of the river.
That summer we were both in free-fall.
I had no money
My friend was on the run from the Draft
We were circling the flames of a war zone
In Hawaiian shirts and beach sandals.
There are times
When to be present
Is to walk in the past,
Slightly out of focus in old footage,
The Jeep making a U turn in the street,
Conscripts in olive drab battle fatigues
Queuing with obsolete weapons
To climb into vintage trucks
And two figures
Quite out of place,
On the way from California to India.
He came running through the traffic at us
From the transports on the other side of the road
Yelling my friend's name,
Grabbed his shirt in both hands
And pushed him backwards hard with his fists
Furiously angry.
He's maybe twenty pounds lighter
But he's shoving at him
As if he would force him
Through the wall of the nightmare
Back onto some beach they both knew
In Santa Barbara or Monterey.
They trade explanations.
He's pouring out
A tirade of cliches:
"WE'RE DYING, MAN!" and "HELL"
And "GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE, MAN!"
Dialogue from a bad movie,
And it's embarrassing,
Like someone screaming the details
Of their terminal illness in your face,
His repellent angular head jerking,
And suddenly....
The grenade blast,
The shrapnel embedded in the wall
The pigeons scattering in panic
While you look in amazement
At the blood pumping out
At your stupidity
And the soldier
Climbing into the truck across the road
Not looking back.
I don't think we discussed it.
The ship dropped down river
Sometime after midnight,
In complete darkness,
No lights on the banks,
Into the skirts of Typhoon Rose
The kind of seas
That seem to lift you off your feet on the crests
And crush you into the deck in the troughs
The whole vessel shuddering and rattling.
May 2012
Note: Typhoon Rose is in the meteorological records for the first week
in September 1965.
Excerpt from an American soldier's war diary dated September 3rd:
"Early today a grenade was tossed into an Ordinance Repair Shop right
smack in the middle of Saigon near the Rex, wounding one GI. Then the
one tossed on our roof tonight, wounding none but scaring 10......Harry
says he is ready to go either back to the field or go home- Saigon bothers
him. He says if the VC don't get you with a grenade, the taxis will get you
while you're crossing a street!"
This poem is for Ray, who chose not to fight but was afraid of nothing.
Chance and Necessity
World without purpose
Cascade of outcomes
Unpredictable, flowing
Not from intelligence
But towards it. Intelligence itself
A confluence of chance.
This world,
The friction between chance and necessity
Igniting a fire
That burns its own ashes,
The atmosphere that sustains life
Is the debris of living processes,
Flame feeding flame,
The bee, its eye and neural networks
Shaping the colours and scents of plants,
This world, this garden of contingency
Reaching its fruit into our hands.
May 2012
In the Valley of the Moon
The moon
Was filling the whole wooded valley,
Nearly touching both sides,
In the heat of the day.
It was so big
It took half an hour
To walk through the forest beneath it
To the lowest part of the sphere
Just above the trees.
It cast no shadow
And seemed to be shining with a warm light
Absorbed from the sun.
The air was bright under it
And the birds were singing.
I climbed up to the treeline
Level with its equator
And came out into real sunlight,
The great curvature of its side
So close
I was able to hit it with a stone
Raising a puff of dust
That settled slowly back to the lunar surface,
While the stone fell down to earth,
And when I picked it up
It had become almost weightless
And blew off my hand in the wind.
By the time I reached the ridge
The sun had set
And I took shelter among the rocks.
I awoke to a roaring sound.
The moon was rising
And a huge volume of displaced air
Was pouring back into the valley
Tearing at the trees,
Vortices of leaves and debris
Twisting uphill towards me
And I crouched with my back to them
As they came showering past.
Then, quite suddenly,
It went very quiet
And the moon was low in the sky
Already distant
Moving away over the far hills.
April 2012
A Way Still Open
The compass spins
And all directions are a return.
From up here the full extent of the isle is visible,
The old rock-falls, the angles,
The steep blue air,
The vine slopes
And wooded gorges,
And you can see
That to embark on life
Is to build a road into the past.
Time
The thread of time
Running through my hand
The bull, roaring from below,
Even in the light of day
On this hot road,
The drawn-out skein of time
Curved taut in the wind
The sheen on it
Time.
We leave behind us
A trace of emptiness
Always there
Under the pines
On the hill above the old stone track,
Where I turned back to the sea
From a road untraveled:
A movement in the light
And a way still open
Climbing up through the trees.
April 2012
An Idyll on a Summer Evening
A newspaper cutting
From the Frankfurter Allgemeine.
A picture of three young men
Standing outside the Jazz Haus
In Frankfurt, in 1964.
One was an American saxophonist
Who played with Charles Mingus.
Born a few years before me,
He died in Vienna twenty years ago.
The other, a German,
Was later involved with Baader-Meinhoff
And the Red Army Faction.
I have my back to the camera.
A woman is holding a baby at an open window
On the first floor overhead.
There is no story.
The caption reads:
"An idyll on a summer evening."
This fragile scrap of newsprint
Seems perfectly to have preserved
The innocent sunlight of that moment.
It is as if I can hear the music of Clifford Brown
Coming from the record player in the bar,
Taste the cheap German cigarette I am smoking.
But the baby at the window
Would be nearly fifty years old by now.
March 2012
Bassae
A steep rocky combe
In the mountains of Arcadia
A small corner of a landscape
Lit with the strange eclipsed light of memory,
A group of old stone-terraced fields,
Thick with ripe barley,
Steps down to a tree
That reaches out over a drop.
No other human sign
Only the vanishing footpath,
Perhaps the distant clink of a bell,
One of those places
You turned back from.
I retraced my steps
Up to the ruins of the Doric temple
That stood at the head of the valley
And waited out a long afternoon and evening
In the great silent building
With only the wind for company,
After dark
Lying with hip and shoulder
Comfortable in warm hollows
Worn in the Sanctuary pavement.
I awoke far into the night,
The temple seeming to float in the sky
The friendly stars moving among the columns
And over the lintels,
And then slept again immediately.
No other memories remain.
February 2012.
Tiresias
I Tiresias,
Sitting below the wall
Among the potsherds,
Know the exact limits of myself,
Feel the slow procession of the stars
Scratch against my skin.
The tragic discourse of the birds
Stops my ears,
I am invaded,
My ribs have become a cage
Of frantic birds.
They exit through my eyes
And I am blind
Fly out of my mouth
And I am dumb
My tongue
Is a red bird.
My womb is fertile
It is a fountain
Or a flame.
My breasts are ripe
My navel sucks in souls
There is a smile on my lips
I am the dryad
Of an ancient tree.
I Tiresias,
Old man beneath the stars
Sleeping among the potsherds
Below the wall
Dream at will
Knowing both the beginning and the end.
February 2012
Paris Late November 1962
When I recall it now
It's like a film from that time
Shot in black and white.
A houseboat on the Quai D'Orsay
The last leaves are falling,
Outside it is misty and cold
A kind of purity.
I walked along the river
Towards St. Germain
In the late afternoon
The streets nearly empty.
Unreal city
City full of dreams.
In the bar of the Beat Hotel
I sat down alone.
The evening closed in
No one else came or went
I thought, for sure the ghost of Rimbaud
Walks the street outside
Baudelaire stares from the shadows
With his murderer's eyes.
I crossed the bridge
And walked past Notre Dame
The square in front of the cathedral
Completely deserted.
Now, after so many years,
I can still feel the emptiness of the place
Remember the smell of coal smoke
And the silence.
What lingers most of all
Is the silence.
February 2012
Logos
After the storm
Seabirds make landfall
Flocking along the length
Of the coast of Patmos
On a day in Spring.
From the beginning
Transmission of forms, memory,
Of what shapes and is shaped by the world
And comes through chaos
The long flight and the sea storms.
Aphrodite of the foam
Emerges from the eukaryotic worlds
Washing up in galaxies along the shore
A vigour from her life running through
The filaments of weed
The cool, living sea
And the birds feeding at the water's edge.
She smiles in their cells.
In the beginning
The wave
Replication and increase
The wave.
Then the sea
Alpha and Omega
Birth and Death
The sea.
From the wave
Comes the sea
From the wave
Comes the sea.
The galaxies ripple out
Elaborating and combining through forms
That emerge and dissolve
A fractal wave that foams into forests and ecosystems
Into species, mutating and changing,
Throwing up a rainbow spray
Of behaviours, instincts,
Minds, cultures,
This human world,
Surface phenomena
On the wave.
In the rocks above the beach
A thin layer in the strata
Marks a mass extinction event
The wave passed beyond long ago
To expand into other forests
Different beasts
A new Heaven and a New Earth.
Aphrodite,
Laughing in the sweet cries of the birds along the shore,
Untwines her limbs
And clings again
In her helical embrace.
January 2012
Days of the Sixties
Days of 1962
I've long forgotten why
I was in a Barcelona jazz club
One afternoon in October 1962.
No one else was there
Save me, my companion, and a silent barman.
I remember it was up some stairs in a long room
With windows open to a narrow street
And nothing happened. Time dragged.
The barman stood behind the bar.
Kenny Clark was on the bill
And it seemed strange to me
That this lion of Be Bop
Would soon be in the room.
It came on to rain and got dark early
And then it was time to go.
I don't know why we didn't wait to see the band
If I could go back in time
I would certainly wait to see the band.
I can't remember now why we were there
Or why we left when we did
But what happened next I remember vividly.
As we came down stairs
The barman put Charlie Parker on the record player.
In the street the music was loud, astonishing.
The wet pavement reflected
All the coloured neon lights of the bars,
And a torrent of water
Was flowing with brilliant colours
Pouring along the gutter.
Quite suddenly I was overcome with emotion,
I could hardly speak or breathe
Standing in a street I can still see clearly
After nearly fifty years
Hearing and seeing such profligate beauty
Flow so recklessly away.
Days of 1963 Ikaria
I disembarked
From a rusting Aegean ferry
And walked along the quay in the sun.
Smells of fish sea and diesel.
A small town
With mulberry trees in the square
Wooden fishing boats in the harbour
Mountains inland.
That island summer
Was to last for nearly six months.
I rented a little house with a courtyard.
Hornets the size of my thumb
Blundered around the kitchen.
In the morning I wrote,
In the hot afternoons
I swam in the harbour
With the local teenagers.
I was nineteen
The only foreigner.
At night, to pass the time
I played chess with the girl from the coffee shop.
The town generator thumped away
The light bulbs in the square
Brightened and dimmed
A mild breeze blew off the sea.
I returned to the mainland for a while
To visit the ancient sites
Took a blanket rolled up in a shoulder bag
And slept out on the warm ground.
Once I was discovered by children at dusk
Who came back with stuffed tomatoes
Bread, and a bottle of wine
Put them down at a safe distance
And retreated to watch me eat.
Back on the island time lapsed
The summer stretched away forever
And it seems to me now
That I had escaped completely.
But the season progressed
Imperceptibly at first
The nights deepened
The heat increased.
Then cool winds came from the mountain
And blew the mulberry leaves across the square
And eventually, in late October,
I headed north
Without a thought
Moving on.
I have an old black and white photo from that year.
In it I am standing on the deck of a small dory boat.
Beside me, quite close,
Is a pretty girl.
She is looking at me
And I am gazing out across the harbour.
Days of 1964
There was no road there
Not even a track
Crossing the fractured limestone upland
Under a blinding Cretan sky
The sea somewhere over to my right
As I struggled all day over rocks
Weathered to knife edges
Finding a way to the west.
Then suddenly in late afternoon
A dark narrow valley
Filled with old olive trees
And the sound of water
And a steep scramble
Down to the sea.
There, quite unexpectedly,
In the early dusk of the place
I came upon an ancient mosaic
On a small area of level ground
Among stone ruins.
Dolphins, in pairs,
Around a wave pattern circle.
The day declined
The light on the sea became opaque
The trees stood a little closer around
While I made a small human home again
Within the dolphin circle
With a rolled out sleeping bag
A candle in a glass jar by a box of matches
A meal of bread, cheese, olives
Water from the stream
A cigarette
Looking at the dolphins
Shifting in the unsteady light from the candle
Until night came on
And shut down everything completely.
Then, high up through the trees
The miraculous Greek morning was on the hills
The sea beyond the shadowed valley
Brilliant again
The stream running like time passing.
And when you step out of the circle
It is gone forever
And no way back.
There is no road out from there
Not even a track, leading up out of the valley
And crossing the harsh limestone upland
Towards the west.
Days of 1965
I remember her from time to time
The little girl in the green sarong
At the food stall
Beside the entrance to the temple of Angkor
In Cambodia
In that time of peace.
She would stand by our table
And watch us eat
And seemed so pleased with us
The thin melancholic Englishman
And the laughing American.
And the nearby town
With its clean river
Children swimming in the shade of trees
Its quiet atmosphere
Like a French provincial town
French bread in the bakery
And a hotel
Smelling of coffee
And fresh linen.
I think about it all from time to time
Recalling the girl
The street in the town
That hotel balcony
The distant sounds of children
The light under the trees.
Days of 1966
I remember the Grand Trunk Road
That ran from Peshawar to Calcutta
Unchanged since the days of the Raj
With its ancient trees
Its holy dust
Its signposts to places
A thousand miles distant
Its long empty silences.
And riding those smoky night trains
The Janta Express
The Madras Mail
Drawn by steam locomotives
Across the plains of Great India
And waking up in the small hours
To hear the lonely tea sellers sing out
From deserted platforms
At stops in the heart of nowhere.
And everywhere the smell of wood smoke
Breath of Agni
Igniting colours of sunset and dawn
Raiment of gods
Sita and Ganesh
Lakshmi and Siva
Glowing in the air
And in their sacred images
On the walls
Of every poor Chai Wallah
Feeding the flames
Of his fire.
India
In the hour before dawn
The hour of memory.
India
In the pure hour
The hour of ablution
And sounds of falling water.
India
In the hour
When the sleepy servant boy
Blows on the seed of fire in the ashes.
India
In the peaceful hour
The great steam locomotive hissing gently
As the engineer drinks hot sweet tea
And the shrouded passengers
Await departure
India!
Days of 1967 Jersey Channel Islands
I can see her now
Getting off the plane
And walking across the runway
Towards me.
Her hair is up
And she is wearing black eyeliner
Curved up at the corners of her eyes,
A yellow mini dress, pale tights:
Eighteen.
I took her back to a tent
In a quiet corner of a campsite.
On the way, in a friend's jeep,
We didn't speak
We were breathless
Speeding through the country lanes
On that day in August.
Later, in the pub, we talked.
Her mother thought she was staying with a friend.
She would call her mother soon
From the phone box in the village.
She had dropped out of Art School.
It had seemed like marking time somehow,
Now the world was all before us.
I felt the same
That was how we were then
No plans
Walking back to the tent in the dark
The future coming towards us
Like a breaking wave.
Days of 1968
The path through the wood
Was quite unchanged
When I returned to the place
Years later.
The spot where we camped
Was just the same
Damp, and shaded,
The patch of grass, thin,
Barely surviving.
And there was a willow warbler there again
Like the one seen
When we emerged that morning
Which still moves, a perfect yellow tone,
In the light and shade of my memory
As if the place itself
Were a mind containing memories,
The bird returned, replaced,
The feint grass, clinging on.
I think, perhaps, I returned more than once
And followed the rout we took
Out of the wood towards the cry of gulls
Into high blue air and light
Hundreds of feet above the sea,
Remembering how, after that hour or so,
The landscape had become drenched
In the unworldly purple glow of the heather,
The little tent,
Where we had pitched it again,
Right on the edge of the cliff,
Shivering in a warm wind,
The yellows and purples and acid greens all around
Soaking into the brilliant static of the light
Penetrating us
At the navel, and under the heart,
As everything started to flow in upon us
Blowing through, like wind dispersing mist,
Until finally there was nothing left at all
Just the place
Painting the inside of a sphere.
Days of 1969
I can still feel them
Those distant summer days
The hot embrace of the sun
The warm dust of the sunken lane
Running through my fingers
The searing light off the wheat field.
I can still feel them
Those hollow afternoons
The far echo of the world
Beyond the warping light along the horizon
The intense stillness.
I can still feel
The easy limbs of youth
The cooling air at the end of the day
The sudden scents
The cold fingers of the dew
Touching my face
The violet light of those evenings.
I can still feel the sensation
Of walking deep into the fading wheat field
Under the first stars
The open palms of both hands
Just brushing the tips of the ears of wheat.
2011
Days of 2011 The Return to the Island
Dream
A dream, repeated.
Conversation,
And the sharing of food.
Dishes passed from hand to hand,
Wine poured, spilled,
( The splash of red
Divining meaning, not fate )
In an empty house
Always, at all hours,
In a house
Overflowing with logos.
Aegean
The island turns and moves towards the swimmer
Out there in the Aegean hallows
So much blue spent to hide her!
She enters the little rocky inlet
And hauls herself out of the water
Throwing onto the hot stones
The Complete and Incontrovertible
Articles of Peace.
She is only animal after all
Wet and warm
Curved like the sea
Arranging herself on the hot rock
With contented sighs.
And I am as quiet as a fox,
She is hardly aware of me
Sniffing at the wet documents
Squinting down at them
With vertical eyes.
Waiting for the Barbarians Athens
The old center of the city
Lies in ruins
The broken streets
Dense with the people who have fled
Gathering their strength who can
Mounting defenses
Even here.
The sun is corrupt.
The sun rakes the facades
Where poets lived
Tipping the shutters askew
Breaking open the rooves.
From the citadel
The past has been looted
The ground freshly opened
The place ransacked
Only an inventory has been left behind.
Deep under the ground
Out of sight
There are networks of tunnels and mines
Sapping everything
No one can make out anything
Down there in the confusion of dust and movement.
Acropolis
Along the cliffs of the Acropolis
Five Lanner Falcons play in the air
Unmarked by anyone but me
Walking among the strollers, the lovers,
The friends.
Look up!
Into the light!
The birds soar and fall
Glinting past one another
With sharp cries
Out of the sun.
Apollo, akestor,
Bring her health!
A falcon rises up on the thermals,
Ascending above the cliff line,
Tumbles with broken wings as if shot
And stoops.
Apollo, musegetes!
Bring her beauty
Like an empty house
Beauty which is the void
Which is the naked curve of flight.
Far below, another
Rolls onto its back in the air
And strikes up with its talons
As the attacker flashes past
And up
With the arc of a slingshot.
Apollo, aegletes!
Bring her life
Which dives and ascends
With a cry of joy
And combat.
The calls of the birds
Echo from the rocks
While I stand and watch
And the evening walkers pass by
Talking quietly
Or silent.
The Return to the Island
Nothing remains of the past.
We step out of a vanished world
Moment on moment.
Only life connects past and future.
The rest
Falls back into chaos
Chaos into silence.
Nothing remains of the past
Except what the living renew,
A language evolving
In cell
In history
Orpheus making another song
To carry beauty and fragrance
Beyond the realm of death.
The past is loss.
The young man who was here
Fifty years ago
Has gone
His beauty and his strength
Faded in the old man.
Now there is just
This scent of pines
This sun, hot on my face,
This blue Aegean
These distant islands
This loss
Which sustains and holds the world.
2011
Cairn
Lost, on the high ridge of the island,
In a blue wind off the Ikarian sea
No path to be seen
Casting around for a way forward
Among rocks thorns and pungent herbs
I saw, with a small leap of the heart,
A cairn up ahead
A few stones only
One upright
Like a figure on the skyline.
There was the sweet tang of grace and reason
In these balanced stones
The first of a chain of small cairns
Marking the pathless way along the ridge
And moved by custom and the benefit done to me
By unknown hands
I stopped to put the fallen rocks back on
The sound
Pricking up the ears of the place
And in the heightened awareness raised
Standing a little outside myself
Understood an ancient truth there
That I am the stranger who walks ahead
And the stranger who walks behind.
Down Towards Land's End
I turned off the headlights and the engine
And rolled the Morris Van
Quietly down the grass track in the darkness
Out of sight from the Road.
No dogs barking from the farm across the valley
Sweet Devonshire air and silence
A level one night park-up among the gorse.
Down in the pub
I sat on that same bench under the window
Trying to connect the present with the past.
Later, something woke me in the night,
And I got out of the van.
The stars were very close,
And I realised that what had roused me
Had been a sudden jolt of happiness.
In the morning
( Dew on the spider's webs
A damp feel to the duvet )
I made coffee
And considered my situation.
Then I screwed the jet needle up in the carburetor
Wound the tick-over speed right down
And drove to Bideford
Arriving with the petrol pump clattering on empty.
I took the saxophone
And busked the pedestrian street.
Slowly the money came in,
A girl stood for a minute or two and dreamed.
Eventually I picked up the coins
Walked with the can to the petrol station
And bought some warm French bread on the way back
Which I ate, driving with one hand,
Down towards Land's End.
Nov 2011
Three for Ikaria
The Stone Road.
Above the Aegean
The stone road up into the interior
The pines
Oozing resin in the heat
The cicadas singing like fire
And just out of sight
Beyond that flank of the mountain
The end of time is there.
The wind.
The transparent man
Emerging from the side
Of the man of flesh and blood.
The sound of the wind.
Dionysus.
Dionysus of the vines
Tilling the red earth
Of cultivated ground
The wine, translucent,
Tasting of iron
In the pine groves beyond the boundaries
And on the mountains
Reeling with flowers and light
The sea in her blue robes asleep
The watchful leopards
The stones and sun dapple
Under the vines.
Icarus.
Why are there stars in the zenith at noon
And a new constellation emerging
Above the sun?
Why is blue air flowing down
Between us and the mountain
And the sky descending
Immersing everything in light?
Why does the wind blow so ceaselessly
With the sea as still as a stone
And the silence sound like the silence
After a storm?
Dec 2011
On Sappho's white island
Along the shore
Songs of Eurydice
Hiss of waves.
Golden Aphrodite
Born of the sea
Aphrodite of the lovely tresses
Who burned with love
For a mortal youth.
She, who in his house at midnight,
Trailing stars
Woke him with her iridescent touch
Lay beside him
Warm as the air from the south
Her train of songbirds
Murmuring under the eves.
He saw, wise youth,
Only a glimmering girl
But she was mad with love
His beauty overwhelmed her.
Time passed, and an old lean man
Now sits by the same low door.
A shrine to Olympian Aphrodite
Stands beside the spring
But he bears no mark or sign
Save the young girls
Smile at him.
Golden Aphrodite
Born of the sea
Aphrodite of the lovely tresses
Who burned with love
For a mortal youth.
She, who in his house at midnight,
Trailing stars
Woke him with her iridescent touch
Lay beside him
Warm as the air from the south
Her train of songbirds
Murmuring under the eves.
He saw, wise youth,
Only a glimmering girl
But she was mad with love
His beauty overwhelmed her.
Time passed, and an old lean man
Now sits by the same low door.
A shrine to Olympian Aphrodite
Stands beside the spring
But he bears no mark or sign
Save the young girls
Smile at him.
