Poems

Falling Upwards Again

Oriflammes of summer rage

High cirrus

Ice clouds

Frozen, flinty

Gestures of air,

Reaching,

Cracking black shards

Out of a blue sky……

Swifts, spinning,

Falling upwards

Again.

              May 2017

City Lights

In the south

Over the city

The moon and Jupiter

Seen through glass….

The moon and Jupiter,

City lights,

Above them

The stars, uncaring,

Silent, aloof,

Like they will be

Beyond our time.

And here, now,

Below this house,

Distant headlights,

Driven, glittering,

Circle the intersection

Without purpose…..

These too

Like stars.

       April 2017

Skylarks

The Indian philosopher Shankacharya

Learned all the rhythms of the tabla

From the song of the skylark,

And his name sounds like lark-song….

Shankacharya….

The syllables shimmer,

Ripple, pour down

Like a shower of light.

The song of the lark

Has accents that elide, reverse,

Turn inside-out,

Like a mantram

Or a Möbius-strip, the bird

Flying on both sides

Of reality, on two surfaces

Of the heavens; the philosopher

Grasping nature and art

In one hand.

Today, in a pearly April wind

Off the Severn Sea

Larks rising high above the marsh-sward  

Flutter against the fine

Crystal ceiling of the sky,

Break through it and vanish,

Appearing again among the swarm

Of motes in my eyes.

Deaf as I am,

With the volume up high in my ear

The song is ethereal, glittering….

Within me,

Like a shower of falling glass.

                       April 2017

Simple, Life Asserting

In the spring of twenty seventeen

I turned seventy three.

Every new year

Shoulders the old years aside,

Days pass more quickly,

Old friends pass out of reach,

And what have I learned?

Maybe nothing an intelligent

Twenty year old couldn’t know

By reading a dozen

Of the world’s great books.

Yet perhaps also this:

That it is anger not resignation

That carries life with it;

To grieve over past 

Horrors is to build

A comforting inertia; to name

Evil is to fend it off, to seek  

To isolate it, as if

The events happened

In another place, beneath

Another sky, under the

Ineffable religious laws of good

And evil, and are made safely distant

By appeals to nature,

Made apparently-tragic and

Somehow inevitable by talk       

Of the human condition,

While we listen to the survivors

As if they speak of a different planet,

An unimaginable zone

Impalpable, obscure,

Beyond our understanding,

When it is all here now, a commonplace,

Banal, jostling us in the street,

Too immediate to be

Hidden within a nightmare.

Because it didn’t have to be

Like that. (Grave the sentence

Deep).  It doesn’t have to be

Like this. Metaphysics

Has no traction on what          

Has no need for being….

It’s simple, and our anger is

Simple, life-asserting,

Dangerous, feared alike

By gods and masters…..

I learned anger.

                March 2017

The Woodcutter and the Taoist Immortals

The great bridge at Chang’an lies in ruins

Wild foxes live in Kingfisher Pavilion

Green ghost-fires burn in the abandoned palace.

Wang Zhi the woodcutter looks on in sorrow,

Deep in the forest, he had stopped to watch

Two old Immortals playing at chess.

Returned, hundreds of years have passed…..

The handle of his axe is rotting in his hand.

                                  March 2017

Bat and Man

I’ve loathed you long enough D H Lawrence

You fox!

The red-fox beard on you,

The mangy, pedagogic, red tweed hide of you,

Belligerent, foxy, head-down stare,

Defensive, caught-in-the-hencoop, sharp-snouted, needle-toothed watchfulness,

Lawrence, you fox!

Listen!  The dogs are barking.

Do you hear?

Animal! 

Primal, prehistoric stink-dog!

Red as ochre, vertical pupils, uncanny red-wolf gaze;

And the fox stink of you, the male fox stink

Sprayed all over your poems,

That trot on tip-toe, bouncily

Assertively across the pages,

And the little puffs of self-assertive piss-spray

Here, there,

A musk-gland stink-marker of your territory, your boundaries,

Your primeval struggle-for-existence. 

You!

Sniffing the world in ecstasies of ancient fear,

Shivering,

Stink-dog hackles raised at bats, snakes, reptiles, fish.

In Florence you sprang around your room

Like a trapped fox, unstoppable, up and down the walls,

Light on its toes, the white tip of your brush was

The handkerchief you were flapping in horror

At a bat in the room, in the daytime, a terrifying bat!

A disgusting bat!

The hot afternoon swarmed with your revulsion,

The nightmare breaking through, red in tooth and claw,

Your very own nightmare, Lawrence, that keeps you whole,

You. The heroic individual!  Springing

Wide-awake, ripe to pounce…..

Lawrence you fox! 

Blood-toothed fox-man guarding your struggle

Your kampf

Your peril, your horror, your potency,

Threatened by the potency of a bat!

In Spain once,

Out of the fiesta night,

A bat fell to the pavement at my feet

Stunned by the instantaneous crash of a firework.

I picked him up and put him in my pocket

Touching death, maybe, or rabies,

But fearing more the brief stab from the fascist unconscious

The ingrained horror

That atavistic sickness of a moribund civilisation.

Rabies is less terrible than that fear!

Brother bat!  Sister bat!  Comrade bat!

Inwoven with the same codes of life as me,

Do you hear in colour?

Do you hear brilliant colours

Echoing your voice in the blind dark,

Flying blind in a world of coloured sound?

And I hung the coat on a nail, went to bed,

Found him in the morning, warm, vibrating.

Wing membranes soft and warm, wing claws

Pricking my fingers,

Brother bat, relaxing into the warmth of my hand,

And took him out to the wood where he flew off my hand

Straight as an arrow, heading for home, his roost,

Alert, wise, with his own culture, his organisation,

No scrap of horror, he,

Lawrence!

You fox-man, curling your lip at the world.

I’ve loathed you long enough,

Grown used to your stink

Whenever I enter the feverish, slit-pupil gaze of your poetry,

Smelling the musk of you

Like the reek in the wood that opens the third-eye,

Vulpine, immediate, the sharp stink of fear and angst….

Do we smell in colour?

Do we smell in colour, image, light?

Can I smell the stark, fox-eyed brilliance of your imagined worlds?

A lifetime ago, in Greece, 

Crawling into the blocked entrance of a drift-mine through a gap scarce wider than my shoulders

I put my torch-light on a colony of bats, thick on the roof inside,

And they flew!  All at once!  Straight at me,

Escaping me,

Big bats, the size of my hand,

And I pressed face-down in the dust as they winnowed over me

Rustling, creaking,

Blowing my hair with the down-draft of their wings

Nearly touching me,

And I was filled with mad delight,

Cackling madly with delight, spitting dust,

Hauling myself back out into the searing light.

A baptism of bats!

Lawrence!  Old fox!

I’ll make my peace with you,

But we are different animals

You and I.

Instinctively I curl my lip at you…..

Voice of the fascist unconscious

The colours of freedom echoing from the voice in your poetry

The voice in your darkness, in spite of you,

Poet, like Milton who spoke for Satan, not God,

You, who once looked in dread at a swimming pike,

The Alien,

Whose God was not your God, you say,

With it’s horrible watery gaze through eyes

That made your skin creep…..

You couldn’t know they were eyes that fish bequeathed us long ago,

The same structure, the same genetic code,

Give or take a millionth of a chromosome…..

Eyes bequeathed to mice, bats, elephants, whales.

Brother Pike!

Comrade Fox!

You’re looking at each other through the same eyes…..

And what room is there for God in this unity?

What room is there for God

Where the bat and the sightless mole evolve beyond light,

Protean, mutable,

Surpassing vision, illuminating the visionless dark?

Brother mole!

What colours do you smell?

Sister bat!

Flying through a world of coloured sound…..

Is the moth you seize

As iridescent as a hummingbird?

                          February 2017

Sacre Coeur de Montmartre

Why didn’t the Luftwaffe drop a stick of bombs on Sacre Coeur

The church that lies like a bleached heart over Montmartre?

White as leprosy.

White as death.

Sacre Coeur,

Swollen like a glans erected

To expiate the sins of the Communards

By the same people who slaughtered thirty thousand of the poor of Paris for daring to be free.

I climbed up the steps past the queuing tourists in the anniversary of the Bloody Week

Desiccated with anger

Dry in the mouth

Breathless

And hawked up enough meagre spit

To gob in the entrance.

People stared.

What did I care?

The same people would stand by and do nothing

If I were being shot against the wall.

Somehow I managed to juice-up enough bile

To splatter the stones once more.

It was running down my chin as I walked slowly back down the steps,

Hearing the blackbirds singing,

Feeling calm, warm,

Breathing easy,

Feeling my blood-pressure dropping down into the range of a healthy twenty year old….

Let no one tell you anger isn’t good for you.

                                       February 2017

New Wave II  “Golden Earrings.”

A Berlin jazz club.

At the far end of the room

Through the smoke and conversation

Friggi Hoffmann plays “Golden Earrings” on the piano:

  
   “There’s a story the gypsies say is true

   That when your love wears golden earrings

   He belongs to you…”

He plays the song in dense block-chords.

Half a century later I can still hear the piano clearly enough to say what they are….

Thick, diminished chord-voicings fog the melodic line,

The notes of the tune sing out like bells above the smoke.

But none of the men wear earrings;

They are wearing Italian suits, crew-cut hair, sharp shoes,

And the women are eyeing them calmly, nevertheless.

                                             January 2017

A Part: New Wave 1963

Like a scene from an arthouse film:

A suburban room in Stockholm,

Snow outside. It’s after midnight.

A young, rather awkwardly-handsome man,

A bohemian, perhaps a poet,

Observes two men and a woman sitting across the room.

She is wearing a knee-length black dress.

Black hair curves to her neck.

The two men are in dark suits and ties.

They are all drinking cocktails;

Miles Davis is on the hi-fi:

The theme from Lift to the Scaffold.

Silently the two men begin kissing her.

They kiss her in turn.

She watches expressionlessly, drink in hand,

As one man enlarges a small run in one of her stockings

Playfully tears it open, caressing her thigh.

The woman looks steadily at the poet,

Her eyes wide open while she is being kissed.

Then she stands up

And the two men follow her out of the room.

The muted trumpet speaks of alienation and desire.

The poet listens until the record ends

And the needle sways and hisses out of the groove,

Finishes his drink and leaves the house.

He quietly closes the front door

Pulls up the collar of his overcoat

And walks back into town through the falling snow…..

                                January 2017

The Cats of Chartres Cathedral

In Chartres there are cats the colour of the cathedral,

Silver-grey cats

Cats like liquid stone

Shadow-cats that glide around the walls following the sun

With their oriflamme eyes,

Cats like no other cats on earth

That reach and paw the opal pelt of the stone

That lurk the gutters below the gargoyles

Like bits of some forgotten goddess,

Her grizzled hair and weaving ways,

Who flowed into the building between the masons’ feet

And froze it up….

Silver Chartres,

Prowling down the years.

                                           December 2016

Travelling Like a Fox

Some places seem to cling….

A track into a wood

A field corner among the vines

Discovered after dark

While travelling like a fox

Unseen, alone, in peace,

Down through France and Spain;

Places never forgotten, but lost

On roads travelled without a map

Like the scrap of land clinging

Above the crests of the pines

On a pass through the Pyrenees

Rain hammering on the roof of the van

Water roaring off the road

Dislodged rocks crashing through the trees

A candle burning all night

Contracting and expanding

The little world within the vehicle;

Or the deserted casa de la finca

At the head of a valley in the Spanish Sierra

With its avenue of wind-crippled trees

The ruined house

All the landscape the tones of saddlery and army green,

The kind of place

You roll out of bed into the driver’s seat

And leave at first-light with a prayer.

                             December 2016

On This Road

Blue world

White moon

And on this road

The moon has fled.

Gypsy moon

The world’s blue glance

And on this road

The moon has fled.

       November 2016

Chet and the Iceman

“He knew how to use the silence. In his music, and in his life.”

A high-altitude jazz musician

Snow, and ice

In a hotel room in Amsterdam.

Six thousand years ago,

A Neolithic hunter starts down a glacier

At ten thousand feet in the Alps.

Both men are prematurely aged, deeply lined,

Cheeks caved in, but undaunted….

Alive above the snowline.

The hunter carries a copper-headed axe,

Very light, no more than a walking-stick -

The angle of a yew branch

With a small blade lashed in the heel of the handle.

He has the traces of copper smelting in his tissues.

He is dressed in furs stitched with sinew,

Woven grass thermal gear,

Bear and chamois skin snow-boots

And a bear-skin hat.

His frozen body will be found at the end of the twentieth century

Lying beside a short yew bow, still under construction,

Some half-made arrows,

A pouch containing fire-flints, flint arrow-heads,

A bone pressure-flaking tool, a stone knife,

A bow-string for a longer bow

And three species of medicinal mushrooms.

He is tattooed at acupuncture points for arthritis.

Everything else he needs is in his head.

Chet Baker, too, is traveling light:

A Martin trumpet in a hard case,

A second mouthpiece, some valve-oil,

Two unused sheets of manuscript-paper,

A change of clothes in a small suitcase,

A wallet containing high denomination notes and a credit-card,

A passport, a packet of Camel cigarettes, a Zippo lighter,

And in his head

The words, melodies, chords and substitutions

For over a hundred songs and jazz compositions,

Scales, gestures, turn-backs, side-slips,

A spatial language

To negotiate his way through the harmonic landscape,

Using the silence, always listening,

Like the Iceman hunting in the mountains,

Moving, pausing, using the silence, listening,

Moving through the forms of the icescape,

The harmonic elevations,

Moving with grace and lyricism,

Improvising a way, taking risks,

Making a cadencial descent

Down the glacier.

Chet Baker puts the trumpet he has been playing on the bed.

A few minutes later he lies dead on the sidewalk below his window.

No clues.

The Iceman is hit by an arrow curving down from above;

He is on his knees trying to pull out the shaft

When he is struck down from behind.

The good hunting bow and the arrows he must have carried

Were stolen by his killers;

The length of the spare bow-string tells us that.

We know more about the death of the Iceman than the death of Chet Baker.

For six thousand years the Iceman left only the wind across the ice

The rustle of spindrift

The silence.

Chet left the silence that gave his music form

The blue distance

The high empty spaces.

                                   November 2016

Indian Jungle

When you walk alone in a forest

Where a tiger walks,

And leaves his footprints in the dust;

Where elephants are present,

Maybe watching you

Like grey clouds with rose-mole, stippled ears;

Or a leopard gazes from a swarm of spots in the undergrowth;

Or, most dangerous of all,

The tusky pig with red eyes and a malevolent attitude……

You just let go

And your mind empties out,

The jungle, with all its intricacies,

Seethes into the vacancy

Deep in the river gorge

Where the rock python sleeps out the day

In that nice green room of his

And you wade along peacefully, to where,

Almost within reach of your hand,

The great brown fish owl, big as an eagle,

Perches with his back to you,

Unaware of your approach

For the noise of the rushing water.

                               October 2016

How the Gods See Us

Observe the deathless gods

If you would understand mortality

And the race of men.

Learn of the murderous desire they conceived

To renew themselves

Pitting youth against age.

Realise that we

Who emerged from the blood and smoke of their wars

Were unforeseen

That even the gods were blind to chance

And the birth of misfortune.

Know that the gods love the beauty of the world

And the perfection of youth above all

And that Aphrodite moves among them

Like a flame.

No one has seen the gods as they are;

They appear to us as forms we understand.

Neither do the gods see us as we see ourselves,

To them we look like clouds

Or illusions in flowing water…..

Like the clouds that appear motionless

Over hills, shaped like the tops of waves,

Curved airflow made visible,

Or like the moving and returning shapes in flowing water;

The gods see us like this,

And stand before us

Amazed and terrified.

                     October 2016

Brown Eyes

With such brown eyes, the child

Slipped into my heart,

There, along the river, in the sun,

Laughing up at me.

River that runs through the heart…..

Prove us:

We are porous

Without limit.

                  September 2016

To the end of the world   

In memory of Bill Wyatt

South at the solstice, blackbirds singing,

In Montmartre and Venice

In Arcadia under the planes,

By the temple of Hera,

Where I put a flower for you…..

Singing in Montmartre

At cherry blossom time,

Of the dead behind the barricades,

Then as now,

Singing by the grave of Louise Michel

Where I put a stolen red rose for all forgotten dreamers….

Singing in Venice, in the walled gardens, always,

And south

On that journey to the gate of the underworld with the gift of your poems,

To the southern tip of Laconia

Cape Tainaron….. stark, treeless,

Where no birds sing.

                                       September 2016

Passing Ithaca By

On the ferry,

Parked-up trucks rock in a choppy cross-current,

Pawing at the deck

As we grind our way north over the Ionian Sea.

An apocalyptic sunset

Red sun, inky sea,

The shadowy islands rising abruptly.....

Beyond them nothing but a great commonplace.

I find a quiet spot at the rail…..

There is a solitary shearwater out there;

The Greek truck drivers are chain-smoking on the poop-deck

Watching the World Cup on tv.

The name Ithaca

Quickens the world  

The word hollows it out

It moves………Ithaca………

We are passing Ithaca by.

Just a darkening hill-ridge above the sea,

Few lights, no sign of a road,

A wooded island, mountainous,

The deep gouge of a double harbour,

A bit of good land, a small town….

How it ever was

A commonplace

A place to escape to Argos from,

To Troy, to sail the seas

In the company of drunk truck drivers

Roaring for a goal.

Ithaca……

We are passing Ithaca by.

                           August 2016.

Augury

This landscape of light

Resonates to the rub of dreams

Awakes in echoes

Names, words,

As I hold the car to the lyric

Line of the road

Winding through the shadowy combs of Arcadia

Onto the scorched shoulder of the mountain

Sinewy, muscular, arm of Sparta

Armoured brow of Sparta, Laconia,

Black mirages boiling off the road.

O rebel sister! Wind!

Two eagles hold the crest

Over the plume of pines

Eagles crossing from the right

Augury of strength and courage

On this desperate, falling road

Descending over an empty plain

Land well-watered, green as moss,

Where the Titans fell,

Wrack of the old gods,

Where Zeus’ bolt-lit lignite fires

Burned wild still in Herodotus’ time

And bones of giants lay abroad.

Now

Under the eagles tracking air,

Below the auspices

The giant bulk of a coal-fired power-plant

Placed like a toy upon Elysium,

Spins out filaments of power-lines, pylons,

Fed by the lignite open-cast

Pollutes Alpheios, the sacred river,

Kills the sacred oaks with sulphur.

Off the road, under the mountain,

In a wind out of a furnace,

I look down on the cubic Titan far away

Webbed to the grid like Gulliver

Livery of red and white

Smoke-stack smearing the sky

A great concrete block

A colour-banded chimney

Blunt, perfect…..

And up at the eagles in the light.

                     August 2016

The Clue

In Arcadia, driving in the mountains,

I came upon a big tortoise walking in the road,

Jammed on the brakes,

Left the car where it stood,

(I had seen no other for half an hour),

Picked him up

And carried him off into the thorny scrub.

He fought me all the way,

Indignant, hissing, reaching round trying to bite me,

Trying to loosen my grip with the claws of his strange, cold feet,

His shell cool in the fiery mountain sunlight that burned my scalp

So that I was glad to set him down and have done with him,

The heavy beast walking in the air,

Now landborne again, contemptuous,

Barging through the cruel thorns with a scratching noise….

When an old woman was suddenly at my elbow, out of nowhere,

Very handsome, of the mountains,

With sun-bleached, corn-gold hair and eyes like the sky.

I thought: “Is she older than me or younger?” noticed

Her curiously modern dress, its clean folds,

Its pale grey colour (in a country where noone wears grey),

Her head bare under the scorching upland sun,

As if (I thought later)

She were constructing herself out of the stuff of my mind…..

Grey, like mist,

Eyes, like the sky….

Aphrodite Ourania,

The older Aphrodite,

Daughter of the sky and Gaia,

Whose emblem is the tortoise.

We walked back to the road together.

She was carrying something in a very neat, grey polythene bag,

And walked with a staff.

Even then I thought the grey bag strange.

The engine of the car was running,

The driver’s door open,

The air-conditioning struggling to cool the entire Peloponnese;

I offered her a lift

And she laughed it off.

A couple of hundred meters down the road I stopped dead.

The grey clothes were the clue.

There was no sign of her in the mirror.

I reversed fast back up the road, spitting gravel,

And she was nowhere to be seen.

You could see clearly for miles around,

But there was nothing there,

Only the sunlight.

                                                   July 2016

These White Nights

July weather.

In the limestone gully,

Marjoram, pale as a cloud,

White yarrow, whose stalks cast the Ching,

St John’s wort, yellow flower of midsummer,

Devil’s-bit scabious, blue as the breeze,

Bird’s-foot trefoil,

The lotus of the Greeks,

Canary-yellow, tight in the turf,

And thyme,

Out of Elysium,

Just beyond this northern summer

These white nights.

                  July 2016

Alpheios

I walk along the road above the sanctuary,

At Olympia, under the pines.

Above the temple of Zeus,

On the hill that crowds the road,

Hooded crows shout in the trees,

As they always must have done,

And a blackbird sings.

What gods are voiced by these birds

Even now?  Thanatos, mocking the fallen?

The blackbird, Hera’s voice,

Sweet, slow mother of the gods?

The road runs parallel to the stadium

To where a track drops away

Shaded by old olives and scrub pine,

Curves around the ruins

And finds the river to the south:

Alpheios, flowing out of Arcadia,

River of dreams,

Flowing like the sky,

Willow girt, and wide.

I find a place to sit on the bank,

Bare feet cool in the turquoise water,

And a snake swims out between my ankles

Brushes my flesh with its tail

A nymph’s cold touch.

I sit for hours

Without thought or feeling

Waiting for the big orange and brown hornet

That returns every half hour to a stone at my feet

And drinks there.

Swallows and martins from the village

Fly over the river. Long ago they must have built mud nests

Under the cornices of the temples

When they were bright with stucco and paint.

Under the protection of what god?

I sit by the river throughout the afternoon

Until the sun sinks beyond the plane trees behind me.

Fifty years ago I slept out under the stars not far away

In a field where there are mature olives now.

No time has passed.

These same birds were here

Forty million years ago.

                                                        June 2016

Leviathan in Sparta

Sad hills cradle a blue bay.

I park the hire-car among the olives,

Walk down the track from the level scar of the road

To the stone tower by the sea

Carefully detaching and collapsing the webs of fat black spiders

Barring the way.

The ruined square tower.

Rock, olives.

Two great southern oaks.

A couple of time-stilled, rust-eaten oil drums,

Big, slow, yellow butterflies,

And the silence.

Under the oak, in the shade,

Watching the pale grass move,

I am swarmed all over by ants

Thick on my shirt. And I’m up

And dash them off,

Beat the shirt on a rock. Cry:

“We too have resources

Us large creatures!” Feel

Their feeble bites,

Bush off their corpses;

Ant-free….calm.

It is said that ants

Are like the cells of a large creature

And that nest communicates with nest

Across continents;

That they form immense organisms,

The largest living things on earth.

I find a quiet place to sit again,

And wonder

Did this leviathan feel my feeble bite?

                     June 2016

The Time

We've got to fight.

Not to fight is to harm living beings.

O rebel sister. Wind!

The time of the warrior is here.

                             

                              May 2016

Imagine

Let’s say,

The world….

Like a skull as white as a cloud.

And summer…

The river.

Call it….

“The totality of summer”

Or….

“Summer through and through.”

Say,

“It cannot be grasped.”

See,

Slack water,

Splash of fish.

See,

The river flow,

Make an under-world,

Darker, greener….

Imagine,

The river enters the skull

Flowing slowly

Flowing out again…..

The river moving

Like peace.

Wait,

For the kingfisher,….

Blue jewel on the throat of the river,

Flashing across water smooth and dark as flint….

Ask,

Why would he not

Forever curve round the river-bend

That washes the back of the skull? 

                        May 2016

Decades

“I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-second Street

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade”

W.H. Auden September I, 1939

The decade lasted eighty years

Penetrated every life

Crossed over the millennium,

Laying waste….

Progress. Modernism. Empire.

Ruthless, deadly,

Feared even by the gods.

Eighty years:

Ceaseless war,

The beauty of the world,

Scarred….

The beauty of the world

So loved by the gods

Scarred

Dried up

Cut down

Wasted.

April 2016

Seeds

Maybe only the mad “get it”…..

Down-trodden

Cracked open

Bowed heads breaking through

Rising up

Waving

Waving their hands at the light.

                                  April 2016

Freedom, Autonomy

Beneath the bones of it all

Under the flint-hill,

Below old Cyclops’ murrum stones

His ancient walls, his boundaries;

Below the roots of priest-craft, land-rod,

Bushel and cubit;

Before the sacred, the embodiment,

Before fealty and measure……

Here, now,

In the shadow of this red rock

In this handful of dust

I will show you

Freedom in the grip and pump of your heart,

Autonomy in the insurgent wind.

                                                 March 2016

Read the Spring

Do I want to read the Spring?

These pale words

These innocent yellow and blue words

These thin, stretched words

White as a Raphael Madonna?

Do I want to read these green words

These words like spears , poking through,

These bland, deathless words?

Do I want to read this naked light

This primrose, like a cliché,

These metaphors of birth,

This tawdry innocence?

Look for the fractured words…..

The bones of the slaughter unburied,

Poking through,

This white light.

Look for the first bee staggering about

Hounded by the wind,

Butterfly blown to tatters,

Sun-harassed,

Small blind birds …..

Whispering.

This ragged syntax of generation.

Do I want to read this Spring?

This glossy ad

This naked light?

                March 2016

Blue Flowers

There was a field of barren flint

Above a house I could find no trace of again

Where a child had been buried in stony ground

And I could remember nothing.

I will put blue flowers

Where there is only the sun and the wind

And the small quick bird of the rocks.

I will put blue flowers where there is only the wind.

                                                        February 2016

Falling

Under the immortal stars

I saw you falling

Birth to death,

Falling 
Falling out of reach.

Who can hold you?

Birth and death
Who can hold you? 
Falling 
Falling.

February 2016

Howl Redux

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by property-ownership, well-fed, sober, dressed by Marks and Spenser,

breezing through Tescos after work looking for a decent  red wine,

Guardianheaded hipsters burning for that ancient heavenly Equity in the dynamo of the money-machinery of night,

who in Levi cords, mild-eyed and high, sat up smoking in the supernatural glow of their televisions, floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to the boss for the Job and saw angels of security on terraced roofs illuminated,

who dropped out of universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating an exit from the world,

who made no sound publishing  odes on the windows of suburban bed-sits,

who cowered in shaven employment saving their money in ISAs and Pension Plans listening to the Terror through the wall,

who withdrew into gardening, nature-poetry and Zen while the Beast poisoned their world,

who thought anger was a disease of the soul,

who thought themselves virtuous because they had no claws.

                                             February 2016

These Days. Round Here.

There are no more larks

Round  here

Today and

Today and

Today

These days

Round here

No eels

I remember

Larks anymore

These

Days’

Singing round

Here

Eels anymore

These

Eels

Days

Today

Round here

Nothing

Anymore

Nothing

Can be done so

Sorry and

So Mr. So and

So advanced today and so

These days

Round here anymore

No

Eels and larks

No

Days

Round here

Anymore.

       January 2016

Let Slip

“Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist” George Orwell.

Open your chaotic heart

Wolf-paw

Pace-breath

Shadow-land

Let slip

Ask

What tsunami killed a sea?

Ask

What earthquake buried a world?

Ask

What volcano obliterated a species?

Ask

What disorder could order a holocaust?

Ask

What peace brought forth tumultuous freedom?

Ask

Where are the gods of liberty?

Ask

What saint gave you a piece of your world?

Ask

What guru left the stage?

Ask

What wisdom rises like a shout?

                       January 2016

The Word

Here?

Where at a word great spaces open in the firmament

Singing voices excavate the hillsides in unknown clefs

Language expands iron mouths,

Caves of adamantine vowels

Miraculous grammars

Prosodies of alchemy.  

The world is subject to the word!

                        December 2015

Go Tell the Mole

Go tell the mole…..

Under the stars,

Or tell the whale

A mile down,

Go whisper to the elephant

Where his fate leads,

Or to the bees

Where their interests lie,

Go tell the mole

The secrets of the earth.

               December 2015

Emptiness

From pole to pole

From the chateau to the glacier

From touch to touch

Always

From the shadow camps to the flower

From St-Merri to Creteil

From the spoken word to the vast Mela

From Rimbaud to Messiaen

From the unswept sea

To the plateau

From being time to the constant way

From the albatross to the Kawahiva

From star swarms, whirlpools….

From emptiness

To tumultuous morning.

                   November 2015

Tortured Heart

Arthur Rimbaud

My poor heart drools at the poop

My heart is full of caporal

Spurting gobs of soup

My poor heart drools at the poop

Jeering from the troop

My poor heart drools at the poop

My heart is full of caporal.

Ithyphallic and pioupiesque

Insults have depraved my heart

At vespers painting frescos fresh

Ithyphallic and pioupiesque

O abracadabratic waves

Make my heart hurt less!

Ithyphallic and pioupiesque

Insults have depraved my heart.

When they’ve shot their wads

What shall we do my stolen heart?

Bacchic songs and Bacchic nods

When they’ve shot their wads

I’ll have to heave my guts

My stolen heart all gobbled up

When they’ve shot their wads

What shall we do my stolen heart?

                        November  2015

Note: This translation of Rimbaud’s poem was done with help from Pierre Michel and Jeff Morsman.

“Poop” is the rear of a ship in French as in English.

“Caporal” is corporal (the army rank) or a kind of French chewing tobacco.

“Pioupiesque” is meaningless in French as in English. It echoes poop.

“When they’ve shot their wads,” literally “When they’ve finished their quids.

Like an Echo

On entering the combe

What did I see?

Dilute gold

Motionless air  

Leaves falling

Like silence.

The buzzard lets go,

Rune-marked,

Emblem, or spell,

Flaps twice….glides,

The landscape slides backwards

In a long curve.

A wheeling cohort of birches

Stops,

Reassembles,

Obstructs my view.

The leaves touch the ground only now,

Like an echo.

                 October 2015

Crow

Crow,

Iridescent.

Scent of quince,

The velvet breath that blackens hearts.

Your hangman’s deep bow, wolf!

The loping flight, the gallows eye,

White night’s crooked laughter.

Ragged shouts,

Festivals of tatters, blown.

Cling to the wind!

Clouds!

Your nictatating eye of corpse

Your arrow tongue

Soft as a tear.

Sword-face,

Pike-head,  stab-heart,

Let slip the black flag

Cracking in a shrill wind

Crow!

Your soul of red silk

Your soul of red and black.

                   October 2015

Just This

Peaceful sunlight

Morning still and cool

The Himalayas

Nanda Devi and the Sanctuary

To the north.

                September 2015

Open

              Field

This poetic

                        of

                                      absence?

no, erase that,

                                       it’s just

we carry on

                           as if

                                       we had

taken

              half a Valium

no vulgarity

display

                      of

 un-hip feeling

                                       beauty is

              a

              vague

              piquant

              angst

   

 nothing

to be done

about  anything

                                          adamantine bunker

of irony

                    

                   bicycle frame

                   broken tv

                   in the weeds

          

                   old man  

with a

drop on his nose

                                 in

                                 the

                                 bus

                                 station

                     

                      September

                                                 15

                                     20

Compatriots

I am a migrant, although I was born here seventy years ago and my ancestors have been here since the ice age.

I am a refugee from this mean-spirited, petty-fascist, brutal little country into my own autonomy.

They can’t get rid of me but I have no loyalty to the State.

The Syrian family fleeing war are my brothers and sisters.

The Afghan penned in a cage is my comrade.

I grieve for my grandson washed up on a Turkish beach.

I rage over my brother drowned off Libya.

They are my compatriots

Who share my freedom.

                                            September 2015

Rimbaud is the shadow left on history by the flash.

Fuddled sky, black elms,

The white road……

Beer, bosoms and pink ham, upheld,

Haystack soirees, sullen stars,

Betrayed! And every Eden told….

That brattish visionary dawn

Sink deep in a blue lake!

You’re sixteen

You haughty bumfluff schoolboy

Pockets stuffed with rolled up verses,

Sticks of dynamite

Tied with Mama’s knickers’ lace

Sweet runaway without a ticket,

Busted

Buggered in a Paris jail

Poor heart!

All spit and baccy juice.

Absinthe assassin

Shitty smell in the noses of the sublime

Legislators of the world,

Savage child,

Robespierre de la poésie!

Impuissant jardin!

Scummy seer of disordered senses

A poet who changes reality!

Ransack the parlours of bourgeois culture.

Uproar in the Hotel de Ville!

The poor!

Les insurgés!

Vile stinkards!

Sweating, riotous doxies,

Sans-culottes!

The poor….

The unknown dispossessed

The holy poor of Paris

Changing reality

Arthur,

Disordering all the senses

Those poets of the real,

Dancers on the gallows,

Les Communards,

Street sweepers,

Dreamers,

Hungry urchins, rag men,

Seamstresses, cooks, scullions,

Vanished into the sunlight,

Invisible,

Their blood

Drying on the streets you walked

In that summer of seventy one,

Dreaming an upheaval of dreams

Heroic quest!

The same summer

The Communards died to a man and woman

Shot down

Behind barricades that defended your visions

Arthur

Slaughtered in thousands

By the troops that define history…..

Poetry, dreams, culture

Looted into history,

The spoils of war,

Arthur

Absinthe hashishin,

Great soul,

Igniting language beyond meaning,

Revolutionary flashes,

Cracked open by the searing light from the Invisible,

Les invisibles

That casts your shadow on history.

                                              August 2015

Say

Say

Blood-heart mother

Say

Clay-hand

Mother red-earth

Say

Father yam

Father iron-hoe

Root-face                   

Father red-foot

Say

Brother Sorghum

Mud-bones

Brother fill-bowl

Say

Sister-wind

Cut-millet

Sister sow-seed

Say

Fire-in-the-ash

No-moon

Palm-wine kola-ghost

Say

Drum-talk

Ghost-flute

Song-tree

Say

Grandmother-mouth

Grandpapa-mouth

Oracle fat-belly

Say

Rain voice

River oracle

Say

Witch-forest

Oracle slash-and-burn

Yam ground

Say

Witch-voice

Ancestor-voice

Say

The earth is leaving us

The forest

Leaving

Say

Sister-moon

Yam

Shrunk back to the root

Say

Oracle lean-belly

Smoke oracle

Say

The sky is leaving us

The wind from the north

Gone away

Say

A city of ten million people

Dries up the wind

Say

Mother blood

Mother red-earth

Mother tin-roof

Mother shanty-shack

Rebel-mother

Blood-sister

Say

Words

Dry in the dust.

           August 2015

On a Forty Nine Million Year Old Fossil of a Swift

Flat as a shadow

Bird of coal

Broken, chaotic,

Rock bird….

Ragged as a fallen star.

Black asphodel

Pressed between the leaves

Of the book of shale,

Wings open

Drowned in the dust.

This work of death,

Hieroglyph written on a wave

Of crag-heave,

Mountain-thrust….

Rock more mutable

Than the configurations of chance

That write the bird.

Swifts in the Eocene,

In a hot, iceless world,

Before the Alps.

Swift form,

An idea

Arcing across time

Through the wind;

A curved thought

In curved air;

A swarm of cells…..

Blood-rich heart-race buzzing like a bass tone

Driving muscle loom

Bone weft         

Cortex neurone-galaxy

Spiralling above shifting continents

Up-lifting mountains,

New plants,

Different beasts;

The spellbound horses  

Rising from the birth of grass.

This work of death,

Cell swarm

Abraded

Cut down

Shaped by winds of dissolution

Brought down in the dust

Spun forth again….

Swift

A dream

Hard as obsidian

Riding the gale.

Now…..

This world,

In the Anthropocene,

Cold winds in late July

Blowing the birds south again

Circling down to Africa,

Seven million swifts on the move….

For every swift,

A thousand human beings.

Anthropocene swifts,

In a temperate world,

Second primary

Reaching longer than the first now,

Shaped by the air,

Tail more deeply forked,

Quicker to turn,

Ranging to China behind ice clawed back to the poles,

And we stand

Here

Between these drifting shadows…..

Icehouse world

Greenhouse world

These cloud shadows…..

Who are

A glint of consciousness,

A flash,

Sunlike;

We stand

Here.

  July 2015

Spinning the Wheel

Pinned down

On the point of Pembrokeshire,

Right here, coast path,

He’s spinning into a fractal wind  

A candyfloss sunburst.

The giggling elves are right on time,

Lay down your tattered shadow boy

On the pink, on the blue,

On the devouring light;

Place a bet on oblivion,

Let the luminous croupier

Guide your weightless hand.

Right here, coast path,

A forgotten world wells up.

He’s too heavy to raise his head now,

The kiss of life is on his lips.

                          July 2015

Something Fitting

I want to write something

About our English summer,

Our high summer,

Which has been so beautiful this year.

I am looking for a way into the subject,

A poetic voice,

A little like Cavafy perhaps,

Quietly elegiac,

Melancholic.

I imagine I am sitting in an Alexandrian café with him

In the hot city night

Wearing a cinnamon coloured suit,

Maybe twenty years old, handsome, a poet,

And I am trying to explain to him

That the exquisite beauty of summer

Is really ours, of the north,

It belongs most passionately to us,

For whom it is most fleeting.

He tells me that I am able,

That I am just the man to write fittingly

About our beautiful northern summer,

To find a musical phrase

With something of our life in it

To express how like passing youth

A Summer is for us,

Like those lips once glimpsed in the dusk of the street,

Or in a café at midnight,

So quickly lost,

Never found again.

                                   June 2015

Black Screen

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.”

Just for the kick

Twenty years old

Frankfurt, Summer ’64,

Dierk Hesse at the wheel

A gun

A lid of Moroccan kif

And what he called his “combat pipe”

In the pocket of a flying jacket.

100 klicks per hour

In a brand-new, grey, split-windscreen V.W. minibus

Down the entry ramp

Slap into Rheinmein USAF base

At the height of the Cold War

The M.P.s on the gate scattering….

Foot down through the base

And we’re out at the South Gate

The White Helmets running like rabbits

The engine screaming like a broken hairdryer.

He finds the pipe

He lights it between his teeth

He passes it to me as we slide onto the autobahn:

“Marrakesh Commando-Gruppe returning to base……….”

Just a movie

Just a hipster game…..

Back at base

We’re drinking beer out of bottles

In the Jazz Keller, chatting up

The black and white beat girls, listening

To a free jazz combo play Ornette Colman tunes….

In my pocket

The little .22 revolver he reactivated for me in the workshop to take to India,

For the hell of it….

Stoned

“There are agents everywhere man.”

A few months later

I dumped the gun in the South China Sea

(Like you do)

Never was in Frankfurt again.

That endless Asian summer!

A new world lighting up the horizon.

Just now

I googled “Studio Kunsttechnik Metal”

And his name.

It’s fifty one years ago this summer.

The screen suddenly filled with references

Wikipedia in German

Links to websites

A history of urban terrorist groups

“The Red Commando Brigade.”

It seems they came to the studio

Told him they wanted props for a film

“A kind of revolutionary fiction”

Grenades, bomb casings,

That sort of thing.

He got cold feet.

They produced a gun.

“Just the metalwork, comrade…..

Just a movie.”

Six dead and forty two injured.

He was acquitted at the trial.

Sitting at the computer

In a kind of frozen reverie

The machine went into sleep mode

Black screen

And my own face looked back at me

Seventy one years old

Staring at me out of the darkness.

                                         June 2015

Jimbo

You always trailed a dream Jimbo  

One love

The dignity of a good heart

Justice regained.

On the street

Drinking White Lightning outside the offie in the summer

Playing on a three stringed guitar

Unobtrusive, precise, musical,

You

With the small yin yang sign tattooed on your cheek

Like Pierrot’s tear.

You carried your alcoholism lightly,

A bit tired at the end of the day, perhaps,

A bit too precise in your steps,

That smile,

Slightly self-mocking….

We both knew you had gone beyond reach.

“Drinking like a fool” 

That blues line says it all,

But to bump into you

Was always to receive a small gift somehow…

An assurance of my dignity,

Solidarity,

Nothing special

Just what it was.

How long has it been now?

Three years?  Five years?

You had taken refuge in innocence

Childlike

Harmless…

The unforgiven harmlessness of the lost.

I’m trying to dust them down

Those past summers,

Find some trace…..

I think it’s more than five years.

I came upon you sitting in a doorway,

Unobtrusive.

And you were screaming quietly,

Almost inaudibly.

I sat down beside you in the sour smell of heavy drink.

I don’t think you could hear me.

I doubt you recognised me.

I never saw you again.

                            May 2015

Pastoral

The whitethorn grieves

Like a bride-at-the-graveside.

Her face grows green and pale….

Swifts (those gauchos)

Knives out

Circling

Black-eyed

Jaunty,

(It was about the girl),

Slash at the face of the wind.

                    May 2015

Just Another April Day

Blinded by the light.

From these eye-sockets

A dandelion sun winks.

Chimes of green or yellow,

(The ash that pours through the flame),

Enter demons of blue air,

The strident hours,

The white bone beyond the world.

                                 April 2015

History

“Who controls the past controls the future;

who controls the present controls the past.”

Let us make a revolution to overthrow History.

Let us rise up, oppose and completely overthrow

History and the Ascent of Man.

Let us shatter the Future,

Overwhelm Progress, Modernity,

Drive them down and destroy them utterly.

Let us crush the Evolution of Culture

Rise up and pull down the walls of Art and Culture

Forever lay them in the dust,

So that we may build another world

Deep in time

With the Awa, the Baka and the San

At its heart

As RNA is at the heart of the cell.

                                            April 2015

Isle of Dogs

For Alison Yates

The Sick Asylum,

Poplar,

Male, 37 years,

Emphysema and bronchitis,

Wine Warehouseman,

Of 10 Broad Street,

July 1889.

What did you bequeath me

Grandfather, Great Grandfather?

What river of self-replicating molecules?

What history?

What breathing lungs,

Grandfather, Great Grandfather?

What river?

What tidal flow

Down Greenwich reach

Past the Isle of Dogs?

What sharp and bitter anger?

I’m breathing within you

Grandfather, Great Grandfather,

In Mile End and Bow

I draw air into your lungs,

I draw air

And The Holy Spirit

In Stepney and Poplar

In St Anne Limehouse.

By London Wall

The river sweats.

In the furnaces of Los

And in the winepress treading day and night,

What did you bequeath me

Grandfather, Great Grandfather?

What history?  At what tables?

What sigh, running in blood?

What wine?

What bitter wine?

The corner of Broad Street weeps

Grandfather, Great Grandfather,

By London Wall it breathes in me

Draws breath in me

What history breathes?

What unknown grandchild

Bleeds into the mud at Passchendaele,

Grandfather, Great Grandfather,

(Coil and flow of molecules),

What river into darkness?

What broken river down Greenwich reach?

What dark river into the heart?

My feet are webbed with the Jews

Grandfather, Great Grandfather,

In Cable Street,

In Warsaw and Berlin,

In Stepney and Whitechapel under the bombs.

What river of flame?

What New Jerusalem,

Grandfather, Great Grandfather,

Builded here, on Estuary Marsh,

By Blackwall, building day and night,

By Spitalfields and Crock Lane?

What chartered Thames

By Commercial Road and Free Trade Wharf,

What trade and blood?

What Irish and Jew

Didikai, Lascar, African,

Delving here,

In blood and sweat, by Ratcliffe Highway,

By Globe Town and Limehouse Cut?

What dark Jerusalem

Builded here,

Grandfather, Great Grandfather?

                            March 2015

Shade

Your letter from prison arrived by the same post

As Katerina’s poems.

I opened the book.

Her shade slipped out.

Shadowed the floor.

(“Empty pill bottles.

Pullover.

Old poems”).

You

(Busted for vandalising police cars)….

She likes you.

(And slowly she falls apart again.

Weeping in the park.

Constituents of dust.

The type to die of freedom).

                     March 2015

Wake Up Call

The mind is their target  Katerina Gogou

Trapped in a world of intersecting lines

Like architecture

(It’s a film)

YOU

Make it up.

“Get me some men in white coats

Vicious, bald, total stereotypes, steel glasses, smelling of soap, get them to come crashing through doors, breathing through their noses.

Get me a shot of a severed hand in the deepfreeze.

Get someone to start building this set

Tell those fuckers to get down here with nail-guns and an angle grinder,

Do it.

Just do it. 

Like in the sixties.

The Fear.

Get me some of that Fear.”

You start running.

It’s a tower block

You just make it into the elevator

They’re trying to wrench the doors apart

Fingers writhing through the rubber.

It’s going up and up.

And they’re running up the stairs

They just keep coming and coming

Smashing through the doors, the corridors,

Every time you turn a corner,

Setting the air-conditioning clattering.

Out on the roof you slide the bar across the steel door.

You look over the parapet.

You begin to wonder.

It’s a hundred floors straight down

The pigeons are crawling through the air down there.

Dead time…

“Get me Special Effects!

Get me explosives!

We’re going to blow the door off the goddamn roof-house

They’ll come bursting out of the smoke with baseball bats and hypodermic syringes.”

You’re backed up against the parapet now

They’re squirting little fountains of drug

Out of the syringes

The size of……

Tapping the glass to get the bubbles out

Judiciously squinting.

They are about to lay hands on you

YOU
Take them both by their shirt fronts

Lift them off their feet

And throw them back over your head.

You turn round.

You see them pedalling all the way down.

You hear them slam into the ground

With a sound like a car crash.

Now

You’re a black cockerel

With red legs

Painted by Picasso

Strutting

Ink dripping from its feathers.

Crowing so loud

It’s rattling the windows.

                       February 2015

That Morning

Why do I remember that morning?

It’s the early summer of nineteen sixty nine

Or nineteen seventy

About five a.m.

I’m on the sandy path

Just inside the clear-felled woodland,

Fresh deer tracks…

I’m standing side-on to the cottage.

It seems I’ve moved outside myself over the years.

I see myself in profile

And from slightly above…

Young and upright

Just standing there in the sunrise

No one else awake.

And the world is ringing

It’s seething with bird song

A willow warbler

All the birds

Just that moment,

The warm risen sun,

Both of us,

Standing quite still.

         February 2015

Blake in Felpham

He’s beset by angels

Heaven knocks on his door

A shower of light,

That queasy apocalypse…

The golden gates

The robes of air

Her tread upon the sky.                 

It could be

A summer day

Good William Blake

A day to mulch the turnips

Awash with sunlight

Reeling with eternity

Their fairy antics

Subdued

Grown vegetable along the drills

Another use of time…

But this harrowing moment!

This perfect tilth!

This pattern of paradise!  

               January 2015  

Seize the Day

It’s more than forty years

I’ve walked these streets

At night, under the same stars

Hearing the same hollow wind that crowds the trees,

Seeing Orion and Sirius among the branches,

Jupiter and Saturn

Sliding imperceptibly through the constellations…

The endless stars.

In those forty years

Half the animals have gone

From this world

Orbiting this star,

That turns to face Orion again,

Arcturus, Vega, the Pleiades

And all the configurations of chance

Out in the freezing depths.

Back then we thought we’d seized the day.

We thought the tide flowed with us.

It overwhelmed us

Who have learned

We fully lived

Those last days of a healthy planet

Of a sustaining climate

Of real hope.

                     January 2015

When Does It Arrive?

The wind shakes the branches,

Birds cling in ones and twos.

Are blown away again.

The curved flight of a gull,

A slow arc,

Like music,

Like the unstoppable

Arc of emotion,

When does it arrive?

The totality of summer,

“Lost in autumn,”

Winter…

Where is the place

Between this and that

Across which nothing

Is ever transmitted?

What occurs there

In the wind?

The wind….

When does it arrive?

            December 2014

The Door in the Field

When you find the door in the field

You see that the landscape on either side 

And the landscape through the half-open door,

Behind the insubstantial door and door frame,

Is continuous,

It’s the same landscape…

The roll of the hill

And the fall of the wood

The larks singing over the corn.

Nothing changes

And you do not notice

That now

You are on the other side of the door

Looking in.

That’s just how it is.

Your neighbours observe you

Looking in upon the real world

Through a door they can’t see

And it puzzles them about you.

                      December 2014

The Shaping Space

You’re not going very far

Are you?

The atoms you are

Just a splash of water

A few minerals

Staining the water

Enough to freshen the flowers

Maybe

Or house a fish

Now the shaping space

Has moved on.

        November 2014

The Funeral of Buenaventura Durruti

“All of Barcelona was on the streets

Half a million people walked behind the coffin

Not counting those who lined the way

Or were in the windows, on the rooftops,

In the trees along the Ramblas.

It was grandiose, sublime, extravagant.

No it wasn’t a royal funeral.

It was a popular funeral.

Nothing ordered

Everything spontaneous, improvised.

It was an anarchist funeral and therein lay its majesty!

The crowd moved forward without being led

There had been neither orders nor prior organisation

Everything happened anyway

In the centre a cavalry detachment and some motorised troops

That someone had ordered to precede the coffin

Who represented a militarism he detested

Were hemmed in

The motorcycles revved their engines

The automobiles honked their horns unable to go forwards or backwards

The horses reared.

At 10.00 am

Militiamen from the Durruti Column

Carried his body out of the anarchist building on their shoulders

The crowds raised their fists

And the coffin bearers couldn’t take a step

It was impossible to form the funeral procession

It took half an hour to clear a path 

It took hours to reach the Plaza de Cataluna

Which was only a block away

Where the massive procession,

The flower of Spanish Anarchism,

At last assembled at the foot of the Christopher Columbus Statue

Where Ascaso had been killed

On the first day of the beautiful season.

This the last

Now in freezing wind and rain coming on.

On the last day, too, 

Of the world that arose with Don Quixote

That dreamer who had more heart than sense.

The crowds filled the cemetery

Blocked the way to the tomb

Thousands of wreaths covering the path

Making the approach even more difficult.

Night fell

It began to rain torrentially.

The cemetery turned into a sea of mud

Drowning the flowers.

The previous day

They brought along Durruti’s suitcase with the body

To the National Sub-Committee building.

It was the only luggage he carried with him.

It was old and small.

What did it contain?

It was almost empty except for a dirty change of clothes and a shaving kit.

That’s all it held.

That’s all he took with him to the battle for Madrid.

That was the entirety of Durruti’s baggage.”

                                     November 2014

Note: This poem has been assembled from the accounts of two eyewitnesses who both knew Durruti, Ariel, the war correspondent for the anarchist periodical “Solidridad Obrera” and the French writer E H Kaminski. I have rewritten some of the material and interpolated sections of my own composition. 

Ibises and Bison  For Dave James on reading his “Ibis on the Roof or How to Spell.”

"Bison" is an insult to bisons

These singular plural are contemptuous.

(Think of "the negro" 

And "the jew"). 

Long ago,

In the morning of the world,

Ibis perched on the shoulders of man,

Probed their brains with those long bills

And planted morsels of respect in there.

Consider "wildebeest"

"The plains are filled with wildebeest."

Or "Europeans" and "Chinese".....

(Surely Chineses or European?)

"A flood of European are out there

Threatening to overwhelm us"

(The pink peril)....

Now contemplate "elephant"

The poor elephant

“A great herd of elephant”

Tusker and cow

Hunted to extinction for their ivories...

                               October 2014

Orwell in Catalonia

Quixote tilts at a typewriter

An Old Holborn rollup between his lips

The keys banging like a Gatling gun

Sees the stars over a farmer’s barn

The wise animals in the straw

Their innocent eyes…

Every night is Christmas when the workers win,

When the beasts speak,

He pays homage

To love, humanity, decency…

And smells the shit and the lies

The pigs plotting in the Generalitat.

This bristling man

His head above the parapet

Stands at the centre of an explosion

(A bullet shot through his scraggy neck)

Thinks… “The fascist who just killed me

I would have shot him too if I could.”

Orwell in Catalonia

Fighting on the streets of Barcelona in May 1937

“Revolutionary posters flaming from the walls

In clear reds and blues”

The beautiful season slipping away

His wounded voice just a whisper.

Homage is the word to warm a ghost…

No cold ghost in the damp slums of the North

Nor ghost haunting the polite fascism of the Shires;

But a ghost in the Catalan heat and light

Dodging bullets on the Ramblas

Where workers once had guns in their hands

And defeated an army.

Look for him there.

                                       October 2014

The Good Morrow

The loggers’ camps are abandoned,

The rivers flow on,

The jungle returns,

The last of the hiding tribes

All their familiar country

At peace again.

Terra incognita

The seas thick with whales

Those remote islands

Outposts of the albatross

And the fur seal

Lost to memory.

The Indian lovers lie

Their waking souls, no better hemispheres….

The sea-discoverers have gone

To dream new worlds.

Tomorrow everything was known.

Now the known is all behind us,

We sail

Towards our own lost continent.

                         September 2014

Just Another Autumn

The leaves fall down

Like broken hearts

(Or is the world

Hamming it up again?)

Look,

It’s just another autumn

It’s like a gesture…

Only now

Nothing moves at all.

            September 2014

Late August

Cold winds from the north in late August

A breath of robin song, released

By the drop in temperature

From that cellular current,

Flow of copying molecules,

Assembled from the world

Into the bird singing now,

Poured forward,

The song, like the bird,

A pattern in the flow off alchemical intelligence,

A shape, a memory, 

An association of particles…

An association with autumn

Going back sixty years in my memory,

That electro-chemical flow

Assembled in the ecosystem of consciousness,

A pattern of neurones firing…

The bird, as light as thought,

Lichen green, bark brown,

A flickering configuration of chance and necessity

A song assembled

From wind-voice, water-voice,

The voice of winter

Going back a million years

Into the past.

                                   August 2014

Crescent

A mullah hurls a black cat

From the highest minaret

But when God sees the screaming cat

(Its ears flat back, its claws outspread)

He quickly throws a blessing down

(It travels with the speed of light)

And with a flash the cat’s a swift

Flung high above the town.

Great God be praised for the dashing swift,

Its wings are the swords of justice!

Great God be praised for the screaming swift

Its cries are the Suras of triumph!

Great God be praised for the black tear drops

That slide down the cheek of heaven.

                                        August 2014

Dawn

Sometimes you wake up just before dawn,

And half asleep, sense that something immense is approaching.

You can hear the blackbirds talking about it in awed voices,

Or there is a spray of gull cries from the across the city

As if they had all flown up at once,

Or the sound of the motorway sighing

Like time beginning to move.

But if you look out to see what’s happening

All you see is the grey morning

The tired, ordinary morning. 

It’s better, then,

To fall back into sleep

The blackbirds at your ears

Speaking of a vast, timeless dawn that is walking out of the East

Unstoppable

Like a blessing.

                                               July 2014

Peace

             

Behind those gates

A high-tech company

On a suburban road

In a quiet neighbourhood

In July heat.

Smell of hot creosote from the fences

Scent of flowering privet

Birds singing

Mothers in summer frocks

Buggies and babies.

Now look carefully at the ants’ nests

In the cracks in the pavement

That childhood memory

The busy ants

The crumbled soil spilling out

The grass verge.

It’s cool in the offices,

Systems engineers

In their shirt sleeves

In air conditioning

The glimmer of computers.

Below, outside,

The neat corporate planting

The car park

The black-clad security guards

The peace

In this moment.

Another city.

A flash.

A heavy detonation, perfectly engineered.

Silence.

A dead silence after the explosion

In this moment

Two thousand miles away

Over the curve of the world

A child bleeding to death

Her lungs choked with dust

Bleeding into the broken glass and concrete

Rustle of settling masonry

Peace.

A North Somerset village

Almost deserted in the daytime

The peace

Heavy in the summer heat,

Unworldly

The stillness…

The park gates

The silent eighteenth century house

The daughters

Away at a good school in the cathedral town.

“He is in Aerospace”

As if it’s in the ultraviolet light

Above the curve of the world.

And there is always

That pleasant drifting feeling

In the shopping mall

In the air conditioning.

The silent shoppers

The freshly-washed pastel colours,

The brands

The images of style

And wealth.

                    July 2014

The Beautiful Season

This is the beautiful season

The season of light

The season of high clouds

Piled up over Aragon

Over Catalonia, over Valencia,

Over the harvest

In the summer of 1936.

(Now, in this summer!)

Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia,

In the long days

In the marvellous season,

Women and men

Bathing naked in the sea at noon                        

While the churches are burning,

The stones of the churches

Built into roads,

Foundry workers, peasants,

Who have abandoned their names…

The fishermen pour out their catch

At their feet.

This is the marvellous season

Season of forests

Season of the wind,        

Season of the City,

The streets overwhelmed,

Filled with the dispossessed

The wretched and hungry

Breaking bread, pouring wine,

The season of music

The season of courage and love,

The season of seas and abundance      

(Now, in this summer!)

This is the beautiful season

When we find our hearts

When we find our reckless hearts

When we peel away the layers

And find the void

And sow it with our love

And plant it with our liberty

                           June 2014.

Note: This poem celebrates the spontaneous anarchist uprising that occurred during the military coup led by Franco, the coup that precipitated the Spanish Civil War.

Sam Dolgoff, the American anarchist writer, estimated that about eight million people participated directly or indirectly in the Spanish Revolution, which "came closer to realizing the ideal of the free stateless society on a vast scale than any other revolution in history."

Across the Solstice

Swifts arc across the Solstice

In summer starlight

On the high edge of dawn

The air pink with pheromones

Insects rising with the light

Jupiter and Mercury

Hanging like lamps

And black wings, black fins

Spiral up

Slicing the stars to shivers

To star spray, Solstice glow.

                  June 2014

The Shade of Robert Desnos

A thin black shadow

Like nothing else on earth -

It’s the shadow of a cat -

Flees along the roads from Terezin to Cretiel

From Creteil to Paris.

In Quartier St-Merri

It runs off with the shadow of a tramp

The tramp waves his stick

He dances and curses,

Red wine and vomit splatter his chops

The two shadows chase each other

Stirring up the feathers in the gutter.

The tramp knows his shadow will never come back to him now.

Where rue St Martin meets rue de la Verrerie

He watches the cat

Gather the shadows of Paris into the night.

The cat steals the shadow from the old pharmacist

Who walks home alone along rue St Martin.

A weeping girl watches her shadow run after them.

The spiralling night is filled with black flames

The shadows of poems and stars.

The shade of Robert Desnos

Gathers the shadows into the night

That slip under doors

That descend from the bells of St Martin-des-Champs

That fall from the wings of the poor hungry pigeons.

The shade of Robert Desnos

Gathers all the shadows of Paris

Into the warm spring night.

                                 May 2014

Note: The surrealist poet Robert Desnos died in Terezin concentration camp shortly after it was liberated in June 1945. He had been imprisoned in Buchenwald and Auschwitz for his work with the Resistance. He was remembered by Holocaust survivors for his generosity, courage and surreal humour. One of his poems is called “The Cat Like Nothing Else on Earth.”

Dragons

Two small black dragons

With curved wings

(One would sit on the palm of your hand).

A castle in the clouds

Above Sussex or Hampshire.

A little Chinese girl

At home with her old smiling father

(Wispy beard, his hands in his sleeves, eyes like rising suns).

Of course

The man in the deerstalker hat

Will take you there by balloon,

You can safely walk over the clouds to the castle gate,

Look down from the battlements

Above Arundel, or the South Downs,

Higher than the larks.

And the dragons fly right through the castle walls

And the walls of the oriental room

Where the laughing Chinese girl

In her brocade gown

Serves green tea.

And they will fly right through you

If you get in the way

Like shards of obsidian.

                         May 2014

Blue Remembered Hills

In that far country,

Under the same hills,

Among the remembered hours,

Among the distant farms, the spires,

The recollection of a verse

Written before the Great War,

The sky filled with larks then

In Herefordshire in June

And forty years ago, unchanged,

Corn buntings singing on the fence posts along the lanes

The cuckoos calling like ghosts all day

As they always had,

And there is only this widening silence now…

This absence.

When did the world lose its memory?

                                       April 2014

Bird and I

5.00 a.m.

I dreamed I was lying in a roadside ditch near Bird.

Blue sky...
Somewhere in the desert.

I’m holding a stainless-steel .38 automatic

And Bird and I have hit the dust because of the near presence of an assassin.

I see him up ahead looking for us.

He’s a bald white man

Looks like a bureaucrat.

I level the gun and take aim.

The trigger won’t pull because the safety catch is on.

Bird and I are still trying to find the catch when I wake up.

In the next dream Bird is still around.

Just his head.

It looks like a large white stone

Or an egg.

Radiant, like the music.

                                           April 2014

Golden Age

I went back into my life,

The sun burning still,

The sea, just beyond my shadow,

Curved to the edges of the world,

As it was then,

But everything richer, more alive, louder,

Like an echo is more of a voice…

More pure

Like a well filled with rain that fell years ago,

The colours more vigorous,

Grown stronger, darker,

The pines, the rocks,

More resinous and fragrant.

I went back into my life

Into that golden age

Before I became who I am

And found it again

Richer, more alive.

      March 2014

Nine Tongues

Wolf tongue

Lion tongue

Tongues of the sea

Eagle tongue

Tongues of flame

White tongues of the stars

Moon tongue

A tongue of air

The sweet tongues of night.

                        March 2014

Left Behind

It’s a still afternoon, a long time ago,

I’m walking through an empty English village

Guarded by a vast motherly sun reaching down

Over vegetable gardens, summer flowers,

Sparrows dusting in the seed drills,

And I've been left behind,

The place deserted,

Only the carved voices of the birds,

The people

All gone away into the future,

And the sun shining like a jailer.

Beyond the village, along the lane,

Vacant fields, watchful oaks,

The bright corn

Silently becoming Demeter,

The startled partridge chicks

Running in the dust along the field margin,

The Woodcock, with their great black eyes,

Safe in the cool of the wood.

                     February 2014

Things Fall Apart

Throughout the winter

Jupiter moved within Gemini

Orion and Sirius towards the West

Vega and Aldebaran circled the Pole.

In this house above the city

Gales shook the windows, rain

Spattered the glass, blurring the city lights.     

Deep troughs, one after another, like waves,

Brought storms and floods across the country.

The familiar configurations of the stars,

All we have ever known,

Are imperceptibly falling apart:

Polaris moves from its place above the pole,

The stars in Orion

Drift away from one other,

Within cells, DNA configurations,

Transient and mutable, recombine,

Adapting to change.

Complex species,

The surface layer of evolution only,

Are vulnerable and impermanent,

Passing like shadows over the biosphere.

This benign age

An era of inter-glacial stability

That fostered diversity and abundance,          

Enriched forests and savannahs

Made fertile the seas,

Has been disrupted by the evolution of human intelligence,

A sharp gradient of disturbance

Feeding increasing energy into climate systems,

Altering the balance of albedo,

The earth, like some great animal,

Stretching, shaking its pelt,

Waking up.

The storm batters the windows.

In Africa my house swifts

Drift further north.

Fragile and temporary

We share this dream

This turning moment.

                      February 2014

Scapegoat

No, it’s not the same;

It’s never the same.

Only this…

The cruelty is reborn,

The old disease spreads,

This up welling of the fascist unconscious,

These self-righteous dogs

Snarling over a “parasitic untermensch,”

These pogroms against the wretched and defenceless managed by officials of the State,

This ideology of a superiority won through struggle,

Through the fight for survival,

This absolute right of the strong,

This rising hatred of the outcast,

The dispossessed,

This transference of evil,

This acquiescent population,

This old fear,

Fear of being summoned,

Of interrogation,

Of being driven from your home,

Of loss of livelihood,

Of hunger and cold…

This final solution of forced labour

For private corporations

Which are the State.

No, it’s not the same;

Not in kind

Not in scope,

It’s never the same.

Only this…

The cruelty is reborn,

The old disease spreads.

         January 2014

Note:

Line 8. The word “untermensch,” although associated with the Nazis, was borrowed by them from Lothrop Stoddard, an American conservative who theorised a threat to society from the “underman.” In The Revolt Against Civilisation (1922) Stoddard proposed that civilisation placed an increasing burden on the individual leading to an underclass that cannot keep up and a “ground-swell of revolt.”

The Beast  for Dave James

Finally, it turns out,

I’m invincible.

All I did was run…

Run and get stronger

While the Beast lost ground all the time.

These days it’s tame,

Cringing and fawning at my heels,

Knows that where I’m headed

It can’t reach.

            January 2014

Back Then

Back then

In the early sixties,

I used to get out of the country as soon as I had any money,

Hitch south across Europe alone,

Down to Spain, Greece,

Eighteen, nineteen years old.

I would quit the job I had,

Those endless dead afternoons hearing the Beast getting closer,

Quit the Mob Poets in the pub,

The Xeroxed poetry magazines,

The Art School girls,

And get out on the road where I could breathe again.

The adrenalin felt like champagne

Or being in love,

But really it was fear…

Fear of missing The Connection

Fear of being pulled down out of orbit,

Out of freefall,

(The curved world at my feet,

The weightlessness)

Fear of time getting away from me,

Brother Time, Sister Time,

Getting away from me…

Listen. In those days

The roads passed right through the cities

And I just kept on going

Pushing on through the nodes of fear

Until the sun and the white stones rose up…

I wasn’t traveling to see the sights.

Brother Time, Sister Time,

I lay on the grass verge

Beside the road outside Salzburg

On the way to India

With one hand on the surface of the road

Cars going past inches away…

And no one stopped.

I didn’t want a lift

I wanted to be alone,

Feeling the road

Feeling its strength

The same road

Rolling out into India, China,

Across Asia where it was always summer

Across time

Across the light

Brother Time, Sister Time,

Time and light

And the purifying sun that burns away sorrow

And if you keep pace with the light

You will return to a world beyond your time

To the valley where the moon descends

To the island

Where the roads pass through your dreams.

                                       January 2014

His Flame

A Gloucestershire summer,

After a long hot day,

The children, dead weights of sleep in our arms,

Put to bed unwashed

While the sun still shone.

“They’re both asleep.”

It might have been…

“There’s a winged being outside,”

The door open,

Brush of wings, air…

Then quiet at last;

When will we recall his youth, his strength, his flame,

His peace?

                             December 2013

Mandela

Mandela’s death hit me.

I feel depressed; reduced

Now he's gone.

I played “Motherless Child” on the street

Under the sour eye of the Romanian gypsy Big Issue seller.

She doesn’t like the competition.
I don't care what she likes
But I love her defiance.

It seemed like she was trying to hex me...

I was finding it difficult to shape the tune.

But it wasn’t her.

The people on the street looked absent

What Rexroth called “looted minds.”

I just kept playing, thinking of Ayler.

Not a penny.

I just kept on with it, into the greyness.

No comprehension.

But the stones were listening…

It’s like I’ve lost someone close to me.

                  December 2013

What is Not There

Under these faint city stars,

Beside a low moon, bright as a street lamp…

Beneath the bare trees in the park

The dark, autumnal smell of fallen leaves
A smell absent for years

Hits me like a surfacing memory.

We don’t notice

When we die…

The gap that opens in us        

In our senses, which are all we are…

We don’t notice

What is not there.

This quickening pang,

This richness, suddenly gone again,

The flash recall of childhood,

Immediate, sharp,

A whole forgotten world raised up…

Is this how the dead see us?

                         November 2013

Badger

Badger lives in a council house

He’s been on the sick for years

Keeping his head down

Smoking whole packets of fags

Coughing and wheezing

Asleep half the day.

Just look at the muddy path to his door

The stinging-nettles in the garden

Curtains drawn

Rubbish strewn all around

Just chucked out anywhere

Old sofas, damp bedding.

Badger still wears Brylcreem

There are white streaks in his hair

His old grey herringbone overcoat is a disgrace

His chavvy kids use hair gel

Half a dozen of them in there

Getting stoned.

We’ll sort him out

His kind infects the herd

Happily chewing the cud

Waiting to be milked

Galloping up and down

In their black and white England strip.

But old Badger’s been around for ever

Long before the bovine masses

Factories full of idiot chickens.

Some say the herd infected Badger

That he’s indestructible anyway…

Time will tell.  

                         November 2013

Tiger

Tiger, your tracks are under the flame-of-the-forest trees

In the black mud of the path

Past Pughan’s garden…

His house empty for days

The dog gone

Just me in the forest now

Alone in the temple

An oil lamp left burning on the veranda all night.

Tiger, villagers say you drink at the temple spring

They say it with horror and disgust

As if you were a demon or a vampire

But I imagine you crouching to lap the water

Head down, shoulder-blades raising your pelt,

Lapping with that great hot tongue

Finding such solace

In the water of Sita’s Spring.

Tiger, I bar the door at night

There are teakwood bars on the window too

But I go out into the night sometimes

To the track under the trees beyond the gate

I talk quietly to you then

Knowing you could be just there in the darkness

Unconcerned, watching, calm,

Waiting for me to go.

Tiger, the dawn, grey and immense,

Assembles with apocalyptic clamour

The birds seethe and echo like a well

Deer bark and call…

When I blow the conch

Your roars answer through the mist along the valley

Om!…..Aum!

You are swallowing the world whole.

                     October 2013

October

Coal fire red sunrise…

During the night

The Pleiades rose,

Orion stood above the horizon.

Later, a half-moon in the morning

Tipped down above the sun

Fragile as glass...

Old flame-haired sun

Raising a glass.

        October 2013

Sappho

She lies in fragments

Warm as touch

The Pleiades 
Are in her hair

Beside her hand,

The setting moon-

The moonlight

Is her milk white dress,

Three turquoise cats

Guard her watch...

Her hair is dressed

With asphodel.

        September 2013

Autumn

Autumn is blowing in.

The jet stream snakes between latitudes

More to the South now.

The spinning world

Stirs waves and whirlpools in the atmosphere

That form along the boundary

Between tropical and polar air,

Cyclones running West to East

Twisting anti-clockwise,

Dragging dense oceanic rain clouds up

Over sinking Arctic air,

Behind each vortex

A cold swell

Spume-flecked with thunder cumulus

Pulls polar maritime winds

Down from the North West.

The biosphere reacts, contracts,

Mirrors the sinuous atmosphere.

Forests, seen from space,

Show a moving shadow of browning leaves

Sinking from the North.

Migrating birds retreat

Flow around storm cells.

I am sitting in this early autumn garden…

The robin sings in the late sun.

                  September 2013

The Border

Up on the border

In this desert country

Time is evaporating

Time is as thin as the wind.

Pale fox of the outlands

Skirting the gaps in the world 

Where stars drift apart

Galaxies fall asunder.

Deep in the interior

Time was another country

Immense, green,

Gazing in upon us.

Those long years

Wandering through

The world’s confusions,

Untangling the wind.

  August 2013

The Perseids

The Perseid meteors shower down.

This warm, living world

Arcs through a trail of comet debris

The dust from a close shave

Strewn across the orbits of the planets.

August night, under a weight of stars,

A trace of peril scratches the earth’s faint bloom,

In the cold house beyond the sun

The comet is frozen in deep space again,

Out of sight

Falling back towards the light…

On earth, stars seem to fall from the sky,

Burn out as quick as a breath,

The centre of the galaxy

Like a road overhead

Like a mirage…

Too distant to separate its stars

Too close to see it at all. 

                  August 2013

Jessie

Even into her sixties

She had the aura of a young Edwardian woman about her,

Something of the light of that era, the echo

Of those distant summers

In her period clothes

Her cool femininity.

She lodged with my grandparents

In the red-brick terraced house

Of an industrial Midland town.

In a lost photograph, a graceful girl,

Very beautiful,

In a long dark skirt and white blouse

Stands resting her hand on a small table.

“Her fiancé was killed in the trenches.”

 (My mother)

“She was a spinster all her life”

That cold dismissive word “spinster”…

The shadow of the war.

It was Auntie Jessie who always met me at the station

With a twinkle in her eye,

Travelling on my own, aged six or seven,

Delivered from the guard’s wagon of a steam train.

She showed me the way down the alley

To the railway sidings behind the house

How to cross the tracks safely

How to reach the bridge above the main line

To see the express-train crashing through…

“You be careful crossing the lines”…

A cucumber sandwich when I got back

My clothes reeking of coal smoke.

I realise now that she was modern

In that dark Victorian house.

I once glimpsed into her room,

Bright, airy, the window open.

“She had a very good job”

(My mother)

A job in the office of the engineering works

Beside the railway

Where my grandfather had been a toolmaker.

She lived in that house for forty years,

The spinster aunt.

Cared for my grandparents through old age and sickness

And then moved in with a friend.

“Jessie got nothing”.

But every week through my childhood in the Fifties

She sent a tight roll of comics by post

The Dandy, The Beano and The Eagle,

You heard it thump through the letterbox

You tore the address wrapper off

Smelled the fresh ink…

“Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future”

And I remember on one visit

She took me to watch her play in the town symphony orchestra.

She was a cellist.

I was small, on my own in the crowded auditorium,

She looked very distant and strange.

I never heard her play in the house

My mother said she would hear her practice sometimes,

But she was never asked to play for the family

Perhaps they did not know,

And never considered,

That such a thing was possible.

                        July 2013

The Light of Day

On this journey

Never forget the light of day,

The heat of the sun,

The summer sky,

Don’t forget them.

Don’t abandon the memory

Of the warm hours,

Of breath

Touch…

Keep them fresh in your mind.

Remember the swift passage of time

The years so soon lost

The days of peace

And abundance.

Hold fast to the memory

Of eternity found

A long time ago

Eternity found again.

          July 2013

Undecided

There is no theme yet

But the poem is here

Undecided,

Tentative,

Like the summer

Like the succession of weathers

Tumbling among the trees,

Like the sun fleeing

And the shores and reaches,

Like the blue highways...

                        June 2013

Solstice

All through the afternoon

The elder flowers were opening.

Do you remember the immortal summers?

The grass still warm at night,

Scorpius, and red Antares,

Low in the south

On the solstice,

When a faint light moved across the Pole

Diminishing the stars...

The skylarks above the hills at sunrise

In a slow wind from the Azores,

Do you remember the incorruptible hours?

                                    June 2013

A Corner of the Lane

Maybe it was July

In the heat

A corner of the lane
In just that moment.

Or waiting

In the silence

In the dark meadow

Where the track entered the wood.

Or it’s a summer evening

She’s walking home through the mowing grass

In the late sun

In heels

And a green dress

A moment never touched again

A scent only

A fragrance.

         May 2013

The Afternoon Sun

This café by the harbour,

This must be the café I remember so well. This door

Must be the same door that was here fifty years ago

With these iron fittings and the same blue paint,

And although there are now other cafés along the waterside

Behind the tamarisk trees,

I think this must be the café I remember.

And sure enough

As if to tell me this is the one

There are framed photos on the walls

Showing the harbour as it used to be then:

The old Aegean island ferry, the fishing caiques,

The same trees

Looking thicker and healthier

Nostalgic pictures of a bygone era.

I have brought some black and white snapsots with me

Which the waiter shows to the old men

(They are only my age)

Playing backgammon by the bar,

But no one recognises anyone,

The old men shrug and pass the pictures back,

Fifty years is a long time,

Perhaps those people moved on, or died.

I sit on the side of the door where I used to sit

Drinking coffee.

The place is edgier these days

Much like the rest of the world,

Kids cruise by on scooters

A television stutters...

And slowly the afternoon sun,

Beginning to shine under the tamarisk trees,

Reaches just to my table

As I remember it always did.

                         May 2013

The Hare

A hare among the flints

As still as a stone

But warm, alert, unblinking,

Facing into the wind.

The high field

Ploughs the stars.

Ice whispers in the ruts

Of a field of barren flint

Above a house long gone,

A name only now,

A patch of richer ground

Where nettles grow.

        April 2013

A Perfect Grass

Not one, not many,

But a deeper unity,

We are shapes of the world.

Some other summer,

Lying on the Downs,

Looking at the tall bents

Against the sky

I understood Dogen:

“You must surely know,

The void is a perfect grass.”

          April 2013

Burial

Buried under an east wind

Beneath snow clouds

And a narrow sky

Rolled round with the falling earth…

The faces in the air

Closing out the light.

             March 2013

Jay   for Alis

What is it that is left now

That reveals no trace?

And what is this no-trace

That continues endlessly?

What is it that is here,

This emptiness…

A shape of the world?

The world this shape?

From emptiness

We will take what we can

Take a little

Or take a lot

Take a part

Or take the whole

The emptiness

Will not run dry.

From emptiness

We will take what we chose

This no-trace

Is an open hand

Take a part

Or take it all

A shape of the world

The world 
His shape.

             March 2013

Indus

We came out of a cold high country

Following the mountain roads

Among a stony intractable people

The cities freezing

Wreathed in wood-smoke,

The passes barren,

Just rocks and distance

And a long journey down to the plains,

The river,

Smelling of vegetation,

And warm air.

One bright pearl

Like a sudden spring

But a different country

With strange seasons

And an unfamiliar light.

Nothing is the same now

This is another sun 

The stupas dissolving in the atmosphere

Parrots wrangling in the trees

Birth-and-death, one thing again,

The little red gods in their wayside shrines
Like fat babies 

Sticky with milk and ghee.

                       February 2013

Prometheus

Prometheus

Coal bones

Old diamond eye

Tar foot, blood oil,

Chained in bedrock

Grinding the black sap of the sun.

Prometheus

Sea bloom,

Blue green roiling cyanopheta

Swallowing light

Exhaling a miasma

Prometheus the cursed.

In green flame

The world burned

Long ago

A toxic wasteland

Nothing but ice and death.

In green flame

Agni shines against the dawn

In the beginning

Matarisvan, Pramantha,

Order and sacrifice restored

In green flame

In fire and sagacity

And this world.

The word

Prometheus, forethought

The word

Pramantha, the fire bow

Touching the world

The artificer.

Diamond eye, tar foot,

Blood oil…

Exxon Aquila probes his guts:

A miasma

Intelligence

Touching the world.

       February 2013

The Hour of Prophecy

The hour before dawn

Is the hour of prophecy

The winter thrush

Calling like a voice

After Orion has set

When the summer constellations return

Ahead of sunrise.

Dog days of an exhausted season

Orion and Sirius

Emerge from behind the sun

Move deeper back into the night

Into winter

The axis now

Inclining towards the stars.

In the last hour of night

We look into the future

Along the line of orbit.

The hour before dawn

Is the hour of prophecy.

           January 2013

Flowing Water

Flowing water

Slakes this thirst,

Cold pools,

Shade among the rocks

Under the planes.

The sky,

The broken sun,

Splintered in the leaves.

Cool sands

Lift me into sleep

Flowing through the surface of the world:

Sweet sounds, run softly…

Who arrived at now?

Above the water

Three indigo nymphs, 
Wavering fragments of another world, 

Beautiful Demoiselles

Iridescent, blue.

Nymphs of this place

(By the cool water the breeze murmurs)

My heart

Floats downstream…

                           January 2013

Note:

“By the cool water...”   Sappho: The Garden of the Nymphs.

Beautiful Demoiselle: Calopteryx virgo.

The Sun the Moon and the Stars

The sun is a burning house.
The windows are ablaze...

Slowly the roof-tree will fall in

And the walls collapse.

The moon is a fish

It turns this way and that

It can jump out of the sky

At any moment.

The stars are musical notes

Perfect intervals separate them

Or they can be

Just a touch…

Cold fingers on your stops.

                      December 2012

Trachila Beach

Between these shattered cliffs

A febrile, convulsed sea,

So blue,

So wracked with foam,

The beach,

Narrow, steeply shelving,

Sliding away into deep water.

No one comes here anymore

After the track down was washed away:

If I swim out much further in this undertow

I am never coming back...

The sea loves me, the sea

Wants to rock me in her arms.

Fighting all the way back up onto the beach

The shore at the water’s edge

Like quicksand,

Sucked from beneath my feet…

I am naked

Alone

Shouting

Feeling the sharp texture of the world,

Abrasive, and gritty,

And the sun, burning.

Flat on my back.

Swifts break away from the cliff face

Like falling stones

Crack back in,

Like the film

Run in reverse

Black swifts

Above the spray

Through this blue mist.

Behind me, up in the valley,

Along the dry river bed,

The oleanders

Are as pink as a naiad’s kiss.

                             December 2012

Rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud

A sudden memory of her

Came back to me tonight

I don’t know why it came back after so long

So complete

Or why I remembered the time

It was about a week

That we spent together in Paris

In the flat on rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud.

I seemed to see her so clearly:

Tall, forthright,

A frank, direct look,

But slightly awkward too,

A rangy, vaguely boyish stance,

A little self-conscious in her twenty five or six years

In her new freedom, her independence.

That time came to an end

She went back to her life

I went south alone

We planned to meet up again soon

Now two decades have come between us.

                               November 2012

Aphinar

Mistah Rimbaud - he dead

Odysseus leans on the steering oar

Among the blue waves

The Enchanted Isles

Brine streaming off him

Sinews twisted like cordage

Bathed in the poem of the sea

The dolphins

The singing fish

The bones of coral

Where Ariel flames on the yards

Beneath the Island of the Winds

The harsh footprints of the wind

Treading down the sea

The Ship

A brigantine

Driven south into the void

Into the whiteout

The great white bird

Shearing along the crests

The vessel

Emerging from the mist under full sail

Eastward bound from the Celestial Isles,
No one on board,

Trailing a frayed rope,

Its pinewood hull

Washed clean and buoyant

Sailing in the wake of a dream

A materialisation

Reality changed

The smell of fetid swamps

And flowering jungles

Clinging to its sails

The golden eyes of leopards

In the undergrowth below decks

The deep forests, impenetrable,

The poles, as distant as the moon,

The hinterland beyond the reefs

Out of reach

Where men go to disappear

And nothing but a blotched photo comes back

Of a man faded to ectoplasm

In a crumpled white suit

Against a theatrical backdrop of Africa

His life seared away by the light

Who is boarding the ship Aphinar 
In the courtyard of the house in Aden

Where he dreams he is dying

The world shrunk between walls now

The Arctic ice retreating

The forests fragmenting

Boarding the ship

From al finar

From the courtyard of the house. 

                    November 2012

Note: 

Rimbaud dictated a letter to his sister shortly before he died in a Marseilles hospital: 

 "I have come to inquire if I have anything left on account with you. I wish to change today my booking on this ship whose name I don't even know, but anyway it must be the ship from Aphinar. There are shipping lines going all over the place, but helpless and unhappy as I am, I can't find a single one - the first dog you meet in the street will tell you this. Send me the prices of the ship from Aphinar to Suez. I am completely paralyzed, so I wish to embark in good time. Please let me know when I should be carried aboard..."

It has been suggested that Aphinar, or "le service d'aphinar", may have been how Isabel Rimbaud heard the Arabic word al Finar, taken to mean the lighthouse. Al Finar actually means the courtyard. Lighthouse is al Manar, and one stands close to Rimbaud's house in Aden, which may hint at how a visiting biographer, making local inquiries of the meaning of Aphinar, has got hold of the wrong end of the stick. Why a boat to Suez? Because Rimbaud did business and banked in Cairo. I am imagining in the poem that at the end of his life Rimbaud thought he was at home in Aden in his house with a courtyard. Perhaps "le service d'aphinar" means that he needs to be "carried aboard" from the house.

The Crickets

All day long

Trying to gain a foothold.

Hoeing weeds
At the time of the moon landing

The radio on

The apocalypse of the sparrows

Unfolding in the chicken barn.

The house stares at the sky

To retreat into the kitchen

Is to feel the slight chill of the grave,

Most of the house is absent you find.

In Little Dewchurch

Women in flower print frocks

Inspire the summer thunder

The bosomy drops

That pock the dust.

Elastic and heavy

Like being deep under water

The world is a tight fit again.

                    November 2012

The Raven and the Kite

They came out of the West

Out of the past

Out of the days of our ancestors,

With the nebula of the mountains and moors around them,

Peat hag and stunt birch, heather and ling,

Cool and sweet smelling,

The raven and the kite.

Circles of infinite separation,

Rain in the wind, cold lights,
Poles against the sky at evening

And beyond these warm enclosures

We are helpless, blind,

Feet sucked in the clay.

This is your fierce parade

This brittle music that masks

Importunate danger

This is your water sphere.

Carrion birds

Among the baggage trains

Flew when the axe struck the roots

When the barns were burned

The kite whistled

The raven called

And who could argue for peace there

For a celebration of joy and fertility

For the abandoning of necessity?

If not now, when?

We skirted the bones in the loam

Amid the plenty

Danced under the stars, exhausted,

The music thumping

Red sparks whirling from the camp fires,

Drunk, deaf to the roar beyond the horizon after sunrise,

The flame in the East. 

Look... the graves have been lost,

The dead stand by the walls,

The crowded fields of resurrection,

The upright presences,

Have been  abandoned.

We have forgotten the future.

Here are the ruined cloisters

Here are the bare stones

And the lime mortar exposed

The choirs open to the sky

The broken wood

Clear felled

The hedgerows put to the torch

The flint acres

Where once were sweet birds,

The nightingale and woodlark

The cuckoo and the quail.....

And the asphodel,

Beyond time,

And the dew-soaked shadowy meadows.

                           October 2012

Among the Ruins

It is more than a thousand years

Since Tu Fu wept 
Beside the broken stone horses
Of the forgotten prince

In Jade Flower Palace

Among the ruins.

The storm roared in the pines.

Far away, along the ocean shore,

New ghosts from the war on the border

Wailed among the old

Howling in the wind off the sea.

Already an old man for his time

His hair whitened by moonlight

His heart bitter

The country overrun with war

Tu Fu died at fifty.

Would he, I wonder,

Have exchanged for thirty years more life

His world for ours:

A world overrun with war

Where the oceans and the winds

Now lament their own deaths?

                    October 2012

David

Suddenly he is there

Quite unexpectedly,

Young, slim, handsome, a little pale,

A bit distant in manner perhaps,

And I am shocked, and then happy

To realise that I had forgotten so completely,

Forgotten again,

That he had pulled through

That the other outcome was just a bad dream

That he is quite well, and has been for years,

With another life

Some unimportant job,

The kind of job that requires the dark suit,

That rather cheap Burton’s suit he is wearing

(But that looks good on him nevertheless),

Running a shop maybe,

Something not in keeping with his abilities at all,

Except that he has stepped aside from everything

And is now quite contained within himself.

There is no time to talk.

He moves to the edge of the crowd

By the window

Greets a few people

Looks my way.

And what is strange

Is that he does not seem to notice

That I am now much older than he is

(Perhaps this is the reason we do not talk)

That I am now an old man,

Old enough to be his father,

When he is no more than thirty

Or thirty five at the most.

                               September 2012

At this place

Across the light,

Across the silence,

This empty road.

Here 

Where there is only 

The sun and the wind

And the small quick bird of the rocks

On this stony ground,

Among these tenacious herbs

My hand on the strong back of the road,

At this place,

In the shade of this quiet rock

I will show you 
Peace in a handful of dust.

At this place.

                                 September 2012

Jageshwar

On the ridge above Jageshwar,

Women were harvesting animal feed from the forest,

In the cool of the morning,

Girls in long coloured skirts

High in the big trees reaching out over the valley

Walking fearlessly along the boughs

Sixty feet up

Graceful, balanced, nonchalant,

Cutting fresh shoots with reaping sickles

Dropping them down

To the older women on the slope below:

The trees, shaped by pruning,

Knotted, pollarded, fists of new growth along the limbs,

They must have been harvested in this way

Beyond memory.

Standing on the dusty track

Pulse raised by vertigo

Foreshortened, open mouthed,

Wide eyed I must have seemed

To the girls overhead,
My shadow clinging to my feet,

Their colours in the leaves,

Voices, laughter,

Evergreen tones of the fern and moss haggard trees,

Long shades down the forest slope

The snows in the north.

When they had finished

They came to earth in a rush

Shinning quickly down the shaggy trunks

Just under control,

And set about bundling the forage,

Walking past me quietly

And down the switchback track through the pines

Towards the farms and villages lower down.

I waited until the voices faded

And then moved out into the sun.

The place felt cold suddenly

And a little threatening.

I sat in the dust for a while

Warming up.

I couldn’t help thinking about the risk

And the falls there must have been

During the lifespans of those trees.

                                 September 2012

Sitapani

Women from a village in the forest

Wash their children at the temple spring,

Feeding them with the meat of freshwater crabs

Just caught in the river below.

Curious and shy, they stare at me,

Smile back warmly when I smile.

Pink conch,

Cool on the lips

Sounded through the birdsong

At first light.

I snuff out the lamps in the shrines

Light incense

And go to make cinnamon tea,

Brewed in the hot ashes

On the veranda of the hut,

Watching the smoke go off into the sunlight.

There are tiger tracks

Under the Flame of the Forest trees up the hill.

Pristine forest:

Flocks of Blossom-Headed Parakeets

Fly across the canopy

On the other side of the river gorge,

There are Laughing Thrushes and Babblers

In the Lily Jungle below the terrace.

The river,

Fed by thermal springs,

Steams in the cooler air of the valley.

                                    September 2012

Under May Hill

Cider at the Glasshouse

Under May Hill,

Through Gifford’s Wood,

After the rain,

The level evening sun between the trees.

The Snug

Set in amber,

Shafts of light through a cigarette haze

Smoky cider in the glasses,

A damp gust when the door opens,

We are wet to the knees.

And all that weighed on us then

Is as if it had never been:

We were as insubstantial as the smoke

Winding through the rays,

Or the glare among the trees

That dismembered the wood,

A confusion of the senses,

An intoxication of light and movement.

After Time

In the cool night air

Cider happy, groping our way

In the blind dark,

The horse on the hill

Snorts and runs,

A vague shadow only,

And gasping, breathless, laughing,

We did not notice

That we too

Were shadows only.

                         August 2012

How Fragile

How fragile they were,

Those days

That world.

How evanescent,

Those moments

Melting into air.

     August 2012

No Trace

     

I could find no trace of the house again.

The living

Have crowded out the dead.

Sound of water now,

Lemon trees, oleander,

Villas deep in vegetation

Shouts of children

Where there was once

A desiccated field of olive trees

Star thistles

A solitary yellow house in the sun.

                August 2012

The Kiss

She is now a self-assured woman

In her mid-sixties

Head of her department

Living in New York.

The last time I saw her

Was the summer I got back from India

When I was twenty two

And she was still at school

And used to drop in to see me

For a chat and a smoke in her lunch hour.

I suppose I would have put the Beatles on,

The windows open to the hot suburb,

Told tales of my trip to India,

Scent of privet blowing in

A blackbird singing?

We met again at a reunion over here

Propped up the bar and talked.

It is curious

How little there is to be said

About fifty years of living.

She gave no indication

That she recalled those afternoons

Or how once, leaving,

She turned back from the door

Sat deftly on my knee

And kissed me.

Leaning on the bar

I enjoyed her composure

Her sense of irony.

I got the impression of an apartment in Manhattan

But I don’t think she told me anything

Of husbands or children.

As for me

The memory of that afternoon is sharp

Tactile.

I can still remember clearly

How light she felt,

For some reason I never forgot

The kiss we shared

All those years ago

When we were young.

          August 2012

Full Moon at Lulworth

Keats’ ship

At anchor in the bay

The star

The eternal watch

The dream.

Another time

The sky blazing with moonlight

The bright track on the water

Enclosed

Like the sound of the sea

In a shell.

Here there is no history

No world

We stand inside a skull

In the light.

Then

And no trace remains

Save when we hear it

The faint echo of the sea

At our ears.

         July 2012

Artemis and the Hunter

He dragged the trembling dogs
Down to the stream

And returned to the kill.

The birds had stopped singing

Nothing moved,

He had noticed the tall shape between the trees

Where there were no flying insects.

He decided

That in the time remaining

He would do everything that was fitting.

He lit a small fire,

And with a knife

That depicted on its blade
Actaeon pursued by his hounds,

Eviscerated the carcase and fed the dogs.

He cut thin strips from the meat

Laid them across the coals

Waited for the fat to burn

And sang a short strophe

In praise of the goddess.

Then he quartered the carcase

Brought water from the stream

Carefully doused the fire

Packed the wet satchel with the meat

And went back to the dogs. 

They cringed to the side of him

Away from the shape under the trees

While he examined their paws,

Pulled ticks and burrs

From their ears and lips.

(She thought: “How like a god he is,”

But it was his care for the dogs

That calmed her).

He came alert when the birds started to move,

The dogs perked up,

Hoverflies and midges

Filled that space between the trees again.

He grabbed his bag,

But the knife was nowhere to be seen.

He searched around for it frantically

And then started to run.

He ran for the rest of the day,

Following the dogs

And at night

Slept without a fire or food.

It would take him

Twenty such hunts as this

To buy another knife of that quality.

He remembered the knife seller’s patter:

“From the workshop of Hephaestus himself, sir.

A knife fit for a god!”

                                  July 2012

 Therma

The derelict hotel

Built only fifty years ago
Beside the hot springs at Therma

Is slowly falling into the Aegean,

The winter storms of the island

Scouring the foundations,

And the place is full of ghosts

Bumping the shutters when you pass

Washing back and forth through the empty rooms

Sighing like the sea dragging stones-

The ghosts of all the dead

Who came to the hotel seeking a cure

And who now swim in the night

Under the waters of the bay

Like luminous fish,

Or, in the day, if you look carefully,

They are still there

Forming and dissolving

In the diamonds on the water.

The children,

And the Athenian families

Playing on the beach and in the sea,

And the old sick people

Who have come to seek a cure

At the new bath house,

Taking their last sea dips,

Do not notice the ghosts at all,

The calm, glinting ghosts in the sea,

But the ghosts know

That death will soon come for the old and sick

Who stand knee deep in the water

Gazing mildly at the light on the sea,

The ghosts know

That death will soon bring them

Into their ruined hotel

Above the beach.

                      June 2012

 L'Après-midi d'un Faune

Perpetuated in this music

The memory of a summer afternoon

A distillation of heat and silence

Like a breeze of day

Warm on your skin   

And the feeling always of loss

The nymph

Gone to work in the town

Beyond this drowsy hillside among the trees

The clearings filled with pink willow herb

The falling notes of a flute

The down floating and clinging.

An undulating Herefordshire road

Dove grey through the amorous green,

The old motorcycle

Aspirating perfectly,

Breasting the hills,

Floating, rhapsodic,

Its deep sound

Exactly the pitch of the basses

In this lush orchestration.

She waits under the limes

Below the cathedral

In the tawny hour

Glimpsed in the distance

Through the traffic’s entanglements,

A distance widening through time,

A form, a scent,

A synesthetic caress of the strings

A touch

The rustle of bees in the limes

The warm breath of that summer

In this music.

                            June 2012

                                                                                                     
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.

The soldier 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 clichés:

“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 along 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 diary dated September 3^rd:

“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".

                                     
                                     

                               

                        
                      
                        
                           

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

An accident 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






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

In the Valley of the Moon

The moon

Was occupying the whole wooded valley,

Almost touching both sides,

In the heat of the day.

It was so big

It took fully 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

Which raised 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 woke 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 above the far hills.

                      March 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 the summer of 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 among the potsherds

Below the wall

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 foam 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.