Month: Jun 2020

It is to you, the children carried
clapped to the parental back,
careering absently so married
through this wilderness, I speak:

I am the dangerous seducer
you were always warned about;
don’t worry then if I produce a
bag of sweets, present a doubt,

it’s just my way. The chance I offer
(get into the car) is this:
to join me on the journey of a
lifetime, no return. “Do his

advances merit any trust?” I
hear you ask. St Christopher
approves such transports, he is my
guarantee. If you prefer

we’ll only talk this time- an
introduction, if you like,
to vistas as a mountain climber
takes the summit, plants his spike

and starts again for home. This I can
give you, this and more. I know
you’ll probably refuse, and like a
nice well-brought-up infant, go

away and tell on me; however,
(since the car is moving now)
why don’t you stay awhile? You never
know just what you might allow

yourself, reminded by the senses
(feel the quickening in my thighs)
of what you can be. Confidences
such as this are rare, say I.

Now you are mine, the change of horses
made and irreversible;
the child who rides with me, of course, is
lost, elusive, terrible.

I: BOY AMONG THE ROSES

Torn between blossom and thorn
in the half-light of morning-
which is it to be?
Soon
from a possible noon
will come practical fire:
just now, there is just
The desire

II: SWANS (Le blanc souci de notre toile)

Wingless littering the lake
wings open papering the void-
perfect, they say nothing, feed, take
human lovers, are destroyed.

Silence is white, an empty page
clean sheets and airless virgin skies;
and after innocence, a cage
of birdsong where the black stars rise.

III: SIBELIUS’S EIGHTH SYMPHONY

icefall nightfall the air is thin
sounds will not carry in the dark

IV: A MIRROR SINGS

Meaning and antiphon: that figure both
present and distant is yourself as yet
unclothed in my apartfulness: beware.

V: METICULOUS, PAST MIDNIGHT IN CLEAR RIME…

No sleep tonight. I know a place
where moonlight stiffens on the face

where marble gods embrace below
the cloudy falling six-fold snow

there, silent and in silence lie
apart together you and I

VI: DEADLY VIRTUE

Well-dressed, scrubbed until
untouchable, these operators near
the senseless, the nude
soon-to-be-grateful but as yet
unwounded flesh:

clean, clean, the arrogant ways
of expert purity

VII: A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME

Horizon
and half-moon
rise by one
whole semitone

Voices break
the baroque
figures lark
to their music

On the stave
a relief
they believe
the death-motif

VIII: MAY

In the middle was the word
I was an egg once calls the bird

O madrigaux the parachutes
are open falling put down roots

They come in singles leave in pairs
laughing the water runs upstairs

May probably perhaps we’ll see
a month of possibility

Odes IV.I

Oh God, are we off to war
again, after all this time?
Spare me, Venus, for fuck’s sake!
I’m not the man I once was
back in the day (or the night),
and fifty years have hardened
me against such soft delights.

So, if this Mutha’s after
a hot time, better to look
elsewhere; why don’t you drive round
to Rucellus Brandus’ place?
He’s right where it’s at, and not
just a pretty face as the
hapless he speaks for will know.

He’s the one with the talent
to move into new markets,
push your label, and see off
the opposition. He will
build for you, a nice and white
marble statue near a lake
somewhere, in a cedar grove.

There will be music and drugs;
a woodwind, strings and brass mix
all for your praise, your pleasure.
Boys and girls will swing for you,
but for myself – I think not.
Love is history now, drink
bores me, I have allergies.

So why, my Ligurinus,
why all these idle tears, this
tell of a stumbling tongue?
Why is it in dreams that now
I hold you fast, now follow
you, hard, across a grassy
parade ground, into the sea?

Odes IV.10

Cocktease, and currently licensed to thrill,
when down has sprouted on your cheeks, and when
those lovely long tresses are thinned and shorn,
and when the rosebud skin tones are all gone;
you’ll wonder, Ligurinus, as you look
at all those wrinkles in the mirror: “Why,
if youth is wasted on the young, can’t I
enjoy both beauty and experience?”

Odes IV.7

The snows have melted. Fields are greening up,
the trees are now in bud;
the earth is altering, the rivers fall
to babble after flood;

The Nymphs and Graces take the plunge; they strip,
dance naked out of doors.
But you are not immortal warn the hours,
the passage of the years.

The turning of the seasons: winter dies
on a warm breeze, as spring
is overrun by summer, autumn’s gold
by winter stiffening.

Monthly, the running moons renew themselves;
but for the likes of us,
once we join our elders and our betters,
well, we are shadows, dust.

Who knows how long, how far, for how many
days the gods will spare us,
so go on, treat yourself, and spend, spend, spend,
leave nothing for your heirs.

Once you’re dead, my Torquatus, that’s your lot;
once judgement has been done,
no virtues, pleading, family influence
can bring you back: you’re gone.

Diana could not spare Hippolytus,
pure as he was, from pain;
nor Theseus his dear Pirithöus,
from death’s consuming chain.

Thus ends a first collection drawn from my writing over the years. Another to follow.

We shall take several forms
before turning to the worms:
our flesh aspires to the Word
as the tadpole to the toad,
the nestling to the raptor;
stories of change and capture,
parables of flux and greed.

Song of the earth   o the grief and the shriek
of it all   the anger and storming out
the retreat   the keening of seabirds   bleak
and belonging   the long-echoing shout

that is a music still   broken and bare
as the stack   as the waves   as reflected
light over the old hills   here is nowhere
and everything   bells   the heavenly dead

What pretence has the art to claim kindred with poetry but by its power over the imagination? To this power the painter of genius directs his attention…

I: THE DEATH OF THE VIRGIN

after Michelangelo Meresi (Caravaggio)

Art stands apart. As adamant as all
screen temptresses, she keeps her jewelled eye
in fighting trim. Lids lift, its iris winks
from pools of sorrow onto gloss, fool’s gold,
fun-furs; sun-dusts such ugly hurtful stuff.

Abstract at last, that fatal madam sprawls
(she never even knew the gentlemen);
if I kiss this inviting virgin’s lips,
or look, thorns blossom womb-torn blood. Not God,
but lust usurps us; untruth turns up trumps.

II: L’EMBARQUEMENT POUR CYTHÈRE

after Jean-Antoine Watteau

Islands and their music; sirens
calling us from across town
it’s time to get up and leave
now they sing all together
they sing and blow the expense
and off we go, everyone
on board, each with their grief

III: CLOACA

after Vim Delvoye

A genesis betwixt
and between excrements:
extreme, infinitely
replicable machines
make plain these passages
of matter: many forms
of coiled and cooling shit

A brand, a sacrament
a marque: poise of countless
obedient moving
parts, tooling their perfect
objects of devotion:
stool and motion, the hard
business of a hard art

IV: FOYER DE LA DANSE

after Edgar Degas

Pastels, gouaches
the surest of hands
catching attitudes

crouches, the pliés
poised and perfected
the yes that means no

as the casting couch
claims and dispatches
you, gauzes and tulles

to the back of the row;
you bend your body
to the line of the barre

look to the artist
to remember: you
as you really are

V: HURRICANE

after Rachel Whiteread

As if the air were to come to itself
suddenly about us, our houses thick
with its waste of matter: plaster, plastic,
water, mud. As if we were set aside,
our echoes and shadows pressed to the edge
of a new nothing. As if we were dead.

VI: FATBERGS

after Joseph Beuys

Unhomed, we have taken to your voids
the gaps between downpipes and culverts
pylons and ramps, moulding to the cracks
in your curation. We rot and weep
beneath your feet, the chips and dust from
your social sculpture. Take a wet-wipe
and burnish your modest space. Flush it
and be thankful for some room to breathe.

VII: MARSYAS

after Tiziano Vecelli (Titian)

Exemplar of the late style: oblique
other-worldly: something torn to pieces
by its act of making: message from the front
although rising above it in the grand manner

An extremis: take it or leave it
this colour-field will find you as it found
all of them: fools for life playing to the end
a skin considered their own quite slipping away

VIII: DROPPING A HAN DYNASTY URN

after Ai Weiwei

Earth, running to greet its past
with a kiss; alone at last
in an ecstasy of dust

A falling leaf: a return
to sender with a puzzled frown:
a whisper: were you the one?

IX: A SECRET SERVICE

after Jan Gossaert

Some angels are not in excelcis
but are fallen, hidden, out back
with the other animals; they look
at us askance, wear the face
of an artist, strive to comprehend
the why of glory in such ruin,
this business of an adoration
in the shadow of the world’s end.

I am food for what I am good for – worms.

Too late or perhaps
too early not yet
in the First-Person
Peculiar instead
re-animation
of a corpse-corpus

Sins of the Father
have come visiting
here a dissection
of what might be true
folly in this craic
between syllables

This alchemy of
filthy creation
forensic thrillers
well-made and cooling
to the Doctor’s touch
are just the business

The remains (ghastly!)
tease and provoke us
into tragedy
as a fit response
or else the glee
of a squat cretin

Move along now there’s
nothing for you here
give us a laugh help
us to understand
life as an illness
the cure curare

Today we shot the last of the huskies
such are the trials of use and sacrifice

of butchered seal-blubber and reindeer skin
drawn taut over frostbitten ghosts of men

as much as we might drive our colours north
toward the frozen axle of the earth

subzero and its stricken images
persist   snowpack   windchill   glacial seas

a great white silence at the end of life
we’re going nowhere now   nowhere is safe

Back after a brief spell for another
frantic rummage in the dressing-up box

Believe you me there is nothing to touch
the gaudy pomp of each year’s renewal

A flourish of the chestnut-monstrances
the eucharists of petal in the dirt

Previously published in The Warwick Review (2012)

it wasn’t her fault
it’d been raining
don’t forget and if
he had followed her in
who knows the trouble
he’d have saved himself
(and her) you know all
that wild talk all those
embarrassing flowers
it was frightening
upsetting the way
he would spend whole nights
there staring down at
the brook just singing
no wonder he drowned

sad but what to do
it wasn’t her fault
and anyway as
everyone said she
was much better off
with her hunter (now
there was a real man)

Previously published in PN Review 163 (2005)

The ice become slush
thus the opening gambit
of another year
a moodiness offset by
some sun, the first aconite.

Moss is luminous
in this wet and winter wood
wherever dark is
green is, hard at work for us
for those that may look and see.

Instead of the spring
here is another winter
and another, walls
of snow that build as a brief
reminder of age and graves.

The seasonal bugs
are abroad, cutting our throats
we splutter and hack
behind curtains as the rain
falls across empty pavements.

Now, with sudden warmth
and quick as a granted wish
all is white again
hedgerows laden and vivid
with blankets of sloe blossom.

The bedsheets are damp
with sweat and with our concern
the tumour is out
and we are waiting for news
a reprieve, as the grass dies.

Heat is upon us
and without the wash of rain
gardens now retreat
into themselves, to a green
memory of death outgrown.

But not yet outrun
as the fires of our making
enfold us, our flood
of ruin sweeping through woods
to a black and burning sea.

Islands on the edge
of the world, still blown and scoured
by oceanic wind
seaweeds and blots of sphagnum
clinging to their weary rock.

So far, so gorgeous
as the opening stanzas
of our fall proclaim
perfection of the gages
ripe and rotting in our hands.

Insinuation
of the light into landscape
lower and older
now as the bushes declare
their glittering, bletted haws.

Lie down and look up
through the rose and ochre leaves
to the flawless blue
of this moment, a last glow
before the day’s withering.

The twigs at twilight
clattering on the windows
remind us, remain
as a dark and slender thought
to see us over the ice.

After the beating, release
and every cell not guilty
by virtue of herbal teas

The blessings of SS Vervain
and Valerian rain down
on us, to assuage our pain

To bathe us in the waters
of a lo-salt godliness,
to excuse us our real tears

The lucky men are up nights
in the Old Town, turning gold
into piss, to river-mud
that will rise and worship them

Their women are repulsive
mouthy and bearded, grasping
from the altar; no wonder
dirt seems the better option

Good shit from this Schatzkammer
but how to beat the clock, be
steeled against all withering?
OK folks, this is the deal

Build a robot, lose your soul

to mime a parody
of boyhood to what end
but this curse of the free
to fly and never land

a broken whistling
of wind in the reed-beds
a warning voice that sings
on the incoming tide

a cloven body struts
to this inner music
contrapposto it is
the allure of the sick

out of the borrowed skins
the tic-tic and the itch
uncoil a dream begins
to die while we all watch

is a thread in the long past
of every particle of dust

the flickering bloom-and-bust
of a slippery rippling crust

the running and sudden flight
of the fish-men into their net

the bloat and the burning-out
of all suns and the end of light

Once or twice in a lifetime
a shadow defines the flame

as sharp and unsettling
as an X-ray of the lung

as the path of a bullet
the burn of a cigarette

she comes to us a dark thought
to furrow our brief delight

One day all of this shall pass
as through filters and smoked glass

Blood caught and blood sold
tricky rivers of gold
that run to us through
tall African grasses

The waters and rust
of our wealth compounded
rich as the red-shift
of an exploding star

As the virgin earth
become flush with labour
the sun rebranded
as a quickening pyre

The woodland vampire
fleshy fingers haunt
this hazel coppice

A rapist, breeding
in its coffin-soil
this blanket of leaves

You are elusive
cryptic, teeth and nails
of the carnivore

We are hunting you
walking the grid for
you, recording you

Your white meat moving
from tree to tree, from
one world to the next

Up against the wall in full flower:
flesh-pennies; phallus/omphalos;
ur-salad; sovereign for slow
waters; logo for Nature’s loos.