In The Poetry

Man in the Street

He claps a hand
across the gaping hole –

or else the sight might
well inside to

melt the mind (if any
thinking spoke

were in the wheel,
or any real

fright-fragments broke
out of the gorge to

soak the breast, the meaning
might incite a stroke – best

press against it, close
the clawhole, stand

in stupor, petrified. The dream
be damned, the deeps defied.

The [...]

Then I also, after ‘Self Employed’, sometime later wrote ‘Curriculum Vitae’ and at the end of it I allude to something that Yeats said (close paraphrase if not the exact words): he said “rhetoric comes from the quarrel one has with the world, and poetry comes from the quarrel one has with oneself.”

‘Curriculum Vitae’

1

Scribe [...]

Man on the Moon

Hardly a feature in the evening sky
As yet-near the horizon the cold glow
Of rose and mauve which, as you look on high,
Deepens to Giotto’s dream of indigo.

Hardly a star as yet. And then that frail
Sliver of moon like a thin peel of soap
Gouged by a nail, or the paring of a nail:
Slender [...]

One for St Joseph.

The Pay for Fosterage

The carpenter could have stayed
hunched over, at work on his chagrin,
left everything to the hush-ups
and stone-evadings of women.
He could have escaped the thousands
of years of speculation. The horns.
But all that weakness was behind him.
The courteous presence had spoken
unearthly sense to its equal,
himself. As he would be from now
on into [...]

The Clocks of the Dead

One night I went to keep the clock company.
It had a loud tick after midnight
As if it were uncommonly afraid.
It’s like whistling past a graveyard,
I explained.
In any case, I told him I understood.

Once there were clocks like that
In every kitchen in America.
Now the factory’s windows are all broken.
The old men [...]

Seven Types of Shadow

Part iii

This is a country of ghosts. Down the eastern shore
Lie the drowned villages, drowned luggers, drowned sailors.

After a hot summer, fields grow talkative.
Wheat speaks in crop marks, grasses in parch marks.

Wheat or grass, what they tell is the truth
Of things that lay underneath five thousand years ago,

The forts, the barrows, the [...]

The ballad of Donna Quixote

I want to be
a Viennese lady
eating up Art in a cloche.

I want to walk
down the Champs-

Blood and Lead

Listen to what they did.
Don’t listen to what they said.
What was written in blood
Has been set up in lead.

Lead tears the heart.
Lead tears the brain.
What was written in blood
Has been set up again.

The heart is a drum.
The drum has a snare.
The snare is in the blood.
The blood is in the air.

Listen to what [...]

This poem is an experience in London when I came from America (and went back home and stayed awhile and then I came to England) and I was living in Brixton at the time. The poem is called:

In-a Brixtan Markit

I walk in-a Brixtan markit,
believin I a respectable man,
you know. An wha happn?

Policeman come straight up
an [...]

Initial Illumination

Farne cormorants with catches in their beaks
shower fishscale confetti on the shining sea.
The first bright weather here for many weeks
for my Sunday G-Day train bound for Dundee,
off to St Andrew’s to record a reading,
doubtful, in these dark days, what poems can do,
and watching the mists round Lindisfarne receding
my doubt extends to Dark Age Good [...]