In The Poetry

Losing

We lose each other everywhere:
the children in department stores
return as parents, fils et p

Reading Leaves

A change of wind brings a few foreign leaves,
skimming the hedge and the dustbins,
landing on my lawn like splashes of blood.
I pick one up and try to read it, but the message
is in a language of reds I can’t decipher.
Its texture is of folded money, suggesting
a climate of plenty, wild parrots, a generous sky.

I [...]

The Good Neighbour

Somewhere along this street, unknown to me,
behind a maze of apple trees and stars,
he rises in the small hours, finds a book
and settles at a window or a desk
to see the morning in, alone for once,
unnamed, unburdened, happy in himself.

I don’t know who he is; I’ve never met him
walking to the fish-house, or [...]

The poem I’m going to read is ‘Blandeur’. Blandeur’s a made-up word, I couldn’t find the proper word in English to suggest this condition of sensory relief, edging on sensory deprivation, that I frequently yearn for.
Blandeur
If it please God,
let less happen.
Even out Earth’s
rondure, flatten
Eiger, blanden
the Grand Canyon.
Make valleys
slightly higher,
widen fissures
to arable land,
remand your
terrible glaciers
and [...]

A vignette from post-war Japan.

The Noodle-Vendor’s Flute

In a real city, from a real house,
At midnight by the ticking clocks,
In winter by the crackling roads:
Hearing the noodle-vendor’s flute,
Two single fragile falling notes…
But what can this small sing-song say,
Under the noise of war?
The flute itself a counterfeit
(Siberian wind can freeze the lips),
Merely a rubber bulb and metal [...]

The Lovers of the Poor

arrive. The Ladies from the Ladies’ Betterment League
Arrive in the afternoon, the late light slanting
In diluted gold bars across the boulevard brag
Of proud, seamed faces with mercy and murder hinting
Here, there, interrupting, all deep and debonair,
The pink paint on the innocence of fear;
Walk in a gingerly manner up the hall.
Cutting with [...]

The fourth sequence in Dante’s Heaven is called ‘Love is a Babe’, a sequence of poems around Beatrice’s voice.

Someone kissed me

Someone kissed me ―
Is it blood or lipstick
on my cheek?

Was it a thought
brushed past me
or a moth’s wing

but there, those scarlet stains
on my skin, my white dress.
I walk the Lungarno

near the Ponte Sante Trinit

Almost thirty years ago I was talking to the Nebraska poet William Kloefkorn on the street one day and he asked me if I’d been invited to read poems at an event out on Grand Island, Nebraska, and I said no I hadn’t heard about it at all and I was generally sort of angered [...]

Apart from birds I’ve written quite a lot of poems about insects and similar creatures.

Song of the Death-Watch Beetle

Here come I, the death-watch beetle
Chewing away at the great catherdral;

Gnawing the mediaeval beams
And the magnificent carved rood screen

Gorging on gospels and epistles
From the illuminated missals;

As once I ate the odes of Sappho
And the histories of Manetho,

The [...]

This poem is about my birth. My grandmother, my mother’s mother, was at my birth – she gave me my name after her husband who had recently died in a sudden accident.

My Arrival

Showing the creature I landed
I slipped from my mother’s womb
flesh connected, laced in a blood-spatter.

My father waited with a bottle of rum.
The moon [...]