In The Poetry

‘The Cormorant’ is dedicated to the one lonely male of the species that lives in the resort where I live. He’s been there for years; he’s never found a mate. I don’t think there are any female cormorants around, but this is for him. I wrote this in the Caf

Local Legend

Arriving late at the opera one night
I ran into Dr. Gradus ad Parnassum hastening down the marble stair,
swan-like. “I wouldn’t bother if I was you,” he confided.
“It’s a Verdi work written before he was born.
True, his version of the Faust legend is unique:
Faust tempts Mephistopheles to come up with something
besides the same old shit. Finally, at his wit’s end, the devil
urges Valentine to take his place, promising him big rewards
this side of Old Smoky. Then, wouldn’t you know, Gretchen gets involved.
They decide to make it into a harassment case. No sooner
does Faust hit the street than the breeze waffles his brow,
he can’t say where he came from, or if he ever had a youth
to be tempted back into.”
The bats arrived. It was their moment.
Twenty million bats fly out of an astonishingly low culvert
every night, in season. I kid you not. After a cursory swoop
or two, they all fly back in. It all happens in a matter of
minutes, seconds, almost. Which reminds me, have you chosen your second?
Mephisto wants you to use this foil. It works better.
No, there’s nothing wrong with it.

Hours later I stood with the good doctor
in a snow-encrusted orchard. He urged the value
of mustard plasters on me. “See, it makes sense.”
Yet we both knew they are poisonous in some climates,
though only if taken in minute quantities.

See you again, old thing.

In the years following the death of my friend and colleague Les Arnold in 1992 I wrote a poem in 31 parts which is based in part upon the Cotswold landscape looking towards the chalk of Salisbury Plain and that centres upon Arnolds Wood – a small area of woodland that I and his family and colleagues planted in his memory.

Section from Arnolds Wood

As we walked here
on the castle mound,
you told me you felt
you were walking
into a black tunnel.

now the strange, delicate
pink and white cyclamen
is out by the ivied stump
where I walk between classes
to rest my mind.

It is a quiet time
when light shining on the walls
seems to fall through centuries
picking out one question:

how to shape a life.

Saint Francis and the Sow

The bud

stands for all things,

even for those things that don’t flower,

for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;

though sometimes it is necessary

to reteach a thing its loveliness,

to put a hand on its brow

of the flower

and retell it in words and in touch

it is lovely

until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;

as Saint Francis

put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch

blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow

began remembering all down her thick length,

from the earthen snout all the way

through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,

from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine

down through the great broken heart

to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering

from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:

the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

Considering the Snail

The snail pushes through a green
night, for the grass is heavy
with water and meets over
the bright path he makes, where rain

has darkened the earth’s dark. He
moves in a wood of desire,

pale antlers barely stirring
as he hunts. I cannot tell
what power is at work, drenched there
with purpose, knowing nothing.
What is a snail’s fury? All
I think is that if later

I parted the blades above
the tunnel and saw the thin
trail of broken white across
litter, I would never have
imagined the slow passion
to that deliberate progress.

‘For Me’ is about when I first started running writing workshops. It always seemed to me that half-way through the workshop, somebody would say “For me, if it doesn’t rhyme, it’s not a poem”, and I thought, right:

For me

For me,
if it’s not got rockers
it’s not a chair.
It’s just a pile of sticks,
and you can pick a pile of sticks up
on the street

For me,
if there’s no flaps on the pockets
it’s not a suit.
It’s just a piece of cloth,
and you can pick a piece of cloth up
on the street.

For me,
if you can’t lock it
it’s not a briefcase,
it’s just a bit of leather,
and you can pick a bit of leather up
on the street

So here’s me,
rocking backwards and forwards on my chair,
flapping the flaps on my suit,
locking and unlocking my briefcase,
and trying to sick a splat of rhyme
on my verse to make it complete.

And you can’t fault that:
it’s neat.

‘Poem of Disconnected Parts’ is written in closed couplets – it’s meant to evoke some of the anger and confusion I feel when I read the newspaper. I hope the parts are not unconnected, but the jaggedness of the movement from one couplet to the next is meant to be expressive.

Poem of Disconnected Parts

At Robben Island the political prisoners studied.

They coined the motto Each one Teach one.

In Argentina the torturers demanded the prisoners

Address them always as “Profesor.”

Many of my friends are moved by guilt, but I

Am a creature of shame, I am ashamed to say.

Culture the lock, culture the key. Imagination

That calls boiled sheep heads “Smileys.”

The first year at Guant

Later

Later. I look out at the moon.
I lived here once.
I remember the song.

Later. No sound here.
Moon on linoleum.
A child frowning.

Later. A voice singing.
I open the back door.
I lived here once.

Later. I open the back door
Light gone. Dead trees.
Dead linoleum. Later.

Later. Blackness moving very fast.
Blackness fatly.
I live here now.

1974

Ruins of a Great House

though our longest sun sets at right declensions and makes but winter arches, it cannot be long before we lie down in darkness, and have our light in ashes…
Browne, Urn Burial

Stones only, the disjecta membra of this Great House,
Whose moth-like girls are mixed with candledust,
Remain to file the lizard’s dragonish claws.
The mouths of those gate cherubs shriek with stain;
Axle and coach wheel silted under the muck
Of cattle droppings.
Three crows flap for the trees
And settle, creaking the eucalyptus boughs.
A smell of dead limes quickens in the nose
The leprosy of empire.
‘Farewell, green fields,
Farewell, ye happy groves!’

Marble like Greece, like Faulkner’s South in stone,
Deciduous beauty prospered and is gone,
But where the lawn breaks in a rash of trees
A spade below dead leaves will ring the bone
Of some dead animal or human thing
Fallen from evil days, from evil times.

It seems that the original crops were limes
Grown in the silt that clogs the river’s skirt;
The imperious rakes are gone, their bright girls gone,
The river flows, obliterating hurt.
I climbed a wall with the grille ironwork
Of exiled craftsmen protecting that great house
From guilt, perhaps, but not from the worm’s rent
Nor from the padded cavalry of the mouse.
And when a wind shook in the limes I heard
What Kipling heard, the death of a great empire, the abuse
Of ignorance by Bible and by sword.

A green lawn, broken by low walls of stone,
Dipped to the rivulet, and pacing, I thought next
Of men like Hawkins, Walter Raleigh, Drake,
Ancestral murderers and poets, more perplexed
In memory now by every ulcerous crime.
The world’s green age then was a rotting lime
Whose stench became the charnel galleon’s text.
The rot remains with us, the men are gone.
But, as dead ash is lifted in a wind
That fans the blackening ember of the mind,
My eyes burned from the ashen prose of Donne.

Ablaze with rage I thought,
Some slave is rotting in this manorial lake,
But still the coal of my compassion fought
That Albion too was once
A colony like ours, ‘part of the continent, piece of the main’,
Nook-shotten, rook o’erblown, deranged
By foaming channels and the vain expense
Of bitter faction.
All in compassion ends
So differently from what the heart arranged:
‘as well as if a manor of thy friend’s…’

The Dark Side of the Head

I.M. Gwen Harwood,1920-1995

Just around the corner of the eye,
at every reach of its big screen,
there is a magic which is neither
black nor white, but only absent:
the disappearance of all world.

Even when the eyes are shut,
and all the field is pink or dark,
it still unhappens, at the rim
- a sudden gradual nothing,
beneath the notice, or beyond.

I sometimes hope that if
my head jerks leftwards, quick
as warp, I might just catch
the edge of right side visual field,
as if there is no dark side of the head

but one world only, seamless,
like the small curved universes
painted on the Grecian urns,
or like a Mercator projection
of the globe, that having mapped

itself, bent weirdly at the polar
ends, for flat-screen eyes,
now unmaps in reverse, becoming
whole again and full and round
and as satisfactory as heaven.