In The Poetry

Her

I had been told about her.
How she would always, always.
How she would never, never.
I’d watched and listened

but I still fell for her,
how she always, always.
How she never, never.

In the small brave night,
her lips, butterfly moments.
I tried to catch her and she laughed
a loud laugh that cracked me in two,
but then I had been told about her,
how she would always, always.
How she would never, never.

We two listened to the wind.
We two galloped a pace.
We two, up and away, away, away.
And now she’s gone,
like she said she would go.
But then I had been told about her -
how she would always, always.

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.

White Vase

Two figures on a sofa, side by side,
The stench of bitter almonds, smoke and sweat;
A man who ate no meat lies with his bride.

Fresh tulips and narcissi cast aside,
A white vase tipped; a chiffon dress splashed wet.
Two figures on a sofa, side by side.

The room is hushed, its spell defies the tide
Of history – no servants enter yet.
A man who could not paint lies with his bride.

Her spittle flecked with glass and cyanide,
Her buckskin pumps beneath the blue banquette.
Two figures on a sofa side by side.

The brimstone face grown slack and glassy-eyed,
Its shattered skull concealed in sillouette.
A man who blamed the world lies with his bride.

Outside, the spring has come while worlds collide.
Here, blood and water drip in grim duet.
Two figures on a sofa, side by side:
A man who ate no meat lies with his bride.

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…’

Variation On An Old Rhyme

This is the blackbird that wakes with a song.

This is the sun
That shines for the blackbird that wakes with a song.

This is the earth
That welcomes the sun
That shines for the blackbird that wakes with a song.

This is the snow that fell through the night
That covers the earth
That welcomes the sun
That shines for the blackbird that wakes with a song.

These are the children that cry with delight
That play in the snow that fell through the night
That covers the earth
That welcomes the sun
That shines for the blackbird that wakes with a song.

This is the wonderland of white
That surrounds the children that cry with delight
That play in the snow that fell through the night
That covers the earth
That welcomes the sun
That shines for the blackbird that wakes with a song.

This is the quarrel that started the fight
That stains the wonderland of white
That surrounds the children that cry with delight
That play in the snow that fell through the night
That covers the earth
That welcomes the sun
That shines for the blackbird that wakes with a song.

This is the wrong that none can put right
That caused the quarrel that started the fight
That stains the wonderland of white
That surrounds the children that cry with delight
That play in the snow that fell through the night
That covers the earth
That welcomes the sun
That shines for the blackbird that wakes with a song.

These are the nations in all their might
That suffer the wrong that none can put right
That caused the quarrel that started the fight
That stains the wonderland of white
That surrounds the children that cry with delight
That play in the snow that fell through the night
That covers the earth
That welcomes the sun
That shines for the blackbird that wakes with a song.

And this is the song that goes on in spite
Of all the nations in all their might
That suffer the wrong that none can put right
That caused the quarrel that started the fight
That stains the wonderland of white
That surrounds the children that cry with delight
That play in the snow that fell through the night
That covers the earth
That welcomes the sun
That shines just the same on everyone.

November in Devon

Leaving Plymouth last seen after first smashed by bombs,
Driving North all the morning after rain
Towards Hartland’s hospitable hearth
Through landscapes clad in disruptive pattern
Material edged be hedge or walls of dry-stone:

Under a cover of commingling cloud and clear,
Drifts of drab haze transpierced by wet blue slate,
Between lofty moor and deep glen
Past lanes twisting off into the arcane
We spin towards midday’s strengthening sun.

After Launceston eleven o’clock approaches
At a thousand revs per minute four times
Beneath us: the car radio
Picks up brass playing Nimrod in Whitehall,
Rearousing a reticent love for this land.

While memory brings back like a sepia still
Holding my mother’s hand in a Bournemouth
Doorway during the first of all
Remembrance Days’ two minutes of silence,
Today I anticipate the advent of death.

A parade of folk sporting mass-produced poppies
In the next village briefly delays us
At a border-point round which spread
Areas of age-old non-violence.
In ivy-dark gardens hang white rags of late rose.

An abrupt paranoia wonders just how sure
One can be now that no secret convoy
Was out during last night on roads
Linking Hinckley Point and Bull head, that near-
by tin-mines or tumuli hide no lethal hoards.

At half my age this might have worried me more.
The South country kept my childhood secure.
Now I know that to Whinny-moor
Before long I shall come, as one more year
Declines towards departure in deceptive calm.

Puriri

A puriri moth’s wing
lies light in my hand

my breath can lift it ―

light as this torn wing
we lie on love’s breath.

In Britain when you make a phone call and hesitate before dialling a recorded voice comes on and says, ‘Please hang up and try again.’

The Excuse

Please hang up… I try again
“My father’s sudden death has shocked us all”
Even me, and I’ve just made it up,
Like the puncture, the cheque in the post,
Or my realistic cough. As I’m believed,
I’m off the hook. But something snags and holds.

My people were magicians. Home from school,
I followed a wire beneath the table to
A doorbell. I rang it. My father looked up.

Son, when your uncle gets me on the phone
He won’t let go. I had to rig up something.

Midnight. I pick up and there’s no one there,
No one, invoked, beyond that drone. But if
I had to rig up something, and I do,
Let my excuse be this, and this is true:
I fear for him and grieve him more than any,
This most deceiving and deceived of men…
Please hang up and try again.

Well, Francis, Where’s the Sun?

They buried him in this complete basilica
But let him roast the Umbrian countryside,
Brother Sun, baked as hard as silica,
With Clare, as clear as conscience, by his side.

But where’s the sun today? Its canticle
Is sung by orphans on a pilgrimage.
The sun’s not in his high conventicle
As Maga bends to wash the feet of Mage.

Brother Wolf and Brother Body, pity
Brother Sky’s minute particulars,
Which must conceal in serendipity,
The love that moves the sun and the other stars.