In The Poetry

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 they did.
Listen to what’s to come.
Listen to the blood.
Listen to the drum.

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 search mi bag!
Man – straight to mi.
Like them did a-wait fi mi.
Come search mi bag, man.

Fi mi bag!
An wha them si in deh?
Two piece a yam, a dasheen,
a han a banana, a piece a pork
an mi lates Bob Marley.

Man all a suddn I feel
mi head nah fi mi. This yah now
is when man kill somody, nah!

‘Tony’, I sey, ‘hol on. Hol on,
Tony. Dohn shove. Dohn shove.
Dohn move neidda fis, tongue
nor emotion. Battn down, Tony.
Battn down.’ An, man, Tony win.

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 Book too.
Eadfrith the Saxon scribe/illuminator
incorporated cormorants I’m seeing fly
round the same island thirteen centuries later
into the In principio’sinitial I.
Billfrith’s begemmed the jewelled boards get looted
by raiders gung-ho for booty and berserk,
the sort of soldiery that’s still recruited
to do today’s dictators’ dirty work,
but the initials in St. John and in St. Mark
graced with local cormorants in ages,
we of a darker still keep calling Dark,
survive in those illuminated pages.
The word of God so beautifully scripted
by Eadfrith and Billfrith the anchorite
Pentagon conners have once again conscripted
to gloss the cross on the precision sight.
Candlepower, steady hand, gold leaf, a brush
were all that Edfrith had to beautify
the word of God much bandied by George Bush
whose word illuminated midnight sky
and confused the Baghdad cock who was betrayed
by bombs into believing day was dawning
and crowed his heart ot in a deadly raid
and didn’t live to greet a proper morning.
Now with noonday headlights in Kuwait
and the burial of the blackened in Baghdad
let them remember, all those who celebrate,
that their good news is someone else’s bad
or the light will never dawn on poor Mankind.
Is it open-armed all all the victory V,
that insular initial intertwined
with slack-necked cormorants from black lacquered sea,
with trumpets bulled and bellicose and blowing
for what men claim as victories in their wars,
with the fire-hailing cock and all those crowing
who don’t yet smell the dunghill at their claws?

The Sssnake Hotel

An Indian python will welcome you
to the Ssssnake hotel.
As he finds you your keys he’ll maybe enquire
if you’re feeling well.
And he’ll say that he hopes
you survive the night,
that you sleep without screaming
and don’t die of fright
at the Ssssnake hotel.

There’s an anaconda that likes to wander
the corridors at night,
and a boa that will lower itself onto guests
as they reach, reach out for the light.
And if, by chance, you lie awake
and nearby something hisses,
I warn you now, you’re about to be covered
in tiny vipery kisses,
at the Ssssnake hotel, at the Ssssnake hotel.

And should you hear a chorus of groans
coming from the room next door,
and the python cracking someone’s bones,
don’t go out and explore.
Just ignore all the screams
and the strangled yells
when you spend your weekend
at the Ssssnake hotel.

Remembering Carrigskeewaun

A wintry night, the hearth inhales
And the chimney becomes a windpipe
Fluffy with soot and thistledown,
A voice-box recalling animals:
The leveret come of age, snipe
At an angle, then the porpoises’
Demonstration of meaningless smiles.
Home is a hollow between the waves,
A clump of nettles, feathery winds,
And memory no longer than a day
When the animals come back to me
From the townland of Carrigskeewaun,
From a page lit by the Milky Way.

Watching television cowboys was how they learned to gallop; peeoo peeoo (that was the gun) and they smacked their bums (the horse’s back). We had the wireless: And now for our serial: ‘The Eagle of the Ninth.’ It was the end of the Empire. Hundreds of Roman soldiers had headed north and disappeared. I ran home to go looking for them. At school we mapped the Queen’s visit to Australia all along the classroom wall. Can you bring in pictures? No, there aren’t any pictures of the Queen in the Daily Worker. And soldiers, please. She wanted soldiers; there was trouble in Kenya but there was good news: locking them up seemed to be working, she said. Hopalong Cassidy, Cisco Kid, peeoo peeoo, who are you?

A woman who longs to buy an antique strand of amber beads imagines the woman who once wore them.

Amber

Coveted week after week on the market stall,
coiled, nonchalant, arrayed under the lid
of locked glass, they grew familiar.
She’d finger them, drop them over her head,
try them for size, spoilt for choice –
red-amber, yellow, cut Russian ruby,
or those sad rosaries, widow’s beads of Whitby jet.
In each bead surfaced the cloudy face of a woman.

Warmed by the sunlight on dressing tables,
or against a woman’s skin, then laid safe
in a drawer each night between the silk leaves
of her underwear. Never cold, as if
each bead were an unquenchable flame
that burned a million years like a sanctuary lamp
beneath the ice, each drop of sticky gold
hardening to honeyed stone.

As if nothing that has ever contained heat
can be cold again, mirrors never empty
and our rooms, furniture, hoarded amulets,
could reassemble themselves into a life
and still pass hand to hand from underneath
the permafrost, ice woman to living daughter.

Rapture

I can feel she has got out of bed.

That means it is seven A.M.

I have been lying with eyes shut,

thinking, or possibly dreaming,

of how she might look if, at breakfast,

I spoke about the hidden place in her

which, to me, is like a soprano’s tremolo,

and right then, over toast and bramble jelly,

if such things are possible, she came.

I imagine she would show it while trying to conceal it.

I imagine her hair would fall about her face

and she would become apparently downcast,

as she does at a concert when she is moved.

The hypnopompic play passes, and I open my eyes

and there she is, next to the bed,

bending to a low drawer, picking over

various small smooth black, white,

and pink items of underwear. She bends

so low her back runs parallel to the earth,

but there is no sway in it, there is little burden, the day has hardly begun.

The two mounds of muscles for walking, leaping, lovemaking,

lift toward the east – what can I say?

Simile is useless; there is nothing like them on earth.

Her breasts fall full; the nipples

are deep pink in the glare shining up through the iron bars

of the gate under the earth where those who could not love

press, wanting to be born again.

I reach out and take her wrist

and she falls back into bed and at once starts unbuttoning my pajamas.

Later, when I open my eyes, there she is again,

rummaging in the same low drawer.
The clock shows eight. Hmmm.

With huge, silent effort of great,

mounded muscles the earth has been turning.

She takes a piece of silken cloth

from the drawer and stands up. Under the falls

of hair her face has become quiet and downcast,

as if she will be, all day among strangers,

looking down inside herself at our rapture.

Eighth Period

Last year’s sexkitten, out of work again,
(mean effrontress, chased and bare)
saunters about the grounds with her great Dane,
as sandy blonde as that lassitude of hair -
boy-hunting, leash seductively in hand.
Four o’clock and time to make a stand.

I plot my progress through the room to reach
the window for a glimpse of her, compare
her insinuity with these hulks I teach,
mobile jumble-sales with sweep’s-brush hair.
One week to go. Difficult to think
by then they’ll learn to dress like her and slink.

Drama for Today. She reads a speech,
a mother deprived of husband and only son
in the World War. (Once more undo her breach,
dear friends.) The long day’s task is done.
The slumping class as usual does not hear,
luckily. She speaks with passion. And they’d jeer.

Only I hear and follow closely now,
head in the book to hide my smarting eyes,
tensing for fear I have to pick a row
with some lout there before that passion dies.
This part of her may last until the bell,
perhaps a year. A glance outside may tell.

Untrammelled sunset across the silt plain
leans in the window, deriding all shapes,
knocking the shadows sideways once again.
Chalk dust solidifies two broken scapes
propped on the sill. Some day soon
that girl will find her shadow squat at noon.

And this one? She’ll leave, now that she can,
to work for drinks, good lays and a night’s rest.
And then she’ll feel it in her bones how man
is easy straight up or flat out at best;
till at her gate one evening she will stand
watching his shadow deformed by ploughed land.