In The Poetry

Elegy of the Flowing Touch

Almost anywhere there’s a poem lying around
Waiting for someone to lift it up, dust it off,

For instance, the argument with a neighbour
About a large dog: was it a German Shepherd

Or a mutt? Would it jump into the sea hereabouts
To save a child, if a child went overboard?

The argument was conducted in civilized terms,
But we stood in the street, there were distractions,

In spite of which we both felt for the crux:
Does a dog have a will capable of the Good?

Insistent as I was that, however eagerly it swam
Toward the child, a mutt, being untrained,

Might forget the good it had set out to do,
I was brooding on something else – the dignity

Of the dog, whatever it was, standing as we had seen it
There on the prow of a small rubber boat;

That figurehead of a dog, did it know
How dignified it might look to the likes of us?

Who cared if it jumped into the water?
Who cared if it collared a floundering child?

And under the brooding lurked, not yet material,
A poem scheming to coax into focus a local image –

Ten dinghies fluttering tiny peppermint sails,
Each dinghy a nest with two children in it,

Strung out on a cord behind the rubber mother boat,
All the children laughing, waving, and feeling free,

The bursts of song from the children’s throats,
And before them, gold against an oceanic blue,

The figurehead dog, ears pinned back by the wind,
His attention to it all, and a great joy in his jowls.

Even then, the scene: and the poem would pivot
On breathlessness, a moment of suspense.

How, it would say, as the procession of dinghies
Headed away from the coast and out to sea,

Either their voices had passed out of earshot,
Or else the children were learning fear.

The silence now as they skim over the water.
The blue of a ravening deep underneath them.

Several years ago I took a kind of private vow that I would give no readings that don’t explicitly acknowledge the wider suffering of the world, which some of us feel, others of us are privileged to only know from newspapers, and yet which every day bring the evidence of our extraordinary capacity for an incomprehensible inhumaneness, one toward the other. In this case the poem recalls the genocide in Rwanda.

Manners / Rwanda

They took the woman
and tied to one arm a child
to the other arm a child
to one leg a child
to the other leg a child -
you also read this in the paper -
and threw them all in.
No marks of damage, not one
on the five bodies,
which means of course
that they drowned,
which means of course
that she knew.
The river made its way
from higher ground toward lower
and carried them with decorum,
the way a river does,
it carries what it is given,
and because in the night
a border was crossed,
what was given then was
taken out with a pole.
It may have been untied
before being added
to the tally sheet with others
and given next
to the quicklime and earth,
but probably not.
There it will likely stay,
where it was carried,
the last contact
with anything living
a hand’s continuing rising,
almost a waving,
almost a plea,
letting go after rolling it in.
The two beats of the fall
almost gentle,
a door being carefully opened,
quietly closed.
And though you too
are sickened, as even the river
is sickened, undrinkable now
with the human heart,
you also carry
what you were given with decorum.
Perhaps reminded later
by something mentioned
only in passing -
a large family,
a cat’s toy of string -
you stop smiling a moment soon.
Across the table
someone notices,
but does not speak.
You watch his question rise
and seem to waver like a hand
about to act,
a hand about to change its mind,
then drop politely away.

During the War

When my brother came home from war
he carried his left arm in a black sling
but assured us most of it was still there.
Spring was late, the trees forgot to leaf out.

I stood in a long line waiting for bread.
The woman behind me said it was shameless,
someone as strong as I still home, still intact
while her Michael was burning to death.

Yes, she could feel the fire, could smell
his pain all the way from Tarawa -
or was it Midway? -and he so young,
younger than I, who was only fourteen,

taller, more handsome in his white uniform
turning slowly gray the way unprimed wood
grays slowly in the grate when the flames
sputter and die. “I think I’m going mad,”

she said when I turned to face her. She placed
both hands on my shoulders, kissed each eyelid,
hugged me to her breasts and whispered wetly
in my bad ear words I’d never heard before.

When I got home my brother ate the bread
carefully one slice at a time until
nothing was left but a blank plate. “Did you see her,”
he asked, “the woman in hell, Michael’s wife?”

That afternoon I walked the crowded streets
looking for something I couldn’t name,
something familiar, a face or a voice or less,
but not these shards of ash that fell from heaven.

The Rose

a labyrinth,
as if at its center,
god would be there -
but at the center, only rose,
where rose came from,
where rose grows -
& us, inside of the lips & lips:
the likenesses, the eyes, & the hair,
we are born of,
fed by, & marry with,
only flesh itself, only its passage
– out of where? to where?

Then god the mother said to Jim, in a dream,
Never mind you, Jim,
come rest again on the country porch of my knees.

This is a version of a famous poem by Mallarme called ‘Brise Marine’

Sea Wind

(Mallarme)

It’s a sad creature I’m afraid the body
all the classics – every book that stands steady
I on my shelves I’ve read them through but only
to make this wish – oh to walk to the edge of the sea
and watch stints skittering along the tideline
then scattering up and beyond into the sky!
not a thing – not the gardens of mouldy chateaus
wet and glaucous in her eyes -
not a thing no one will stop me I’ve got to go
down to the wild sea – I tell you not nights
crossing blank pages under my desklamp
- not that desert wild or the sigh
of a dumpy girl breastfeeding her child
will stop me booking a berth on some tramp
steamer heaving its rust toward the tropics

- I’ll wave my snotrag from the deck sick
of stroking my own boredom – by the saltstained smokestack
let me dream of wind and wrecks!

‘Paradise’ is about something that really happened to me. I saw a fight between a sparrowhawk, or a kestrel, and a smaller songbird in the sky, and a spot of blood did fall down and it fell on to my hand. And I also saw a storm, I experienced a storm, as it came over the Bristol channel, into Porthcawl, and I looked at it coming, and I took refuge.

Paradise

Above me the sparrow
and above the sparrow

the shape of the hawk,
the sparrowhawk itself.

But how soon the sky is emptied of both
the sparrow and its terrorised song.

Yet one drop of blood
has fallen onto my hand

and I carry it gravely like a child
wanting a father’s word for some unworded thing,

evidence, surely evidence,
though of what he will now never say

and soon I am on the summit of the dune
and out on the ocean

I see the altars of rain
from which shapes of birds are rebounding

as if from a forcefield, black
sparks from the black

conflagration of rain coming my way
at such a speed the eye can hardly take it in

and now that black rain
is falling and the black shapes of birds,

sparrows and sparrowhawks, crying in their outrage,
and there’s lightning like the circuitry, botched,

modern, fed through a medieval mosque,
and how soon it is twisting around me, the storm’s black

jalabiyah and the rain looking like
some ziggurat the dictator

demanded built, a black and empty
tower where the rain twists itself

in handfuls of black roots
ripped from this earth,

and the storm’s a perfect cylinder
contructed by the mechanics of the air

and I think surely if there are paradigms
of paradise they are found

within the storm’s anterooms,
lit now only

by the black light of its rose-window,
for now it’s a cathedral that’s passing overhead,

a supersonic corral
of prayer with the sound of choirs shouting their amazement

and the rain crackling like soldered rods
as if the stones on this summit

were still hot from their first configuration,
and then it is gone, growling into the north, gone from the dune

the storm headed north,
and who were they, I wonder,

the man in the black coat with the child
in her black hood under his arm

who brushed past when I could not move
or even stand for rain

leaving me behind and my sky
and my skin and my voice gnawed white.

A poem called ‘A Blade of Grass’.

You ask for a poem.
I offer you a blade of grass.
You say it is not good enough.
You ask for a poem.

I say this blade of grass will do.
It has dressed itself in frost,
It is more immediate
Than any image of my making.

You say it is not a poem.
It is a blade of grass and grass
Is not quite good enough.
I offer you a blade of grass.

You are indignant.
You say it is too easy to offer grass.
It is absurd.
Anyone can offer a blade of grass.

You ask for a poem.
And so I write you a tragedy about
How a blade of grass
Becomes more and more difficult to offer,

And about how as you grow older
A blade of grass
Becomes more difficult to accept.

Elegant Sibyl

Having become an expert at false tones
as the voices slide lower or higher than intended
out of control, having heard so many lies
seen so many faces altering crazily
trying to hide their real motives,
having pondered the fate of those who came to consult her
and how little difference any words make,
her gaze is now withdrawn and watchful as a diplomat’s.
Her lips, though still full, meet firmly in a straight hard line.

But her feathered cloak and tall head-dress of glorious plumage
are so elegant, no one can resist her.
The Emperor comes to hear her pronounce almost daily.
All the rich men’s wives copy her style.

Alone at last, she strips off her regalia
lets the fine cloak drop to the floor
pushes strong fingers through the stubble of cropped hair
and climbs into the deep stone bath of water so cold
that even at the height of summer she shudders, and in winter
the effort of will the action demands
has become her greatest indulgence.

Only then is she able to think of the god and wait his pleasure.

I like to write about children, especially about their talk because they say very wise things and ask very strange and wonderful questions. And also they love to play in the middle of it all frequently. So asking questions and loving to play – I sometimes think that’s what education should be about. This poem is called ‘Poem from a Three Year Old’.

Poem from a Three Year Old

And will the flowers die?

And will the people die?

And every day do you grow old, do I
grow old, no I’m not old, do
flowers grow old?

Old things – do you throw them out?

Do you throw old people out?

And how you know a flower that’s old?

The petals fall, the petals fall from flowers,
and do the petals fall from people too,
every day more petals fall until the
floor where I would like to play I
want to play is covered with old
flowers and people all the same
together lying there with petals fallen
on the dirty floor I want to play
the floor you come and sweep
with the huge broom.

The dirt you sweep, what happens that,
what happens all the dirt you sweep
from flowers and people, what
happens all the dirt? Is all the
dirt what’s left of flowers and
people, all the dirt there in a
heap under the huge broom that
sweeps everything away.

Why you work so hard, why brush
and sweep to make a heap of dirt?
And who will bring new flowers?
And who will bring new people? Who will
bring new flowers to put in water
where no petals fall on to the
floor where I would like to
play? Who will bring new flowers
that will not hang their heads
like tired old people wanting sleep?
Who will bring new flowers that
do not split and shrivel every
day? And if we have new flowers,
will we have new people too to
keep the flowers alive and give
them water?

And will the new young flowers die?

And will the new young people die?

And why?

This sequence ‘From a Diary of Non-Events’ was written over one year but it started in December of the year 2000 and carries on until the November of the following year, 2001. And the title is slightly ironic because I do in fact include some events although the poem is mainly about what I call non events which are the cyclic processes, mainly of nature and of human life and the events are the things in the newspapers.

January

Damped light. The daily lane.
Four times above it
The dubious bird,
And no binoculars on me.
A blackbird silhouette
But the tones leafless, bare
As where it perches, the high willow bough,
Not the accented phrase
That’s small-talk still.
No stress, arpeggio, trill,
More monologue than call -
To whom, to whom whom whom, whom whom…
And that continuous.
With quarter-tones in it?
If so, not for these damned iambics,
Not for noise-cluttered ears
Another ‘elegy’ for Edward Thomas’s England,
His bird, the missel-thrush
Suburbanized even then, but commonly met,
Vernacular of the footpath, pavement, road.

Revenant now at best
In half-light, half-remembrance, half-recognition
Here, where by order once again
The skeletal hedgerows have been slashed
So that container trucks grown cottage-sized,
Tanker, delivery van
Suffer no damage, no delay
To their prefabricated bulk
Ever more smoothly coming, going, gone.

And in between, on the same willow bough,
This hint of a return the rumbling drowns.