|

RESISTANCE

Resistance in the wire

Resistance on the streets
In the peopleǯs faces
Resistance red and black

Some are guilty

Some are ashamed
Some are envious
Others jealous
All are in two minds

Resistance in the rocks the trees

Resistance in bricks in buildings
Despairing poets tear up their works
Trains derail all too easily

White fever dream

Stare through walls
Faces blank
Bodies listless
Cut-throat lovers
Besotted with their quarrel

Resistance the suicide

Resistance the homicide
Outbreak of plague
Outbreak of war
Resistance the Michelangelo
Resistance the Newton
 _

FAIRY TALES

Cinderella, among the ashes of the dead,

Speak to the invisibles in flame,
At the hearthstone,
And the dark god in dogskins
Looms in your eyes.
The Ugly Sisters killed your mother
And ate her,
But you collected the bones
And planted them
Under the yew tree.
It sprang up from just three drops of blood,
Branches full of fruit, clothes and treasure.
From one grain of corn you make bread for the world,
From one thread you spin endless cloth.
Legions of ants march through your head.
Pumpkin moon races across the sky,
A mouse-drawn carriage,
Wherein you sit, black-veiled.
Your three bright robes dance,empty,in the air,
And a swooping blackbird catches the falling glass slipper,
Carries it away over the sea.

With a talking stick and a ball of mist,

Cinderella steps from her dead motherǯs tomb,
Her laughter falls from the ramparts
Of a castle in the forestǯs heart.

A hawthorn branch guards the night.

The changelingǯs eyes open. A weird blue stare.
Footsteps and shadows play chess with the mind.
The sun goes down behind Bluebeardǯs castle.
The same riddle is put
To the True Bride and the False.

The kingǯs third and youngest son,the despised simpleton,

Comes to rescue the realm,where his brothers have all failed,
Mounted on a scraggy nag,dressed as a fool
In hempen coat and dunceǯs cap,
Wand in hand and a childǯs smile on his face.
 È

Pricked by a spindle, you sleep

In the highest chamber of the castle,
While a spinning wheel whirrs the world awake.
 ß

ÖOETHE

In Weimar, tormented by doubt and despair,

Öoethe strikes out on muddy winter roads,
Through wind, rain and mist, into the Harz Mountains,
To climb the Brocken, citadel of witches and demons,
To seek a sign, and question the cryptic Fate
That brought him so oddly to Weimar
As courtier and official to an autocrat,
The same Fate that decreed his sisterǯs death,
And would thwart his own inspiration.
m

 

  

 

 

Half-human whispers and warnings swarm
In the thick mist enveloping anfractuous heights;
Denied the summit, Öoethe rests on a rock,
Heavy-hearted, asking: Must I even now turn back?
Then, suddenly, wondrously, the weather
Starts to clear, and a sun-ray strikes the Brocken
Like a torch setting a beacon on fire,
Signalling to the quester that the challenge is still on.
Onward, upward, through deep snow, Öoethe
Slogs, and, standing, at last, breathless, on the peak,
Öazes round, in exultation, at the glorious chaos
Of cloud and light, crowned lord of the world,
Boundless in vision, power and potential.
At the Devilǯs Altar he offers thanks to Öod,
That, yes, he can exalt his life with meaning,
Still the beloved, conquering son of Fate,
Able to overcome any perplexities!

Knapsack on back, on geological expeditions,

Öoethe leaps from rock to rok, pursuing
Some principle of harmony and order in nature,
The path direct to the centre of the maze.
In his study, he broods over an elephantǯs skull,
Awaiting an insight, an answer to the riddle,
Te unity in multiplicity, the origin, the essence.
Constricted with long stern routine, he
Suffocates within a stiff benevolent public dignitary,
Emotions suppressed, rebellions quelled.
 ü

Italyǯs dusty roads open ahead, as the coach

Rattles into an idyll of mulberries, quinces and vines,
Plump grapes drooping over lizard-basking walls;
A northern bear set free from dark forest,
Into a carnival of light, too vivid to be real,
The intoxicated Öerman plucks peaches ad figs
From branches, sucking at lifeǯs core.
On the Venice Lido, watching crabs scrabble
Over breakwaters, he marvels at the tenacity
Of life, absorbed in inexhaustible oneness.
In the museum, transfixed by antique statues,
He feels new inspiration stirring in his guts,
The same secret grace every age has known...
 *

PIERROT MASK

amnesiac anaesthetized in my mind out of my mind in two minds no

more

am I anywhere or nowhere

at all times or no time

 A

I am metaphor I am symbol

every possible antithesis simultaneous

looking for coigns of vantage for pitfalls for confrontations with the
other

contemptuous and contrite

how many letters unopened faces avoided or misread how many

places passed through blindly and words spoken stupidly and things
idly lost

inadvertently I breathe exist ad infinitum ad nauseam to stop short

denouements none but moments dense and unreal a grammar never

mastered

accidence of happenstance

solipsistǯs solfeggio recidivistǯs fandango

history histories for all it is worth

catoptromancer in a city of mirrors I do my thing and eat from

demonsǯ hands

apathy aeipathy my identical twins

FRANZ LISZT

Will lightning strike through the drawing room ceiling?

Öazing upward in solemn supplication, he
Lets his hands fall casually to the keyboard,
 o

Dishevelled head motionless, in suspense,

As the haughty philistines wait to be entertained,
To have their luxurious expectations fulfilled.
Those stern white hands tease across the keys,
Trembling into a numinous prelude...
Abruptly the maestro starts to his feet,
Bangs the piano lid shut with imperious flourish-
÷



In his rooms Liszt paces back and forth...

Too many years performing for idiots,
Titillating with idle brilliance,
When he should give himself to solitude and creation,
Abandon vanityǯs charavari...

Like a jockey on an Arab mare,he jumps the piano,

Daredevil storming the atmosphere,
His galloping fingers an entire orchestra,
Hurtling into the abyss.
Öenteel ladiesǯ faces boggle with rapture,
Electricity jolting them out of their seats,
Hoisting their skirts over their heads.

IVAN TURÖENEV

That brave handsome face, always distant, like the stars...

A single kind word or gesture from his father
Startles the little lad into incoherent babbling,
 †

A grateful sinner in the presence of Öod.

Just for a moment, the idol is a friend,
Loved and trusted without restraint,
Then suddenly, inexplicably, that magisterial hand
Brushes him aside like a bothersome fly,
But with such terrifying courtesy-and then he is gone.

Once, only once, did his father caress him-

So tenderly, so unexpectedly, that the boy
Thought he would burst into sobs like a ninny,
Shocked by the possibility of love.
Be decisive, be determined! If only!
If only he could please his idol thus.
To be a hero...but what kind of hero?
Something like that forbear, Peter the Öreatǯs jester,
Who enlightened shaggy boyars with a barberǯs shears?

The big house, swarming with gossip and intrigue;

The serfs in the fields, carrying the world on their backs,
Tensed for the next blow to fall...
The gentle boyǯs greyblue eyes are always watching:
Registering his motherǯs cruel caprice
As she sends a domestic out to be flogged.
This is the miniature state she has ordained,
Her lackeys given courtly titles and ministerial dignity,
And her own police force at her beck and call.
Expert at inflicting humiliation and distress,
She guards her own almighty serenity at all costs,
Checking her reflection in the glass.

From a Parisian window, Turgenev trains his telescope

On the East, and rolls superb Russian syllables
On his tongue, wondering at his countrymenǯs folly:
How could the possessors of such enchanted speech
Not themselves be beautiful, just and free?
Surrounded by vivacious blasé French chatter,
The courtly Russian bulks in his own slow timezone,
Maintaining stately balance and control...
But sometimes a wind blows in from the East,
Carrying the sound of quarrelling voices,
And he yearns for the motherlandǯs dark earth.
 |

MONOLOÖUE FOR A ONE-ARMED MAN

No more boiled shoes, please! I refuse to eat any more boiled shoes.
Do you hear! Stop serving them up all the time! Boiled shoes, boiled
shoes, nothing but boiled shoes, in all sizes! This is not what I ordered.
 ||

Autumn again. My season. Nothing to do but fall like Lucifer.

Where are my instructions? I must have direction. Point me the way,

tell me what to do.

Pass me a cliché, if you will, a vacuous overused formula, something to

disappear into, with minimal fuss.

The cavalry charge again; over the brink with a tally-ho, buttons
gleaming, trousers creased...in pursuit of the Unattainable!

LESSONS OF OCTOBER

I gazed down from the hill at the crisscrossing roadways and the
vehicles whizzing in all directions, and tingled at the thought of so
 |_

much indecipherable motion and intent, the patterns made by

intersecting lives, the tender web of everything, seen and unseen.

Windowless corridors of the insect hotel

Lead inward, inward...
Winking voices of multicoloured stones
Hypnotized me on the barren plain,
And bird shadows frighten me into strangeness.
A coffin full of stars slowly lifts off the ground,
A mad boy holds up a wasp in a jar.
Thoughts drift like seahorses over a reef,
As you enter the luminous garden in silence,
And a hurricane of laughter passes over the land.

Dawn throws a twinkling coin into the air,

Angels escape from a shipwreck on the moon.
The beautiful idiot tunnels through mirrors,
Salamander mirrors where history
Explodes in a blank.

Martyrdom of consciousness mortgages my bones. I am a living relic

of my own religion, a premonition of the past. I interpret the garbled
language of things, the Proto-Indo-European roots.

CORNWALL

Radioactive granite. Hard rocks. Sharp coast.

This land breaks you down so you can live anew.
 |È

Blackbacked gulls and oystercatchers

Angel the winter beaches.
Bladderwrack and tangleweed
Wave brown in remotest coves.
Jagged rocks torn from the land lie tumbled
Amid seaweed and anemone,
Cormorants and shags stand, shivering on rocks,
Staring deep into the sea,
Nightwalkersǯ country: a fish rises in a stream,
Drum-loud plop rippling in the still.
Dry sticks crackle. Something is moving
In the deep secretive wood.
Suddenly the sad cry of a rabbit
Pounced on by a fox.
A badger emerging from its sett
Raises its muzzle to the moon in homage.
The furious moon gallops down into the sea,
The dizzy earth turns over like a foetus in the womb.

The churning gull-stormed Atlantic is my own pulse.

Billows shatter against headlands,
Throw white foam-spouts into the air.
Morning sun paints rainbows in the salt drift,
Waves are blustering, breaking, besieging,
All fluttering flaking whirling white steam;
The sunǯs reflection in the water
Is juddering disintegrating fire-flakes...

In the abandoned slate quarry

Saplings of ash, beech and willow have rooted;
Rusty deserted tramways and disused machinery,
Rusted wagons and winches lie around.
Half-hidden under ferns and wildflowers;
Slate-red, green and white- winks in the sun;
Jackdaws nest on ledges.
Buzzards and ravens fly overhead.
Purple orchids, hawkweed, thistles and sloe bushes
Thrive among spoil heaps.
Öod the hermit clenches in the granite,
The desolate moorland, the bogs, the buttercup meadows.
The harsh fanatical voice of a Celtic saint,
Uttering terror and peace.
 |ß

Look at the isolated farms, shouldering the wind,

Confronting the sea and its dead,
Ricks crow-and-jackdaw-stewarded,
Stonechats frickering over gorse-thatched greystone walls.
Megalithic stone circles dance under the sky,
Summer sea-mists curl up to slumber
In obsolete quarries and mines.
Can you hear , when the tide is running,
The bells and voices of drowned Lyonesse?

Here the Celtic missionaries walked, ragged and wild,

Preaching and healing like the wind,
Tasting the blown sea-salt on their tongues
As they shook their staves in righteous anger.
Their gnarled fists christened granite,
Raising baptisteries over heathen springs and wells.
At night, they lay down with the sheep for warmth;
At dawn, they sang as they bathed in cold rivers.
They grew old and gnarled like winter elms and thorns,
And fell, at last, gladly into Öodǯs hands,
Absorbed into the moorsǯ endless prayer.

The lights of Bodmin Moor are the milkwort and lichens,

Skylarksǯ wings and wide skies,
A realm more dangerous and exquisite,
Where birds sing themselves into ecstasy,
A chalice uplifted swirling with murmurous spirits.
Heal yourself by clinging to granite,
Shed sickness into the immovable incorruptible stone,
Among the wastes and ruins, forced to face yourself,
Initiated into humility and courage
By Neolithic stillness.
The sun settles on your face
Like a dragonfly on a stream.
Thin earth drizzled over granite.
Örass. Rock. Wind. Marsh. Bog.
Uncanny horses appear out of nowhere,
Charging into the cold air, manes blazing, heads high,
Dragon-pennants of breath streaming
From strained nostrils and shining backs;
They gallop across their winter underworld,
Lift their sovereign heads in piercing neighs.
 |ü

Faint eerie murmurings hang over the stone circles,

Voices of the Beaker People who saw
The sun spinning off the summer tors
And the moon swimming like a sea-monster
Through their dreams, as they danced
To hold the sky up...

Shipwrecksǯ whale skeletons litter the bays.

Desolate waves boom in caverns, bite at rocks.
Crabs and lobsters pick out drowned sailorsǯ eyes,
Tear the flesh from their limbs.
Along bare cliffs only winter gorse blooms.
Everything is crumbling away
Into that vast invincible sadness
Under the shrunken phantom sun.
Seals gaze out to sea with the eyes
Of drowned souls, beyond hope or prayer.

White china clay waste pyramids gleam

In the sun, reflecting the sea off the clouds,
And the whole hill-range shivers with the windy light,
Silver, blue and gold, and sometimes magenta...
Here, you are deathǯs astronaut, cut off
In white space, belittled yet exalted,
Turned into a ghost, until sunset
Crimsons the hills, lava streaming into darkness.

THE PHOENICIANS

From wilderness they came the oceanǯs Bedouin,

Their vessels indomitable camels saddled,
 |*

The watery wastes their pasture and delight,

Roaming far from citiesǯ clenched fists,
Their liberty in impermanence, in perpetual motion,
the night sky their flickering compass and dream.
They arrive, do there business, disappear again,
A voluble people, with thin canny features,
Trading wares found only in their shipsǯ holds,
Hinting at shores no mere Öreek ever trod;
And many an Athenian captainǯs cry of discovery
Dies on his lips as a rounds a newfound headland,
Only to find the Phoenicians there before him.

Their hooded agents stand behind the throne

Of Egypt, and mingle at the highest courts,
Whispering in the ears of Eastern kings.
Even Alexanderǯs eyes are dark with envy
At these mysterious seafowl gliding, untouchable,
In their element, masters of infinite chance.
Yes, he, Alexander, will break their proud wings
And forbid them, cast the back onto land
In abjection, drain the ocean from under them,
Laughing to see them marooned, undone!
There shall be no demi-gods but he alone!

Who, frittering sand through superstitious fingers,

Riddles the riddle of glass? You Lebanese mages
Inexplicably turn the sombre into light.
Little murex shells plucked from shallows
Are milked with tender cunning for their secret
Splendour-that stately purple cloth that lies
Nonchalantly on monarchsǯ and senatorsǯ shoulders.
Cockleshell boats cast off into the chartless,
Caulked and buoyed audaciously, risking all
On the windǯs evil eye, the sailors striking
Bargains with the gods, from dawn to dawn.

Jezebel Phoenicia- Europe astride the white bull;

Aphroditeǯs bare feet on the sands of Paphos,
As she wades ashore, out of the shimmering East...
Hawk nosed Adonis, that pungent brown Semite,
 |A

Is smelted and recast in foreign climes;

Dionysus, dragon in a bubbling chalice,
Breathes fire into Crete and Hellas,
Beer-bibbersǯ nemesis, man-shaped vine...

   ...oxǯs head, house, door...

Merchantsǯ tally, the seaǯs exclamations,
Crane-wingsǯ casual genius on the air!
Notches in the tongue bespeak the tempest,
Historyǯs roaring assaults and weird lulls,
The longing for a firm and bounteous shore...

THE AMERICAN ORÖASM

Stellar rocket-burst, upward arc extreme, slow-motion photographic

blossoming-the phantom orchid-America!
 |o

Frenzied masturbation in freedomǯs name, imagining everything all at

once...sold to the sun for a dime, - and then you die...
The prophet in the shopping mall slashes his wrists and lets the truth
flow.
Conveyor-belt baptisms proceed at the river of sewage.
A mystical dollar sign appears in the sky.
A locust-swarm of lawyers strips the earth bare, leaving dry husks
behind.
Cash tills chorus like cats on heat.
The Big Idea grins like an imbecile.
Out of the western desert comes a holy man, fed on rattlesnakes and
honey, selling encyclopaedias with machinegun spiel.
The revolving chairǯs black shadow falls across the prairies.

CLOUD-KINÖDOM
 |†

The wind charging through the empty chambers of the abandoned

citadel
raises little wisps of dust that rush about like ghosts. In a corner
stands an ancient drum, whose echo rumbles through the voids.
A dog barks in the distance and a door slams shut.
A swastika is carved into a boulder.
A man in a goatskin steps out of the sandstorm with a curious smile.
He unclenches his hand and a spinning top leaps across the ground.
A river flows uphill, beneath the black mountain.
A conch shell calls across the valley, rising and falling; the sound
reverberates into infinity, shuddering the whole earth.
Caravans of thought stumble through the mountain passes, teetering
on the precipice-edges, on tortuous tracks, suspended over
uproarious chasms.
On the highest crag grows a single blue poppy.
 _

THE LEÖEND OF MARIA

Crushed coffee-beans and citrus fruit,

Taste of summer on your lips,
And a slim brown body shaped for my hands...
White sand and jungle river,
Blowpipe shooting with a whisper-
Maria!
Alone beneath a hunterǯs moon,
Alone in a café, crystalgazing into an empty glass,
Alone on a bus, going nowhere in a dream,
Alone in a book ,hardly understanding the language,
I shout into the Jurassic wind-
Maria!
 _|

THE MAN WITH SEVEN FINÖERS ON ONE HAND

Who meets the winter wind head on

And guts fish with ill-gotten skill?
The man with seven fingers on one hand.

Slyly he defeats infernal knots,

And runs wild on the skylineǯs edge,
The man with seven fingers on one hand.

His every thought is a dice-throw.

He plays hide-and-seek with time,
Öoing under different names.

Who pearl-dives in English puddles

And wishes on the full moonǯs glamour?
The man with seven fingers on one hand.
 __

AMARA

Her smooth face is an Agamemnon mask

Of beaten gold; those panther eyes see all.
She feeds me morsels with a silver spoon.

Sweet succulence!-pears in red wine-

The beautiful negress with pink-palmed hands,
Chocolate skin on lunar sheets.

Bubbles in a slender glass-darkest elixir-

My heat and her cool, cool intimacy,
Not Europe, not Africa, nor the moon.
 _È

OPEN COUNTRY

What logic is there here

But archipelagoes of diary entries,
Travelling light in various directions,
Bemused to find themselves one text?

The pioneer, reining in his horse,

Focuses his glasses on the haze,
Jotting down sparse impressions,
Free from latitude or longitude.
On he rides, ever open to surprise,
Determined and naive...

Dots are somehow joined up

Into a narrative; data become description;
Rhetorical asides are turned
 _ß

Into philosophy, after a fashion.

The explorer zigzags, doubles back, stands still,
Confronted by portents and possibilities,
Auguring from the flight of birds.

The setter hunkers down in a clearing

To recount tales of the wilderness;
Boundary posts stand like exclamation marks.
The first axe blows sound;
Then a gunshot; the fording of a creek;
And a pen scratches across an empty page.

NICHIREN SHOSHU

Always the ten worlds, from moment to moment-

Hell, hunger, animality, anger, tranquillity,
Rapture, learning and realisation,
Boddihisattva, buddhahood!
Infinitely fluctuating mind, feverish merry-go-round...

You worry at dire imaginings,

Slander yourself with grimacing glee...
From hell to heaven the road is short but steep.

Hunger, hunger...desire loves only itself...

Who but you can turn poison into elixir?

Shakyamuni, walking in the Deer Park,

Came upon a deer lying stricken by an arrow;
Two learned Brahmins stood there, arguing
 _ü

Earnestly the nature and meaning of death,

And ,turning to the stranger, asked his opinion.
Shakyamuni, silently, simply knelt
And pulled the shaft from the suffering animalǯs side.

The urge to live and live, and never die,

Clumsy destructive greed,
All the animal dread in your instincts,
Making hostile and blind...
Angry idiot, attached and detached,
Suprerior, so superior (to what?),
Feigning benevolence, righteousness, propriety,
Disfigured underneath...
Contemptuous one, is it fame you want,
Is it success?

Human, be true, be tranquil,

Excellent and wise in every motion.
Do you smother yourself in sloth?
Do you fear the risks of change?
Rapture of fulfilled desire-
All formlessness and form-
The ridiculous orgasm-gone!
Your goodness may imperil you more than your evil.
In everyone is a motherǯs devotion,
The vacuum is a plenum of love,
Absorbing all evil, unlocking all prisons
In an everlasting instant.
When there is war in a single particle,
How can there be peace anywhere?
If the soul condescends or begrudges,
So much good will is undone.

The entire world is latency,

The seen from the unseen, here and not here,
Memories now unconscious, now manifest,
Cherry blossoms appearing and disappearing as they will.
The cause is the effect.
Miraculously, exquisitely strict and harmonious-
The laws, the connections everywhere!
Each moment offers the gift to choose
And become.
_*
 _A

MOORINÖ

The skiff, like dragonfly clinging to stalk,

Caught in laser crossfire, trembled in the lull,
Summer-struck on the swan-bright river,
As we merged with dangling willow-arcs,
Catching the drips of melted azure.
Your hurricane hair swept over me,
Your musk the opium of long desire.
We moved as one, in a double dream,
Tender and bold as the noon demanded.
Your slim thighs mooring me fast,
We rocked together in a cradle of light.
Öliding dizzily with the dazzle-current,
Downstream to some unknowable release...
 _o

TEDDY BEARSǯ PICNIC

We entered the hushed woods like spies

At summerǯs command,
The sun a nest of spices within,
Intending to heal a bleeding wound.

The world was our secret subtle game,

A beauty and grace of our making,
Connoisseurs of one another,
We ran the seasonǯs gauntlet.

Admitted to undergrowthǯs confessional,

I raised, with spoiled priestǯs hands
Your red dress, the spiderǯs web,
And saw, reflected in your eyes, a crow.
 _†

INTERBELLUM

They are building ships again.

Titanic clangour shakes the dockside.
Riding out beyond the city limits,
I trespass with a vengeance
Through half-remembered fields.
The world must soon explode
Like a spiderǯs egg.

They are building ships again.

Even out in the country you can hear
The welderǯs manic flame tearing
At steel, and hammers beating grim tattoos.
Hide where you will, you are part of it.

The shipwright is a stranger,

A distant priest in his office in the air,
Bent like a general over his blueprints,
He moves a slender finger, tracing designs.

Through rhetorical months the vessel gestates,

A dinosaur skeleton taking flesh.
On another shore, its twin is also being born,
And my lost twin stands, as I do, at the window,
Stiff with dread, sure of nothing,
Hot stupid tears in his eyes.
 È

THE NAPOLEONISTS

It is always a question of fathers:

The good papa, distant in his foreign realm,
The rotten dad here at home.
A mad god rules the centre.
The sons of despots become despots, too,
Rulers of their own rival courts.
They ride with Napoleon in the wilderness,
Banished from the corrupt citadel,
Rallying the righteous legions of the dead
Against the present, under the futureǯs flag.
Only revolt is pure and religious:
Mercurial escapists, spitting cobras
Of the mind, they relish their venom,
Yet believing their hatred benign,
All too ready to turn the dagger
Against themselves, in vicious despair.
Dandyǯs nonchalance turns to violence,
Persuaded of its own moral right,
Against the loved detested patriarch.
The cold moon promises final defeat,
After grand performances of nursery games,
The exercise of narcissistic martyrdom
In Dzrevolutiondz or Dzenlightened reformdz.
And all these faces, theoretically loved,
Are but masks in a sinister charade.
 È|

IN THE DAYS OF ANCIENT CHINA

Tsung Ping loved landscapes more than any man.

In the west, he ascended Mounts Ching and Wu,
In the south he stood on Hengǯs summit.
On Mount Heng he constructed a hut
And lived in tranquiliity, until he fell ill
And was forced to return home to Chiang-ling.
DzMy wandering days are over, Dzhe lamented,
DzIt befalls me to meditate on the Tao,
Only to roam in dreams...dz
All that he had seen his travels
He painted on the walls of his house.

Po Chu-i, in official disfavour,

Ended up in a rat-hole on the Yangtze,
Blue-shadowed by the peaks of Lu-Shan.
Tramping the hills, he chose a site
And contrived a thatched cottage retreat.
One nightǯs lodging there brought rest to the body,
Two nights were a guarantee of peace;
Three nights and nothing existed at all
But the bambooǯs dripping
Amid rocks, clouds and trees.
He sowed the pool with lotus
And stocked it with fish,
And a pine-shaded torrent sang in his ears.
Springwater pearls trickled over the ledges,
 È_

Turning to mist on the breeze.

THE INITIATION (PAPUA NEW ÖUINEA)

Sinuous, impeded current, cargoeing terremote debris,

All the soil sucked from the screes,
Frothing like a sick horse, the river churns downward,
Kicking hillocks dropped from heaven.
Rock-dice spin amid panting vapour,
Ferrous waters oiled with plant decay.
Stumble, stumble through strangling purgatory,
Purblind through thickets, lianas, thorns.
Scratches. Ant-bites. Hunger. Rotting skin.
Bellyaches. Isolation. Fever. Eyes wonǯt focus.
Paltry bivouacs; leaves clatter; lukewarm rain.
Bottlegreen monotony, falling, bruising.
Cold bone-crack nights of mosquito savagery,
Led astray, disoriented, by a false twinkle,
Drowning in chaos of flagellating branches,
Knotted and noosed nothing straight or true...

Rainblack bark: leeches stretch and lean,

Waving as they wait to fasten.
Cobble-scouring river gushes slower, darker.
Slowly loose-clustered bats flap across pink sky.
A subtle orange sun goes to ground
Behind the village. Naked children, balanced
On slick black branches, launch into the water,
Kicking as they crash; they surface, shrieking
With joy. Tinfoil moisture peels down
Treebrown skin, as they monkey up
Their makeshift divingboards again.

Slimy slugbodied clouds dawdle over

 ÈÈ

The treetops, where spirit houses hide

In forests enclaves, under the mottled full moon.
Morning miasma. A sprightly canoe
Cuts the channel, sticky new cobwebs
Snapping in the paddlersǯ faces,
Damp air sickly with overripe fruit.
Bat-squadrons whud away to somnolent asylums.
Egrets lodged on drift-logs poise their scissor profiles.
The crocodile awakes...initiates sleep with their fear...
The panting river shimmers, mercury near boiling...
Tick-tock: hand-drums, a monster stamping...
In the crocodileǯs nest, the threshing floor
Of manhood, beaten, bleeding, mud-shrouded
Sleepwalkers dance...submitted to perfect pain,
The delving knifepointǯs dreamy shock...
Dueting parent flutes lull the little ones to sleep.
Shavenheaded, scarified, they sing out
Their suffering, tortured and mocked
In the hallowed arena, forbidden the privileges
Of men, to please a cruel loving god.
 Èß

SAMUEL JOHNSON

Large unpredictable hands zoom in, assail him,

Freakish through his eyesǯ semi-darkness,
Whudding round his headǯs cracked bell,
Violating with a will to correct.
Little Samuel sits in scrofulous stupor,
Defiantly gulping down the painful world,
Wills himself independent, responsible,
Not to blame the world for anything,
But cure himself with unceasing ambition.
What if disease should unman him,
Make him crave self-pity, and forfeit
The hopeful energy to strive and fight?
The inner man is madness, treachery, fear...
He gropes at the solid world for support,
To sober his erratic mind with fact.

The young man stares up at the town clock,

Too stunned by lassitude even to recognise
The hour. Suicide or lunacy? Reason has
No jurisdiction here. Every resolution
Disillusions itself, stranded in self-loathing.
Mile after mile, the cumbersome idiot
Tramps the roads, trying to forget himself,
To outpace the demons of sloth.
Self-persecuting his soul with scruples,
He teeters, besieged, in self-revenge,
Bedevilled by angry tics and compulsions.
Imagine, imagine, imagine!-Attack the void
With ferocious invention, toil, travail
To outmanoeuvre despair...or die...
 Èü

On a Lincolnshire hill, with friends,

Johnson surveys the steep slope, mischievously
Örinning: DzWhy, I havenǯt had a proper roll
In ages!dzIn a moment, he empties his pockets
And lies on the edge, then launches himself,
Turning over and over, bouncing down
To the bottom, then clambers to his feet,
Huffing and laughing, big face flushed
With childish triumph.
Sleepless, the sage paces up and down his rooms,
Measuring out the floor with heavy tread,
-Will it bear his weight, his confusion and grief?-
Contriving ritual patterns with heels and toe,
Soothing himself with arithmetical exercises.
In the neighbouring room sleeps a sick young
Prostitute, a hollow-cheeked wretch he had lifted
Out of the utter the night beforehand carried
Safely home on his broad back. The destitute
Would always find succour under his roof,
Where he returned, always, with pockets empty,
All the coins given in alms to street-beggars.
Hunched at table, through the night, he hews
Out solemn stately periods, solid bridges
To hold him to the earth and carry him over.
 È*

HENRY JAMES

Historyǯs passenger, the fastidious American

Observes and records with cool discernment,
Passionate for art, not for passion.
All these adventures in the mind-
Indirections, omissions, anxiety, control...
A lonely old celibate in an English villa,
Surrounding himself with precious artefacts,
He rewrites their beauty with critical élan,
His solitary solace this difficult craft
That wrings a man out, squeezes him dry.

The last springtime of the century:

Mourning a absent young ephebe
Held off-perhaps wrongly-but tenderly-
He sees, in the mirror, grey streaks in his beard...
Too late? Too late? He must begin again,
Believing in new discoveries and ambitions,
To ensphere the soul entire,
Open himself to all he has neglected,
Break out to the great world beyond
And share in unpretentious human warmth.

Too long concealed and muffled by this beard,

With sudden resolution, he shaves
And stares back at the clean rejuvenated face,
Domed skull, strong nose, sensuous lips,
The deep blue lyncean eyes of the Master.
In his mind, a new book is taking shape:
His grave, measured voice sounds through
The hosue, dictating to an amanuensis,
Evolving long sinuous sphyngine sentences.
On his bicycle, he hums along seaside lanes,
Enacting his mindǯs looping motions,
 ÈA

Winding in and out with aristocratic aplomb.

BLACK WIDOW PULSAR

Brittle rock cries out.

Ölitter-birds consecrate the air.
Prayers float downriver.
Statues look around.
Lava bubbles up.
Centre and circumference are one.

A woolly mammoth is raised intact from the ice.

How can the material convolutions of a brain

Contain a mind?

Through spring the alien rainbow woman strolls.

Warm reefs grow coruscations
While human generations live and die.

A small boy passes his finger through a candleflame, delighted.

A jeweller sits at his table, shaping a diamond with infinite patience.

How much damage have I done in my life?

How much damage?

Who built the cyclopean cities,

The semi-visible capitals of time?

Stones into plants into animals into men.

The somnambulist walks among the dead,

Faces he never really looked at.
The funambulist sets out on the rope,
Wobbling, stopping, advancing step by step.
 Èo

In a frozen rock-wave an ammonite is sleeping.

A bloody hare soaks in a jug.

The marketplace is deserted.

Where have all the noisy demons gone?

A man with forged documents crosses the border.

A red horse canters alone in a field

Where the sun plays dice.

The glittering fleece hangs on a tree

On an island at the end of the world.

The enemies of poetry sit in contracting rooms,

Counting grains of dust
And checking the exchange rate.

Mountains inverted in a lake.

A squirrel leaps between two branches.
Lightning flickers under the sleeperǯs eyelids.

A green snake sheds its skin in the undergrowth.

An oxǯs carcass shines in the hot sun.
The stranger will come as foretold.
 Ȇ

BACKÖROUND RADIATION

Strontium-white, the moon, I observe,

Boil ripe in the dark, diminish and vanish;
Three days in the grave, and she rises again,
Empress, archpriestess in purple silks.
I howl in ecstasy, wild wolf running,
Infrared eyes swivelling to and fro...

I pray for subtle sight and perfect conscience.

No jinglejangle, texture, tang or scent,
Nor crumbling shapes, nor uncontrollable changes,
Can circumscribe or distract .
Let me not drag myself from death to death...
Öive me eyes that pierce through walls!

The whole earth is my pilgrimǯs bundle.

I am on my way again.

Instantaneous eternity:
tissue of coincidence
I am somewhere
on the inside of a curve
passing through all the points
my mind determines

nameless
stateless
I warp through different time zones
astronaut of the impossible
 ß

I pray to be accurate in perception,

unhindered in action,
precise in good will.
emergencies of lust and hate
must be sublimated.

No, you were never mine,

But I loved you.
Let love itself suffice.

Winterǯs child stares into

The worldǯs blasted roots.
A lone sparrow digs up a worm.

Learn not to wish for happiness.

Not to wish at all.
The tide turns with a sigh.

I fell from your side,

A falling star,
Singing to its death.

The centaur looses an arrow,

Celebrating the birth of fire,
The astronautǯs ascent.

Drizzly days in rheumatic England,

Lunatic asylum of embarrassed restraint,
Where no-one knows quite what to think...
Fall between two stools and break your neck,
Just donǯt get upset, donǯt show it!
Careless evil hides in well-meaning faces,
Teacups fall from slightly trembling hands.
No revolution here, no messy apocalypse:
Carry on and do the done thing.
 ß|

Here I come again, with my sideways glances, pockets full of assorted

lies,
bumbling and brawling, mincing and crawling, sometimes surprised
by that throbbing in my neck and wrists.
Öravity keeps me here. Otherwise, I might simply drift away. Into
space. Into words.

Where are you?

I sense you around the next corner.
Behind the curtains.Under the stairs.
Are you gone forever?
May I find the eyes to see you
And know you at last?

A bridal veil covers the face

Of the one whose bed Iǯll never share.
I sit in my mousehole, groaning,
Not a hero or a saint, not even a lover,
But a penny in the fountain,
A notch carved in a tree.

The man who pricked himself on a rose

Looks with fascination at the swelling drop
Of blood...the red avenger...
O, straight line! Pure lance of the horseman!
A passionate cancer creeps through
The bodyǯs corridors...

I love to be alone here with my bones.

Alone with the night that knows me as I am,
Another shadow on the run.

I flex my hands, amazing strangers,

Puzzling at the palm-lines.
 ß_

Sometimes I think I am half-mad.

Örant me leisure to meditate,

Subsumed into continuum,
Not wanting anything.

The heavy mask of sleep still clings to me.

Am I ever truly awake?

10

Crystallized trees and fields, ghostworld transfixed under the white

sunǯs dazzle. Frosted bone cracks in pistol shots.
Nothing moves. Nothing thinks.
Magma-fires writhe in the dead planetǯs core.
I have no language to engage the earth. If I exist, it is in the faintest
most attenuated dimensions, passig from crisis to crisis with inhuman
calm.
These are the days of my destruction. I enter again from nowhere,
with a sheepish smile, and bunch of roses in my hand, loitering like a
tipsy tap dancer on the brink.
My frost-mask glitters with supernatural prescience. The new year,
with idle amusement, tosses titbits in my direction. At night, the
impenetrable plutonium fog closes in.

11

Cryptanalysts of the New Year, orphans in masks, we crouch over

signs and symbols drawn in dirt. Was it so long ago that we were
children, laughing and fighting under these-or similar-trees?
A shadow moves under the ice. A dead starling lies in the snow.
The Pole Star transfixes us, crownless kings of this world, or another.

12

Always new beginnings in the past; always vulnerable...

Here I am, among the living dead.
Paradox is the oxygen that surrounds us.
The powerful are defeated by the truly strong.
 ßÈ

The foolish want everyone to see reason; to come to conclusions; to

tidy up the mess.

13

Petty acts of reason,

What use are they now?
Down with cleverness-
Letǯs eat the sacred cow!

Respected citizen,
Donǯt you know youǯre abstract,
A number with a hole in it,
Atoms neatly stacked?

14

Intellectual filigree!-
Another fine hypothesis
Wobbles round the mind,
A dancing hippopotamus,
A double bind.

Life?
Itǯs the tale of a swaggering dandy
Bent double in the end.

Whatǯs history but an epic in doggerel,

A drunkardǯs rambling?
After the speeches, the cavalry charges;
After the charges, the memorials.

Nauseous at the thought of infinity,

I confine myself to etiquette,
Each day a joining-up of dots,
The placing of a secret bet.

Wristwatch strapped like a timebomb to me

Tuts away the wasted hours
Of days when nothing special happens
 ßß

In a world just waiting for the pendulum to stop.

15

Parsifal arrives outside the castle.

Has he come too early or too late?

Watching bathwater spiralling down the plughole

I stand, mesmerized.

The sacrifice has yet to be made;

The overseers stand arrayed,
And a drum beats implacably within.

16

When pianos fall silent

And their coffin-lids come down,
The moon, a sweaty fevered voyeur,
Stalks about the town.

Incestuous anxieties, then premonitions of exile...

Laughter accumulates in a frown,
Horror in a smile.

17

How many journeys stretch before me,

Still just hints and flashes in the mind?
Meanwhile,I open and close doors,
Tear up letters, write and rewrite them,
Catch my reflection in a window as I pass,
Somehow surprised that Iǯm still here.

What if the world should end in boredom,

Yawning as it breaks apart?
No more tedious nightmares then
To underwrite the heart.
 ßü

What ails you, human protoplasm-

A sexual or a spiritual spasm?

18

Melancholy tinkling of a music box-

It stood once on my motherǯs dresser-
Abruptly ends, still quavering the air
With reminiscence and regret.

19

Isidore Ducasse? Not known at this address.

Who is this strange twitchy young man,
Sitting night after night at the piano,
Thumping the keys with discordant relish,
Composing a hectic monologue aloud?

20
In a bourgeois quarter a piano plays
Through a yawning window in summer,
Testing melodies like spider webs
Till they break.
 ß*

ZANSKAR

A long deep valley with no entrance,

High above the world,
High above itself.
This crystalline light brings out the gods in men.
The air is so dry and clear you can see forever,
Looking down on the earth from the heavens,
Spotting tiny human figures many miles away.
Are you a man or a snow leopard?
 ßA

SECRETS

These secrets are Promethean fire.

A path, a riddle, a jewel, an oath...which will you choose?
Those who answer the Sphinx incorrectly are torn to pieces and
devoured.

Insiders, outsiders, guarding the unspeakable with circumlocutions,

we draw boundaries round names. Transparency may tempt us, at
times, yet we remain, with guilty gratitude, opaque.

Who controls this information? Who penetrates the enemyǯs

defences? Who is augmented and who is reduced?

What is open closes, what is closed opens-under the spell of a secret, a

formula for creation and destruction, a chemical catalyst.

Bodily excretions, mental secretions...here goes another s tab at

definition, another attempt to put birds in cages.

The initiate is led through gloomy mazes, by vertiginous precipices,

into a den of ravenous monsters, a coven of torments. Until he reaches
the Holy of Holies and the hallowed words.

I must have a confessor. Someone to show sympathy, someone to

intrigue and shock, to manipulate wit flaunted weakness ad concealed
strength. I name my temptations the better to resist them. Dear
listener, will you interpret my revelations and guide e to release? I am
here to seduce, to exploit, to elicit responses.
 ßo

Invisible crimes infest the air. Who does not crave the exposure of
justice? Who does not wish to unmask?

The devilish secret is stolen and then offered as a gift. Why, friend, are
you reluctant to accept it? It is simply a trade, a property.

This gossip is a substitute for understanding. Not to reel at dangerous

complexity. Not to blink and look again.

Did I exist? Did I have an effect? I dabbled in judgements, dealt a few

blows, kept most things to myself.

LIÖHTNINÖ BIRD OF AFRICA

Africa, where spirits abound,

The baleful and the benign!
The seer breathes life into the bones;
They open their eyes,
Smile, walk and speak.

Man from elsewhere, who are you?

What do you dance?

 
  
 
 
 



In the beginning was the Öreat Serpent,
Whose seven thousand coils gave birth to the stars
And the earth, gouging out rivers and streams.
See him now, moving in the river,
Lashing up waves in the sea;
See him rainbow the sky.

A woman astride a quern

Örinds the grain and sings.

A woman strikes her grindstone

And it rings like a gong.
Perfect. Without flaws.
 ߆

The sky hears it and smiles with pleasure.

All across Africa,

The stones are growing, singing to themselves.

The new chief at his inauguration

Swallows a crocodile stone.
It is his head, his life, his power.

Have you seen how a captured snake,

After that first wild battle,
Never shows the same ferocity again,
Its spirit broken,
The will to be free lessening by the day?

A hamerkop stands in a pool of water,

Staring intently at its own reflection.
It knows the unknown.
It knows those things that vanish
When you look at them.
It stands alone.
It cannot be pointed at.
It indicates wizards, for it shares their powers.

Once in many generations,

The Lightning Bird,
Pursued by wind and rain,
Assumes human form.

A rock-gong hums
And the hills throb with one fundamental note.

Bare red mountains,

Waterless citadels with the smell of leopards,
Caves filled with paintings.
On one wall a witch doctor,
In mask and tail,
Poised on the ball of one foot,
Reaches out his hand
To cup an impalaǯs head.
The creature stretches forward its neck,
Meeting the sorcerer mouth to mouth
 ü

In a kiss,
The two of them sharing breath.
In the impalaǯs dark uterus
A pair of eyes stare out,
Bright and watchful.

The first men left their footprints

And we must follow,
In a world black, white and red.

The man struck by lightning

Öot up and walked away.
The trees looked after him.
The rocks sang to him.
He wandered with leopards and antelopes.
He vanished in the mountains with the evening sun.

Under a thorn tree the black bull is sacrificed,

While the women chant shimmering praise;
A hammer stone strikes between the horns,
The throat is slit.
Let it rain, let it rain!

In the old days the people buried their dead

Sitting up, facing the rising sun.
But now the world is sad and the land is thin.
The old customs are forgotten.

But still there is water,

And water knows everything,
All secrets,
Mine and yours.
 ü|

PARIS

Approaching Notre-Dame across the Parvis,

Under mercurial sky, you stop at Point Zero,
The compass star, with, somewhere below,
An entrance to the Underworld, guarded
By Cernunnos, the stagheaded yogi.
Barges glide down the greengrey Seine
And the fabled Ark, docked in morass
Of guidebook clichés, rises up, flying
Buttresses soaring from chestnuts in bloom.

Climbing the narrow winding stair,

You enter the Sainte Chapelle, red and blue
In dizzying shades, miraculously harmonized,
Each window unique yet integrated;
The west rose window, focussing sunset,
Is a map of the heart, a nexus of blood vessels.

In this small room in the Conciergerie

The condemned were shorn like sheep,
Their soft white hands bound behind backs.
In due course, they were led out across
The dreary courtyard, into crowded, jeering
Streets, to the waiting tumbrils.To Calvary.

Aroma of croque-monsieur from cafés...

Dappled river-light mesmerizes worn cobblestones.
Lovers walk hand in hand under chestnut trees.
 ü_

At dusk the reds in Notre-Dameǯs rose window

Fade out, till only a huge round sapphire
Ölows on, as the organist extemporizes
An elaborate fugue, rising, looping to climax,
Huge music born and lost in the atmosphere.

Across the mellow-stoned Pont Marie

To the secret Ile Saint-Louisǯ cobbled quays.
In summer heat the lime trees are in flower,
Sweet elusive scent imbuing the air,
Tramps sleeping under the bridges.
The whole isle is a cloud of cottonseed
From the poplars, or, perhaps, a dream,
Raspberry-ice-cream-delicious on tongue.

Misty autumn mornings, sun coming through

In nacreous glow, slowly revealing the Seine...
On wet nights the cafes and restaurants sheen
With warm sad life, and all the lights of Paris
Shimmer across the riverǯs mnemonic black.
City of catacombs, sewers and tunnels,
Will you collapse one day into the underworld,
Destroyed for your sovereign creative vices?
In the Cluny Museum, I stand before a tapestry:
The resplendent lady, poised at the entrance
Of her tent, blazoned 
 

,
Removes her jewelled necklace and places it
In a box, as the unicorn raises his horn in salute
At her noble gesture of renunciation.

Crusty loaves mother-warm from bakersǯ ovens-

Passionfruit sorbets from a famous parlour-
Rich deliciousness of living, here and now!
The spire of Saint-Louis-en-LǯIle, almost
Transparent, oval-pattern-pierced, glimpsed
In passing, bewitches with asymmetrical kinetics.
On the Quai dǯAnjou, from a high window,
Baudelaire would watch the river hours on end,
Drawn always to water, needing the quaysǯ
Discipline and form.There, one day, stirred
By prophetic desire, he spotted a mulatto girl
Bathing, and knew he must make her his Muse
 üÈ

And worship at those small brown feet.

AUSTRALIA

Öreen twilight on continental shelf:

Vast submarine kelp forests
Undulate in slanting sunlight.
A male seahorse paying court
Circles his intended,
Inflating his womb-pouch for a deposit,
Writhing in coital tango to fertilize the eggs
And glue them fast with sperm.
Philoprogenitive octopi
Flash and tangle, trysting on a ledge.
Voracious crayfish scavenge over the bottom,
Appeasing one anotherǯs cannibal tastes.
A myriad phyllosomas swim towards the light.
Negotiating the frond-slalom, riding rock-channel surges,
Seals surf shoreward on each exhilarating swell.
A right whale breaches with thunderclap ardour,
Roistering down the tempest, flukes extended.
Öyring currents mesh in delicate clockwork,
Frisking leviathan islandsǯ shores.

Humpbacks sing southwards to the mating ground,

Varying their epic compositions year by year.
The Barrier Reef coruscates in dynamic equilibrium,
Coral polyps symbiotic with zooxanthellae.
Öorgonians fan their sieve-like bodies;
A crinoid settles, and sea whips wave,
 üß

And everywhere anemones sweep the paralytic feelers.

Moonlit seas swirl with spawn-clouds floating up.

At dawn, hundreds of fish hang in the current,
Waiting for the tide to turn.
In late summer, island sands heave and erupt,
As turtle hatchlings quake free, and run,
Kamikaze-dashing towards the waves
Through their enemiesǯ gauntlet.

Balletic lizards bob and sidestep on a salt lake,

Shin up the salt-cones, their look-out points.
The rains come, soaking through sand,
Awaking the frog asleep in his burrow.
Ants hang from subterranean ceilings,
Distended with nectar to regurgitate
Into their brothersǯ mouths.
Multitudinous termite castles cast their shadows
Across the grasslands, north to south,
Clay, faeces and saliva shaped and packed high.

Sand dunes segue into gibber plain.

A gibberbird crouches over its nest,
Umbriferous wings repeating gibber-patterns.
Subtle lizards lurk in saline basins,
Blent with crystal hillocksǯ scintillation.

Arenaceous rivers chunder out of rugged ranges,

Fossils mesmerised inside precipices.
River red gums flaunt white festoons
Of cockatoos, in hundreds, reposing.
Pungent eucalypts drip flammable oils.
Marsupials and eutherians-marvellous sects-
Roam telepathically over the land.
Kangaroos stand toe to toe, grappling,
Seeking the optimum aikido stunt,
Duelling for female favours.
 üü

JAPANESE ÖARDENS

The redblack gate out of the moss garden

Frames red maple branches falling diagonal.

Thin black branches, red leaves cascading...

Densely married green trees beyond...
Mossy old stones fit the black fissures between.

A flight of worn stone steps slides down into shadow

Strewn with maple leaves.

Pale grey dappled stepping stones wend among azaleas.

A bamboo dipper, weighted for handǯs pleasure,

Lies across a round stone stoup.

White light-scraps ripple in dark green water.

A cubical moss-clad stone sits on wet cobbles,

Majestic as a throne.

An old stone lantern hangs under a maple branch,

Sharp scarlet clusters overdangling the grey tower
As it mushrooms upward, dark under the brim.

Translucent red sunshade on a verdant knoll,

Pitted greywhite stones beneath.
A slender stone pagoda rises in a tree-recess.
 ü*

Yellow lanterns in zigzag pattern

In the evening gloom,
On the wet dark cobble path to the teahouse.

Intricate pavements, each stone distinct

And irreplaceable,
Unique in texture and hue.

Cobbles, moss and sand:

Three textures, three rhythms
Juxtaposed.
Stepping stones of irregular shapes
Archipelago a pebble-sea.

Leaves orange, pink and yellow,

With brown trunks slanting between,
All over a fluted wallǯs horizon.
A trance of bark and stone.

Spy out from shadow

Through an oval window:
Autumn delirium of vermilion and green
Overlapping, green in vermilion,
Vermilion in green.
And then it is winter,
Dark blue trimmed with white,
Öhost-ermine.

An aged cherry tree in blossom:

Whiskery danglers and pink umbrellas,
Önarled auburn branches propped with long poles.
Clustered bushes look up into its heights.

A fuzzy bridge upside-down under water.

Do you want to cross it?

Damson-dark bridge-pavilion,
Roofed with winter white...
The image in the shadow-lake shivers,
Breaks up, yet holds.
Water dreams it is air.
 üA

Shiny black pine-needled cobbles on pondside.

A rain-lit trunk towers up bottlegreen,
Bent like a stick immersed in water.
The pond is misty-grey,
Öhost-stones in the shallows.

A serpentine rill writhes through patterned forest,

Russet earth littered with autumn stars.

A stone junk floats on a raked-sand river,

Öreyblack on greywhite.
A shadow-rock, a volcanic islet,
Bobs in a froth of melting snow.

A stone tortoise with head uplifted

Swims in the moss.
A carp climbs the dry cascade,
Aspiring to dragonhood.
In the lake is an island made of seven stones,
Exquisitely composed.

Snow on the roofs of the Öolden Pavilion

And on the Öolden Pavilion in the lake...

In the Ryoan-ji Temple garden

Fifteen stones in five groups
Rise from pale raked sand,
Five, two, three, two and three,
Balanced inside the rectangle,
Flowing left to right,
One group standing out against the current.
Subtle rain highlights
The tones and textures in the rocks,
Brightens the trees
And darkens the sand.
Every detail is proportionate and apt.
 üo

URBAN ÖOTHIC

Love comes wearing a surgeonǯs mask,

Diabolically skilful, alert to every twitch.
Under the railway stationǯs cathedral roof,
One souls arrives, another departs,
Passing on different trains, different tracks.
The city, lubricated metal hermaphrodite,
Mates with itself, grimly efficient.
Family politics proceeds in scared little rooms.
Sunset glares like an open furnace
Where the whole world is tortured into steel,
Manipulated by supply and demand.

Love calls again, a cheerful arsonist,

Impervious to psychotherapy.
In the small hours, while the innocent sleep on,
The accused are taken for interrogation.
 ü†

THOMAS HARDY AS A BOY

The Dorset boy lies on his back in the grass,

Squinting at the summer sky from under a straw hat;
Why can he not stay this way forever
And never have to grow into a man?
He knows every clod of this county,
Every field, hedge and gate, every treeǯs silhouette,
The depth and temperament of every stream,
The works of fairies, the scenes of ancestral crimes.
And words emerge from him like miller-moths
From the mouths of the dying.

Solitary Tom sits by, silent, unnoticed,

Watching others sing, play, chatter and jest.
Till the day he dies he will never forget
That smile, so sweet, a nameless beauty gave him
As she passed by on horseback
In the fragrant August lane.

At Dorchester prison he stands, transfixed,

Next to the creaking gallows, staring up
At the murderess who slit her husbandǯs throat.
Beautiful, she dangles against the rainy sky,
Her black silk gown wound tightly round her,
Her face half-visible through a mask of wet cloth.

Sketch-pad in hand, he walks from village to village,

Prentice architect, surveying ancient churches,
 *

Touching their stones with a loverǯs hands,

Tracing their lineaments with a pencil,
His quiet eyes lighting on chronicles and dreams.

THE ÖREEN MAN

In an ancient village church, still, so still,

Smelling of wood and stone,
The dust of memory imbuing the air,
I look up and spot the Öreen Men
Inhabiting the roof bosses,
Snarling, sighing, following me with their eyes,
Disgorging vegetation from their mouths,
A puissant uncanny tribe.

Chartres in the rain:

Stones deepen to brown-orange and blue-grey,
Walls and buttresses glisten,
Portalsǯ columns and carvings shine.
Nourished at the roots, the whole cathedral
Swells, replenished, green hints in the stone,
The recesses, arches, gables and tabernacles
Revealing some of their mysteries.
Water pouring down the transeptsǯ facades
Issues from the spandrels, north and south,
Through bestial mouths, jetting in gouts
To splash on steps below...This is the cross-bar
Where the north-south line of time
Transects the east-west line of eternity.
Corbelled out on brackets, carved in waves
Of Deluge, the Öreen Men and gargoyles
Swim through the sky, as earthly waters
Pour and pour, transfigured into life itself,
 *|

And the devout soul, bearing witness,

Leaves this place with newfound vigour,
To bless the world with holy water.

Viriditas: the Divine Word penetrates

Body and soul, here in the branches
Of the Tree.
I have seen the Öreen Manǯs face
In so many places, peering out from the swirl:
Wise, demonic, sinister, angelic,
Contemplative, prophetic, idiotic, frowning,
Benevolent, weary, youthful, primitive,
Leonine, chivalrous, fantastical, amused,
Mournful, bestial, solemn, ethereal,
Omniscient, somnambulant, professorial,
Mischievous, filling the woodland
With laughter, praise and song.
 *_

CHARLES MINÖUS

Couldnǯt write a straight tune if he wanted to.

Couldnǯt read music or keep time.
Couldnǯt do anything the way others did it.
Swung at anyone who pissed him off, or pulled a knife, even.
Once threw a piano down the stairs in a rage.
Chased women all the time, white women, especially.
Talked non-stop, always ranting about some kind of mistreatment.
Cheated anyone to get his own way.
Bragged incessantly about himself.
Loved fine wines and exotic cuisines.
Lived rich and died broke.
Had a grin as wide as America.
A voice, a charm, a wit, a charisma, a splendour
That he carried around in his bass.
All that he saw and felt and learned
Went into that instrument,
Nothing was separate, nothing was wasted.
All he had was death and women.
And that sound.
 *È

IN HER PRAISE

Do you know,have you heard

she is beautiful
as modulating sunlight on Moroccan city walls
as the water spiderǯs equilibrium
when he runs the meniscus chasing prey
as the mercury in a barometer
or the water in a well
never seen only sometimes heard
when a child drops a stone in

I seek her in recondite corners

a silhouette
a glimmer
a footstep or a giggle
a tightness in the stomach
a maggot in the mind

A swooning apple-tree
I break into blossom
for the airǯs delectation
mysterious harmonies
gather me into the earth

Hippos in a mud-hole
we wallow in each other
 *ß

THE OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN

Tamerlaneǯs invaders scale the Rock of Alamut

And breach the Assassinǯs citadel, fortress of Hasan -i-Sabbah.
Penetrating deeper and deeper along sinister corridors,
One unwary soldier, probing an unlit tunnel,
Drops with a shriek into the secret honey-store,
And, struggling like a fly in amber, drowns.

The legendary Hasan could not die like any mortal.

Sensing deathǯs call, he withdrew to his sanctum,
Instructing his attendants to wait three days, then enter.
Alone, he plunged ,with a smile, into a bath of vitriol,
Blissfully dissolving into the Absolute.
On the fourth day, when the door was opened,
Not a trace of the Master remained
In the hushed room, empty except for a raven
Ölaring like a demon on its perch.
 *ü

HUMAN EVOLUTION

Comes Cro-Magnon, tall, young, invincible,

Hunter-warrior, rich priest of flints,
The sunǯs disciple, born to summer plains,
Falling in anger upon the runts,
The ugly Neanderthals, beasts of night,
Blood-drinking lunatics, who, offering submission,
Present their hairy behinds.
Ochre-ruddled corpses gestate in the earthwomb,
Bone-notches mark the teething moonǯs indenture.

Red Ochre Men stalk across Australia,

Inquisitors hunting down the blasphemer,
The traitor to ceremony and myth.

Cretan dancers romp in the sevenfold mazeǯs spiral:

Seven maidens and seven youths
Offer their throats to the stranglerǯs cord.
The horned altar waxes with the moon.

Spiral Castle, the revolving isle,

-Örave of the expired king,
Fallen sunǯs haven,-
Ölints in the mind when cranes are in flight.
The penitent, offering prayers as he steps,
Negotiates the maze inlaid on a church floor.

The spider moon shuttles with threads of intent.

 **

Shamanǯs garter-cord, sutra and cincture

All fasten in bondage to the crux quadrata.

Three strands twist the umbilical,

The baby a spider suspended by a filament.
Leftward the moon blooms and perishes.

A centrifugal spider throws out radial threads,

Enunciating a sinistral spiral,
And turns back at the outer edge,
Back towards the centre,
Coming home to symmetry.
His octagonal sanctum awaits a sacrifice.
The moon turns white, then red, then black;
First, a virgin, sealed in immaculate reveries,
Then a blushing flirt deflowered, making monthly blood-libation,
Bringing forth the red-blessed babe,
And, lastly, the venerable dame entombed,
Pending a glorified body.

Thirteen moons stir the cauldron of space,

Brewing fire and rain.
See what burns in the waterǯs eye:
Tiny salt-stars from the sea.

Left-handed shadows walk backwards forever,

Upside-down in the trancetime of the dead.

Midsummer. The spent king, mead-sodden,

Enters the megalithic circle of thirteen.
Lashed to the cross-oak, flayed, blinded, gelded,
Hacked into joints, he roasts over fires,
And twelve celebrants dance the figure-of-eight,
Tearing his flesh with their teeth.
An alderwood boat floats downriver to the island,
Bearing the genitals and the oracular head.
 *A

PETRA

The road curls and curls into the hills,

Fragile gamble across bare shimmering distances,
Rock-scumbled wastes of russet dust that dip
And fold, concealing desiccated wadi beds.
In winter, glacial winds drive sleet-blizzards
And crouched rocks glint in the sombre light.
In summer, shrill silence and shrinking heat
Invest the motionless air with expectation;
Bleached earth phases from ochre to violet,
Faraway horizons vibrate with cobalt glare.

White rocks in the Bab el Siq irradiate white light,

Still but for the rattle of stones underfoot,
As the hills close in stealthily around;
Deeper, narrower the high gorge plunges...
Squinting little wadis, glutted with tumble-boulders,
Intersect at intervals from either side,
And sometimes a tantalizing flight of worn steps
Rises, leading to nowhere at all.

Towering rock-walls glow with stratified hues,

Ranging from pearlwhite to mellowest yellow,
Öold and madder, red, carmine and mauve.
One moment, exploratory sunlight slants down
Across a curving pirouetting surface,
Nubbed pinnacles conspiring with the sky;
The next, all is horrible shadow, sullen shades
 *o

Convulsed, pining for light, as the traveller

Stumbles on, disheartened.Suddenly, the chasm
Opens wide onto vivid greenery and white blooms,
But instantly the rocks press in again, relentless,
Higher, tighter, more menacing even than before.

Near its end, the intestinal ravine clamps deadly

In doomy twilight, where the echo of scuttling
Boot-crunched stones rebounds .Ahead, a squinting
Sunlight-fissure glints, with weird contortions,
A keyhole to be picked or unlocked.
Black-framed, a classical façade, a questerǯs castle
Rises up, revealed, as you exit, transfigured,
Into miraculous dazzle, blinking at the peach-coloured
Treasuryǯs hallucination, chiselled into rock.

From the High Place of Sacrifice, you look out

Over the deserted cityǯs eerie mysterious maze,
North to rumbling uplands, south to low sere hills.
At nightfall, waiting spectres emerge among the stones
That mortal hands once touched and cherished,
Öathering at the altar, eager to clutch at your arm
In the chill, to greet you and explain themselves.
Under the Nabateansǯ dolphin stars, nightsurfing,
Empty tombs disintegrate into darkness,
Secrets easily reclaimed by the desert air.
 *†

SILBURY HILL

The goddess squatting in labour

green spiderǯs web
catcher of souls

The mother-throne
the proud eye of wisdom

White Mountain isle

chalk-shelled egg
whose yolk is bliss

Sickle,grain and cornstook

treasurechest of umbilical snakes

Mother and Child

androgyne progenitor
the spinner and weaver
the Wiltshire stag

Mother-lover-destroyer
she reclines
around her moated risen womb
ripe with numberless offspring
a great loaf leavened and baked

In the waters of her body

the heavens meet the earth
 A

fire earth air and water

interacting
in a cell

Hill and hole are wedded

absence and presence

This is the omphalos

the Mountain at the Centre of the World
the wheeling hub
a coiled cornucopia
a covenant

The astronomical eye

unblinking
absorbs the inexhaustible sky

The prolific womb-head

broods eternally

Time and destiny

she breeds from her tissue
herself and the world
one text

Öentle farmers
who milk the earthǯs udders
have crafted a posset
frothing at the brim

Stagsǯ antlers wax with the corn

antler picks hack at the ground
the devoted hind keeps her calf beside her
turns back
and finds him when he strays

The virile goddess

lives in the antlerǯs curve
and shows a wilting phallus
the wounded dying consort she includes

At Lammas-tide
 A|

the loyal come

sickles in hand
illuminated
by chalklandsǯ lunar dazzle

Albion uplifted from the ocean

tamely to the stewardsǯ hands
puissant flints
stone embryos
empower their hands with fire
and the White Ladyǯs springloaded womb
delivers amid the tall green corn

Into the labyrinth

the Kennet threads
visiting the underworldǯs autumn and winter
mewling forth again in spring

Swallowhead Spring
with a modest addition
baptizes the Winterbourne Kennet
the cunning cunt foretells the price of corn
the riverǯs silt turns water to milk
the womb-eye weeps with understanding

Here
the great snake swallows its own tail
the green world continues
her myriad midwives assisting

Sun and Moon

reflected in the moat
nourish the mother
quicken the child

Midwinter sunset:
pink in the old motherǯs tit
her lower lip dribbles the gobbled sunǯs blood

Midwinter sunrise:
blood trickles
 A_

down the thigh

At the equinoxes
sun and moon
are born simultaneously
at the vulva
and die at the head
lighting the moat-eye
with their torches
then reversing

Midsummer sunrise:
light climbs the spine
to the skull

The moon
born from water
coaxes birth
in the water

On Lammas Eve
the moon draws out the child
from darkness
cuts the umbilical
the first sheaf

The child turns and faces

motherǯs breast
the nipple
lit with midnight milk

Exhausted after climax

the land subsides
around the fertile raised tomb
and the dead earth
dies in coming to life
devoured again
in a world both dead and alive
 AÈ

BORIS PASTERNAK

The lilacs were in bloom on the day of your death.

Consecrated by Moscowǯs golden cupolas,
You boomed and sang, the stormǯs hierophant,
Tenderness and courage in those huge amber eyes.
That sovereign stallionǯs head, alert to vibrations,
Shot out laser glances at the strangest tangents,
Catching nature unawares. Erupting in centrifugal
Öenesis, you stormed the silence with ecstasies,
Obedient to destinyǯs strictures, never failing
To praise life with an awkward seraphǯs joy.
 Aß

DOÖFACES

Now the past means nothing. It does not exist.

For a body trained to react without question,
A body renunciant, submissive to fate.
Now there is nothing but day-to-day detail,
Instructorsǯ incantations, catechism of fear.
Accept your death as simple and correct.

Black rain. Drenched to the slimy root bone.

Everything soiled in the glutinous morass.
Reek of flesh and dung. Vegetable putrescence.
Foxholes full of slop and dusk all hours.
The jungle thinks evil every second,
Concocting infection, fever and death.

Weary automata, -scared shitless,-dig, dig, dig.

Benumbed in every fibre, they curse and pray,
Pray and curse. Blistered, bombarded, shaken
Apart. Up to the line the veterans sleepwalk,
Indifferent as workers through factory gates.
Their world is superstition and random doom.

Bone-brittling terror. Twitching sinews and minds.

Clenched guts. Clamped jaws. No mouth, just void.
The entire world a rising nausea, a maddened pulse.
Idiots, idiots, why do you return from the dead?
You should sleep and find some ease, some love,
Under the ground, beyond misery and disgrace.
 Aü

MADOC

It is told how Madoc, son of Prince Owain Öwynedd,

Sick of fighting his brethren,
Took leave of the homeland, and prepared ships
With men and munitions,
To seek far shores, sailing west,
Until he came to a land unknown,
Where many strange things were revealed.
A man much changed, he returned
To Britain, declaring the wonders he had seen,
To any who would listen,
And drew to him such men and women
As would quit the quarrelsome wasp-nest, Wales,
For a bounteous and peaceable demesne.
Thus, bidding farewell forever, he voyaged
Again into the West, never seen on these islands again.
It is said by those who have knowledge
That he and his people settled in that distant country
And prospered there, learning its customs and speech.

In a cottage in a haunted vale in South Wales,

Iolo Morganwg bends over precious maps,
Shuffles notes and draws lines with a ruler,
Scribbles calculations, specifying the lineaments
Of a dream, until, at last, his hovering finger
Comes down on that empty space
In the American heartland.
 A*

These are the First Men, who grew out of the ground,
The Mandans, at the heart of the world.
And, at the village centre, stands the shrine to the Lone Man:
Cottonwood palisade, bound with willow thong,
To mark the water level of the Deluge,
And a red cedar enclosed within.
When the willow leaf is full, the ceremony commences:
Öourds like upturned tortoises are brought,
Filled with water from the four quarters.
The villagers rush to see the Lone Man coming:
White-clay-covered, descending from the western hills,
He marches among the houses and people,
And opens up the medicine lodge.
Just as, at the time of the Flood, he had saved the Mandans
From drowning, landing his big canoe on a mountain
And bringing all good things in his hands.

The Welsh Indians? Everyone knows they exist.

They must be a little further on, beynd the next mountain.
If not the Delawares, they might be the Shawnees,
Or the Pawnees, no, not the Pawnees, the Comanches, then,
The Padoucas, perhaps...but they must be somewhere,
Those elusive whiteskinned Indians,
Öabbling and crooning in Welsh.

Out beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains,

A certain intrepid Evan Williams of Colcoed
Comes across Indians bantering in Welsh-
North Walian at that, and no mistake!
Wide-eyed and earnest, he addresses them politely,
Breathless as they blink dn respond,
In a queer yet familiar gab, Welsh and un-Welsh,
So they all stand there, gawping, bewildered,
Excitedly trying to communicate,
Expecting any minute an intelligible sentence...
 AA

MOZART

A coach speeds along the roads of Europe,

Little Mozart enthroned inside, exhilarated,
Watching the landscape vanish behind,
Into Backwardsland, his private kingdom,
Complete with its own geography and laws,
A realm of children, all happy and good...
So he muses, as the coach clatters onward,
With Papa, his faithful ervant, at his side.
Vast operas swell within the boyǯs heart,
Tales of exotic prince and their courts,
With he the benevolent castle-building autocrat.
His finger picks out just the right note on the clavier,
His tongue tosses out the exact unsurpassable word!

Quartets: pure unearthly realms of sound,

Eddying energy, growling agitation, radiant streams,
Violins etching diamond-point moments
On glass, and behind it all a solemn stillness,
Simple as a morning cobweb in the sun...

Dead...dead...his father, Leopold,-dead!

His own growth was dear Papaǯs decline...
How many times had father accused him
Of hastening his death with his waywardness,
As the old man waited, paced, fretted, waited
For ever rarer, ever briefer letters from his son?
All too often Wolfgang had failed the one
 Ao

Who had created him ,loved him, encouraged

Each step, sacrificed so much for his sake,
Infusing him with all his knowledge and pride.
And now there is guilty relief and terrible freedom-
Never, never, never to hear that voice again,
Offering encouragement and counsel...

Symphonies ascend out of chaos

As the bailiff world beats down the door...
Bent over the final chorus of ð
 
!,
Mozart strains after a serene simplicity,
Earth made heaven in rippling auroras,
Each instrument soaring to curtain-fall,
Death confronted, converted, overcome.

As Mozart lies dying, his pet canary strikes up

Innocently trilling merry tunes by its master,
A mockery too cruel that strains his fevered nerves
Until the offending bird is removed.
On the desk the Requiem lies unfinished,
Leopold, the hooded judge, betrayed by his son,
Looms before him now, a dire revenant,
Bringing black sobbing tremors and clamour,
The crushed soul weeping in penitence.
The clock strikes: he slips into oblivion,
Lips mouthing a last breath of music,
Some indistinguishable irrepressible phrase.
 A†

ÖANDHI

In Hardwar, amid the pilgrim swarm,

The returned exile roams the streets,
Appalled by the credulity, hypocrisy and dirt
Öoing by the name of religion.
Can one man, one soul among myriads,
Redeem, through virtue, the sins of all?

A spinning wheel turns in a prison cell

As Öandhi meditates on his sorrow:
If his penance were perfect,
Would Indiaǯs violence not cease?
The world thwarts and destroys itself as before,
Yet, staring into the wheel, he smiles,
For he cannot but see love in its revolutions.

Leading a pilgrim host to the salt shores,

The Mahatma marches through villages
And towns, drawing crowds to his side,
A frail little man, more powerful than armies.
To the sea! In joy and triumph, to the sea!
Let this gathered salt be the sign of hope.
 o

BUDAPEST, 1900

In violet twilight the lights come on

Along the boulevards.
Raucous energy surges:
Juvenile metropolis thrashes back and forth,
Sophisticated and coarse.
Chestnuts dropping on Castle Walk
Echo the autumn forlornly.
A lonely cello complains.

Clear skies rise again in December,

Paler gold of a winter sun
Refracted through crystalline cold.
Festive innocence falls with the snow:
Rich women prance along, snuggled in furs,
Emerging from confectioneries,
Fondling dainty parcels, a joy to unwrap.
Dayǯs blue diamond sings fire and ice.
Skating rinks and ballrooms ring
With pleasure, crisp as snow-crunch.

In March, the riverǯs rising thrills

With ripe commotion, swirling increase.
By April, the quays and bridges
Quaver in mother-of-pearl.
Acacias, apricots and lilacs in May
Charge the atmosphere with sex,
Some wild transcendence in the bone,
 o|

Elusive as the sinuous smiling motions

Of pagan brides in light frocks.
Summer thunders with gypsy bravura,
Dishes clatter in open-air restaurants,
Young wives throw open their windows
And lean out into the sun.

The city initiates its strolling neophytes,

Writers beginning

.
Outbreaks of appetite exuberate in sorrow,
Breaking up the slow sad music
Of futility, prolific with schemes.
New forms, new expression! Coffee houses
Seethe with a bold pioneer generation;
Brief lurid straw-fire flares into ashes.
Beneath the clamour, a wistful knowing tone
Strangely illuminates the night.
 o_

THE FENS

Slowly the sun moves towards the worldǯs edge

In early summer, before the grain hardens,
When the earth stares into space, expectant.
Herons take up their posts on their river;
Only their eyes move, hypnotizing fish.
Swifts and swallows tangle with the sky.
The opiate sun fades, shedding red petals.
Distant spires disappear into night.
The earth rocks like an open boat,
Constellations foaming over.
Tiny lights perforate the distance.
Will the sea someday return here,
The old foe bent on revenge?

The riverǯs a steel sword snug in scabbard.

Sparrows chip at morning silence,
Chiselling electric blue.
You can almost hear excited roots pushing
And barley thickening to burst.
Straight roads skip and run on ahead.
Skylarks strive upwards and release
With parachute exhilaration.
Church spires conduct hidden lightnings.
Seductive space opens up to be loved.

August sunset over the flat lands:

Coral reefs of fires fanfare the sky.
 oÈ

White buildings shine like icebergs.

Dervish weathervanes swivel and whoop.
Thunder avalanches: shards and splinters
Explode from the shattered pane.

Autumn strings up glistening webs

From hedge to hedge, and telepathic mist
Creeps through trees and people.
Primeval pungency of damp vegetation...
Fish-bubbles break the riverǯs still.
A clock ticks in an empty house.
Fleets of churches sail across fenlands,
And a solitary walker throws back his head,
Swallowing rain like sloe gin.

Rimy grass crunches like glass-splinters.

Winter chill wrings out the bladder.
Dead moles hang in a line on a fence,
Thirty-seven little peat-black corpses.

Spring looses bright serpents in the air.

No time now, no limits.
Only iridescence .A kingfisherǯs wing.
 oß

BELARUS

Thousands and thousands, the storks are flying...

Their nests hang on rooves and birch trees,
On chapels amid the green rye.
Hushed plains tremble with the tread of bison herds.
These lands alone withstood the Tatars
And repulsed them.

Hills spiked with towns,

Humpback streets and lime groves,
The lakes resplendent on summer evenings,
Reflecting dark ursine forest upside-down.
Along the Neman ruined castles loom
Like mammoths buried, huge worn tusks
Protruding from the ground,
Ancient oaks like green thunderheads
Ölower over the quiet banks...

In the east, moraine ridges and peat bogs,

Cranberries in autumn are gatehredwith scoops,
Pungent pine forests point to the sky,
the mushrooms are too numerous to gather.
in the southern swamps mating cranes
Dance in the springtime, hopping,
And gloomy forests stretch forever,
Pierced only here and there by sunbeams,
The ground steaming light vapour,
Primeval aurochs wandering in dream...
 oü

In the Dnieper lands are ancient towns

Overgrown with gnarled oaks, roses and sweetbriar,
And ducks take flight from old riverbeds.

Morning mist over the river.

splash of a beaver flopping into the water,
barking of village dogs at night...
a waterwheel murmurs as it turns
And swallows skim the fish-pond at evening.
Mistletoeǯs sticky pearls hang in the woods.
The cried of wild geese pierce the soul.
The and oozes with springs, ponds and swamps,
Rivers, lakes and streams...

In spring cannonade sound above the river,

Ice floes star to shift ad crack up, clambering
Onto each other, ice castles, towers and walls
Appear and disappear instantaneously,
Ice masses battering against the banks
Desperate to bust free...
Once the villagers say they saw
A whole wooden chapel drifting on the April flood,
Celebrating Mass as it sailed away...
In the dark fir forest the wood-grouse
Utters its calls, a sound like the dripping
Of thawing snow...

In summer the orioles whistle,

The nightingales trill,
Hawks and golden eagles plane
Over the water meadows,
Cranes dance in the swamp mists,
The cuckoo foretells long life for him
Who approaches with good will...
At dawn huge pike splash among waterlilies...
 o*

ARCTIC CIRCLES

Malemutes stretch taut their leashes,

Brown eyes ensorcelled by the masterǯs legerdemain,
Leaping to snatch hunks of meat in mid-flight-
A clack of the mandibles, one gulp, all gone.
The head dog stands apart, calmly waiting,
Reprimanding his fellows with tactical nips.

Summerǯs smoke soon drifts away.

Fishing-lines sink in salmon torrents.
Children gather huckleberries by the handful.
Seabirds are crying, preparing to leave.
Languid boys stretch out on springy tundra,
Watching clouds in a suspended world.
Offshore, glacier and rock blend in blue expanse.
One freakish night transfigures the world with white,
Iron earth thuds underfoot.

The mountain resounds with harsh inhuman yelps.

A fox trots along the crest, tail extended,
Pace even and brisk, a thing possessed.
He sits and perks triangular ears,
Pointed little head alert to all vibrations,
And, hoarsely, with double-triple quavers,
Calls to his mate, to the empty tundra and the wind...
 oA

Sand and stone. Rocks through fractured earth.

Space...space...white pebble valleys...desolate peaks...
Tawny slopes freaked with snow...
Ölacier gleaming, king of the wilderness...
Emptiness thrills to odd noises-
Creaks, wingbeats, gullshrieks, muffled crunching,
Öunshot crack of icebergs calving.

An Inuit shaman intones in his igloo,

Fidgets, frets, grimaces, grunts and trembles,
Cries out , panting, in a strange jerky tongue,
Petitioning the stealthy powers of the air.
Down he buckles, a dead heap, dreaming,
Swimming with the goddess under the ice,
Caressing her, untangling her tresses,
Wedded in the holy sight of the dead.
How long, he asks her, will the warm spell last?
When will seals leave and narwhals return?

Happy smell of animal skins and grease...

Thawing earth steams. Excited birds circle.
Obsidian sea without a ripple shimmers
From iceberg to iceberg, mesmeric mirages.
Cheery, the hunters recite each landmark:
Here, one set his traps for triumph;
There, another made love under a tent.
The kayak takes after a red-eyed walrus,
One Eskimo imitating its cry...
One-two-strike! The harpoon shudders,-
A widening blood-circle on the water...

Days draw shorter. The flushed sun, bidding adieu,

Tracks along the dazzle-cliff, sinking at last.
Fleeting twilight. Horizon, emerald-white,
Flares orange-purple. Southwest is yellow sky,
Translucent clouds and weird shadows on cliffs.
Hibernal wind corrugates ferruginous screes.
The ocean contracts in black gelatinous paste.
People languish, morose, enraged over niggles.
Hysterical, a woman runs riot with a knife,
Boggle-eyed with superhuman wrath.
A crazed hound yelps and zigzags, staring blindly,
 oo

Collapses, spitting froth, jaw agape.

A sledge flies smoothly along,-gallant malemutes!

Brothers to the Eskimo, their skullbones alike,
The pack united by quarrels and amours-
This bitch venting her menstrual potion,
That dog running his flatulence out...

Polar night. The dogs on their haunches

Tilt their heads towards the moon, eyes half-closed,
And yowl in unison, modulating some desperate
Propitiatory appeal.
Far away, to the south,
A pale solar halo arises. Men moving about
Are silhouettes darker than dark.
Day explodes in multicoloured space,
The ocean unshackled, carousing,
Heated birds shuttling to and fro.
Now let the blood thaw in veneryǯs season!

The storytellerǯs eyes gaze inwards,

Voice grave as he draws listeners
Into the iceblink dream, their secrets
Inscribed on the air.
All men are shapeshifters,
Öenies made of ice.

Agile hands flutter in a string game,

Knotting little pictures to tease the air;-
See,-a penis embedded in a tight vagina;
And now-a defecating woman venting a fart.
The strong deride the weak. The lazy are damned.
The winning wrestler pisses on his victim.

A hunter returns, snorting, coughing, saying nothing,

Unharnesses the team, the dogs whimpering with pleasure,
Flattering him with a show of female weakness.
He works alone, weary but proud,
Then trudges to his place amid feigned indifference,
Cherishing his mystery intact within,
He stretches out, putting on a solemn face,
As his canny wife simply hands him a bowl of water.
 o†

He slurps, wipes his mouth on his sleeve,

And only then, eyes lowered, does he utter,
Allowing his tale to run forth like a sledge,
Öathering speed on bumpy ice,
As he recalls aloud all the details of his journey,
The changing colours of the land and sky,
And all he saw thought and felt...

A mother licks her newborn child

That cries out to be recognised and named.
DzDonǯt cry, donǯt cry, donǯt cry,
The big black crow will peck out your eyes...dz

The men, clustered together, laugh as they discuss

The womenǯs vaginas: whose is the best shape,
Which one is best lubricated,
How well this or that one fits.
Meanwhile, their wives, gathered elsewhere,
Öossip about the men just the same,
Scorning this oneǯs Dzmaggotdz, that oneǯs ineptitude.

The people sniff the breeze, the peaty summer earth,

Appraise the ice-crackǯs intonation,
The snow-pileǯs dampness, the animalsǯ moods,
Lunar haloes and the plucked strings of the air...
To be vigilant and furtive, not to force anything,
But serve the moment, part of whatever one witnesses-
That is the way to succeed.

Morbid anxieties haunt the sleeper as he wakes,

Nightmares of sickness, debility and starvation,
Baleful spiritsǯ machinations...
A man has died and the village dogs are howling,
Muzzles all pointed like guns at the empty sky...
A corpse lies buried, sewn up in a skin,
Head turned towards the sun.
Relatives rotate with the heavens around him,
Fearing vengeful visitations;
Uneasy minds recall slighted taboos,
Murders and malicious tricks, calumnies, deceptions...
These are dangerous days, a blizzard of conscience,
When the heart may lose all pleasure in living.
 †

Expectant, the air hums with springǯs inception;

Fertile steam puffs from ice-breaches,
Slipped rocks thud, jockeying ice-slabs crunch,
Muffled echoes come from precarious snow-slopes.
Barnacle geese cackle down the coast,
Seagullsǯ throbbing whistle resonates.
Leprous snow gutters, rivulets trickling, massing,
Diaphanous radiance swells and spangles the air.
Incendiary blossoms flare up all over,
Saxifrage and campion and cochlearia.
White hares caper on a talus.

Sinuous, a polar bear sneaks up on an indolent seal,

Smashes its skull with one immaculate wallop.
A barking, bobbing Eskimo hunter edges
Towards the colony, lulling the plump black prey
As they slumber, too slow to recognise him as a man.

Bluegreen moonlight. Shadows steal over hummocks.

Parallel snow-lashes pummel the quaking ground.
Whirlwinds tower up in white-fumed darkness.
The tragic wind hisses and rattles its grief,
Making free with eerie screens and ballistic rocks.

As the hunter returns from long absence,

The village children greet him with the ritual phrase:
DzAre you a spirit or a man?dz
 †|

A MEETINÖ IN THE ARCTIC CIRCLE



"# "$"$

Commander John Ross and Lieutenant William Parry,
Officers of the Royal British Navy,
Stand resplendent in cocked hats and tailcoats,
White-gloved, with swords at their belts,
Buckled shoes sinking into the snow
As they stand meeting a band of Eskimos
In Melville Bay, Öreenland,
Their two square-rigged ships at anchor behind,
As they shiver in regulation wool and broadcloth.
The icebound sea coruscates with palaces
And castles, weird statues and phantom monuments,
Slightly out of focus, perhaps only a dream,
Emerald, azure, indigo and alabaster.

The Englishmen and the Eskimos stand staring,

Equally amazed at each other,
And the Eskimos ask, in a dialect so obscure
The interpreter can barely understand it:
DzWhere are you from? The sun or the moon?dz
Then they address the ships as living beings
For they have seen their wings move.
They spit out the biscuit they are offered,
And shrink from their reflections in a hand-mirror,-
What kind of monster is this?
Shown a watch, they wonder if it is alive,
And is it good to eat?
The interpreter makes them doff their caps
In deference to the Englishmen,
And they obey cheerfully, mystified by the ritual.
Meanwhile, the navy men, wandering round,
Find themselves drawn hypnotically
To certain stones in view, bewildered
 †_

When what seems half a mile away

Turns out to be a minuteǯs stroll.

Pink blush of a hard frost, and pastel shades

Of the northern heavens, where the aurora
Showers, trickles and pulsates down the darkness,
Huge illuminations streaming and shooting,
Silently rushing...
Icebergs seem to float in mid-air,
Other icebergs upside-down on top of them,
Protean apparitions proliferate on all sides.
Ships float in the concave of a vast sphere
And doppelgangers wander through the mind.
Whirlwinds shoot skyward from hilltops,
Spraying white clouds into the air.
Solid foam-masses lash the capes,
Breaking over icebergs, fogging the sea,
Rising and falling with each gust.
 †È

PATHFINDERS

These are the maps, the palimpsests,

Criss-cross routes congealing into lands.
Imaginary dialogues with potential objects
Hasten the explorer through his expanded self.
The itinerant cartographer, subtly violent,
Draws metaphors into his passage,
Bringing the invisible into focus.
He cherishes occasions,
Places that are means to travel more,
Experiments in ignorance and knowledge.
The centre is everywhere and nowhere.
These places are not their names,
Nor are their names translations.

Following dumb unlettered rivers,

Seeking out their sources,
The pathfinders surrender to a new syntax.
Armed with ambiguous terminology,
They slowly assemble landscapes,
Yielding to the lie of the language.
Naming, they inaugurate a history,
A sense of centres, edges and vectors;
Everywhere they tread is borderland.
 †ß

AZTEC ÖODS

Huitzilopochtli, Southern Hummingbird, aloft, aloft,

Patron lord of the Mexica,-
We who trekked in exodus to the site foretold,
The eagle perched on a cactus,
Small birds feathers scattered around-
Make us a rainbow!
Fallen warriors escort the risen sun,
Beating their wings to frisk the skies for rain.
Come, strict fruition, in strife and immolation,
Implacable daystar, be nourished with blood,
The red of sacred terror in menǯs veins...
Tlazolteotl, excremental goddess,
Hears confessions from the dying,
Their evil whispered in her ear.
Spare us, spare us- we who believe!
The rabbit moon leaps. The pulque-gods seethe.
Tezcatlipoca, Smoking Mirror,
Sleek black jaguar padding across the heavens,
Our sorcerers will feed your maw
With trembling incantation.

New Fire is unsheathed on the Hill of the Star,

Fire-drill swivelled in the sacrificeǯs breast;
A slash, a yank and a live throbbing heart
Is offered to the saviour flame.
The Flayed Öod sniffs the iron reek,
The Sunstone revolves, world after world
Destroying themselves in hopeless succession.
Whittled jaguar-bone in hand, the ruler
Öladly stabs his own ears and thighs,
Red flowers blooming for his people.

A comet scorches the heavens. A temple burns.

On a calm day the lagoon seethes like a cauldron.
 †ü

Phantasmal women wail beneath the moon,

Prophesying unavoidable disaster.
Hunters come before Moctezuma,
Bringing a wondrous, unnameable fowl,
A circular speculum set in its head.
Peering therein, the Emperor sees
The stars by day, and, looking again,
A bizarre fearsome horde, drawn up
In squadrons, advancing to war,
Creatures half-man, half-deer.
A runner comes up, babbling of a mountain
In the sea, erupting in fiery monition.

The white god has returned from the east,

Not seen on these shores since the Toltecsǯ demise.
Aztec envoys, coming down to the harbour,
Place the turquoise serpent mask upon
The face of a hard-bitten Spanish hidalgo.
Quetzalcoatl throws a thunderbolt from his hand,
-A cannon fired in brisk ceremonial salute,-
And the Aztec deputation fall, terrified, to the ground.
Picking them up, the bemused Spaniards
Restore these ridiculous little creatures with wine.
What witchcraft is this, the Aztecs ask themselves,
Clutching their heads, feeling their souls
Imprisoned, so sluggish, befuddled, dehumanised.
 †*

SUMO

Three white-robed referees step into the ring,

Where seven wands lie in zigzag pattern.
The solemn chief pronounces:
DzEverlasting life to heaven, long life to earth,
And may the winds and rains be seasonable.dz
Lucky emblems in an earthenware pot
Lie blessed and buried in the middle.
The ring is consecrated with salt and sake,
And three circuits the attendants march,
Lacquered drums suspended from poles.

First quarter of the new moon:

River spirits will fasten on bathers
And wrestle them down to their deaths.
Kites are flying, horses running,
Sumo wrestlers wobble to the clash.

On the Day of the Chrysanthemum, the Double Sun,

At the Kamo shrine two large circles are traced in dust.
The male-crow priest hops to the sand-mound at one circleǯs centre
And the female-crow priest hops to her circleǯs centre,
Three times with three hops, there and back,
They journey to and from their little mountains,
Bearing a mat, a bow and arrow, a sword and a fan.
The male crow on the left calls to the female on the right;
Three times he calls and she responds.
Three times clockwise round the left mound
Boy sumo wrestlers circle;
Counterclockwise round the other their opponents troop.

It is time for the rice to be planted.

A sumo wrestler stands in the ring,
Before the sacred ricefield at the shrine.
He stamps his feet, rinses his mouth with water,
 †A

Scatters salt, crouches then stands up,

Circumambulates the ring widdershins,
Straining against an invisible foe.
Suddenly his legs are seized-he is thrown!
He staggers up, valiantly grapples the air again,
And is toppled to the ground.
CUMBRIA

Water and stone. Water is stone is water.

Stone jutting, thusting in pinnacles.
Stone quivering in fragments on shilly-beds.
Stone gouged and chiselled by glaciers,
Weathered into grotesques.
Stone hewn and hauled into sacred circles.
Stone packed into walls and roads.
Handled by generations of dalesmen
For sheepfolds, farmsteads, bridges, churches, mills.
Stones in tranquil valley bottoms.
Stones clustered on ledges and in gulleys.
Crouched in millions on stormy summits.
Skygazing as seasons pass.
Englandǯs landscape garden
Is a masterpiece of trompe lǯoeil.

A spread map conjures Nordic gutturals:

Fells, becks, gills and tarns,
Brant slopes and flou brooks,
Slacks, hauses, grains and scars.
Somewhere, a sheep, binked on a ledge,
Sends loose pebbles skittering,
And an overfeagued hiker, blister-hirpled,
Toils, stark-thewed, through clotted mist.

Nineteenth-century Tourists circulate,

Browsers in a gallery, comparing
Pictures and frames.
They fill notebooks with classical allusions,
And aim Claude-glasses tinted to an antique glow,
Shrinking unwieldy views to Lilliputian perfection.
Regattas resound on the meres,
Cannon salvoes from mock naval battles
Echoing among the peaks.
 †o

Near Öosforth the Esk and Mitre

Coalesce in a sad estuary,
Stillness slashed by seabirdsǯ cries,
Sand, sky and water melting into silver-amber blur.
Enter into the sand-dunes, the sere grass hummocks,
The long glisk of firth beyond.
Blink at the black ships approaching in line,
Riding low and flatbacked, prows reared high,
Sea-dragons charging to battle.
In Öosforth churchyard an Anglo-Viking cross
Rises, Christ-tree and Yggdrasil,
Its roots deep in the oceanǯs floor,
Öirdled by the coils of the Midgardsworm
That catches its own tail in its teeth.
One wolf swallows the Moon, another the Sun.
Loki writhes, bound, the adder round his neck,
Punished for his dirty tricks and jibes.
%  
m
 

  
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'
Odin on Sleipnir, upside-down,
Öallops down to Mimirǯs well to consult the oracle.
The Magdalene gazes upwards
At her crucified love,
Dying at the juncture of two worlds;
Underneath, two wolf-headed ogres
Thrash in mortal combat.
 ††

THE END OF ÖENÖHIS KHAN

The Mongol hordes overrun Khurasan,

Burning crops, razing cities, slaughtering populations.
Returning home along the path of his invasion,
Öenghis Khan pauses to erect a stone pillar
And dictate the inscription:
DzI turn to simplicity; I turn again to purity.dz

Jebe Noyan and Subedei Bahadur

Dine on a box-shaped table in camp,
The Prince of Kiev suffocating to death inside it.

At winterǯs onset, in peacetime, the Öreat Hunt begins:

The entire army, at a signal from the Khan,
Canters forward, in battle array,
For three months on horseback,
Driving the game relentlessly before them.
Bone-chafed, weather-drenched and sore,
The armyǯs wings advance in harmony,
Slowly closing to encircle the prey,
Until the two ends meet, and the circle contracts
Like a whitehot horsehoe quenched in water.
Terrified animals by the thousand
Are herded together, trapped in the killing zone,
Not a single beast, big or small, permitted to escape,
On the last day, seeking to outdo one another
In the eyes of their comrades, and their Khan,
Men fight with sword or hunt on foot,
And throw themselves into danger,
So that some even die wrestling tigers barehanded.

Troubled by ill omens, the Öreat Khan

Sets out to avenge himself on the insolent Tanguts.
Out hunting, during the campaign,,
He tumbles from his mount,
 |

But carries on, hiding the haemorrhage pain in his guts.

Weaker and weaker, through narrowed eyes,
He watches his soldiers lay waste to the land,
Soothed, as always, by the smell of destruction.
On the frozen banks of the flooded Yellow River,
The Tangut cavalry, charging headlong,
Slide haywire, crashing, jumbled in heaps,
Taken in the flank and massacred
By the dauntless Mongols, their horses shod with felt,
And lavish crimson smears the ice.

Shrouded in furs, huddled, shivering in his tent,

Öenghis, delirious and despairing,
Cries out to any who will hear:
DzMy descendants will wear gold
And eat the choicest meats;
They will ride the finest horses,
Hold in their arms the loveliest women,
Forgetting to whom they owe it all.dz
He repeats to his sons the fable
Of the snake with many heads that argued amongst themselves;
He reminds them that one arrow is easily broken,
But a bundle of arrows never.
Soon afterwards he died.
In fertile mountains, where three rivers start,
In a few years the great leaderǯs grave was overgrown and forgotten,
And who now even remembers which peak it was on?
 |
|

VARANASI

On a crescent-moon sweep of the Öanges

The rejuvenated sun strikes the City of Light:
Ashrams, temples, pavilions and shrines
Shine gold and majestic, casting deep reflections.
Bathers go down to the ghats, whose roots
Reach into the water.
In the narrow streets sproliferates
In infinite protean forms,
But here, here is .
On the river steps students practise yoga,
Smoke spirals from perennial funeral pyres
And famous spires elevate the mind.
The city that rules the earthǯs centre
Öathers Creation within its mandala,
The crossroads of the soul.
Here, all is ,
Oneness witnessed through innumerable lenses.
Varanasi guards the eight directions;
Time itself is earthed in these walls.
The world turns through creation and destruction
But Kashi the imperishable cannot be moved;
Between two rivers, the Sword and the Averter,
See the , the chakra between the eyebrows,
Obliterator of sins.

Birds still sing in the Forest of Bliss,

Bees make gold, and blossoms swell,
All the animals prosper in peace,
And even the gods are envious.
Transparent here is the membrane
Between dimensions;
Shiva is in every stone, every atom,
Every pilgrim come here to be free.
Here, the corpse of the universe, its cycle run,
 |
_

Will coil in serpent slumber.

From the Himalayas to Kanya Kumari,
India spins the pilgrimsǯ web,
All the fording places of the spirit,
Where avatars descend and men rise up.
Kashi, the crystal, focuses and refracts
The light of all Indiaǯs 
;
Kashi inheres in every place,
And every place inheres in Kashi-
The seven sacred cities and the seven sacred rivers;
The one hundred and eight seats of the Öoddess;
The twelve places where the linga shone forth as a column of light;
The sixty-eight places where linga appeared self-engendered;
The four divine abodes, arms of a swastika,
Badrinath, Puri, Rameshvaram,and Dvaraka.

In every shrine Shiva-linga focus power,

Shaft set in circular base,
Womb-seat of Shakti;
From the womb a vaginal channel
Drains off libations.
A snake coils up the channel
Or winds around the shaft.
Centrifugal evolution into infinite variety;
Centripetal involution into the moveless centre;
Opposing forces body forth in stone.
Manifest, unmanifest Öod
Phases through innumerable forms;
The three worlds are transpierced
By the lingam of light.
A devotee, his rite completed,
Casts a makeshift lingam into the river.
These waters are liquid wisdom,
And liberation-seekers once came here
To drown themselves, happy to die in Kashi.
Bathers climb the steps of Kedara ghat,
To the self-born lingam in the temple.
In the Age of Perfection this lingam was a jewel;
Then it became gold; and, after that, silver;
And now, in the Age of Strife, it is stone.

The sun has come to Kashi for a year,

 |
È

Disguised first as a beggar,then a rich man,

Then a heretic, and finally a sadhu.
A husband and wife bathe together
In a solar pool, offering squashes to the water,
Praying to conceive a son.
An old man standing in the Öanges
Cups the filthy water in his hands,
As the ashes of the dead swirl by-
To him, it is the purest nectar!
O, Öanges, quintessence of all rivers,
Moving mass of scriptures,
Vigilant energy of the Supreme!
Every drop is divinity distilled,
Cleansing ingrained sin.
Each temple, each image has its own day and hour;
Each moment in time has its pattern.
When the Earth sinks, weightless, deathless.Kashi
Will float upon the flood,

City of transcendence, sheathed soul

With five layers, each subtler towards the core -
Food, breath, heart, intellect and bliss.
The city itself is the yogic body,
Veined with meridians and channels,
A fiery ladder, a demi-godǯs spine.
Here the simplest pleasures
Delight the complex man-
A succulent mouthful
Or freshly laundered clothesǯ caress...
He who dies in Kashi
Hears Siva whisper in his ear
The mantra of the crossing-
Liberation for all beings.
Even the tiniest microbe, if it dies here,
Will be released into nirvana,
A crawling ant no less than a Brahmin.
These inconspicuous birds, pecking on the ground,
Were they not once celestial spirits
Translated to earth in myriad forms,
Now congregating in Kashi for the final crossing,
Each flying in at his appointed time?
 |
ß

In the cremation ground, the eldest son,

Clutching flaming splints of 
grass,
Circumambulates the pyre counterclockwise
Then stoops to set the wood alight.
Once the fire has done its work
And the corpse has shrunk to nothing,
He cracks his fatherǯs skull with a stick,
Opening an exit for the soul.
Filling a clay pot with river water,
He throws it backwards over his shoulder,
At the dimming embers, then walks away,
Not looking back, trying to tame his grief,
For the tears of the living can only pain the dead.
MOROCCO

White koubbas shine on a stony plain,

A family of djinns.
A Kasbah rises below the mountains,
Black windows in the white,
Empty as skull-sockets.
Windblown,sunscorched, the traveller
Sees before him in the setting sun
Ochre clay walls gleaming like copper.
Within,winding alley arcades
Turn the wind hurtling above to a cool draught
And all is order,rhythm and function.
Shimmering fabrics,richly worked killim,
Flaunt themselves in the kissaria.
The secretive medina harmonizes shadows
And voices...
Öreen tiles of a mosque roof splash
In serried waves over black and white.

On a mountain pass, a wayfarer

Casts a stone at a kerkour
To ward off evil fortune.

Water, capricious, bewitching water,

Withholding yourself or spilling in excess,
Do you share the peopleǯs joys and sorrows?

Sea wind, desert wind...

 |
ü

The Arab horses of the conquerors,trotting,

Kicked up billows of dust.
Unnoticed lay the bones
Of pithecanthrope,
His only artefact a splinter of rock.

Red-hearted Morocco-taste of saltpetre and sugar...

Swarthy aroma of morningǯs consecrated coffee,
Spice marketǯs pungent profligacy,
Thick fleshy odour of virgin olive oil...

West of Tangier, the Caves of Hercules

Echo the sea like giant seashells.
Once,local prostitutes would bring their customers here,
Carefully negotiating the rocks, lanterns in hand.
When the world still wore its first feathers,
Troglodytes swooned here in trance,
Waving stone phalli to propitiate the dark
That followed them with animal eyes.
At the Pillars of Hercules,migrating birds of prey
Ride the thermals,gaining height
For the flight across the straits.

Tetouan pulses with dissident tribesǯ blood,

Brutal and sophisticated,
Nostalgic for the Andalusian dream.
From Sufisǯ zaouia
Come chants and whispers
Of metaphysical debate.
In the Sephardic cemetery
Stands a whitewashed meteorite,
Freckled with votive candlewax.
Kif smokers loll in bleary backrooms,
Handling their pipes with automatic ease.

Red-stained slopes of the eastern Riff

Menace as you approach
Past stubborn square dwellings
Set in mean soil.
Not even spring can make the hillsides bloom.
 |
*

Feuds are the ancient entertainment here,

Habitual as clearing the fields of stones.

The stone circle at Mzoura

Draws ductile time into a perfect ellipse,
Miming equinoctial sunsetǯs path.
In the cave of Bou el Kornien,the Horned Man,
Seekers kneel to suck the milky secretion
Dripping from a hallowed stalactite.
(% 
 
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*




m
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At the sacred pool in Chellah
Barren women peel boiled eggs
To offer to the holy black eels
Swimming up into the shady recesses,
Emissaries from another world.

At summerǯs end, the tassergal swim off the coast of Pointe

Imessouare.
In September, the Atlas tribes gather at Imilchil
And choose brides at the marriage fair.

At dusk,in Jemaa el Fna,Marrakesh,

Hunched figures lay out tarot cards
And trace destinies in outstretched palms;
Street urchins hiss Dzhashishdz,
Blind beggars, expert in using their weird eyes
To accuse the world, cry to the crowd DzAllah!dz

Southward the Souss valley shimmers,

The oasis people harvest the date palms,
Bouncing children snatch the dropping prizes,
The women sing thanksgiving for the plenty
And the men sternly sort, weigh and pack.

In the Anti-Atlas,the Immouzer Falls

Slides reluctantly in viscous undulations,
Encasing bushes in stiff tufa sheets,
Secret dripping grottoes glistening
With wet moss and fern.
 |
A

A sonorous cascade slobbers into a plunge pool,

Öolden rocks with intricate curves,
Looming up through deathless blue
From veiled feminine depths.
Laughing, shouting, bathers revel,
Making love to the water.

Over Tafraoute, granite formations, mauve and red,

Transfix the eye like meteor showers, suspended in flight.
Almond trees, extending thin black sinuousbranches,
Laugh pink-white blossom at the sky;
Bitter narcotic oil they conceal,
Maliciously laced with prussic acid.

Up in the High Atlas, on a perilous pass,

The narrow road, twisting through dizzy bends,
Contorts in sheer fright, startled by the mutilated corpse
Of a toppled vehicle far below.
At night, remote stabs of light on ridiculous altitudes
Threaten still more terrifying distances to go...

At the Portuguese cistern, El Jadida,

Flooded crypt snakecharmed by a bolt of African sun,
The ceiling, vised in stone groins,
Vaults from square surly pillars
Interspersed with slender Tuscan columns,
The whole self-hypnotized in shallow water,
As pressurized sunlight jets from the central well -head.
 |
o

THE SHOWA ERA

Aloof, introspective, the Son of Heaven

Pores over his marine collection, ravished by thoughts
Of prehistoric cuttlefish, and sea spidersǯ rituals,
Lingering with delight over bloodless invertebrates
And the rarest creatures from the oceanbed,
Exquisite monsters seldom witnessed by man.
His impassive eyes glint behind glasses
As he looks up from the microscope.
This, his era, will be an age of enlightenment and peace,
Blessed by the copper mirror in the Shrine of Isé
That first tempted Amaterasu from the cave
To contemplate her features in the light,
Thus delivering the earth from darkness.

Robotically intoning the divine archaic tongue,

Hirohito addresses the court from his throne
As they bow in awe before this slim, blank youth.
In China, his troops are running through Nanking,
Tossing babies on bayonets, threshing empireǯs harvest.

Öeneral Ishii, man of science, receives an audience

To demonstrate his new invention, a wonder-machine
That turns wine into water. Performing the miracle
With a mountebankǯs flourish, he quaffs a glass
Before the startled Emperorǯs gaze. Hirohito, at once,
Bestows his gracious approval for the Öeneral
 |
†

To pursue his work, his patriotic mission

To master the secrets of biological warfare,
And obliterate Japanǯs foes with invisible squadrons
Of typhus, tetanus ,anthrax and other such allies.

In the Manchurian wastes a secret complex hums

All night beneath the cold stars, a walled Xanadu
Of barracks and laboratories, where technicians
Experiment on convicts, vagrants and prisoners -of-war,
Injecting, gassing, freezing and dissecting,
Studiously compiling scientific reports.
Ishii looks on, rapt, as another pickled specimen
Is added to his store,- a corpse floating in alcohol,
Suspended in limbo, empty eyes staring like a fish.
Admiral Yamamoto laughs and capers, entertaining
Ladies of the Dzwater tradedz on board his ship,
A pocket-sized maverick, cackling irreverent banter,
Able to subdue any man with one look.
Later, alone, he sits in a calligrapherǯs trance,
His balletic brush kissing arabesques on paper.
A gambler with all the cards in his hand,
For a dare he will execute perilous handstands,
Balanced on a high balconyǯs edge.
Brooding now over maps, the Admiral
Plans the great attack: his diminutive finger
Stabs at the coordinates-Pearl Harbor, Hawaii...
For this, they should give him a proper reward -
A casino of his own in Singapore!
He laughs to himself, the frowns again;
This strange foreboding will not leave him,
That Japanǯs greatest victory will also be its doom...



 
&,
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Sadly, Hirohito ponders his grandfatherǯs haiku...
He offers peace-and the world refuses!
Eight corners of the earth under his protection...
Why do they not gratefully comply?
Oh that he could return to ichthyology,
True to reason and the scholarǯs retirement,
 ||

But war, it seems, is the will of the age,

And its strange euphoria possesses him, too,
Vast designs not found on microscope slides.

A letter to the Emperor from Yamamoto:

DzWithout ceremony or delay, the little wrestler
Attacked and shoved the giant from the ring
And the audience cheered his audacity.
But then the heavyweight staggered back,
Strengthened his stance, and slowly advanced.
Now he confronts his opponent in the centre,
The last five minutes will decide the contest...dz

In the New Öuinea jungle lies a crumpled plane,

A swatted dragonfly, tangled in itself;
Shouting soldiers pull out Yamamotoǯs body.
At last, he has gone to follow them beyond the sun,
The grieved-for warriors lost to the skies.

ARCHITECT

His mystery was stone; his mission

To dress the material world with silhouettes
Of grand emotion, monuments to being here.

His passion was substance, the effort

To redeem foolish man from his own servitude
With monstrances of artifice and balance.

In the rigorous etching of a line

He lanced the emptiness with lightning,
Applying the cool dark spell of an idea.
 |||

THE ORNITHOLOÖIST

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Like a secret agent, always drawn back into the game,
I hide myself, binoculars poised,
Reconnoitring the terrain.
The treetops know me for a harmless impostor,
A wingless creature without guile.
I dream that the objects of my attention
May sometimes notice my smile.
What casual revelations may come to pass?
Some figment of my own strangeness
 ||_

Comes into focus in the glass.



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Sky-skaters, cutting figures in the mind!
Distant heralds, what riddles do you drop from your beaks?
Carefully I set my snares for life.
The flying dinosaurs nest in my loneliness.
Perhaps I only seek some hints for living
From those lighter and braver than men.
My place is with the ostrich and the dodo.
I envy the blackness of the crow.
Beauty is small consolation
For a lifetime of tedium and mistakes.



The birds explode from undifferentiated chaos,
Assuming multifarious guises
To baffle the world.
I recite their names like passwords to heaven,
Spells to cleanse the blood.
Shaman plumed for action,
I humble myself to the drum,
Stealing up on stray souls,
Inveigling them into my sack.

I am the necessary observer,

Born to the margins,
Trained in vigil.
I tunnel through the seasons,
Killing myself with thought.
These acts of contemplation are my passage
Through countries of the mind.
I taste the rain for memories;
Time has drenched me to the bone.
I have no understanding but the wind.

 ||È

34



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Human life is heavy,

Staggering among the stones.
All my life I have longed for lightness and flight.
The wren-king beats the eagle to the crown.

I skulk in hedgerows, hover over farms,

Reeling off the queer green world;
I drill through the wind with my beak.

Sound from silence. Silence from sound.

Call-signs tease the air into filigree
Or shock it with brute hunger.
Earth and sky stare each other out
Or play peekaboo.
My world shivers like a tuning-fork.

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The swanǯs white shadow

Blinds me into submission.

Petrels soar before the storm,

And cakewalk over the clapping waves;
Awestruck bridesmaids, they gather the trains of ships.

A cormorant plunges
And fishes up the moon in its beak.

A heron stands, mesmerised, in shallows,

Öawky frowning professor
Poring over the waterǯs scroll.
 ||ß

Ravens and crows pick over my corpse,

Swinging from a lightning-oakǯs bough.
My eyes are gone, but still I see
The emptiness that sees through me.

As if waiting for the Second Coming,

I sit in expectation of some 

A miracle to make good my witness.

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First a door, then a key to turn.
How should I know
If my positions are but poses?
And is there any completion,
Even in death?

All I want is a way of walking

To trust in, even if I occasionally fall,
And somewhere to head for, hoping for the best.
(Stupidly, I envy
That starling there, flying to its nest).

Can I make a pact with the earth

To share our secrets?
I walk like a dipper on the streambed.

I think of this country and the world that is changing...

What shall I say to the wind?
That human hearts will never have the courage to be free?
That misery has no end?

Another year will pass, another chance of happiness.

I shall still be prowling under wet branches,
Mutely lifting the glasses in homage,
Assembling the jigsaw as best I can.
Earth-astronomer, dying like the stars I scrutinize,
I know all this flamboyant pullulation
Is fragile as a wrenǯs skull.
Ravenous questions, like the begging mouths of chicks,
 ||ü

Shriek inside me, gaping at the sky for succour.

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THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW

Slim by the window, in frittering light,

She stands, slender fingers stroking the sill,
Lids flickering over languid brown eyes as she muses,
Something unspoken on her lips.

Priestess of nuance and implication,

She looks to the evening to ease her,
The cool green stars to read her mind
And the river to wash away pain.

A shuddering bird-shadow prophesies

In the detailed emptiness, the sifting shades
Like water in a well, only betrayed, now and then,
By a falling thoughtǯs splash, a tiny echo.

Terrible sophistication belies her.

 ||*

How long since she saw herself truly?

Her face cannot be seen in mirrors.
Her voice is not heard when she speaks.

These yearnings, if they do not kill her,

May force a new treaty with reality,
A more decent compromise with the truth,
Or so it feels when the retreating sparrow calls.

A VILLAÖE IN THE ÖAMBIA

Violet-skinned women in the baobab shade

Stand lissom and sinewy, vital as leopards,
Their eye-whites glowing in the darkness,
Facing adversity with courage and humour.
This bare thin land, where every rock and clod
Is known in the bones, is their mentor.

The flame trees are in bloom, vermilion blossoms

Against the blankness. Thin smoke-skeins drift up
Into empty sky , as the people burn the remains
Of last yearǯs crops.
Nothing but a few skinny trees and giant pink termite hills
Emerge from the parched grey brittle earth.
Pink sand of the streets, littered with animal droppings,
Brittle grey thatch, mud walls and rusty iron rooves,
Scrawny goats and chickens moseying around,
 ||A

Naked and brilliant in the hard white light...

Magenta petals swirl over the dusty ground...

During long Ramadan afternoons, the women

Sprawl beneath the mango trees, dazed and speechless
From fasting, their shirts discarded to air their breasts,
Some picking lice from one anotherǯs hair,
Others staring at nothing with expressionless eyes.

Red earth riddled with termite holes,

Red dust covers the grasses, bushes and trees,
And a branch attacked by the termites
Crumbles, at a touch to powder,
A shell of dust, hollowed out from within.

Early evening and the village starts suddenly into life:

Pestles thud in eager syncopation,
Faster and faster as the breaking of the fast
Approaches, the holy relief,
Children run about, excited, chattering,
The yellow millet stalks incandesce in the setting sun,
The pink sand turns lilac in the dusk,
In the light of a hurricane lamp, shining
On their joyful faces, Koranic students sing a long refrain,
Voices of boys and men chiming together,
Led by the white-robed teacher, head thrown back,
His undulating chant reaching into the darkness,
Supported by the surging chorus...

A feather moon hangs upside-down in pale lilac sky,

Framed by a mango tree;
The people all come out to greet it and rejoice.

Dangerous afternoons when the sunlight

Throws a shadow-mesh over colourless brittle vegetation,
Tone, shadow and substance all blend into one,
One can so easily lose oneǯs way or oneǯs mind here,
In the bush of ghosts and devils.
There are people who have gone insane
Or died long agonized unexplained deaths
Because of what they have seen here.
 ||o

Towards evening the mango leaves rattle,

The dust starts to rise in gusts from the ground,
The women at the wells hurry for home,
The wind hurls litter at the clattering roves
And the first fat raindrops start to fall.

In the morning the red-puddled earth

Sprouts new grass, and the sky is bursting
With white clouds. The men tread barefoot
In the gardens, pushing maize and sorghum seeds
Deep into the black soil with their toes.
Eagles soar above, and cattle crash through undergrowth.
In the ricefields women bend double, hoeing,
Hacking at the grey crust till the violet starts to show,
Singing in Mandinka, opening up the earth,
Exulting in laughter, argument and discussion,
All joining in the same rhythm and chorus,
Chorusing over and over till the air vibrates
To their drum, and some even throw down their tools
And begin to dance, stamping the ground.
Pausing to wipe the sweat from their brows.
The laterite road glows deep orange.
In the evening vast violetgrey clouds steam in,
The baobabs emit unearthly light,
The wind writhes through the shuddering grass
And massive raindrops splash down all over
In furious spasms, as lightning forks out
To the very nerve-ends of the sky
And the earth leaps about like a maddened toad...
In the morning swirling currents of moisture
Seethe out of the earth, and the drenched flora,
The women, all brilliant pink, blue, red and yellow,
Hurry along the paths out of the village,
Hoes over their shoulders, exhilarated...

Dungbeetles toil over heaps of cattledung,

Rolling it into balls, pushing it away over the ground
With their back legs.
Slim green-gold rice spears shoot straight up
And lines of millet fountain from the earth...
The termite hills are collapsing back into the earth,
Thousands of tiny brown grubs swarming round..
 ||†

Skeletal starved curs lie curled up,

Flies buzzing round their sores,
When they have no their choice they go
And dig up corpses in the cemetery to eat
And then the villagers will hack them to death with their hoes.

The aged marabout, tall, very thin, in pale blue robe,

Carrying a staff and Koran wrapped in cloth,
Walks to the mosque along the red dust road.
In his house he crouches amid the smoke
On a worn sheepskin, saying in thin cracked voice:
DzThe world lasts but a moment, and all
Who refused Öodǯs word will be cast into the fire...dz

Tall, slender beauty, features smooth and still,

Immemorial as an ancient Egyptian sculpture,
With just the hint of an ironical smile...
Might a jealous demon not inhabit her
And coax her to the brink of a deep well
Or to the topmost branches of a tree
And make her jump to her death?
Beneath the placid faces and resigned smiles
Of the good respectable people
Malice and resentment stir the pot,
The suppressed tensions ready to disrupt
The peace at any moment. All jealous
And suspicious of each other, they dread
Their own wickedness being released.

Let it sound again, the legendary music

From the courts of Mali-xylophone orchestras
And young girl choirs raising their voices
In joyous wailing, and suddenly a woman
Crying out, agonized, from beyond the world,
Invoking the spirits, the airǯs black riders...

The rice brims, shimmering, between the iron baobabs,

Stretching away into the distance.
The women, by ones, twos and threes, move
Through the fields, cutting the plump grain.
This is their dominion, the grandmotherǯs realm,
Liberated from menǯs polluting gaze,
 |_

The arena of initiation and circumcision,

Where secrets are imparted in the night,
And their laughter carries through the air,
As pestles thud in the encampments,
Drumming the harvest of hidden knowledge.
In the evening light they shuffle back to the village,
Laden baskets bobbing on their heads,
The cloud-patterns rippling over and through them,
And, at night, in the square, glowing in the light
Of hurricane lamps, they run towards the drummers,
Spinning round at the last moment to dance,
Every sinew in play as the pummelling rhythms
Of taut skins force their souls,-see them whirl,
Stamp and clap in a rush of bliss and relief.

The bush is burning, and the roadside covered with ash.

Leaves hang frazzled from blackened branches.
Under the orange moon, a parade of hunched silhouettes
Moves silently through the undergrowth, a tribe
Of baboons, the males leading the females,
The young clinging to their chests.

Dry season: the world is a discarded husk,

Porous and dusty, under the scourging sun,
The air molten glass bulging and writhing
In monstrous shapes, reducing everyone
To numbed blanks, while skinny lizards
Scamper up the mosquito netting...

At night auroras of sparks rise in the darkness,

Trees outlined by fire,-the whole world
Is tipping and tumbling into the flames...
The next day the land is blue smoking waste,
Black smoke towers out of the bush,
Eagles hang on the shuddering heatwave.

One night, in the lamplight, look-a lump

Of matter jumps out of the mud, and rolls away,
A pair of mating toads, the mounted male holding tight
As they bounce along the ground, still coupling,
 |_|

And disappear back into the undergrowth.

DEAR DIARY

Dear diary,
Do you think it might possibly
Be time, at last,
To stop thinking
And start living?

What became of our friends,

Whom we loved and laughed with?
Some died of drink, some of broken hearts,
Some drowned in puddles, some in seas,
Some went in search of glory
And never returned,
Some stayed at home
And only dreamed,
Some found religion,
 |__

Some found Öod,

Some found nothing
But themselves.
Y
Y
Europe is mythology and killing:
See it in the face
Of every stranger in the street.
The weasel on the inside of my skull
Is digging his claws in.
A sick animal
Without philosophy or direction,
I sweat weird fevers,
Climbing the walls of my mind.
Requiems of snow are falling
On this city,
On this world.
Y
Y

MEMORANDA

There is a city you abstain from visiting,

A pilgrimage you delay,
It would mean too much to you,
A truth from which you might never recover.

You and your memories,

Secret certificates of humanity,
Torn-up treasure maps full of imaginary isles,
Do you presume to master the future?

Connoisseur of disasters,
I relish the fatal conjunction of planets,
The syllables of nemesis.
 |_È

John came, offering water,

And Jesus came, offering fire.
And I walked between them
And walked on.

To see the fires of Pentecost

In an English village,
And pray, pray for redemption,
To endure the rigour
Of exaltation,
Joy demanding compassion,
To recognize the whole
By the smallest part,
And the part by the whole,
To take the sacrament
On oneǯs tongue,
To celebrate without cease,
Never failing in courage,
To be the bridegroom
Walking up the lane.
3

DzWomen,dz he said,
DzTheyǯre all pink inside,dz
And frowned into his glass.

Öold-mining the darkness of her eyes,

I discovered California again.
I made her a statue in my mind,
Then smashed it into pieces.

In fear of masks and broken hinges,

In fear of doors impossible to open,
I look for lost friends under bridges
And stitch the sky with smiles.
 |_ß

Warm bread from the murdererǯs oven!

Unknowing is a mouthful of snow.
The lean gods in their eyries
Play dice with discontinued stars.

Who sews mailbags for alien gaolers?

Who hides up his motherǯs sleeve?
The lonely drover on a mountain road
Measures out death step by step.

I was born, so they tell me, I donǯt remember. It must have been a day
like any other.
I recall the odd thing, of course: learning to tie my shoelaces, to
balance on a bicycleǥatmospheresǥ
So many knots in time!
This moment I anticipate sensation, ideas, acts.
The pendulum oscillates,
The child on the swing
Cries out, thrilled, into the wind.
I exist
With my tenth-of-a-second brainwave,
My one-second cardiac rhythm,
My six-second respiratory cycle,
My twenty-four hours of dead-and-alive.
Megalithsǯ and sundialsǯ shadows,
The monastic candleǯs cascading wax,
Hourglass and clepsydra,
Are all in the cavemanǯs notched bone-clock,
Lines, circles and linesǥ

I examine the knobbles on treebark ,the patterns of waterblobs on the

bathroom floor, the crenellations of a seashellǥ

Moments of my life
That tenderly break me,
To show the inside,
 |_ü

Red and wild.

THE RELUCTANT LOVER

Columbus wasnǯt looking for America.

Nor I for you.

The world belongs to jesters and dancing bears.

So jest. Dance.

This game of blindfold chess

Is the only vocation I can manage.

A tricky fugler, I lime the branches of my mind

To see what I might catch.
Y
Your face in the crowd I could never mistake;
I can feel your eyes a mile away;
And it pulls, the current, it pulls me under.
Drowning seems like fun.
 |_*

We shall go on like this, until we can go on

No longer.
Y

THE BALLERINA AND THE DWARF

I kiss your sculpted ankle, your leg to the hip,

Nonchalant prima donna!
Your magic ring has captured me...
A red wind is blowing through the treetops-
I only want to hold you, beautiful, immortal,
And listen for a perfect rhyme.
I adore the secret numbers,
The constellated equations our limbs make;
Öipsy risks in my mad moon eyes,
I kiss your bodyǯs question mark.
 |_A

FIREWALKERS

If beauty were a crime

You would be forever imprisoned,
Breaking rocks, breaking rocks.

Iǯm up to my neck in you:

Quicksand.

What else have I

But your mischievous green eyes
To fix me to the earth?

Photographs by the thousand

I could take of you,
From every angle,
In every light.
 |_o

I could sit and watch you

All day every day.
I wouldnǯt need a hobby.

Adorable!
Just to fall into your arms
Crying: Me too, me too!
So helplessly powerful,
Overcoming my stupid self.

You teach by touch

And come through in numbers.

My Life on Trains and Buses

Dead time
Hanging around
Waiting for life to begin
Waiting for the bus
The train

Escape, escape the state,

That administers you out of existence,
Herds and milks you, for its own profit,
Wastes half your money and steals the rest,
Knowing you to be stupid, placid and weak.

Who rules here and who is ruled?

Who holds power and for what is it used?

The stupid English, laughing through gritted teeth

 |_†

At the life they feel impotent to change,

Strangling their own unfeasible aspirations
With twists of irony, as if wringing chickenǯs necks.

Some chemical compounds

Smell-at low intensities-like flowers,
And-at high intensities-like shit.

Red wolves of lust chase through the star-forest, ravenous for the
absolute.

Just wait till time drops the other shoe.

Perverse desire, why fasten so on unattainables,

When the real is here and now, yours to adore?

Raindrops like shooting stars slide diagonally across the pane of the
moving bus.

My life seems such an oddity,

Bizarre, disjointed,
Half-genius, half-nonsense.

Should I fall into the sun,

Or make a break for the outer darkness?
INÖLESE ITALIANATO

Italy, my leonine domain,

I rub your sunlightǯs balm into my wounds;
Revelling like a swallow
As spring uplifts the sunǯs Eucharist.

Pale impostor trailing a thespian cloak,

I whore after passion and grace,
Reconstructing from ruins a mythic Europe,
An empire for the godless heart.
 |È

NO POST TODAY

Itǯs April. Why donǯt you write to me?

Until you do, the spring cannot begin,
Stalled underground in frustration,
The sunǯs wheel is stuck in a rut.

You were my mercy in a hot land,

Cool bright water to drink;
Less lonely in your company,
I dreamed of endless rapture.

Mystery of friendship, never leave me:

Life makes such fine judgments
In the meetings of strangers,
Recognising themselves in each other.
 |È|

SECOND NATURE

I like it here. I like you near.

What we do together doesnǯt seem to matter;
What matters is the atmosphere.

Your beautifully muscled back,

The sacral dimples,
And the lozenge of Michaelis at the spineǯs base,
Your rounded belly and linea alba,
The shadowed secrecy of the navel;
The beauty of your feet,
Each with twenty-six bones,
A hundred and fourteen ligaments,
And twenty muscles,
Superbly nimble, elegant and clever,
 |È_

Their subtlest shifts and movements

Revealing moods and fancies...

You make me feel so useless:

I only fiddle with words.
You suck the marrow out of life.

I knock on your door

Like a Jehovahǯs Witness
To ask: Do you want to be saved?

But there is nothing to save you from.

MAYBE

Maybe in the fey pale light

Of a February afternoon
Some sparse intuition will take
And usher me home.
Mysteries grown into:
Standing under the tree
Waiting for a fruit-fall.
 |ÈÈ

BLACK AND WHITE MOVIE

There is always a wreck before dawn,

The sleepless and the loveless
Clinging to the flotsam.

Now my soul is in purdah

Awaiting her again.

The slope of her shoulders

And the dimpled ridge of vertebraeǥ

Can I remain the man

That love made me?

Like a soaring goose sucked into a jet engine

I sometimes regret my impulsive ascents.
 |Èß

Hearts, gravely tested, attain greatness.

Faces are most beautiful when sad.

WHAT I DO

My ballet days are over.

And I seldom play much Chopin any more.
There is nothing to build with,
Nothing to express.
It just is.

Stare deep into the poem

Until it recognises you
And comes right.

The day is not far off,

The day is very near,
When a loss more immeasurable than galaxies or language
Will stroll into your room, very matter-of-fact,
 |Èü

And kill you, almost kill you.

To be neither one thing nor the other,

Or both at once,
My Japanese trick;
I collect new selves
And paste them into my album.
This momentǯs actor,
I play for the skyǯs sake,
Juxtaposing images
In vertiginous collage,
Lines in a haiku.

THE WORLD IS INCOMPLETE

Born on the lion-crowned heights of summer,

I fell into a season of rich decay.

I donǯt know why, but I can remember

Conversations I had many years ago,-
Ordinary conversations, in all kinds of places-
Seeming now prophetic and uncannyǥ

I love the nowhereness of motorways,

Being a direction and nothing more,
A world of signs, seen through the windscreen,
Points on a map.
In the lonely service station,
I pay in strange currency,
And move on.
 |È*

Y
English, impure tongue of the semi-savage,
My coarse bloodǯs birthright,
Pun these bones into extinction
With extremes of delight.

Solitary hitchhiker on the back roads of life,

I follow the sun,
Awaiting my next ride.

Black Swan

/
3 
Knights of the Nine,-
Who pass through
The arch of Notre Dame,
And carry the banner
Black,white and red,-
Fashion from words
Persian castles!
Weak human hands
Take up the pen:
Christǯs long fingers
Uplifting the Örail,
Muhammadǯs hands
 |ÈA

On the reins of al-Burak.

No joy could be purer,

Than to seize and ravish
The world with my eyes,
Penetrating the essence
Without the smoke of words.
Exulting in ineffable light,
In line, colour, form and mass.

Homewardǥ.but to follow the left way

Or the right?
My life writes itself in the mirror.
Skeins of thought in time migrate
Through skies and climes half-remembered,
But different again. My restless hand
Digs out the airǯs scattered flints.
To be here, to breathe, is serendipity,
Rites of gravity, prayer and sacrifice,
A virginǯs awe before the bridal bed.
Ashes await you, to anoint your body;
Remember not to fidget and fret,
Not to foe what you ought to befriend.

Never is where we live,

What we are made of,
How we are.

The moon has surfaced;

Whaleǯs eye in the foam.

White blossoms floating on the river.

 |Èo

AFTERMATH

Summer was a pride of suns in procession.

What is all the logic in the world,
Compared with just one tree in bloom?
Autumn contacts us with pauses,
Rumours of passions and ideas;
Trading loads on dream-wharves,
We listen for borascoes on the rise.
Now all is mouldering, dark and fertile,
Promise of departures and returns,
Fulfilments growing down in the opulent damp.
Pink petals drop from a potted geranium,
Tiddlywinked by breezes over the stones.
The shrimmed air sheds itself in mizzle,
Fattened grass invested with leaves.
 |Ȇ

FIÖHT OR FLIÖHT

Life, that tireless old southpaw,

Is coming at you,
So raise your fists and fight.

This is life, or your life, anyway,

No use complaining, explaining, or excusing,
It will all work itself out in the end,
Fatally, no doubt.

We live too late or not at all.

And, of course, I would do everything so much differently,

Were I another man.

Ruins can be foundations,

 |ß

If you have a builderǯs eye.

SYLPH

The green-eyed girl in her world of desire

Is the black cat on the rooftops of my heart.

I am learning the syntax and vocabulary of your body,

Conjugating verbs of state and action,
To communicate some simple message
Before I lose my voice.

Sylph,
Elf,
The lyric of your skin
Imbues the world
With synonyms
For love..
 |ß|

Skin on skin, lip on lip,

Easy does it,
Pantherish.

SLOPINÖ OFF

Weird memory drifts like woodsmoke;

The stranger crosses himself at the threshold.

Autumnǯs frisson, -perfect nostalgia of a loved refrain...the lilting of

leaves into a stream...

My life: a secret quest for technique, to create self and world.

What is more voluptuous than ideas?

Watching a foreign film,

Subtitles,
The language,
I feel intrigue,
 |ß_

Beauty,
Like a forged picture,
A counterfeit coin,
Signs and countersigns of thought...

I breathe time,
So tired of thinking
And worrying,
Living for others
And not Öod.

The small goodbyes are mounting up

Into definitive farewell;
A pale hand waving,
An empty eye.

HAWAII

Words, summits of submerged volcanoes,

Crest a lifetimeǯs archipelago,
Conducting the mind back
To Pangaea.
The mindǯs microclimates
Evolve ecosystems
More delicate than time.
The rhyming of created things
Sounds the singer
Through the genealogy
Of dolphins and kings.
Life: how to survive?
You must plant your feet
Like a surfer
And balance
On the seventh wave....
 |ßÈ

FELLATIO

Itǯs not about power, or coercion,

Or whoǯs doing what to whom,
But what society insists we are...
A sharp negotiation in the dark.

To untangle who controls

And who surrenders
Is no simple matter.
Can we both release one another
And be released?

You are swallowing my power,

Stealing my life.
Cruel pleasure: genesis
Of religion.
 |ßß

THE SEAL

All those who attain to loveǯs high office,

Deemed fit to carry her scarlet seal,
Attend the spirit and serve her ends,
Begging no reward, no restitution.
Obviously, mystery is their palanquin,
Bearing them above the rough crowd,
On missions and embassies unknown.
Love makes of us poor humans
Sordid heroes and exquisite villains,
Riders in the night cloaked against the storm.
 |ßü

LIP SERVICE

You ask me what Iǯm thinking.

I reply: itǯs on the tip of my tongue,
So meet me halfway.

Those lips deserve the highest praise;

They alone divine my future;
Now let me work the oracle.

Stiltwalker in the circus ring,

I circle within you, head in the clouds,
Showing off all my best tricks
To bring the roof down.
 |ß*

SUBURBAN ROCOCO

Mirror neurons fire

-Starbursts in Brocaǯs brain
And the parietal cortex-
As I perform an action
And observe the same
Performed by someone else.

I know the tricks, I can do them all:

The French Drop,
And the Asrah levitation,
The Mystery of Princess Karnac,
The Sands of the Nile.

I have lived too little and written too much.

My words are not to be trusted.
 |ßA

All these songs in my head,

Resounding, transmuting,
Making strange sense.

I hereby resign from my post

As President of the Universe.
I shall live incognito in the crowd.

I write another poem

Like a South-East Asian swain
Inserting little objects under the skin of his penis-
Bells, stones and jewels, pearls and shells-
To make the shaft bumpy and rough
Like a chimpanzeeǯs.

BAD BISHOP

Look what youǯve done:

Youǯve burnt the house down.
Didnǯt your parents tell you
Not to play with matches?

I flick through the pages of a magazine,

Noting advertisements for eau de cologne.

What do you know of farewells and sorrows,

That will be your constant fate?
Always the same self-obsession and self-pity,
Faith of the faithless, in this idiotic world.

Welcome to the university of souls:

Small men studying great men,
 |ßo

Öreat men studying themselves.

Put your hand on your sack

And find your bollocks.
You are a man,
Casting a shadow.

This world is a voodoo doll

Into which I stick my pins,
Cursing enemies to doom.
 |߆

ROÖUE

Voodoo queen,
You will never steal my soul.
Do you suppose I keep it in my back pocket?
Or in an old Coke bottle under the bed?

Curve of her body, curve of my mind:

Senator from a small provincial planet,
I dabble in shadow-sonatinas.
Fear and fantasy are my companions,
As I come undone, like Solomon,
Beguiled by foreign women.

I can walk on the inside of your skull

And you wonǯt even hear me,
Treading so lightly,
Floating without a care.
I know you better than you know yourself,
But then, thatǯs not so difficult, now is it ?
Oh, look what weǯve come to,
And where weǯve been,
Brilliant idiots, illustrious fools.
.
,
Jeers the bleary sunǥ

I believe in your face

And the shape of your arse
And nothing else in the world.

You drew blood

But Iǯll win in the end.
You landed a few lucky blows
But Iǯm still on my feet.
 |ü

PRELUDE

A pulse of energy enters the mind

Instantly before an idea or image
Starts to form.-sudden clarity!
Lightning down the spine,
Witchcraft in the fingertips.
Words, concepts, memories, feelings
Realize-such tantalizing elegance
Hinting at perfection beyond.
Thus I focus and contemplate
A nexus, lift it up in consecrated space
And sacrifice it to the stillness
To let the power break free.
 |ü|

AUÖURIES OF APRIL

Candescent lawn; breeze-tousled cherry trees

Quake and rustle. Shadows blend away
As the tentative sun plays peek-a-boo.
Occasional ants doodle over the patio.
It seems a very virtue just to laze.
What of Europe and its Caesars?
Here the palisaded Saxon takes his stand,
Öauntlets against the rosesǯ thorns,
His village epic an alliterative routine.

What is it between here and there?

I tremble, I liveǥ
Cracks in the floorboards-
Something down there, breathing, waitingǥ
I tie myself in sailorǯs knots,
Self-tortured, between Yea and Nay.
Another moment, another death,
Chaos flays through you,
Exquisite pangs you secretly enjoy.
 |ü_

ANTHROPOS
 |üÈ

Since man first saw the sun rise in the east

And truly saw,
We have stood upon this earth
And wondered.
Life soared out of its skin,
And mind-
Hummingbirdǯs vibration-
Öathered in the pine-cone eye.

Sufi

v







 


 

Mirza Abdul-Qadir Bedil

First I am earth,
then water,
 |üß

then air,
then fire.

Seventy thousand veils separate us

From Öod,
Veils of light
And veils of darkness,
Before birth the soul passes through these veils,
And for each of the veils of light
The soul sheds a portion of divinity,
And for each of the veils of darkness
The soul takes on an earthly quality,
And so at last the child is born weeping,
Örieving its separation from Öod.

Why do I live?
To see the Soul Inspired,
The Soul Self-accusatory,
The Soul Inspired,
The Soul Tranquil,
The Soul Öod-satisfied,
The Soul Öod-satisfying,
The Soul Clarified and Perfect.
Y
Y
Y
In vertical time
I meet
The seven heroes within:
Black Adam,
Blue Noah,
Red Abraham,
White Moses,
Yellow David,
Black Jesus,
Öreen MohammedY
Y
Y
|üü
 |ü*

PAKISTAN

Neither the Aryans nor the Huns,

Neither Alexander nor Timur, nor Nadir Shah,
Could march their armies through here
Without grave loss of blood.

From the lionǯs mouth the Indus pours,

And spreads the Hand of Fatimah
Across bird-priested plain.
The horsemanǯs fists grip the reins
Of the sun, as he gallops
Over horizonǯs fire-altar.

In the mudbrick granaries of Mehrgarh,

People heaped their lifetimes,
A harvest for descendants to reap,
And balanced like the sun
On the water buffaloǯs horns.
The dead curled in the ground
Like seeds awaiting spring,
 |üA

Turquoise beads in their hands.

A Öandhara Buddha
From the Silk Road,
In a Roman emperorǯs toga,
With the head of Apollo.

Simple elegance
Of a teapotǯs chased metalwork,
Curved like a dancing girl
From Harappa.

EMPEROR KANÖXIǯS SOUTHERN TOUR, 1689

Two thousand miles from Beijing,

All through the southern provinces,
The Emperor journeyed with his entourage,
And a legion of bodyguards,
Inspecting his realm and aweing the people
With munificence and pomp.
He climbed to the top of Tai-shan,
The axis of the world,
Sacred to every religion,,
And offered the gods thanksgiving
For an empire, a newborn dynasty
Prosperous and stable.
Now all China could see his greatness-
To rule not as some Manchu interloper,
But as a rightful king!

By Kangxiǯs decree, the artist Wang Hui

Set to work, commemorating the tour
In a series of twelve vast handscrolls,
Replete with tiny figures and detail,
 |üo

Mountains, streams, rocks an d skies.

Not having accompanied the tour,
He drew on the imperial diary,
Together with maps and descriptions
By those who had travelled to the region.
Only after the Emperor himself
Had viewed and approved his drafts
Was Wang Hui given fine silk and minerals
And a team to aid him in the work.

For his palette he chose the blue greens

Beloved in the Tang Dynasty;
He merged Song landscape styles
With Yuan brushwork
Voraciously he fed on the past
And worked his own moods,
Meditating with brush in hand
And feeling the spirits in the ink.
So he could read the memories
And essences in the atmosphere,
And become the water passing
Over stones, the clouds dispersing.
Scale and distance would suddenly
Warp; solid and vaporous interchanged,
Transparent and infinitely sad.

So pleased was the Emperor with his work

That he bestowed upon Wang Hui the title
DzLandscapes Clear and Radiantdz.
Y

Y
 |ü†

FACINÖ THE WORLD WITH FLIES UNDONE

DIVERSION
DARK MATTER
CROOKED PATH
A SPEECH FROM THE SCAFFOLD
MAD PROFESSOR
THE STONE THROWERS
TO COMPLETION
THE MIME ARTIST
KABUKI STICK MASK
SILENT MOVIE
BAD ACTOR
LIFE SIDEWAYS
LOSS LEADER
WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION
MOTION IN A CIRCLE
MOMENTS OF INERTIA
 |*

FACINÖ THE WORLD WITH FLIES UNDONE

Realityǯs adulterer, trying to run with your trousers down,

Once cock of the walk, now chased around town!

Only a fool sleeps with the butcherǯs wife;

Pile up a pyramid of dung and call it life.

The witchfinderǯs dogs are howling for dinner-

What a feast is this, flesh of a sinner!

In Sunday morning stillness I attend my own breathing.

A dog barking;a train passing; the murmur of traffic on a road
somewhere...
With one foul fart I ignite a Dutch oven under the bedclothes, a
swirling thunderhead of noxious gas, which, poking my snout under
the covers, I guiltily inhale.

Do not feed the animals; do not walk on the grass;

Do not drop litter; do not lean out of the window;
Do not talk with your mouth full of nothing.
 |*|

Prince of platitudes and misadventures, I mount a worn-out nag and

wield a broken sword in petty crusades for the glory of Me.

The ghosts in rocks are my advisors. When I dream they speak. Lost
gold mines, littered with skeletons, riddle the basalt.
I have dug myself out of ancient graves, laden with treasures and
signs.
A limping blacksmith on the side of night, I strive ahead.

LOSS LEADER

Wake up with a hard-on, you need to pissǥ

Sunlight smears the carpet. eerie still.
Another day, unplanned, strange to feel,
Pregnant with ifs and buts.

Break free? Run wild? Perhaps not yet.

Too much information to process,
And gravityǯs routine pressing on you,
Charged with astronomical ennui.

Pale, lustful vampire, I shrink from the light,

Backing into darkness when the dawn sun waves a crucifix.

It shames me, disgusts me,

This sloppiness of comfort,
To lick and lick at sweetness,
To huddle in my own sty,
 |*_

Öreasing my insides.
Cringing, I lash myself with acid spittle.
I envy the purity of picked bones.

Let the world be cleansed

With municipal efficiency,
Purged and recycled
For the love of all.

INFANCY

Piloting paper aeroplanes on the thermals of childhood,

I survived a thousand crashes
To cross the Atlantic and circumnavigate the globe.

Certain Irish summers of my infancy reverberate with me now, still,

and always,-tumbling and chasing over the grassy dunes at Bannow,
above the dazzle-strand, toasting the sun with pink lemonade, among
the starfish and seashell days...

Öo ahead, play below, behind and beyond the notes,

And ignore the critics who say you just play out of tune.

A memory, a curio:
A Devonian trilobite, its eye lenses
Exquisitely preserved for hundreds of millions of years.
 |*È

THE KILLER AND HIS WOMEN


He moves through the streets,
And each person he passes
Is delicious prey;
Imagine how they would scream and beg
If he cut them up
And drove the knife in
To draw the last breath out.



 


 
  


/m3 

(
 
 
.
 
- 


(m







In his prison cell he lies on the bunk,

Reading scented letters of love and adulation
 |*ß

From women he has never met,

Studying the nude photographs enclosed:
DzI love you, I admire you...
I want you to fuck me in the ass
In a cemetery at night, on top of a tombstone,
With your victimsǯ blood on your cockdz.

In a dusty little town,

She sets up an altar in her room,
With a black candle always burning,
Before his picture.
And dreams he will come to her tonight.

THE BULÖAKOV MUSEUM

Through the tunnel into the yard....

A mighty black tomcat strolls around, keeping an eye on you.

Write your wish on a piece of paper

And post it in the magic box

For the Master to read and grant if he will.

In August all the wishes are tied to balloons

And released into the sky.

This apartment was Bulgakovǯs purgatory,

He tried desperately to write

While drunken neighbours brawled

And conspired against him,

 |*ü

The hated intellectual in their midst.

Moscow and the Öreat Whore have beguiled you.

Black Easter blesses the kulich,
Saffron-scented phallus of the Devil
Baked in the soulǯs oven,
Babylonian haloes light the saintsǯ heads
In churches where you have shed confusion
Through ceremony and art.
These times are an angel of Satan
Sent to find you out.
My Western pain embraces its Eastern brother.
All writersǯ hands are guided by that demon
Whose sorrow winters in these streets.

THE SIBERIAN WHORE

Superstitious, she would not take the cash

From my hand, but motioned me to lay it
On the dresser. As I slunk out, she stood
Faceless, peeking out between drab curtains,
At the dull and usual afternoon.
I did not know what was in her head.
It had all been so simple, so practical,
A business transaction, without shame.
For me, a cold and puzzling enjoyment.
The street received me with a smirk.
She awaited her next phone call.
 |**

DUFAY

The Cambrai choirboy

Felt the seasons on his tongue,
His body an overbrimming grail of song.

Astonished and ashamed, he wept,

Hearing the Burgundian courtǯs
Blind minstrels play with a skill
And grace scarcely human.

A trinity of voices intertwining

Could thread a spiral ladder
Through the atomǯs core.

His mortal body became the Mass,

Offered in fear and longing,
As he honed, like a lensmaker,
Breathǯs point and counterpoint.
.
 |*A

Tuscan Roads

White roads, cypress trees...

The architectǯs dream
Takes shape in stones
And graded shadows.

a

 cattle stand

Proud and massive,
White Etruscan-monsters,
Staring through you.

Rosemary in the summer air

And pungent woodǥ
Beware the salamander:
His bite is poison.

Benedictine monasteryǯs
Alabaster dazzle-stones:
Dust monks tend gardens
With meditative care.

Sculpted landscape
 |*o

And perfected cuisine:

Handmade ravioli
In wild chestnut sauce.

Just this: a terracotta pot

Of deep red geraniums
Tended by an old lady
In the hill town afternoon.

Walking in the Corbières

Ravines and gorges and swift clear streams,

Castle ruins on limestone crags,
Öoats grazing over Moorish graves in the 

ǥ
Stony paths hard on the feet
And the scent of pines and wild thymeǥ
Deep between the limestone cliffs,
The Agly tumbles from pool to turquoise pool,
Under willows and azure;
On a gravel beach I strip naked
And dive into glacial water,
A Cathar baptized out of the Devilǯs Church.

A land of heretics and monks.

Fields of red poppies and flowering broom,
Black cypresses and green vines...
Plump kumquats grow at my door;
I throw open the window,
Breathe the fragrant evening air,
And look to the hills, as multitudinous frogs
Raise a racket.
Little pots of homemade jam-
Apricot, lemon and strawberry-
Sit upon the breakfast table,
Cruets on a country priestǯs altar.
 |*†

The slow wisdom of winemakers

Is the peace I covet.

Stronghold of bees and women,

Honeycomb to the leonine sun!
A spoonful of rosemary honey
Ölints with dark sacrament.
My wild boarǯs snout sniffs the air
For flavours and clues to the world within.

Scientific Solutions to Everyday Problems

When the rain starts,

Resist the instinct to run.
Öreater saturation
Is the unexpected outcome.
If you had a head for science,
You would understand.

My dear friend Death

Knows everything,
A wise old cove indeed.
To me he occasionally whispers
Necessary truths.

One peruses the classic papers

With interest:
7%
÷ 


 ð
',
A particular favourite,
And Dzm0
 



40

&  '
By a noted Indian surgeon.

Identify the problem and form a hypothesis.

Design and conduct a study
To examine and test it.
 |A

Analyse and interpret the data.

Communicate the results.

Bulls in china shops prove disappointingly nimble.

A penny dropped from a skyscraper
Will not kill a pedestrian passing below.
Hair and fingernails do not continue to grow after death.

DzDo not disturb my circles,dz said Archimedes.

Very well, dear Öreek,
And do not disturb 
.

WHOREHOUND

The exhilaration of the unfamiliar

Stimulates my fever.
Of this I am a connoisseur.
No lies, no compromises,
No delusions of romance.
An honest trade, without harm.
Now I know the truth:
I do not want to be understood,
Falsely cared for, wrongly loved.
My mouth is not for wifely kisses.
Allow me the visitorǯs privilege,
The explorerǯs occult power.
No-one takes and no-one gives:
The purity of commerce
Cleanses me of sin.
This is life without the bullshit.

Putrescent body, let us, together,

Celebrate the wicked animal;
The Devil directs us with a smirk.
Sweet nuances of betrayal
Spike the wolfish hidden hours,
The secret dimension I creep
In and out of, my centaurǯs hooves
 |A|

Concealed in polished shoes.

Desire, the universal glory,
Is thwarted everywhere, misdirected
And spurned, left shabby.

The whore has my sympathies,

My attention and my cash,
For boldly crossing that threshold
Into the obscene, beyond
Hypocritesǯ approval; there
We meet, outlaw to outlaw,
In unadulterated action.
Ungoverned, we conspire and collude.
I am in nobodyǯs hands.

This Season in Tangier

Cloaked ghosts, hooded faces.

The beach is piled with rubbish,
The bars are full of whores.

This is the periphery

Whence ibn Battuta
Set forth on foot
To seek the heart of Islam.

Drift through the medina,

Inhaling mint and fish;

In a bright square women

In red and white shawls

Sell muddy vegetables.

Blue parasols wind-quiver

In a pavement cafe,

A cliffǯs edge where you sit,

 |A_

Sipping mint tea.

Start again? A new life?

Remember, the djinns

May work for or against.

Can you accept what they write?

Rain spikes down in the Kasbah,

Outside my covered yard.

From a bamboo chair, I watch

A cat curl up on the wall.

He has no doubts, no despair.

To be happy where you are,

As you are, this very moment;

To taste the water you drink,

The bread you eat.

Can you manage that?

Sky cleared, pink sun setting,

Prayers silent or spoken,

And all your pride gone west.

 |AÈ

THE PETERHOF ÖARDENS

August: month of wars and disasters, realm of the terrible Caesar.

Öolden Samson wrenches open the lionǯs jaws of the lion, to shoot a
scintillating jet into the air. Children are jumping through the
prankish fountains, while hydrofoils skim the violet Öulf.
Either side of the Sea Channel, each the hub of eight paths, the great
fountains Adam and Eve send their joy into the wavy air.
Never yet has man lost faith in paradise, a paradise on earth....

An artificial tree drips water on children laughing beneath its

branches. Persian fantasies disturb the cool lines of my European
dream, reminding me that I am neither fish nor fowl.

The geometry of these fountains I could never describe: lightning-

trees in the mind, quick as the pulses in neurons, sublime as shooting
stars.
The gravity that works these wonders works me too.

The symmetry of autocracy strikes at every turn.

Öolden dolphins jet into the air, a transparent grail in whose centre is
a sun rotating on a glittering misty axis.
And can you climb that seven-stepped pyramid there, up into the
clouds? Or are you not a pharaoh, after all?
 |Aß

STONES OF THE MOORISH DEAD

They dug wells in a dry land

And raised waterwheels of the spirit;
The mulberry tree shone dark
In the silkwormǯs domain.
There was pleasure
In the smell of apricots
And ice cream made with mountain snow.

This is Europe
In an African skin,
Peninsula of the singing dead.
Even the ghosts love sweetness,
The taste of cinnamon and honey,
v and 

.

Olive trees, row upon row,

Stretch to the lunar mountainsǯ horizon,
Silver-green leaves against the pastel earth.
Dusty white villages sail through the sky
In sudden ravines,
High-towered churchbells ringing
With heretical tongues.

Ölorious were the harems

 |Aü

Of the lecherous sultans

To whom pretty boys and scented girls
Were oranges to be picked
In an oasis orchard.
Hashish and wine, sodomy and verses
Eroded what virtues they had.

All forms were born in the circle;

All geometry led back to the One.
Tumbled graves and castles
Still hide the secret numbers,
Infinite pattern and love.

ÖRAMSCIǯS VILLAÖE

Basaltic stones and mossy little houses,

Mélange of Pisan, Spanish and Aragonese...
A simple pastel-painted house
With a wooden door,
Behind which is a little boy.
See, now he is running in the olive orchard
And among the cork oaks!

In the Fascist prison, he lies on his bunk,

Dreaming of a dish of 

5.
He can smell the village bread,
See the womenǯs hands making pasta and sauces.

DzYou only screw the Sardinian donkey once.dz

He recalls the proverb with a smile,
As she shivers in the winter ice,
Wrapping his blanket around him.
 |A*

ROMULUS AUÖUSTULUS IN EXILE


 89:ð

They call me a boy,

A stripling,
But have I not been the ruler of the world,
All menǯs master,
Decreer of fates?
The gold and gem-encrusted belt,
The white robe with precious border,
The purple and gold cloak,
All have passed to the eastǥ
The powerful find themselves powerless,
The feared become the fearful.

I shall be the last to wear the toga.

If nothing else, a master of loss,
With whatever dignity that affords.
Named for two founders,
I hand back their empire
To the ground and sky,
Watch its solid majesty
Dissolve into the elements again.
Let the barbarians take
What they cannot possess,
 |AA

Mocked forever by its magnificence.

This cape is my lookout

Where I scan the wavesǯ boustrephodon
And walk among centaurs
In the orderly gardens.
Slave, come tell me that tale again-
I love to hear how Theseus
Defeated the Amazons.

BERLIN MANUSCRIPT

An illuminated miniature of Margrave Otto IV of Brandenburg,

Minnesinger, playing chess with his lady, deploying the Ascanian love
of conquest to other ends, among the slant-eyed Slavic placenames,
the glacial valleys embedded with flint axes and arrows, where stag -
masked men prance in seasonǥ

Rusting carousel horses in an abandoned fairground; the Ferris wheel

stands still; giant plastic dinosaurs lie toppled in the undergrowth.

Bullet holes tattoo the wall behind a currywurst stall...Who needs to

travel to the Amazon to study the customs of primitive tribes?

The Dance of Death in the Marienkirche: the clerics, bankers and

lawyers being led by the hand, into the plague-pits, their rank no
protection, in the cool gloom where the gilt chalice is uplifted and
catches the sunǯs cascadeǥ

In a dingy cafe with wooden ceilings, supping golden Landbier, sitting

among the drunk and rheumatic, you gobble a schnitzel worth more
than all the worldǯs philosophy and art, a thing so absolute and 
.

Histories do not define me, in my city of glory and dread. Fail and fail
again, sublimely, meaningfully, carrying the essence of failure
forward as a precious gift to oneself.
 |Ao

In the Franciscan monastery laboratory, Leonhard Thurneysser

studies urine samples sent to him from all over Europe, dispenses
herbal tinctures and potions, and plots the movements and
conjunctions of the planetsǥ

The watertower looms up near Kollwitzplatz: buried in its shadow is a

subterranean water chamber where Nazi torturers used the operatic
acoustics to amplify their victimsǯ screams.

Whatever I say is both right and wrong. I am content with that.

At Örunewald train station, I look down at the platformǯs edge, at the

dates and destinations carved there, 1941 to 1945, and the tracks
stretch away into the snow.

A Few Days in Bruges

To Bruges I raise
A glass of Westmalle Dubbel
To rouse the spirits,
Black and lovely,
With that bitter vanilla aftertaste.

Patiently I illuminate
My Book of Hours
With scenes from a dream,
A life unlived.

In Sint Walburgakerk
Argentine light streams
From pale stained-glass
Onto black and white marble maze floor,
As the eye is led straight
Down the nave to the golden glow,

I am a crosser of bridges,
In love with their mystery,
Weaving stone and water
In my mindǯs oratory,
 |A†

Lace prayers for the seeking.

History plays the three-card trick,

Then life goes on as before.

THE HUNDERTWASSER HOUSE

Purples, pinks and candy reds,

Yellows and periwinkle blues-
Undulating floors of an earthly vision...
Wrought iron Juliet balconies
Cast shadows on the walls
As leaves move in the breeze
And mossy cracks wrinkle the foundations.
Crows perch along the gutter.
Can paradise be so simple, so obvious?
In this city of lies and compromise
Something must stand true.
 |o

HASTINÖS

A strange disjointed season, this:

Trawling along the seafront,
Where geysers of spray explode over the wall,
And a crazy old tramp shouts obscenities into the wind.
I huddle in a bus shelter, burning the roof of my mouth
With greasy fish and chips.
Alone, I crunch over the stony beach,
Stooping to select the most numinous stones,
Smoothed and empowered by the sea.
Rooting through musty second-hand bookshops,
For esoteric knowledge to drag back to my lair,
I smell sin and death in the ozone.

Discarded syringes on the castle path.

Teenagers humping on the beach as night falls.
In my faded room, among sulking hills,
I tuck into a yellowed paperback,  )
 |o|

Étienne on the Côte dǯAzur

I am the dream-thief, the pickpocket of memories,

Stealing through the crowd,
Among false faces.
A voice in my ear
Hisses;
DzPraise the sea but stick to the land.dz

Scramble down canyon steeps

Over dry chalk and scrub
Past crippled pines hanging on somehow
Down into blue glitter,
The *
.
Subterranean rivers
Tug me in their currents.

Afternoon sunlight slices

Through the wine glasses,
Casting straw coloured ovals on the tablecloth.
Ölistening pink langoustines and creamy crabs,
Purple-lined tellines and silvery clams,
Iridescent oysters on the platter...
We are eating prehistory.
 |o_

Turquoise waters wash a small sandy beach.

I lie on the stone and swallow the sun
Like a perfect tangerine.
All I see is blue:
A blue van parked by a farmhouse;
Faded blue shutters against orange walls;
The distant mountain, changing from hour to hour;
A blue awning from a chocolate shop;
Blue water from a stone fountain
And a blue virgin in a church niche;
The lavender on a market stall.

=Y

Y
Y
Y
Y
Öreen glasses on a rack,
Smudged with white light,
Angled like a school of dolphins diving,
Submerge me in pure colour...
Just like the baked orange roof tiles
Layered like fish scales,
Just like the melon sliced open on the counter,
Seeds arranged in mathematical grotesque.

Pour it out, pour it out:

Asti Spumante with a splash of violet
Over crushed ice.
Did I ever, did I
Tell them I loved them?
No, I did not.
 |oÈ

THE LONÖ MAN OF WILMINÖTON

Dodman of the centuries,

He strides across the hills,
Örasping a staff in each hand,
Mercurius, uniter of opposites;
At his foot the Benedictine Priory
Extends a subterranean passage
From its crypt to the churchyard,
Where stands a giant ancient yew,
An altar beneath its boughs.
In this questerǯs land,
Peredur came to a deserted castle
And saw within a chessboard,
The pieces playing by themselves.
Here the Musesǯ nine seasons
Open their gates in succession,
Under vortical starsǯ auspices.
These hills are the Witchǯs cauldron,
Stirring , seething day and night...
Pilgrim, release and receive!
Breathe the dust you tread,
As whirlwinds race across the fields
And animals clock the sun.
 |oß

The Sun edges into Sagittarius

And Jupiter lords the heavens;
Healers all, we are born to celebrate.

EADWEARD MUYBRIDÖE (PERSISTENCE OF VISION)

A running man.
Running towards
And away.
Motion and emotion
Merge in the flow.
The art and science
Of being.

Alone in the deserts and mountains

He stalks like a Saxon king,
Twisting riddles between a killerǯs fingers.
Hammering the light on his anvil.
The rage in his head is the blade of his eye,
Cutting to the quick.

An infinite succession of discrete instants-

 |oü

Enough to drive a man mad.

Under the influence,
One turns to philosophy and fiction.
Haplessly the eye-
Risible monster-
Stakes all on those naked apparitions,
Whatever wanders into the crosshairs.

Frame by frame,
Fragments of action, hard to understand,
Exist, for the duration,
A little blurred,
But distinct.
And that is all.
It is the world, or something like it,
Never properly seen
By anyone.

Death blinks in the camera.

Öravity plumbs to the earthǯs core
As the horseǯs hooves leave the ground.

At the end, he retires to his English garden,

Plants sago palms and gingko trees from California
And constructs a little pond
Shaped like the Öreat Lakes.
 |o*

WRITTEN ON A KERALAN PALM LEAF

.3 

 

Hunkered under a raintree, an old holy man flogs phials of crimson

medicine to passing rickshaw drivers.

Each instant is 
: pungent banyan shade and the patterns cut
by dugouts in the bay...hypnotic revolutions of a punkah fan draw you
down into infinite geometries.

I am building a snake-shrine of words to celebrate the green green tea

hills, where tiny waterfalls glimmer far below, and panther-rumours
move in the jungle, as the diligent workers advance across the
terraces, from one valleyside to the other, picking clean the precious
leaves.

Arabian Sea, speak to me in a lexicon of blues and greens...

Sandalwood incense burns as a lizard shoots up the wall.
Tamarind prawns are marinading in coconut oil, orange chilli powder
and turmeric.
 |oA

In the morning light of the lime-coliured village, clans of monkeys

play on the veranda, swinging off the gnarled balustrade, switching
lights on and off, munching jackfruit with glee.

Thundercloud of bison moving across a faraway hillside...

Clove-scented tea to my nose, my lips...
Will you live to be a hundred and fifty, or be killed by a falling
coconut?
The body awaits its monsoon.

In the palace frescoes Krishna the louche smiles and lounges with an
innocent baby face, all the while using his toes to tweak his loversǯ
nipples and rummaging with his hand through their saris.

Purple and yellow blossomed evening and the pyrotechnic palm trees
against pink and violet sky at sunset as dark girls bathe their babies at
the seaǯs edge...

Stork billed kingfisher streaks low and light across the river, brilliant
turquoise, as the boat moves ahead...stippled sun-patterns project
through the mosquito net

In the dusk, fishing canoes, lit by lanterns, head out from villages and
wobble all night on the water, tiny lights everywhere on the horizon...

02 naked on a wooden bench,coated in warm oils,tenderly

massaged to the depths,and the cascade of warm oil is dripped onto
the Third Eye...
 |oo

ALÖERIAN VERSES

Carthaginian rectitude holds me

To the red moonǯs rise;
This is all, the vast Sahara,
Once the bed of steaming seas.

Rapacious as a Barbary corsair,

I loot the skies for light,
And sail through straits of time
To fetch up on wild shores.

Tuareg-blue, time lopes across

The space between oases,
A caravan of lives; summer
Holds a perfect death in its crown.

Scent of herbs and absinthe

Tinges the harbour air after rain;
Turquoise water beats against
The ruins;     ...
 |o†

Portia

A baleful alignment of the planets,-

Malignant airs,-
Forces another poem
Sweating from me.
My gift to you:
A serpent with a ruby in its mouth.

A moon of Uranus
Or a jumping spider.
A orchid from Costa Rica.
All these things and others
Inhabit your name.

There is no remedy for you

But more of the same.
The niceties of Murphyǯs Law
Are my speciality.

The shy and the ugly

Are my kin.
As long as I donǯt love you,
 |†

I can be happy.

Remember Venice:
The Secret Chancellery,
Where state documents were copied
By trusted illiterates,
Faithfully transcribing
What they could not understand.
And the Torture Room
With the long rope hanging
From the roof;
Victims were suspended
With hands tied behind their backs,
On full moon nights,
Silhouetted in the darkness,
While hissing Inquisitors
Interrogated from the shadows.

THE NOISE

Venerable tramp on a tax-funded bench,

Swaddled in yesterdayǯs news,
I call for help in the human tongue
Drowned out by journalese.

Billboard colours blur to blankness,

Advertising a hole in the road
Where each preoccupied passer-by
Falls in and disappears.-youǯre dead!

Financial scandals, warnings of war,

Scared headlines gallop across the sky
Come on, punters, place your bets-
What does it matter if you win or lose?

Tailored rags for the restless naked,

Öossip in the drilled crowdǯs ear;
The flirting world flaunts action
While twisted mouths cry for more.
 |†|

Ingrid, Itǯs Only a Movie

Heraclitus cannot help you now.

No need for philosophy;
We have entertainment instead.
You can live forever
And control everything.

To affirm life
And rescue the spirit
By locating certain images
In the back of your mind;
That is all you can do,
All you should do,
All you must.

The curtains part,

The film is about to begin.
Wonder what...
All the desultory days
You could not parse,
The visages
Confused with one another,
 |†_

Though a few, at least,

Remained distinct.

Ingrid, itǯs only a movie.

Donǯt take it all so seriously.
Youǯll only ruin your life.
Youǯll only ruin your life.

Lake Como

Science, silk and architecture

Beguile my loneliness.
Sad emperor, only the most profound
Lake could entertain you
And refract your mind.
Oleander and camellia,
Jasmine and roses,
Scent the villa garden
And the terrace where waiters
Elegant as Austro-Hungarian hussars
Swoop with silver trays
And change tablecloths
With ballet dancersǯ élan.

Here, Paul the Deacon,

Seduced by demons,
Saw himself in Natureǯs Hell,
Consumed by green fires.
The watersǯ cornucopia
Terrified the Benedictine
With heathen powers
 |†È

From beneath his feet,

Beneath the foundations
Of resplendent churches,
The very fountains of his voice.
Caught on the bullǯs horns,
He cried out first in ecstasy,
Then begging forgiveness
And redemption. Having eaten
Pomegranatesǯ sinful flesh
And breathed myrtleǯs Babylonian
Perfume, he recoiled from the rot
Shadowing the ripeness.
Was this water in fact Avernus?

I do not ask to be spared.

Faithless, but not without hope,
Afraid, but not in terror,
One prays, all the same, after a fashion.
Y

Quiet, so quiet the water around

And the tiller wedded to your hand,
Feeling the breezes, deciding
When to trim and when to ease out;
Here a tack, there a jibe, you are sailing
Through reflections, marrying wind
And water with your hands,
Sinking your treasure to the bottom.
 |†ß

Ibizan Fiesta

Like a dream of green water,

Like a sunset,
Those eyesǥ

Lioness
In a gypsy dress
Barefoot she strides

Naked
She clutches the water
Swimming in the bay

Oh oleander
If I could but forget
Your scent
Y
Together
We jump the fires
On the feast of John the Baptist
 |†ü

Together
We stiltwalk above the crowd
Drumming the voodoo

Oh orange blossom
Not to burn my eyes
On your shape

INTERNET BOY

-




Tim-Berners Lee

Do as you desire,
No permission required,
Incognito in limbo,
Weightless astronaut.

The library exploded:

Now all the pages
Are falling from the sky.

No boundaries,
No near or far,
Contain me;
I am whatever
I choose to appear.

Living is like
 |†*

Learning to speak Chinese,

Never sure
If the tones are right.

In Praise of Suicide

Someone jumped off the bridge last summer

Landed in a tree,
And hung there, unnoticed, till the leaves fell offǥ
That is the purpose of autumn.

So you think that things will never get better?

How right you are.
Take the hint,
Do the proper thing,
-A bullet or a rope.

Kill yourself
And take me with you.
Letǯs go over the edge
Together,
Alone.

We have this power in our hands,

The beautiful cowards we are,
The stupid heroes.
 |†A

When you get to the end of the road

Turn left
And keep on straight.

Toledo

Out of treeless torrid desert,

Out of dun plainsǯ drear,
This: like a hawk soaring up
To snatch the sun on the wing.
Alchemical city of scholars,
Of Arab, Christian and Jew,
Melding mysticism and science,
Pour your mercury into my soul.
Öold Baphomet of necromancers,
Utter worlds to come!
Silk and steel united in stone,
Be my spiritǯs 
.
Steep narrow streetsǯ grimoire
Proffers strange omens.

A shaft of light in the cathedral

Strikes the altar in benediction.
Cardinalsǯ hats hang rotting
Above expensive tombs.
Autumn demands a subtle bargain...
 |†o

The marzipan moonǯs ripe to eat,

Pink from a nunǯs skinny hand.
Death climbs the stair at a quarter
To midnight, inquisitor extraordinaire,
Adept with Iron Maiden and spiders.
Time is my religion: self-martyred,
I stumble on, keeping queer faith
With the hours, to an artificial hill,
My pale reckoning, my poetryǯs end.

SHADOWS UNDER THE EYES

Wednesday
-Humpback bridge
Thrown up by the Devil;
Celtic stone head,
Janus-faced.

Misbegotten halfling,
You cling to the wrong things
That reassure your nescience
And justify your fear.

We donǯt want to think about Jesus, Mohammed or Buddha,

We just want to sit in a café,
Drinking brandy, eating pastries.

Our sonar loves are drowned at sea.

Elementary frisson! A coil of passion heats in the hidden indusium.
We are jeopardy and wonder.Öriefǯs gold tips the cupel; whorled stars
in the perse spring.
 |††

Langrage disembowels the silence. Scoria runs menstrual from the

furnace in thunder and glare.
A rigged clipper gybes in the bottle.
Semi-contented, we succumb to lambent ;
.

To rifle the skies for enchantment, such is the marrowǯs prayer.

I remember the centuries that made us, and the chiliads to
come.Apocalypse is still in the womb.
Parodyǯs caul fits the shrunken skull.Paeans peter out in ditties.
It is the time of tribes and sects divided, of burning haystacks and
pastures laid waste. Mountains split and glaciers melt into rivers that
web and wind.

ASSIMILATION

I enter the city of art

Like a pilgrim in Jerusalem
Öoing crazy with religion,
Bathing again and again to be pure,
Turning the hotel bedsheets into a white robe,
Marching alone to the holy places,
Singing psalms and crying out to Öod,
Preaching brotherhood and love to the passing crowd.

Each day is symbol and ritual.

Perfect is the beaverǯs lodge,
His simple cathedral on the river.
Not a stick too many or too few.

Daylight drives on a mission to win,

Recovering whatǯs hidden.
Who knows what the hills believe?
We strive with the starlingsǯ wings.
 _

Thoughts dance
In my mind,
Scorpions mating,
I, the desert prophet
In animal skins,
Baptizing crowds of lepers
In a river of light...

The killer comes from within

In a mask of gold,
His sacrificial knife
Honed on treetops.
What happened to the privacy of my body,
To the warm homestead of flesh?
The spiritǯs seal is broken.
The world overruns me.
That cherry treeǯs blossom is so bright
It stings my eyes
And I shudder.
I mourn for all I am, the done and not done.

THE TENDEREST MINUTE

Slow as the sea,

And sometimes above,
And sometimes below,
All tide and slide,
Uncapturable,
Her face a mask,
A grimace,
A laugh,
She tortures me
Deliciouslyǥ
This is murder,
Premeditated
And cruel.
 _
|

SECONDARY SYMPTOMS

Like a witch on a windy day she came,

A whispering premonition.
An inaudible whistle
That brings all the dogs in the neighbourhood running.

That your body curves just so, particular and fine,

That your eyes radiate so variously, in different lights and darks,
That your motions are the sign of grace,
Is all I can affirm.

I shouted to myself: forget about it!

I beat myself about the head,
And wished that I was dead, dead, dead.
But I could not forget.

The turtledove so chaste and loyal

And the lecherous popinjay.
Both commend themselves to thebirdlover.
 _
_

The sweep of her back

And the glorious pout
Of her behind...
What is it so attracts me
To the rear side of things?
My fierce eye brooks no impediment in its research.

Bloodshot soul,
What can save us
But the technology of the spirit,
Transforming utterly
The ignorant self?

NIETZSCHE AT LAKE ORTA

Steep cobbled streets down to the fierce blue lake,

Witchǯs cauldron for the sabbat.
After the morning mists,
After last nightǯs dreams...
And so it was in 1882,
The May air green and wild as absinthe,
When Nietzsche and Lou von Salome
Wandered off ,alone,in the Mont Sacre woods,
Forgetting the world and time,
Öone for longer than was proper.
Wherever they stood on the shore,
Their eyes were drawn back to the island,
The blood-cleansed wyvernǯs lair,
Where ouroboros doors guard
The caves of Mithras
And Zoroastrian hymns intone
Beneath the Roman liturgy.
In the basilica,he looked upon the bones
Of saint and dragon alike,
 _
È

And saw his own immense blinding death

In the silver-crystal sarcophagus.
Was not Julius the patron of masons,
The master of the Craft?
What transpired there,up in the woods,
No-one will ever know,
But there must have been a rapture
Imperfectly shared,a misunderstanding
Too rich to be sustained.
Later came the proposal, the rejection,
A tiny opera of swallowed doom.
Looking out across the lake,
He saw the blackness in the waves
And wrote. A man had died within him,
And shed a conquering god.
The morning mists began to clear.
_
ß
_
ü
_
*
_
A