Based on "The House By the Dvina" by Eugenie Fraser
1912
Forever and ever, the once-upon-a-time train
Chunters on and on, past endless forests and snows,
Flat fields and poor dark cottages sunk in drifts,
Small grey stations flashing by...
Northward rolls the train, into darkness,
Little Natasha sits dangling her legs
Over the top bunk’s edge, trying to grasp
The flow of grown-up talk beyond her ken,
Conversation, drollery and laughter....
Now and then one of the men glances up at her,
With a wink and a smile, as if sharing a secret.
The windows frost over with fairy rings,
And the wheels keep repeating
Something lonely and sad, into the night...
They open hampers of pirozhki and vatrushki,
And delectable spiced biscuits,
And one man fetches out a balalaika,
Strums and sings a plaintive folksong.
Tatiana lies back, clutching her doll:
Little Red Riding Hood, basket in hand,
Fiel with tiny loaf, apples, oranges
And a bottle of wine-oblivious
To the wolf hiding in pine branches
Behind, only his glowing eyes visible.
Pale morning sunlight fires the carriage,
Warm glow, and she wakes to the tinkling
Of tea-glasses, giant snowflakes cling
To the windows, and a startled bird flies up
Over the vanishing birches and pines....
And at last the station, rich and poor
All hurrying, jostling back and forth,
Breathing steamclouds, peasants
In bulky gear, rugged and longsuffering,
Opulent merchants and their wives,
Proud ladies and gentleman of bored mien,
Debonair young officers in white gloves,
The cabbage smell of Russia...
Dazzling-wide the river stretches before her,
The sun lighting up the city’s pastel buildings,
Golden church dome crosses glinting,
And the clean smell of snow...
Shawl-muffled in the sledge she sits,
The horses break into a gallop, heads
Thrown back, bells jingling...
Natasha sits by Babushka, laughing for joy....
Creaking of runners and the sudden cry
Of a crow in flight...the sledge turns
Into the familiar street, races through
The gates to the house, and stops,
And Babushka leads her in through door
Into a warm and loving embrace...
All winter the house is closed and intimate,
Soft light pools on tables, lampadas
Flickering on the faces in icons,
Sweet humming samovar,
Fragrance of birch and pine logs
In stoves...she dares not look
Into the dark fathomless eyes
Of St Nicholas, miraculous icon....
Wind pounds the windowpanes,
And Natasha lies curled up on the bed,
Watching and listening, listening,
Babushka brushes she hair in the mirror
And talks, talks of the past,
Her face glowing in the lamplight,
As she recalls her younger days,
And the journey she made once
By troika to St Petersburg, to see the tsar;
The snowshimmering birches,
Squirrels dancing on pine boughs in the sun,
Snowdrifts turning pale rose as the sun
Descended, and the small green eyes
Of wolves weaving through the trees
At night, as the fearmaddened horses
Starting to race, the kibitka bumping
Over frozen ruts, -it could turn over
Any second, - the passengers saying prayers
To ward off evil, until the barking
Of dogs leads them into a safe village,
And the horses stand trembling in clouds,
Foam dripping from their muzzles...
Uncle Misha has a beard as long as a saint’s.
He wears a peasant shirt and long boots.
Drunk, he rages and wrecks whole rooms,
Broken china and chairs scattered all over,
Mirrors shattered, trampled into the floor...
The next day he grovels at Babushka’s feet,
Beseeching her forgiveness, once again.
Once he had even joined a revolutionary march,
Full of bravado, carrying a red flag,
Proclaiming the slogans in full voice,
Side by side with workers,
Then suddenly a troop of Cossacks had appeared
And charged at the gallop-the procession
Scattered, in panic, and Uncle Misha
Threw aside his banner and leapt into the river;
Clinging to the bridge, in the cold water,
He waited as the hooves boomed overhead,
Then swam ashore and crept back to the house,
Creeping in, drenched, through the back door.
Snow lies thick in the garden, burying the gate.
Spangled drifts on bowed pine branches
Powder the glittering birch twigs.
The whole garden scinillates.Nothing moves. Silence.
Golden beams play on cherry trees’ trunks.
The summerhouse, “The Fairy Castle”,
Is snowed up, Natasha cannot get in.,
But the tress around are protecting it,
Guarding the sleeping princess within
Who will awake when spring returns.
At Christmas, the floors and mirrors are polished
Till they shine; and all over the house
Mysterious preparations are afoot...
All the lights are extinguished;
The ballroom doors are thrown open,
There in the darkness rises the tree,
Stretching up to the ceiling, ablaze
With glorious lights, the snow queen
On her sledge with silver reindeer,
The princess in a diamond coronet,
The evil witch beside her grotesque cottage,
The crystal icicles tinkling,
Layer on layer of brilliant candles,
Each pointed flame haloed like a saint....
1913
Epiphany. High snowdrifts. Empty streets.
Darkened windows and eerie silence.
The family play games of divination:
In an empty room a mirror is set
On a table, a lighted candle on either side.
Draping a sheet over her shoulders, a girl
Sits down, another mirror right behind her.
Darkness. The mirrors reflect her face
And shoulders in the flickering lights,
The candles multiplied by the mirrors-
Uncanny gallery of infinite lights.
There she sits, immobile, meditating,
Till shadow forms and faces take shape,
And whole scenes emerge in the air....
All of a sudden, she turns white, rushes
Out of the room, shaking and crying,
And will not say what she has seen.
Shrovetide. Children toboggan down hills,
Tumbling and rolling in snowdrifts.
Evening and the snow changes hue
From gold to crimson to lilac.
Babushka deftly conjures a golden tower
Of pancakes, light and delicious;
The moon vanishes, as snowflakes fall
Thicker and thicker, and troikas appear,
Dark formless shades in the haze.
Easter. In church, the candles are put out,
And the choir’s poignant singing
Rises, possessing all hearts.
Christ’s body is taken down fro the Cross:
Worshippers lay flowers beside the icon.
At home, they mix the sweet cheeses,
Bake the kulich and rumbabas.
Hams are decorated, joints of veal
Are glazed, baby sturgeons arranged
In aspic, zakuski laid out on fine plates.
In the centre of the table rises a pyramid
Of eggs in so many vivid colours,
Blue, crimson, gold and green.
Spring. The river’s white is tinged with lilac;
A dark ribbon appears in the middle and widens;
Suddenly the ice breaks; broken floes, borne
By churning waters, rush towards the sea,
Clambering over each other, rearing and collapsing,
Showering ice splinters high.
In the garden, grass spurts through the snow,
The black birch twigs show green tinges;
Rooftop snow starts to slide and crash
Down onto pavements. The windows are unsealed
And noises burst in-the whole earth
Chirping and cawing and barking...
Natasha wakes to summer morning,
Watching strange shadows glide across the wall,
Opposite the wide-open windows....
She catches the drifting pollen of light
And clasps it to her smiling face.
The summerhouse is open again:
Hurry, hurry! Baba Yaga is hiding in the bushes!
The garden is marvellous and sinister,
Glaring with newfound force...
Down on the riverfront people stroll,
And bands strike up in the park.
A little crowd is gathered,
Trying to revive a drowned man.
Uncle Dima returns like a prince,
Thin and still, full of goodness,
Having trekked across Siberia, alone.
He sits smiling benignly,
Loving all animals, flowers and trees.
He describes the wondrous steppe in spring,
Flowers as far as the eye can see;
In his hands he holds seeds and bulbs
From the Far East, and little icons
And crosses from far-off monasteries.
It is Aniushka’s coming-out ball.
When the dancing starts, little Natasha
Hides behind a curtain, watching
As the dancers form pairs and glide
Hand in hand around the floor,
Forming a great circle and breaking into pairs.
Aniushka, in white chiffon, flashes past,
Held by an office, smiling down at her,
She as ever looked so beautiful, so happy!
Creeping back to bed, Natasha cannot sleep:
Lies listening to the strains of waltzes,
Voices and laughter rising up the stairs,
And somehow she feels strangely sad....
1914
All too soon the summer is over.
Natasha and playmates go fishing
In the pond, but the hideous old carp
Are far too wily, impoosibet to catch.
They gather berries and mushrooms
In the cool pungent wood,
Where sunbeams splash sombre pines,
Doves coo, and capercaillies call.
The villagers are in the fields,
Harvesting the crops, when a stranger
Arrives and pins a notice to a post:
Germany has declared war on Russia.
Women congregate round tables,
Making bandages from gauze,
While Tsar Nicholas looks down
From the wall, his eyes benign,
A faint smile on his lips.
In the banya the naked women
Whip themselves with birch twigs,
And scrub in the furious haze,
And Natasha throws basins of water around,
And lies on the floor to peep
Through the drainhole at the bare feet
Of the men next door-
And occasionally she is confronted
By a pair of curious eyes
Staring from the other side.
A letter comes for Dasha. Her husband
Has been killed in action. She holds
His little medal in her hand.
In church, Natasha stands with her candle,
Remembering his handsome face,
And the wedding day, when the salt cellar
Had toppled and smashed on the floor
When the bread and sat was brought,
And how everyone has gasped
At the evil omen, and poor Dasha
Had wept with dread at what might be.
1917
One March morning, walking through slush
To school, Natasha sees a procession
Of men and women tramping along the road,
Waving crimson flags, and singing the Marseillaise.
In school, on walls where only yesterday
Hung portraits of the Imperial family,
Now there are blank spaces.
The children are putting on a play:
When the curtain raises, Old Mother Russia-
A wicked old crone in black-
Slowly sinks, banished by greater magic,
Through the floor into Hell,
While a beautiful young girl, dressed
In red sarafan, rises through the same trapdoor,
Struggling under an unwieldy red flag.
It is the Festival of the Assumption
And the convent is crowded with worshippers;
Natasha, clinging to Babushka’s side,
Sees the people coming to beg
Blessings from the resident saint,
A shrunken crone in black cloak
Of skull and crossbones, risen
From the depths where she dwells,
Living on bread and water, and sleeping
In a coffin; mechanically, she raises
Her claw to make the sign of the cross
Over each supplicant in turn,
Her shrivelled deathly face half hidden
By a dark hood, her eyes inhuman.
After dark the nuns and villagers
Circumambulate, chanting, in torchlight procession
The ancient convent walls
Lifting their brands to heaven, showering
Clouds of sparks like fireflies,
Glazing the moat with rippling light.
Seryozha returns from the front,
Carried on the flood of deserters,
Rushing back, pillaging estates on the way.
He has walked for days, and travelled
On packed diseased trains
Where the dead were thrown out
At every station. Now he enters again
The gates of his beloved home,
Hollow-eyed and filthy, in tattered uniform,
No more the merry lad, the patriot,
But a cynical grieving old man.
The family bring down the old bathtub
From the garret, and he scrubs himself
In the kitchen, for hours on end, as if somehow
He could scrub himself clean as a baby,
Free of dirt and war and death.
1918
Shura’s house is a magic realm, her room
With pictures of fairytales on the walls,
The cat following her round everywhere....
Shura! Everything Natasha is not-
Talented at the piano and guitar,
Dancing and singing in fine contralto,
The cleverest pupil, with beautiful face
And large calm grey eyes...-
And yet they are the best of friends.
All their life they will both remember
And delight in the time they appeared
Together in the school play, and Shura
Starred as the wicked princess
Who suddenly sees her true reflection
In the mirror, and realizes what she is.
After the thunderstorm, the garden reeks
Of sweet lilac, deep purple blossoms
Opening their petals to the sun;
Raindrops sparkle on lacy twigs.
Upriver, battles are being fought
In woods and villages, the rumour
Of gunfire and voices carries on the air.
Poor Uncle Dima, -who crossed Siberia
And survived so many adventures,-
Is found dead one morning,buried
By a blizzard, not far from his home.
And in his hand,frozen into a fist,
He clutches a tiny flower..
1920
In the evening dark shadows pass
The windows, fleeing north. The White Army
Is falling back, the Reds are winning...
Crouching at a window, Natasha sees
Horsemen galloping after ragtag groups
Of soldiers, tattered and barefoot,
Heedless of the snow and frost.
Running like madmen from the Devil.
Staving wretches burst into the house,
And devour the family’s only meal
While they stand by, helpless, shocked.
In school, the boys and girls join hands
And move in a chanting circle, dancing
The khorovod, around a singe figure;
Natasha has her turn at the centre,
And as she dances, notices Alexei,
The boy she has had her eye on for so long-
She rushes up and kisses his cheek,
Choosing him to stand in the middle-
With a laugh, he in turn takes her place,
And the khorovod starts up again,
But, next time, when his choice comes,
He selects not Natasha but Shura
While Natasha looks on with jealous chagrin.
In spring, when icicles shatter on pavements
And firs shake the hoarfrost from their boughs,
On the outskirts of town the sounds
Of shots are heard, as prisoners are taken
To the woods, and executed by the Reds.
Bolsheviks trample through the house,
Search for treasure, turning out pillows
And cushions, destroying the rare plants
In the greenhouse, and hauling off
The old family piano in a cart.
Day by day the old routines are crumbling,
And few gather anymore around the samovar
To drink its comfort and love.
One day on the street Natasha sees
Prisoners tramping by under guard,
Haggard and unshaven, carrying spades,
Not giving a sideways glance as they pass.
In the woods, gathering berries, the children
Hear distant shots, and a flock of birds
Whurries, frightened, overhead.
Later, walking home, with baskets full,
They meet the same guards, briskly marching,
But no prisoners with them, bundles
Of clothing thrown over their shoulders.
The family gather, ready to leave for the ship.
Natasha runs out into the garden
To say goodbye to the trees,
The dropping poplars, the summerhouse
Now shabby and forlorn.
As the ship moves downriver, she
Leans against the railing on deck,
Watching the familiar places slip by,
An suddenly she sees the house,
Lit up by the setting sun,
Before it vanishes forever.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Stendhal,1783-1842
Spring in Italy, and a raw young subaltern
Rides across the Saint-Bernard, joining Napoleon’s army,
Under fire for the first time, bewildered, exulting.
In June, in Ivrea, Cimarosa’s Matrimonio Segreto
Bursts over him, divine thunderstorm,
Purifying the heart of worries and distractions;
Reborn, he wanders, in a blissful trance…
One champagne morning, the eve of Marengo,
He first rides into Milan, through cheering throngs,
An instant hero in the Liberator’s legion,
Caught up in love for this magnificent city,
And betrothed to Itlay, his one true bride,
Loved and cherished with enduring passion,
Where a nonchalant goddess smiles upon him.
Angela Pietragrua-marble statue-cantering mare-
To whom he dares not even reveal himself,
Only yearn and worship at the threshold.
Racked on his bed in syphilitic fever, Beyle
Dreams the ideal unattainable one, the vision
Sought for years, indifferent to his pleas;
His forlorn voice echoes in her silence.
Love is rank and disgusting, seen close: -
Where else then find happiness but in glory,
Carriages and servants at your beck and call?
On Bastille Day, in the crowd outside the Tuileries,
Beyle watches, intent, as Bonaparte passes,
Resplendent on white steed, saluting and smiling-
Ah, but that smile is theatrical, false-
Has no-one else noticed that the great man’s eyes
Do not accord with the set of his mouth?
Short, flaccid, ugly, with plebeian prognathous face,
Small eyes emanating inexplicable charisma,
Beyle fumbles and twitches, an awkward provincial
Longing for the Parisian’s instinctive poise.
Composing his conduct with worldly calculation,
He anticipates posterity even in his private letters,
Projecting an image with studied effect.
His mother died perfect and adored,
That serene noble spirit with vivacious smile,
Whose plump nude body the boy had longed to kiss
From top to toe, in slow shared reverie.
As for his father-when would the old bastard
Die, and cough up his inheritance? -
Then he might serve some purpose after all!
One August noon in a vale outside Marseilles,
Picnicking with a beautiful mistress,
Where a river runs through the haze,
Beyle, gazing upward, spies the towers
Of a château, above the chestnut trees,
Grail Castle of a chivalrous knight and his lady,
And he wanders, tall and immortal,
Senses blending in rapt fantasia,
Looking down on the earth from on high.
To scrutinize the facts-and thus rise above them!
Nightlong at his table, Beyle dips his pen in life,
Classifies the passions, interrogates the soul,
Forcing plain words to express the inexpressible.
Milan again, and Angela…-all the years between
She has haunted him with pleasure and sorrow…
Blithe Italy washes the Parisian acid away…
Proud turbulence-a woman and a city,
Enchantment enough to burst the sky apart!
Summoned into Angela’s box at La Scala,
The very womb and cloister of love,
He sits like a god, presiding over Creation,
Among the women, so indolent and graceful,
Sipping ices and giggling over tarok.
It comes to a mortal to seduce the goddess! -
As they wander together through the picture gallery,
Whenever, by chance, their hands touch, they clasp,
In needy recognition, -this, the shock and disaster
Of love, -a thousand charming details, a thousand
Glad memories and associations, all now
Dull, vacant, irrelevant to the heart
Overtaken by tyrannical passion, -
In imagination only can he lose himself entirely,
And in love is still the critical observer,
Silently mocking his own extravagances,
In a world less real than his own fictions.
Ah, how beautiful, how Italian he feels now! -
Standing alone in the Coliseum, blessed
By birds singing in the arcades, he gasps
And cannot restrain the tears that flow.
Like leopards in diamond collars, they stroll as one
Through the Milanese streets, in evening’s candleglow…
Such sibylline beauty in Angela’s visage-
Can those eyes not dive the soul’s Marianas trench
And fish out the monsters swimming there?
(Yes, she, faithless whore, every popinjay’s bedmate,
Rubbing and grunting in sty and stall-
But that he is not to know, not till later)
With the Emperor’s headquarters in Russia,
Beyle, stumbling through mud under blank sky,
Curses this whole barbarous purgatory
And longs for Italy, bel canto of spring.
Silently he watches Moscow burn,
Pyramid of fire reaching up to the moon,
His face impassive, fascinated how to make
This spectacle of history into art.
Lumbering away in flight towards Smolensk,
Amid bedraggled convoy in endless retreat,
Each night pitching camp in bone-cracking cold,
Fending off ambushes out of the wilds,
Marching on at dawn through demonic fog,
Beyle, in his barouche, reads and dreams,
Flushed with fecund excitement, watching
Wondrous ideas rise and vanish in his mind,
Like visions in an opium trance.
Standing on a hilltop at Bautzen, Beyle,
Straining, through opera glasses, to make sense
Of the chaos in the valley below, as the army
Swarms across the river into battle,
Panoramic pantomime of world’s absurdity,
He sighs with weary disgust, yet thrills
To the majesty, the terror, in the din.
Introduced at a dinner party to Lord Byron,
Beyle, embarrassed bourgeois, greedy for approval,
Regales the English idol with invented anecdotes
Of his close acquaintance with Napoleon himself,
“And then the Emperor turned to me and said…”
Matilde! That oval Lombard face and brooding eyes-
She, with passionate majesty restrained,
Holds him severely beyond her embrace,
Till imploring desire redoubles and kills,
As he bumbles around her like a hobbled satyr,
Breaking his own rules, despising his folly.
Inventive despair composes operas in his mind,
Building rich arias on a single word or gesture-
Her voice, her glance, the slightest movement,
The brusque, delicious disdain she bestows!
More than copulation he craves reverie,
Moments of music and light across the earth.
In the glow of Roman orange trees, he stands
By a window, musing on the novelist’s science;
To solve what cannot be solved in life,
Experiments in enchantment and revolt.
All his life he has sacrificed the real for the ideal,
Aspiring to the highest, the most remote.
Arriving awkwardly at some salon, he launches,
Into one of his notorious mystifications,
And scarcely notices his straightfaced listeners
Sniggering up their sleeves, -how uncouth
He is, this squat balding parvenu, -and so pretentious!
Rides across the Saint-Bernard, joining Napoleon’s army,
Under fire for the first time, bewildered, exulting.
In June, in Ivrea, Cimarosa’s Matrimonio Segreto
Bursts over him, divine thunderstorm,
Purifying the heart of worries and distractions;
Reborn, he wanders, in a blissful trance…
One champagne morning, the eve of Marengo,
He first rides into Milan, through cheering throngs,
An instant hero in the Liberator’s legion,
Caught up in love for this magnificent city,
And betrothed to Itlay, his one true bride,
Loved and cherished with enduring passion,
Where a nonchalant goddess smiles upon him.
Angela Pietragrua-marble statue-cantering mare-
To whom he dares not even reveal himself,
Only yearn and worship at the threshold.
Racked on his bed in syphilitic fever, Beyle
Dreams the ideal unattainable one, the vision
Sought for years, indifferent to his pleas;
His forlorn voice echoes in her silence.
Love is rank and disgusting, seen close: -
Where else then find happiness but in glory,
Carriages and servants at your beck and call?
On Bastille Day, in the crowd outside the Tuileries,
Beyle watches, intent, as Bonaparte passes,
Resplendent on white steed, saluting and smiling-
Ah, but that smile is theatrical, false-
Has no-one else noticed that the great man’s eyes
Do not accord with the set of his mouth?
Short, flaccid, ugly, with plebeian prognathous face,
Small eyes emanating inexplicable charisma,
Beyle fumbles and twitches, an awkward provincial
Longing for the Parisian’s instinctive poise.
Composing his conduct with worldly calculation,
He anticipates posterity even in his private letters,
Projecting an image with studied effect.
His mother died perfect and adored,
That serene noble spirit with vivacious smile,
Whose plump nude body the boy had longed to kiss
From top to toe, in slow shared reverie.
As for his father-when would the old bastard
Die, and cough up his inheritance? -
Then he might serve some purpose after all!
One August noon in a vale outside Marseilles,
Picnicking with a beautiful mistress,
Where a river runs through the haze,
Beyle, gazing upward, spies the towers
Of a château, above the chestnut trees,
Grail Castle of a chivalrous knight and his lady,
And he wanders, tall and immortal,
Senses blending in rapt fantasia,
Looking down on the earth from on high.
To scrutinize the facts-and thus rise above them!
Nightlong at his table, Beyle dips his pen in life,
Classifies the passions, interrogates the soul,
Forcing plain words to express the inexpressible.
Milan again, and Angela…-all the years between
She has haunted him with pleasure and sorrow…
Blithe Italy washes the Parisian acid away…
Proud turbulence-a woman and a city,
Enchantment enough to burst the sky apart!
Summoned into Angela’s box at La Scala,
The very womb and cloister of love,
He sits like a god, presiding over Creation,
Among the women, so indolent and graceful,
Sipping ices and giggling over tarok.
It comes to a mortal to seduce the goddess! -
As they wander together through the picture gallery,
Whenever, by chance, their hands touch, they clasp,
In needy recognition, -this, the shock and disaster
Of love, -a thousand charming details, a thousand
Glad memories and associations, all now
Dull, vacant, irrelevant to the heart
Overtaken by tyrannical passion, -
In imagination only can he lose himself entirely,
And in love is still the critical observer,
Silently mocking his own extravagances,
In a world less real than his own fictions.
Ah, how beautiful, how Italian he feels now! -
Standing alone in the Coliseum, blessed
By birds singing in the arcades, he gasps
And cannot restrain the tears that flow.
Like leopards in diamond collars, they stroll as one
Through the Milanese streets, in evening’s candleglow…
Such sibylline beauty in Angela’s visage-
Can those eyes not dive the soul’s Marianas trench
And fish out the monsters swimming there?
(Yes, she, faithless whore, every popinjay’s bedmate,
Rubbing and grunting in sty and stall-
But that he is not to know, not till later)
With the Emperor’s headquarters in Russia,
Beyle, stumbling through mud under blank sky,
Curses this whole barbarous purgatory
And longs for Italy, bel canto of spring.
Silently he watches Moscow burn,
Pyramid of fire reaching up to the moon,
His face impassive, fascinated how to make
This spectacle of history into art.
Lumbering away in flight towards Smolensk,
Amid bedraggled convoy in endless retreat,
Each night pitching camp in bone-cracking cold,
Fending off ambushes out of the wilds,
Marching on at dawn through demonic fog,
Beyle, in his barouche, reads and dreams,
Flushed with fecund excitement, watching
Wondrous ideas rise and vanish in his mind,
Like visions in an opium trance.
Standing on a hilltop at Bautzen, Beyle,
Straining, through opera glasses, to make sense
Of the chaos in the valley below, as the army
Swarms across the river into battle,
Panoramic pantomime of world’s absurdity,
He sighs with weary disgust, yet thrills
To the majesty, the terror, in the din.
Introduced at a dinner party to Lord Byron,
Beyle, embarrassed bourgeois, greedy for approval,
Regales the English idol with invented anecdotes
Of his close acquaintance with Napoleon himself,
“And then the Emperor turned to me and said…”
Matilde! That oval Lombard face and brooding eyes-
She, with passionate majesty restrained,
Holds him severely beyond her embrace,
Till imploring desire redoubles and kills,
As he bumbles around her like a hobbled satyr,
Breaking his own rules, despising his folly.
Inventive despair composes operas in his mind,
Building rich arias on a single word or gesture-
Her voice, her glance, the slightest movement,
The brusque, delicious disdain she bestows!
More than copulation he craves reverie,
Moments of music and light across the earth.
In the glow of Roman orange trees, he stands
By a window, musing on the novelist’s science;
To solve what cannot be solved in life,
Experiments in enchantment and revolt.
All his life he has sacrificed the real for the ideal,
Aspiring to the highest, the most remote.
Arriving awkwardly at some salon, he launches,
Into one of his notorious mystifications,
And scarcely notices his straightfaced listeners
Sniggering up their sleeves, -how uncouth
He is, this squat balding parvenu, -and so pretentious!
The Uses of War
Heavy as fate itself is war.
Who can divine its meaning?
Once you enter therein,
You will never come back,
For how can one recover from a myth?
In battle’s procedures, the gods are most visible,
Directing action and fortune,
Fashioning destinies, inexplicably.
You may muster all the facts
And marshal every science,
But no answer will you find
Except in love.
A million bushels of men and horses
Were harvested from the battlefields
Of the Napoleonic Wars,
Shipped to England and ground into bone meal
By factory workers,
Toiling to feed their families.
Name the enemy
And let violence begin.
Think of General Patton,
Gloomy as his war was ending,
-What would he do now?
Until he discovered,
With joy and relief,
A new and worthy foe,
Savages from the East.
Picture of the Week
In Life Magazine, May 1944:
An attractive young woman
Writing a thank-you letter
To her boyfriend in the Navy,
Smiling at his beautiful gift,
Set upon her desk:
The skull of a Japanese soldier,
Autographed by him
And his pals.
So much is buried in the earth
To make it vengeful;
The god of the chariot
Also drives the plough.
Splendour of another order
Flourishes in the horror;
Those who perish
Also exult.
“The Battle of Lookout Mountain,”
Said General Grant,
“Was no battle at all,
But poetry, all poetry”.
Like the blonde merkins
Italian prostitutes wore
For their Yankee soldier boys
In the Great War.
Who can divine its meaning?
Once you enter therein,
You will never come back,
For how can one recover from a myth?
In battle’s procedures, the gods are most visible,
Directing action and fortune,
Fashioning destinies, inexplicably.
You may muster all the facts
And marshal every science,
But no answer will you find
Except in love.
A million bushels of men and horses
Were harvested from the battlefields
Of the Napoleonic Wars,
Shipped to England and ground into bone meal
By factory workers,
Toiling to feed their families.
Name the enemy
And let violence begin.
Think of General Patton,
Gloomy as his war was ending,
-What would he do now?
Until he discovered,
With joy and relief,
A new and worthy foe,
Savages from the East.
Picture of the Week
In Life Magazine, May 1944:
An attractive young woman
Writing a thank-you letter
To her boyfriend in the Navy,
Smiling at his beautiful gift,
Set upon her desk:
The skull of a Japanese soldier,
Autographed by him
And his pals.
So much is buried in the earth
To make it vengeful;
The god of the chariot
Also drives the plough.
Splendour of another order
Flourishes in the horror;
Those who perish
Also exult.
“The Battle of Lookout Mountain,”
Said General Grant,
“Was no battle at all,
But poetry, all poetry”.
Like the blonde merkins
Italian prostitutes wore
For their Yankee soldier boys
In the Great War.
Afghanistan
Strange gods irradiate the desert:
Desiccated mountains dimly glimpsed through flying sand,
The salt river scours the heartland of the dead,
Ragged roadmenders wave empty waterskins, lamenting…
Volatile, the river tapers almost to extinction,
Then suddenly, somewhere else, mutates into a lake,
Shivering, phantasmal, between earth and sky.
Blowtorch wind storms the water into waves,
Toppling crests of yellow froth that break into rainbows.
Upstream, a herd of bullocks are swimming across,
Drovers astride the leaders, urging them on.
Nacreous morning conjures with a lopsided grin:
Wild melons sit pregnant by the twisting road.
In a fly-eyed little town dogs bark in the distance,
And an old man laments under a mulberry tree:
“Where is the light? The light is extinguished,
Once I prospered, but now I have nothing.
Once I ate the fruits of the earth, but now I eat salt…”
A naked man appears on the road,
Slowly strutting like a diver on the seabed, entranced;
He pauses in the middle of the bridge awhile,
Then stumbles away toward the mountains.
Sandbanks keen in the wind,
Outcast souls in limbo.
Stunted trees cast ghoulish shadows.
The twisting roads comes suddenly
To a verdant valley ambered in heavenly light,
Terraced fields where sickles reap in easy unison,
And laden donkeys trooping in good order.
Ebullient boys sport with the river,
Jumping from branches, whisked along in the frisky current
To deep delicious pools downstream.
Silk-bright women stroll the banks, gaily chatting,
Poplars shimmer, willows flounce in the breeze.
Slow streams dawdle through the apricot orchards
Where old men proudly dandle their grandchildren,
Building up their sinews and bones with stories.
Green-apple-sheen sky: the odd squint of sun
Slices wryly through imbricate branches,
Photographing fish-flash in the shallows.
Clambering in a mulberry grove, Tajik lads
Shake the branches, laughing, while their sisters below
Hold out blankets to catch the pattering fruit.
Dust-embers swirl over red-hot earth:
The track winds up by castellated bluffs,
High above the turgid yellow river.
Exhausted, you ride into a village-oasis,
And tether your mount beneath a walnut tree
Where a spring bubbles up through lunar sand
And a rapt stallion nuzzles a smiling mare.
Further on, a body lies face down on the track,
Skull smashed to pulp with a rock,
Lammergeiers congregating for the love-feast.
Beetles carry off bonbons of horse-dung in the dust.
The gorge constricts, granite chaos echoing,
Caves’ feral eyes pursue you from above,
Now and then an overhanging slab
Crashes down with ominous report.
In the Parian Valley, huge intricate spider’s webs
Glisten in the sunrise; pinnacles ignite,
Towers of silence on an icy star.
Mir Samir holds the shaky horizon,
Hedged in haze and floating in shadow;
A vast meadow materializes, kicking with wild horses,
Magnificent creatures, manes streaming as they run.
Digging a pauper’s grave for the sun,
The wind hustles hearse-clouds from behind ghastly mountains;
Occulted streams whirr under terminal moraine
And bass notes boom from the glacier
Where visceral batteries of hosepipes spurt.
The cloud is lifting; the mountain is on fire;
Vapour eddies over the nether scarps,
Shuddering with rockfalls’ boom;
Everything is wobbling, disintegrating…
Sometimes a sudden hush seizes the moment,
The roaring of a seashell pressed to the ear.
Desiccated mountains dimly glimpsed through flying sand,
The salt river scours the heartland of the dead,
Ragged roadmenders wave empty waterskins, lamenting…
Volatile, the river tapers almost to extinction,
Then suddenly, somewhere else, mutates into a lake,
Shivering, phantasmal, between earth and sky.
Blowtorch wind storms the water into waves,
Toppling crests of yellow froth that break into rainbows.
Upstream, a herd of bullocks are swimming across,
Drovers astride the leaders, urging them on.
Nacreous morning conjures with a lopsided grin:
Wild melons sit pregnant by the twisting road.
In a fly-eyed little town dogs bark in the distance,
And an old man laments under a mulberry tree:
“Where is the light? The light is extinguished,
Once I prospered, but now I have nothing.
Once I ate the fruits of the earth, but now I eat salt…”
A naked man appears on the road,
Slowly strutting like a diver on the seabed, entranced;
He pauses in the middle of the bridge awhile,
Then stumbles away toward the mountains.
Sandbanks keen in the wind,
Outcast souls in limbo.
Stunted trees cast ghoulish shadows.
The twisting roads comes suddenly
To a verdant valley ambered in heavenly light,
Terraced fields where sickles reap in easy unison,
And laden donkeys trooping in good order.
Ebullient boys sport with the river,
Jumping from branches, whisked along in the frisky current
To deep delicious pools downstream.
Silk-bright women stroll the banks, gaily chatting,
Poplars shimmer, willows flounce in the breeze.
Slow streams dawdle through the apricot orchards
Where old men proudly dandle their grandchildren,
Building up their sinews and bones with stories.
Green-apple-sheen sky: the odd squint of sun
Slices wryly through imbricate branches,
Photographing fish-flash in the shallows.
Clambering in a mulberry grove, Tajik lads
Shake the branches, laughing, while their sisters below
Hold out blankets to catch the pattering fruit.
Dust-embers swirl over red-hot earth:
The track winds up by castellated bluffs,
High above the turgid yellow river.
Exhausted, you ride into a village-oasis,
And tether your mount beneath a walnut tree
Where a spring bubbles up through lunar sand
And a rapt stallion nuzzles a smiling mare.
Further on, a body lies face down on the track,
Skull smashed to pulp with a rock,
Lammergeiers congregating for the love-feast.
Beetles carry off bonbons of horse-dung in the dust.
The gorge constricts, granite chaos echoing,
Caves’ feral eyes pursue you from above,
Now and then an overhanging slab
Crashes down with ominous report.
In the Parian Valley, huge intricate spider’s webs
Glisten in the sunrise; pinnacles ignite,
Towers of silence on an icy star.
Mir Samir holds the shaky horizon,
Hedged in haze and floating in shadow;
A vast meadow materializes, kicking with wild horses,
Magnificent creatures, manes streaming as they run.
Digging a pauper’s grave for the sun,
The wind hustles hearse-clouds from behind ghastly mountains;
Occulted streams whirr under terminal moraine
And bass notes boom from the glacier
Where visceral batteries of hosepipes spurt.
The cloud is lifting; the mountain is on fire;
Vapour eddies over the nether scarps,
Shuddering with rockfalls’ boom;
Everything is wobbling, disintegrating…
Sometimes a sudden hush seizes the moment,
The roaring of a seashell pressed to the ear.
Apsara
At dawn and twilight we pour milk and oil into the fire.
Juice of the aloeswood tree, dark and aromatic, is her incense, her perfume and her medicine; yes, she.
Vishnu reclines on the coils of Ananta,canopied by the cobra’s seven hoods,afloat on the infinite ocean; he awakes from yogic sleep, as a lotus stalk sprouts from his navel, revealing in its flower Brahma the Creator.
In the temple’s gloom, the priest circumambulates the god; igniting the camphor, he breathes its fire and scent, watches it burn to nothing, and leave no trace;
The damaru booms, vibrates with the rhythm of Creation, the same sound into which the world will one day be reabsorbed; the two triangles of purusha and prakriti; the upward and the downward.
I would learn the science of the crow, his three secrets; to understand immortality, the creation of the world and the nature of Hell.
Brother, sister, lover, raise your hand in abhayamudra.
At dawn and twilight we pour milk and oil into the fire.
Juice of the aloeswood tree, dark and aromatic, is her incense, her perfume and her medicine; yes, she.
Vishnu reclines on the coils of Ananta,canopied by the cobra’s seven hoods,afloat on the infinite ocean; he awakes from yogic sleep, as a lotus stalk sprouts from his navel, revealing in its flower Brahma the Creator.
In the temple’s gloom, the priest circumambulates the god; igniting the camphor, he breathes its fire and scent, watches it burn to nothing, and leave no trace;
The damaru booms, vibrates with the rhythm of Creation, the same sound into which the world will one day be reabsorbed; the two triangles of purusha and prakriti; the upward and the downward.
I would learn the science of the crow, his three secrets; to understand immortality, the creation of the world and the nature of Hell.
Brother, sister, lover, raise your hand in abhayamudra.
At dawn and twilight we pour milk and oil into the fire.
Three Russian Icons
A Saviour Icon of the Moscow School
In a purple tunic interwoven with gold,
Covered with dark blue cloak,
Christ stands, holding in his left hand
The opened book of judgment-
His right hand he bestows a blessing,
Fingers making the Ichthys mudra-
Immense energies in his narrowshouldered frame,
His long face, high brow and small mouth,
Withdrawn into ferocious inner fire,
Staring into every human heart
With severe compassion, excluding none,
So each feels comprehended, him alone.
Such is history,whose meaning only Christ
Can reveal, with a saving hand and smile.
The Saviour in the Deësis of Zvenigorod by Andrei Rublev
Purify the senses, renounce imagination,
Radiate from within like the angels,
Manifesting God’s hidden splendour,
The presence in the icon.
This Christ is more human than anyone,
He has turned, this very moment, to gaze into us,
His luminous face extremely delicate,
Subtle arch of the eyebrows, clear hazel eyes,
So youthful, sweet and good.
Yet absolute.
A man’s hand made this,
Shaping the prayer.
The Yaroslavl Virgin of Tenderness
The delicate longneckedVirgin,
Gazing away into the distance,
Her left hand lightly touching the back of her son’s head,
Her tapering right hand in a gesture of prayer,
Cradles their oval of mutual love;
The Child has an adult’s mien,
His head a circle of perfection,
Snuggled up against his mother, clasping her cheek,
His white robe reflecting light on them both,
As he gazes into her face,
Acknowledging the fullness and wonder of her gift.
So open and loving is she to God,
So wounded in her humanity,
That the God-child cannot but love her in return,
With infinite tenderness for the world,
Entrusting himself to her graces,
As if the true Creator were she.
In a purple tunic interwoven with gold,
Covered with dark blue cloak,
Christ stands, holding in his left hand
The opened book of judgment-
His right hand he bestows a blessing,
Fingers making the Ichthys mudra-
Immense energies in his narrowshouldered frame,
His long face, high brow and small mouth,
Withdrawn into ferocious inner fire,
Staring into every human heart
With severe compassion, excluding none,
So each feels comprehended, him alone.
Such is history,whose meaning only Christ
Can reveal, with a saving hand and smile.
The Saviour in the Deësis of Zvenigorod by Andrei Rublev
Purify the senses, renounce imagination,
Radiate from within like the angels,
Manifesting God’s hidden splendour,
The presence in the icon.
This Christ is more human than anyone,
He has turned, this very moment, to gaze into us,
His luminous face extremely delicate,
Subtle arch of the eyebrows, clear hazel eyes,
So youthful, sweet and good.
Yet absolute.
A man’s hand made this,
Shaping the prayer.
The Yaroslavl Virgin of Tenderness
The delicate longneckedVirgin,
Gazing away into the distance,
Her left hand lightly touching the back of her son’s head,
Her tapering right hand in a gesture of prayer,
Cradles their oval of mutual love;
The Child has an adult’s mien,
His head a circle of perfection,
Snuggled up against his mother, clasping her cheek,
His white robe reflecting light on them both,
As he gazes into her face,
Acknowledging the fullness and wonder of her gift.
So open and loving is she to God,
So wounded in her humanity,
That the God-child cannot but love her in return,
With infinite tenderness for the world,
Entrusting himself to her graces,
As if the true Creator were she.
Pink Dolphins of the Amazon
The people speak of an enchanted city
Beneath the river surface,
Ruled by magical beings,
And those mortals who visit there never want to leave,
For there all is beauty, riches and pleasure,
A place of no sorrow or longing, only music and dancing.
Out of the water the dolphins climb,
Shapeshifters assuming human guise,
Appearing at village festas to seduce men and women,
And steal them away forever to their underwater city.
How easily they fall in love with human beings,
And enter their dreams to bewitch them,
Returning night after night,imploring the beloved
To come away with them....
Such passion few hearts can resist.
Annihilated by ayahuasca,
The shaman swims with the dolphins of the stars,
Learning their secrets and powers,
Their prayers and medicines,
For they are the protectors of the river.
Their poisoned darts can kill.
White and black, light and darkness, flow together,
Life and death, creation and destruction, fear and desire,
In the all-consuming waters....
The pink dolphins rise about your boat with seething bubbles,
Their faces emerge, otherworldly yet eerily familiar,
Melon-browed, long-beaked, delicate-skinned,
Sometimes grey or white, or mottled, sometimes dazzlingly pink,
Lucky hunchbacks you long to touch;
Tiny eyes full of humour and intelligence, smiling mouths,
With tremendously powerful teeth and jaws,
And huge flippers like wings.
Swimming alone, or in pairs,
They revel, seeking out sport and interaction,
Lost twins of man,with foetal human faces,
Navigating the dark by sonar,in trance,dream and echo,
Projecting a sound-beam,
Pulsing clicks at the highest frequencies,
With mathematical precision.
(First fish,then amphibians,then reptiles,then mammals,
Humans float in the womb’s warm ocean,
Learning all the water has to teach).
In the Miocene seas the ancestors
First swam into the Amazon
When the river still flowed westwards,
Before the Andes were born.
The sun and the moon were once lovers,
But were separated by the gods,
And, exiled from her beloved,
The moon wept endless tears,
And her tears formed the Amazon,
River of impossible love.
At dawn and dusk you may hear the dolphins’ call,
Rising to kiss the clouds...
A breath, a splash,a patch of rose skimming the surface,
Floating up and sinking down,
Mother and young swimming together, one on top of the other,
Their long snouts touching,
One flipper trailing along the other’s flesh, for comfort and love;
One dolphin will massage another
By blowing glittering laughing curtains of bubbles
Through which the other will then swim,
Rolling and revelling in the sensual caress of the bubbles on his skin;
The aroused male nibbles gently at the female’s flippers and flukes,
Then they make love head-to-head,or head-to-tail,or at right angles,
Over and over again, with inexhaustible ardour;
They masturbate with inventive abandon:
The male rubs his penis against objects,
Inserts it as a probe wherever he can,
Even into another dolphin’s blowhole;
While the artful female inserts objects into her vagina.
Most of all,they adore the lakes and flooded forests,
Down among the labyrinth of sunken trees, branches and undergrowth,
In soupy thick brown water, electric with teeming life, like skin and blood,
World-womb, the source, seething and overbrimming
With ravenous mysterious inexhaustible life,
Gorging and mating and hunting,
Feeding on death.
This is the giant anaconda,mother of all creatures,
Coiled and breathing rain:
Sometimes a storm splits the sky with lightning,
Crashes branches, rips animals from the trees,
Scatters birds, and then is gone,
Other times the rain just pours for hours and hours, sobbing and heaving,
Grieving for all the world.
Beneath the river surface,
Ruled by magical beings,
And those mortals who visit there never want to leave,
For there all is beauty, riches and pleasure,
A place of no sorrow or longing, only music and dancing.
Out of the water the dolphins climb,
Shapeshifters assuming human guise,
Appearing at village festas to seduce men and women,
And steal them away forever to their underwater city.
How easily they fall in love with human beings,
And enter their dreams to bewitch them,
Returning night after night,imploring the beloved
To come away with them....
Such passion few hearts can resist.
Annihilated by ayahuasca,
The shaman swims with the dolphins of the stars,
Learning their secrets and powers,
Their prayers and medicines,
For they are the protectors of the river.
Their poisoned darts can kill.
White and black, light and darkness, flow together,
Life and death, creation and destruction, fear and desire,
In the all-consuming waters....
The pink dolphins rise about your boat with seething bubbles,
Their faces emerge, otherworldly yet eerily familiar,
Melon-browed, long-beaked, delicate-skinned,
Sometimes grey or white, or mottled, sometimes dazzlingly pink,
Lucky hunchbacks you long to touch;
Tiny eyes full of humour and intelligence, smiling mouths,
With tremendously powerful teeth and jaws,
And huge flippers like wings.
Swimming alone, or in pairs,
They revel, seeking out sport and interaction,
Lost twins of man,with foetal human faces,
Navigating the dark by sonar,in trance,dream and echo,
Projecting a sound-beam,
Pulsing clicks at the highest frequencies,
With mathematical precision.
(First fish,then amphibians,then reptiles,then mammals,
Humans float in the womb’s warm ocean,
Learning all the water has to teach).
In the Miocene seas the ancestors
First swam into the Amazon
When the river still flowed westwards,
Before the Andes were born.
The sun and the moon were once lovers,
But were separated by the gods,
And, exiled from her beloved,
The moon wept endless tears,
And her tears formed the Amazon,
River of impossible love.
At dawn and dusk you may hear the dolphins’ call,
Rising to kiss the clouds...
A breath, a splash,a patch of rose skimming the surface,
Floating up and sinking down,
Mother and young swimming together, one on top of the other,
Their long snouts touching,
One flipper trailing along the other’s flesh, for comfort and love;
One dolphin will massage another
By blowing glittering laughing curtains of bubbles
Through which the other will then swim,
Rolling and revelling in the sensual caress of the bubbles on his skin;
The aroused male nibbles gently at the female’s flippers and flukes,
Then they make love head-to-head,or head-to-tail,or at right angles,
Over and over again, with inexhaustible ardour;
They masturbate with inventive abandon:
The male rubs his penis against objects,
Inserts it as a probe wherever he can,
Even into another dolphin’s blowhole;
While the artful female inserts objects into her vagina.
Most of all,they adore the lakes and flooded forests,
Down among the labyrinth of sunken trees, branches and undergrowth,
In soupy thick brown water, electric with teeming life, like skin and blood,
World-womb, the source, seething and overbrimming
With ravenous mysterious inexhaustible life,
Gorging and mating and hunting,
Feeding on death.
This is the giant anaconda,mother of all creatures,
Coiled and breathing rain:
Sometimes a storm splits the sky with lightning,
Crashes branches, rips animals from the trees,
Scatters birds, and then is gone,
Other times the rain just pours for hours and hours, sobbing and heaving,
Grieving for all the world.
Balthus
Seigneur of a longlost summer,
-Those worshipful days, wandering through Italy,
Noticing Piero’s geometry everywhere,-
He gazes out over the Alps from his castle window,
And breathes a sovereign love.
Enigmas edge his long thin silhouette.
Seducer and seduced.
There is no beauty like the beauty of young girls.
Radiance of prepubescence
Is the artist’s elixir.
There is reverence in his Mephistophelean passion,
Supreme sensuality darting away
Like a unicorn in the trees.
Such beauty is the terrible crux.
He creates the grandeur due to him,
An aristocrat by temper, not by birth,
His hauteur but the sable cloak of kindness.
Distance is his medium, the art of secrecy
That vouchsafes the truly human,
Which is only, when all is said and done,
A kind of atmosphere.
A single work deserves the toil of years,
Perpetually changing, determined not to become
Too much itself. The sole pleasure is that moment
When it seems, against the odds,
To be complete, an illusion which all too soon
Passes, allowing the usual frustration
To do its necessary work.
-Those worshipful days, wandering through Italy,
Noticing Piero’s geometry everywhere,-
He gazes out over the Alps from his castle window,
And breathes a sovereign love.
Enigmas edge his long thin silhouette.
Seducer and seduced.
There is no beauty like the beauty of young girls.
Radiance of prepubescence
Is the artist’s elixir.
There is reverence in his Mephistophelean passion,
Supreme sensuality darting away
Like a unicorn in the trees.
Such beauty is the terrible crux.
He creates the grandeur due to him,
An aristocrat by temper, not by birth,
His hauteur but the sable cloak of kindness.
Distance is his medium, the art of secrecy
That vouchsafes the truly human,
Which is only, when all is said and done,
A kind of atmosphere.
A single work deserves the toil of years,
Perpetually changing, determined not to become
Too much itself. The sole pleasure is that moment
When it seems, against the odds,
To be complete, an illusion which all too soon
Passes, allowing the usual frustration
To do its necessary work.
David Lean (1908-1991)
His eye was a viewfinder, composing every scene,
Demanding impossible perfection,
Determined that others should see things his way.
He could hide that shy uncertainty,
And play the impeccable gentleman,
Grooming his vanity with anxious superiority,
Making the world adore and serve him.
His secrets were between him and the dark.
As a boy, the first time he sat in a cinema,
Irresistible brothel of false idols and desires,
The curtains parted, and a beam of amber light
Stabbed through the smoke, a miracle,
So he entered another dimension,
And sat in awe, trading pain and loneliness,
For mystical revelation and forbidden magic.
The useless boy, backward in school,
Scorned as a dullard by his parents,
He sat glum and silent, staring into space,
Seeing things he could not tell to anyone,
Training his eye on the weird distance.
Breaking out of the sky’s chrysalis,
He wandered the fields after butterflies,
His eyes in flight, chancing the currents.
Disintegration took a long slow time,
One could die while still somehow breathing,
Abandoned, waking in an empty house,
Branded on the flesh, damned for all eternity,
Accursed in the eyes of God and man.
Where had father gone and why?
It must have been something he had done.
Nothing ever came between him and the lens;
Ruthless beauty would not allow any nuisance,
And people could only be angels or devils.
Tall and commanding, Quaker mouth set grim,
He raged at the world’s rude interruptions,
Conjuring wondrous stories in the air.
All his life he despised himself as second-rate,
Still beholden to the censor of pleasure,
Accusing himself of some lucky fluke.
Each love affair was played out,
Then canned and shelved when the credits rolled,
He would walk out and close the door forever,
Excise emotion like a malign tumour.
Loneliness remained his faithful companion,
When guilty bodies could no longer communicate,
Perfection thwarted, beauty fallen short.
More sensual than a woman’s skin
Was the feel and smell of film,
The ionised atmosphere of the cutting room,
All passion concentrated in each moment,
As solemn as a priest celebrating the Mass.
Life was in the cutting, not the leaving in;
The missing link, the space between two hearts.
Cold and correct, set apart in pained deliberation,
He yielded nothing to humour or praise,
Militant Lucifer directing his host of angels,
Commanding the tiniest detail with grim resolve,
Decreeing right and wrong.
Every story was a grand anabasis,
Mounted with the most meticulous preparation,
The child’s desire to astound,
To go further and further, beyond any rival.
Self and the world were riding on horseback,
Setting out for the crusade, to attain the hero’s crown;
But enemies were everywhere in ambush,
Their poisoned arrows flying through the air.
Clenched on the brink, in peril of madness or murder,
Punishing his senses for their godless craving,
Afraid to show his heart for fear of what might be,
He would lead all to perdition for his cause,
To carry through his mission to the end,
Exacting the infinite splendour of the minute,
The thoughts of a lone mind in a vast landscape.
Alone against the hostile crowd’s menace,
He framed the great geometry of emotions,
Inexplicable immensity in a single look.
Demanding impossible perfection,
Determined that others should see things his way.
He could hide that shy uncertainty,
And play the impeccable gentleman,
Grooming his vanity with anxious superiority,
Making the world adore and serve him.
His secrets were between him and the dark.
As a boy, the first time he sat in a cinema,
Irresistible brothel of false idols and desires,
The curtains parted, and a beam of amber light
Stabbed through the smoke, a miracle,
So he entered another dimension,
And sat in awe, trading pain and loneliness,
For mystical revelation and forbidden magic.
The useless boy, backward in school,
Scorned as a dullard by his parents,
He sat glum and silent, staring into space,
Seeing things he could not tell to anyone,
Training his eye on the weird distance.
Breaking out of the sky’s chrysalis,
He wandered the fields after butterflies,
His eyes in flight, chancing the currents.
Disintegration took a long slow time,
One could die while still somehow breathing,
Abandoned, waking in an empty house,
Branded on the flesh, damned for all eternity,
Accursed in the eyes of God and man.
Where had father gone and why?
It must have been something he had done.
Nothing ever came between him and the lens;
Ruthless beauty would not allow any nuisance,
And people could only be angels or devils.
Tall and commanding, Quaker mouth set grim,
He raged at the world’s rude interruptions,
Conjuring wondrous stories in the air.
All his life he despised himself as second-rate,
Still beholden to the censor of pleasure,
Accusing himself of some lucky fluke.
Each love affair was played out,
Then canned and shelved when the credits rolled,
He would walk out and close the door forever,
Excise emotion like a malign tumour.
Loneliness remained his faithful companion,
When guilty bodies could no longer communicate,
Perfection thwarted, beauty fallen short.
More sensual than a woman’s skin
Was the feel and smell of film,
The ionised atmosphere of the cutting room,
All passion concentrated in each moment,
As solemn as a priest celebrating the Mass.
Life was in the cutting, not the leaving in;
The missing link, the space between two hearts.
Cold and correct, set apart in pained deliberation,
He yielded nothing to humour or praise,
Militant Lucifer directing his host of angels,
Commanding the tiniest detail with grim resolve,
Decreeing right and wrong.
Every story was a grand anabasis,
Mounted with the most meticulous preparation,
The child’s desire to astound,
To go further and further, beyond any rival.
Self and the world were riding on horseback,
Setting out for the crusade, to attain the hero’s crown;
But enemies were everywhere in ambush,
Their poisoned arrows flying through the air.
Clenched on the brink, in peril of madness or murder,
Punishing his senses for their godless craving,
Afraid to show his heart for fear of what might be,
He would lead all to perdition for his cause,
To carry through his mission to the end,
Exacting the infinite splendour of the minute,
The thoughts of a lone mind in a vast landscape.
Alone against the hostile crowd’s menace,
He framed the great geometry of emotions,
Inexplicable immensity in a single look.
Honey
Spy, inside the hive,
Newborn bees shoving out of the larvae,
Shaking themselves off, enlightened,
Instantly carrying food to the queen.
At the same time, others
Are dying, dying, falling to the bottom.
The beekeeper, veiled priest of gold,
Tends the hive in silent contemplation,
Movements economical and loving,
Calm to the bone.
Time and again, risking their lives,
The Veddhas of Sri Lanka set out after honey;
The Rajis of the Nepalese Terai
Follow the bees through the forest all their lives;
The Bassari of Senegal abstain for three days
Then set out to hunt the wild honey.
Love should feed on the honeys of Lebanon,
From white orange blossom
And mountain oaks.
Love should live on the kikeon,
Elixir of the ancient Greeks.
At the flower’s sweet liquid core
The honeybee fills her stomach
Drop by drop
With celestial nectar.
All the flavours and scents of the country
Will swirl in her elixir.
Jesus emerges, hungry,
After three days entombed,
To eat a piece of broiled fish
And a honeycomb.
Newborn bees shoving out of the larvae,
Shaking themselves off, enlightened,
Instantly carrying food to the queen.
At the same time, others
Are dying, dying, falling to the bottom.
The beekeeper, veiled priest of gold,
Tends the hive in silent contemplation,
Movements economical and loving,
Calm to the bone.
Time and again, risking their lives,
The Veddhas of Sri Lanka set out after honey;
The Rajis of the Nepalese Terai
Follow the bees through the forest all their lives;
The Bassari of Senegal abstain for three days
Then set out to hunt the wild honey.
Love should feed on the honeys of Lebanon,
From white orange blossom
And mountain oaks.
Love should live on the kikeon,
Elixir of the ancient Greeks.
At the flower’s sweet liquid core
The honeybee fills her stomach
Drop by drop
With celestial nectar.
All the flavours and scents of the country
Will swirl in her elixir.
Jesus emerges, hungry,
After three days entombed,
To eat a piece of broiled fish
And a honeycomb.
Peruvians
A mummy
Clutching his head
With both hands:
Petrified scream.
Follow the ceques
To the huacas;
Stone smelts
Under your hands.
The granite frieze at Sechín:
Two lines of warrior-priests
Advance from either side of the walls
Towards the steps that rise from its centre
To the top, accompanied by their victims’ bodies,
Decapitated, mutilated, intestines spilling
Out of stomachs, blood pouring from wounds
In thick gouts, the mouths gawping in shock
And terror; and a skullrack stacked high
With trophies; all depicted with exquisite skill
And relish. Were human lives sacrificed
To propitiate the gods of weather?
Well, then, the gods turned against them,
For eventually tremendous deluge
Buried the temple under mud
For thousands of years.
The Pyramids of the Sun and Moon
I ascend,
Bound by the spider;
The sea demands my death,
I am meat and drink
To the god of the fishes.
The bird-men will squeeze my blood into a goblet,
Take my head for a trophy,
Leave the bones to the vultures.
I gaze upon Moche pots,
Playful and grotesque:
Skulls laughing and copulating with humans;
Amputees and poor wretches
With hemiplegia, elephantiasis, leishmaniasis and pox;
A chicha jar in the form of a giant phallus,
Enticing the drinker into fellatio;
Women masturbating men;
Men masturbating themselves;
Male and female bodies locked in sodomy.
A young boy peeps through a hole in a wall
At a couple making love in the next house,
While a dog sleeps outside.
An ithyphallic prisoner kneels, hands tied behind him:
The club strikes his head
And a priest slits his throat,
Cradling the gold in a goblet.
The gaping nostrils and staring eyes
Of the stone jaguars at Chavín,
Shapshifting priests
Drunk on the San Pedro cactus;
With its slow and gorgeous
Ocean of joy,
Shot through with explosions
Of anadenanthera,
Snakebites of horror,
Fire and nausea,
Hunched on the ground, vomiting death,
Growling and fanging the dark
Whence visions come.
At Nasca the people pace the lines
To spell rain from the stars,
And trek to the mountain waters
Sounding its flute in their heads.
On the Island of the Sun,
Lake Titicaca, -
A thousand shades of blue,
Twisters spinning across the waves, -
At the June solstice,
The sun rises between the two towers,
Where Inca nobles stand in adoration.
Clutching his head
With both hands:
Petrified scream.
Follow the ceques
To the huacas;
Stone smelts
Under your hands.
The granite frieze at Sechín:
Two lines of warrior-priests
Advance from either side of the walls
Towards the steps that rise from its centre
To the top, accompanied by their victims’ bodies,
Decapitated, mutilated, intestines spilling
Out of stomachs, blood pouring from wounds
In thick gouts, the mouths gawping in shock
And terror; and a skullrack stacked high
With trophies; all depicted with exquisite skill
And relish. Were human lives sacrificed
To propitiate the gods of weather?
Well, then, the gods turned against them,
For eventually tremendous deluge
Buried the temple under mud
For thousands of years.
The Pyramids of the Sun and Moon
I ascend,
Bound by the spider;
The sea demands my death,
I am meat and drink
To the god of the fishes.
The bird-men will squeeze my blood into a goblet,
Take my head for a trophy,
Leave the bones to the vultures.
I gaze upon Moche pots,
Playful and grotesque:
Skulls laughing and copulating with humans;
Amputees and poor wretches
With hemiplegia, elephantiasis, leishmaniasis and pox;
A chicha jar in the form of a giant phallus,
Enticing the drinker into fellatio;
Women masturbating men;
Men masturbating themselves;
Male and female bodies locked in sodomy.
A young boy peeps through a hole in a wall
At a couple making love in the next house,
While a dog sleeps outside.
An ithyphallic prisoner kneels, hands tied behind him:
The club strikes his head
And a priest slits his throat,
Cradling the gold in a goblet.
The gaping nostrils and staring eyes
Of the stone jaguars at Chavín,
Shapshifting priests
Drunk on the San Pedro cactus;
With its slow and gorgeous
Ocean of joy,
Shot through with explosions
Of anadenanthera,
Snakebites of horror,
Fire and nausea,
Hunched on the ground, vomiting death,
Growling and fanging the dark
Whence visions come.
At Nasca the people pace the lines
To spell rain from the stars,
And trek to the mountain waters
Sounding its flute in their heads.
On the Island of the Sun,
Lake Titicaca, -
A thousand shades of blue,
Twisters spinning across the waves, -
At the June solstice,
The sun rises between the two towers,
Where Inca nobles stand in adoration.
Obscure Heroes of Philosophy
Not the famous names, lauded and annotated beyond repair,
Not the obviously great, no, somehow they just bore me,
But some of those others,
The oddities and footnotes,
Now, they are much more me.
Aristippus of Cyrene, for instance,
Saint of the senses-
Who, when offered three whores and asked to pick just one,
Responded: “When I think of the grief caused by Paris
When he was asked to choose between three women,
It is clear I must take them all!”
Crates of Thebes is another
Who takes my philosophical fancy,
Entering strangers’ houses uninvited
To harangue them on philosophical conundrums,
And scandalising philistines by making love
To his dear wife in public.
And what about Peregrinus Proteus,
That wise and curious rogue?
No-one will ever know for sure
Exactly why he chose self-immolation,
Vaulting onto a funeral pyre before the crowds
At the Olympic Games in AD 165.
But I, for one, at some distance,
Appreciate the gesture.
And, if it is true that he killed his father,
He recommends himself all the more.
Not the obviously great, no, somehow they just bore me,
But some of those others,
The oddities and footnotes,
Now, they are much more me.
Aristippus of Cyrene, for instance,
Saint of the senses-
Who, when offered three whores and asked to pick just one,
Responded: “When I think of the grief caused by Paris
When he was asked to choose between three women,
It is clear I must take them all!”
Crates of Thebes is another
Who takes my philosophical fancy,
Entering strangers’ houses uninvited
To harangue them on philosophical conundrums,
And scandalising philistines by making love
To his dear wife in public.
And what about Peregrinus Proteus,
That wise and curious rogue?
No-one will ever know for sure
Exactly why he chose self-immolation,
Vaulting onto a funeral pyre before the crowds
At the Olympic Games in AD 165.
But I, for one, at some distance,
Appreciate the gesture.
And, if it is true that he killed his father,
He recommends himself all the more.
Beluga Whales
Whimsical and white in sapphire water,
Pixies elusive as thought itself,
With wry smiles and dark lustrous eyes,
In the rainbow polar sea, amid jumbled ice,
The whales come, pumping their flukes,
Exhaling mysterious arias.
Magenta saxifrages dig in,
And willow trees stunted on the stony shore;
Terns circle and call overhead,
Eiders string out in flocks across the water.
One day, blue fissures open, mile after mile,
The next, the ice jams into bays and locks tight.
A lone whale, from his blowhole,
Slowly grows a big globe of air into the water,
And conjures with this bright bauble, his toy,
Slurps it into his pursed mouth,
Then spews it out once more, praising his own artistry,
And shapes it into a twisting bracelet,
Shining and expanding, till it begins to break
Into flattened rising spheres.
What fun! What perfect fun!
Around Alaska, Canada and Greenland,
Around Scandinavia and Russia,
The belugas in myriads range,
Singing symphonically to each other,
Beaming clicks through the echoing deep,
Chorusing whistles, yelps, creaks and croaks,
Blares, rasps, squawks, and warbles,
Trills and chirps and blurts.
In July and August belugas crowd into estuaries
To moult and nurse their young,
Yellow-white ghosts against the jade water, jostling in swathes,
Pounding their tails to hover in the current,
Sending plumes of spray into the chill air,
They rub off their yellowish wrinkled old skins
Against the bottom,in floppy belts,
And gleam anew, cadmium-white and smooth.
Pixies elusive as thought itself,
With wry smiles and dark lustrous eyes,
In the rainbow polar sea, amid jumbled ice,
The whales come, pumping their flukes,
Exhaling mysterious arias.
Magenta saxifrages dig in,
And willow trees stunted on the stony shore;
Terns circle and call overhead,
Eiders string out in flocks across the water.
One day, blue fissures open, mile after mile,
The next, the ice jams into bays and locks tight.
A lone whale, from his blowhole,
Slowly grows a big globe of air into the water,
And conjures with this bright bauble, his toy,
Slurps it into his pursed mouth,
Then spews it out once more, praising his own artistry,
And shapes it into a twisting bracelet,
Shining and expanding, till it begins to break
Into flattened rising spheres.
What fun! What perfect fun!
Around Alaska, Canada and Greenland,
Around Scandinavia and Russia,
The belugas in myriads range,
Singing symphonically to each other,
Beaming clicks through the echoing deep,
Chorusing whistles, yelps, creaks and croaks,
Blares, rasps, squawks, and warbles,
Trills and chirps and blurts.
In July and August belugas crowd into estuaries
To moult and nurse their young,
Yellow-white ghosts against the jade water, jostling in swathes,
Pounding their tails to hover in the current,
Sending plumes of spray into the chill air,
They rub off their yellowish wrinkled old skins
Against the bottom,in floppy belts,
And gleam anew, cadmium-white and smooth.
Bob Dylan
Reaching for what others have not thought of,
Responding to a call inaudible to other ears,
Always summoned to some new adventure,
The gypsy king wanders with his guitar,
Always on the road, alone in empty hotel rooms,
Looking out on bleak city skylines,
Making sorrow and loneliness sing for their supper.
Skinny and dirty, with the world under his fingernails,
Still wearing the boots he wore a hundred years ago,
In another time and country, under a different guise,
He wanders in on dawn’s whim,
Itinerant mummer of passion plays.
A sudden turning,a fortunate accident,
And the game continues,
Call it freedom or perversity,whatever you will.
It is never the same song twice.
Deal the cards face down,and turn them over.
Only the wise can be so savage.
Trust the music, the wisdom in sounds,
Shaping each moment of the song as it comes,
Jumping from word to word like a squirrel
In the treetops, perfectly at ease, no need to think;
All your life, this is the true religion,
The Guardian Angel guiding you,
Amongst corruption, depravity and sickness.
Beauty will be there at the end,
As it was in the beginning.
Do not be distracted by the crowd.
All his life he reads from the Bible of the land,
The blood-sounds coming through
On weird frequencies, out of the mouths
Of the dead, the dustbowl phantoms.
All men are storytellers, the land demands it,
Crafting what they can to stay the night,
The more fragile, perhaps the more true,
And one can, at least, confide in words
As one so seldom can in people.
Each new disguise is a revelation,-
Clown, devil, child, prophet, magician, fool and hero,
All at once,-the bashful showman
Learning what secrets are
And the zany things they do.
This is America,where death has no credit,
But you can work the land for its mysteries,
If you have a will to learn.
And the songs will always find their way back to you.
Responding to a call inaudible to other ears,
Always summoned to some new adventure,
The gypsy king wanders with his guitar,
Always on the road, alone in empty hotel rooms,
Looking out on bleak city skylines,
Making sorrow and loneliness sing for their supper.
Skinny and dirty, with the world under his fingernails,
Still wearing the boots he wore a hundred years ago,
In another time and country, under a different guise,
He wanders in on dawn’s whim,
Itinerant mummer of passion plays.
A sudden turning,a fortunate accident,
And the game continues,
Call it freedom or perversity,whatever you will.
It is never the same song twice.
Deal the cards face down,and turn them over.
Only the wise can be so savage.
Trust the music, the wisdom in sounds,
Shaping each moment of the song as it comes,
Jumping from word to word like a squirrel
In the treetops, perfectly at ease, no need to think;
All your life, this is the true religion,
The Guardian Angel guiding you,
Amongst corruption, depravity and sickness.
Beauty will be there at the end,
As it was in the beginning.
Do not be distracted by the crowd.
All his life he reads from the Bible of the land,
The blood-sounds coming through
On weird frequencies, out of the mouths
Of the dead, the dustbowl phantoms.
All men are storytellers, the land demands it,
Crafting what they can to stay the night,
The more fragile, perhaps the more true,
And one can, at least, confide in words
As one so seldom can in people.
Each new disguise is a revelation,-
Clown, devil, child, prophet, magician, fool and hero,
All at once,-the bashful showman
Learning what secrets are
And the zany things they do.
This is America,where death has no credit,
But you can work the land for its mysteries,
If you have a will to learn.
And the songs will always find their way back to you.
Rosslyn
This is the Wood of Celidon,
Where Merlin dwelled with wolves and wild boar,
Nourishing himself with berries and nuts,
Reciting bardic strophes in incantation;
Where druids gathered in hazel groves
And King Arthur rode with his knights
To fight his seventh battle.
The Picts,too,stalked above the Esk,
Faces lurid with blue woad,
Battle-naked bodies a-swirl with tattoos
Of birds,beasts and crescents;
They carved symbol stones
With eagles, snakes, boar, bulls and salmon,
And wheel crosses covered
In intricate knotwork and whorls.
On an outcrop high above the Esk,
In a deep red sandstone ravine,
The broken stones of Rosslyn Castle rise;
Deep beneath the ruins
Extends a labyrinth of chambers and corridors,
Abandoned rooms and dungeons,
Where dwells the Black Dog,
That savage hellhound spectre,
Whose baying can be heard beneath the moon,
Whose footfalls echo in the empty castle,
Sounding portent of doom.
And,there, in that netherworld,
Lives the White Lady, waiting to reveal
A great treasure’s secret hiding place -
She, a maiden of the St Clair line,
Bewitched by an evil spell and doomed
To sleep in an enchanted chamber;
Upon a stately chair she sits and will remain
In white robe, adorned with gold,
Till the bravest of knights should come
To her rescue,taking up the magical sword
And gold hunting horn at her side
To rouse and slay the monster that guards her,
Breaking the evil spell.
A white deer runs from the hunters,
As the horn sounds among the trees,
Horses’ hooves gallop, and panting hounds race;
The terrified hart flees over hills, across burns,
With the pack snapping and snarling close behind.
The woods are full of bogles and nuckelavee,
Boomen, brownies, sheelycoats and fuath,
So fearsome that, on Halloween night, the villagers
Would light bonfires and carry burning torches
Round homes and fields to protect them.
Travellers who walked alone
On deserted roads ,or ventured into fairy rings
Of moonlit mushrooms might be abducted
To Elfland, and never seen again.
Thomas the Rhymer spent seven years
Beneath the Eildon Hills
Among the rivers and meadows of fairyland,
The apple orchards and halls full of feasting and dancing,
When the Queen of Elfland appeared to him
All in green, riding a white horse
With silver bells on its mane
And she stole him away with her
And made him a prophet.
Round the Apprentice Pillar’s base
Dragons chew the vine-roots
To keep wisdom from the unworthy;
At the crown is a carving
Of Abraham, Isaac and the ram in the thicket.
Is this Yggrasil, at the world’s end,
From which Odin hung upside down
For nine days and nine nights, fasting,
In order to achieve enlightenment?
All over the chapel the Green Man
Rears his head,growing old with the seasons,
Clockwise with the year;
Young and beardless in the east,
Mature and barbed in the south,
And,in the north., visages and skulls,
Pegtoothed and decaying,
With vines twisting from between the teeth
And out of vacant eye sockets.
Vines weave over the aisles,
Roses and lilies, oak leaves and wheat
Adorn the walls and window arches,
Earthly paradise, bursting with vegetation.
Each dawn the rising sun shines
Through the Lady Chapel’s east window;
The eightpointed Star of Bethlehem above,
Signifying this place midway
Between the fourfold realm of earth
And heaven’s perfect circle.
Where Merlin dwelled with wolves and wild boar,
Nourishing himself with berries and nuts,
Reciting bardic strophes in incantation;
Where druids gathered in hazel groves
And King Arthur rode with his knights
To fight his seventh battle.
The Picts,too,stalked above the Esk,
Faces lurid with blue woad,
Battle-naked bodies a-swirl with tattoos
Of birds,beasts and crescents;
They carved symbol stones
With eagles, snakes, boar, bulls and salmon,
And wheel crosses covered
In intricate knotwork and whorls.
On an outcrop high above the Esk,
In a deep red sandstone ravine,
The broken stones of Rosslyn Castle rise;
Deep beneath the ruins
Extends a labyrinth of chambers and corridors,
Abandoned rooms and dungeons,
Where dwells the Black Dog,
That savage hellhound spectre,
Whose baying can be heard beneath the moon,
Whose footfalls echo in the empty castle,
Sounding portent of doom.
And,there, in that netherworld,
Lives the White Lady, waiting to reveal
A great treasure’s secret hiding place -
She, a maiden of the St Clair line,
Bewitched by an evil spell and doomed
To sleep in an enchanted chamber;
Upon a stately chair she sits and will remain
In white robe, adorned with gold,
Till the bravest of knights should come
To her rescue,taking up the magical sword
And gold hunting horn at her side
To rouse and slay the monster that guards her,
Breaking the evil spell.
A white deer runs from the hunters,
As the horn sounds among the trees,
Horses’ hooves gallop, and panting hounds race;
The terrified hart flees over hills, across burns,
With the pack snapping and snarling close behind.
The woods are full of bogles and nuckelavee,
Boomen, brownies, sheelycoats and fuath,
So fearsome that, on Halloween night, the villagers
Would light bonfires and carry burning torches
Round homes and fields to protect them.
Travellers who walked alone
On deserted roads ,or ventured into fairy rings
Of moonlit mushrooms might be abducted
To Elfland, and never seen again.
Thomas the Rhymer spent seven years
Beneath the Eildon Hills
Among the rivers and meadows of fairyland,
The apple orchards and halls full of feasting and dancing,
When the Queen of Elfland appeared to him
All in green, riding a white horse
With silver bells on its mane
And she stole him away with her
And made him a prophet.
Round the Apprentice Pillar’s base
Dragons chew the vine-roots
To keep wisdom from the unworthy;
At the crown is a carving
Of Abraham, Isaac and the ram in the thicket.
Is this Yggrasil, at the world’s end,
From which Odin hung upside down
For nine days and nine nights, fasting,
In order to achieve enlightenment?
All over the chapel the Green Man
Rears his head,growing old with the seasons,
Clockwise with the year;
Young and beardless in the east,
Mature and barbed in the south,
And,in the north., visages and skulls,
Pegtoothed and decaying,
With vines twisting from between the teeth
And out of vacant eye sockets.
Vines weave over the aisles,
Roses and lilies, oak leaves and wheat
Adorn the walls and window arches,
Earthly paradise, bursting with vegetation.
Each dawn the rising sun shines
Through the Lady Chapel’s east window;
The eightpointed Star of Bethlehem above,
Signifying this place midway
Between the fourfold realm of earth
And heaven’s perfect circle.
The Chakras
I.
Wheels within wheels, endlessly turning,
Galaxies,flowers,planets,trees and human beings,
And the seven vortices of the subtle body,
Receiving,assimilating,transmitting,
Leading you to the heart of the spiral maze…
Earth, water, fire, air, sound, light and thought!
The god is nothing without his goddess;
The seed is nothing without the womb;
He descends to embrace her, and she ascends,
To eternal love-making, creating the cosmos,
Flesh and spirit, out of their spirit and flesh.
The coiled serpent at the base of the Tree
Awakes,unfolds,and climbs, winding round
The caduceus, the spine of Universal Man,
Reaching for the crown, the consummation,
Opening the seven gateways as she rises,
Seven initiations, seven stations to bliss.
Out of the perineum, the coccygeal plexus,
Out of the adrenal glands, the red energy
Rises, under Saturn’s glare, with the horns
Of the bull, the light of bloodstone and ruby,
Leaden and square, rooted in the earth,
Pushing upwards against the force of gravity;
The moon glows in the coral womb,
Six-petalled lotus, floating on water,
Spiral desire and pleasure bathing the eggs
In the ovaries, the sperm in the testicles,
Glinting like tin, smelling of orris root,
In the sacrum’s chalice, where opposites attract;
The solar plexus flames with yellow plasma,
All will and power, laughter and anger,
Burning sandalwood and saffron at the altar
Of the pancreas, under ram-horned Mars,
As blacksmiths wrestle iron on the anvil,
In a topaz prism, a prison of amber;
Venus unsheathes its emerald sword
In the heart, and winds rush through the lungs,
Aromas of lavender,jasmine,meadowsweet,
Like doves in flight, and antelopes leaping,
As kissing lips conjoin in equilibrium,
And the thymus opens up its copper mine;
Blue sound vibrates in the throat, synthesising
Ideas into symbols, quicksilver in the mirror,
As Mercury waves its wand in the ether,
And frankincense burns in the thyroid gland,
Speech-seeds blooming turquoise, aquamarine,
Sensitive as the elephant’s inner ear;
The pineal gland ignites with silver light,
Lapis lazuli forms a jewel in the brow,
To perceive, to command, drawing the favour
Of Neptune and Jupiter, and the scanning owl
Takes flight, through indigo, light as the scent
Of mugwort,spreading its wings with joy;
Violet to white, light fountains from the crown
Of the head, Uranus is in the ascendant,
In the pituitary gland, in the cerebral cortex,
Adamantine bliss, the gold of El Dorado,
After the mountains and deserts crossed,
The incense of the invisible lotus.
II
Spiral galaxies, thousands of light years across,
Trillions of atoms whirling in a grain of sand,
Spinning firewheels of energy
In flowers,trees,planets,people….
Receive, assimilate, transmit:
I am the vehicle of eternity,
The gorgon-headed starfish of light.
Seven colours in the rainbow,
Seven notes in the Western scale,
Seven days of the week,
And they say that life goes in cycles of seven years…
When the holy serpent comes
I must answer his questions and obey him-
No running, no hiding,
Just the medicine in his fangs.
Let kundalini rise,
With visions,insights,voices,
Weightlessness and bliss.
What is this invincible force
Thashing through me,
Smashing the barriers
And breaking through to the sky?
Exultation and dread
Quake my fibres,
Through monstrous eyes
I view the world anew.
III.Muladhara
Out of the red earth,
Out of the deep root,
I climb.
The sciatic nerve sings
Down the legs
As they touch the earth,
All gravity and motion.
Out of the perineum,
Out of the coccygeal ganglion,
The force of a thousand suns sprouts and grows.
Let me be my royal body,
Its pain and pleasure and shape,
Its heavenly stuff,trillions of pulsing cells,
The world’s lodestone,
Full of wisdom and healing.
I am the sun’s lightning rod,
Resonating with the ionosphere.
IV.Svadhisthana
Connect and grow.
Now I am down in the water,
A creature of the abyss.
The vortex of the sacral plexus
Churns with roaring force.
Since the world began,
What of any worth has been achieved without passion?
Blood, piss, semen, tears,
Liquid oozes out of me,
Trawled by the moon.
The roots are deep
And the fruit is sweet:
All is pleasure and nurture.
Soothe the limbic system,
Pleasure the hypothalamus:
Heart,blood and breath
Ease and enjoy themselves.
Expand and surrender,
Let impulses flow fearless and free,
Tune the senses to the heavens.
A hundred drops of semen
Distil a single drop of wisdom.
Let the blue fire of the pineal gland
Catabolize melatonin
Into 10 methoxyharmalan-
Visions and revelations…
Touching,reaching out to each other,
We are smiling into each other,
Saying, “We are here.”
Love: this word so easy to pronounce,
So difficult to capture-
The foundation,
The precious essence…
What longing and dread
The strange beast inspires!
Without this binding force
How would anything hold together
Long enough to evolve?
After all, we are only seeing
The connections that existed all along.
All these endless patterns!-
Dynamic equilibrium.
V.
Thirteen billion interconnected nerve cells of the brain,
One hundred million sensory receptors within the body,
Ten trillion synapses in the nervous system…
As when you scatter sand on a steel plate
And rub a violin bow along the edge,
The vibration makes the grains
Dance into a mandala,
So your touch re-orders me…
Sound waves projected into water
Conjure patterns like the forms of nature:
Spiral galaxies,
Cellular division in an embryo,
The iris of the human eye.
The pineal gland,
Magical cone in the head-core,
Translates variations of light
Into hormonal language.
As when the singers of a choir
Hold their last note until their voices resonate,
Shaking the auditorium to the core
With that pure electric ring
That echoes ever after in the heart,
So our lives lock into each other,
Each the other’s key.
Wheels within wheels, endlessly turning,
Galaxies,flowers,planets,trees and human beings,
And the seven vortices of the subtle body,
Receiving,assimilating,transmitting,
Leading you to the heart of the spiral maze…
Earth, water, fire, air, sound, light and thought!
The god is nothing without his goddess;
The seed is nothing without the womb;
He descends to embrace her, and she ascends,
To eternal love-making, creating the cosmos,
Flesh and spirit, out of their spirit and flesh.
The coiled serpent at the base of the Tree
Awakes,unfolds,and climbs, winding round
The caduceus, the spine of Universal Man,
Reaching for the crown, the consummation,
Opening the seven gateways as she rises,
Seven initiations, seven stations to bliss.
Out of the perineum, the coccygeal plexus,
Out of the adrenal glands, the red energy
Rises, under Saturn’s glare, with the horns
Of the bull, the light of bloodstone and ruby,
Leaden and square, rooted in the earth,
Pushing upwards against the force of gravity;
The moon glows in the coral womb,
Six-petalled lotus, floating on water,
Spiral desire and pleasure bathing the eggs
In the ovaries, the sperm in the testicles,
Glinting like tin, smelling of orris root,
In the sacrum’s chalice, where opposites attract;
The solar plexus flames with yellow plasma,
All will and power, laughter and anger,
Burning sandalwood and saffron at the altar
Of the pancreas, under ram-horned Mars,
As blacksmiths wrestle iron on the anvil,
In a topaz prism, a prison of amber;
Venus unsheathes its emerald sword
In the heart, and winds rush through the lungs,
Aromas of lavender,jasmine,meadowsweet,
Like doves in flight, and antelopes leaping,
As kissing lips conjoin in equilibrium,
And the thymus opens up its copper mine;
Blue sound vibrates in the throat, synthesising
Ideas into symbols, quicksilver in the mirror,
As Mercury waves its wand in the ether,
And frankincense burns in the thyroid gland,
Speech-seeds blooming turquoise, aquamarine,
Sensitive as the elephant’s inner ear;
The pineal gland ignites with silver light,
Lapis lazuli forms a jewel in the brow,
To perceive, to command, drawing the favour
Of Neptune and Jupiter, and the scanning owl
Takes flight, through indigo, light as the scent
Of mugwort,spreading its wings with joy;
Violet to white, light fountains from the crown
Of the head, Uranus is in the ascendant,
In the pituitary gland, in the cerebral cortex,
Adamantine bliss, the gold of El Dorado,
After the mountains and deserts crossed,
The incense of the invisible lotus.
II
Spiral galaxies, thousands of light years across,
Trillions of atoms whirling in a grain of sand,
Spinning firewheels of energy
In flowers,trees,planets,people….
Receive, assimilate, transmit:
I am the vehicle of eternity,
The gorgon-headed starfish of light.
Seven colours in the rainbow,
Seven notes in the Western scale,
Seven days of the week,
And they say that life goes in cycles of seven years…
When the holy serpent comes
I must answer his questions and obey him-
No running, no hiding,
Just the medicine in his fangs.
Let kundalini rise,
With visions,insights,voices,
Weightlessness and bliss.
What is this invincible force
Thashing through me,
Smashing the barriers
And breaking through to the sky?
Exultation and dread
Quake my fibres,
Through monstrous eyes
I view the world anew.
III.Muladhara
Out of the red earth,
Out of the deep root,
I climb.
The sciatic nerve sings
Down the legs
As they touch the earth,
All gravity and motion.
Out of the perineum,
Out of the coccygeal ganglion,
The force of a thousand suns sprouts and grows.
Let me be my royal body,
Its pain and pleasure and shape,
Its heavenly stuff,trillions of pulsing cells,
The world’s lodestone,
Full of wisdom and healing.
I am the sun’s lightning rod,
Resonating with the ionosphere.
IV.Svadhisthana
Connect and grow.
Now I am down in the water,
A creature of the abyss.
The vortex of the sacral plexus
Churns with roaring force.
Since the world began,
What of any worth has been achieved without passion?
Blood, piss, semen, tears,
Liquid oozes out of me,
Trawled by the moon.
The roots are deep
And the fruit is sweet:
All is pleasure and nurture.
Soothe the limbic system,
Pleasure the hypothalamus:
Heart,blood and breath
Ease and enjoy themselves.
Expand and surrender,
Let impulses flow fearless and free,
Tune the senses to the heavens.
A hundred drops of semen
Distil a single drop of wisdom.
Let the blue fire of the pineal gland
Catabolize melatonin
Into 10 methoxyharmalan-
Visions and revelations…
Touching,reaching out to each other,
We are smiling into each other,
Saying, “We are here.”
Love: this word so easy to pronounce,
So difficult to capture-
The foundation,
The precious essence…
What longing and dread
The strange beast inspires!
Without this binding force
How would anything hold together
Long enough to evolve?
After all, we are only seeing
The connections that existed all along.
All these endless patterns!-
Dynamic equilibrium.
V.
Thirteen billion interconnected nerve cells of the brain,
One hundred million sensory receptors within the body,
Ten trillion synapses in the nervous system…
As when you scatter sand on a steel plate
And rub a violin bow along the edge,
The vibration makes the grains
Dance into a mandala,
So your touch re-orders me…
Sound waves projected into water
Conjure patterns like the forms of nature:
Spiral galaxies,
Cellular division in an embryo,
The iris of the human eye.
The pineal gland,
Magical cone in the head-core,
Translates variations of light
Into hormonal language.
As when the singers of a choir
Hold their last note until their voices resonate,
Shaking the auditorium to the core
With that pure electric ring
That echoes ever after in the heart,
So our lives lock into each other,
Each the other’s key.
Innocence and Violence
The penny drops
And falls a long long way:
The moment of impact
Is a nuclear explosion.
Everywhere is violence,
The weapons unseen;
Catastrophes of language
And perception.
We are fighting on the barricades
Of a lost cause,
Always a lost cause,
Judas our patron saint.
What is the politics of a smile,
Of a movement, a gesture,
A quotidian action?
All is perverted, human.
This anger is the effort
To break through to meaning,
Coup d’état in the republic
Of vacuous signs.
And God? Well, He too
Will sometimes exceed
The norm,go a little too far
And make a mess.
And falls a long long way:
The moment of impact
Is a nuclear explosion.
Everywhere is violence,
The weapons unseen;
Catastrophes of language
And perception.
We are fighting on the barricades
Of a lost cause,
Always a lost cause,
Judas our patron saint.
What is the politics of a smile,
Of a movement, a gesture,
A quotidian action?
All is perverted, human.
This anger is the effort
To break through to meaning,
Coup d’état in the republic
Of vacuous signs.
And God? Well, He too
Will sometimes exceed
The norm,go a little too far
And make a mess.
Hong Kong
From far out at sea at night you can see the fierce red glow
Of that open furnace, that phoenix nest,
The drragon’s mouth,wheecne fierry energy
Flows out from the backbone along the mountaijns
Of the Middle Kingdom,only to be absorbed
By the waters of the South China Sea.
As the morning mist lifts, the hunchbacked island
Stands revealed, fanfare of gleaming citadels,
Great harbour packed with bustling ships,
Humped in the hot haze, the sea’s green dazzle,
Bedlam of voices, faces, streets, skyscrapers, ships,
Huge shimmering hulks in majestic procession,
Junks and sampans loitering and weaving between.
In the temple people shake wooden cylinders
Full of forty bamboo sticks,yin and yang,
Till one stick falls to the ground,
To be decoded.
This pirate swarm are demons of bold enterprise,
Making fortunes hand over fist,
Celebrating their own ingenuity with voracious brio,
Buying and selling with crazy intoxicated speed.
Young men fresh out of England made fortunes here,
Their emperors the taipans on their golden thrones,
whose jewelled hands commanded armadas, their eyes
The steel vaults of banks shut to the world.
White coolies in high collars and thick suits,
They toiled to exhaustion on chain gangs of gold,
Living on a spree, larking with schoolboy spirits,
Doing handstands on the billiard table,
Laying frenzied bets at the racecourse,
Raising champagne glasses to the future,
Flouting any petty rules that hampered success,
Their only ambition to get rich and go home.
In stately hillside villas the British sipped tea
And looked down in fear and suspicion on the alien horde
Swarming below in the dirty uncivilised streets,
That maelstrom where the gentleman went armed
With an elegant cane as his sceptre and weapon,
Lashing out with casual anger at any wretched coolie
Who failed to show the proper awe and respect.
Picnics, balls and regattas, the pomp of military bands,
The starched whites of cricket and tennis,
The intrepid duckshoots, the amateur dramatics;
The colonists could make believe that this was home,
As Pax Britannica set the heathen world to rights.
Cathedrals and warehouses, barracks and esplanades,
Proved their dominion with confident display,
As soignée ladies from the Home Counties mounted
Their sedan chairs, propelled on coolies’ shoulders,
Or promenaded at the races, twirling their parasols.
The Governor went about Her Majesty’s affairs,
In pantomime uniform and jaunty cockatoo hat.
Boarding his ceremonial barge with elegant step,
He sailed out to assert dominion over the unruly waves.
Merry chirp of Cantonese, electric free-for-all
Of bodies in motion, feasting on the world with abandon,
Dragon-dancers at the endless festival of days;
They thrive on commotion, mayhem and adventure,
Breathing air spiced with villainy and intrigue.
The geomancer studies every angle and aspect,
Operating Lo Pan compass and Lo Shu square,
Placating the spirits with ingenious devices,
Keeping the balance between man and nature,
To let the Dragon’s energy flow unimpeded.
Avaricious appetite seethes in the swirl,
Delicious as the tang of crime and sex;
Gamblers and killers bred on corruption
Fight in the eye of the typhoon.
The nubile mistress slides out of her dress;
The loaded dice skitter across the table.
Strolling round Victoria Peak in the early morning,
Through bowers of jasmine, rhododendrons and wild indigo,
While butterflies waver across the secluded path,
And kites and magpies swoop among the trees,
You gaze out over the island-studded green-blue sea,
The hills of Guangdong blue in the distance,
The sea filled with stately ships coming and going,
And, up here, scores of old men and women
Practising tai chi chuan with slow silent grace,
Moving like ghosts, with serene concentration,
Encompassing the whole universe in their circle.
Of that open furnace, that phoenix nest,
The drragon’s mouth,wheecne fierry energy
Flows out from the backbone along the mountaijns
Of the Middle Kingdom,only to be absorbed
By the waters of the South China Sea.
As the morning mist lifts, the hunchbacked island
Stands revealed, fanfare of gleaming citadels,
Great harbour packed with bustling ships,
Humped in the hot haze, the sea’s green dazzle,
Bedlam of voices, faces, streets, skyscrapers, ships,
Huge shimmering hulks in majestic procession,
Junks and sampans loitering and weaving between.
In the temple people shake wooden cylinders
Full of forty bamboo sticks,yin and yang,
Till one stick falls to the ground,
To be decoded.
This pirate swarm are demons of bold enterprise,
Making fortunes hand over fist,
Celebrating their own ingenuity with voracious brio,
Buying and selling with crazy intoxicated speed.
Young men fresh out of England made fortunes here,
Their emperors the taipans on their golden thrones,
whose jewelled hands commanded armadas, their eyes
The steel vaults of banks shut to the world.
White coolies in high collars and thick suits,
They toiled to exhaustion on chain gangs of gold,
Living on a spree, larking with schoolboy spirits,
Doing handstands on the billiard table,
Laying frenzied bets at the racecourse,
Raising champagne glasses to the future,
Flouting any petty rules that hampered success,
Their only ambition to get rich and go home.
In stately hillside villas the British sipped tea
And looked down in fear and suspicion on the alien horde
Swarming below in the dirty uncivilised streets,
That maelstrom where the gentleman went armed
With an elegant cane as his sceptre and weapon,
Lashing out with casual anger at any wretched coolie
Who failed to show the proper awe and respect.
Picnics, balls and regattas, the pomp of military bands,
The starched whites of cricket and tennis,
The intrepid duckshoots, the amateur dramatics;
The colonists could make believe that this was home,
As Pax Britannica set the heathen world to rights.
Cathedrals and warehouses, barracks and esplanades,
Proved their dominion with confident display,
As soignée ladies from the Home Counties mounted
Their sedan chairs, propelled on coolies’ shoulders,
Or promenaded at the races, twirling their parasols.
The Governor went about Her Majesty’s affairs,
In pantomime uniform and jaunty cockatoo hat.
Boarding his ceremonial barge with elegant step,
He sailed out to assert dominion over the unruly waves.
Merry chirp of Cantonese, electric free-for-all
Of bodies in motion, feasting on the world with abandon,
Dragon-dancers at the endless festival of days;
They thrive on commotion, mayhem and adventure,
Breathing air spiced with villainy and intrigue.
The geomancer studies every angle and aspect,
Operating Lo Pan compass and Lo Shu square,
Placating the spirits with ingenious devices,
Keeping the balance between man and nature,
To let the Dragon’s energy flow unimpeded.
Avaricious appetite seethes in the swirl,
Delicious as the tang of crime and sex;
Gamblers and killers bred on corruption
Fight in the eye of the typhoon.
The nubile mistress slides out of her dress;
The loaded dice skitter across the table.
Strolling round Victoria Peak in the early morning,
Through bowers of jasmine, rhododendrons and wild indigo,
While butterflies waver across the secluded path,
And kites and magpies swoop among the trees,
You gaze out over the island-studded green-blue sea,
The hills of Guangdong blue in the distance,
The sea filled with stately ships coming and going,
And, up here, scores of old men and women
Practising tai chi chuan with slow silent grace,
Moving like ghosts, with serene concentration,
Encompassing the whole universe in their circle.
Elephants and Men
Enormous, oh-so delicate intelligencers,
Pacing across the earth
Like peripatetic philosophers,
Rumbling and soughing in the language of the soul...
Did they swim up out of the deep,
These lunar titans,
With testes buried deep in the abdomen
And snorkelling trunk,
And, in the foetus, the nephrostomes of fish?
In Tamil Nadu, an anxious student
Inscribes his every book
With the whorl of Ganesha,
Blessed Remover of Obstacles.
Pacing across the earth
Like peripatetic philosophers,
Rumbling and soughing in the language of the soul...
Did they swim up out of the deep,
These lunar titans,
With testes buried deep in the abdomen
And snorkelling trunk,
And, in the foetus, the nephrostomes of fish?
In Tamil Nadu, an anxious student
Inscribes his every book
With the whorl of Ganesha,
Blessed Remover of Obstacles.
April
This handsome season high with light and song,
Women wading along in high heels
Beside the shining river…
The spring sun makes us langorous and lustful,
Sniffing the flesh-musk with canine glee,
Licking the least trace of sex.
And time takes its time:
It has nowhere particular to go,
It is what it is, and counts itself happy.
A vision of beauty in the street
Can hurt me for days and weeks,
Bleeding into everything I do.
Is there no anaesthesis
For anamnesis?
We write poems on one another’s skin.
A palimpsest of kisses,
A golden mosaic.
What terrible power trembles in us
To ravage and annihilate this world and ourselves
Or exalt Creation to the highest joy
And fruition, singing the heart divine…
Dread dangers oppress us
Only to charge us with duties,
To cherish ourselves and the whole,
And pray us not to fail.
Women wading along in high heels
Beside the shining river…
The spring sun makes us langorous and lustful,
Sniffing the flesh-musk with canine glee,
Licking the least trace of sex.
And time takes its time:
It has nowhere particular to go,
It is what it is, and counts itself happy.
A vision of beauty in the street
Can hurt me for days and weeks,
Bleeding into everything I do.
Is there no anaesthesis
For anamnesis?
We write poems on one another’s skin.
A palimpsest of kisses,
A golden mosaic.
What terrible power trembles in us
To ravage and annihilate this world and ourselves
Or exalt Creation to the highest joy
And fruition, singing the heart divine…
Dread dangers oppress us
Only to charge us with duties,
To cherish ourselves and the whole,
And pray us not to fail.
Prague Montage
1
Autumn sunlight incandesces colours;
Footsteps’ report in vaulted arcades;
At night on Charles Bridge
Eerie shadows between streetlamps
And terrible visions in the mist.
Kafka,born under the sign of the crow,
Scribbles through long nights of solitude,
Writing for salvation,in his distant eyes
The mute accumulation of objects.
2
Oh,winter snow!
The ghosts return to haunt us.
Time to insert the talisman
Into the Golem’s mouth.
All my life seeking
The stone which is not a stone,
A precious thing which has no value,
A thing of many shapes,
This unknown which is most known of all.
3
From the Old Stone Bridge Tower
I gaze down along the Charles Bridge,
From where the secret police
Used to sit and point their lenses
And microphones
At those conversing down below.
Above is the stone hunchback
Who guards from evil spirits:
Gone the medieval inscriptions
That once held demons at bay,
Delaying them as they stopped to read:
Take note, take note,
You are touching and torturing me.
Midway across Charles Bridge
I stop at the small bronze Cross of Lorraine
Embedded in the wall:
They say when the Dalai Lama came here
He recognized this spot
As the very centre of the universe,
Here, whence St John Nepomuk
Was hurled into the river
And five stars appeared
Above the drowning corpse.
4
Impatience,
My beloved vice!
Always asking:
What time is it?
What time?
In the Clementinum’s Astronomical Tower
Light pierces a tiny hole in the wall,
And,at noon, the narrow beam strikes
Its target on the floor.
5
In the Powder Tower
Beneath St Vitus’s flying buttresses,
Remain retorts, crucibles, and alembics
Of Rudolf II’s alchemists
Who laboured long here,
Concocting potions and philtres
To His Majesty’s delight,
Though the elixir remained forever elusive.
From all over Europe they came,
Quacks, necromancers and spagyrists,
Vowing to produce the Philosopher’s Stone.
6
Christmas coming,
Tubs full of carp appear on the streets
And the pavements foam
With blood and water
As fishmongers slaughter
And gut the sacred creatures.
Among the teetering tombstones
Of the Old Jewish Cemetery,
With myriads of dead
Beneath my feet,
And all the scribbled wishes
And pebbles left on the graves,
I remember again that stupid fantasy of mine:
That Israel might inhabit my own blood.
7
Woodpeckers clamour
In pink and white orchards ,
Wolf’s-bane in the shadows
And memories of other lives.
In the Church of the Nativity in the Loreta,
St Agatha hands her severed breasts on a dish
To an appreciative angel;
On either side of the altar
Lie dummies in glass cases,
In wax masks and dusty costumes,
The skeletons of Felicissimus and Marcia.
In the corner chapel,
In sky-blue dress with silver brocade,
Bearded St Wilgefortis is crucified,
Protectress of ill-wed women.
Autumn sunlight incandesces colours;
Footsteps’ report in vaulted arcades;
At night on Charles Bridge
Eerie shadows between streetlamps
And terrible visions in the mist.
Kafka,born under the sign of the crow,
Scribbles through long nights of solitude,
Writing for salvation,in his distant eyes
The mute accumulation of objects.
2
Oh,winter snow!
The ghosts return to haunt us.
Time to insert the talisman
Into the Golem’s mouth.
All my life seeking
The stone which is not a stone,
A precious thing which has no value,
A thing of many shapes,
This unknown which is most known of all.
3
From the Old Stone Bridge Tower
I gaze down along the Charles Bridge,
From where the secret police
Used to sit and point their lenses
And microphones
At those conversing down below.
Above is the stone hunchback
Who guards from evil spirits:
Gone the medieval inscriptions
That once held demons at bay,
Delaying them as they stopped to read:
Take note, take note,
You are touching and torturing me.
Midway across Charles Bridge
I stop at the small bronze Cross of Lorraine
Embedded in the wall:
They say when the Dalai Lama came here
He recognized this spot
As the very centre of the universe,
Here, whence St John Nepomuk
Was hurled into the river
And five stars appeared
Above the drowning corpse.
4
Impatience,
My beloved vice!
Always asking:
What time is it?
What time?
In the Clementinum’s Astronomical Tower
Light pierces a tiny hole in the wall,
And,at noon, the narrow beam strikes
Its target on the floor.
5
In the Powder Tower
Beneath St Vitus’s flying buttresses,
Remain retorts, crucibles, and alembics
Of Rudolf II’s alchemists
Who laboured long here,
Concocting potions and philtres
To His Majesty’s delight,
Though the elixir remained forever elusive.
From all over Europe they came,
Quacks, necromancers and spagyrists,
Vowing to produce the Philosopher’s Stone.
6
Christmas coming,
Tubs full of carp appear on the streets
And the pavements foam
With blood and water
As fishmongers slaughter
And gut the sacred creatures.
Among the teetering tombstones
Of the Old Jewish Cemetery,
With myriads of dead
Beneath my feet,
And all the scribbled wishes
And pebbles left on the graves,
I remember again that stupid fantasy of mine:
That Israel might inhabit my own blood.
7
Woodpeckers clamour
In pink and white orchards ,
Wolf’s-bane in the shadows
And memories of other lives.
In the Church of the Nativity in the Loreta,
St Agatha hands her severed breasts on a dish
To an appreciative angel;
On either side of the altar
Lie dummies in glass cases,
In wax masks and dusty costumes,
The skeletons of Felicissimus and Marcia.
In the corner chapel,
In sky-blue dress with silver brocade,
Bearded St Wilgefortis is crucified,
Protectress of ill-wed women.
Opera Buffa
Scowling from the battlements of his soul’s castle at the world below,
At the savage mob clamouring to invade his solitude,
Retreating, with a toss of the head, into sovereign silence,
He mystified the real with curmudgeonly grace....
Melancholia in the blood,yes,some people are just born that way, and can never be rid of the facts, whatever their yearnings and attainments....and of course there is no final resolution, only a fool would expect that,and,whatever else this boy is he is not a fool...
Accept so as to reject, enquire so as to enquire again, with a different form of words, that is the best you can do...
Least alone in the alone, capture what you may, and let the sometimes harsh decisions fall. Such is your inheritance, which you, in turn, in time, will shed into other hands.
Pirate, dilettante, plunder the high seas of cargoes, and bury secret treasures on scattered isles. The parrot musing on your shoulder is the oracle of the world.
At the savage mob clamouring to invade his solitude,
Retreating, with a toss of the head, into sovereign silence,
He mystified the real with curmudgeonly grace....
Melancholia in the blood,yes,some people are just born that way, and can never be rid of the facts, whatever their yearnings and attainments....and of course there is no final resolution, only a fool would expect that,and,whatever else this boy is he is not a fool...
Accept so as to reject, enquire so as to enquire again, with a different form of words, that is the best you can do...
Least alone in the alone, capture what you may, and let the sometimes harsh decisions fall. Such is your inheritance, which you, in turn, in time, will shed into other hands.
Pirate, dilettante, plunder the high seas of cargoes, and bury secret treasures on scattered isles. The parrot musing on your shoulder is the oracle of the world.
Colombia
1
Has someone slipped me burundanga?
I feel so sleepy, so helpless,
Forgetful, feeble and compliant…
No past, no future,
Just the vagueness of now…
Can I pay the sun’s ransom
With flesh and bones?
2
“There have been three great fools in history:
Jesus, Don Quixote and I”:
So Simón Bolívar on his deathbed,
Crossing the white mountains,
Disintegrating like the land he had created…
3
The ceremonial raft sails out to the centre
Of Lake Guatavita,
And the Muisca cacique,
Coated with gold dust,
-The meteor,
The divinity,-
Plunges in.
Into the deep end
Of everything.
4
It is always 1499:
Alonso de Ojeda,
Climbing into the Sierra Nevada,
Gold everywhere, and tales of great treasure inland.
El Dorado:
Is it mountains of emeralds,
Or three thousand species of orchid?
5
Time is just an ambience.
Who can pay history’s ransom?
And who has the balls to fight with God?
Give me wisdom, give me grace-
Or sun, rum
And a girl with a beautiful bum.
6
Down on the coast no farm beast is safe
From horny country boys in gangs,
Proudly venting their lust:
“Come on, it makes your cock grow bigger!”
While one stands caressing the she-donkey’s head,
Each caballero takes his turn to mount her from behind;
Dropping their kecks and yanking out their tiny peckers,
Holding up the tail with one hand and gripping her scrawny haunches,
Each humps the oblivious donkey’s behind,
While his buddies whoop and cheer and egg him on.
7
Like Muisca offering emeralds to the gods,
Placing them in the tombs of the dead,
Musicians introduce their sounds
Under our eyes,
Porro, merecumbe, mapalé.
Has someone slipped me burundanga?
I feel so sleepy, so helpless,
Forgetful, feeble and compliant…
No past, no future,
Just the vagueness of now…
Can I pay the sun’s ransom
With flesh and bones?
2
“There have been three great fools in history:
Jesus, Don Quixote and I”:
So Simón Bolívar on his deathbed,
Crossing the white mountains,
Disintegrating like the land he had created…
3
The ceremonial raft sails out to the centre
Of Lake Guatavita,
And the Muisca cacique,
Coated with gold dust,
-The meteor,
The divinity,-
Plunges in.
Into the deep end
Of everything.
4
It is always 1499:
Alonso de Ojeda,
Climbing into the Sierra Nevada,
Gold everywhere, and tales of great treasure inland.
El Dorado:
Is it mountains of emeralds,
Or three thousand species of orchid?
5
Time is just an ambience.
Who can pay history’s ransom?
And who has the balls to fight with God?
Give me wisdom, give me grace-
Or sun, rum
And a girl with a beautiful bum.
6
Down on the coast no farm beast is safe
From horny country boys in gangs,
Proudly venting their lust:
“Come on, it makes your cock grow bigger!”
While one stands caressing the she-donkey’s head,
Each caballero takes his turn to mount her from behind;
Dropping their kecks and yanking out their tiny peckers,
Holding up the tail with one hand and gripping her scrawny haunches,
Each humps the oblivious donkey’s behind,
While his buddies whoop and cheer and egg him on.
7
Like Muisca offering emeralds to the gods,
Placing them in the tombs of the dead,
Musicians introduce their sounds
Under our eyes,
Porro, merecumbe, mapalé.
Druid
I am the seer whose stallion eye gallops over distant hills,
Who changes shape at will and casts mists over the land,
Raises winds and tempests, and baffles enemies with deceptions.
I hold both a draught of forgetfulness and a healing potion;
I can dry up watercourses or turn the tide of battle;
I can prophesy and divine, read omens of all kinds,
Speak the tongues of animals, merge with trees, rocks and rivers,
Curse men to destruction or raise the dead;
All magic is mine, all the rhymes and mysteries of these isles.
Immortal, I walk through the centuries, sacrificing to the gods,
Scion of the Tuatha De Danaan,son and lover of the Goddess;
I sing the sea’s enchantment, the night’s beguiling;
I am man and wolf, male and female, hill and vale,
Sea-wind and wave-surge, rock and plant, flare of horses’ manes,
One with all, all will, intuition and desire;
I am the darkness in the pupil of your eye;
Wherever I desire to be, there I am.
I have drunk of the cauldron, all wisdom is mine;
My rhyme makes a hovel a shining castle, a puddle the moat against foes;
The pauper’s rags become a king’s mantle;
All glamourie is at my word’s command;
My snake eyes transfix and compel.
I wear the serpent’s egg about my neck,
Crystal born of twining vipers’ congress under summer moon,
Green globe of their spittle hissed into the air,
That I, most daring, snatched in a cloth ere it fell,
And ,mounted on a swift steed, spirited away,
Chased headlong by the maddened serpents across fields,
Till, leaping a running stream, I escaped
Where they, in their fury, could not follow;
And so the prize ,the blessing of the gods, was mine,
And dangles now prepotent about my neck,
Proof against evil and licence of office,
Winner of lawsuits and glass of speculation.
Tuatha De Danaan,keepers of the island, fathers of the soul,
Strengthen my hand and vouchsafe me your magic,
Point me always toward the navigator’s stars,
And I will sing of your shining victories over evil,
Your vanquishing off the dark Fomorian hordes,
Those cruel cunning demons in the sea’s deepest pit,
Routed by your greatness to the Land of the Dead,
Their black sorcery banished from Ireland.
I see the souls of the dead assume new bodies,
The endless cycles of transmigration and reincarnation;
I am the man of many lifetimes, counsellor of kings;
Mine is the true throne, the earth’s guarantor
That rivers teem, fields ripen, orchards bow down with fruit.
I am the man of marriage and sacrifice,
Binder of sheaves, whose hand grasps the sickle of the sun;
I bless the man and woman making love in the furrows;
My speech is the storm of rich seed.
O hallowed doak,lightning-beloved,pillar of fire in the mind,
Mistletoe ignites upon your branches and beckons
Priestly procession across silent fields.
I am the Glass Castle’s keeper, the Grail Knight mounted for the quest,
Lion-lord of the zodiac and the stone circle;
I see the grail borne floating through the air,
Bestowing upon the beholder the meat and drink of his desire.
The Stone of Destiny shrieks in my mind,
As when it felt the feet of King Conn of the Hundred Battles
As he paced the battlements of Tara, keeping vigil with the dawn,
Scanning the heavens for fortune’s favour
And the Stone foretold the future of the realm.
This elixir from my cupped hands heals all wounds
And cures all ills with its perfect song;
I am the hooded well-keeper,amster of memory and forgetfulness,
My rowan wand inscribes the air and all things do its bidding.
I hear the witching music of the silver apple bough
Leading me to the Land of the Gods,
Whose apples are the pilgrim’s salvation,
Whose music purges all sorrow and care
And lulls men into blissful oblivion.
The thumb of knowledge witnesses all;
Pressing it to my lips ,I speak the future,;
I have eaten the flesh of the salmon
That swims in the well beneath the hazel-trees
And lives on the nuts that fall from the branches.
I am come back from the Realm of fairies;
I am esk,adder,lion,red-hot iron, mother-naked man,
Then, dipped in milk and water, stand raw and absolved.
Here, take this chance-found iron horeshoe,cast from a grey mare’s hind leg;
Nail it above your door, pointing skyward,
And evil shall not enter the house.
I chew the pig’s flesh and fall asleep;
Song flies to my lips; when I awake sing,
And my song is the breath of all that is, all that has been and will be.
I cure with herbs and stones, wave the rowan in evil’s face;
Toad-stone and snake-stone are my friends and protectors;
The shamrock’s holy trinity watches over me.
I am born a prince of rainbows;
My hand was not made for the plough!
Free of the insubstantial world’s distractions,
I roam where I will, in wondrous other-realms,
And no man may arrest me or treat me with disrespect.
Do your cattle waste away? Does your child pine and sicken?
Then the evil eye has singled you out for revenge,
Its envy sucking dry the sweetest marrow,
Battening on the finest horse, the prettiest child.
How your fine horse sweats and trembles and weakens day by day!
How your best cow’s udders shrivel and give no milk!
How your dear child stares into space with empty eyes!
Enemy mine, I shall make you lose your wits
With a wisp of grass flung in your hated face!
Sickness and distemper I wreak on my enemies,
Melting their clay effigies in fire,
So they waste away to nothing and lose the will to live;
I puncture them with elf-arrows, eviscerate them with oaths.
I flay men alive with incantations, scorch the eyeballs from their skulls;
Disfigure them with pestilence and dislocate their bones;
Undo their slackened sinews beyond repair;
Curse and jibe them to the depths of hell.
My satires are the killing scourge of shame;
I shall turn the blood in your veins to poison,
Be the thorn that bleeds you to death!
I am the lord of second sight,
The wraiths of men made visible to my eyes,
Their astral bodies roaming where no other can see;
I see events and people yet unborn,
And all things far-off and still unknown;
I see the shrouds sewn for the laughing,
And the black dog that will howl at the open grave.
I dance with the fairies, and share their powers,
I ken their dwellings and movements, and parley in their tongue;
My sight has been awakened and trained with method;
The gods are my teachers and protectors,
The dead are ever close to guide my hand.
I riddle you the riddles of existence,
Expound and resolve the perplexities that confound;
Art and science are twin in me,
I am teller of tales, diplomat of worlds.
Come, test your wits against me, and I shall triumph!
I am lord of Beltane; my fire lights the wicker man!
I am swineherd of words,
The black sow is my familiar,
And I ride a white mare by the seashore,
The shouting sea my monster of love!
I know all friends and foes on land and water;
Does the Loathly lady come to your door, begging shelter?
Take her in and feed her, and the kindness of your home
Will deliver her from her spell’s captivity.
The washerwoman comes to the ford after dark,
To wash the shrouds of those soon to die;
Evil follows upon the sight of her,
But come between her and the water
And she must grant any boon you ask.
The banshee keens in the night, foretelling doom,
Dark-cloaked old crone crouched crying on a rock,
Crooked and bony and hideous-eyed,
Long white hair floating in the wind.
The Morrigan ,disguised as a carrion crow,
Scavenges on the battlefield, tearing flesh from bone;
Crows and ravens peck out the eyes of the living,
Loosing madness from under their wings.
Beware the kelpie that haunts fords and pools;
He who mounts the wild black horse with staring eyes,
Thinking to cross the stream on his back,
Will find himself thrown off mid-stream and drowned.
Fairies of raths and barrows, remnants of the Tuatha De Danaan,
Wise beyond reason, deserving of oblation,
Guardians of standing stones and crops in the fields,
I move between you and the living;
I greet you in woods and copses, rocks ,trees and lochs;
The wren and the raven are my kin,
Birds’ voices are my guide amid confusion,
Smoke and flames of sacred fires, shapes and motions of clouds
Are my scripture, and the stars command me;
I reckon the patterns of destiny in a sheep’s clavicle;
My alphabet is everywhere ,the fey world my orchard of words.
I hear the spirit call, and its distant echo;
By the flight of birds and the movements of animals,
By visions in crystals and dreams in the night,
I scry the future; any fate is whispered in my ear;
My thumbs twitch with unearthly intuitions;
Whatsoever I desire to know is revealed to me.;
The visions of ages whelm in my head,
And I utter in the voices of gods.
I am the seer wrapped in a bull’s hide,
Stretched sleeping behind the waterfall, awaiting revelation.
At Samhain, on November eve, when fires are quenched
And rekindled, and the harvest of souls gathered in,
The dead wander free and wayfarers go in peril,
And everywhere is mischief and confusion.
Then the last corn-sheaf is cut and dressed as the ancient hag;
Bonfires are lit on hilltops; sacrifice is offered to the gods;
The black sow devours her own farrow,
Yet the torch is passed from hand to hand, from heart to heart,
And the fire survives the trial of night.
Ghosts of the dead swarm around me,
Weird and horrible, forbidding all approach,
Heralds of calamity, their magic more terrible than death!
I see among them the fetch whose face is my own,
My twin in the netherworld, my stalking shadow,
Beside me always, reflecting me back to front.
I am the sword of Finn MacCoul, tempered in hound’s blood,
Invincible in battle, sharper than death itself;
I keep the genealogy of men, the laws and annals of mind;
My spells and charms aaare legion; I am master of taboo;
Man’s fate is in my keeping, for I swear him to his duties;
My will is the dragon, maker of worlds,
Infinite in power, persuasion and force;
I know the nature of all creatures and things,
Becoming this or that at a glance,
For all forms are in the flow, all elements are altered by mind;
I chant the rhymes of transformation;
I wish myself invisible; change shape; evade all capture;
I circle with the deosil sun, in the right,
And my deeds are propitious, blessed by the sun;
I walk on fire without fear or harm,
And raise the cup of plenty, from which all tastes are poured.
In the quarter before sunrise, barefoot and fasting,
I circumambulate the house with the sun,
Eyes closed, round to the doorstep,
And when I open my eyes, and peer through the circle
Made by my finger and thumb,
The first thing I see shall be my witness,
Showing me the whole world, far into the distance.
If the king shirks and sins, if he betrays his sainted office,
The land will fall waste, the springs cease and the pastures wither,
And the lost tribe wander without hope.
Then only the Grail can save and replenish,
The cauldron of plenty and inspiration,
That repels the unworthy and cures the wounded soul,
If only the right man asks the right question,
Healing the broken world whole.
Who changes shape at will and casts mists over the land,
Raises winds and tempests, and baffles enemies with deceptions.
I hold both a draught of forgetfulness and a healing potion;
I can dry up watercourses or turn the tide of battle;
I can prophesy and divine, read omens of all kinds,
Speak the tongues of animals, merge with trees, rocks and rivers,
Curse men to destruction or raise the dead;
All magic is mine, all the rhymes and mysteries of these isles.
Immortal, I walk through the centuries, sacrificing to the gods,
Scion of the Tuatha De Danaan,son and lover of the Goddess;
I sing the sea’s enchantment, the night’s beguiling;
I am man and wolf, male and female, hill and vale,
Sea-wind and wave-surge, rock and plant, flare of horses’ manes,
One with all, all will, intuition and desire;
I am the darkness in the pupil of your eye;
Wherever I desire to be, there I am.
I have drunk of the cauldron, all wisdom is mine;
My rhyme makes a hovel a shining castle, a puddle the moat against foes;
The pauper’s rags become a king’s mantle;
All glamourie is at my word’s command;
My snake eyes transfix and compel.
I wear the serpent’s egg about my neck,
Crystal born of twining vipers’ congress under summer moon,
Green globe of their spittle hissed into the air,
That I, most daring, snatched in a cloth ere it fell,
And ,mounted on a swift steed, spirited away,
Chased headlong by the maddened serpents across fields,
Till, leaping a running stream, I escaped
Where they, in their fury, could not follow;
And so the prize ,the blessing of the gods, was mine,
And dangles now prepotent about my neck,
Proof against evil and licence of office,
Winner of lawsuits and glass of speculation.
Tuatha De Danaan,keepers of the island, fathers of the soul,
Strengthen my hand and vouchsafe me your magic,
Point me always toward the navigator’s stars,
And I will sing of your shining victories over evil,
Your vanquishing off the dark Fomorian hordes,
Those cruel cunning demons in the sea’s deepest pit,
Routed by your greatness to the Land of the Dead,
Their black sorcery banished from Ireland.
I see the souls of the dead assume new bodies,
The endless cycles of transmigration and reincarnation;
I am the man of many lifetimes, counsellor of kings;
Mine is the true throne, the earth’s guarantor
That rivers teem, fields ripen, orchards bow down with fruit.
I am the man of marriage and sacrifice,
Binder of sheaves, whose hand grasps the sickle of the sun;
I bless the man and woman making love in the furrows;
My speech is the storm of rich seed.
O hallowed doak,lightning-beloved,pillar of fire in the mind,
Mistletoe ignites upon your branches and beckons
Priestly procession across silent fields.
I am the Glass Castle’s keeper, the Grail Knight mounted for the quest,
Lion-lord of the zodiac and the stone circle;
I see the grail borne floating through the air,
Bestowing upon the beholder the meat and drink of his desire.
The Stone of Destiny shrieks in my mind,
As when it felt the feet of King Conn of the Hundred Battles
As he paced the battlements of Tara, keeping vigil with the dawn,
Scanning the heavens for fortune’s favour
And the Stone foretold the future of the realm.
This elixir from my cupped hands heals all wounds
And cures all ills with its perfect song;
I am the hooded well-keeper,amster of memory and forgetfulness,
My rowan wand inscribes the air and all things do its bidding.
I hear the witching music of the silver apple bough
Leading me to the Land of the Gods,
Whose apples are the pilgrim’s salvation,
Whose music purges all sorrow and care
And lulls men into blissful oblivion.
The thumb of knowledge witnesses all;
Pressing it to my lips ,I speak the future,;
I have eaten the flesh of the salmon
That swims in the well beneath the hazel-trees
And lives on the nuts that fall from the branches.
I am come back from the Realm of fairies;
I am esk,adder,lion,red-hot iron, mother-naked man,
Then, dipped in milk and water, stand raw and absolved.
Here, take this chance-found iron horeshoe,cast from a grey mare’s hind leg;
Nail it above your door, pointing skyward,
And evil shall not enter the house.
I chew the pig’s flesh and fall asleep;
Song flies to my lips; when I awake sing,
And my song is the breath of all that is, all that has been and will be.
I cure with herbs and stones, wave the rowan in evil’s face;
Toad-stone and snake-stone are my friends and protectors;
The shamrock’s holy trinity watches over me.
I am born a prince of rainbows;
My hand was not made for the plough!
Free of the insubstantial world’s distractions,
I roam where I will, in wondrous other-realms,
And no man may arrest me or treat me with disrespect.
Do your cattle waste away? Does your child pine and sicken?
Then the evil eye has singled you out for revenge,
Its envy sucking dry the sweetest marrow,
Battening on the finest horse, the prettiest child.
How your fine horse sweats and trembles and weakens day by day!
How your best cow’s udders shrivel and give no milk!
How your dear child stares into space with empty eyes!
Enemy mine, I shall make you lose your wits
With a wisp of grass flung in your hated face!
Sickness and distemper I wreak on my enemies,
Melting their clay effigies in fire,
So they waste away to nothing and lose the will to live;
I puncture them with elf-arrows, eviscerate them with oaths.
I flay men alive with incantations, scorch the eyeballs from their skulls;
Disfigure them with pestilence and dislocate their bones;
Undo their slackened sinews beyond repair;
Curse and jibe them to the depths of hell.
My satires are the killing scourge of shame;
I shall turn the blood in your veins to poison,
Be the thorn that bleeds you to death!
I am the lord of second sight,
The wraiths of men made visible to my eyes,
Their astral bodies roaming where no other can see;
I see events and people yet unborn,
And all things far-off and still unknown;
I see the shrouds sewn for the laughing,
And the black dog that will howl at the open grave.
I dance with the fairies, and share their powers,
I ken their dwellings and movements, and parley in their tongue;
My sight has been awakened and trained with method;
The gods are my teachers and protectors,
The dead are ever close to guide my hand.
I riddle you the riddles of existence,
Expound and resolve the perplexities that confound;
Art and science are twin in me,
I am teller of tales, diplomat of worlds.
Come, test your wits against me, and I shall triumph!
I am lord of Beltane; my fire lights the wicker man!
I am swineherd of words,
The black sow is my familiar,
And I ride a white mare by the seashore,
The shouting sea my monster of love!
I know all friends and foes on land and water;
Does the Loathly lady come to your door, begging shelter?
Take her in and feed her, and the kindness of your home
Will deliver her from her spell’s captivity.
The washerwoman comes to the ford after dark,
To wash the shrouds of those soon to die;
Evil follows upon the sight of her,
But come between her and the water
And she must grant any boon you ask.
The banshee keens in the night, foretelling doom,
Dark-cloaked old crone crouched crying on a rock,
Crooked and bony and hideous-eyed,
Long white hair floating in the wind.
The Morrigan ,disguised as a carrion crow,
Scavenges on the battlefield, tearing flesh from bone;
Crows and ravens peck out the eyes of the living,
Loosing madness from under their wings.
Beware the kelpie that haunts fords and pools;
He who mounts the wild black horse with staring eyes,
Thinking to cross the stream on his back,
Will find himself thrown off mid-stream and drowned.
Fairies of raths and barrows, remnants of the Tuatha De Danaan,
Wise beyond reason, deserving of oblation,
Guardians of standing stones and crops in the fields,
I move between you and the living;
I greet you in woods and copses, rocks ,trees and lochs;
The wren and the raven are my kin,
Birds’ voices are my guide amid confusion,
Smoke and flames of sacred fires, shapes and motions of clouds
Are my scripture, and the stars command me;
I reckon the patterns of destiny in a sheep’s clavicle;
My alphabet is everywhere ,the fey world my orchard of words.
I hear the spirit call, and its distant echo;
By the flight of birds and the movements of animals,
By visions in crystals and dreams in the night,
I scry the future; any fate is whispered in my ear;
My thumbs twitch with unearthly intuitions;
Whatsoever I desire to know is revealed to me.;
The visions of ages whelm in my head,
And I utter in the voices of gods.
I am the seer wrapped in a bull’s hide,
Stretched sleeping behind the waterfall, awaiting revelation.
At Samhain, on November eve, when fires are quenched
And rekindled, and the harvest of souls gathered in,
The dead wander free and wayfarers go in peril,
And everywhere is mischief and confusion.
Then the last corn-sheaf is cut and dressed as the ancient hag;
Bonfires are lit on hilltops; sacrifice is offered to the gods;
The black sow devours her own farrow,
Yet the torch is passed from hand to hand, from heart to heart,
And the fire survives the trial of night.
Ghosts of the dead swarm around me,
Weird and horrible, forbidding all approach,
Heralds of calamity, their magic more terrible than death!
I see among them the fetch whose face is my own,
My twin in the netherworld, my stalking shadow,
Beside me always, reflecting me back to front.
I am the sword of Finn MacCoul, tempered in hound’s blood,
Invincible in battle, sharper than death itself;
I keep the genealogy of men, the laws and annals of mind;
My spells and charms aaare legion; I am master of taboo;
Man’s fate is in my keeping, for I swear him to his duties;
My will is the dragon, maker of worlds,
Infinite in power, persuasion and force;
I know the nature of all creatures and things,
Becoming this or that at a glance,
For all forms are in the flow, all elements are altered by mind;
I chant the rhymes of transformation;
I wish myself invisible; change shape; evade all capture;
I circle with the deosil sun, in the right,
And my deeds are propitious, blessed by the sun;
I walk on fire without fear or harm,
And raise the cup of plenty, from which all tastes are poured.
In the quarter before sunrise, barefoot and fasting,
I circumambulate the house with the sun,
Eyes closed, round to the doorstep,
And when I open my eyes, and peer through the circle
Made by my finger and thumb,
The first thing I see shall be my witness,
Showing me the whole world, far into the distance.
If the king shirks and sins, if he betrays his sainted office,
The land will fall waste, the springs cease and the pastures wither,
And the lost tribe wander without hope.
Then only the Grail can save and replenish,
The cauldron of plenty and inspiration,
That repels the unworthy and cures the wounded soul,
If only the right man asks the right question,
Healing the broken world whole.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Carlo Gesualdo (1560-1613)
High and lonely, in the foothills east of Naples,
Castle Gesualdo looms over curry-combed fields,
Haughty stone lair where the Prince of Venosa,
Suckled like a wolf-cub on rich seething milk,
Would lean from windows, excited by stormbursts,
Stretch out his hands and catch rain in his mouth.
Sorcery of music! His whole body trembles,
Discovering itself, future’s ghost, alive and strange,
God’s harpsichord, established in the air,
Attuned to the mind’s slightest tremulation.
Cousin Donna Maria-O, dangerous magic!
She, his bretrothed since childhood, a vision
Of luminous black eyes and black tresses,
A body of spun glass, glowing in the dark....
Beside him now, beneath the high cathedral altar,
Pledging herself, his honour, his pleasure, his wife,
Blessed by summer’s dancing sheaves of light,
Their names entwined on the sun’s scarlet seal.
Lean and sallow, the prince gallops over hills,
His long lutenist’s fingers gripping the reins,
Breeze on his face, breath of music in him,
His small mouth set in an enigmatic frown...
The nights glow with passion and adventure,
Worshipping Maria’s naked body by moonlight,
Her brooding breasts taut with the inexpressible...
Hoisting his newborn son high like a monstrance,
Gesualdo hears divine chords resound through time
And space, as cypresses’ dark tapers smoke
On the earth’s altar, in awe of willing sacrifice.
What, then, makes the loving heart turn traitor,
Scorning and forsaking the graces it has known,
For novelties and adventures, doomed to destroy?
The handsomest, most gracious cavalier in Naples
They call the Duke of Andria, a dancer’s poise
And pride in every sinewy motion and look,-
For him Donna Maria falls, cuckolds Gesualdo,
Dancing secret capers away from the ballroom,
As stealthy couriers shuttle between them,
Arranging hurried trysts in havens of dreams.
Exulting at the prize in his arms, the Duke
Plunders her with ravenous kisses, as they smelt
Together, transubstantiated in their revels,
Twin idols of their own private cult;
But, unbeknown to them, a jealous spy
Looks on, the flickering eyes of Don Giulio,-
The Prince’s uncle, himself rebuffed and shunned
By the beauteous Maria,-peeping from behind
Dusty shutters, pounce upon their entrances
And exits, their noonday tarantellas...
That sinuous dry voice, electric with indignation,
Hisses in his blanching nephew’s ear,
Drawing out scandalous report
With vindictive aplomb, feigning sympathy
And gesturing the most sincere regret.
Scorched and twisted by lightining, more dead
Than alive, cast into a snakepit of confusion,
Don Carlos howls, grieved to the marrow
By his wife’s betrayal, and cries to heaven:
“Let me witness this hell with my own eyes!”
Alerted now to the traitoress’s every feint,
Gesualdo, lying sleepless beside her in the dark,
Plots revenge with grim anticipation, there
In the Palazzo di San Severo, and one day soon
Informs his court that he is off to hunt,
Not to return until the morrow, and, thereupon,
Accompanied by kinsmen and cronies,
Mounts his horse and rides away, with the air
Of a smiling dupe, to his enemies’ satisfaction,
Who do not see him halt five streets hence,
And hide behind a kinsman’s door, waiting
For the blundering bird to trip the snare.
That very night, the Duke of Andria, hungrily
Steals into the lady’s rooms in the palace,
And, as they pluck the clothes from each other,
And wrestle on the bed, taking their pleasure
Under the hunter’s moon, then fall asleep,
Contented, in one another’s embrace,
Gesualdo swoops, fierce troop at his heels.
Rushing upstairs to the guilty bedchamber,
He smashes in the door with his boot,
And looks on, aghast, at the adulterers,
Naked as newborns, in diabolical cahoots,
The silk sheets rumpled by their foul joys.
Mad with God’s vengeance, the Prince leaps in,
And falls upon the sleeping sinners, his henchmen
Joining in at his command, with poniards and pistols,
As he stabs the whore’s belly again and again,
Her treacherous womb and loahesome sex,
Butchers her carcass, and slits her gullet,
And empties his pistol into the writhing Duke,
The skewers him, screaming, with his sword,
Stabbing and stabbing till he falls back, spent,
Staggers off, panting, stepped in blood,
And groans, “Is she dead? I do not believe it...”
Mangled on marble floor, the lovers lie
Like two dogs killed and rotting by the road,
As Don Carlos helterskelters down stairs
And vanishes like a hell-hound in the night.
At Castle Gesualdo, assured of immunity from trial,
The grieving Prince wanders, in terror of his soul,
As fierce storms burst over the walls and towers,
The hilltops bristling like frightened cats.
Through hours, days, months he fights the devil
As fiercely as any desert saint, close to suicide,
Blood for blood the burden of the soul,
Till, suddenly, he realizes the way to atone.
He builds a gift for God, a Capuchin monastery,
And, in its chapel, commissions his artists
To paint a great altarpiece, of his own design:
He, Gesualdo, kneels to beg God’s forgiveness,
Presented by his uncle, Saint Carlo Borromeo,
While saints and angels point to the sinner,
And the Magdalene outstretches, interceding;
Christ himself raises his hand in absolution
As a man and woman are hoisted out
Of Purgatory’s flames, reprieved by His mercy.
Solitary, the Prince breathes silence, composing
Madrigals, lovely and brief as shooting stars;
Compacted abundance of gesture and allusion,
Iridescent and precarious, oppositions pressed
To near-implosion, tortured and rejoicing,
Portents in a fevered dream.
Such is the anguish of style,
Intricate and oxymoronic beyond all,
Rich in new sonorities and new tones.
Alliance with the House of Este, Ferrara’s
Golden hive of artists and musicians
Making honey for God,-joyous prospect!
Trekking along dusty roads with grand cortege,
Gesualdo arrives in his unseen bride’s city,
Met with banquets, tournaments and pageants,
Orchestras hymning the illustrious nuptials.
And when flesh’s treaty is signed and delivered,
Night setting its seal upon the risky bond,
Young Leonora’s lovely face gasps
In astonished pain as the ageing Prince,
Maddened by her mystery, takes her
With furious passion, behind their bed’s holy veils.
Bizarre in this northern realm, possessed
By music and fury, his head a nest of singing snakes,
Cruel whims afflict the southern seigneur,
Who beats his bride for pleasure, and flaunts
Infidelities, only to worsen her misery,
Delighting in his power to torment another soul.
Asthmatic, drowning in a sea of monsters,
He finds himself reviled by the Estes,
So abandons Leonora and the north
To trek home to the native lands below
Which bred his tumultuous spirit.
Listless, he prowls the castle corridors, alone,
And, kneeling in chapel, supplicates the Virgin
To intercede for him with God;
Naked, he enters under Her blue mantle,
Bliss! Bliss!-sighs of unsatisfied love
Turned into the Passion’s threnody.
Stretched out like a villain on the block,
He bids hired men beat and flog him
For his pleasure, bringing a saintly smile
To those lips, as he hymns his martyrdom
In anguished cries, separating from the body
To float on heavenly harmonies above,
The purest music bleeding from wounds
Of love.Eventually, weakened, he crawls
To his bed, closes his eyes, and listens
For the first last note, the perfect sound.
Castle Gesualdo looms over curry-combed fields,
Haughty stone lair where the Prince of Venosa,
Suckled like a wolf-cub on rich seething milk,
Would lean from windows, excited by stormbursts,
Stretch out his hands and catch rain in his mouth.
Sorcery of music! His whole body trembles,
Discovering itself, future’s ghost, alive and strange,
God’s harpsichord, established in the air,
Attuned to the mind’s slightest tremulation.
Cousin Donna Maria-O, dangerous magic!
She, his bretrothed since childhood, a vision
Of luminous black eyes and black tresses,
A body of spun glass, glowing in the dark....
Beside him now, beneath the high cathedral altar,
Pledging herself, his honour, his pleasure, his wife,
Blessed by summer’s dancing sheaves of light,
Their names entwined on the sun’s scarlet seal.
Lean and sallow, the prince gallops over hills,
His long lutenist’s fingers gripping the reins,
Breeze on his face, breath of music in him,
His small mouth set in an enigmatic frown...
The nights glow with passion and adventure,
Worshipping Maria’s naked body by moonlight,
Her brooding breasts taut with the inexpressible...
Hoisting his newborn son high like a monstrance,
Gesualdo hears divine chords resound through time
And space, as cypresses’ dark tapers smoke
On the earth’s altar, in awe of willing sacrifice.
What, then, makes the loving heart turn traitor,
Scorning and forsaking the graces it has known,
For novelties and adventures, doomed to destroy?
The handsomest, most gracious cavalier in Naples
They call the Duke of Andria, a dancer’s poise
And pride in every sinewy motion and look,-
For him Donna Maria falls, cuckolds Gesualdo,
Dancing secret capers away from the ballroom,
As stealthy couriers shuttle between them,
Arranging hurried trysts in havens of dreams.
Exulting at the prize in his arms, the Duke
Plunders her with ravenous kisses, as they smelt
Together, transubstantiated in their revels,
Twin idols of their own private cult;
But, unbeknown to them, a jealous spy
Looks on, the flickering eyes of Don Giulio,-
The Prince’s uncle, himself rebuffed and shunned
By the beauteous Maria,-peeping from behind
Dusty shutters, pounce upon their entrances
And exits, their noonday tarantellas...
That sinuous dry voice, electric with indignation,
Hisses in his blanching nephew’s ear,
Drawing out scandalous report
With vindictive aplomb, feigning sympathy
And gesturing the most sincere regret.
Scorched and twisted by lightining, more dead
Than alive, cast into a snakepit of confusion,
Don Carlos howls, grieved to the marrow
By his wife’s betrayal, and cries to heaven:
“Let me witness this hell with my own eyes!”
Alerted now to the traitoress’s every feint,
Gesualdo, lying sleepless beside her in the dark,
Plots revenge with grim anticipation, there
In the Palazzo di San Severo, and one day soon
Informs his court that he is off to hunt,
Not to return until the morrow, and, thereupon,
Accompanied by kinsmen and cronies,
Mounts his horse and rides away, with the air
Of a smiling dupe, to his enemies’ satisfaction,
Who do not see him halt five streets hence,
And hide behind a kinsman’s door, waiting
For the blundering bird to trip the snare.
That very night, the Duke of Andria, hungrily
Steals into the lady’s rooms in the palace,
And, as they pluck the clothes from each other,
And wrestle on the bed, taking their pleasure
Under the hunter’s moon, then fall asleep,
Contented, in one another’s embrace,
Gesualdo swoops, fierce troop at his heels.
Rushing upstairs to the guilty bedchamber,
He smashes in the door with his boot,
And looks on, aghast, at the adulterers,
Naked as newborns, in diabolical cahoots,
The silk sheets rumpled by their foul joys.
Mad with God’s vengeance, the Prince leaps in,
And falls upon the sleeping sinners, his henchmen
Joining in at his command, with poniards and pistols,
As he stabs the whore’s belly again and again,
Her treacherous womb and loahesome sex,
Butchers her carcass, and slits her gullet,
And empties his pistol into the writhing Duke,
The skewers him, screaming, with his sword,
Stabbing and stabbing till he falls back, spent,
Staggers off, panting, stepped in blood,
And groans, “Is she dead? I do not believe it...”
Mangled on marble floor, the lovers lie
Like two dogs killed and rotting by the road,
As Don Carlos helterskelters down stairs
And vanishes like a hell-hound in the night.
At Castle Gesualdo, assured of immunity from trial,
The grieving Prince wanders, in terror of his soul,
As fierce storms burst over the walls and towers,
The hilltops bristling like frightened cats.
Through hours, days, months he fights the devil
As fiercely as any desert saint, close to suicide,
Blood for blood the burden of the soul,
Till, suddenly, he realizes the way to atone.
He builds a gift for God, a Capuchin monastery,
And, in its chapel, commissions his artists
To paint a great altarpiece, of his own design:
He, Gesualdo, kneels to beg God’s forgiveness,
Presented by his uncle, Saint Carlo Borromeo,
While saints and angels point to the sinner,
And the Magdalene outstretches, interceding;
Christ himself raises his hand in absolution
As a man and woman are hoisted out
Of Purgatory’s flames, reprieved by His mercy.
Solitary, the Prince breathes silence, composing
Madrigals, lovely and brief as shooting stars;
Compacted abundance of gesture and allusion,
Iridescent and precarious, oppositions pressed
To near-implosion, tortured and rejoicing,
Portents in a fevered dream.
Such is the anguish of style,
Intricate and oxymoronic beyond all,
Rich in new sonorities and new tones.
Alliance with the House of Este, Ferrara’s
Golden hive of artists and musicians
Making honey for God,-joyous prospect!
Trekking along dusty roads with grand cortege,
Gesualdo arrives in his unseen bride’s city,
Met with banquets, tournaments and pageants,
Orchestras hymning the illustrious nuptials.
And when flesh’s treaty is signed and delivered,
Night setting its seal upon the risky bond,
Young Leonora’s lovely face gasps
In astonished pain as the ageing Prince,
Maddened by her mystery, takes her
With furious passion, behind their bed’s holy veils.
Bizarre in this northern realm, possessed
By music and fury, his head a nest of singing snakes,
Cruel whims afflict the southern seigneur,
Who beats his bride for pleasure, and flaunts
Infidelities, only to worsen her misery,
Delighting in his power to torment another soul.
Asthmatic, drowning in a sea of monsters,
He finds himself reviled by the Estes,
So abandons Leonora and the north
To trek home to the native lands below
Which bred his tumultuous spirit.
Listless, he prowls the castle corridors, alone,
And, kneeling in chapel, supplicates the Virgin
To intercede for him with God;
Naked, he enters under Her blue mantle,
Bliss! Bliss!-sighs of unsatisfied love
Turned into the Passion’s threnody.
Stretched out like a villain on the block,
He bids hired men beat and flog him
For his pleasure, bringing a saintly smile
To those lips, as he hymns his martyrdom
In anguished cries, separating from the body
To float on heavenly harmonies above,
The purest music bleeding from wounds
Of love.Eventually, weakened, he crawls
To his bed, closes his eyes, and listens
For the first last note, the perfect sound.
Crete
I
Crete, the horned god, hive of thunderclouds, double axe!
See the white bull emerging from the waves,
With the sun between his horns;
The day is drunk on raki, trying to ward off
The evil eye, reeling with erotic dreams.
Daedalus is busy with his next invention,
Crafting his loneliness into fantastic shapes,
Toys for the doom-hunted mind.
This stray mangy dog is a Turk reincarnated,
Thrashed and spat upon and starved,
Suffering the vengeance of centuries.
The spider orchid mimicks female scents
To lure a male wasp in courtly dance,
The praying mantis waits in supplication
For the ritual meal, the blessing.
The winged lion soars into the heavens,
The golden oriole sings on a branch.
The goddess holds up a snake in each hand.
Europa takes the bull by the horns.
I am the griffin in the field of lilies:
Find me in the Throne Room of the heart,
Alone among overturned jars.
A pair of Scops owls duets in the night,
Calling to each other with deep-sea pings.
I place my kiss upon your lips,
Like a believer after Mass on Easter Day,
Taking home a candle lit from the holy flame
And using the smoke to mark a cross
On the door lintel, to protect the house
From bad luck and evil spirits.
Now for the meeting under the plane tree,
The pilgrimage to the cave,
And the navigation of the labyrinth;
Who speaks out of the sarcophagus,
If not the man you once were?
O, dolphin seas, leaping and romping,
Filled with the music of lyre and lute,
And the double-headed axe of the sun!
Water pours from the lion’s mouth,
And the stony path leads upwards into the hills.
II
Every eight years, every ninety-nine lunar months,
At the marriage of sun and moon,
King Minos confers with his father Zeus,
And sits, enthroned, watching the dancers spiral,
In the courtyard of the palace at Knossos,
As the red man leaps through the bull’s crescent horns.
Corona Borealis,-
Crown that Theseus fetched up from the sea
And presented to Ariadne,-
Seven-towered silver castle
Of Arianrhod!
Asterius, no man can know your pain.
At a wedding feast
Demeter, seized with passion for the Titan Iasion,
Sneaks out with him
And the two make love
In the furrow of a thrice-ploughed field.
III
I enter an old church,
To find the frescoes intact
Except for the eyes, gouged out
By the Turks, the occupiers
Maddened by that clairvoyant Byzantine stare,
That angelic trance;
Raging against the Christian heresy,
They chiselled and hacked with their knives,
But the deep eyes pursued them in dreams.
How did evil enter the world?
Was it here from the beginning
Or did it just, while no-one was looking, sidle in?
And as for me,
I have sinned without stint,
And could I live my life again,
Would do the same, and worse.
In Arkoudiotissa cave, I turn my torch
On the bear-shaped stalagmite,
Sacred to Artemis, Mistress of the Wild Animals,
The stone bear leans over a cistern,
Replenished by dripping stalactites;
The ceiling is blackened with millennia
Of candlesmoke and incense.
From this cave the path wends down and down
The steep cliff, to the cave of St John the Hermit,
Who grew so stooped and emaciated
From his diet of roots and vegetables
That a hunter mistook him for an animal and shot him
And he crawled back to this cave and bled to death.
On the anniversary of their massacre,
The phantoms of the Cretan dead
Rise up at dawn, fully armed,on horseback,
From the monastery graveyard at Frangokastello
And silently proceed towards the abandoned fortress,
Dissolving, at last, into the sea.
Crete, the horned god, hive of thunderclouds, double axe!
See the white bull emerging from the waves,
With the sun between his horns;
The day is drunk on raki, trying to ward off
The evil eye, reeling with erotic dreams.
Daedalus is busy with his next invention,
Crafting his loneliness into fantastic shapes,
Toys for the doom-hunted mind.
This stray mangy dog is a Turk reincarnated,
Thrashed and spat upon and starved,
Suffering the vengeance of centuries.
The spider orchid mimicks female scents
To lure a male wasp in courtly dance,
The praying mantis waits in supplication
For the ritual meal, the blessing.
The winged lion soars into the heavens,
The golden oriole sings on a branch.
The goddess holds up a snake in each hand.
Europa takes the bull by the horns.
I am the griffin in the field of lilies:
Find me in the Throne Room of the heart,
Alone among overturned jars.
A pair of Scops owls duets in the night,
Calling to each other with deep-sea pings.
I place my kiss upon your lips,
Like a believer after Mass on Easter Day,
Taking home a candle lit from the holy flame
And using the smoke to mark a cross
On the door lintel, to protect the house
From bad luck and evil spirits.
Now for the meeting under the plane tree,
The pilgrimage to the cave,
And the navigation of the labyrinth;
Who speaks out of the sarcophagus,
If not the man you once were?
O, dolphin seas, leaping and romping,
Filled with the music of lyre and lute,
And the double-headed axe of the sun!
Water pours from the lion’s mouth,
And the stony path leads upwards into the hills.
II
Every eight years, every ninety-nine lunar months,
At the marriage of sun and moon,
King Minos confers with his father Zeus,
And sits, enthroned, watching the dancers spiral,
In the courtyard of the palace at Knossos,
As the red man leaps through the bull’s crescent horns.
Corona Borealis,-
Crown that Theseus fetched up from the sea
And presented to Ariadne,-
Seven-towered silver castle
Of Arianrhod!
Asterius, no man can know your pain.
At a wedding feast
Demeter, seized with passion for the Titan Iasion,
Sneaks out with him
And the two make love
In the furrow of a thrice-ploughed field.
III
I enter an old church,
To find the frescoes intact
Except for the eyes, gouged out
By the Turks, the occupiers
Maddened by that clairvoyant Byzantine stare,
That angelic trance;
Raging against the Christian heresy,
They chiselled and hacked with their knives,
But the deep eyes pursued them in dreams.
How did evil enter the world?
Was it here from the beginning
Or did it just, while no-one was looking, sidle in?
And as for me,
I have sinned without stint,
And could I live my life again,
Would do the same, and worse.
In Arkoudiotissa cave, I turn my torch
On the bear-shaped stalagmite,
Sacred to Artemis, Mistress of the Wild Animals,
The stone bear leans over a cistern,
Replenished by dripping stalactites;
The ceiling is blackened with millennia
Of candlesmoke and incense.
From this cave the path wends down and down
The steep cliff, to the cave of St John the Hermit,
Who grew so stooped and emaciated
From his diet of roots and vegetables
That a hunter mistook him for an animal and shot him
And he crawled back to this cave and bled to death.
On the anniversary of their massacre,
The phantoms of the Cretan dead
Rise up at dawn, fully armed,on horseback,
From the monastery graveyard at Frangokastello
And silently proceed towards the abandoned fortress,
Dissolving, at last, into the sea.
Sarajevo
A priest with his chalice,
I celebrate, at a pavement table,
The sacrament of coffee.
What have I learned
Between the bear and the wolf?
Illyrian ciphers
Irradiate the air.
The world is utter war
And history a tale of many deaths.
Say little, and keep your knife sharp.
Come, twist the blade,
And do not ask who, what, when, where and why.
You will not make sense of this!
Some foul evil has been done here,
By souls perverted and possessed.
Bosana-
Water…
The ancient word
Gushes in cascades, lakes and rivers
Of blood.
Fierce voices storm the murderous air,
Invoking hate and harm.
Who comes next
To conquer and oppress?
While the innocent are slaughtered,
The powerful stand by
And watch.
What better entertainment could there be?
In the National Museum
I look upon the Haggadah,
Brought from Spain
By the fleeing Sephardis.
The fires of Hell
Could not destroy this book.
Let this poem be an amulet,
Muslim or Christian,
A reading from the Koran
In an Orthodox church.
I celebrate, at a pavement table,
The sacrament of coffee.
What have I learned
Between the bear and the wolf?
Illyrian ciphers
Irradiate the air.
The world is utter war
And history a tale of many deaths.
Say little, and keep your knife sharp.
Come, twist the blade,
And do not ask who, what, when, where and why.
You will not make sense of this!
Some foul evil has been done here,
By souls perverted and possessed.
Bosana-
Water…
The ancient word
Gushes in cascades, lakes and rivers
Of blood.
Fierce voices storm the murderous air,
Invoking hate and harm.
Who comes next
To conquer and oppress?
While the innocent are slaughtered,
The powerful stand by
And watch.
What better entertainment could there be?
In the National Museum
I look upon the Haggadah,
Brought from Spain
By the fleeing Sephardis.
The fires of Hell
Could not destroy this book.
Let this poem be an amulet,
Muslim or Christian,
A reading from the Koran
In an Orthodox church.
Gothic Revival
I
You may call me Van Helsing, for that is my business. Or something like it. Exact equivalents are not, perhaps, on offer.
We are bodies in rooms, suffering diseases of the blood; revenants all, among the spires and pointed arches.
Plunderers, cannibals, look to the skull for counsel, in these days of crooked art.
Walpole stalks through the papier mâché Wunderkammer of Strawberry Hill, arranging his medieval curios with whitegloved hands, setting mousetraps of the soul. On an escritoire lies his medieval manuscript, not quite finished.
Stumbling from level to level, through the labyrinths and secret passages of the Internet, I piece together felicitous discoveries and cannily arrange my texts.
II
Satan will have his say, one voice or another.Who would deny him a little fun?
Man’s joy is in transgression; he can but build dark castles of desire and debate varieties of ruin.
Here come the barbarians, over the Alps, to sack Rome and plunder the world of metaphors-terror and vice write another chapter in the illuminated Book of Infamy.Call me a pessimist, but the accumulated evidence would seem to indicate that heaven on earth will never be.
Suits me fine.Now charge the crystal goblets with Raven’s Blood.
III
Dominate me, mutilate me, invert me: you and I, we scarcely know our power. We can entertain ourselves with perverse genius, and turn terror into the sublime. The world is out to kill us, however you dress it up.
It is the age of Pugin and Kent, designing stage-sets for the anguished soul.
Another costume change and the opera enters its final act.
IV
Let us take a modest tour of Hell, beginning in Naples.
Salvator Rosa, novice monk, abandons his cell and takes to the Calabrian hills like a bandit; to do black magic with blasted trees and weird rocks.
Carlo de’Rossi, showing guests round his private gallery, comes to the climax of the tour: with a melodramatic flourish, he draws aside the curtain and reveals Rosa’s Scene of Witchcraft, vicious burlesque of the withered and wicked, not easy to exorcise.
At the captured Bastille, a scullery boy, a little carried away with the day’s proceedings, cuts off the governor’s head with a clasp-knife, and parades it on a pike.
At the Royal Academy, students practise Crucifiixion scenes, their model the preserved corpse of a murderer,-first dissected by anatomists, then sewn back together,-nailed to a wooden cross.
You may call me Van Helsing, for that is my business. Or something like it. Exact equivalents are not, perhaps, on offer.
We are bodies in rooms, suffering diseases of the blood; revenants all, among the spires and pointed arches.
Plunderers, cannibals, look to the skull for counsel, in these days of crooked art.
Walpole stalks through the papier mâché Wunderkammer of Strawberry Hill, arranging his medieval curios with whitegloved hands, setting mousetraps of the soul. On an escritoire lies his medieval manuscript, not quite finished.
Stumbling from level to level, through the labyrinths and secret passages of the Internet, I piece together felicitous discoveries and cannily arrange my texts.
II
Satan will have his say, one voice or another.Who would deny him a little fun?
Man’s joy is in transgression; he can but build dark castles of desire and debate varieties of ruin.
Here come the barbarians, over the Alps, to sack Rome and plunder the world of metaphors-terror and vice write another chapter in the illuminated Book of Infamy.Call me a pessimist, but the accumulated evidence would seem to indicate that heaven on earth will never be.
Suits me fine.Now charge the crystal goblets with Raven’s Blood.
III
Dominate me, mutilate me, invert me: you and I, we scarcely know our power. We can entertain ourselves with perverse genius, and turn terror into the sublime. The world is out to kill us, however you dress it up.
It is the age of Pugin and Kent, designing stage-sets for the anguished soul.
Another costume change and the opera enters its final act.
IV
Let us take a modest tour of Hell, beginning in Naples.
Salvator Rosa, novice monk, abandons his cell and takes to the Calabrian hills like a bandit; to do black magic with blasted trees and weird rocks.
Carlo de’Rossi, showing guests round his private gallery, comes to the climax of the tour: with a melodramatic flourish, he draws aside the curtain and reveals Rosa’s Scene of Witchcraft, vicious burlesque of the withered and wicked, not easy to exorcise.
At the captured Bastille, a scullery boy, a little carried away with the day’s proceedings, cuts off the governor’s head with a clasp-knife, and parades it on a pike.
At the Royal Academy, students practise Crucifiixion scenes, their model the preserved corpse of a murderer,-first dissected by anatomists, then sewn back together,-nailed to a wooden cross.
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