Waltzing the Danube

Staring out of a train window

As it hurtles through the countryside,

One knows that life eludes all taxonomies

Can never be reduced to diagrams.

You raise your face to the breeze,

Life’s essence passes through you

And seeps into the bones.


Where is the river’s source?

Is it on Mt Abnoba?In Hesperia?

In the land of the Hyperboreans?

This is the zone of hybrids and metamorphoses.

In a small dip in the hillside the Breg

Bubbles up from underground;the meadow

Is steeped in water,sodden and flooded

By countless rivulets...

Once the primeval Danube flowed

Into the Gulf of Thetis,into the Sarmatic Sea,

Its mouth where Vienna now stands.


In the Clock Museum at Furtwanger,

Timepieces by the thousand tick off the hours

In a dream of perpetual motion,pendulums

And cogwheels dividing eternity

Into mathematical units,while life

Flies up and down and in and out

And all around...The relief of science,

Distracting us from our inner torment,

Turning our gaze to the world outside!

Perhaps ths way we will keep our heads,

Discover a world secure and structured,

A home for the self-tormented spirit.


Stations I pass through,words I write...

The struggle to fill in the blank spaces,

Annul the nullity, escape from insignificance...

Why did it all turn out as it did-myself

And the world-from the beginning till now?

Keep moving bravely forward,do not rest.

The mystery of the Hapsburg Empire

Draws me in,through paradox and oxymoron,

The irreconcilable contradiction,the puzzle

Never to be solved,too many pieces missing,

The synthesis that cannot be achieved.

This is my future,forever postponed,

My mind,like a Klein bottle.


Must one believe in God to have faith in the world?

Very early I began to doubt priests’ words

And see in their rites mere theatre.

One must love the created world,all the same,

Be it underwritten by the heavens

Or by ourselves alone.


The Danube is, with no need of affirmation,

Promising nothing,flowing on, oblivious;

I will bridge and ford it however I can,

Accept my destiny as the seasons determine.

A parasite on the hide of Europe,

A parasite feeding on the ideas and emotions

Of the living and the dead,I mime a life

Inside a carapace of rhetoric.


Am I Roman or barbarian? I am drawn

To the empire’s crumbled stone frontier,

Dividing and defining all the way to the Black Sea.

In Ulm, the sparrow’s nest,the shrine

Of Ahasuerus’s shoe,German law and custom

Bless the sad clerks at their desks,

Their hidden passions distorted by convention,

Rendered pitiful and grotesque.

Close,so close to perdition,I dig into the black roots

Of a language I cannot speak,a culture

Far from my birth,and maunder on,

Sure,at least,of desire’s ordeal,

That binds me to the indescribable beloved,

That face,those hips, those shoulders...


Triple-rivered Passau,floating and flowing

Away on the current,gold and carnation marble

Palaces and churches ,streets winding beneath

Arches,domes and colonnades-a cosmos

Of curves,spheres,circles and ellipses-

The nearest is the furthest away,

The simplest is the most mysterious,

As we seek a home on earth, a hearth

To tend with care and hope,

Discovering grace before nothingness.


Smell of snow in Linz,the hills and river

Heraldic in the still-the imperial AEIOU

Spells infinitely receding possibility

To the heart.To break out

Of this landlocked desolation and reach

The sea!-There we might be happy

As humans, as animals,as gods.

Ochre and orange buildings fade

Into the evening’s watercolour,


In Artstetten Castle crypt,they lie,

Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his Sophie,

Their idiocies annulled by martyrdom.

The old Europe died in their arms,

As they died in each other’s,

Pulling the whole world down with them

Into the bottomless wishing well,

Keeping forever their lovers’ secrets

Deadlier than bullets or bombs.

The first blood flowed out onto his blue tunic,

From the sleeve and chest,as his hat

With huge green feathers fell unharmed.


In Vienna’s Cemetery of the Nameless,

Treading over the Danube’s sacrificial victims,

I watch big crows rise on the wing,

Inhale the simple joy of morning.

How hard it is to tell the real from the unreal,

Fact from feeling,life from death.

In the Museum of Medicine,among

Anatomical models sectioned to reveal

The madness of muscles,organs,arteries

And nerves,I stop before a beautiful

Colourless male head,the lips drawn

Into the smile of a kouros,the skull

Exposing,in median sagittal section,

The cerebellum’s tree of life.

A woman with abdominal walls removed

To lay the genital organs open

Lies serenely prone,in a blonde wig,

A necklace round her waxen throat.


Plump white hands of Hungarian princes,

Earthen hands of Slovakian peasants;

Renaissance palaces winged like griffins,

Hovels made from straw and dung;

Only the trees and stones know

The lives that have gone into this soil.

Wave on wave of invasions, superimposed

Upon one another, have steeped

The earth with Eurasian dreams.

Solitude is their birthright,these souls

Abandoned to the horsemen’s plains,

Forever,even in victory,defeated.

In an open-air cafe in Budapest,I spoon

Icecream into my lying mouth,and watch

The Danube run beneath titanic bridges,

To some unseen horizon,which the spirit,

Fed on books and pictures,can reach for

But never,to its anguish,attain.

Powerless in a marginal province,

One hears the muffled cries of lives

Unknown, destinies arbitrated elsewhere.


Sunflowers and maize cover Mohács field,

Wooden statues planted in the ground

To mark the battle,men and horses.

Faces contorted with ferocious agony,

Crosses and crescents opposed;

The day when the olive tree at Pécs

Turned barren,and King Louis II,

Egged on by his nobles,shrugged

And gave the accursed order for battle.


Like Gaius Scribonius,unwilling

To advance his army into the dark forests

On the other shore,clinging to the pure

And noble Latin tongue as his shield,

I plot strategic victories of speech.

In Bulgaria,-no man’s land of heretics,

Among late nations half-mapped

By Western arrogance,where the dark

Vowels of Old Church Slavonic swung

Their bronze bells in high towers,-

I spy on a church wall an anathema

Against the Bogomils,the peasants’ friends,

Who denounced the satanic princes

Of the earth, its irredeemable evil

Perpetuated through human lust.

Forward the Thracian horseman

Charges,serene in the face of death,

Cloak-wings flying out in the wind.


At the gibbeted crossroads,in the path

Of evil,Romania lures me in where many

Gods have been created then sacrificed.

Only the most fallen, the most corrupt

Can long so for redemption,-

The swarming world,condemned

By sensual delusion,staggers

Under its own desire’s burden.

The delta ravels its secrets before me:

Stream on stream,ramified rivulets

Feeding the great dissolution,

The terminus of death and rebirth.

Nature’s bass note booms through me,

Amid the vast jungle of land and water

Merged,the cavernous shadows

Of overhanging trees, the deep bays

Where time moors,like the Argo returning.

Loosen,release,abandon to the flow!-

Gulls and herons crowd the evening air,

Shouting madly to the sea’s horizon.

Mesopotamia

Between two rivers, between drought and flood,

Alluvial civilisation accretes.

Mudtowns obliterated by disaster:

The wind piles sand against their ruins,

Filling in their streets,while the rain

Smooths forlorn heaps into mammary mounds.


Ur lies in ruins,its people dispersed,

Wife abandoned,daughter abandoned,

Walls broken,houses burnt down,

The dead like potsherds scattered

And turning to sand.


In Uruk,home of Anu and Inanna,

Temple cone-mosaic facades

Gleam red,white and black in the glare.

Hunched Sumerian scribes etch pictograms

Into clay tablets,agglutinative thought

Made flesh.They are heaven’s liege-men

On this flat disc surrounded by mountains,

Floating ensphered on a sweetwater ocean,

The terrifying Netherworld groaning below.

Here,where a sudden blinding cloudburst

Turns dusty plain to malebolge,

And a sandstorm candevastate the brightest day,

What should men do but placate the gods

And labour to win their goodwill?

To the gods the ziggurats extend

An invitation to descend;men they command

To shed their shells and ascend.


The temple doors are opened:

The gods gilded statue shines forth

In the shrine’s semi-darkness,

Washed,anointed,perfumed,dressed and fed,

Incense and flowers at his feet.

The air vibrates with music and incantation,

Bread,cakes,butter,fruit and honey on the altar,

The smoke of roasting flesh commingled

With cedarwood and cypress fumes.

Whisper the prayer through a reed tube

In Sumerian into the bull’s right ear,

In Akkadian into the left.


The king lives in harmony.His palace is harmonious,

The sun-gloried courtyard paved with gypsum slabs,

And,inside,the long proud flight of steps

To the throne-room, to the dais

Where His Majesty sits,

His justice as simple as a handful of flour and dates.

In the narrow dusty rubbish-clogged streets,

Pedlars and shoppers walk in the walls’ shade

And a crowd gathers at the crossroads

To hear a storyteller recite “Gilgamesh”.


Ashurnasirpal, King of Assyria,

No pity,no piety in his beaked image,

The straight-staring eyes of total power,

Proclaims: “I built a pillar and covered it

With the skins of rebellious chiefs I had flayed.

Some I walled up inside the pillar,

Some I impaled upon the pillar.

Others I had bound to stakes around it.”

Returning in triumph from campaigns of conquest,

He brings with him strange beasts in cages

And unknown seeds to plant in his gardens.


At Nineveh the omens are reported;

Mathematicians and astronomers plot the heavens

And some already wake from horrible dreams,

Having witnessed the seat of the gods in flames.


In Babylon the New Year’s Festival commences.

A priest unlocks the Temple gate,

Opening the courtyard for prayer.

Purify the precinct with Tigris water,

Smear the walls with cedar resin.

The ceremonial slaughterer with dripping hands

Casts the decapitated sheep into the river

And the old year’s sins are carried away.

The penitent king surrenders his insignia,

The priest strikes his cheek and he bows to the god,

“I did not sin, I protected Babylon.

Neither did I neglect the rites

Or punish without reason.”

Then he rises,purged and blessed,

And once more puts authority on,

Heaven’s chosen Lord of Men.

Catch Me Before I Kill Again

The panic in my veins is the chaos on the streets.

Repetition.My black muse.My love.

Do you fear the wolf? I do. His terrifying grace.

The news is full of menace and alarm,

The same old decadence about to receive

Its comeuppance,as the evil omens accumulate.

God help me, I live among cannibals and beasts

Who cannot control themselves,cannot stop

Doing the same things over and over,committing

The same accursed mistakes,to no purpose,

In love with their own nameless demons.

Protestant sermons and Catholic rituals

Bedevil my solitude.How we need our monsters!

Dear God, control me,control us,keep order

On earth; all this free will is killing me.

Mourning

My death has already taken place,

Somewhere out there, in the future,

While , here,I haunt myself and mourn myself.


I am human technology,

The melancholy android,unsure of its place

Among all the exquisite objects in the universe.


Graphs, flow charts and probabilities

Replace imagination among the elect,

Desperate to manage every detail, every illusion.


Our science is, in truth, science fiction.

Save me,cries the soul,that mad machine,

Superbly engineered by demons and angels


All knowledge is glorified uncertainty

I find;no two testimonies completely agree;

Belief itself is all I can believe in.

Angler

Out from the house, the slim quick supple wand

Tremulous with anticipation in your hand,

You hurry down by dandelions to the lake,

Summer’s idle prince coming into his kingdom.

A woodpecker beats time in a treetop,

Frankincense languor seeps through the pores,

Moody water overhung with alders and willows,

Where the tall float’s quizzical antenna drifts

And bobs, pricking at a sotto voce omen.

Thrilling through refractions, the rudd

Come plunging and fighting to the net,

Gilt flanks minted in the evening gleam.

Time and again, the spry float dashes

Across black meniscus in hesitant trickles.

Discreetly abundant,a Gioconda moon

Perches, approving,in an old ash tree.

Wending home, holy Lord of Animals,

You breathe the dew-spongeing lane and smile.

African Dream

War-drums are beating...

Red sun rises in the bush of ghosts...

War-drums are beating...

A knife cuts the black goat’s neck.


Blood flows on the breathless dust.

The chant moves slowly through the trees.

It stirs the bones, our ancestors,

Joins them together till they rise

And dance for the moon’s delight.


The wells are poisoned, there is nowhere to go.

Bullet holes in village walls

Gape like starving children’s mouths.

Emaciated earth has no breath to gasp.


Bibles and Korans fall from the sky.

Round and round a madman dances,

Crying like a strangled chicken.


Here come the bankers in black suits,

Undertakers to bury the living,

Cannibals with shiny shoes and small lifeless eyes.


The weapons have been chosen:

Pencils and rulers, drawing lines on a map;

Bullets tipped with promises and lies.


Through the Great Rift Valley they walked,

The first human beings,under the blue cones

Of a thousand volcanic peaks,

Their minds drifting like the herds of elands and zebra,

Their hands as busy as the monkeys’ and baboons’.

No-one had told them this was Eden.

They cooked their words over night fires.

Wild Swimming

Pagan me, wild water’s lover-worshipper,

Taking the cold deep inside me

To feel like an animal-god.

Celebrate in the shivering skin,

Plunging into another nervous dimension,

Where you scoop out revelations

With hands turning into flippers.

There is always this moment’s dithering

On the edge,goosebumped flesh

And brain,asking “Am I crazy?”-then the rush,

The fall, the surrender-a memory of birth.

Life stares through me,dark as a seal’s eye.

Black Pearls

Not order, not measure, but the wild and subtle arguments

Of wistful minds, impossible explorers,

Whose geometry is unorthodox, whose theses

Are exotic, esoteric, prone to the vast diverse panorama....


The soul’s academy drives them to plutonic dialogues,

Theologians of their own imagined deaths,

Wagering all they are on salvation, in an age

Of exile and destruction, divided against itself.

Skimming Stones

A flat round stone will serve you best.

With a sidearm toss and a flick of the wrist

The trick is to hit the surface

At twenty degrees precisely.

The force from the water

Is proportional to the squared speed of the stone.


A game of ducks and drakes

Is what draws me to the shore,

A practised squanderer wondering

How many bounces I will manage this time.

There is always this stillness

When I am throwing my stones.


A mathematical formula

To describe my life has not yet been found,

Although it may exist.From what I read,

Numbers are capable of limitless feats.

Meanwhile,it’s back to the seashore for me,

And practise,practise,practise.

Cruelty

We are the cruel;in cruelty is our truth,

The ingenuity of the self-despising,

Born needlessly into difficult flesh

To suffer and make others suffer.


We busy ourselves with dark accounts:

One must balance the books somehow.

“God is love” they taught us in church,

Shadowed by priests’ black wings.


Sanctioned by deliberate reason,

An ordinary man goes about his work,

Eviscerating the enemy,the scapegoat,

With infinite pleasure and disgust.


The fiendish other is always there,

Projecting the evil eye upon us,

Innocents ill-used by life and fate,

Overcoming only by delicious revenge.


The warring actions of my brain

Poise fury and love in the scales;

Mad calculus chases the infinite

Through the bones of the condemned.


Fatal unfathomable mind –vortex

Of countless precise events

From the womb to this wild minute-

Drives every cell in my body;


Keeps Hell’s bureaucracy at work

Classifying and justifying;

Adds skull to skull upon a pile

Joining earth and heaven.

Biographies of Hitler

So I sit reading biographies of Hitler,

All the crazy confused verdicts in my head,

Fretting at history’s Mephistophelean games,

Solemn and absurd turned inside out.


The carnival dead survive us all,

Reborn to baffle,seduce and damn,

Their minds escape with their bodies,

Leaving empty skulls in our hands.


Rumour,legend,myth and deceit:

Conflicting testimonies map the vertiginous

Terra incognita where scholars wander,

Shades in purgatory,abandoned to pain;


Nothing is settled, all conclusions vex;

May, might and could run the masquerade;

Back and forth horned questions hunt us,

Scorning this guilty lust to explain.

Pythagoras Alone

Pythagoras sits tuning his seven-stringed lyre,-

The little boy who climbed the forested mountains of Samos,

The merchant seaman’s son born from the waves,

The wanderer who surveyed the stars from Egyptian temple roofs-

And arranges pebbles into triangles and squares on the ground

As the sun tracks across the sky.

Now he knows the object of science is joy;

He is building his pyramid of life and death

To ascend beyond calculation and feeling.

Albatrosses

Bones, muscles, feathers and wind;

They glide for hundreds of miles without a flap,

Wings locked wide, catching the sky

And sailing upwards, then hugging gravity

To plane seaward, in effortless undulations.

Never touching earth for months on end,

They hurtle up, or weave downwind,

Catch the crosswind and head for the sun

Then turn down into the veering breeze,

Riding out tempests and blizzards, undaunted,

The Innocent

Sitting in Liverpool Street Station,befuddled by hubbub,the toing and froing of anonymous bodies in suspension,strange flesh and alien consciousness blurring into chaos and occasionally resolving itself into harmonies and patterns,I drift in a fog,benumbed,inhuman.

Walking through rain,I am invisible,absorbed into the plangent puddle streets.When will the hidden be uncovered? When will suffering be redeemed? I have pawned my days in the backstreets of the mind,with no hope of recovery.

Glance from a girl on a tube train sparks through Babylonian darkness,excites cruel fantasies.Insular under a clean white shirt and well-pressed suit, my plump white flesh quivers with embarrassed pride.

The World Is Incomplete

Born on the lion-crowned heights of summer,

I fell into a season of rich decay.


I don’t know why, but I can remember

Conversations I had many years ago,-

Ordinary conversations, in all kinds of places-

Seeming now prophetic and uncanny…


I love the nowhereness of motorways,

Being a direction and nothing more,

A world of signs, seen through the windscreen,

Points on a map.

In the lonely service station,

I pay in strange currency,

And move on.


English, impure tongue of the semi-savage,

My coarse blood’s birthright,

Pun these bones into extinction

With extremes of delight.


Solitary hitchhiker on the back roads of life,

I follow the sun,

Awaiting my next ride.

What I Do

My ballet days are over.

And I seldom play much Chopin any more.

There is nothing to build with,

Nothing to express.

It just is.


Stare deep into the poem

Until it recognises you

And comes right.


The day is not far off,

The day is very near,

When a loss more immeasurable than galaxies or language

Will stroll into your room, very matter-of-fact,

And kill you, almost kill you.


To be neither one thing nor the other,

Or both at once,

My Japanese trick;

I collect new selves

And paste them into my album.

This moment’s actor,

I play for the sky’s sake,

Juxtaposing images

In vertiginous collage,

Lines in a haiku.

My Life on Trains and Buses

Dead time

Hanging around

Waiting for life to begin

Waiting for the bus

The train


Escape, escape the state,

That administers you out of existence,

Herds and milks you, for its own profit,

Wastes half your money and steals the rest,

Knowing you to be stupid, placid and weak.


Who rules here and who is ruled?

Who holds power and for what is it used?


The stupid English, laughing through gritted teeth

At the life they feel impotent to change,

Strangling their own unfeasible aspirations

With twists of irony, as if wringing chicken’s necks.


Some chemical compounds

Smell-at low intensities-like flowers,

And-at high intensities-like shit.


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


Just wait till time drops the other shoe.


Perverse desire, why fasten so on unattainables,

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


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


My life seems such an oddity,

Bizarre, disjointed,

Half-genius, half-nonsense.


Should I fall into the sun,

Or make a break for the outer darkness?

The Reluctant Lover

Columbus wasn’t looking for America.

Nor I for you.


The world belongs to jesters and dancing bears.

So jest. Dance.


This game of blindfold chess

Is the only vocation I can manage.


A tricky fugler, I lime the branches of my mind

To see what I might catch.


Your face in the crowd I could never mistake;

I can feel your eyes a mile away;

And it pulls, the current, it pulls me under.

Drowning seems like fun.


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

No longer.

Memoranda

1


There is a city you abstain from visiting,

A pilgrimage you delay,

It would mean too much to you,

A truth from which you might never recover.


You and your memories,

Secret certificates of humanity,

Torn-up treasure maps full of imaginary isles,

Do you presume to master the future?


Connoisseur of disasters,

I relish the fatal conjunction of planets,

The syllables of nemesis.


2


John came, offering water,

And Jesus came, offering fire.

And I walked between them

And walked on.


To see the fires of Pentecost

In an English village,

And pray, pray for redemption,

To endure the rigour

Of exaltation,

Joy demanding compassion,

To recognize the whole

By the smallest part,

And the part by the whole,

To take the sacrament

On one’s tongue,

To celebrate without cease,

Never failing in courage,

To be the bridegroom

Walking up the lane.


3


“Women,” he said,

“They’re all pink inside,”

And frowned into his glass.


Gold-mining the darkness of her eyes,

I discovered California again.

I made her a statue in my mind,

Then smashed it into pieces.


4

In fear of masks and broken hinges,

In fear of doors impossible to open,

I look for lost friends under bridges

And stitch the sky with smiles.


Warm bread from the murderer’s oven!

Unknowing is a mouthful of snow.

The lean gods in their eyries

Play dice with discontinued stars.


Who sews mailbags for alien gaolers?

Who hides up his mother’s sleeve?

The lonely drover on a mountain road

Measures out death step by step.


5


I was born, so they tell me, I don’t remember. It must have been a day like any other.

I recall the odd thing, of course: learning to tie my shoelaces, to balance on a bicycle…atmospheres…

So many knots in time!

This moment I anticipate sensation, ideas, acts.

The pendulum oscillates,

The child on the swing

Cries out, thrilled, into the wind.

I exist

With my tenth-of-a-second brainwave,

My one-second cardiac rhythm,

My six-second respiratory cycle,

My twenty-four hours of dead-and-alive.

Megaliths’ and sundials’ shadows,

The monastic candle’s cascading wax,

Hourglass and clepsydra,

Are all in the caveman’s notched bone-clock,

Lines, circles and lines…


6

I examine the knobbles on treebark ,the patterns of waterblobs on the bathroom floor, the crenellations of a seashell…


Moments of my life

That tenderly break me,

To show the inside,

Red and wild.

Dear Diary

Dear diary,

Do you think it might possibly

Be time, at last,

To stop thinking

And start living?


What became of our friends,

Whom we loved and laughed with?

Some died of drink, some of broken hearts,

Some drowned in puddles, some in seas,

Some went in search of glory

And never returned,

Some stayed at home

And only dreamed,

Some found religion,

Some found God,

Some found nothing

But themselves.


Europe is mythology and killing:

See it in the face

Of every stranger in the street.

The weasel on the inside of my skull

Is digging his claws in.

A sick animal

Without philosophy or direction,

I sweat weird fevers,

Climbing the walls of my mind.

Requiems of snow are falling

On this city,

On this world.

The Lost Saharans

Brown sands of the Ténéré desert:

The heat can leach all moisture from a body

In just a few hours.

Bones of Nigersaurus and Sarcosuchus

Are stripped bare by the winds...

Human skeletons are emerging:

Skull fragments push up through the sand,

Jawbones clench near-full sets of teeth,

A child’s tiny hand has floated up, intact.

Here are the potsherds,beads and arrowheads,

The axheads and grindstones they fashioned,

The fishhooks and harpoons,

All from green volcanic rock.

Bones of crocodiles,hippos,turtles,fish and clams.

Bones of antelope and giraffe.

Millennia ago, a wobble in the earth’s axis

Caused the monsoons to shift north

And brought new rains to this desert,

Verdant grasslands spread everywhere,

Life thrived with fabulous profusion.

The rocks are painted with herds

Of ostriches,cattle and elephants.

Here a woman lies on her side,

Facing two children’s skeletons,

Her arm bones reaching out to them,

A cluster of disarticulated finger bones

Strewn between them,where once

Their hands had been clasped.

Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie

Waking up is everything.

Cartesian diver, sceptical of the father,

I bob up through the bedclothes

To the always-shocking surface.

Back into my territory

Of fear and relief.

Get up, dress up, go to work,

Make yourself useful,

Clean.

Out into the chaos and control,

Exchanging yourself for the world,

On credit.

Renegades

1


Into the hills of Hell we flew,

Lawhounds at our heels,

Less than nothing did we know,

Though kings of dodgy deals.


Into the arms of Satan we ran,

Happy for a little rest,

And, to his satisfaction,

Our few good deeds confessed.


Now, in fiery comfort we dwell,

Relieved of morals and such;

Sometimes,yes, we miss the world,

But not often and not much.



2


In the so-called world

I cram my mouth with tradition,

With names compressed

From bloody clay.


Reading the palm of silence,

I follow the heart line.

The seasons of speech

Turn on death’s wheel.


Beauty’s uranium

We mine with our hands.

Aborted suns,

Shine in the darkness…


3


In October’s salty cold I am alone,

Intoxicated, as by a woman,

Drawing lots to learn my fate.


The sibylline year turns in its sleep

And visions flare-unheard-of comets-

Through my chaste galactic dark.


I adore the whetted axe-blade

And the virgin thorn bush clenched.

Paring winds hollow me out.


I stare into the day’s black eyes

That stare into me-the raven’s kingdom

Lives as long as mountains dream.

Body

Body, wondrous and bizarre!

Soft flesh that the least thorn will puncture,

Without claws, fangs, poison or armour,

Yet conqueror and ruler of worlds!

Body, exploded from a microdot,

Reared up on hind legs out of monkey jungle,

Scanning horizons with predatory eyes,

Strutting ungainly and proud!

These grasping hands manipulate the world.

This head, butting against the sky,

Radiates power and desire.

Sarawak

At dusk flying foxes stream over the river

Slow steady wingbeats,

And the white ribbon of a paradise flycatcher

Homing to its nest, to its mate,

And a million bats charge out of their cave

In huge wheeling storms,

Wheel and spiral high into the sky,

Giant smoke-rings and vortices;

Limestone pinnacles rise

Sheer and white out of dark throbbing jungle;

Morning mist rises in layers,

The mountain changing blue to mauve to pink

A green heron stands motionless gazing into the water

And striped squirrels sport on a branch

As the sun shoots up like a gibbon’s whoop.

Vertiginous the chamber of Deer Cave,

Acrid with guano,

You can only gawp upwards at the distant roof,

Your whispers echoing into lostness,

While lucent water drips from gargantuan stalactites,

Dazzling crystals, gypsum trees, calcite fans.

A giant forest scorpion, nursing her brood

Of newborns, secretes milk into their mouths,

Till, after the nectar is exhausted, she

Starts devouring them.

New York City

Exultation of life

In my veins,on the streets,

Exultation of the sky!

Just being here is joy.


Here they come, and come, and come,

The most ambitious, the most desperate,

Burning, faster and faster, to blackness;

The ordinary world,too slow,too old,

Dwindles to nothingness, far behind,

While this fierce fire consumes its devotees.


Too busy to think or feel,

You watch the market rise and fall,

Wondering whether to buy or sell,

And cry out to the neon night.

And if everything is not perfect?

If the requested product is not supplied?

Then break it, destroy it, start again.


What do the soothsayers predict?

What do the financiers foretell?

The god of Now demands fresh blood.

When you visit the oracle,

Bring a sacrifice.

Are you wearing the latest clothes?

Are you humming the latest tunes?

Are you seen by the right people in the right places?

Are you now, are you very very now, are you it?

Are you an angel elect,

Imbued with the Immanence Divine,

Serving your purpose, doing God’s will?


I stroll along the Battery promenade,

Lean against the rail; look out past the Statue of Liberty,

Out towards the hidden Atlantic,

Like the ghost of Herman Melville,

Dreaming of distant isles.


Brooklyn Bridge, great aching poem,

Flight of the winged eye, reaching for heaven!

Pure mathematics sports with joy,

The cables swooping down from the towers

And soaring up again, with unbroken rhythm,

Chords resonating in the gull-slashed air!

Drinks at the Danube Bar on Hudson Street,

Mauve against gold in the candleglow,

High ceilings calling me upward,

As if elegance was all.


In the hall of the Bank of New York on Wall Street,

Whelmed by red terrazzo, dark purple marble,

And sparkling red-orange-gold mosaic tiles,

I throb with the red pulse of money.


In Columbus Park the Chinese gather,

Clapping mah-jongg tiles down on the tables,

And fortune-tellers hang out their red banners

And consult their battered old books.


On a bench in the walled garden of St Luke-in-the-Fields,

In spring, with the first crocuses coming up,

I sit in my squirrel-tailed songbird-coloured tree of words,

Among lilacs, tulips and roses,

With the light on my face,

And the world in my hands,

And everything happy and fine.


Rooting through a bookstore on Broadway,

Smelling the dust and fingerprints of used books,

I chase the unicorn as always,

In my dumb old-fashioned way.


In Washington Square Park the chessplayers

Do single combat under the trees,

Sitting on a slave graveyard,

And a Revolutionary drill ground,

Among musicians,acrobats,comedians and clowns.


The Bayard Building soaring into the sky,

White façade beaming in sunlight,

Dragonfly caryatids, shouldering the cornice,

Wings outstretched to leap into the sky,


In the Russian Turkish Baths on East 10th Street,

After tramping the streets, soaking up the punishment,

The weariness and dread in my bones,

I sit in the steam room,

Sweating out poisons,

And kill myself,intermittently,in the cold pool;

And my soul seems to leave my body

And return soothed and repaired.


In the magic shop,

I watch a silver orb inexplicably levitate,

And the card I have visualised

Rises unaided from the deck…

Interdimensional tricksters,

The salesmen perform legerdemain

With smiling aplomb…


The Empire State Building from the south at sunset:

Parallel steel lines catch the light,

Glowing with red-orange shimmer

Along the thousand-foot shaft to the wings

Of the crown and the spire;

On the summit, you are floating, weightless,

Above the bought-and-paid-for horizon…

Lightning snakes up and down the building,

And St Elmo’s fire hovers,hissing,at the top.

Whimsical god of winds,the tower

Forges a solenoid of weathers,

As snow falls upwards

Or rain travels sideways round .


In Grand Central Terminal,

I stand, watching crowds surge all around,

Sleek and rapid, expertly dodging, adjusting their bodies

With minute efficiency and precision,

Shoulders drawn in like boxers,

Advancing with long purposeful strides,

Jockeying, diving, racing for the goal,

Each on an urgent mission,

None yielding an inch, yet none colliding,

Seeking the shortest path to their destination;

In the Whispering Gallery,

Two people can stand at opposite ends

And ,whispering into the corner,

Hear each other’s voice

Miraculously speaking into the ear,

So close and intimate, as if side by side,

The secret message audible only to them,,

Across the swirling bedlam between.


Any country on earth can be dismantled

And imported here,

Reassembled In the Metropolitan Museum of Art,

Just like the Studiolo of Duke Federico da Montefeltro

From his palace at Gubbio:

This wonder ofperspective intarsia,

The myriads of minute wooden tesserae,

And the multiple varieties, cuts and grains

The trompe l’oeil of cabinet doors ajar

Revealing books casually stacked or left open,

A page of the Aeneid visible for sortilege;

A parrot perches in a cage,

A pair of eyeglasses lie neatly folded in their case,

Sand sifts through an hourglass,

A lute lies ready to be picked up and played,

All the duke’s cherished belongings,

As real as if he himself had been made of wood!


Iceskating in Central Park at night,

Under the city lights and stars,

With the sound of Sinatra in the cold air,

Gliding around and around, thrilling

To the chill, and stopping for a cup of hot chocolate,

Frigid fingers burning round a paper cup,

Pouring delicious elixir down my throat,

Watching the Zamboni machine sweep the rink

To glassy smoothness…-

I welcome the gods of New York into my darkness,

To bless me with terrors and ecstasies.


On a Sunday just before Halloween,

At Harlem Meer, as darkness falls,

The children come in their hundreds,

Clutching carved pumpkins with candles inside,

And float their precious star-ships on rafts

Out onto the water…

Yobs

Louts and thugs roam everywhere,

Cursing and fouling the air,

Bastards whelped from a cancerous womb.

Fucking and fighting on a whim,

They spew violence in the faces

Of the horrified, revelling

In the carnival of terror

As they wreak with fists

And blades and guns

The chaos in their heads.

In offices of government and business

As on the shit-fouled streets,

Brutishness swells and whelms,

Menacing civility into cowering

As it shoves its way forward

To wrangle selfish aims at all costs.

The vicious contagion spreads unchecked,

The vile delight in their power,

In making their victims suffer,

In a climate of lies and dread,

And all is war, without justice or end.

America: A Symphony

Born under Scorpio rising,

America,

Born to accumulate power,

By money, by armies, by ideas!

America,

Incessantly seeking

To be the richest, the strongest, the most righteous!

And so the cycles of death and rebirth,

The necessary transmutations,

As the eagle rises on outstretched wings,

Fearlessly confronting the sun,

Ready at any instant to strike!

A cold and ruthless purpose

Glowers in the heart,

Controlling whatever it can-

Auspicious conjunctions and aspects

Of stars and planets

Bode the most magnificent fate,

And Sirius,haven of the dead,

Guides the calendar of nations,

The ebb and flood of civilizations,

As sublime intelligences

Filter through the living

And manifest the higher will.


From Atlantic to Pacific,

The almighty self proclaims itself,

Shouts anthems to the heavens,

Saints and prophets of America

Your bodies are the Bible of the world.



Plymouth Rock:-granite seed,so small and humble,

Cornerstone of the Temple,

Ashlar of light!

Down by the wax museum,the souvenir store

And the replica Mayflower

Moored in the bay

Of a human tear.

Utah

Wild country of the heart,

Where everything and nothing happens.

The First People moved

Across rich grasslands,

With abundant herds

Of mastodons, giant bison and camels,

And left behind in caves

Exquisite chert spear points

And stone tools.

They thought they lived in Paradise.

They thought it would never end.

But in a few thousand years

There were drought and famine,

And on sandstone cliffs,

Imploring the gods for help,

They painted in red haematite

Herds of bighorn sheep,

Fresh flowing water

And thin wraiths with huge empty eyes...



Prophets and saints of the desert

Dig for roots with the Indians,

Mining the uranium of divinity,

And finding, now and then,

A sign from within,

Like a dinosaur footprint

Sealed in sandstone.

Phyllorhodomancy

1


I was born of a wolf

In the crimson forest,

Deciduous terrors

Dropping from the trees.


I walk through the door

Of smoke, and on the inside

Of my skin hieroglyphs

Shine phantasmal.


2

Abstract world,brilliant and abstruse,

Ordain me in my proper use;

To serve you whole and in tiny parts,

Instrument of occult arts.


3

Eoliths unearth you in time,

Arrowheads of old emotions,

And these invented selves,

Answering cryptic demands.


4

By means of thirty-two secret paths of wisdom,

Ten numbers and twenty-two letters,

Yahweh created the universe,his book,

Which the initiated may read,

And thereby learn how to create life themselves.


Fantastical privacy of reading,

My lights of learning and joy,

Foraging for God’s love in knowledge...

Premonitions of myself, these books

My heart chooses, for its capital...


5


April’s rain-dog stray in the shining streets,

Inside and outside, it’s all the same to me,

All tossed on the season’s pyre.

Tree-surge, earth-tide, sunlight storms

The heights; blooded by rainbow cascade,

I fall to the rat’s teeth of night.


6


Domes of mosques and madrassas,

Catching and amplifying whispers,

Focussing energy in the core,

As designs so intricate and geometric

Turn endlessly in upon themselves,

Inwardly involve us too,

And harmony endures.

The Hopewell Hand

Exquisite mica talisman,upraised in abhaya mudra salute:, it lay in a dead leader’s grave, to kindle the new sun inside.

The eye in the palm follows you wherever you turn,penetrating and protecting, stealthy as a rattlesnake.

The wounded warrior unclenches his red fist: see through the stigma to the stars.Miraculous death can be grasped by the fingers and sown in the earth in season.

The all-powerful hand. The bearpaw. The portal whereby a power may enter or exit the body.

The hand that twirls the firestick at the hearth, beneath the Evening Star.

The bloody hand the warrior clasps to his face, blazoning his pride: I drink my enemy’s life.

The Alchemical Wedding

In the Fountain of Mercury

The King and Queen embrace

Under a hovering dove

And a six-pointed star.

From their passion

The sunchild is born.


The excluded third, the tertium non datur,

Presents itself for philosophers’ games.

“Yes” and “no” will not suffice.

Out of the three comes the fourth.


Work on yourself,and every feeling

Can be matter for magisterial designs;

Good and evil thoughts alike

Will serve the higher will.


Can it be that a single soul’s transformation

Can elevate the whole world?

Two lives holding one another

In delicate equilibrium

Make the subtle body sing.


In the dirt you will find the Philosophers’ Stone.

In the mating of dogs and bitches

The dew falls from Heaven.

Heart Transplant

Holding death off with one hand,

Beckoning it on with the other,

I live my disappearance

And call it survival.

I cannot believe in my own death,

Therefore I cannot die.

I shall be the first person in history

To avoid that misfortune.

The unforeseeable,the indefinable-

That is all there is.

Beside myself,and far from home,

I am a body that speaks,

A mouth that eats,

A birthcry and a dying breath.

I hold forth,and hold nothing:

All this blather is just a way

Of asking to be touched.

Kundmanngasse 19, Vienna

A pure white house composed of cubes.

Nothing but straight lines –

No flourish, no stucco, no painted surfaces.

As he wanted himself to be.

It was all measure and proportion,

The battle to reduce life to the concrete.

Sharp-cornered windows

And sharp-cornered walls,

Unadorned, absolute,

Permitted no disturbance.

With especial attention he designed

The doorhandles and radiators

To blend exquisitely into the whole

Without disruption,to exist and no more,

Their simplicity won by immense finesse.

Every detail must annihilate itself,

A presence honed into absence.

Second looks would unsettle the stillness,

Dislodge anomalies, release ruptures,

Reveal the chaotic within the serene;

Suddenly the seamless door

Was awkward and heavy,

And the flowing flowed no more.

There could be no absolution.

Sailfish Attacking Sardines

A quicksilver globe of massed sardines,

Hundreds strong, with unified mind,

Moves frantically as one,

Shimmering in sunlight as it turns,

Shifting in perfect synchrony,

Each fish both leader and follower,

Orbited by a dozen long shadows, sailfish

Hunting in a pack, pushing the prey

Into ever tighter formation,

Taking bites in turn

With a rush and flare of the dorsal fin.

The rapier bills stab with precision,

Corralling, swatting, gulping,

The melanophores in their skin

Iridescing with the thrill,

And soon the feast is over,

And the sailfish quit the scene,

Leaving drifts of sardine scales

To lilt down in the blue.

Fins/ Wings/ Limbs

The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder

                                            Charles Darwin

Outstretched wings of bats in flight

translucent

the spinning tails of bacteria

motors for comets and thoughts

choanaoflagellates

in a scoop of pondwater

flitting with electric grace

making and sharing proteins

my head

the front tip of a sea squirt

my beautiful imperfect eye

with its blind spot

clocking the light

like a ragworm

The Hidden Hand

In portrait after portrait, the great men pose,

One hand hidden inside their uniforms,

Masters of the veils,touching their own bosom

-The sign of Moses,commanded by God-

Grasping occult powers in the unseen fist

To show that what we are is what we do.


Five fingers played the thief of souls:

So the Corsican consulted his Book of Fate;

Washington stood proudly on the square;

Mozart knocked three times upon the door.

The Diagonal

Plato was drawing figures in the ground,

Trying to remember himself.

He drew a square

And sat thinking for a long time,

Looking and looking.

Finally,he had it!

He drew a diagonal line

Across the square,

Dividing it into equal halves.

Then he got up, laughing,

And walked away.

Replicas

In the Venetian Hotel, Las Vegas,

Walking through an exact copy of the Doge’s Palace,

But better, more up-to-date,

I thank God I live in these times.

And in the Paris Hotel Casino

I stroll down the cobbled sidewalks

And look up at the Eiffel Tower in the distance.

Meanwhile,Luxor is just around the corner,

With the Pyramids

And King Tut’s tomb.

It is all so convenient.

No unnecessary travel.No mess.

A Japanese pagoda stands right next to the Trevi Fountain.

The Statue of Liberty’s outstretched arm

Points towards a massive medieval castle,

With a Sphinx behind.

The Venetian canals have been repainted again and again

To give them exactly the right blue;

The striped poles  lean with precise verisimilitude

As if they had spent centuries sinking into the Adriatic mud.

The neon fires of the Strip stretch away

Into black desolation.

I thank God I live in these times.

Australia

Green twilight on continental shelf:

Vast submarine kelp forests

Undulate in slanting sunlight.

A male seahorse paying court

Circles his intended,

Inflating his womb-pouch for a deposit,

Writhing in coital tango to fertilize the eggs

And glue them fast with sperm.

Philoprogenitive octopi

Flash and tangle, trysting on a ledge.

Voracious crayfish scavenge over the bottom,

Appeasing one another’s cannibal tastes.

A myriad phyllosomas swim towards the light.

Negotiating the frond-slalom, riding rock-channel surges,

Seals surf shoreward on each exhilarating swell.

A right whale breaches with thunderclap ardour,

Roistering down the tempest, flukes extended.

Gyring currents mesh in delicate clockwork,

Frisking leviathan islands’ shores.


Humpbacks sing southwards to the mating ground,

Varying their epic compositions year by year.

The Barrier Reef coruscates in dynamic equilibrium,

Coral polyps symbiotic with zooxanthellae.

Gorgonians fan their sieve-like bodies;

A crinoid settles, and sea whips wave,

And everywhere anemones sweep the paralytic feelers.


Moonlit seas swirl with spawn-clouds floating up.

At dawn, hundreds of fish hang in the current,

Waiting for the tide to turn.

In late summer, island sands heave and erupt,

As turtle hatchlings quake free, and run,

Kamikaze-dashing towards the waves

Through their enemies’ gauntlet.


Balletic lizards bob and sidestep on a salt lake,

Shin up the salt-cones, their look-out points.

The rains come, soaking through sand,

Awaking the frog asleep in his burrow.

Ants hang from subterranean ceilings,

Distended with nectar to regurgitate

Into their brothers’ mouths.

Multitudinous termite castles cast their shadows

Across the grasslands, north to south,

Clay, faeces and saliva shaped and packed high.


Sand dunes segue into gibber plain.

A gibberbird crouches over its nest,

Umbriferous wings repeating gibber-patterns.

Subtle lizards lurk in saline basins,

Blent with crystal hillocks’ scintillation.


Arenaceous rivers chunder out of rugged ranges,

Fossils mesmerised inside precipices.

River red gums flaunt white festoons

Of cockatoos, in hundreds, reposing.

Pungent eucalypts drip flammable oils.

Marsupials and eutherians-marvellous sects-

Roam telepathically over the land.

Kangaroos stand toe to toe, grappling,

Seeking the optimum aikido stunt,

Duelling for female favours.

Urban Gothic

Love comes wearing a surgeon’s mask,

Diabolically skilful, alert to every twitch.

Under the railway station’s cathedral roof,

One souls arrives, another departs,

Passing on different trains, different tracks.

The city, lubricated metal hermaphrodite,

Mates with itself, grimly efficient.

Family politics proceeds in scared little rooms.

Sunset glares like an open furnace

Where the whole world is tortured into steel,

Manipulated by supply and demand.


Love calls again, a cheerful arsonist,

Impervious to psychotherapy.

In the small hours, while the innocent sleep on,

The accused are taken for interrogation.

The Woman in the Window

Slim by the window, in frittering light,

She stands, slender fingers stroking the sill,

Lids flickering over languid brown eyes as she muses,

Something unspoken on her lips.


Priestess of nuance and implication,

She looks to the evening to ease her,

The cool green stars to read her mind

And the river to wash away pain.


A shuddering bird-shadow prophesies

In the detailed emptiness, the sifting shades

Like water in a well, only betrayed, now and then,

By a falling thought’s splash, a tiny echo.


Terrible sophistication belies her.

How long since she saw herself truly?

Her face cannot be seen in mirrors.

Her voice is not heard when she speaks.


These yearnings, if they do not kill her,

May force a new treaty with reality,

A more decent compromise with the truth,

Or so it feels when the retreating sparrow calls.

A Village in the Gambia

Violet-skinned women in the baobab shade

Stand lissom and sinewy, vital as leopards,

Their eye-whites glowing in the darkness,

Facing adversity with courage and humour.

This bare thin land, where every rock and clod

Is known in the bones, is their mentor.


The flame trees are in bloom, vermilion blossoms

Against the blankness. Thin smoke-skeins drift up

Into empty sky , as the people burn the remains

Of last year’s crops.

Nothing but a few skinny trees and giant pink termite hills

Emerge from the parched grey brittle earth.

Pink sand of the streets, littered with animal droppings,

Brittle grey thatch, mud walls and rusty iron rooves,

Scrawny goats and chickens moseying around,

Naked and brilliant in the hard white light...

Magenta petals swirl over the dusty ground...


During long Ramadan afternoons, the women

Sprawl beneath the mango trees, dazed and speechless

From fasting, their shirts discarded to air their breasts,

Some picking lice from one another’s hair,

Others staring at nothing with expressionless eyes.


Red earth riddled with termite holes,

Red dust covers the grasses, bushes and trees,

And a branch attacked by the termites

Crumbles, at a touch to powder,

A shell of dust, hollowed out from within.


Early evening and the village starts suddenly into life:

Pestles thud in eager syncopation,

Faster and faster as the breaking of the fast

Approaches, the holy relief,

Children run about, excited, chattering,

The yellow millet stalks incandesce in the setting sun,

The pink sand turns lilac in the dusk,

In the light of a hurricane lamp, shining

On their joyful faces, Koranic students sing a long refrain,

Voices of boys and men chiming together,

Led by the white-robed teacher, head thrown back,

His undulating chant reaching into the darkness,

Supported by the surging chorus...


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

Framed by a mango tree;

The people all come out to greet it and rejoice.


Dangerous afternoons when the sunlight

Throws a shadow-mesh over colourless brittle vegetation,

Tone, shadow and substance all blend into one,

One can so easily lose one’s way or one’s mind here,

In the bush of ghosts and devils.

There are people who have gone insane

Or died long agonized unexplained deaths

Because of what they have seen here.


Towards evening the mango leaves rattle,

The dust starts to rise in gusts from the ground,

The women at the wells hurry for home,

The wind hurls litter at the clattering roves

And the first fat raindrops start to fall.


In the morning the red-puddled earth

Sprouts new grass, and the sky is bursting

With white clouds. The men tread barefoot

In the gardens, pushing maize and sorghum seeds

Deep into the black soil with their toes.

Eagles soar above, and cattle crash through undergrowth.

In the ricefields women bend double, hoeing,

Hacking at the grey crust till the violet starts to show,

Singing in Mandinka, opening up the earth,

Exulting in laughter, argument and discussion,

All joining in the same rhythm and chorus,

Chorusing over and over till the air vibrates

To their drum, and some even throw down their tools

And begin to dance, stamping the ground.

Pausing to wipe the sweat from their brows.

The laterite road glows deep orange.

In the evening vast violetgrey clouds steam in,

The baobabs emit unearthly light,

The wind writhes through the shuddering grass

And massive raindrops splash down all over

In furious spasms, as lightning forks out

To the very nerve-ends of the sky

And the earth leaps about like a maddened toad...

In the morning swirling currents of moisture

Seethe out of the earth, and the drenched flora,

The women, all brilliant pink, blue, red and yellow,

Hurry along the paths out of the village,

Hoes over their shoulders, exhilarated...


Dungbeetles toil over heaps of cattledung,

Rolling it into balls, pushing it away over the ground

With their back legs.

Slim green-gold rice spears shoot straight up

And lines of millet fountain from the earth...

The termite hills are collapsing back into the earth,

Thousands of tiny brown grubs swarming round..

Skeletal starved curs lie curled up,

Flies buzzing round their sores,

When they have no their choice they go

And dig up corpses in the cemetery to eat

And then the villagers will hack them to death with their hoes.


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

Carrying a staff and Koran wrapped in cloth,

Walks to the mosque along the red dust road.

In his house he crouches amid the smoke

On a worn sheepskin, saying in thin cracked voice:

“The world lasts but a moment, and all

Who refused God’s word will be cast into the fire...”


Tall, slender beauty, features smooth and still,

Immemorial as an ancient Egyptian sculpture,

With just the hint of an ironical smile...

Might a jealous demon not inhabit her

And coax her to the brink of a deep well

Or to the topmost branches of a tree

And make her jump to her death?

Beneath the placid faces and resigned smiles

Of the good respectable people

Malice and resentment stir the pot,

The suppressed tensions ready to disrupt

The peace at any moment. All jealous

And suspicious of each other, they dread

Their own wickedness being released.


Let it sound again, the legendary music

From the courts of Mali-xylophone orchestras

And young girl choirs raising their voices

In joyous wailing, and suddenly a woman

Crying out, agonized, from beyond the world,

Invoking the spirits, the air’s black riders...


The rice brims, shimmering, between the iron baobabs,

Stretching away into the distance.

The women, by ones, twos and threes, move

Through the fields, cutting the plump grain.

This is their dominion, the grandmother’s realm,

Liberated from men’s polluting gaze,

The arena of initiation and circumcision,

Where secrets are imparted in the night,

And their laughter carries through the air,

As pestles thud in the encampments,

Drumming the harvest of hidden knowledge.

In the evening light they shuffle back to the village,

Laden baskets bobbing on their heads,

The cloud-patterns rippling over and through them,

And, at night, in the square, glowing in the light

Of hurricane lamps, they run towards the drummers,

Spinning round at the last moment to dance,

Every sinew in play as the pummelling rhythms

Of taut skins force their souls,-see them whirl,

Stamp and clap in a rush of bliss and relief.


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

Leaves hang frazzled from blackened branches.

Under the orange moon, a parade of hunched silhouettes

Moves silently through the undergrowth, a tribe

Of baboons, the males leading the females,

The young clinging to their chests.


Dry season: the world is a discarded husk,

Porous and dusty, under the scourging sun,

The air molten glass bulging and writhing

In monstrous shapes, reducing everyone

To numbed blanks, while skinny lizards

Scamper up the mosquito netting...


At night auroras of sparks rise in the darkness,

Trees outlined by fire,-the whole world

Is tipping and tumbling into the flames...

The next day the land is blue smoking waste,

Black smoke towers out of the bush,

Eagles hang on the shuddering heatwave.


One night, in the lamplight, look-a lump

Of matter jumps out of the mud, and rolls away,

A pair of mating toads, the mounted male holding tight

As they bounce along the ground, still coupling,

And disappear back into the undergrowth.

The Ornithologist

Great Grey Shrike.Lanius excubitor.Inhabits open areas with scattered trees and bushes. Tail in continual motion while perched, usually in a circular pattern. Flight undulating and low, swooping upwards to perch. Regularly hovers. Prey is impaled upon thorns to form “larder”. Voice harsh, chattering cry, all shrikes sounding similar.



Like a secret agent, always drawn back into the game,

I hide myself, binoculars poised,

Reconnoitring the terrain.

The treetops know me for a harmless impostor,

A wingless creature without guile.

I dream that the objects of my attention

May sometimes notice my smile.

What casual revelations may come to pass?

Some figment of my own strangeness

Comes into focus in the glass.


Grasshopper Warbler .Locustella naevia. Voice: song distinctive, always uttered from dense vegetation, said to resemble a fisherman’s reel. Very high pitched and carries for long distance ;movement of the bird’s head appearing to later the location of the bird.


Sky-skaters, cutting figures in the mind!

Distant heralds, what riddles do you drop from your beaks?

Carefully I set my snares for life.

The flying dinosaurs nest in my loneliness.

Perhaps I only seek some hints for living

From those lighter and braver than men.

My place is with the ostrich and the dodo.

I envy the blackness of the crow.

Beauty is small consolation

For a lifetime of tedium and mistakes.


The birds explode from undifferentiated chaos,

Assuming multifarious guises

To baffle the world.

I recite their names like passwords to heaven,

Spells to cleanse the blood.

Shaman plumed for action,

I humble myself to the drum,

Stealing up on stray souls,

Inveigling them into my sack.


I am the necessary observer,

Born to the margins,

Trained in vigil.

I tunnel through the seasons,

Killing myself with thought.

These acts of contemplation are my passage

Through countries of the mind.

I taste the rain for memories;

Time has drenched me to the bone.

I have no understanding but the wind.


Tengmalm’s Owl. Aegolius funereus. Flight wavers from side to side rather than undulating. Voice: series of whistling notes said to resemble the sound of dripping water.


Human life is heavy,

Staggering among the stones.

All my life I have longed for lightness and flight.

The wren-king beats the eagle to the crown.


I skulk in hedgerows, hover over farms,

Reeling off the queer green world;

I drill through the wind with my beak.


Sound from silence. Silence from sound.

Call-signs tease the air into filigree

Or shock it with brute hunger.

Earth and sky stare each other out

Or play peekaboo.

My world shivers like a tuning-fork.


Reed bunting. Emberiza schoeniclus. Rarely high up in vegetation, preferring to cling to stems of reeds, willows etc, close to ground. Semi-gregarious in winter months, all-male parties often forming in early spring. Voice: monotonous unmusical song, usually of all four notes, can be rendered as “burp burp burp pardon”.


The swan’s white shadow

Blinds me into submission.


Petrels soar before the storm,

And cakewalk over the clapping waves;

Awestruck bridesmaids, they gather the trains of ships.


A cormorant plunges

And fishes up the moon in its beak.


A heron stands, mesmerised, in shallows,

Gawky frowning professor

Poring over the water’s scroll.


Ravens and crows pick over my corpse,

Swinging from a lightning-oak’s bough.

My eyes are gone, but still I see

The emptiness that sees through me.


As if waiting for the Second Coming,

I sit in expectation of some rara avis,

A miracle to make good my witness.


Jack Snipe. Lymnocryptes minimus. Very difficult to flush, often not rising until almost trodden upon. Has drumming display flight, with noise said to resemble galloping horse.


First a door, then a key to turn.

How should I know

If my positions are but poses?

And is there any completion,

Even in death?


All I want is a way of walking

To trust in, even if I occasionally fall,

And somewhere to head for, hoping for the best.

(Stupidly, I envy

That starling there, flying to its nest).


Can I make a pact with the earth

To share our secrets?

I walk like a dipper on the streambed.


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

What shall I say to the wind?

That human hearts will never have the courage to be free?

That misery has no end?


Another year will pass, another chance of happiness.

I shall still be prowling under wet branches,

Mutely lifting the glasses in homage,

Assembling the jigsaw as best I can.

Earth-astronomer, dying like the stars I scrutinize,

I know all this flamboyant pullulation

Is fragile as a wren’s skull.

Ravenous questions, like the begging mouths of chicks,

Shriek inside me, gaping at the sky for succour.


Capercaillie.Tetrao urogallus. Feathers of neck and throat can be raised to produce whiskered effect. Rather shy and secretive. Flight rapid and direct, periods of wingbeats interspersed with glides on downcurved wings. Voice: wide variety of calls ,variously likened to drawing of cork from bottle, clearing throat and loud rattle.

The Showa Era

Aloof, introspective, the Son of Heaven

Pores over his marine collection, ravished by thoughts

Of prehistoric cuttlefish, and sea spiders’ rituals,

Lingering with delight over bloodless invertebrates

And the rarest creatures from the oceanbed,

Exquisite monsters seldom witnessed by man.

His impassive eyes glint behind glasses

As he looks up from the microscope.

This, his era, will be an age of enlightenment and peace,

Blessed by the copper mirror in the Shrine of Isé

That first tempted Amaterasu from the cave

To contemplate her features in the light,

Thus delivering the earth from darkness.


Robotically intoning the divine archaic tongue,

Hirohito addresses the court from his throne

As they bow in awe before this slim, blank youth.

In China, his troops are running through Nanking,

Tossing babies on bayonets, threshing empire’s harvest.


General Ishii, man of science, receives an audience

To demonstrate his new invention, a wonder-machine

That turns wine into water. Performing the miracle

With a mountebank’s flourish, he quaffs a glass

Before the startled Emperor’s gaze. Hirohito, at once,

Bestows his gracious approval for the General

To pursue his work, his patriotic mission

To master the secrets of biological warfare,

And obliterate Japan’s foes with invisible squadrons

Of typhus, tetanus ,anthrax and other such allies.


In the Manchurian wastes a secret complex hums

All night beneath the cold stars, a walled Xanadu

Of barracks and laboratories, where technicians

Experiment on convicts, vagrants and prisoners-of-war,

Injecting, gassing, freezing and dissecting,

Studiously compiling scientific reports.

Ishii looks on, rapt, as another pickled specimen

Is added to his store,- a corpse floating in alcohol,

Suspended in limbo, empty eyes staring like a fish.


Admiral Yamamoto laughs and capers, entertaining

Ladies of the “water trade” on board his ship,

A pocket-sized maverick, cackling irreverent banter,

Able to subdue any man with one look.

Later, alone, he sits in a calligrapher’s trance,

His balletic brush kissing arabesques on paper.

A gambler with all the cards in his hand,

For a dare he will execute perilous handstands,

Balanced on a high balcony’s edge.

Brooding now over maps, the Admiral

Plans the great attack: his diminutive finger

Stabs at the coordinates-Pearl Harbor, Hawaii...

For this, they should give him a proper reward-

A casino of his own in Singapore!

He laughs to himself, the frowns again;

This strange foreboding will not leave him,

That Japan’s greatest victory will also be its doom...


Throughout the world,


Everywhere all men are brothers;


Why then do winds and waves


So turbulently rage?

Sadly, Hirohito ponders his grandfather’s haiku...

He offers peace-and the world refuses!

Eight corners of the earth under his protection...

Why do they not gratefully comply?

Oh that he could return to ichthyology,

True to reason and the scholar’s retirement,

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

And its strange euphoria possesses him, too,

Vast designs not found on microscope slides.


A letter to the Emperor from Yamamoto:

“Without ceremony or delay, the little wrestler

Attacked and shoved the giant from the ring

And the audience cheered his audacity.

But then the heavyweight staggered back,

Strengthened his stance, and slowly advanced.

Now he confronts his opponent in the centre,

The last five minutes will decide the contest...”


In the New Guinea jungle lies a crumpled plane,

A swatted dragonfly, tangled in itself;

Shouting soldiers pull out Yamamoto’s body.

At last, he has gone to follow them beyond the sun,

The grieved-for warriors lost to the skies.

Morocco

White koubbas shine on a stony plain,

A family of djinns.

A Kasbah rises below the mountains,

Black windows in the white,

Empty as skull-sockets.

Windblown,sunscorched, the traveller

Sees before him in the setting sun

Ochre clay walls gleaming like copper.

Within,winding alley arcades

Turn the wind hurtling above to a cool draught

And all is order,rhythm and function.

Shimmering fabrics,richly worked killim,

Flaunt themselves in the kissaria.

The secretive medina harmonizes shadows

And voices...

Green tiles of a mosque roof splash

In serried waves over black and white.


On a mountain pass, a wayfarer

Casts a stone at a kerkour

To ward off evil fortune.


Water, capricious, bewitching water,

Withholding yourself or spilling in excess,

Do you share the people’s joys and sorrows?


Sea wind, desert wind...

The Arab horses of the conquerors,trotting,

Kicked up billows of dust.

Unnoticed lay the bones

Of pithecanthrope,

His only artefact a splinter of rock.


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

Swarthy aroma of morning’s consecrated coffee,

Spice market’s pungent profligacy,

Thick fleshy odour of virgin olive oil...


West of Tangier, the Caves of Hercules

Echo the sea like giant seashells.

Once,local prostitutes would bring their customers here,

Carefully negotiating the rocks, lanterns in hand.

When the world still wore its first feathers,

Troglodytes swooned here in trance,

Waving stone phalli to propitiate the dark

That followed them with animal eyes.

At the Pillars of Hercules,migrating birds of prey

Ride the thermals,gaining height

For the flight across the straits.


Tetouan pulses with dissident tribes’ blood,

Brutal and sophisticated,

Nostalgic for the Andalusian dream.

From Sufis’ zaouia

Come chants and whispers

Of metaphysical debate.

In the Sephardic cemetery

Stands a whitewashed meteorite,

Freckled with votive candlewax.

Kif smokers loll in bleary backrooms,

Handling their pipes with automatic ease.


Red-stained slopes of the eastern Riff

Menace as you approach

Past stubborn square dwellings

Set in mean soil.

Not even spring can make the hillsides bloom.

Feuds are the ancient entertainment here,

Habitual as clearing the fields of stones.


The stone circle at Mzoura

Draws ductile time into a perfect ellipse,

Miming equinoctial sunset’s path.

In the cave of Bou el Kornien,the Horned Man,

Seekers kneel to suck the milky secretion

Dripping from a hallowed stalactite.

(Alexander, thou art the son of Ammon,

So the Berber oracle spoke,

Receiving the alien conqueror with honour

In his Saharan shrine.)

At the sacred pool in Chellah

Barren women peel boiled eggs

To offer to the holy black eels

Swimming up into the shady recesses,

Emissaries from another world.


At summer’s end, the tassergal swim off the coast of Pointe Imessouare.

In September, the Atlas tribes gather at Imilchil

And choose brides at the marriage fair.


At dusk,in Jemaa el Fna,Marrakesh,

Hunched figures lay out tarot cards

And trace destinies in outstretched palms;

Street urchins hiss “hashish”,

Blind beggars, expert in using their weird eyes

To accuse the world, cry to the crowd “Allah!”


Southward the Souss valley shimmers,

The oasis people harvest the date palms,

Bouncing children snatch the dropping prizes,

The women sing thanksgiving for the plenty

And the men sternly sort, weigh and pack.


In the Anti-Atlas,the Immouzer Falls

Slides reluctantly in viscous undulations,

Encasing bushes in stiff tufa sheets,

Secret dripping grottoes glistening

With wet moss and fern.

A sonorous cascade slobbers into a plunge pool,

Golden rocks with intricate curves,

Looming up through deathless blue

From veiled feminine depths.

Laughing, shouting, bathers revel,

Making love to the water.


Over Tafraoute, granite formations, mauve and red,

Transfix the eye like meteor showers, suspended in flight.

Almond trees, extending thin black sinuousbranches,

Laugh pink-white blossom at the sky;

Bitter narcotic oil they conceal,

Maliciously laced with prussic acid.


Up in the High Atlas, on a perilous pass,

The narrow road, twisting through dizzy bends,

Contorts in sheer fright, startled by the mutilated corpse

Of a toppled vehicle far below.

At night, remote stabs of light on ridiculous altitudes

Threaten still more terrifying distances to go...


At the Portuguese cistern, El Jadida,

Flooded crypt snakecharmed by a bolt of African sun,

The ceiling, vised in stone groins,

Vaults from square surly pillars

Interspersed with slender Tuscan columns,

The whole self-hypnotized in shallow water,

As pressurized sunlight jets from the central well-head.

Varanasi

On a crescent-moon sweep of the Ganges

The rejuvenated sun strikes the City of Light:

Ashrams, temples, pavilions and shrines

Shine gold and majestic, casting deep reflections.

Bathers go down to the ghats, whose roots

Reach into the water.

In the narrow streets samsara proliferates

In infinite protean forms,

But here, here is moksha.

On the river steps students practise yoga,

Smoke spirals from perennial funeral pyres

And famous spires elevate the mind.

The city that rules the earth’s centre

Gathers Creation within its mandala,

The crossroads of the soul.

Here, all is darshana,

Oneness witnessed through innumerable lenses.

Varanasi guards the eight directions;

Time itself is earthed in these walls.

The world turns through creation and destruction

But Kashi the imperishable cannot be moved;

Between two rivers, the Sword and the Averter,

See the kshetra, the chakra between the eyebrows,

Obliterator of sins.


Birds still sing in the Forest of Bliss,

Bees make gold, and blossoms swell,

All the animals prosper in peace,

And even the gods are envious.

Transparent here is the membrane

Between dimensions;

Shiva is in every stone, every atom,

Every pilgrim come here to be free.

Here, the corpse of the universe, its cycle run,

Will coil in serpent slumber.

From the Himalayas to Kanya Kumari,

India spins the pilgrims’ web,

All the fording places of the spirit,

Where avatars descend and men rise up.

Kashi, the crystal, focuses and refracts

The light of all India’s tirthas;

Kashi inheres in every place,

And every place inheres in Kashi-

The seven sacred cities and the seven sacred rivers;

The one hundred and eight seats of the Goddess;

The twelve places where the linga shone forth as a column of light;

The sixty-eight places where linga appeared self-engendered;

The four divine abodes, arms of a swastika,

Badrinath, Puri, Rameshvaram,and Dvaraka.


In every shrine Shiva-linga focus power,

Shaft set in circular base,

Womb-seat of Shakti;

From the womb a vaginal channel

Drains off libations.

A snake coils up the channel

Or winds around the shaft.

Centrifugal evolution into infinite variety;

Centripetal involution into the moveless centre;

Opposing forces body forth in stone.

Manifest, unmanifest God

Phases through innumerable forms;

The three worlds are transpierced

By the lingam of light.

A devotee, his rite completed,

Casts a makeshift lingam into the river.

These waters are liquid wisdom,

And liberation-seekers once came here

To drown themselves, happy to die in Kashi.

Bathers climb the steps of Kedara ghat,

To the self-born lingam in the temple.

In the Age of Perfection this lingam was a jewel;

Then it became gold; and, after that, silver;

And now, in the Age of Strife, it is stone.


The sun has come to Kashi for a year,

Disguised first as a beggar,then a rich man,

Then a heretic, and finally a sadhu.

A husband and wife bathe together

In a solar pool, offering squashes to the water,

Praying to conceive a son.

An old man standing in the Ganges

Cups the filthy water in his hands,

As the ashes of the dead swirl by-

To him, it is the purest nectar!

O, Ganges, quintessence of all rivers,

Moving mass of scriptures,

Vigilant energy of the Supreme!

Every drop is divinity distilled,

Cleansing ingrained sin.

Each temple, each image has its own day and hour;

Each moment in time has its pattern.

When the Earth sinks, weightless, deathless.Kashi

Will float upon the flood,


City of transcendence, sheathed soul

With five layers, each subtler towards the core-

Food, breath, heart, intellect and bliss.

The city itself is the yogic body,

Veined with meridians and channels,

A fiery ladder, a demi-god’s spine.

Here the simplest pleasures

Delight the complex man-

A succulent mouthful

Or freshly laundered clothes’ caress...

He who dies in Kashi

Hears Siva whisper in his ear

The mantra of the crossing-

Liberation for all beings.

Even the tiniest microbe, if it dies here,

Will be released into nirvana,

A crawling ant no less than a Brahmin.

These inconspicuous birds, pecking on the ground,

Were they not once celestial spirits

Translated to earth in myriad forms,

Now congregating in Kashi for the final crossing,

Each flying in at his appointed time?


In the cremation ground, the eldest son,

Clutching flaming splints of kusha grass,

Circumambulates the pyre counterclockwise

Then stoops to set the wood alight.

Once the fire has done its work

And the corpse has shrunk to nothing,

He cracks his father’s skull with a stick,

Opening an exit for the soul.

Filling a clay pot with river water,

He throws it backwards over his shoulder,

At the dimming embers, then walks away,

Not looking back, trying to tame his grief,

For the tears of the living can only pain the dead.

Zanskar

A long deep valley with no entrance,

High above the world,

High above itself.

This crystalline light brings out the gods in men.

The air is so dry and clear you can see forever,

Looking down on the earth from the heavens,

Spotting tiny human figures many miles away.

Are you a man or a snow leopard?

Cloud Kingdom

The wind charging through the empty chambers of the abandoned citadel raises little wisps of dust that rush about like ghosts. In a corner stands an ancient drum, whose echo rumbles through the voids.

A dog barks in the distance and a door slams shut.

A swastika is carved into a boulder.

A man in a goatskin steps out of the sandstorm with a curious smile. He unclenches his hand and a spinning top leaps across the ground.

A river flows uphill, beneath the black mountain.

A conch shell calls across the valley, rising and falling; the sound reverberates into infinity, shuddering the whole earth.

Caravans of thought stumble through the mountain passes, teetering on the precipice-edges, on tortuous tracks, suspended over uproarious chasms.

On the highest crag grows a single blue poppy.

Lessons of October

I gazed down from the hill at the crisscrossing roadways and the vehicles whizzing in all directions, and tingled at the thought of so much indecipherable motion and intent, the patterns made by intersecting lives, the tender web of everything, seen and unseen.


Windowless corridors of the insect hotel

Lead inward, inward...

Winking voices of multicoloured stones

Hypnotized me on the barren plain,

And bird shadows frighten me into strangeness.

A coffin full of stars slowly lifts off the ground,

A mad boy holds up a wasp in a jar.

Thoughts drift like seahorses over a reef,

As you enter the luminous garden in silence,

And a hurricane of laughter passes over the land.


Dawn throws a twinkling coin into the air,

Angels escape from a shipwreck on the moon.

The beautiful idiot tunnels through mirrors,

Salamander mirrors where history

Explodes in a blank.


Martyrdom of consciousness mortgages my bones. I am a living relic of my own religion, a premonition of the past. I interpret the garbled language of things, the Proto-Indo-European roots.