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.

Alfonso VI and the Spoils of Andalus

The three sons of Ferdinand fought amongst themselves,

United by bad blood.

The kingdoms of poetry were kingdoms of war.

None of the brilliance of scholars and scientists,

Nor philosophy, religion or verse

Could keep those little Taifa states from vicious feuding.

Not even the polylobed and interlacing arches

Of Cordoba’s Great Mosque

Could keep brothers from killing each other.

To Sancho,his eldest,Ferdinand gave Castile;

On the second son, Alfonso, he bestowed the richest portion, León;

And to the youngest,Garcia,fell Galicia’s realm.

Coveting his lands,Sancho and Alfonso

Drove their brother Garcia into exile

Then turned against each other with a vengeance.

In Seville, the guest of al-Mutamid,

Garcia wandered the irrigated gardens,

Refreshed by miraculous fountains,

And, seated on silk cushions amid colonnades,

Smiled as the whole court jousted in verse.

Likewise,Alfonso,defeated and banished,in turn,

Saw for the first time the botanical gardens of Toledo,

Enjoying the hospitality of al-Mamun,

And banqueted in columned palaces

With fellow guests in silk perfumed robes,

And played manqala with priceless ivory pieces.

He admired the easy mingling of Mozarabic craftsmen,

Jewish physicans and Muslim astronomers,

And began to dream of ruling such a realm.

Within a few years,the mighty Sancho was betrayed

And assassinated outside Zamora,

So that Alfonso was free to return

And seize the Christian kingdoms for himself;

And, after a few years, al-Mamun also

Fell to an enemy’s dagger, and was succeeded

By his corrupt weak grandson al-Qadir,

So, seeing his chance, the ambitious Alfonso

Who had so long dreamed of this moment,

Conquered Toledo without a fight,

Promising its citizens safety, property and freedom of worship;

Thus, he took possession of the most glorious citadel in Castile,

With all the wonders the Muslims bequeathed;

Palaces and courtyards resonating with poetry and song;

The qasidas of Ibn Zaydun, all passion and doom;

The pennants of the poetic champions,

Carried out of the Arabian deserts.

St Anthony's Tongue

The patron saint of lost objects,

And the cat got his tongue.

A hazardous dagger,

A necromancer’s wand.

A tiny shrivelled titbit of flesh

In a crystal cylinder.

The nub.


Bodies: immortal absences.

The first,second and third- class relics

Of Catholic imagination.

From a lullaby baby

To a dismembered corpse.


There has to be proof.

Scientists of the invisible,

Physicists of love,

We enter equations

In our book-keeping

And feel for a warm true body in the night.

Cathar Castles

Dew on the grapevines

in the Aude valley,

among the beeches and pines;

through narrow gorges,

vaginas of the Goddess,

under hermit caves.

Climb through privet and scrub oak

to Puilaurens,clinging

to the limestone,

up to the crenellated walls.

The people dug their fingers

into this earth,and cultivated

each other’s bodies

to feel the joy

that troubadours chanted

in the green bird tongue.

Only in that Bible

was there revelation.

A ghost,they say,

patrols these ruins:

the lady Blanche of Bourbon,

wife of King Peter the Cruel,

who smothered her to death

when beauty had outlived usefulness.

Along the north wall

the latrines remain,

where elegant courtiers-

Lucifer's angels-

would bare their white bums

over the vertiginous abyss.


Quèrebus on its limestone pinnacle:

hallucination luring you upwards

on steps hewn from the rock;

the wind can blow a man

straight off the mountain.

In the keep’s core you circle

the Gothic chamber-

solar sanctum of the imagined Grail-

and in the dank passages

and gloomy chambers illuminated

only by arrow-slits,

you feel the terrible heaviness

that stimulates flight.

Little Monsters

God is the persecutor of newborn children; he it is who sends tiny babies to eternal flames.


                                                                                            Julian of Eclanum


These hundred thousand years of Homo sapiens sapiens,

Trillions of neural connections in the brain…

Look at all the cannibals killing their children,

Mutilating, abandoning, torturing and raping,

Prostituting them for their own needs.

All their self-hatred they pour into their babies,

They punish them for their own sins,

Break its legs, tear its eyes out,

Touch its privates, kick it to death.

The guilty one, the persecutor.

What can the people do with their poisons

But pour them into wars and slavery,

And into their children’s veins?


The mother kills her baby

Because it might grow up to be a sorcerer,

Because it is a terrible clinging mouth,

Because she is angry with her husband

Or afraid he will leave her foraother woman,

She tosses the newborn to the sows

And watches them devour it;

She kills it and feeds it to its siblings;

She buries it alive in a shallow hole

So its brothers may see it suffocating

And though they try to save it

Their mother stamps it deep into the earth

Until it is dead.


Stroking, masturbating and sucking

Their children’s’ genitals,

The parents amuse themselves,

In incestuous trance;

Overcoming their own depression.

The men bugger the boys’ mouths and arses,

Turning themselves from victims into conquerors,

To purge their mother-polluted blood

With powerful semen

And show them to eat and not be eaten.

Their selves split into others,

And act out the scenes again and again,

Sick and dreaming.

They will march to war

To mend their broken selves,

And cannibalize the enemy,

Devour his penis, muscles and tongue,

Absorbing their strength.


The men trade seashells

Reddened with ochre

To redeem the souls of murdered newborns.

They fondle and gaze at their precious shells

For hours on end, healing their hurts.


Demons are our wetnurses.

They will beat the bewitched child

For daring to grow up and separate,

To defy their domination with each breath.

Look at the devils-how like children they are-

Dancing, lauging, farting and joking!

Have you felt the joyous rage, the rising?

A seizure in the hippocampus,the amygdala,

Releasing God from the poor cramped body.

In the bigman’s house

His enemy’s severed head is kept in honour,

Fed on choice morsels

And consulted for oracles.

At the tree hung with human placentas

The Serpent Lady reigns

Over a fearful congregation;

Her priests cut off their own genitals

And run riot through the town.

Futures

See the traders forming alliances or operating solo,

Roaming widely or staying still,

Chasing one particular stock or voracious for all,

Scheming and reacting, living and dying,

Speculating in their magic mirrors.

As ciphers jittering on a screen

Decide the rise and fall of civilisations,

And the Brownian motion of algorithms

Tips the market this way and that.

Unhappy hunters, follow the running stag

That will lead you to your doom!

The predator, it seems, becomes the prey.

What to do when the funhouse isn’t fun any more?

Because I Am Lonely I Know I Am Alive

They are building the Tower of Babel again,

With new technology but old ambitions.

As before,there will be lies and simulations.

What is it in man that he should hate himself

And purpose his own damnation?

I cannot live in that Tower;

Let me out into the wilderness.

I am with the nobodies, the everybodies.

They call themselves superior who conquer

With force,not with reason.

The bombs that are dropping on them over there

Are dropping on us here.

Grace

It is the third person, the Holy Ghost,

That moves when she moves.

Her eyelids are theology to me;

The whorls in her fingertips

Are a Milky Way.

Because she exists I can be sure

That God is real, and everywhere.

Catholic no more,I am thankful

For the chalices and vestments

An adolescent boy cast off in anger,

For the Midnight Masses

And the Ave Marias;

Without them I could not appreciate

This charisma, this grace.

Beauty’s rebellion tutors me

In strictures of freedom;

There is a glamour in society

That mediates the pain.

Suddenly a miraculous incident

Brings the distant near;

And wretched struggling desire

Becomes the hope of love.

Neither work nor knowledge

Have any place here;

One simply must believe.

Mystical body,precious cult

I serve, in union most alone!

Lost Languages

She was the last one, the last speaker,

And the words came slowly to her now,

There was no-one left to talk to,

No-one to understand,

An old woman,more and more alone,

A whole world disappearing.

She lay on the bed in her small house,

The grammar of her body coming apart,

All the precious exact names for reindeer

Muted and killed.

Soon she would be gone

Back to the place where the words came from.


When Captain Cook’s scientists

First discovered it off Hawaii,

They named the darkfaced fish “Moorish idol”,

Pleased with their invention,

They sketched it and classified it,

Never consulting the Hawaiians,

Who had always known it as kihikihi,

“Crescent shaped,” “sailing zigzag”.


The Marovo of the Solomon Islands

Observed every aspect of fishes’ behaviour

And named them precisely:

Ukuka “the behaviour of shoals

When individuals drift and circle as if drunk,”

Udumu,” a large school so closely packed

As to resemble a single object,”

Sakoto, “quiet almost motionless schools at rest,

Looking like a gathering of mourners.”


The Borôro people of the Amazon

Would specify exact times for meetings

By coded gestures of arm and hand

Denoting precise angle and location

Of the sun in the sky at the chosen hour

And by pointing to various parts

Of head,face and neck.


The Nivkhs of Outer Manchuria

Employed twenty-seven different classifiers

To count and place precisely

Every possible object in the world.

There was nothing that could not be designated

In the memory theatre they lived in.

They counted the suns and moons for their children.

They sang their songs alone.

At the Chateau Lacoste

Under the stone arch of the Goats’ Gate,

Past shuttered houses,crouched and spying,

You climb over cobbles to the wolf in the mist…

Beloved residence of the Marquis de Sade,

Fortress-theatre of reckless imagination ,

Where the same man who would revel

With his children at hide-and-seek

Also choreographed pornographic fiestas

With virgins, valets and whores.

Here he could always return in trouble,

Fleeing the law and enemies’ revenge,

Safe among the contrary peasants

Who shrugged off his every scandal

As the normal antics of a nobleman

And never ,to the end,betrayed him,

Though he scorned them as canaille.


From the ruined ramparts,you survey

Foreboding country,the mother wolf

That whelped a criminal-martyr.

Red clay soil and dark green olive trees,

Mustard yellow and orange of autumn,

A breeze in the rosemary and thyme...

You wander the narrow stone alleys

At twilight ,the buildings turning gold

Then yellow,then grey-white...

France will be a part of you,always,

However far from her superb excess,

Urging abandon,rebellion and love.

What’s a man without obsessions and delusions?

One carries on,despite the knowledge

That finally,the longsuffering villagers

Turned on their disgraced seigneur

And tore his hated castle down.

The Ship of Theseus

Not a plank or nail

Of the original survives,

All replaced,

Yet the same craft it is;-

The Ship of Theseus,

My paper boat

On an autumn pond

In the park

Where I never was.

Demonology

Something in the blood

Calls you back to the black book.

Would you rise to the seventh hierarchy

And abide among the Furies,

Spreading discord,evil and war,

Ruled by Abaddon?


You can call me La Rue.

A priest condemned to the fires.

The dukes of Hell come riding to my door.


Abraxas,

Guide me by this opal ring

In the ways of heresy.

These are my scorpion days.


Sound the bells,

Drive evil away!

Subtle perversion is my mistress.

What does the black book counsel?

Read it backwards.

Its letters are written in blood.


There’s a black dog at the crossroads,

Always there as I approach.

In a ruined church at midnight

Where toads spit venom on the shattered altar

The cursed priest lifts the black Host.


The fallen angel Caim

Will answer your questions with burning ash.

See,he is that blackbird on a branch at your window.

He will open your ears

To the language of animals

And the running waters.


Look about you: the possessed

Walk side by side with you on the streets,

No different from you,

Their souls controlled by others.


Babylonian voices take me over.

The Devil comes tall and handsome,

Dressed all in black,

Full of ingenious persuasion,

Eloquent and unknown.


Imp in a bottle,

Are you good or evil today?

With English words

I catch poems in my incantation bowl.


Satanael,speak to me

In the flames of falling stars!

It was you, they say, who created Adam

Then saw he was imperfect,

With life leaking from his right foot

And a forefinger in the shape of a serpent.

Inhale/Exhale

Cadmium orange and ivory the Kalahari, furred with grasses and stunted trees, and then the viridian myriad-rivering pale-gold-crystalline lagoon-glittered yellow-grass-floodplain-drenching lily-eyed Okavango Delta,delicate as a bee-eater poised on a branch,and the rainstorm-scenting elephant herds stride in,cutting intricate trails through the tawny grasses, carrying the winter deluge on their trunks..their hearts are little raindrops bulging towards the earth and their ears whud thunder across the wetlands, they plunge with glee in the blissful pools,frolicking and tumbling,thwacking their trunks in delight...

Oh carmine and crimson sunsets!The air is thick with stabbing,swallowing,flapping,screeching,cackling birds!Herds of impala race through the water,silhouetted in explosions of spray...Buffalo by the thousand,gently bellowing,steaming the misty morning air with their breath,steadily advance across the shallows,curved horns one endless joyous rhythm...

Green specks of phytoplankton in bloom drift through sunbeams in the Alaskan waters...the planet rolls on its axis,the sun stands proud and millions of herrings emerge from deep water, heading for the shallows to spawn,pulsing in waves along the shoreline and all is a white soup of milt...flocks of common murres lance down through green water in pursuit of prey,trailing comet-flares of bubbles...

Steller sea lions spin through green gloom,almost colliding but twisting away at the last instant..one bull sea lion floats broken and doome don the surface,as a pod of orcas keeps charging in and ramming his body with brutal tail whacks,making pass after pass, remorselessly methodically killing him, then pulling him underwater in pairs to tear his flesh with ther teeth..
In the still morning air come the exhalations of humpback whales,white plumes smoking in the blue air,rasping and foghorning..

Across the green Serengeti the myriads of white-bearded wildebeest migrate,one endless wave for a moment,then dispersing again in exquisite patterns...a lioness sits Buddha-like surveying the distance with serene golden eyes..tall dust devils twist high into the air and undulate across the horizon...a female wildebeest on the move ,looking out for cheetahs and hyenas,walks away from the herd,lies down on her side and heaves her baby out of her body,her head turned to watch the calf emerge...

Arctic summer: the ice is splitting and turquoise pools riddle the expanses in the heat shimmer...narwhals surface and joust with their tusks in an icehole...snowgeese flock in the sky...enormous swarms of sea snails and jellyfish ride the North Atlantic Drift...blood is scarlet on the ice as a polar bear rips skin and blubber from a slaughtered seal..wobbling in masses, walruses clash and quarrel,honking,spitting and stabbing at each other with their tusks,then flop back into stupor,farting and dribbling through the warm afternoons...

Up the cold clear rivers of British Columbia the salmon are returning,hard against the currents to shed their lives,-chum,coho,pink,sockeye and chinook...grizzly bears stand on top of the river falls,catching leaping salmon in their open mouths ...The wolf-eyed trees watch every motion,every heartbeat in their green sky, and thunderstorms drip under the Spirit Bear’s claws...

In the winter waters off South Africa, in the clash of the Agulhas and Benguela Currents, billions of pilchards gather in mammoth shoals, while the great ocean’s predators converge to feast, the sharks,dolphins,fur seals and Bryde’s whales , and gannets in myriads bomb into the waves, slicing down through the foam..waltzing dolphin pods patiently herd the massive globes of pilchards to the surface, and the mayhem begins...

Catholic Magic

It is time for the Mass of St Secaire: the Gascon peasants prevail upon their priest too kill a man with the Liturgy, saying Mass backwards in a ruined church, with a black Host ,ending on the stroke of midnight; thereafter, the chosen sacrifice slowly withers away of a wasting disease.

Pope Silvester II pores over Arabic astronomical treatises in secret; the mechanical talking head prophesies in the stillness of his chambers, answering whichever questions he puts to it..

Pope Honorius III is writing a grimoire by night.Babylonian demons stir about him; his jewelled ring harbours shifting lights.This secret work is intended to sit beside the Roman Ritual in a country priest’s library. I conjure you, O Book, that you be profitable to those who use you in all their affairs, I conjure you, by the power of the blood of Jesus Christ, that is contained in the chalice, that you be good to them who read you.

There will be revolutions,assassinations,hidden crimes;demons will be invoked and set to work;there will be profit in terror, business without limits.Pacts will be made with nefarious powers.

They should have used the Malleus Maleficorum on me...-All those wretched Sunday mornings in church,bored out of my adolescent mind,making up little sins in the confessional to keep the priest happy,saying penance like a plastic robot,the day long forgotten when Father Daly had proudly told my mother: “By God, that boy’s full of religion!”

Scent of the Jaguar

A low vibration from out of the dark.

A gruff hoarse rumble.

A guttural war-cry

Rising to crescendo.

A coughing grunt

That bristles the trees.

Under the hunter’s moon.

There is something out there. In here.

Secret brother,stay alive!


Mists cling to the forest canopy,

Incandescent in the moonlight,

And a chacalaca calls.

In a limestone hill cave

Chac is carved on the wall,

With erect penis

And extended tongue,

Patron of the blood-letter,

The willing sacrifice.

Soft rumours of running water

Whisper off the walls,

Hushed voices from the underworld.


In a bag of jaguar leather

The shaman stores his medicine;

Tonight he will paint himself

Like the jaguar,

Prowl, climb, swim, stalk and kill

While the jungle holds its breath.


Here is a ceramic pot

Shaped like a jaguar’s head

With the mouth emitting

An ecstatic howl;

Once it was used

To administer psychotropic enemas

To shamans and kings.


Mesmeric stare

Dispassionate and all-powerful

And that ominous odour,

Lithe rippling burnished gold

Splotched and flecked

With dark code,

It steals in and out

Of this world.

It snaps vertebrae,

Crumples skulls,

Crushes windpipes,

Strips bodies to the bone.


Were-jaguars, the Olmecs,

Deforming their heads

To emulate the great cat’s skull...

See the serpentine mosaics at La Venta,

Depicting ferocious jaguars,

The colossal basalt jaguar heads

And the jaguar altars close by...

The Olmec kings were descended

From the union of human women

And male jaguars,

Babyfaced and snarling,

Clawed and fanged for victory,

Dream-princes of the night.


The Jaguar Knights are dancing

With shields and clubs,

The warriors of the Maya,the Inca,the Aztecs,

Roaring,hissing,growling,

Swallowing the night-beast’s supremacy,

To hold the world under their claws

And suffer no enemies.


The jaguar stalks the stars

Above Copán,

Escorting the sun to dawn;

The god-cat’s moon eyes

Follow the action

On the ball court;

Soon rich blood will be drawn.

(In)finite

                                              You know, I was no Einstein.

                                                                     Albert Einstein


Infinity,or the illusion of it,

Keeps me in business.

My world is finite, without edge.

Demented concepts are my speciality,

All there is,in the end.

Neither and both are my twins.


I can’t help thinking of all the mathematicians

Who have killed themselves...

Did numbers drive them mad

Or were they just lonely like the rest of us?


On a winter beach,

Picking up stones and releasing them

If they do not quite possess the shape I want,

I try to catch the curve of things,

The distance within.

Each thought is like a message from a neutron star.


I look at my hands,

Ridged and veined,slightly calloused,

And remember they were made

In the cores of stars.


My life is a Möbius strip,

A Klein bottle.

There’s terror in the beauty,

Panic in the idleness.


I am trying in vain to make a universe

That looks a little like this one.

All I knw is that nothing can be perfectly smooth

Or perfectly still.


At night from my window

I can see the Ferris wheel on the pier,

Lit up and turning.

Somehow everything fits together

And no-one really knows how.


Will the cosmos one day collapse in on itself

And disappear into the tinest dot

Only to be born again

With the same ecstasy and terror?

Will history repeat itself entire

And find me standing here,this moment, once more?

The Lost Books

I have read them all, the lost books:

Homer’s Margites,Confucius’s Book of Music,

Love’s Labour’s Won and Byron’s Memoirs,

The burnt plays of Aeschylus and Dead Souls Part Two...


No words you will ever read could be as marvellous

As those, forever invisible,

Wyverns and griffons in the ether.


Literature began with a savage laugh.

Margites the human monster, the absurd puppet,

Blunders along, ignorant and inept,

A fool worthy of his own epic,

Still amusing the blind old entertainer in his old age.


The silent voices cry out

Like the two hundred and sixty Confucian scholars

Buried alive on the orders of the Emperor Shih-huang-ti

To prevent them from reconstructing the classics from memory.


One thinks of the precious box of papers

Flaubert buried in his garden at Croisset

As the Prussian army advanced across France;

Letters ,notes and drafts for unwritten works,

Perhaps the proposed satire on socialism

Or his Second Empire novel.


And Rimbaud’s notebook,

Misplaced by the friend to whom it was entrusted,

With fifty or sixty unpublished poems,

The only one of which he could recall

"Something about geese and ducks

Splashing around in a pond.”

Astronomy for the Damned (The Lonely Astronaut)

From the atmospheres and oceans of the primeval Earth

These molecules of me...

Here is the information, the nucleic acids of words.

This instant in the billionfold history of a planet.

The instincts of the hunter-gatherer.

Climb the steps of the ziggurat, astronaut,

Ascend into the cockpit of time.

Listen to the stars,

Speaking in the language of dolphins.


Stars,nurses of life and death,

We are your holy barbarians.

Fish,reptile,mammal,human,

An embryo is evolving in the womb.

The thoughts of every animal on earth

Are in my brain.

Can the elegance of science

Redeem me?


To hike the mountains of Mars

Is my vocation;

Gas, dust and stars,

Billions on billions of stars,

Spin me a galaxy

To call my own.


Golden-helmeted for the crusade,

Jousting with stellar invaders,

I breathe the artificial air

Of unread poems.


Death and time work their magic

On my secret evolution;

The chemistry of proteins,

The neurology of brains-

My poetry!

(Lightning and ultraviolet

Breaking apart the simple molecules

Of the primitive atmosphere,

The fragments recombining

Into ever more complexity,

Then dissolving in the oceans...)


I can see great herds of trilobites hunting across the Cambrian ocean floors...

Myriads of superb adaptations succeeding one another with vertiginous speed..

I can see the first trees shoving against the sky...

God’s parasites, honey-thieves of light and air,

Carbon-pirates flying the skull and crossbones,

We sacred animals ravage the land as fast as we imagine it.

Inhaling and exhaling one another,

We suckle at the same teats.

Into the cell’s subtle labyrinth I voyage-

A galaxy evolved over aeons,

Self-maintaining, transforming molecules,

Storing energy, plotting its own reproduction,

A microdot of frenzy and patience.

Hectic nucleus, whirling coils and strands,

Is there any end to your wisdom?

Multitudinous nucleotides bear me in their sea-snake swarm...

Limitless combinations await us,

The undreamt faces and minds in the core,

Future monarchs of mankind!


The nebulae are on fire with death;

Defunct wraith-worlds drift near the core-star,

The remnant sun a small hot star,

Collapsed to unimaginable density,

Cooling with degenerate indifference

To a black dwarf.


Rorschach blobs of galaxies,

Exist for just a few seconds

Then dissolve,only to reform,

Dying, or committing suicide.

Star-clusters plunge through the Milky Way plane

And out the other side,

To slow,reverse and hurtle back again.

Hot newborn stars squawl in the spiral arms.

Behind my eyes.

In the cerebral cortex.

August Afternoon in Paris

Beloved Sunday, the soul’s respite...

The shutters have come down on cafés and boulangeries.The bellowing traffic is muffled and thinned.

Empty chairs around the fountain in the park.

The waiter almost smiles.

I find a stone bench by the Seine and watch the barges pass by.

It’s not my actions I remember most, it’s my inactions; the not-done is my gift to the world.I am everything that I have not performed.

Can’t you see that everything has changed- and nothing? All your life you have been fooled by appearances.All your life has been ruled by fear.

In the terrace gardens of the Cluny Museum, the Unicorn Forest rustles with poems and quests; the Lower Mysteries of Paris are everywhere around you, once you start to see.

In the flea market at Clignancourt I look into an antique gilded mirror:could that be the face of an eighteenth-century aristocrat, strutting the opulent corridors of Versailles(where the rulers of the world would crouch anywhere they pleased for a shit)? No, rather a peasant, a potato-eater.A Gaul.

I like to spend Sundays with the dead.Their conversation is most congenial to me.Prowling the streets of Pere-Lachaise,with a map of the netherworld,I seek out the mentors in my head.

The artificial river beaches ripple in the heat, Disney oases of palm trees and sand. The day slowly evolves like a game of pétanque.

Then, one morning, the cafe opposite is open again. The shutters are up everywhere. Workers are hurrying along, grabbing something to eat.

No time, no time.

Zinc Cafe (2ieme Arrondissement)

A ballon of rosé, and an oeuf mayonnaise,

That’s all.

I sit staring into space.

Space stares into me.

The waiters practice the art of indifference

With supercilious expertise.

I am part of the furniture,

Not here at all,

Yet so ridiculously alive.

Believe it or not,

My greatest lies have been my greatest truths.

Keep it simple, I tell myself,

Keep out of trouble, can’t you?


The glistening leaves on the pavement

After the autumn rain,

The leaf-smell in my nostrils,

Heady as cocaine...-

That child’s sailboat launched

In a Tuileries fountain

One bright afternoon...

Translator

To live is to translate.

These are my horrors; cave paintings of a damned mind...

Impossible exactitude drives me on,

Endlessly rewriting the world,

To resemble some perfect original.

Normality conspires to reclaim

The oddness in these words,

To turn a carnival into a shopping centre.

Can I catch here and there a motif, a refrain

From out of the chaos?

What will foreign eyes appropriate,

What will they assimilate of this?

Find a style of being,

Such is my imperative since birth,

And the knack is not easily won.

What is my natural habitat?

I have not found it yet,

Not on these streets or in these days

Or in this country or any other.

A life spent at the borders,

Busy with espionage and contraband,

Is my calling; the world hangs

On a semi-colon.

Have I misread the situation again?

Misunderstanding is a way of life,

A way of getting by.

Too many compromises

Hedge me in my neverland,

But I press on towards the next crossroads.

Fascists

“A few excitable Catholics and ardent Socialists think this war matters, but for the general public it’s just a bunch of bloody dagoes killing each other.”

Randolph Churchill



What did they know or care about Spain?

The cause was much greater than that.

Conservatives,monarchists,Catholics,

Paladins saddling up to slay the dragon,

They brought their rage from many lands,

To the proving ground.


In Toledo Republican militiamen,

Purging the city of their enemies,

Search the house of Roy Campbell,

And rooting through his library

Seize on a copy of the Divine Comedy

Shouting, “Italian!Fascist!”

The squad levell their rifles

At the foreigner, eager to shoot.

Quick-wittedly,the poet

Grabs a Dostoyevsky novel

Off another shelf,and roars back,

“Russian!Communist!”

A sticky moment.

Then fingers ease off triggers,

And the militia,

Deciding he must be neutral,

Turn and leave the house.

Outside in the street

Slaughtered Carmelite monks lie in a row

Under a tarpaulin.

Rua dos Douradores (With Pessoa)

Night falls on the street of sour oranges.

The street of the soul’s accountant,

The man with so many alter egos

He forgot the name he had been born with.

This simple unremarkable street

Was all he required,

More marvellous than any argosy

Undertaken by Vasco da Gama,

He loathed the very idea of travel,

Scorned the vulgarity of packing a suitcase,

Despised the mindlessness

Of those who must displace themselves

In order to see and feel.


One city, one unicorn forest.

One language, finite yet infinite.

To walk the length of this street

Is to circumambulate the world.

Each step is a poem, a breath.

Hermann Hesse in Maulbronn

Through the gate in the high wall, he entered,

Into the silent square,

And saw the water rising from the fountain

And falling in exquisite threads,

From level to level,

And the gracious Cistercian monastery complex,

The pale brick walls and high arched windows,

The terraced slopes with ordered vines.

He wandered through empty halls,

Through sunlight and shadow,

And impossible harmonies

Menaced his soul.


A schoolboy about to crack up,

He could hear the forest in his veins.

The goal,too simple and brutal,

The freedom he held like a grasshopper in his hands,

Terrorized him with its mathematics.

The church organ suddenly started,

And called out stronger and stronger,

Profound rumbling chords

Interlacing with the lightest harmonics,

And all he could do was walk towards it,

Over the cliff of sound.

Cartagena

There’s something surely to be said

For gold,sugar and slaves

If they could build such walls as these,

Which,in 1741,so the guidebook informs me,

Held off an unprecedented armada

Of almost two hundred British ships.

I know I shouldn’t,but I find myself drawn

To the torture instruments

In the Museum of the Inquisition

And to gawp at the denunciation window

At horseback height outside,

Where anyone with a grudge

Could slip the name of a “heretic”

Through the iron grille.

Had I lived in those times,no doubt I myself

Should have been accused

Of a little witchcraft or blasphemy,

And well would I have deserved

My rather painful death.

Cream walls and cobalt balconies,

Mansions yellow,pink and red,

Lavender,sienna or tangerine,

Absorb me in their reverie.

On narrow streets loitering men

Ogle the passing beauties

Who float like runway models,

Half-madonna,half-whore.

In the mornings, the streets smell of dust,

In the afternoons, the salty trade winds blow

Through the palm fronds and ferns,

And the air smells damp and leafy.

From a rooftop I look out over

The pantile roofs,and the Caribbean,

And the courtyards,each with a fountain

Playing different music,

Why did I come here? I’m not sure,

Not sure of anything,

But perhaps I had to go somewhere.

And,as these people so wisely say,

“He who must die, must die in the dark,

Even though he sells candles.”

The Jew of Cordoba

Drumbeat in the dark, ever louder,

Dirge of the procession swaying down the narrow street...

Huge twisted golden serpent candelabra

Guard the velvet float,all candlesmoke and incense,

The Virgin,serene and cerulean,in the centre,

Lilies flaming all around her,

As she rides on the shoulders of her sweating devotees

And an old priest walks ahead,

Holding the gold crucifix high.


Café con leche and tostón for breakfast:

Olive oil from the Romans,

Sugar and cinnamon brought by the Moors.

Oh sweet scent of tiny white orange blossoms…

In the heart’s mihrab I turn to face

The Mecca of memory and yearning…

I prefer the impure, in all things.


In the only remaining synagogue,

I tour the white marble walls,so intricately carved,

Long plastered over after the building

Had been converted into a hospital; for hydrophobes.

Here,in this tiny space, the wretches

Screamed and writhed and begged God’s mercy.


On the shady patio,in a tiled mihrab,

Pink and yellow rose petals float

In a marble water basin;

Flowering gardenias and banana trees

Encircle the fountain,

And the only sounds

Are birds and water...

My greedy fingers reach for pistachio halva

Perfumed with essence of roses,

And plump sticky dates.

Berlin Nights

Nadja dances every night at the KitKat Club,

Without shame or .fear.

Desire is her art, her vocation.

It has always been this way.

Here,in the musty dark,

Successes are failures,

Failures are successes

And all are united

In the flesh.

In the witching hour

All the freaks come out

To work their magic

And no one is unwanted or unloved.

Down the stairs she enters,

And sheds her silver dress and cape,

To dance like a Babylonian priestess

Then leads her chosen partner

To the canopied bed.

Papa Hemingway's Cuba

The first time he came here

Hemingway caught nineteen marlin and three sailfish

And after that he was in love forever.

He drank mojitos at La Bodeguita

And daiquiris at El Floridita.

Many mojitos, many daiquiris.

You can see the very stool where he used to sit.

I walk the narrow cobbled streets,

Past peeing dogs and begging urchins,

And grand buildings rotting away.

In the house outside Havana,

His fishing cap lies on the bed,

Shotgun shells stand in rows on the desk,

And stuffed heads of African beasts adorn the walls.

Another tourist bus is pulling into the parking lot.

The waters are fished out now.

The man who lived here belonged to no country,

Belonged to no-one and nothing but his work,

His tender furies remain in the land and sea.

Shotgun shells stand in rows on the desk.

Another tourist bus is pulling into the parking lot.