You know how seductive it is,
The possibility of chaos, of catastrophe,
The spires collapsing and the grand facades just crumbling away;-
It’s all there in the newspapers each morning.
Everywhere is danger and disaster,
A city that will kill you
Slowly, malevolently.
The psychoanalysts are doing good business,
Nodding and smiling and watching the clock,
Fairy godmothers to the rich and unhappy.
In grand cafes elegant ladies drink coffee from tiny cups
While white-jacketed waiters serve patisserie with silver tongs...
Sleek women totter along the pavements in miniskirts and high heels,
Thrusting through the thick hot air,
Desperate to be thinner, fitter, more beautiful,
And rats breed faster and faster in the alleys.
The ghost of Saint Eva Perón walks the streets:
For weeks after her secret death
Her corpse was moved from house to house,
Till her guard went mad with desire for her
And ended his life wandering the streets,
Raving about his lost love.
Meanwhile, Juan’s thirteen-year-old mistress
Was parading round the house in the dead Eva’s clothes,
While the ageing dictator lounged and watched.
You are stranded here, at the edge of the world,
And ruined days turn into ruined months and years, ruined lives,
By slow torture the state will vex and oppress you
And only Creole cunning wins the day.
Nothingness surrounds you,
Immense and malign,
And sometimes you feel sure you will lose your mind
With all this fury inside you
From the living nightmares of each day,
It all feels like a horrible accident,
As the ground shifts again beneath your feet
And hurricanes charge up from Antarctica,
Turning the city upside-down.
In the tango halls the band plays songs
Of love, misery and death,
And couples dance with solemn suffering faces,
Moving fluidly across the floor, with dramatic turns
And complicated steps,
Hips and legs engaged in erotic badinage,
Upper bodies held apart in tension,
Heads touching but eyes turned away,
In brief yet tumultuous trysts.
This, from the criminals, immigrants and sailors
In the ports, the desperate yearning
For happier days long gone,
They would dance all night till dawn
Then fall to knife-fights and murders;
Such excess could only end in violence.
Around the dance floor women sit alone,
Awaiting an invitation to dance,
While the men lurk at the back, in the gloom,
Brooding as they roll the whisky round their mouths,
And with a nod of the head a man
Invites his chosen woman to dance,
And, after she grimly assents,
They meet on the dance floor briefly
Then return once more to separate tables
Not even exchanging a word.
What lives between the city and the pampa?
This was meant to be the Promised Land,
Now see it-all squandered, corrupted and betrayed,
Home to frauds and chancers,
Everything imported,
That swagger and bravado just a sham,
A cover for self-hatred and mediocrity,
This is the beggared decaying land
Of the disillusioned,
Who came here just to get rich, not to found utopia,
And loved only Europe and the faraway.
Unhappiness starts from some dark seed
Within you, grows and takes root,
And pretty soon you cannot live without it,
It is all you cherish and rely on,
And each day you awake, resigned.
The dead have no names, but they walk the streets,
The people were warned but they turned away, paid no heed,
When faces began to disappear from the streets,
Or vanished from their homes,
The young and the clever, with too many ideas,
Kidnapped into unmarked cars in front of everyone,
While everyone else turned away and sleepwalked on,
Telling themselves “there must be some good reason for it...”
With the proper training,
Public servants, skilled in bureaucratic procedure,
Learned to interrogate, torture and murder.
“First we shall kill the subversives,
Then the collaborators,and the sympathisers,
Then the indifferent; who think themselves safe,
And last of all the timid.”
Monday, April 28, 2008
Hildegard of Bingen
Rhine water’s cloister veiled her
And choired through her veins,
Sure that bone would bloom
And the crowned skull sing.
Buried alive, death’s bride,
She swallowed the medicine
Of darkness, shocked into vision
By the wandering Elohim.
Hooded love held her in silk,
And proffered dark wines
To make her fly above the hills
And vineyards, crusader-queen
Of another Jerusalem, somewhere.
Disease and madness shook
Her little frame into rapture,
The barefoot child brought
Over cold stones to the altar,
A lighted taper in each hand.
Why did others not see what she saw?
Could they not feel pure flame
Scorch through to the marrow
And visit seed upon the womb,
The Virgin’s nectared honeycomb?
At the junction of two rivers
She broke the mind’s maidenhead,
Concocting physic for the unwhole,
And wedding-feasts of sound.
And choired through her veins,
Sure that bone would bloom
And the crowned skull sing.
Buried alive, death’s bride,
She swallowed the medicine
Of darkness, shocked into vision
By the wandering Elohim.
Hooded love held her in silk,
And proffered dark wines
To make her fly above the hills
And vineyards, crusader-queen
Of another Jerusalem, somewhere.
Disease and madness shook
Her little frame into rapture,
The barefoot child brought
Over cold stones to the altar,
A lighted taper in each hand.
Why did others not see what she saw?
Could they not feel pure flame
Scorch through to the marrow
And visit seed upon the womb,
The Virgin’s nectared honeycomb?
At the junction of two rivers
She broke the mind’s maidenhead,
Concocting physic for the unwhole,
And wedding-feasts of sound.
Festivals
Dawn horsemen of the Common Ridings hacking round the Scottish Border fields, soldiers of tradition, drunk on rum and milk, bearing their standards high;
Madmen running with the bulls at Pamplona, in the storming terror and bedlam, chancing the horns of fate, on a flood of beer, sangria and blood;
Music galloping over the Glastonbury fields, all stars and dawns and dancing moons, while summer rains golden showers on the heads of the young;
Hogmanay crowds in Edinburgh, wild and whiskied, plunging off the cliff of midnight into the suns’ abyss, while the world goes up in fireworks;
The crazed High Mass of La Tomatina, in the brimming streets of Buñol, the red warriors bombarding each other with the sacred grenades to ecstasy and exhaustion;
The wild giants of las Fallas lurching through the fiery roar and smoke of winter’s end, spewing scathing verses, as hell releases its demons in furies of joy;
The flaming beacons, marching torches and leaping flares of Lewes Bonfire Night, as the year rolls like a burning tar barrel through the dark, and the Devil-Pope explodes in hellfire;
Oktoberfest revellers, swimming to oblivion’s Barbary shores across foaming ambrosial oceans of beer, for life is just too blonde and beautiful to bear;
Aztec ecstasies on the Day of the Dead, all the living skeletons feasting on the bread of souls, raising pyramids of sugar skulls to the sun;
Mardi Gras in New Orleans, casting miracles and signs to the mad, as beads to Indians, black messiahs damned to dance through the hurricane;
Shining brown bodies of Trinidad, carousing on waves of rum and sunfire, wallowing in the mud of sex and sound, rising to the heights of Africa;
Smoke of jasmine, incense and incense in the Kandy streets at Esala Perahera, gold silk elephants processing through the drum-storm, the Buddha’s tooth borne high in its casket;
Delirious dancers frenzying under the full moon on Hat Rin beach in Thailand, dissolving into the waves in a mushroom-cloud of love and wonder;
Holi lunatics, high on bhang, running riot across India, painting the world with vivid colours, the full moon’s bonfire showering them with white fire, with soma;
The naked star-blessed hordes of Kumbh Mela, amid the circus of gods, stampeding into the Ganges’ nectar, to cleanse their carnival lifetimes of sin;
Mongol warriors galloping and wrestling on the Naadam fields, swilling the sky’s kumiss, and singing their arrows to the target,the sun’s white banner theirs to win.
Madmen running with the bulls at Pamplona, in the storming terror and bedlam, chancing the horns of fate, on a flood of beer, sangria and blood;
Music galloping over the Glastonbury fields, all stars and dawns and dancing moons, while summer rains golden showers on the heads of the young;
Hogmanay crowds in Edinburgh, wild and whiskied, plunging off the cliff of midnight into the suns’ abyss, while the world goes up in fireworks;
The crazed High Mass of La Tomatina, in the brimming streets of Buñol, the red warriors bombarding each other with the sacred grenades to ecstasy and exhaustion;
The wild giants of las Fallas lurching through the fiery roar and smoke of winter’s end, spewing scathing verses, as hell releases its demons in furies of joy;
The flaming beacons, marching torches and leaping flares of Lewes Bonfire Night, as the year rolls like a burning tar barrel through the dark, and the Devil-Pope explodes in hellfire;
Oktoberfest revellers, swimming to oblivion’s Barbary shores across foaming ambrosial oceans of beer, for life is just too blonde and beautiful to bear;
Aztec ecstasies on the Day of the Dead, all the living skeletons feasting on the bread of souls, raising pyramids of sugar skulls to the sun;
Mardi Gras in New Orleans, casting miracles and signs to the mad, as beads to Indians, black messiahs damned to dance through the hurricane;
Shining brown bodies of Trinidad, carousing on waves of rum and sunfire, wallowing in the mud of sex and sound, rising to the heights of Africa;
Smoke of jasmine, incense and incense in the Kandy streets at Esala Perahera, gold silk elephants processing through the drum-storm, the Buddha’s tooth borne high in its casket;
Delirious dancers frenzying under the full moon on Hat Rin beach in Thailand, dissolving into the waves in a mushroom-cloud of love and wonder;
Holi lunatics, high on bhang, running riot across India, painting the world with vivid colours, the full moon’s bonfire showering them with white fire, with soma;
The naked star-blessed hordes of Kumbh Mela, amid the circus of gods, stampeding into the Ganges’ nectar, to cleanse their carnival lifetimes of sin;
Mongol warriors galloping and wrestling on the Naadam fields, swilling the sky’s kumiss, and singing their arrows to the target,the sun’s white banner theirs to win.
Bari
All the should-have- beens...-
what do they matter to us now?
This is what we have, what we are,
For which we must be grateful.
And, after all, we have always been
Experts in missed opportunities,
Prey to the avaricious fool
And the thieving crook.
Ruthless energy is fanatical to vent itself
In practical endeavour, to conquer
And convince the world,
And discover new Americas
Of pleasure and profit.
Here there is no melancholy,
Only strong accents of desire,
Calculating the next hectic transaction,
In this rational geometrical grid,
Without heroes or martyrs.
The scirocco and the tramontana
Trouble us equally,
The mysticism of dry stone
And the pragmatism of the sea.
Remember Joachim Murat,
Maniac of vanity,
Swaggering in his self-designed green uniform,
With golden cordons, silve ribbons
And red boots, in love with women
And horses, riding up on a white steed
To lay the foundation stone
Of the new town he had planned.
St Nicholas extends his wizard hand
To bless the sailor, the merchant and the thief,
And in the timeless souk of a moment
Life haggles over subtle advantages,
Speculating with inventive glee,
Desperate to expand, to survive.
Green oriflammes with crescent moon
Wave in the wind as Saracens
Charge on their darting Berber horses
And fire their words like arrows
Into the heart of the sun;
Thus an emirate of sphinxes
Codes its mathematics
Into the air, munificent as Allah.
what do they matter to us now?
This is what we have, what we are,
For which we must be grateful.
And, after all, we have always been
Experts in missed opportunities,
Prey to the avaricious fool
And the thieving crook.
Ruthless energy is fanatical to vent itself
In practical endeavour, to conquer
And convince the world,
And discover new Americas
Of pleasure and profit.
Here there is no melancholy,
Only strong accents of desire,
Calculating the next hectic transaction,
In this rational geometrical grid,
Without heroes or martyrs.
The scirocco and the tramontana
Trouble us equally,
The mysticism of dry stone
And the pragmatism of the sea.
Remember Joachim Murat,
Maniac of vanity,
Swaggering in his self-designed green uniform,
With golden cordons, silve ribbons
And red boots, in love with women
And horses, riding up on a white steed
To lay the foundation stone
Of the new town he had planned.
St Nicholas extends his wizard hand
To bless the sailor, the merchant and the thief,
And in the timeless souk of a moment
Life haggles over subtle advantages,
Speculating with inventive glee,
Desperate to expand, to survive.
Green oriflammes with crescent moon
Wave in the wind as Saracens
Charge on their darting Berber horses
And fire their words like arrows
Into the heart of the sun;
Thus an emirate of sphinxes
Codes its mathematics
Into the air, munificent as Allah.
Antonio Canova
Sensuous delicacy of the body,
Whose curves and countercurves
The eye’s caress can only hazard!
Absolute majesty of line
Conducts imagination to unforeseen ends...
The priestly hand takes up its tools,
Marmoreal offerings to fashion
From human perplexity.
Canny diplomat of worlds, Canova
Serves at the borders, detached
From affection, alone with the dead
And abandoned his resourceful kin.
From court to court, serving patrons
All at war with one another, the artist
Manoeuvres with modesty and grace,
His fortunes greater than their destinies.
Silent, he stands before his finished work:
The tomb of Maria Christina, in Vienna,
The dark door in the pyramid
Drawing in the endless cortège ,
Bone-white into black,
Procession we cannot but join;
Here, there is no consolation, no absolution,
Only infinite mystery to contemplate.
Through art to the existence beyond!
Unappeasable longing will have its way
With you, reveal and conceal,
Force you to the crux.
Thus Cupid gazes into Psyche’s eyes,
Embracing in unbearable suspense,
All energies converging on the focus
Between their almost-meeting lips.
Whose curves and countercurves
The eye’s caress can only hazard!
Absolute majesty of line
Conducts imagination to unforeseen ends...
The priestly hand takes up its tools,
Marmoreal offerings to fashion
From human perplexity.
Canny diplomat of worlds, Canova
Serves at the borders, detached
From affection, alone with the dead
And abandoned his resourceful kin.
From court to court, serving patrons
All at war with one another, the artist
Manoeuvres with modesty and grace,
His fortunes greater than their destinies.
Silent, he stands before his finished work:
The tomb of Maria Christina, in Vienna,
The dark door in the pyramid
Drawing in the endless cortège ,
Bone-white into black,
Procession we cannot but join;
Here, there is no consolation, no absolution,
Only infinite mystery to contemplate.
Through art to the existence beyond!
Unappeasable longing will have its way
With you, reveal and conceal,
Force you to the crux.
Thus Cupid gazes into Psyche’s eyes,
Embracing in unbearable suspense,
All energies converging on the focus
Between their almost-meeting lips.
Mozart's Bones
For the ceremony of human perfection,
The communion of bewildered hearts,
He must annihilate the world and himself,
And in that blessed death
Is freedom and love.
To the last year, let music ascend
Ever higher, plumb ever deeper,
Simplest and most serene.
His ear, attuned to magnificent phantoms,
Sounds the deep with infant glee;
Harlequin skips onstage and capers
In the mournful city of masked balls.
Up and down he paces in his room,
Restlessly prancing, miming, and fiddling,
Driven to and fro by dark persuasions,
Chortling maniac with nowhere to go.
This is life
Without “biographies”,
“Turning points” or “stages”,
This is life,
Inhaling and exhaling,
Knowing it must one day be no more.
Welcome to the ludicrous,
The bizarre.
Welcome to the changing moods
Of unicorns and porcupines.
This is life,
Unbearable concision and rapidity.
Poor little great little Mozart,
Death wants to shake your hand!
Your father is standing behind you,
In an undertaker’s coat.
Into the unmarked grave
Of a perfect symphony,
You go!
Only the tender can be so cruel,
And the calm so mad;
Sweet buffoon, celebrate the High Mass
Of a cackling farce,
And let the strains of divertimento
Absolve you.
The communion of bewildered hearts,
He must annihilate the world and himself,
And in that blessed death
Is freedom and love.
To the last year, let music ascend
Ever higher, plumb ever deeper,
Simplest and most serene.
His ear, attuned to magnificent phantoms,
Sounds the deep with infant glee;
Harlequin skips onstage and capers
In the mournful city of masked balls.
Up and down he paces in his room,
Restlessly prancing, miming, and fiddling,
Driven to and fro by dark persuasions,
Chortling maniac with nowhere to go.
This is life
Without “biographies”,
“Turning points” or “stages”,
This is life,
Inhaling and exhaling,
Knowing it must one day be no more.
Welcome to the ludicrous,
The bizarre.
Welcome to the changing moods
Of unicorns and porcupines.
This is life,
Unbearable concision and rapidity.
Poor little great little Mozart,
Death wants to shake your hand!
Your father is standing behind you,
In an undertaker’s coat.
Into the unmarked grave
Of a perfect symphony,
You go!
Only the tender can be so cruel,
And the calm so mad;
Sweet buffoon, celebrate the High Mass
Of a cackling farce,
And let the strains of divertimento
Absolve you.
Stones of Eireann
Wishing stone and cursing stone,
Stones of medicine and power,
Gloonan and bullaun,
The bedrock of Ireland
Masses in the mind.
Touch the bodies
Of gods and heroes,
Feel their blood in your veins;
Turn widdershins or deosil
To release the magic,
White or black.
The beds and thrones
Of the almighty hag
Summon the dreamer.
Navel stones of Ireland,
Swirling eggs
On pillars of fire,
Channel the force
From below.
Touch the White Stone
Of Calliagh Beri,
Indented with the fingerprints
Of warrior and goddess,
Battling lovers of Armagh,
Who hurled it at each other
During their tiffs.
In Fethard’s town wall,
In County Tipperary,
The Witch stares back,
Sheela-na-Gig,
Warding off evil
Beneath Slievenamon,
Abode of the otherworld women.
On the Hill of Uisneach
Looms the Stone of Divisions,
Fivefold Ireland’s omphalos,
Owned by the queen and her sisters,
Sign of her birth.
Earth’s head is emerging,
Midwifed by the banshee sky.
Queen Meadhbh
Stands upright in her grave,
Atop Knocknarea,
Surveying her realm
From under the cairn;
Woe to him who meets her
At the turn of seven years.
At the entrance to Neale
In Mayo’s fields,
A stone stands over
Lugh’s severed arm
That he lost here, fighting
In the Battle of Moytirra,
Driving off the Fir Bolg.
At Knockbridge, County Louth,
The Big Man’s Stone
Hefts its tilt,
Whereto doomed Cúchulainn
Strapped himself to die,
Still facing the enemy
On his feet.
Dark stone seed
In Cavan’s earth,
-The Crom Cruach!-
Once a gilded pillar,
Hub of twelve megaliths,
Till roaring Patrick
Toppled them all.
St Fiachna’s Butter Lumps
In the field next the graveyard
At Temple Feaghna,
Healing stones
Set like eggs in basins,
To be turned at Easter;
Should any fool remove them,
They would home their way
Back here.
On the Hill of Tara,
Lia Fáil stands
Sovereign granite
Sained with the oaths
Of kings, world-pillar
Clocking Ireland
With its gnomon.
Speckled Stones of Inishmurray,
Seventy in number
On their monastic altar,-
Should any man remove one,
Evil fortune will pursue him-
The fasted pilgrim
Counterclockwise turns the stones
And calls down the curse
On his foe.
St Patrick’s Stones
At Kilkerry, County Sligo,
Seven beauties
Round with power
To heal, to be turned
With prayer, and applied
To the ailing body.
At Glencolumbcille,
At June sun’s midnight,
Deosil with the stations,
Among pillars, boulders,
Flagstones and cairns,
Stone pilgrimage begins;
Pebble-bless yourself ,
And,stretched in Colmcille’s bed,
Turn clockwise and thrice;
Three stones in hand,
Three times about the well,
Marking each round
With a stone on the cairn;
Lave your feet
In the stone boat’s pool,
Sky-voyaging with the saint.
On Altadaven’s druid hill,
St Patrick’s Chair
Becomes your throne
Of secret wishes,
And in the holy well
Heal your ills.
Let wild thoughts gather
For Lughnasa,
Preaching and baptizing!
The Apparition Stones at Knock:
Can you bear to stare
Into the Virgin’s ghost?
Bless yourself
With that vision,
Palping the church wall,
And go free.
Stones of medicine and power,
Gloonan and bullaun,
The bedrock of Ireland
Masses in the mind.
Touch the bodies
Of gods and heroes,
Feel their blood in your veins;
Turn widdershins or deosil
To release the magic,
White or black.
The beds and thrones
Of the almighty hag
Summon the dreamer.
Navel stones of Ireland,
Swirling eggs
On pillars of fire,
Channel the force
From below.
Touch the White Stone
Of Calliagh Beri,
Indented with the fingerprints
Of warrior and goddess,
Battling lovers of Armagh,
Who hurled it at each other
During their tiffs.
In Fethard’s town wall,
In County Tipperary,
The Witch stares back,
Sheela-na-Gig,
Warding off evil
Beneath Slievenamon,
Abode of the otherworld women.
On the Hill of Uisneach
Looms the Stone of Divisions,
Fivefold Ireland’s omphalos,
Owned by the queen and her sisters,
Sign of her birth.
Earth’s head is emerging,
Midwifed by the banshee sky.
Queen Meadhbh
Stands upright in her grave,
Atop Knocknarea,
Surveying her realm
From under the cairn;
Woe to him who meets her
At the turn of seven years.
At the entrance to Neale
In Mayo’s fields,
A stone stands over
Lugh’s severed arm
That he lost here, fighting
In the Battle of Moytirra,
Driving off the Fir Bolg.
At Knockbridge, County Louth,
The Big Man’s Stone
Hefts its tilt,
Whereto doomed Cúchulainn
Strapped himself to die,
Still facing the enemy
On his feet.
Dark stone seed
In Cavan’s earth,
-The Crom Cruach!-
Once a gilded pillar,
Hub of twelve megaliths,
Till roaring Patrick
Toppled them all.
St Fiachna’s Butter Lumps
In the field next the graveyard
At Temple Feaghna,
Healing stones
Set like eggs in basins,
To be turned at Easter;
Should any fool remove them,
They would home their way
Back here.
On the Hill of Tara,
Lia Fáil stands
Sovereign granite
Sained with the oaths
Of kings, world-pillar
Clocking Ireland
With its gnomon.
Speckled Stones of Inishmurray,
Seventy in number
On their monastic altar,-
Should any man remove one,
Evil fortune will pursue him-
The fasted pilgrim
Counterclockwise turns the stones
And calls down the curse
On his foe.
St Patrick’s Stones
At Kilkerry, County Sligo,
Seven beauties
Round with power
To heal, to be turned
With prayer, and applied
To the ailing body.
At Glencolumbcille,
At June sun’s midnight,
Deosil with the stations,
Among pillars, boulders,
Flagstones and cairns,
Stone pilgrimage begins;
Pebble-bless yourself ,
And,stretched in Colmcille’s bed,
Turn clockwise and thrice;
Three stones in hand,
Three times about the well,
Marking each round
With a stone on the cairn;
Lave your feet
In the stone boat’s pool,
Sky-voyaging with the saint.
On Altadaven’s druid hill,
St Patrick’s Chair
Becomes your throne
Of secret wishes,
And in the holy well
Heal your ills.
Let wild thoughts gather
For Lughnasa,
Preaching and baptizing!
The Apparition Stones at Knock:
Can you bear to stare
Into the Virgin’s ghost?
Bless yourself
With that vision,
Palping the church wall,
And go free.
Love in Taganrog
I
Absinthe eyes peer through the blinds,
Light chequers her face.
Nineteen:
Nuptial number of sun and moon;
Gematria of Eve.
This is the citadel of winds,
The centuries’ kurgan,
With the shallow sea,
Silting up by the hour,
All desperate whispers
And rumours of Atlantis.
The south is strange doom,
Chaos of the senses.
The streets run straight down
And out into the steppe,
To the scorpion, death.
II
In the schoolhouse
Tourists look for the desk
Where young Chekhov
Once sat taciturn and snake-eyed,
Doodling satires on his teachers.
In the church
Pilgrims bend to kiss
The relics of Starets Pavel,
Who sanctified this simple town
By prayers and vigils and counsel,
A nobleman in peasant garb,
Who slept upon a bare bench.
III
Sensual deceptions of the enchanter,
Herself enchanted!
She has studied language
But needs no words,
And of philosophy she retains
Only the essence.
Lissom and half-naked
On the brilliant beach,
She dances in the fire
Like Nefertiti.
Absinthe eyes peer through the blinds,
Light chequers her face.
Nineteen:
Nuptial number of sun and moon;
Gematria of Eve.
This is the citadel of winds,
The centuries’ kurgan,
With the shallow sea,
Silting up by the hour,
All desperate whispers
And rumours of Atlantis.
The south is strange doom,
Chaos of the senses.
The streets run straight down
And out into the steppe,
To the scorpion, death.
II
In the schoolhouse
Tourists look for the desk
Where young Chekhov
Once sat taciturn and snake-eyed,
Doodling satires on his teachers.
In the church
Pilgrims bend to kiss
The relics of Starets Pavel,
Who sanctified this simple town
By prayers and vigils and counsel,
A nobleman in peasant garb,
Who slept upon a bare bench.
III
Sensual deceptions of the enchanter,
Herself enchanted!
She has studied language
But needs no words,
And of philosophy she retains
Only the essence.
Lissom and half-naked
On the brilliant beach,
She dances in the fire
Like Nefertiti.
Athens and a Girl
“perfectus vero cui mundus totus exilium est”
Hugh of St Victor, Didascalion III, 20
Gimcrack city,
Restless frenzy in the veins…
I want to go back to the village
Of a single comforting thought,
The sleepy snake village where, I think, I was born.
Panayiota, yours is the casting vote,
The fatal ostrakon, a sentence of exile.
In me are the tyrant and the democrat,
Twin brothers fighting hand to hand,
Kicking, biting and stabbing in the dust…
In the ruins of the Asklepieion,
Among the cypress trees, beneath the Acropolis,
I feel myself among the sick,
Bathing in the sacred spring,
Offering sacrifice at the altar,
Then retiring to the abaton
To sleep, and let dreams heal me.
Just beneath the Odeion archaeologists
Have dug up loutrophoroi,
“Such vessels were used in wedding ceremonies,
Then dedicated in the sanctuary…”
Satyrs dance around the altar of Dionysos Eleutherios,
Singing goat-songs in competition.
Pelasgian fantasies storm the Acropolis,
Where my blue-eyed wonder walks,
Escorted by perverse spirits;
My arrogance covets Tyrian purple
And Byzantine enthronement…
Shyly, the dull little murex shell
Conjures improbable splendour !
Centaurs gallop in among the Lapiths
To trample the feast and abduct their women…
The holy serpent stirs in the Erechtheion,
Lured by honey-cakes,
Athena’s olive tree sprouts again from ashes,
The sea of Erechtheïs sounds its waves
Beneath the temple floor…
What is it the Arrhephoroi are carrying
Down the secret stair and underground passage
To the sanctuary of Aphrodite ?
Thoughts flee like murderers and runaway slaves
To the Cave of the Furies, below the Areopagos,
Seeking asylum by Oedipus’s tomb…
Panayiota, kore, what offering do you grasp
In your hand, -a pomegranate, perhaps,
Or a dove ? And your unearthly smile,
What does it betoken ? I only know
That it stirs and disturbs me
Like a whisper, like an omen.
Amid the Agora ruins, I stand,
Seduced by dim mythistory,
Easily convincing myself
That on this very spot the State Prison stood,
And in this bare remnant of a cell
Proud Socrates downed the hemlock,
With one of those small flasks discovered here…
What drives this yearning and craving
To make history solid
And earth airy dreams ?
Avid as any medieval relic-hunter,
Questing for the foreskin of Christ,
I seize on fancies and farragos,
Naming them nails of the True Cross…
At the Tower of the Winds,
-Sundial, water-clock and weathervane
Of my indefatigable Muse,
Tekke of the dervish heart
-Icall upon the eight winds to blow:
Boreas, Kaikias, Apeliotes,
Euros, Notos, Zephyros, Skiron and Lips!
Climbing up through the Plaka wynds,
Isight the Acropolis North Slope,
Where ithyphallic initiates
Raised altars to chthonic gods;
At the west end, above the Klepsydra spring,
Four caves entice the eye,
One of them perhaps the Pythion,
Where Apollo’s acolytes would wait
And watch for the lightning-bolt from Mt Parnitha
To inaugurate the procession to Delphi.
There, too, is the Cave of Pan,
Where the cult was revived
After the god’s appearance to the courier Pheidipiddes,
On his way to seek Spartan aid against the Persians in 490 B.C.
On this site - thickets blossoming
With courting couples,
And glades where stray cats live,-
Stood Plato’s Academy :
Twelve sacred olive trees grew here,
A well-watered grove with shady walks
Where the students could wander in thought,
And running tracks for the athletes,
Begging the gods to enter their limbs.
To the altar of Prometheus
Torchbearers raced,the dead at their sides,
Shadows of the tide-turning moon.
And Plato,he must, I think,have knelt here,
Powerful as a centaur,
Sketching paradigms in the ground
With his chubby finger.
Mycenaean gold masks once placed over the faces of the dead,
Silver and gold ceremonial rhyta,
An ivory lyre from a tholos tomb,
These objects I place before you, Panayiota,
If only in imagination…
Have you , I wonder, seen the Eleusis relief
In the Archaeological Museum,
Demeter handing the ears of corn to Triptolemos,
Whose mission is to distribute them to mankind,
While Persephone crowns him with a garland ?
Shall I ever with words attain the perfect simplicity
Of any Cycladic Bronze Age pot,
Shaped around emptiness,
Hoarding the air’s secret rituals ?
Lykavittos, crystal cone of light,
I climb you by steep wooded paths,
Gazing towards the sea,
And out over the ramshackle city,
And towards the distant mountains.
Somewhere on the slopes below
Aristotle and his disciples
Wandered under the Lyceum’s colonnades,
Discussing all things under the sun
While young recruits drilled on the parade ground.
Hugh of St Victor, Didascalion III, 20
Gimcrack city,
Restless frenzy in the veins…
I want to go back to the village
Of a single comforting thought,
The sleepy snake village where, I think, I was born.
Panayiota, yours is the casting vote,
The fatal ostrakon, a sentence of exile.
In me are the tyrant and the democrat,
Twin brothers fighting hand to hand,
Kicking, biting and stabbing in the dust…
In the ruins of the Asklepieion,
Among the cypress trees, beneath the Acropolis,
I feel myself among the sick,
Bathing in the sacred spring,
Offering sacrifice at the altar,
Then retiring to the abaton
To sleep, and let dreams heal me.
Just beneath the Odeion archaeologists
Have dug up loutrophoroi,
“Such vessels were used in wedding ceremonies,
Then dedicated in the sanctuary…”
Satyrs dance around the altar of Dionysos Eleutherios,
Singing goat-songs in competition.
Pelasgian fantasies storm the Acropolis,
Where my blue-eyed wonder walks,
Escorted by perverse spirits;
My arrogance covets Tyrian purple
And Byzantine enthronement…
Shyly, the dull little murex shell
Conjures improbable splendour !
Centaurs gallop in among the Lapiths
To trample the feast and abduct their women…
The holy serpent stirs in the Erechtheion,
Lured by honey-cakes,
Athena’s olive tree sprouts again from ashes,
The sea of Erechtheïs sounds its waves
Beneath the temple floor…
What is it the Arrhephoroi are carrying
Down the secret stair and underground passage
To the sanctuary of Aphrodite ?
Thoughts flee like murderers and runaway slaves
To the Cave of the Furies, below the Areopagos,
Seeking asylum by Oedipus’s tomb…
Panayiota, kore, what offering do you grasp
In your hand, -a pomegranate, perhaps,
Or a dove ? And your unearthly smile,
What does it betoken ? I only know
That it stirs and disturbs me
Like a whisper, like an omen.
Amid the Agora ruins, I stand,
Seduced by dim mythistory,
Easily convincing myself
That on this very spot the State Prison stood,
And in this bare remnant of a cell
Proud Socrates downed the hemlock,
With one of those small flasks discovered here…
What drives this yearning and craving
To make history solid
And earth airy dreams ?
Avid as any medieval relic-hunter,
Questing for the foreskin of Christ,
I seize on fancies and farragos,
Naming them nails of the True Cross…
At the Tower of the Winds,
-Sundial, water-clock and weathervane
Of my indefatigable Muse,
Tekke of the dervish heart
-Icall upon the eight winds to blow:
Boreas, Kaikias, Apeliotes,
Euros, Notos, Zephyros, Skiron and Lips!
Climbing up through the Plaka wynds,
Isight the Acropolis North Slope,
Where ithyphallic initiates
Raised altars to chthonic gods;
At the west end, above the Klepsydra spring,
Four caves entice the eye,
One of them perhaps the Pythion,
Where Apollo’s acolytes would wait
And watch for the lightning-bolt from Mt Parnitha
To inaugurate the procession to Delphi.
There, too, is the Cave of Pan,
Where the cult was revived
After the god’s appearance to the courier Pheidipiddes,
On his way to seek Spartan aid against the Persians in 490 B.C.
On this site - thickets blossoming
With courting couples,
And glades where stray cats live,-
Stood Plato’s Academy :
Twelve sacred olive trees grew here,
A well-watered grove with shady walks
Where the students could wander in thought,
And running tracks for the athletes,
Begging the gods to enter their limbs.
To the altar of Prometheus
Torchbearers raced,the dead at their sides,
Shadows of the tide-turning moon.
And Plato,he must, I think,have knelt here,
Powerful as a centaur,
Sketching paradigms in the ground
With his chubby finger.
Mycenaean gold masks once placed over the faces of the dead,
Silver and gold ceremonial rhyta,
An ivory lyre from a tholos tomb,
These objects I place before you, Panayiota,
If only in imagination…
Have you , I wonder, seen the Eleusis relief
In the Archaeological Museum,
Demeter handing the ears of corn to Triptolemos,
Whose mission is to distribute them to mankind,
While Persephone crowns him with a garland ?
Shall I ever with words attain the perfect simplicity
Of any Cycladic Bronze Age pot,
Shaped around emptiness,
Hoarding the air’s secret rituals ?
Lykavittos, crystal cone of light,
I climb you by steep wooded paths,
Gazing towards the sea,
And out over the ramshackle city,
And towards the distant mountains.
Somewhere on the slopes below
Aristotle and his disciples
Wandered under the Lyceum’s colonnades,
Discussing all things under the sun
While young recruits drilled on the parade ground.
Parmenides the Iatromantis
The spirit of the West, it is yours, friend, if you will fight for it,
Still there, imperishable, calling to the worthy
To abandon false comfort for higher pain.
Embrace your death before it embraces you,
For that which you miss is what really matters.
Parmenides sat down and wrote a poem,
An incantation in three parts,
Spiralling inwards, back into the darkness,
Plumbing the sounds and rhythms of being,
All oracles and riddles, hints and puns;
He had to describe for the world
His journey to the queen of the dead,
And what she had taught him
About truth and illusion.
All his life he remained a young man,
Invincible in hope and curiosity,
Sister to the unknown.
Still there, imperishable, calling to the worthy
To abandon false comfort for higher pain.
Embrace your death before it embraces you,
For that which you miss is what really matters.
Parmenides sat down and wrote a poem,
An incantation in three parts,
Spiralling inwards, back into the darkness,
Plumbing the sounds and rhythms of being,
All oracles and riddles, hints and puns;
He had to describe for the world
His journey to the queen of the dead,
And what she had taught him
About truth and illusion.
All his life he remained a young man,
Invincible in hope and curiosity,
Sister to the unknown.
A Danish Pastry
A clean and happy place,
A place of reason-
That is all I ask.
Somewhere safe,
At peace.
This is my life,
A small plot of land,
Which I cultivate
With diligence
And pride,
Striving year on year
To increase my yield.
The mute swan’s poise
Lures my powers to achievement,
The graylag goose
Mates with my silence.
Out on the dunes and marshland
And tidal flats,
I meet my sea-self, changing.
Clarity!-(Pure white dazzle
Of Sankt Knuds cathedral in Odense,
And superb lines of design
In the simplest object)-
The dragonheaded Viking ship
Wings over waves
To raid the shores of night.
Stone and water
Are my words, my breath:
The furrows of ripples,
The reflected world,
I sow with dreams.
All is silver artifice,
Like Tycho Brahe’s nose.
In Kronborg Slot
Hamlet paces corridors
Of shadow, and, playing
Chess with phantoms,
Puzzles over chequered floors.
Everything is too real,
Like a Dutch still-life.
A place of reason-
That is all I ask.
Somewhere safe,
At peace.
This is my life,
A small plot of land,
Which I cultivate
With diligence
And pride,
Striving year on year
To increase my yield.
The mute swan’s poise
Lures my powers to achievement,
The graylag goose
Mates with my silence.
Out on the dunes and marshland
And tidal flats,
I meet my sea-self, changing.
Clarity!-(Pure white dazzle
Of Sankt Knuds cathedral in Odense,
And superb lines of design
In the simplest object)-
The dragonheaded Viking ship
Wings over waves
To raid the shores of night.
Stone and water
Are my words, my breath:
The furrows of ripples,
The reflected world,
I sow with dreams.
All is silver artifice,
Like Tycho Brahe’s nose.
In Kronborg Slot
Hamlet paces corridors
Of shadow, and, playing
Chess with phantoms,
Puzzles over chequered floors.
Everything is too real,
Like a Dutch still-life.
The Dordogne
Twists and turns
Of the Périgueux wynds,
Dank sunless passages,
Alleys and turrets,
Courtyards with exquisite stairs,
Moulded doorways and ancient corbels,
Balconies and elegant steps,
And everywhere the salamander,
And on a staircase in the Rue du Plantier
Adam and Eve stand carved,
Eating of the Tree of Knowledge,
While the serpent peeps out at them,
Tail curled round the tree trunk.
This is the land Sir Lancelot in exile
Divided as spoils among his loyal knights.
The land of Fournier-Sarlovèze,
Greatest and most ferocious of warriors,
Who, during the war in Spain,
Rode into Salamanca Cathedral on his charger,
Galloping right up to the choir;
He broke into a barricaded convent
And astonished the terrified nuns
By bellowing the Holy Office in stentorian voice;
In Russia he charged five thousand Cossacks
With just eight hundred men.
As the panting sow, lusting after truffles,
Can smell the black root’s aroma
When it ripens in November,
And infallibly dig it up,
So can I scent poems in the air.
No need have I of any philosophy
Save the wisdom of wine:
To taste a single year in time,
Fruit of the suffering earth
As stars and people fall into oblivion.
What alchemy is this, extracting
Nectar, elixir,
From the darkness in the vine?
The church in Saint-Amand-de-Coly
Its west tower monstrous and foreboding,
A fortress of the damned;
Inside, the medieval monks and villagers,
Surviving in constant dread
Of sudden attack and destruction,
Sought refuge from attackers,
Climbing ever higher to defend themselves,
There are secret staircases
And hollow pillars
Where they hid.
In the church at Thiviers
The carvings on the capitals
Show monsters attacking human beings
Who cling desperately to coiled branches,
Other men try to ride on the monsters’ backs
Or flee from them in terror.
Force-fed like a goose
Whose liver will end as foie gras,
My mind, stuffed with visions,
And raised in the dark,
Swells to bursting.
In the Priory of St-Julien at Cénac
On the exterior of the apse is carved
A man presenting his bare arse,
To repel evil spirits;
Further round, up high, we spy
A naked couple, lewdly embracing;
Inside the church
Lazarus is raised from the tomb
While watching women hold their noses;
Men and women dance naked
While a man beats a drum;
A snake between two naked women
Castigates the sin of lust;
A pig devours two human heads.
On the Lascaux cave wall
A man is falling backwards, dead, yet ithyphallic,-
Wounded into trance-like power,
With the stillness of absolute vision-
Dropping his bird-headed wand,
Between two wounded beasts;
One of them, a rhinoceros, limps away.
The other, a bison, bristles, enraged,
Her bowels hanging out
Gravid beneath her,
A spear stuck in her,
Very near the vulva.
Yet she seems indifferent, invincible.
And the earth is blissom,
Regenerated in death,
Out of the hunger
For meat and sex.
At Brantôme, I muse
On Pierre de Bourdeilles and his scurrilous pen,
Writing with relish of “Les Femmes Galantes”,
Lay abbot of the town, on his island,
Blessed by the bones of St Sicaire;
A Gascon soldier of fortune,
Crippled by a fall from his horse,
Bitter that this paltry abbacy
Was his only reward for serving the Catholic cause,
He brooded here, bitter and broken,
Scribbling his memoirs with fantastic scorn,
Unsoothed by the clear gentle river,
Or his rose garden’s scent.
Deep inside the Rouffignac cave
The roof of a low wide hall is covered
With profusion of horses, in brown and black,
Galloping, grazing, standing startled,
Running into each other and away,
Superimposed on one another,
Frenzy of hand and eye and heart.
At Hautefort I hear the voice of Bertran de Born,
Volleying crossbow bolts of political satire,
Praising war and mocking his foes...
Nothing could keep him from meddling in poisonous feuds,
And joining the wastrel Prince Henri’s rebellion,
Ravishing the countryside,
Even sacking the Virgin’s shrine-
The mad prince died for his sacrilege,
And here at Hautefort,the troubadour
Surrendered to the vengeful king.
Condemned to death by Henry II,
Wily Bertran asked first to sing a plaint he had composed
For the king’s dead son,
And so moved Henry with his singing
That His Majesty pardoned him and spared his life,
And so the wicked troubadour rode away,triumphant,
Seeking fresh mischief and adventure,
Till age and conscience found him out
And he ended his days on a monk’s bed of ashes.
At seven-shrined Rocamadour, high above the gorge,
The Black Virgin stands on the altar,
Candle-haloed in the gloom,
Dark countenance bestowing
A proud secret smile, beyond comprehension,
Her direct gaze piercing into the other world,
Amused by her own inexplicable power.
The church frieze at Assier
Exalts the sacraments of artillery,
That made the fortune of Galiot de Genouillac:
See-guns being hauled into battle
And cities under siege,
The awesome creativity of war.
Inside, the armourer’s likeness lords over his tomb,
Posing nonchalantly with a cannon,
Vaunting his own glory in the eyes of God,
Certain that his good repute promised immortality.
Limestone country of the Dordogne,
The rock white, amber, pink, purple and grey,
Burning with ethereal fire at sunset!
Each riverbend reconfigures the perspective,
Reflection on reflection, high and low married
With iridescent harmony and love.
Gorse and broom light the hillsides,
Blue scillas in the fields, white narcissi, cowslips,
Gentians, rock-roses, marguerites, and columbines...
Lost to the senseless world,
I sit and watch fish rise in the clear water,
While a nightingale sings in the chestnut tree above.
Of the Périgueux wynds,
Dank sunless passages,
Alleys and turrets,
Courtyards with exquisite stairs,
Moulded doorways and ancient corbels,
Balconies and elegant steps,
And everywhere the salamander,
And on a staircase in the Rue du Plantier
Adam and Eve stand carved,
Eating of the Tree of Knowledge,
While the serpent peeps out at them,
Tail curled round the tree trunk.
This is the land Sir Lancelot in exile
Divided as spoils among his loyal knights.
The land of Fournier-Sarlovèze,
Greatest and most ferocious of warriors,
Who, during the war in Spain,
Rode into Salamanca Cathedral on his charger,
Galloping right up to the choir;
He broke into a barricaded convent
And astonished the terrified nuns
By bellowing the Holy Office in stentorian voice;
In Russia he charged five thousand Cossacks
With just eight hundred men.
As the panting sow, lusting after truffles,
Can smell the black root’s aroma
When it ripens in November,
And infallibly dig it up,
So can I scent poems in the air.
No need have I of any philosophy
Save the wisdom of wine:
To taste a single year in time,
Fruit of the suffering earth
As stars and people fall into oblivion.
What alchemy is this, extracting
Nectar, elixir,
From the darkness in the vine?
The church in Saint-Amand-de-Coly
Its west tower monstrous and foreboding,
A fortress of the damned;
Inside, the medieval monks and villagers,
Surviving in constant dread
Of sudden attack and destruction,
Sought refuge from attackers,
Climbing ever higher to defend themselves,
There are secret staircases
And hollow pillars
Where they hid.
In the church at Thiviers
The carvings on the capitals
Show monsters attacking human beings
Who cling desperately to coiled branches,
Other men try to ride on the monsters’ backs
Or flee from them in terror.
Force-fed like a goose
Whose liver will end as foie gras,
My mind, stuffed with visions,
And raised in the dark,
Swells to bursting.
In the Priory of St-Julien at Cénac
On the exterior of the apse is carved
A man presenting his bare arse,
To repel evil spirits;
Further round, up high, we spy
A naked couple, lewdly embracing;
Inside the church
Lazarus is raised from the tomb
While watching women hold their noses;
Men and women dance naked
While a man beats a drum;
A snake between two naked women
Castigates the sin of lust;
A pig devours two human heads.
On the Lascaux cave wall
A man is falling backwards, dead, yet ithyphallic,-
Wounded into trance-like power,
With the stillness of absolute vision-
Dropping his bird-headed wand,
Between two wounded beasts;
One of them, a rhinoceros, limps away.
The other, a bison, bristles, enraged,
Her bowels hanging out
Gravid beneath her,
A spear stuck in her,
Very near the vulva.
Yet she seems indifferent, invincible.
And the earth is blissom,
Regenerated in death,
Out of the hunger
For meat and sex.
At Brantôme, I muse
On Pierre de Bourdeilles and his scurrilous pen,
Writing with relish of “Les Femmes Galantes”,
Lay abbot of the town, on his island,
Blessed by the bones of St Sicaire;
A Gascon soldier of fortune,
Crippled by a fall from his horse,
Bitter that this paltry abbacy
Was his only reward for serving the Catholic cause,
He brooded here, bitter and broken,
Scribbling his memoirs with fantastic scorn,
Unsoothed by the clear gentle river,
Or his rose garden’s scent.
Deep inside the Rouffignac cave
The roof of a low wide hall is covered
With profusion of horses, in brown and black,
Galloping, grazing, standing startled,
Running into each other and away,
Superimposed on one another,
Frenzy of hand and eye and heart.
At Hautefort I hear the voice of Bertran de Born,
Volleying crossbow bolts of political satire,
Praising war and mocking his foes...
Nothing could keep him from meddling in poisonous feuds,
And joining the wastrel Prince Henri’s rebellion,
Ravishing the countryside,
Even sacking the Virgin’s shrine-
The mad prince died for his sacrilege,
And here at Hautefort,the troubadour
Surrendered to the vengeful king.
Condemned to death by Henry II,
Wily Bertran asked first to sing a plaint he had composed
For the king’s dead son,
And so moved Henry with his singing
That His Majesty pardoned him and spared his life,
And so the wicked troubadour rode away,triumphant,
Seeking fresh mischief and adventure,
Till age and conscience found him out
And he ended his days on a monk’s bed of ashes.
At seven-shrined Rocamadour, high above the gorge,
The Black Virgin stands on the altar,
Candle-haloed in the gloom,
Dark countenance bestowing
A proud secret smile, beyond comprehension,
Her direct gaze piercing into the other world,
Amused by her own inexplicable power.
The church frieze at Assier
Exalts the sacraments of artillery,
That made the fortune of Galiot de Genouillac:
See-guns being hauled into battle
And cities under siege,
The awesome creativity of war.
Inside, the armourer’s likeness lords over his tomb,
Posing nonchalantly with a cannon,
Vaunting his own glory in the eyes of God,
Certain that his good repute promised immortality.
Limestone country of the Dordogne,
The rock white, amber, pink, purple and grey,
Burning with ethereal fire at sunset!
Each riverbend reconfigures the perspective,
Reflection on reflection, high and low married
With iridescent harmony and love.
Gorse and broom light the hillsides,
Blue scillas in the fields, white narcissi, cowslips,
Gentians, rock-roses, marguerites, and columbines...
Lost to the senseless world,
I sit and watch fish rise in the clear water,
While a nightingale sings in the chestnut tree above.
Anna/ Anastasia
Anna Anderson, died 1984
Grand Duchess of a lost day,
Of the sunlight in birch woods
And snowdrifts of imperial words…
My name is Anastasia,
My father was the King of Shambhala.
History: an illness of the blood,
A Fabergé egg,
Containing forbidden Easters.
I am a guest here,
In this haunted house,
This memory palace;
Like Caspar Hauser,
Like the Man in the Iron Mask.
What is this curse upon me
That brings grief and pain
To all around?
You will kiss my hand
And bow to the Queen of the Dead.
My every command you will fulfil.
Papa, look, I have made you a snowman
Out of tears.
Grand Duchess of a lost day,
Of the sunlight in birch woods
And snowdrifts of imperial words…
My name is Anastasia,
My father was the King of Shambhala.
History: an illness of the blood,
A Fabergé egg,
Containing forbidden Easters.
I am a guest here,
In this haunted house,
This memory palace;
Like Caspar Hauser,
Like the Man in the Iron Mask.
What is this curse upon me
That brings grief and pain
To all around?
You will kiss my hand
And bow to the Queen of the Dead.
My every command you will fulfil.
Papa, look, I have made you a snowman
Out of tears.
Athenian Interlude
“With a fortunate shot on a powder-store,
An inextinguishable fire spread this way and that,
Demolishing the houses through two whole days,
Causing the enemy considerable damage
And grievous affliction.
Thus the greatly famed and celebrated fortress of Athens
Has fallen under the sway
Of Your Serenity’s domination.”
Such was the proud dispatch sent by Captain-General Morosini
To the Venetian Senate,
After his forces had bombarded the Parthenon.
In the Acropolis Museum,
I stand before a kòre
Sculpted by Antenor,
Exquisite, enigmatic,
The serene beatific smile
On those silent lips,
Extending her hand
To offer a pomegranate.
Acropolis-side,
On a cypress terrace,
Asclepion’s scant ruins...
Here sufferers would sacrifice to the god,
Bathe in the sacred spring,
And sleep, praying for therapeutic dreams.
O, staff of Asclepius, two serpents winding round,
Draw out evil from the wound,
As doctors would extract a guinea worm
By cutting slits in the patient’s skin
Then coiling the parasite round a stick.
Ambling past kiosks selling postcards
Of sexual intercourse in the ancient world,
I look up and behold a billboard
Advertising Olympic Airways:
MAKE THE MILES YOU TRAVEL EARN FOR YOU!
JOIN THE ICARUS FREQUENT FLYER PROGRAM!
Down in the metro station,
A giant advertisement on the wall:
A tanned female bottom, smooth as a statue’s,
Proclaiming the benefits of depilation.
Around the walls glass cases display
Discoveries from the excavations,
The skeleton of a man.
Ambling through the Plaka,
I imagine the vanished Theseion,
Where the King’s bones, recovered
From Skyros, were interred,
Its walls frescoed with his feats,
Battles with Amazons and Centaurs.
Am I not still that boy
Who first thrilled, so long ago,
To the tales of gods and heroes,
Sailing ever since by those stars?
Dry bone of a city,
Where now your famous rivers and springs?
Buried underground.
On a hot day the tongue longs for their spray.
I stand in the dried-up riverbed
Of the Ilissus, amongst the miniature gorges
Through which water once tumbled,
This spot sacred to Achelous and the nymphs,
Cherished by lovers and philosophers,
The air throbbing with cicadas;
Hollyhock, acanthus and mullein flourish
Under overhanging fig, chestnut, olive and plane,
Agnus castus still grows here,
Purple-flowered and bee-beloved,
Famed since antiquity
As a remedy for excessive lust.
And in the secretive thickets
Discarded condom wrappers lie.
In the cemetery black crowds of mourners
Silently pass to and fro
From chapels to gravesides,
Eating koliva, burning incense for the dead
Among the cypresses and pines.
Schliemann lies like a hero
In a classical mausoleum,
Carved with reliefs of his Trojan exploits.
Outside the cemetery gates
Old ladies sell votive candles
And in the window of the cake-shop “Mnemosyne”
Stand ornate creations for funerals,
Sparkling with marmoreal icing,
Exquisite borders with crystalline roses
Enclosing the names of the dead.
An inextinguishable fire spread this way and that,
Demolishing the houses through two whole days,
Causing the enemy considerable damage
And grievous affliction.
Thus the greatly famed and celebrated fortress of Athens
Has fallen under the sway
Of Your Serenity’s domination.”
Such was the proud dispatch sent by Captain-General Morosini
To the Venetian Senate,
After his forces had bombarded the Parthenon.
In the Acropolis Museum,
I stand before a kòre
Sculpted by Antenor,
Exquisite, enigmatic,
The serene beatific smile
On those silent lips,
Extending her hand
To offer a pomegranate.
Acropolis-side,
On a cypress terrace,
Asclepion’s scant ruins...
Here sufferers would sacrifice to the god,
Bathe in the sacred spring,
And sleep, praying for therapeutic dreams.
O, staff of Asclepius, two serpents winding round,
Draw out evil from the wound,
As doctors would extract a guinea worm
By cutting slits in the patient’s skin
Then coiling the parasite round a stick.
Ambling past kiosks selling postcards
Of sexual intercourse in the ancient world,
I look up and behold a billboard
Advertising Olympic Airways:
MAKE THE MILES YOU TRAVEL EARN FOR YOU!
JOIN THE ICARUS FREQUENT FLYER PROGRAM!
Down in the metro station,
A giant advertisement on the wall:
A tanned female bottom, smooth as a statue’s,
Proclaiming the benefits of depilation.
Around the walls glass cases display
Discoveries from the excavations,
The skeleton of a man.
Ambling through the Plaka,
I imagine the vanished Theseion,
Where the King’s bones, recovered
From Skyros, were interred,
Its walls frescoed with his feats,
Battles with Amazons and Centaurs.
Am I not still that boy
Who first thrilled, so long ago,
To the tales of gods and heroes,
Sailing ever since by those stars?
Dry bone of a city,
Where now your famous rivers and springs?
Buried underground.
On a hot day the tongue longs for their spray.
I stand in the dried-up riverbed
Of the Ilissus, amongst the miniature gorges
Through which water once tumbled,
This spot sacred to Achelous and the nymphs,
Cherished by lovers and philosophers,
The air throbbing with cicadas;
Hollyhock, acanthus and mullein flourish
Under overhanging fig, chestnut, olive and plane,
Agnus castus still grows here,
Purple-flowered and bee-beloved,
Famed since antiquity
As a remedy for excessive lust.
And in the secretive thickets
Discarded condom wrappers lie.
In the cemetery black crowds of mourners
Silently pass to and fro
From chapels to gravesides,
Eating koliva, burning incense for the dead
Among the cypresses and pines.
Schliemann lies like a hero
In a classical mausoleum,
Carved with reliefs of his Trojan exploits.
Outside the cemetery gates
Old ladies sell votive candles
And in the window of the cake-shop “Mnemosyne”
Stand ornate creations for funerals,
Sparkling with marmoreal icing,
Exquisite borders with crystalline roses
Enclosing the names of the dead.
Irish Tunes
Time and again, time out of mind,
The old tunes, version on version, return
And batter down the doors.
Beat and off-beat winds the drum,
The accordion whoops and jumps,
And the whole shebeen is shaking
Down to the black taproot.
And come the lull
Everyone has died into their beer
And swum away with waterhorses
Down druid rivers.
This is the threshing floor,
The furnace of dreams.
How many hands have reached for this tune,
Felt and held it like a lover,
Followed its whorls and gyres?
A fingerprint of sound
Autographs the air,
And the song comes round
Again, always changed,
Telepathically.
Undulations and rolls
Of country roads-
Blue whisky
Makes me drunk
Then sober
Then drunk all over again!
Fill your hand with a flute
And pour out poteen…
Spirits of the alembic,
Visit me under the skin
And lead a merry dance.
Now the hooley, the spree, the rake,
The capers!
The old tunes, version on version, return
And batter down the doors.
Beat and off-beat winds the drum,
The accordion whoops and jumps,
And the whole shebeen is shaking
Down to the black taproot.
And come the lull
Everyone has died into their beer
And swum away with waterhorses
Down druid rivers.
This is the threshing floor,
The furnace of dreams.
How many hands have reached for this tune,
Felt and held it like a lover,
Followed its whorls and gyres?
A fingerprint of sound
Autographs the air,
And the song comes round
Again, always changed,
Telepathically.
Undulations and rolls
Of country roads-
Blue whisky
Makes me drunk
Then sober
Then drunk all over again!
Fill your hand with a flute
And pour out poteen…
Spirits of the alembic,
Visit me under the skin
And lead a merry dance.
Now the hooley, the spree, the rake,
The capers!
The Middle Kingdom
I
Along the Beijing avenues-
The geomancers’ gridiron-
Uniform commuters move in hordes,
Driven by edicts from Heaven.
Blankfaced, tarmac canyons
Imperiously refuse any echo.
Tiananmen Square-
Acres of arid stone-
Numbs and crushes
The compass heart.
In the bathhouse soapsmooth boyish amphibians
Recline, intoxicated, broiling in vaporous broth,
Sybarites, blurred to apparitions,
Eyeblinks retarded to torpid flitters,
Somnambulantly mumbling in the mist.
Emaciated old men, shuffling, pained,
Heave their wheezy jalopies into the swim,
As into a welcome grave.
In the dressing room exhausted bodies
Lie like corpses in a mortuary,
Coughing and hawking under linen shrouds.
Scarlet pavilions and yellow rooves
Of the Forbidden City, palanquin of dragons,
Holding its measured marble up to the sun.
Balanced palaces mass their serenity
Symmetrically; terraces ascend
To the Halls of Harmony.
At dawn in the public gardens,
Along every path, in every clearing,
Limbs life, extend, rotate,
Gravely eurhythmic,
Slow silhouettes flow with tai ch’i chuan,
The tremulous sun takes flight
From old women’s fingertips.
Old men suspend birdcages from trees
Then sit on benches, smiling,
As they listen to beloved birds’ song.
The nightmare abacus is clacking,
And the festival of degustation:
Famished stares and rapt cries,
Orgiasts burping with gusto,
Spiting out bones with whipcrack éclat;
Chopsticks twirl like fire-drills,
Jigging bodies flame,
Devouring the world,
Braised, stewed, fried, boiled and roasted,
Descending to the halls of Hell.
The Temple of Heaven turns on a spindle of light,
Within the square, withn the circle,
Bowing to the Altar of Heaven,
To the power of nine.
A distant giant’s voice re-echoes from the centre,
The moveless moment out of time.
II
Smokeblue mountains exhale fields of maize and sorghum,
Peasants in harness trudge the furrows,
Hauling the cloud-plough of time.
Buffalo teams toil through paddy fields;
Cormorants dive into the moon.
Red lacquer coffins set sail in the Emperors’ tombs,
Chrysalid skeletons in silk,
Dragons snapping at a fiery pearl.
The Great Wall lopes off to the mountains,
Laughed at by cicadas’ wings.
A praying mantis lifts its prehistoric mask,
Jade eyes empty of fear.
Beyond the barrier writhes the Land of Demons,
A distorting mirror, curtains drawn across.
III
Suzhou lies like a glow-worm in the night,
Fish-scale rooves glissade above the currents.
Calligrapher’s ideogram, the garden city
Unfurls its silk-scroll dream of yin and yang.
IV
Clouds fall from Heaven’s boughs
Into the Western Lake;
Autumn’s ink-wash imbues Hangzhou;
Air and water impersonate each other.
V
It is raining on Mount Emei;
The pilgrims’ path disappears in cloud;
Voices, mixed with birdsong, tremor in the dripping forest;
Bamboo stems lightly shudder.
All is faded and unreal,
Save this stairway that goes on forever.
Rain clatters on the monastery roof,
And pilgrim clouds flurry through doors,
Glisten on flagstones.
A sodden monkey-huddle grimace on the veranda.
In the prayer hall straw mats are rotting,
Mildewed Buddha’s squat behind glass.
Damp glazes floorboards and weeps down walls.
Ghosts flitter amid the maple branches,
Looking out over the abyss.
The long climb ends in a precipice,
Whence ecstatic worshippers
Have sometimes launched themselves into the void,
Becoming rainbows.
VI
Where the Yellow River tautens between steep banks.
Cormorant fishermen pole upstream.
West of Xian duststorms writhe on the loess.
Hivernal canyons shrink to trickling ice,
The wind throws razorblades.
At the Great Wall’s end, where the Gobi Desert
Grimaces into colourless sky,
Chaos presses through the mind’s mountain passes,
And beneath the last broken tower
A banished river grovels in mountains’ glare.
Along the Beijing avenues-
The geomancers’ gridiron-
Uniform commuters move in hordes,
Driven by edicts from Heaven.
Blankfaced, tarmac canyons
Imperiously refuse any echo.
Tiananmen Square-
Acres of arid stone-
Numbs and crushes
The compass heart.
In the bathhouse soapsmooth boyish amphibians
Recline, intoxicated, broiling in vaporous broth,
Sybarites, blurred to apparitions,
Eyeblinks retarded to torpid flitters,
Somnambulantly mumbling in the mist.
Emaciated old men, shuffling, pained,
Heave their wheezy jalopies into the swim,
As into a welcome grave.
In the dressing room exhausted bodies
Lie like corpses in a mortuary,
Coughing and hawking under linen shrouds.
Scarlet pavilions and yellow rooves
Of the Forbidden City, palanquin of dragons,
Holding its measured marble up to the sun.
Balanced palaces mass their serenity
Symmetrically; terraces ascend
To the Halls of Harmony.
At dawn in the public gardens,
Along every path, in every clearing,
Limbs life, extend, rotate,
Gravely eurhythmic,
Slow silhouettes flow with tai ch’i chuan,
The tremulous sun takes flight
From old women’s fingertips.
Old men suspend birdcages from trees
Then sit on benches, smiling,
As they listen to beloved birds’ song.
The nightmare abacus is clacking,
And the festival of degustation:
Famished stares and rapt cries,
Orgiasts burping with gusto,
Spiting out bones with whipcrack éclat;
Chopsticks twirl like fire-drills,
Jigging bodies flame,
Devouring the world,
Braised, stewed, fried, boiled and roasted,
Descending to the halls of Hell.
The Temple of Heaven turns on a spindle of light,
Within the square, withn the circle,
Bowing to the Altar of Heaven,
To the power of nine.
A distant giant’s voice re-echoes from the centre,
The moveless moment out of time.
II
Smokeblue mountains exhale fields of maize and sorghum,
Peasants in harness trudge the furrows,
Hauling the cloud-plough of time.
Buffalo teams toil through paddy fields;
Cormorants dive into the moon.
Red lacquer coffins set sail in the Emperors’ tombs,
Chrysalid skeletons in silk,
Dragons snapping at a fiery pearl.
The Great Wall lopes off to the mountains,
Laughed at by cicadas’ wings.
A praying mantis lifts its prehistoric mask,
Jade eyes empty of fear.
Beyond the barrier writhes the Land of Demons,
A distorting mirror, curtains drawn across.
III
Suzhou lies like a glow-worm in the night,
Fish-scale rooves glissade above the currents.
Calligrapher’s ideogram, the garden city
Unfurls its silk-scroll dream of yin and yang.
IV
Clouds fall from Heaven’s boughs
Into the Western Lake;
Autumn’s ink-wash imbues Hangzhou;
Air and water impersonate each other.
V
It is raining on Mount Emei;
The pilgrims’ path disappears in cloud;
Voices, mixed with birdsong, tremor in the dripping forest;
Bamboo stems lightly shudder.
All is faded and unreal,
Save this stairway that goes on forever.
Rain clatters on the monastery roof,
And pilgrim clouds flurry through doors,
Glisten on flagstones.
A sodden monkey-huddle grimace on the veranda.
In the prayer hall straw mats are rotting,
Mildewed Buddha’s squat behind glass.
Damp glazes floorboards and weeps down walls.
Ghosts flitter amid the maple branches,
Looking out over the abyss.
The long climb ends in a precipice,
Whence ecstatic worshippers
Have sometimes launched themselves into the void,
Becoming rainbows.
VI
Where the Yellow River tautens between steep banks.
Cormorant fishermen pole upstream.
West of Xian duststorms writhe on the loess.
Hivernal canyons shrink to trickling ice,
The wind throws razorblades.
At the Great Wall’s end, where the Gobi Desert
Grimaces into colourless sky,
Chaos presses through the mind’s mountain passes,
And beneath the last broken tower
A banished river grovels in mountains’ glare.
Ideas of Caesar
A coin minted before his death
Shows Julius Caesar
Bald and wrinkled,
Bignosed and scraggynecked.
Post-mortem, the profile
Is noble, handsome and smooth.
Who does not love a Roman fiction?
History is kidnapped by pirates,
For strange things happen at sea.
Sicary with the stylus,
The demi-god dictates fables
And lessons from his skin.
Emperor of images,
The visage melts and changes,
Renaissance fresco, Fascist bust.
Conqueror of minds,
Christ and Antichrist,
Romance of violence becomes you.
Twenty-three wounds,
The body in question lies rendered
At Pompey’s marble feet.
Shows Julius Caesar
Bald and wrinkled,
Bignosed and scraggynecked.
Post-mortem, the profile
Is noble, handsome and smooth.
Who does not love a Roman fiction?
History is kidnapped by pirates,
For strange things happen at sea.
Sicary with the stylus,
The demi-god dictates fables
And lessons from his skin.
Emperor of images,
The visage melts and changes,
Renaissance fresco, Fascist bust.
Conqueror of minds,
Christ and Antichrist,
Romance of violence becomes you.
Twenty-three wounds,
The body in question lies rendered
At Pompey’s marble feet.
Friday, July 06, 2007
Nine Grail Ladies
Igraine
They dance, the nine korrigans,
Crowned with flowers, robed in white,
About the fountain, in moonlight.
The three Fates work their distaffs and spindles,
Twisting the thread through their fingers,
One to spin, one to weave, one to cut.
Who seeks the counsel of the fay?
Three times three is their power.
Throw some more wood on the hearth-fire,
And watch for visions in the smoke.
From the Queen’s castle the hero sets out,
The lost son, whose journeys will be arduous,
Whose fate will be the sufferings of a king.
Who but she holds my life in her hands?
My ship sets sail from the shores of her eye,
And disappears into the mists.
Three initiations await the seeker:
To be conceived of his mother’s womb;
To lie with a daughter of the moon;
To enter the enclosure of the Goddess.
In the great hall of the Castle of Maidens,
She sits enthroned, surrounded by her female court,
And wild unearthly music fills the air:
“Stranger, you are welcome for the night:
I ask only that you give me one night’s dreaming,
That I may send you vision and understanding…”
Guinevere
O joyful power that moves all wheels,
Beyond comprehension and control!
Ecstasy of rising,rising,crying the tears of an angel!
Lovers true and false converge from all directions
To court and win the sovereign soul.
The combat commences in the meadow,
The two knights clashing from opposite poles,
Watched by the summer sun and the winter moon,
Till the May Queen lifts her crowned head to the stars.
The gates of the Summer Country are open
For all acts of love and pleasure, without guilt;
Open for the visitations of the fairies,
Abductors of the beloved prize.
Beware the hidden thorns, drawing blood
Before you know it; and the devilment
Of the twin sisters in one body,
The false queen and the true.
Strife is her delight: setting one against the other,
Bringing her rival suitors to blows,
Skilled in cruel deceptions and torments.
Many tests are set, many blows are struck,
Judgment is pronounced in the courts of love,
And the hunters of the white hart spur their steeds,
Chasing their quarry through the forest.
Oh, the sound of pipes among the trees,
And the dancing of fools and jesters!
Hang your wishes on the hawthorn tree,
You, the cuckoo in the sun’s nest…
Morgan
She is the raven to the carrion,
The dark interrogator, pulling from her sleeves
Terrible questions, too long avoided.
In the apple orchard she appears to you,
Speaking strange words in your ear:
Beware when you pick these fruit,
For some are poisoned and deadly.
O, weaving waters, about the Island of Women,
Bless the voyager and the ship.
The hounds are baying:
Here is the ford where champions fight,
And lovers fall into embrace.
The severed head speaks from the tower,
The hag sits at table in the place of honour.
She who makes the wound can heal it,
Herbalist and astronomer, dark and slender,
Mistress of seduction, all her senses engaging,
Her sweetness and her anger equal in force.
What will come of these Enchanted Games?
Prepare yourself for the beheading.
The Lady of the Wheel must have a man in her power,
To which end she will use any spell.
Argante
Be fierce and tender, this is kindness to yourself
And goodness to the world:
The guardian of the doorway wants you for her own.
The jewel in the ring reveals a lake:
In this land there can be no guilt, only love,
Here lovers conjoin without sorrow or shame,
And the mother lets her son go forth without hindrance,
Well-fostered in courage and arms.
Through the deer forest, by the lake, she rides,
In a tunic of white samite and ermine mantle,
And a veil before her face,
Bearing the sword to the worthy one.
Her eyes are silver, catching the tints of the sky,
Leading you into the birch grove,
Where the trees dance around your head…
Look into the well, the water is cold ecstasy,
Myriads of shimmering droplets,
Sparking,glinting,alive with iridescent fire,
Dancing and changing so quickly, in such intricate patterns,
That your senses cannot grasp more than a fraction.
Nimuë
The doors will be opened, the ways will be opened,
New ways and new determinations.
The Lady will imprison you
Beneath a stone, in a sarcophagus, in a hawthorn bush,
In a prison of glass, a moulting cage,
Though you met her at the fountain
And conjured an enchanted orchard for her,
And summoned knights and ladies to dance for her,
And promised to share the stars with her.
Here I am, in the treetops, perching on branches,
Flying from tree to tree, in my cloak of feathers.
In the sunhouse of the glass castle,
The women weave and embroider,
Watching the centuries pass in silence,
Outside their windows, all the follies of men.
This is the triple death chosen:
To fall from your horse from a high place,
Catch yourself in a tree during the fall, and be hanged,
And drown with your head submerged in a river.
Here is the keeper of the forest:
The huntress in her chariot drawn by wild deer.
On with the venery,the sport of the brave!
Enid
Three robes she will wear,
The white, the red, and the black.
Her patience and forbearance
Will temper the fierceness of men.
She will not rest until you are delivered,
Until every burden is lifted, every grief effaced,
And you enter into boundless compassion,
Transfiguring all pain into rejoicing.
She has tasted the bitterest poison and survived,
She has suffered death’s lesson and triumphed,
Triumphant in vivacity and love.
Have you seen the white hart among the trees,
Stately and proud, alone of all his kind?
These lands are dangerous out of season:
What you learn here you must teach others,
And do not linger too long, lest you forget
Your mortality and humility,
And lose your way on the twisting forest paths.
Soon the horn will sound to summon you
Home, through brambles, nettles and thorns.
Kundry
Measure your destiny’s pattern, wise to the limits,
And learn from the circling of the hawk.
Loathsome in her hood of turtle-doves,
She speaks of the movements of the seven planets,
The Black maiden, wedded to her work.
The beauty of blackness is visible to those
Who know the true worth of the soul,
Who have ever sought the dark over the light.
Ah,see the Wheel of Fortune turning,
With the king on top and the beggar clinging
To the bottom, and the others scrambling
To reach the top and not fall to the bottom.
She comes with a riding whip for her mule,
Summoning knights to adventure,
Lamenting that she will never know joy
Until her mule’s lost bridle is returned to her,
And crying out for a champion to serve her,
To seek and find the bridle, and win her love.
Pas beneath the church’s western door,uder the relief
Of the sheela na gig, ugly hag squatting akimbo,
Opening her cavernous cunt for all to see and touch.
Friend, who would be wise, keep a snake at your table,
Feed it on morsels, and listen when it speaks.
Dindraine
Here is she who pursues her course
With dedication and aplomb,
In a country filled with terrors and distractions,
This land of thick forest, rivers and springs.
How many times must you venture to the river,
Before you dare to build a bridge?
No one told the water to flow freely,
No one had to teach the trees to be still.
In the cemetery is the sound of laughter,
And ghostly knights with flaming lances.
She sits on her throne, surrounded by beer and wine,
And asks: “For whom should I pour the cup?”
She offers her guest three draughts,
The white, the red and the black.
The brother and sister arrive together,
Standing on the prow of the ship,
Sailing down the river to the castle,
The White Queen and the Red King,
Opening the ways of grace,
Showing men how to navigate.
A flash of silver in the trees:
The unicorn swiftly passing,
It wants to help you but will not approach.
At the well you fill the golden cup:
Look into the water-what do you see there?
Pour it out to heal the wounds of the world.
Ragnell
Shape-changing is our human play,
The sport of the enchantress, of life on the hoof.
Comes a lady riding a beautiful palfrey, richly caparisoned,
Carrying a lute across her back,
Her face, when she turns towards you,hideous,inhuman,
Like the owl of evil omen, flitting across the moon:
“Place your life in my hands, and I will save you.
I alone can give you the answer to the question…”
They dance, the nine korrigans,
Crowned with flowers, robed in white,
About the fountain, in moonlight.
The three Fates work their distaffs and spindles,
Twisting the thread through their fingers,
One to spin, one to weave, one to cut.
Who seeks the counsel of the fay?
Three times three is their power.
Throw some more wood on the hearth-fire,
And watch for visions in the smoke.
From the Queen’s castle the hero sets out,
The lost son, whose journeys will be arduous,
Whose fate will be the sufferings of a king.
Who but she holds my life in her hands?
My ship sets sail from the shores of her eye,
And disappears into the mists.
Three initiations await the seeker:
To be conceived of his mother’s womb;
To lie with a daughter of the moon;
To enter the enclosure of the Goddess.
In the great hall of the Castle of Maidens,
She sits enthroned, surrounded by her female court,
And wild unearthly music fills the air:
“Stranger, you are welcome for the night:
I ask only that you give me one night’s dreaming,
That I may send you vision and understanding…”
Guinevere
O joyful power that moves all wheels,
Beyond comprehension and control!
Ecstasy of rising,rising,crying the tears of an angel!
Lovers true and false converge from all directions
To court and win the sovereign soul.
The combat commences in the meadow,
The two knights clashing from opposite poles,
Watched by the summer sun and the winter moon,
Till the May Queen lifts her crowned head to the stars.
The gates of the Summer Country are open
For all acts of love and pleasure, without guilt;
Open for the visitations of the fairies,
Abductors of the beloved prize.
Beware the hidden thorns, drawing blood
Before you know it; and the devilment
Of the twin sisters in one body,
The false queen and the true.
Strife is her delight: setting one against the other,
Bringing her rival suitors to blows,
Skilled in cruel deceptions and torments.
Many tests are set, many blows are struck,
Judgment is pronounced in the courts of love,
And the hunters of the white hart spur their steeds,
Chasing their quarry through the forest.
Oh, the sound of pipes among the trees,
And the dancing of fools and jesters!
Hang your wishes on the hawthorn tree,
You, the cuckoo in the sun’s nest…
Morgan
She is the raven to the carrion,
The dark interrogator, pulling from her sleeves
Terrible questions, too long avoided.
In the apple orchard she appears to you,
Speaking strange words in your ear:
Beware when you pick these fruit,
For some are poisoned and deadly.
O, weaving waters, about the Island of Women,
Bless the voyager and the ship.
The hounds are baying:
Here is the ford where champions fight,
And lovers fall into embrace.
The severed head speaks from the tower,
The hag sits at table in the place of honour.
She who makes the wound can heal it,
Herbalist and astronomer, dark and slender,
Mistress of seduction, all her senses engaging,
Her sweetness and her anger equal in force.
What will come of these Enchanted Games?
Prepare yourself for the beheading.
The Lady of the Wheel must have a man in her power,
To which end she will use any spell.
Argante
Be fierce and tender, this is kindness to yourself
And goodness to the world:
The guardian of the doorway wants you for her own.
The jewel in the ring reveals a lake:
In this land there can be no guilt, only love,
Here lovers conjoin without sorrow or shame,
And the mother lets her son go forth without hindrance,
Well-fostered in courage and arms.
Through the deer forest, by the lake, she rides,
In a tunic of white samite and ermine mantle,
And a veil before her face,
Bearing the sword to the worthy one.
Her eyes are silver, catching the tints of the sky,
Leading you into the birch grove,
Where the trees dance around your head…
Look into the well, the water is cold ecstasy,
Myriads of shimmering droplets,
Sparking,glinting,alive with iridescent fire,
Dancing and changing so quickly, in such intricate patterns,
That your senses cannot grasp more than a fraction.
Nimuë
The doors will be opened, the ways will be opened,
New ways and new determinations.
The Lady will imprison you
Beneath a stone, in a sarcophagus, in a hawthorn bush,
In a prison of glass, a moulting cage,
Though you met her at the fountain
And conjured an enchanted orchard for her,
And summoned knights and ladies to dance for her,
And promised to share the stars with her.
Here I am, in the treetops, perching on branches,
Flying from tree to tree, in my cloak of feathers.
In the sunhouse of the glass castle,
The women weave and embroider,
Watching the centuries pass in silence,
Outside their windows, all the follies of men.
This is the triple death chosen:
To fall from your horse from a high place,
Catch yourself in a tree during the fall, and be hanged,
And drown with your head submerged in a river.
Here is the keeper of the forest:
The huntress in her chariot drawn by wild deer.
On with the venery,the sport of the brave!
Enid
Three robes she will wear,
The white, the red, and the black.
Her patience and forbearance
Will temper the fierceness of men.
She will not rest until you are delivered,
Until every burden is lifted, every grief effaced,
And you enter into boundless compassion,
Transfiguring all pain into rejoicing.
She has tasted the bitterest poison and survived,
She has suffered death’s lesson and triumphed,
Triumphant in vivacity and love.
Have you seen the white hart among the trees,
Stately and proud, alone of all his kind?
These lands are dangerous out of season:
What you learn here you must teach others,
And do not linger too long, lest you forget
Your mortality and humility,
And lose your way on the twisting forest paths.
Soon the horn will sound to summon you
Home, through brambles, nettles and thorns.
Kundry
Measure your destiny’s pattern, wise to the limits,
And learn from the circling of the hawk.
Loathsome in her hood of turtle-doves,
She speaks of the movements of the seven planets,
The Black maiden, wedded to her work.
The beauty of blackness is visible to those
Who know the true worth of the soul,
Who have ever sought the dark over the light.
Ah,see the Wheel of Fortune turning,
With the king on top and the beggar clinging
To the bottom, and the others scrambling
To reach the top and not fall to the bottom.
She comes with a riding whip for her mule,
Summoning knights to adventure,
Lamenting that she will never know joy
Until her mule’s lost bridle is returned to her,
And crying out for a champion to serve her,
To seek and find the bridle, and win her love.
Pas beneath the church’s western door,uder the relief
Of the sheela na gig, ugly hag squatting akimbo,
Opening her cavernous cunt for all to see and touch.
Friend, who would be wise, keep a snake at your table,
Feed it on morsels, and listen when it speaks.
Dindraine
Here is she who pursues her course
With dedication and aplomb,
In a country filled with terrors and distractions,
This land of thick forest, rivers and springs.
How many times must you venture to the river,
Before you dare to build a bridge?
No one told the water to flow freely,
No one had to teach the trees to be still.
In the cemetery is the sound of laughter,
And ghostly knights with flaming lances.
She sits on her throne, surrounded by beer and wine,
And asks: “For whom should I pour the cup?”
She offers her guest three draughts,
The white, the red and the black.
The brother and sister arrive together,
Standing on the prow of the ship,
Sailing down the river to the castle,
The White Queen and the Red King,
Opening the ways of grace,
Showing men how to navigate.
A flash of silver in the trees:
The unicorn swiftly passing,
It wants to help you but will not approach.
At the well you fill the golden cup:
Look into the water-what do you see there?
Pour it out to heal the wounds of the world.
Ragnell
Shape-changing is our human play,
The sport of the enchantress, of life on the hoof.
Comes a lady riding a beautiful palfrey, richly caparisoned,
Carrying a lute across her back,
Her face, when she turns towards you,hideous,inhuman,
Like the owl of evil omen, flitting across the moon:
“Place your life in my hands, and I will save you.
I alone can give you the answer to the question…”
Brittany
Mirages and sunsets of the Bay of Mont-St-Michel…
My secret violence breeds a universe,
Of stars and planets revolving,
Nebulae whirling, meteors jetting,
Black holes and wormholes gorging themselves…
The dolmen of La Roche-aux-Fées:
Its opening aligns with the rising sun of the winter solstice…
In the sacristy of the Abbey of Paimpont
Is a silver arm joined with gold nails
Holding a book encrusted with precious stones,
Containing a finger of St Judicaël.
In the Forest of Brocéliande, in the church
Of Tréhorenteuc, a sparkling mosaic
Shows flaming red and haloed wolfish lions
Surrounding a white hart bearing a cross on its necklace.
By Lake Comper, gazing into its waters,
I think of Merlin conjuring in its depths
A fantastic castle for Viviane, beguiled by her wiles,
And where she dwelled as the Lady of the Lake
And reared the foundling Lancelot as her own.
Will I ever, ever give up the hard demented struggle
To understand the world and myself?
Oh if I could, if I could!
But always, like a half-remembered tune,
Some figment of my past will rise like vomit,
And black conquers white.
Walk across the heather moors above the cliffs to Cap Fréhel,
The cliffs and islets of schist and pink sandstone and porphyry,
With guillemots, gannets and petrels overhead,
And then to the dunes and pines beyond…
The music of my life, I am still trying to hear it, to play it, to sing in tune,
-But do my ears deceive me,
Do they baffle me with distortion and hallucinations,
Wrong notes of an untuned mind?
The Ankou stalks the streets of Morlaix,
Tristan Corbière, black corsair of the sky,
Slashing at shades with his rusty cutlass,
Tormented by love and arthritis.
At the chapel of St-They at the Pointe du Van,
The spirit of the saint,they say,used to rign the bells
To warn ships away from this deadly coast,
Yet still so many ships were wrecked here
In the Bay of the Dead; the voices of the drowned
Seem to rise in the wind; from this headland
They transported dead druids to the isle of Sein,
Passing from one world to the next,
Where dwell nine virgin priestesses in seclusion,
Fomenting tempests, and metamorphosing
Into wild beasts, curing diseases and telling the future.
In Nantes, in the Musée Thomas Dobrée,
I gaze upon the golden reliquary for the heart
Of Anne de Bretagne, last duchess of Brittany,
-What strange tricks history plays
To amuse its twisted mind! -
That she should be revered as a saint,
When in life she was a stubborn self-serving politician,
And a spendthrift wedded to pleasure!
On the isle of Gavriinis:
The signs of the Goddess :
Vulvas carved into rock,
Totems of the Mother’s womb,
The crease in the cowrie and the wheat-grain,
The natural fissure in the rock,
The inward-conducting cleft.
Black granite rises and flows :
The temple walls are swirling vortices,
Whirlwinds of vulvas,
The midwinter rising sun
Penetrates through the low entrance
Deep into the darkness.
My secret violence breeds a universe,
Of stars and planets revolving,
Nebulae whirling, meteors jetting,
Black holes and wormholes gorging themselves…
The dolmen of La Roche-aux-Fées:
Its opening aligns with the rising sun of the winter solstice…
In the sacristy of the Abbey of Paimpont
Is a silver arm joined with gold nails
Holding a book encrusted with precious stones,
Containing a finger of St Judicaël.
In the Forest of Brocéliande, in the church
Of Tréhorenteuc, a sparkling mosaic
Shows flaming red and haloed wolfish lions
Surrounding a white hart bearing a cross on its necklace.
By Lake Comper, gazing into its waters,
I think of Merlin conjuring in its depths
A fantastic castle for Viviane, beguiled by her wiles,
And where she dwelled as the Lady of the Lake
And reared the foundling Lancelot as her own.
Will I ever, ever give up the hard demented struggle
To understand the world and myself?
Oh if I could, if I could!
But always, like a half-remembered tune,
Some figment of my past will rise like vomit,
And black conquers white.
Walk across the heather moors above the cliffs to Cap Fréhel,
The cliffs and islets of schist and pink sandstone and porphyry,
With guillemots, gannets and petrels overhead,
And then to the dunes and pines beyond…
The music of my life, I am still trying to hear it, to play it, to sing in tune,
-But do my ears deceive me,
Do they baffle me with distortion and hallucinations,
Wrong notes of an untuned mind?
The Ankou stalks the streets of Morlaix,
Tristan Corbière, black corsair of the sky,
Slashing at shades with his rusty cutlass,
Tormented by love and arthritis.
At the chapel of St-They at the Pointe du Van,
The spirit of the saint,they say,used to rign the bells
To warn ships away from this deadly coast,
Yet still so many ships were wrecked here
In the Bay of the Dead; the voices of the drowned
Seem to rise in the wind; from this headland
They transported dead druids to the isle of Sein,
Passing from one world to the next,
Where dwell nine virgin priestesses in seclusion,
Fomenting tempests, and metamorphosing
Into wild beasts, curing diseases and telling the future.
In Nantes, in the Musée Thomas Dobrée,
I gaze upon the golden reliquary for the heart
Of Anne de Bretagne, last duchess of Brittany,
-What strange tricks history plays
To amuse its twisted mind! -
That she should be revered as a saint,
When in life she was a stubborn self-serving politician,
And a spendthrift wedded to pleasure!
On the isle of Gavriinis:
The signs of the Goddess :
Vulvas carved into rock,
Totems of the Mother’s womb,
The crease in the cowrie and the wheat-grain,
The natural fissure in the rock,
The inward-conducting cleft.
Black granite rises and flows :
The temple walls are swirling vortices,
Whirlwinds of vulvas,
The midwinter rising sun
Penetrates through the low entrance
Deep into the darkness.
Provence
Steep forested hills, sudden eruption sof rock,
Warm scent of pine and eucalyptus
And wild herbs, absorbed through the skin;
Brilliant lizard in a wave of light,
I kiss the thighs of each moment,
Twist out of my body on mimosa sprees.
I feel like the first Greek ashore,
Planting figs and olives, cherry trees and vines,
Looking out for nymphs at every spring.
The white horse, born black,
Turns to snow in his fourth year
And the myriad blues of Mont Ventoux
Ceaselessly swarm and mutate.
Old towns, tight mazes
For the blindfolded lover,
Winding stairs up to the castles
And a glimpse of heaven,
Hot breath behind green shutters
In the silent hour.
Actors in a Roman theatre,
We romp like children through the latest farce
Then nip backstage and don the tragedians’ masks.
Oh to have been in Avignon
In the days of the wicked Popes,
With all the scholars, heretics and hustlers,
When all the vices flourished
In the monstrous palace,
The fat feuding cardinals in bed with their mistresses,
Draping them in jewels and furs
Purchased with the Devil’s bribes,
Musicians, chefs and artists
Fighting for patronage and honour,
Riotous banquets, secret orgies,
Machiavellian intrigues.
Glimmering violet rocks,
Translucent sea,
February mimosa blossom,
Golden chestnuts in autumn,
Reddening vines…
Phosphorescent beaches,
Dark shade of pines and oaks and eucalyptus,
Chestnut-forested hills…
We speak the language of birds,
The troubadours’ code,
Dark on dark, capturing the light,
Homing it ever inwards.
These are the mercies of your body:
Olives and garlic,
White peaches and muscat grapes,
Melons and strawberries,
Almonds and sweet chestnuts,
Basil and wild thyme.
Taste the lavender in the honey,
The tinge that makes the whole…
Here – a purple gentian,
A lover’s token;
Place it in your bosom,
Keep it there.
In the cathedral cloisters at Fréjus,
In a scented garden, around a well,
The slender marble columns rise,
Supporting a wooden ceiling
Painted with monsters and mermaids,
Satyrs’ bacchanalia.
In the depths of caves
Prehistoric painted handprints glow;
Horses running into the dawn sun,
Bison and deer with the sad eyes of humans
Accepting the hunter’s spear.
Flamingos on the marshes,
Black bulls sizing up the horizon,
White horses running free,
And the gypsies arriving from all directions
For the feast of their patron saint…
Caesar’s bastards,
We have our own empire,
Our own dark tongue
In which to hymn
The marriage of Christ
And the Magdalene.
Sunlight on the slopes,
Honeysuckle and immortelle,
Quickness and stillness
Of lizards on the rocks,
Vines and cherry orchards
Stretching into the haze…
We breathe the distant snows
Of sacrificial mountains,
Walking into the waves,
The tide of light…
Warm scent of pine and eucalyptus
And wild herbs, absorbed through the skin;
Brilliant lizard in a wave of light,
I kiss the thighs of each moment,
Twist out of my body on mimosa sprees.
I feel like the first Greek ashore,
Planting figs and olives, cherry trees and vines,
Looking out for nymphs at every spring.
The white horse, born black,
Turns to snow in his fourth year
And the myriad blues of Mont Ventoux
Ceaselessly swarm and mutate.
Old towns, tight mazes
For the blindfolded lover,
Winding stairs up to the castles
And a glimpse of heaven,
Hot breath behind green shutters
In the silent hour.
Actors in a Roman theatre,
We romp like children through the latest farce
Then nip backstage and don the tragedians’ masks.
Oh to have been in Avignon
In the days of the wicked Popes,
With all the scholars, heretics and hustlers,
When all the vices flourished
In the monstrous palace,
The fat feuding cardinals in bed with their mistresses,
Draping them in jewels and furs
Purchased with the Devil’s bribes,
Musicians, chefs and artists
Fighting for patronage and honour,
Riotous banquets, secret orgies,
Machiavellian intrigues.
Glimmering violet rocks,
Translucent sea,
February mimosa blossom,
Golden chestnuts in autumn,
Reddening vines…
Phosphorescent beaches,
Dark shade of pines and oaks and eucalyptus,
Chestnut-forested hills…
We speak the language of birds,
The troubadours’ code,
Dark on dark, capturing the light,
Homing it ever inwards.
These are the mercies of your body:
Olives and garlic,
White peaches and muscat grapes,
Melons and strawberries,
Almonds and sweet chestnuts,
Basil and wild thyme.
Taste the lavender in the honey,
The tinge that makes the whole…
Here – a purple gentian,
A lover’s token;
Place it in your bosom,
Keep it there.
In the cathedral cloisters at Fréjus,
In a scented garden, around a well,
The slender marble columns rise,
Supporting a wooden ceiling
Painted with monsters and mermaids,
Satyrs’ bacchanalia.
In the depths of caves
Prehistoric painted handprints glow;
Horses running into the dawn sun,
Bison and deer with the sad eyes of humans
Accepting the hunter’s spear.
Flamingos on the marshes,
Black bulls sizing up the horizon,
White horses running free,
And the gypsies arriving from all directions
For the feast of their patron saint…
Caesar’s bastards,
We have our own empire,
Our own dark tongue
In which to hymn
The marriage of Christ
And the Magdalene.
Sunlight on the slopes,
Honeysuckle and immortelle,
Quickness and stillness
Of lizards on the rocks,
Vines and cherry orchards
Stretching into the haze…
We breathe the distant snows
Of sacrificial mountains,
Walking into the waves,
The tide of light…
Notes of a Virtual Man
1
Black-bearded polychrome Byzantine,
I walk in blue shimmer;
Candle-glamoured icons glow around.
O,age of polymaths,
Let the gold be smelted!
Illustrated manuscripts fly in the wind;
The radiant city rises from the Flood.
2
That succulent vivacious body
Trances me anguished to bliss;
Lightly, black eyes profess
The quantum mechanics of love.
Up to our eyes in ridiculous ardour,
We raid the skies for innocence,
Fortune’s angels, turning the wheel
With all our trembling strength.
3
I haggled, hoarded, truckled,
Competed for every prize;
I hid my fear ,and never,
Never looked life in the eyes.
4
Sad in a strange way, though summered in blue welkin whiles, and cloud-drift,I,a ghost on earth, disillusioned and dreaming, here and not here. Was I ever so bizarre?
So it goes. As if these words had meaning and could heal. Yet there seems some haunting mercy in all this, working its charm in the midst of grief, guiding me beyond the trees’ cascades, could I but trust the moment.
5
Love’s linguist,syllabled in semantic revrie,aching with hermenutics,in dread of fathomless silence, I parse my way through trouble’s syntax, words of fate in Indo-European sky. continents drift and clash; mountains thrust upward; oceans seethe; and here, in my cell, I follow the motions of the stars .
6
Life, queasy farrago of boredom and fear, wallows in brain and guts, deepening narcosis.
Who goes there. A doppelganger. Woe to the automatic slack-jawed citizen, slumped in his mrchair,chewing regurgitated cud.
Enter the beautiful bureaucrat in shiny shoes and well-creased suit, processed data marching across his monitors, applying the formula to everything in sight. the appropriate forms for all occasions shower from the sky.
“Progress!” cries the Decent Man,steepping over the cliff.Homo sapiens, toddling upright, sniffs the air and teeters forward with crooked gait. What fun we shall provide for the archaeologists of the future.
7
Attenuated mannerists, chiaroscuro vituosi,anxiously angling for perspective, we disappear up our own arses with consummate ease. Self-mortified withmathematcs,we sing the integers and irrational numbers of myth. Distraction is our theology.Infinite speculation and sophistry ensue.
8
Inexplicable, all too human,
What a strange creature I have turned out to be,
Half-genius, half-moron.
I crown myself Emperor of the Banal;
What it all adds up to, I cannot tell.
Twists and puns, enough for everyone,
Bitter aphorisms by the bushel;
All this I offer to the Lord of Heaven,
And pray He will see the joke.
9
On the outskirts of Now,
Stricken into perception,
I trade chance for chance,
Destroying and creating.
10
Love, the musical twins’ knack, solving problems in fluid mechanics, comes at things from all angles at once, running and leaping at the sky. Happiness? Without theories or conclusions, and no demands to satisfy?
Charivari shudders under the skin, shimmerings in the rain.
11
This is my house
That I have built form nothing
From wandering daydreams
And terror in the night;
This is my destiny,
My most secret will.
12
Citizen of an imagined state, statistic in freefall, I enter the neutral zone. Through binoculars, I watch the world destroy itself. It is so quiet here, one can almost hear oneself think.
13
Living subtle fictions, I anticipate myself;
Spun from the vortex, memory’s creature,
Inquring,changing,a process, not a thing.
I carry a vagabond theatre on my back,
Through storms bred on the desert horizon,
Toward the ultimate clarification of dreams.
14
Raucous voices dwindle to whispers;
Lines and perspectives fade;
Only the nights are the same as ever,
The Milky Way like a chloroform mask
Closing down on my face.
Distrusting crude sanity, the mind withdraws,
And the planet stalls, bewildered, spent;
Trapped in a room with cracked walls,
I calculate some attenuated survival,
Whatever the moment can afford.
15
In the caverns of our laughter
Whispers drip.
16
The people process to the dried-up riverbed, bearing human skulls aloft on poles, to lay upon the barren stones, and call down rain from the mountains.
The bull’s head carved in rock glowers with sombre power. Bare trees blacken the sky. this is the land of the wandering dead, where rainbows evartaret in quavering song, and snakes dance and copulate, bringing forth the dawn.
17
Clench your teeth,
And scream like an ape,
Beautiful lunatic,
Coprophiliac!
Shine your shoes,
And walk on air,
Think without thinking,
Planet breathing.
18
In the season of beginnings, I gather herbs under the moon. The island throbs with animal energy. Born between a rock and a tree, baptised in a green mountain river, I walk towards the glint of sunlight in a spider’s web.
I have quarried a sepulchre in the air .The dark one, my brother, comes to slay me in the ravine. his sword is a streak of fire in the heavens.
In the deserted citadel, in a candlelit chamber, the pages of the book of prophecies turn by themselves.
19
At my potter’s wheel, I watch the Pleiades rise. My sibman hands me the jade mask and I fall through the floor.
Shoals of stars swim about me, as I lie on the golden reef, drenched in symphonies and silences.
20
And then I drank the water from the rock. Sunrise streamed through me; I became the rainbow.
Is this the planet of destroyers, the conjuror’s sad trick?
21
He comes, the man with the sardonic smile, talking of home and freedom, accustomed to the company of chimerae,wise to their tricks, his amber eyes gleaming with tall tales of the true.
“You are so proud of your blindness,” he laughs, “Close your eyes, and all will be clear.”
22
I am the pontifex,the mountain’s reflection in the lake you have never seen. What snake-eyed burlesque! Who is that, tiptoeing to the grave?
These pigeon-toed pretensions I dedicate to the day after tomorrow, the day of coming clean.
23
The mouth yawns open
And spews unholy clichés
Filling the awkward spaces
For a while,
Fending off the void.
I have my tricks, my sleight-of-hand,diversions,fantasias,call it what you will.
I study the behaviour of wasps in my dreams, imagine the plunge of the sting,-and then what?
I scrabble in the dirt, stuffing handfuls into my mouth. One just wants to feel full.
What is that noise in my head?Tinnitus of being,carillons,carillons.
I cannot retrace my steps. I have come too far.
Come and Go came and went.
The mouth yawns open
And a herd of cattle
Stampedes over the plains
And vanishes
Over the horizon.
24
Draw a circle in the sand,
And begin at the end;
It is the time of coming together,
It is the time of falling apart.
25
Memories: only the shooting stars, only the rivers, the trees in your mind, as you reach out to grasp what is no longer there.
These winter days are dark fire. Frost glitters with the passion of Nothing.
When I at last somehow relinquish,
Will the earth shine as never before?
26
Black ink, you taste of riddles
And the death of stars;
What stratagem will save me
From losing my mind?
27
We have learned to breathe poison and crave destruction. Our lives ,it seems, can live without us. On the Stock Exchange of the damned, stocks and shares in nothingness change hands amid bedlam and frenzy.
Oblivion is here and now, the moment that evaporates, undiscovered, unloved.
28
Baptised in sleep,
Picking locks with my tongue,
I lose my heart
To the highest branches of the forest,
Praying to be made whole
By the glittering sky;
Everything out of reach
Rushes into me now,
Conceived in here,
Drawn toward perfection;
With all my strength,
I must test the dream
Beyond all limits
And prove it true.
29
The clouds are beyond me,
Nothing I can say about them makes sense,
Nothing approaches them, nothing encompass them,
They are simply themselves, drifting by…
My language is mad of sticks and stones,
Pieces of string of differing lengths,
Ink or grease smudge don the fingers,
And the window that you only dare to open in summer,
When the sky’s chrysalis bursts open.
30
What will you find
In bluebeard’s castle?
The key to the locked room
Is in your mouth,
In the well.
31
Passion’s precipates, colours of death and renewal! the beautiful dragons come. the particles are singing, if only you could hear them. Sell your bones for a skiff to glide downriver. Descending is ascending. Time to eat your words.
Language flickers on the wave crests, under the deaf-mute moon.
Everything begins again, from a slightly different point.
32
Bodies collide,
Destinies crumple into each other,
The sperm and the ovum devour one another,
In an ecstasy of recognition,
Three hundred and sixty degrees of truth.
The difficult homecoming calls you,
Looking upward holds you to the earth,
Paradox crackles in your fingertips,
Whichever way you inspect the situation
It is always the opposite, the other.
33
I like to swallow stones;
I like the way they hold me down;
These cool dark stones
Are good for my fever.
34
I measure her body with prayers,
Captured by the wings of bats and doves,
At the heart of the compass rose.
How will it end? With two mangy dogs
Licking the puddles on tumbledown streets,
In a city without honour, without love?
35
Explorers in a wilderness where names fall to earth like shooting stars, we move forward with animal energy, mapping the vastness ,possessing to dispossess.
From the first intention universe explodes.
We paint our nakedness with patterns, and dance in circles. from horizon to horizon, we become a new language, a mystery shared.
36
How can I face the world and not destroy myself with rage?
Yet still there is contemplation in this sun-tranced garden,
Ants doodling mystical patterns at my feet,
As I savour earth’s rich melancholy aroma .
Intoning the sonorous occult names of shrubs-
Stephanandra,euonymus,helianthemum-
I cling to this small portion of almost-paradise,
This sanctuary that is everywhere and nowhere,
Where the fruit trees answer to my voice.
37
My dying father’s eyes
In dream’s ritual seeing
Bless dark with inception;
Merciful grief phosphoresces
On spring’s giddy boughs,
And love, on the high ground,
Whinnies and bounds, self-amazed.
38
The sun cartwheels overhead,
Over the nomad plains of the beginning;
The current flows through the rock,
The seas turn over,
The shaman’s drum beats out the dance;
A meteorite plummets,
An oak tree rises from an acorn,
Lovers meld in cloudburst
On the first day.
39
Travelling players, roaming from place to place,
Performing tragicomedies for your pleasure,
Our masks are humble, but precious.
We have long since forgotten our real names,
We exist only in the act;
We are your silhouettes, your necessary demons,
Disturbing the order of things, as we go,
If only a little, and only for a while,
Somehow holding the earth together.
40
This gaunt peninsula reverberates with doom. Here, skeletons are bleached and transfigured.
A delicious spring gushes from a cleft under a fig tree, high over the bay. Snakes shimmer in the cataleptic heat. Nothing moves in the mind.
Why have I come here? What am I seeking in the raven-nested ruin sof abandoned
churches, and in the kraken’s caves?
I touch hot throbbing rocks with my silence. Amid the olive groves, invisible spirits draw me on.
41
The most hideous things, the truths that could kill me, I must suffer them and pass through.
February flays me raw with sacramental whips. Winter’s initiate, I grow wrinkled with insight.
Be still, and what wonders may find you!
42
Malingering behind my eyes, I inherit the void.
The spider knows what he needs to know.
And I am a spider.
43
A man and a woman playing chess: “Your move,” says the man.
Towers topple. Seas ebb and flood.
The witch doctor casts the bones across the dust. Nuclear reactors chant hymns to the apocalypse.
Tricks with mirrors and trapdoors proliferate. In the blue castle, the mad seigneur leads his guests in a mazurka. The music box starts up again.
A man and a woman playing chess: “Your move,” says the woman to the man.
44
Our bodies
moored together
sway with the sway
Tarot cards
spread out on the table:
the tower struck by lightning
Love
spirals up and down
instantaneous
unending
The Aeolian harp
recalls us
to the Garden
45
Apparitions cross the bridges
Over auriferous rivers;
The sleepwalker speaks in flame.
There is no clarity here,
No light to love by,
Only mandolin moments,
Travesties and transgressions.
Drift and transmute,
Let involuted time become
The sum of our errors,
Folding in on itself
In catastrophic origami;
When the end arrives,
Will we even recognise it?
Apparitions cross the bridges
And meet themselves, coming back.
46
Most secret felicity
Exquisite to the point of death,
Anagram of paradise!
Our minds touch, our bodies cling,
As if we could keep one another from falling,
Falling from grace with the day.
We share our pain so secretly,
It glows in the dark, when only the moon is looking.
My mouth on your mouth,
My spirit in yours,
Dragonflies at twilight,
We glitter and die.
47
Began with a wolf-howl. Began as bawling galaxies begin. Entered a body, stood upright,stretched,looked around. The bone moon taught my hands to work. Shadow came and showed me how to die.
Now I follow the ghosts of animals across the plain.
48
These sentimental fictions, how we need them to survive!
At year’s end, watching the sun spiral down into darkness, I feel again the sacred wound that makes me human.
Thus I plunge into the cauldron of another year, to witness, if only for an instant, the earth shine anew, reborn at the source for all.
49
Stupefaction dulls the air; the horizon tilts; definitions implode, as far as ever from the truth; reason twists the rope till it catches fire. Confusion insinuates itself into every crack. This strange return to apalce we never knew. What now?-Information without knowledge, knowledge without hope. and then,perhaps,the reckoning.
All is shifting,formless,unsayyable.This is my opium, a wasting asset.
Life, my favourite calembour!The brinkmanship of thought caracoles for its own perverse pleasure.
What category are you in? What name do you answer to? God’s bureaucracy is working day and night; we exist only to serve.
50
If not these words, then others. But words, always and only words. Spoken and unspoken. Connections and short circuits.
Magical grammar, invest me with truth! Order me with the stars. Remember the forgotten, reassemble the scattered.
At the toll-booths of time, I pay my dues.
I am torn down the middle, and no one can see the tear.
51
I say to myself:
Watch your head! Don’t lose it!
Destiny?Pah?
Just get on with it1
Let the whip fall,
Let the sky fall, for all I care!
I like the smell of cemetery flowers,
The damp earth after rain;
Suburbia suits me,
A spiral galaxy.
I say to myself:
What if ?If only!
Such mild insanity,
Pure perversion…
The same old words come round again,
The same old thoughts…
Now take your medicine, and be a good boy.
Clutching my lottery ticket,
I pray to the heavens,
Round-shouldered little beggar that I am,
Always treading on tiptoe,
Sucking up to the Big Man.
But I must, at least, confess to a little sin,
An unaccountable predilection
For killing flies and spiders, as many as I can,
No that it gives me any pleasure…
52
The wolf is coming! The wolf is coming!
And then the three brothers came to a castle
Where everyone had been turned to stone,
And only they could undo the spell
By completing three tasks.
I want to eat up the gingerbread house,
But the witch will get me and eat me alive!
I dream of the kingdom
Of which nothing is known.
Three drops of blood in the snow,
And a golden chalice in the hand:
Little Red Cap filled the wolf’s belly with stones,
And when it woke it could not jump away.
What did the white horse whisper in your ear while you slept?
Tell me, what became of the youngest son?
What became of the simpleton?
53
It is the time of murderers and pathologists, of technologies and disguises. Plenty of work for everyone!
I dedicate my life to the study of ellipses. I delight in a tenuous self, a unique curve vanishing into the distance.
Beautiful pariahs, have faith in the desert sun. The stars are all in place, and the earth knows its mission.
We, who uncover the brilliance of bone, will prosper in death’s reward.
54
When you tell those lies,
The moon is eclipsed;
When you wrench my bones so,
The sea turns cold,
And black blasted trees
Fly through my head,
And the only sound is a heartbeat,
No one’s, nowhere.
How should I begin?-
I have come too far,
Only growing in foolishness,
And seldom in wisdom.
Yet here I am still,
In the flesh, in the moment,
Phantasmal, absurd,
But not insignificant.
And you, my Otherness,
Can you hear me?
When you tell those lies,
The good stone cracks,
And not a thing can be built.
55
Keep your secret, kept it well,
For what else do you possess?
More,more,always more of everything,
To make you real, or less unreal,
Then nothing, nothing at all.
This fatal appetite hates itself.
Annihilation is its game.
56
Don’t look in my eyes for the truth:
There’s nothing there but sorrow.
Don’t tell me what I need,
Don’t show me where to go,
Don’t ask me to come clean;
There’s nothing left but time.
57
Solitary captain,
Hunter of the narwhal,
Man of ice and fire,
Gulls be your pallbearers,
And the ocean your shroud;
Your spindrift story is in the wind;
A mermaid’s haunting,
By barren shores.
58
I see you riding along the sands,
Green-eyed girl, hair blown by the wind,
Who will never belong to anyone in the world.
59
I have seen a flight of dragons
Over the mountain,
And heard a woman’s voice
From the bottom of the well.
The moon that is nearly full brings good fortune.
A spring wells up in the forest,
Where the stricken deer lies down.
The passes are closed to the horseman,
But lightning opens the sky,
And the lame man grasps the moon.
World always beyond me, world in itself,
Will you ever show me the key?
60
The lion left and the spider came,
The invisible people turned against each other,
There was nothing in the sky
But a single cloud, shaped like a sword.
Pierced through by a nightingale’s song,
The ornithologist turned with a sad smile
And walked away slowly across the meadow
Strewn with shining fossils and bones.
61
Among truncated cones of thought,
Suspended by my feet,
I interrogate the earth.
Shooting stars outrun my mind,
As I rummage for ominous stones.
The world brings gifts and questions
To the upturned tree at the end.
62
Nomads of love, we traverse from well to well, placing our faith in the earth, pitching our tents in the spaces between words.
The flint knife casts a noonday shadow, gnomon of the killer’s heart.
We turn our faces skyward, and march into the storm.
63
Blue Italian eyes, body sleek as a cat’s,
Sinuous smile saying Yes to the world,
Coolly you reflect the midday heat,
Long shadow haunting the mind.
Stay with me; why wander away?
We can be feline together,
Slumbering safely inside one another,
Stray cats in a Tuscan hill town.
Even the Pope longs to be pagan:
Take the Fisherman’s ring from my finger,
Hurl it like a meteor into the deep.
64
I feel them, hard within me:
Inoperable tumours of doubt.
Agony on agony is measured
By the dripping of a tap.
65
Two halves of a pantomime horse,
We canter back and forth,
Lumbering,lurching,out of step,
Solitudes rubbing each other threadbare.
What a performance!Bravo!Encore!
Heavenward we ascend on wires,
Winched up by applauding angels,
And a tattered majestic curtain descends.
66
Autumn the stranger
Awakens me gently,
Shivering with premonitions,
Marked for sorrow.
Level with death,
I harvest abundance,
Seeing Rembrandt
And hearing Chopin.
Breeding fantastic
In nuclear frenzy,
Cognition’s enigmas
Eerily sing.
67
Flickering screen of rain:
Stare into nothingness, hypnotised,
Dissolved in the world’s dissolution,
Apotheosis of absence,
Incommunicado, and gone.
68
Deliciousness of simple functioning, nothing to question, no need to think. No drug could be cheaper. No need for hope or despair, no sense in deviation. Cut-price nirvana for all!-This suave democratic oppression; a straight line to the terminus, cattle-trucks disguised as a luxury train.
69
Invited or not,
I am the phantom guest,
Feasting with strangers
Until all is lost.
70
So it ends:you,lying there, a shrunken effigy,
Small, dutiful hands crossed across your chest,
A fragile red rose placed there in token.
You never shirked your fate,or yearned
For some impossible heaven beyond your ken;
Now the white fires will burn you true,
And purge the momentary years’ eerie sorrow.
71
How often the pen slips, accumulating errata.
So many disjointed phrases,mutterings,asides,
Telephone conversations with angels,
Tremulous stupidities that plot a remarkable graph.
72
Some arrogant contrition is the human trick.
We are devious enough to survive, but not to win.
Praise it, ennoble it, stick medal on it: then pour the quicklime over, and be done.
73
Spider mortal, edged on the sly, speaking in glints and glowers, weird with longing for impossibles, the most you can do is inhabit your downfall with some grace.
Gravity’s booby, clowning on the underside, you fabricate the finite from the infinite, the infinite from the finite.
What fun you have had, in this transit camp for the bewildered!
74
My video recorder throbs, warm with desire.Rewind,fast forward,pause.time stops and starts as I will it. This playful universe, boxed and sold, exists to please me.
Hypnotist of solitudes, I extend my authority into shimmering infinity.
The drug runs dark in these veins, hallucinating Me.
75
How well I appreciate the precision of a delicate lie. The truth is so restricting: it lacks insight.
White dazzle in a glass of vodka: Chinese whispers in the head.
Evening comes on like a fever, monstrous with possibilities. Paradox is the Big Bang, the Crucifixion at the core of every moment.
76
With a room full of bird-masks and an altar made from junk pray to the gods who destroy me. I want to fly: they say it is never too late.
Malleable and light, our aluminium madness glimmers in the sun and never rusts. It easily adapts to many uses. We like to build the highest towers we can.
Subtle villainy streaks across my brain. It picks locks and triggers avalanches. It invents political schemes.
77
Suns and empires lived their graphs. Ideas ignited and consumed themselves. the newborn’s howl, the senile gasp. And here, in the mind’s inmost caves, the paintings glowed.
Skin-clad hunters stalk through the grass. The sorcerer’s head seeds the earth’s belly with lightning. Bison are mating, deer are running. The small blue planet sings on its axis.
Makers’ potlatch swells the many-breasted earth. The chosen flint is honed to its ultimate magic.
78
Sprawled naked across the bed, on her stomach,laughing,eating a peach, the girl with the sun in her hair floated on summer’s tide. Kittenish with the air, playing with the moment, she glowed with her own ineffable passing.
A kiss on her behind, then , a homage to ripeness. Let the sunlight hold her fast a moment more.
79
I hardly knew her,
Yet she left her trace
Here, in me,
Secret, inexplicable;
Not love, of course,
But something bizarre,
Beautiful as only
Perversity can be.
80
Jules Laforgue,
Black-coated figure,
Funeral director
On a unicycle;
Poor little orphan,
Where did Mother go?
Did the black spider
Steal her away?
All your self-mocking,
Your irony’s fireworks,
Burst skyward
In harlequin bouquets.
There is only this,
This mudball planet,
And the phthisic sun’s
Gorgon glare.
81
Your green eyes know,
Your green eyes, and the sea:
Your green eyes at sunrise,
And in the silence.
82
You know the signs, but your hands are tied. with silk.
These little deaths in black and white, are they merely part of the pretence?
Exquisite ambivalence thrills you through.Oh,these riches, these sorrows! Madness always sticks to the facts.
Beware, Your Eminence, the demons have no end of tricks.
83
This cool bright water sings with drowned stars.I,born of its shimmering, die in its belief.
84
August sunlight on my face, some fateful music pursuing me through the fields, through the high grass, over the dunes, to the shore. I was born on a lopsided day in the distance, somewhere out there, or even ahead.
August turns to September in my eyes. The sound of galaxies collapsing.
85
Your August-blue eyes foretold it all:
Doom-blessed, they caught the dream,
And saw just where your life’s meaning
Would tumble and come to rest.
86
The black thread and the white,
I honour both, in equal measure:
Without their perfect weaving,
Heaven and earth are torn asunder.
87
Fleeing the evil news of man,
I hide in a flickering cherry-tree,
A torch lit by the Celtic sun.
No one,surely,will find me here,
And ,out of the heart of silence,
Dreams will spiral and sing.
88
Callipygean mistress
When you bend over
My throat is dry with hopeless lust
O,I would do such things
With prick and tongue
That the sun would shout
With violent delight
89
Ask one question, and a thousand more rise before you:
Bewildering labyrinth, luring you inward and on,
To places unknown,alone,through hope and despair,
Finding your way,haphazardly,only to lose it again.
90
A blackbird showed me
How to fly
And I flew to the moon
To fetch elixir,
To live forever,
To give to everyone,
I flew around the world,
Siren stars were singing,
Trying to tempt me,
But I was true
And could not fall.
91
Little by little, I inherit myself,
Studying clouds
As they form and disperse.
Walking barefoot over sharp rocks,
I bathe my wounds in the sea.
92
Cosmologies arise in me, burn themselves out,implode.The universal equation eludes me. I am left at last with crude useless methods that once seemed so refined.
93
Homeless,
Touched through the veil,
I flow out into the unseen.
My slow destruction invents a world.
A head falls, severed,
And a signal flare shoots up.
My face in the glass
Is a perfect unlikeness.
94
Stranded in space-time, I exist on algebra:
Love’s astrophysics throws out equations faster than I can think.
There is no reason in this, no formula,
It takes me by storm in the night.
Pulsars and quasars sing like whales in the ocean.
Terror whirls in the singularity’s blackness.
95
The jealous heart knells in the rib-cage. Distorting mirrors at every turn.
A crazed leer, and the Winter King reels in a scarecrow fit. Frenzy uproots the trees, diverts the rivers.
96
The shame of the all-too-singular
Is acid in the soul:
Expert in self-deception,
You die with the utmost discretion.
No one will know your secret thoughts,
Or what beguiling monsters ride you
Down to merry hell.
97
Faithful to the night,
I am living crystal,
Pulsing with candour,
A madman’s desire.
98
They call this Sunday,
This wretched gap, this amnesia
In the suburbs of my mind,
Where loneliness masturbates
Its filthy glitter.
I want to plant a bomb
Under the whole world
To celebrate this meaninglessness!
99
History can fuck itself! All I want is a bottle of wine.
Crisis is an art, and I fancy myself an artist.
Underground, we are more ourselves, after all.
The curtain has not yet fallen on this show.
What will you do when you have used all your three wishes ?
100
Serpentine and cruel, I move among distractions,
Living on truth and untruth, making ambiguous gestures,
Reading secret messages discovered in crannies,
Achieving now and then a kind of grace, or oblivion,
A subtle detachment, world returned dto itself,
As the sunlight shifts, and nuances vary.
Accidental or predestined, the universe continues
As my senses endlessly probe and recoil;
There are arguments,theories,points and lines,
Actions arising, perspectives to be lived through,
Answers that tremble like mirages in the air,
And the ceaseless urge towards serene completion.
Transparent clichés expand to fill the spaces
Left by explosions, and consciousness mocks itself,
For fear of its own multiplicity, while the dance
Spirals inward, as things coalesce or dissolve.
101
102
O,human progress! Destiny of nations!-
Diagrams and explanations,
Statistics in the name of reason,
Skyscrapers darkly gleaming,
Occam’sr razor stropped on cue
To cut the suicide’s throat.
Computer programs flash across my eyes,
Tabulated in this decomposing body;
Buried under rubbish, a disembodied hand
Reaches upward, clawing at the heavens.
Old newspapers blow across scabrous pavements.
Medieval monsters leer out of the torn pages of fashion magazines.
The politics of everything
Scuttles to and fro with a sneaky simper,
Shaking hands and signing autographs.
Facts and figures flounder in all directions,
Caught in a hurricane started by a butterfly’s wings.
Tantara!War trumpets at dawn:
All the proud cavalry trot out in line,
Ready to be gunned down.
Quizzical eyes
Gaze in the interglacial,
Trapped in lost words’ moraine.
What is this strange complicity?
The art of wasting away.
Horizon:
Mouth turned down at the corners,
All its oracles absurd.
Tried and found wanting. Seen and not seen. The ankh falls form my hand.Suprernal fiasco agitates the atmosphere.Fuitle crescendo.Galctic dust-clouds swirl in paranoid eyes.
Yours is the castle of trapdoors and false walls, of hidden stairways and corridors, and two-way mirrors.
103
My fish-mouth burbles underwater:
Time rushes through my gills.
I am the coelacanth of future days.
104
You burrow into marble,
Hide your smile in a tabernacle,
Mocking everything you hold sacred.
The sun sees through you,
The moon is full of scorn.
Keep going till ugliness and beauty
Are one, and contradictions merge
Into a kind of bliss.
Keep going till you find your city,
Your place of safety, or happy illusion,
In this age of broken violins.
105
To work without hope, or disappointment,
To give oneself to the unattainable,
Disciple of failure, murdered with mirrors and candles;
Thus, one learns the secret will.
O,this drunken sensation of falling,
Spread-eagled in stellar darkness,
Towards the brilliant planet.
106
A star falls into the fountain
And the garden blooms.
The seed sprouts in the sepulchre.
What fresh image forms now in the opal?
107
Summer’s orphan runs towards the sun
Singing in a brilliant shroud,
And the just-named river celebrates
With a festival of swans.
108
Curve of the possible:
I tally the days on my bones.
My mirror-mouth glitters in the night of peacocks,
The almond tree mines the earth for light.
The owl’s flight joins the dying stars.
I disappear into the faintest smile,
Voided at reason’s extreme.
The hour arrives and passes,
With hidden consequences.
Another hard day of boredom,
Drowning kittens in a sack.
Skimming stones across the water,
See them silhouetted against the sky.
O,purity of day polluted
By weird banalities!
No warning can keep you
From testing the poisonous thorn.
109
I turned around and expressionless faces
Stared at me out of the dark:
I quickened my pace, could not escape,
Relentless menace hard at my heels.
I woke somewhere in a strange room,
All the doors and windows locked,
Unable even to remember my name,
And a hollow voice boomed in my head:
Be still, and see, the time has come,
When dragons couple and kill.
110
So casulaly,left to my own devices,
I inhabit the unreal,
Nervous system attuned
To the inexpressible,
Days adding up
To some bizarre destiny.
111
Walking in a field of diamonds,
Walking in a dream,
She is nothing but herself,
With nothing to prove.
She draws the skies to her,
Flies like a sparrowhawk;
Pregnant with star-seed,
Gives birth to auroras.
Everything begins with her,
The seven hills’ Madonna,
Walking in a field of diamonds,
Walking in a dream.
112
Lovers without foresight,
Entranced, we merge,
Turning to Gregorian chant,
Wild as the purple mountains.
Vagrant dust of solar storms,
Ravishing the atmosphere,
We assume a tortuous shape,
Time’s figure-of-eight.
113
A burst of light, then nothing. a black pebble placed in the mouth.
Winter-transparent, I float over crow-winged fields.
I am a dark bacillus in the bloodstream of the year.
Human speech comes slowly to me: I discover odd syllables inside geodes, rooting through ripe shattered rocks. I cover my nakedness with thoughts.
114
Transcendence is just another word
Too long and pompous to be used or heard:
Benumbed, we sometimes ache a little
With unspeakable pain,suppressed,ignored.
Our minds, our lives, are not our own:
We struggle on, bruised slaves resigned
To oppression, scarcely able any more
To ask ourselves: “What does it mean?”
115
On wood and stone, I make these marks,coelbren and coelvain,metaphors for the invisible. I can read the rocks and speak the language of birds.
Is the heart of the labyrinth evil? Or ultimate good?
My fist,unclenching,revelas,a small incomprehensible stone.
116
We are the carnival, the ceremony, the perpetual migration.
Our fire forges metals, our water bathes wounds.
New violence comes through us, extreme and exact. Protean desire vibrates with electromagnetic geometry.
This is my parabola: to surpass myself in self-desrcution,attaining a rigorous grace.
Sumptuous indifferent memory consumes me. the virgin skies concentrate in beautiful crisis.
117
I have passed beyond words into stones,
Into the meteorology of a moment.
The meaning? There it is, between the lines,
-Can you see it?Oh,it’s gone.
Drifting in the streets, in the air,
Magisterial, insubstantial ,
Something of me exists without me,
Or so it seems.
Move along now, no loitering here!
118
A fine old rigmarole, and no mistake.
A devilish mess, no two ways about it.
What nonsense is this? Utter bullshit.
Master of ceremonies, take a bow!
119
My sleeves full of ruses,
I roam the scarecrow days,
Telling stories for children and madmen.
120
You ,in the future, piecing fragments together,
If it us you seek, then look in the mirror.
121
Into the night,
With hands full of fire,
Eyes torn from their sockets,
I vanish into nebulae,
Intoxixtaed by death;
Divine jokes burst about me,
Apocalyptic laughter.
Now everything becomes its opposite,
Retuned to the source.
To leap the chasm,
To conquer the void!
Emissary to the mountains,
I watch for shooting stars,
And gather the earth
Into my solitude.
I cast my stones
And kiss the sacrificial altar,
Black meteorite whose magnetism
Starts multitudes walking across the desert.
122
I feed on polymorphous fantasies bred out of turbulence, out of anger.
Experimental self, which do you prefer-order or disorder?
123
Coffee and croissants, daydreams in the afternoon sun,
Differences of opinion with one’s apparent destiny,
The languid disillusionment of the European soul…-
Connoisseur of rococo decomposition,
Forever on the verge of dissolution,
You await the end with studied indifference,
Your pale desire a repertoire of postures and complaints.
Ironical beauty tempts you to presume:
Some cryptic derision squints back from polished surfaces,
The syntax of ambiguity manipulates your tongue.
How many false premises enter into the commerce?
How many venture find fruition only in going astray?
Empty now, the coffee cup stands sullen in the void,
As if to say: Why ask too much? Sit back, enjoy the view,
Time is your own, and the swallows will soon be returning…
124
History’s dynamiters move in a trance. Silent explosions ripple outward. The embryo capitulates.
Dreams;mutations;geological displacements; one theory succeeds another; the primal syllable resounds;homo sapiens stands up on two legs and screams.
125
In my illuminated bestiary, I study the dipsas,the kraken, the manticore .
I read until my candle dies, and I fall back into the lake of rainbows.
The unicorn’s horn is hidden in the folds of my habit. The moon comes to rest in my hands.
126
What am I doing here, making maps of distant countries, accustoming myself to what may or may not exist?
All the signs point to a sleepwalkers’ Sabbath, a rendezvous with No-one in the cupboard under the stairs.
127
I flow with the crowd, anonymous, stupefied. Swarming faces blur into one mask. We speak no language, possess no soul. I take what I am given, strangely grateful. This is an exclusive club.
128
Always you expected evil, the stigmata of the damned, sniffing the air for foul emanations, for hints of horror disguised as beauty. Ravished by dread, you embraced the abyss. Where else could you be yourself, without effort, or fear of rejection?
What it is to be human, to thrive on the sun’s decay!
129
O,world of the unsatisfied!- those who fear the dark or loneliness or crowds or heights; those who dwell under stones or in the cracks in walls; those who writhe in their beds and wake in a cold sweat; those who mutilate themselves with knives; those with weak hearts and poor circulation; those who spy for paranoid gods; those who live in boredom and delusion in the suburbs of the soul; those on committees who bicker and repine; those who conquer other because they cannot conquer themselves; those who watch the clock but never know the time; those who sit bewildered in premature dotage.
My soul, it is time to acknowledge delusion, to cast off the dark hood and tear the cloak to shreds. Kiss the naked body of silence! Be one with the earth-star, one with the void.
O,pulse of rainbow light! I am life itself.
The fire has done its work:
These ashes are to remind us
To live in perfect meditation,
Believing only what birds’ wings
Write in the laughing sky.
130
This subversive tomfoolery, this tiger-snaring,chicken-pluckign art!
You there, you sidling grumbling shadow,alwas retreating into another haughty evasion, never any closer to the truth, what do you think you are doing?
This is the place of ejaculation under torture. What you cannot throw away, you will have to use.
131
Rain, cool delicious rain! A Mayan priest delivered of the sacrifice, I imbibe heaven’s milk and dissolve .I am weighless,selfless,disembodied,without north or south. I spiral irresistibly inward, toward the heart of the cosmos.
132
Ah,the smiling imbecile, Argonaut of idiocy! Pentecostal gibberish flames from his mouth. Miracles spill out of his threadbare pockets.
Where has he gone now? Has he fallen through a trapdoor in the mind?
133
The myrmidons assemble to hear the Leader speak. Their ears flap in the oracular wind, a convincing imitation of applause. Their eyes gleam with fanatical devotion at all the appropriate moments. Everything is going according to plan. Grave-faced surveyors are plotting out the Promised Land. Soon the Exodus will begin.
Onward, illustrious myrmidons, onward to glory! Dirt-cheap Paradise for all! Just follow the signs, and keep to the road, and complete the requisite forms without delay.Yur dream home awaits you, fully furnished and transparent.
134
Irony, my belladonna, how faithfully I have loved you! So many billets-doux in the form of bitter jests,Pantagruelian fanfares played on tarnished old trumpets, and mincing little airs on a tinker’s whistle.
Lead me, I beg you, to a cosy well-made grave, lined with white satin, and made to measure. Ply me with placebos and anaesthetics; lead me in the goat-dance of days.
135
Did you think you were the master? Did you think life was yours to manipulate?
The mirror blurs and invents another version of You. A beautiful monster, thriving on the unattainable, essence of this now-and-never world.
Failure is your vocation, your way to greatness.
A myriad distractions amount to a world.Rootless,the mind wavers in peril. Only the impenetrable can shine.
Tightrope-minded and malign, I dwell in lostness,for the love of no-one. The leper-bell thousand a soft voice croons a lullaby for the world.
Sterile Genesis programs infinities of artificial worlds. Cause and effect operate without a hitch, and no black cats are ever seen.Three cheers for the technicians, the titanium heroes!
We are left with nothing but memories of blind man’s buff. And yet we have our season, our sad desire’s small chance.
Black-bearded polychrome Byzantine,
I walk in blue shimmer;
Candle-glamoured icons glow around.
O,age of polymaths,
Let the gold be smelted!
Illustrated manuscripts fly in the wind;
The radiant city rises from the Flood.
2
That succulent vivacious body
Trances me anguished to bliss;
Lightly, black eyes profess
The quantum mechanics of love.
Up to our eyes in ridiculous ardour,
We raid the skies for innocence,
Fortune’s angels, turning the wheel
With all our trembling strength.
3
I haggled, hoarded, truckled,
Competed for every prize;
I hid my fear ,and never,
Never looked life in the eyes.
4
Sad in a strange way, though summered in blue welkin whiles, and cloud-drift,I,a ghost on earth, disillusioned and dreaming, here and not here. Was I ever so bizarre?
So it goes. As if these words had meaning and could heal. Yet there seems some haunting mercy in all this, working its charm in the midst of grief, guiding me beyond the trees’ cascades, could I but trust the moment.
5
Love’s linguist,syllabled in semantic revrie,aching with hermenutics,in dread of fathomless silence, I parse my way through trouble’s syntax, words of fate in Indo-European sky. continents drift and clash; mountains thrust upward; oceans seethe; and here, in my cell, I follow the motions of the stars .
6
Life, queasy farrago of boredom and fear, wallows in brain and guts, deepening narcosis.
Who goes there. A doppelganger. Woe to the automatic slack-jawed citizen, slumped in his mrchair,chewing regurgitated cud.
Enter the beautiful bureaucrat in shiny shoes and well-creased suit, processed data marching across his monitors, applying the formula to everything in sight. the appropriate forms for all occasions shower from the sky.
“Progress!” cries the Decent Man,steepping over the cliff.Homo sapiens, toddling upright, sniffs the air and teeters forward with crooked gait. What fun we shall provide for the archaeologists of the future.
7
Attenuated mannerists, chiaroscuro vituosi,anxiously angling for perspective, we disappear up our own arses with consummate ease. Self-mortified withmathematcs,we sing the integers and irrational numbers of myth. Distraction is our theology.Infinite speculation and sophistry ensue.
8
Inexplicable, all too human,
What a strange creature I have turned out to be,
Half-genius, half-moron.
I crown myself Emperor of the Banal;
What it all adds up to, I cannot tell.
Twists and puns, enough for everyone,
Bitter aphorisms by the bushel;
All this I offer to the Lord of Heaven,
And pray He will see the joke.
9
On the outskirts of Now,
Stricken into perception,
I trade chance for chance,
Destroying and creating.
10
Love, the musical twins’ knack, solving problems in fluid mechanics, comes at things from all angles at once, running and leaping at the sky. Happiness? Without theories or conclusions, and no demands to satisfy?
Charivari shudders under the skin, shimmerings in the rain.
11
This is my house
That I have built form nothing
From wandering daydreams
And terror in the night;
This is my destiny,
My most secret will.
12
Citizen of an imagined state, statistic in freefall, I enter the neutral zone. Through binoculars, I watch the world destroy itself. It is so quiet here, one can almost hear oneself think.
13
Living subtle fictions, I anticipate myself;
Spun from the vortex, memory’s creature,
Inquring,changing,a process, not a thing.
I carry a vagabond theatre on my back,
Through storms bred on the desert horizon,
Toward the ultimate clarification of dreams.
14
Raucous voices dwindle to whispers;
Lines and perspectives fade;
Only the nights are the same as ever,
The Milky Way like a chloroform mask
Closing down on my face.
Distrusting crude sanity, the mind withdraws,
And the planet stalls, bewildered, spent;
Trapped in a room with cracked walls,
I calculate some attenuated survival,
Whatever the moment can afford.
15
In the caverns of our laughter
Whispers drip.
16
The people process to the dried-up riverbed, bearing human skulls aloft on poles, to lay upon the barren stones, and call down rain from the mountains.
The bull’s head carved in rock glowers with sombre power. Bare trees blacken the sky. this is the land of the wandering dead, where rainbows evartaret in quavering song, and snakes dance and copulate, bringing forth the dawn.
17
Clench your teeth,
And scream like an ape,
Beautiful lunatic,
Coprophiliac!
Shine your shoes,
And walk on air,
Think without thinking,
Planet breathing.
18
In the season of beginnings, I gather herbs under the moon. The island throbs with animal energy. Born between a rock and a tree, baptised in a green mountain river, I walk towards the glint of sunlight in a spider’s web.
I have quarried a sepulchre in the air .The dark one, my brother, comes to slay me in the ravine. his sword is a streak of fire in the heavens.
In the deserted citadel, in a candlelit chamber, the pages of the book of prophecies turn by themselves.
19
At my potter’s wheel, I watch the Pleiades rise. My sibman hands me the jade mask and I fall through the floor.
Shoals of stars swim about me, as I lie on the golden reef, drenched in symphonies and silences.
20
And then I drank the water from the rock. Sunrise streamed through me; I became the rainbow.
Is this the planet of destroyers, the conjuror’s sad trick?
21
He comes, the man with the sardonic smile, talking of home and freedom, accustomed to the company of chimerae,wise to their tricks, his amber eyes gleaming with tall tales of the true.
“You are so proud of your blindness,” he laughs, “Close your eyes, and all will be clear.”
22
I am the pontifex,the mountain’s reflection in the lake you have never seen. What snake-eyed burlesque! Who is that, tiptoeing to the grave?
These pigeon-toed pretensions I dedicate to the day after tomorrow, the day of coming clean.
23
The mouth yawns open
And spews unholy clichés
Filling the awkward spaces
For a while,
Fending off the void.
I have my tricks, my sleight-of-hand,diversions,fantasias,call it what you will.
I study the behaviour of wasps in my dreams, imagine the plunge of the sting,-and then what?
I scrabble in the dirt, stuffing handfuls into my mouth. One just wants to feel full.
What is that noise in my head?Tinnitus of being,carillons,carillons.
I cannot retrace my steps. I have come too far.
Come and Go came and went.
The mouth yawns open
And a herd of cattle
Stampedes over the plains
And vanishes
Over the horizon.
24
Draw a circle in the sand,
And begin at the end;
It is the time of coming together,
It is the time of falling apart.
25
Memories: only the shooting stars, only the rivers, the trees in your mind, as you reach out to grasp what is no longer there.
These winter days are dark fire. Frost glitters with the passion of Nothing.
When I at last somehow relinquish,
Will the earth shine as never before?
26
Black ink, you taste of riddles
And the death of stars;
What stratagem will save me
From losing my mind?
27
We have learned to breathe poison and crave destruction. Our lives ,it seems, can live without us. On the Stock Exchange of the damned, stocks and shares in nothingness change hands amid bedlam and frenzy.
Oblivion is here and now, the moment that evaporates, undiscovered, unloved.
28
Baptised in sleep,
Picking locks with my tongue,
I lose my heart
To the highest branches of the forest,
Praying to be made whole
By the glittering sky;
Everything out of reach
Rushes into me now,
Conceived in here,
Drawn toward perfection;
With all my strength,
I must test the dream
Beyond all limits
And prove it true.
29
The clouds are beyond me,
Nothing I can say about them makes sense,
Nothing approaches them, nothing encompass them,
They are simply themselves, drifting by…
My language is mad of sticks and stones,
Pieces of string of differing lengths,
Ink or grease smudge don the fingers,
And the window that you only dare to open in summer,
When the sky’s chrysalis bursts open.
30
What will you find
In bluebeard’s castle?
The key to the locked room
Is in your mouth,
In the well.
31
Passion’s precipates, colours of death and renewal! the beautiful dragons come. the particles are singing, if only you could hear them. Sell your bones for a skiff to glide downriver. Descending is ascending. Time to eat your words.
Language flickers on the wave crests, under the deaf-mute moon.
Everything begins again, from a slightly different point.
32
Bodies collide,
Destinies crumple into each other,
The sperm and the ovum devour one another,
In an ecstasy of recognition,
Three hundred and sixty degrees of truth.
The difficult homecoming calls you,
Looking upward holds you to the earth,
Paradox crackles in your fingertips,
Whichever way you inspect the situation
It is always the opposite, the other.
33
I like to swallow stones;
I like the way they hold me down;
These cool dark stones
Are good for my fever.
34
I measure her body with prayers,
Captured by the wings of bats and doves,
At the heart of the compass rose.
How will it end? With two mangy dogs
Licking the puddles on tumbledown streets,
In a city without honour, without love?
35
Explorers in a wilderness where names fall to earth like shooting stars, we move forward with animal energy, mapping the vastness ,possessing to dispossess.
From the first intention universe explodes.
We paint our nakedness with patterns, and dance in circles. from horizon to horizon, we become a new language, a mystery shared.
36
How can I face the world and not destroy myself with rage?
Yet still there is contemplation in this sun-tranced garden,
Ants doodling mystical patterns at my feet,
As I savour earth’s rich melancholy aroma .
Intoning the sonorous occult names of shrubs-
Stephanandra,euonymus,helianthemum-
I cling to this small portion of almost-paradise,
This sanctuary that is everywhere and nowhere,
Where the fruit trees answer to my voice.
37
My dying father’s eyes
In dream’s ritual seeing
Bless dark with inception;
Merciful grief phosphoresces
On spring’s giddy boughs,
And love, on the high ground,
Whinnies and bounds, self-amazed.
38
The sun cartwheels overhead,
Over the nomad plains of the beginning;
The current flows through the rock,
The seas turn over,
The shaman’s drum beats out the dance;
A meteorite plummets,
An oak tree rises from an acorn,
Lovers meld in cloudburst
On the first day.
39
Travelling players, roaming from place to place,
Performing tragicomedies for your pleasure,
Our masks are humble, but precious.
We have long since forgotten our real names,
We exist only in the act;
We are your silhouettes, your necessary demons,
Disturbing the order of things, as we go,
If only a little, and only for a while,
Somehow holding the earth together.
40
This gaunt peninsula reverberates with doom. Here, skeletons are bleached and transfigured.
A delicious spring gushes from a cleft under a fig tree, high over the bay. Snakes shimmer in the cataleptic heat. Nothing moves in the mind.
Why have I come here? What am I seeking in the raven-nested ruin sof abandoned
churches, and in the kraken’s caves?
I touch hot throbbing rocks with my silence. Amid the olive groves, invisible spirits draw me on.
41
The most hideous things, the truths that could kill me, I must suffer them and pass through.
February flays me raw with sacramental whips. Winter’s initiate, I grow wrinkled with insight.
Be still, and what wonders may find you!
42
Malingering behind my eyes, I inherit the void.
The spider knows what he needs to know.
And I am a spider.
43
A man and a woman playing chess: “Your move,” says the man.
Towers topple. Seas ebb and flood.
The witch doctor casts the bones across the dust. Nuclear reactors chant hymns to the apocalypse.
Tricks with mirrors and trapdoors proliferate. In the blue castle, the mad seigneur leads his guests in a mazurka. The music box starts up again.
A man and a woman playing chess: “Your move,” says the woman to the man.
44
Our bodies
moored together
sway with the sway
Tarot cards
spread out on the table:
the tower struck by lightning
Love
spirals up and down
instantaneous
unending
The Aeolian harp
recalls us
to the Garden
45
Apparitions cross the bridges
Over auriferous rivers;
The sleepwalker speaks in flame.
There is no clarity here,
No light to love by,
Only mandolin moments,
Travesties and transgressions.
Drift and transmute,
Let involuted time become
The sum of our errors,
Folding in on itself
In catastrophic origami;
When the end arrives,
Will we even recognise it?
Apparitions cross the bridges
And meet themselves, coming back.
46
Most secret felicity
Exquisite to the point of death,
Anagram of paradise!
Our minds touch, our bodies cling,
As if we could keep one another from falling,
Falling from grace with the day.
We share our pain so secretly,
It glows in the dark, when only the moon is looking.
My mouth on your mouth,
My spirit in yours,
Dragonflies at twilight,
We glitter and die.
47
Began with a wolf-howl. Began as bawling galaxies begin. Entered a body, stood upright,stretched,looked around. The bone moon taught my hands to work. Shadow came and showed me how to die.
Now I follow the ghosts of animals across the plain.
48
These sentimental fictions, how we need them to survive!
At year’s end, watching the sun spiral down into darkness, I feel again the sacred wound that makes me human.
Thus I plunge into the cauldron of another year, to witness, if only for an instant, the earth shine anew, reborn at the source for all.
49
Stupefaction dulls the air; the horizon tilts; definitions implode, as far as ever from the truth; reason twists the rope till it catches fire. Confusion insinuates itself into every crack. This strange return to apalce we never knew. What now?-Information without knowledge, knowledge without hope. and then,perhaps,the reckoning.
All is shifting,formless,unsayyable.This is my opium, a wasting asset.
Life, my favourite calembour!The brinkmanship of thought caracoles for its own perverse pleasure.
What category are you in? What name do you answer to? God’s bureaucracy is working day and night; we exist only to serve.
50
If not these words, then others. But words, always and only words. Spoken and unspoken. Connections and short circuits.
Magical grammar, invest me with truth! Order me with the stars. Remember the forgotten, reassemble the scattered.
At the toll-booths of time, I pay my dues.
I am torn down the middle, and no one can see the tear.
51
I say to myself:
Watch your head! Don’t lose it!
Destiny?Pah?
Just get on with it1
Let the whip fall,
Let the sky fall, for all I care!
I like the smell of cemetery flowers,
The damp earth after rain;
Suburbia suits me,
A spiral galaxy.
I say to myself:
What if ?If only!
Such mild insanity,
Pure perversion…
The same old words come round again,
The same old thoughts…
Now take your medicine, and be a good boy.
Clutching my lottery ticket,
I pray to the heavens,
Round-shouldered little beggar that I am,
Always treading on tiptoe,
Sucking up to the Big Man.
But I must, at least, confess to a little sin,
An unaccountable predilection
For killing flies and spiders, as many as I can,
No that it gives me any pleasure…
52
The wolf is coming! The wolf is coming!
And then the three brothers came to a castle
Where everyone had been turned to stone,
And only they could undo the spell
By completing three tasks.
I want to eat up the gingerbread house,
But the witch will get me and eat me alive!
I dream of the kingdom
Of which nothing is known.
Three drops of blood in the snow,
And a golden chalice in the hand:
Little Red Cap filled the wolf’s belly with stones,
And when it woke it could not jump away.
What did the white horse whisper in your ear while you slept?
Tell me, what became of the youngest son?
What became of the simpleton?
53
It is the time of murderers and pathologists, of technologies and disguises. Plenty of work for everyone!
I dedicate my life to the study of ellipses. I delight in a tenuous self, a unique curve vanishing into the distance.
Beautiful pariahs, have faith in the desert sun. The stars are all in place, and the earth knows its mission.
We, who uncover the brilliance of bone, will prosper in death’s reward.
54
When you tell those lies,
The moon is eclipsed;
When you wrench my bones so,
The sea turns cold,
And black blasted trees
Fly through my head,
And the only sound is a heartbeat,
No one’s, nowhere.
How should I begin?-
I have come too far,
Only growing in foolishness,
And seldom in wisdom.
Yet here I am still,
In the flesh, in the moment,
Phantasmal, absurd,
But not insignificant.
And you, my Otherness,
Can you hear me?
When you tell those lies,
The good stone cracks,
And not a thing can be built.
55
Keep your secret, kept it well,
For what else do you possess?
More,more,always more of everything,
To make you real, or less unreal,
Then nothing, nothing at all.
This fatal appetite hates itself.
Annihilation is its game.
56
Don’t look in my eyes for the truth:
There’s nothing there but sorrow.
Don’t tell me what I need,
Don’t show me where to go,
Don’t ask me to come clean;
There’s nothing left but time.
57
Solitary captain,
Hunter of the narwhal,
Man of ice and fire,
Gulls be your pallbearers,
And the ocean your shroud;
Your spindrift story is in the wind;
A mermaid’s haunting,
By barren shores.
58
I see you riding along the sands,
Green-eyed girl, hair blown by the wind,
Who will never belong to anyone in the world.
59
I have seen a flight of dragons
Over the mountain,
And heard a woman’s voice
From the bottom of the well.
The moon that is nearly full brings good fortune.
A spring wells up in the forest,
Where the stricken deer lies down.
The passes are closed to the horseman,
But lightning opens the sky,
And the lame man grasps the moon.
World always beyond me, world in itself,
Will you ever show me the key?
60
The lion left and the spider came,
The invisible people turned against each other,
There was nothing in the sky
But a single cloud, shaped like a sword.
Pierced through by a nightingale’s song,
The ornithologist turned with a sad smile
And walked away slowly across the meadow
Strewn with shining fossils and bones.
61
Among truncated cones of thought,
Suspended by my feet,
I interrogate the earth.
Shooting stars outrun my mind,
As I rummage for ominous stones.
The world brings gifts and questions
To the upturned tree at the end.
62
Nomads of love, we traverse from well to well, placing our faith in the earth, pitching our tents in the spaces between words.
The flint knife casts a noonday shadow, gnomon of the killer’s heart.
We turn our faces skyward, and march into the storm.
63
Blue Italian eyes, body sleek as a cat’s,
Sinuous smile saying Yes to the world,
Coolly you reflect the midday heat,
Long shadow haunting the mind.
Stay with me; why wander away?
We can be feline together,
Slumbering safely inside one another,
Stray cats in a Tuscan hill town.
Even the Pope longs to be pagan:
Take the Fisherman’s ring from my finger,
Hurl it like a meteor into the deep.
64
I feel them, hard within me:
Inoperable tumours of doubt.
Agony on agony is measured
By the dripping of a tap.
65
Two halves of a pantomime horse,
We canter back and forth,
Lumbering,lurching,out of step,
Solitudes rubbing each other threadbare.
What a performance!Bravo!Encore!
Heavenward we ascend on wires,
Winched up by applauding angels,
And a tattered majestic curtain descends.
66
Autumn the stranger
Awakens me gently,
Shivering with premonitions,
Marked for sorrow.
Level with death,
I harvest abundance,
Seeing Rembrandt
And hearing Chopin.
Breeding fantastic
In nuclear frenzy,
Cognition’s enigmas
Eerily sing.
67
Flickering screen of rain:
Stare into nothingness, hypnotised,
Dissolved in the world’s dissolution,
Apotheosis of absence,
Incommunicado, and gone.
68
Deliciousness of simple functioning, nothing to question, no need to think. No drug could be cheaper. No need for hope or despair, no sense in deviation. Cut-price nirvana for all!-This suave democratic oppression; a straight line to the terminus, cattle-trucks disguised as a luxury train.
69
Invited or not,
I am the phantom guest,
Feasting with strangers
Until all is lost.
70
So it ends:you,lying there, a shrunken effigy,
Small, dutiful hands crossed across your chest,
A fragile red rose placed there in token.
You never shirked your fate,or yearned
For some impossible heaven beyond your ken;
Now the white fires will burn you true,
And purge the momentary years’ eerie sorrow.
71
How often the pen slips, accumulating errata.
So many disjointed phrases,mutterings,asides,
Telephone conversations with angels,
Tremulous stupidities that plot a remarkable graph.
72
Some arrogant contrition is the human trick.
We are devious enough to survive, but not to win.
Praise it, ennoble it, stick medal on it: then pour the quicklime over, and be done.
73
Spider mortal, edged on the sly, speaking in glints and glowers, weird with longing for impossibles, the most you can do is inhabit your downfall with some grace.
Gravity’s booby, clowning on the underside, you fabricate the finite from the infinite, the infinite from the finite.
What fun you have had, in this transit camp for the bewildered!
74
My video recorder throbs, warm with desire.Rewind,fast forward,pause.time stops and starts as I will it. This playful universe, boxed and sold, exists to please me.
Hypnotist of solitudes, I extend my authority into shimmering infinity.
The drug runs dark in these veins, hallucinating Me.
75
How well I appreciate the precision of a delicate lie. The truth is so restricting: it lacks insight.
White dazzle in a glass of vodka: Chinese whispers in the head.
Evening comes on like a fever, monstrous with possibilities. Paradox is the Big Bang, the Crucifixion at the core of every moment.
76
With a room full of bird-masks and an altar made from junk pray to the gods who destroy me. I want to fly: they say it is never too late.
Malleable and light, our aluminium madness glimmers in the sun and never rusts. It easily adapts to many uses. We like to build the highest towers we can.
Subtle villainy streaks across my brain. It picks locks and triggers avalanches. It invents political schemes.
77
Suns and empires lived their graphs. Ideas ignited and consumed themselves. the newborn’s howl, the senile gasp. And here, in the mind’s inmost caves, the paintings glowed.
Skin-clad hunters stalk through the grass. The sorcerer’s head seeds the earth’s belly with lightning. Bison are mating, deer are running. The small blue planet sings on its axis.
Makers’ potlatch swells the many-breasted earth. The chosen flint is honed to its ultimate magic.
78
Sprawled naked across the bed, on her stomach,laughing,eating a peach, the girl with the sun in her hair floated on summer’s tide. Kittenish with the air, playing with the moment, she glowed with her own ineffable passing.
A kiss on her behind, then , a homage to ripeness. Let the sunlight hold her fast a moment more.
79
I hardly knew her,
Yet she left her trace
Here, in me,
Secret, inexplicable;
Not love, of course,
But something bizarre,
Beautiful as only
Perversity can be.
80
Jules Laforgue,
Black-coated figure,
Funeral director
On a unicycle;
Poor little orphan,
Where did Mother go?
Did the black spider
Steal her away?
All your self-mocking,
Your irony’s fireworks,
Burst skyward
In harlequin bouquets.
There is only this,
This mudball planet,
And the phthisic sun’s
Gorgon glare.
81
Your green eyes know,
Your green eyes, and the sea:
Your green eyes at sunrise,
And in the silence.
82
You know the signs, but your hands are tied. with silk.
These little deaths in black and white, are they merely part of the pretence?
Exquisite ambivalence thrills you through.Oh,these riches, these sorrows! Madness always sticks to the facts.
Beware, Your Eminence, the demons have no end of tricks.
83
This cool bright water sings with drowned stars.I,born of its shimmering, die in its belief.
84
August sunlight on my face, some fateful music pursuing me through the fields, through the high grass, over the dunes, to the shore. I was born on a lopsided day in the distance, somewhere out there, or even ahead.
August turns to September in my eyes. The sound of galaxies collapsing.
85
Your August-blue eyes foretold it all:
Doom-blessed, they caught the dream,
And saw just where your life’s meaning
Would tumble and come to rest.
86
The black thread and the white,
I honour both, in equal measure:
Without their perfect weaving,
Heaven and earth are torn asunder.
87
Fleeing the evil news of man,
I hide in a flickering cherry-tree,
A torch lit by the Celtic sun.
No one,surely,will find me here,
And ,out of the heart of silence,
Dreams will spiral and sing.
88
Callipygean mistress
When you bend over
My throat is dry with hopeless lust
O,I would do such things
With prick and tongue
That the sun would shout
With violent delight
89
Ask one question, and a thousand more rise before you:
Bewildering labyrinth, luring you inward and on,
To places unknown,alone,through hope and despair,
Finding your way,haphazardly,only to lose it again.
90
A blackbird showed me
How to fly
And I flew to the moon
To fetch elixir,
To live forever,
To give to everyone,
I flew around the world,
Siren stars were singing,
Trying to tempt me,
But I was true
And could not fall.
91
Little by little, I inherit myself,
Studying clouds
As they form and disperse.
Walking barefoot over sharp rocks,
I bathe my wounds in the sea.
92
Cosmologies arise in me, burn themselves out,implode.The universal equation eludes me. I am left at last with crude useless methods that once seemed so refined.
93
Homeless,
Touched through the veil,
I flow out into the unseen.
My slow destruction invents a world.
A head falls, severed,
And a signal flare shoots up.
My face in the glass
Is a perfect unlikeness.
94
Stranded in space-time, I exist on algebra:
Love’s astrophysics throws out equations faster than I can think.
There is no reason in this, no formula,
It takes me by storm in the night.
Pulsars and quasars sing like whales in the ocean.
Terror whirls in the singularity’s blackness.
95
The jealous heart knells in the rib-cage. Distorting mirrors at every turn.
A crazed leer, and the Winter King reels in a scarecrow fit. Frenzy uproots the trees, diverts the rivers.
96
The shame of the all-too-singular
Is acid in the soul:
Expert in self-deception,
You die with the utmost discretion.
No one will know your secret thoughts,
Or what beguiling monsters ride you
Down to merry hell.
97
Faithful to the night,
I am living crystal,
Pulsing with candour,
A madman’s desire.
98
They call this Sunday,
This wretched gap, this amnesia
In the suburbs of my mind,
Where loneliness masturbates
Its filthy glitter.
I want to plant a bomb
Under the whole world
To celebrate this meaninglessness!
99
History can fuck itself! All I want is a bottle of wine.
Crisis is an art, and I fancy myself an artist.
Underground, we are more ourselves, after all.
The curtain has not yet fallen on this show.
What will you do when you have used all your three wishes ?
100
Serpentine and cruel, I move among distractions,
Living on truth and untruth, making ambiguous gestures,
Reading secret messages discovered in crannies,
Achieving now and then a kind of grace, or oblivion,
A subtle detachment, world returned dto itself,
As the sunlight shifts, and nuances vary.
Accidental or predestined, the universe continues
As my senses endlessly probe and recoil;
There are arguments,theories,points and lines,
Actions arising, perspectives to be lived through,
Answers that tremble like mirages in the air,
And the ceaseless urge towards serene completion.
Transparent clichés expand to fill the spaces
Left by explosions, and consciousness mocks itself,
For fear of its own multiplicity, while the dance
Spirals inward, as things coalesce or dissolve.
101
102
O,human progress! Destiny of nations!-
Diagrams and explanations,
Statistics in the name of reason,
Skyscrapers darkly gleaming,
Occam’sr razor stropped on cue
To cut the suicide’s throat.
Computer programs flash across my eyes,
Tabulated in this decomposing body;
Buried under rubbish, a disembodied hand
Reaches upward, clawing at the heavens.
Old newspapers blow across scabrous pavements.
Medieval monsters leer out of the torn pages of fashion magazines.
The politics of everything
Scuttles to and fro with a sneaky simper,
Shaking hands and signing autographs.
Facts and figures flounder in all directions,
Caught in a hurricane started by a butterfly’s wings.
Tantara!War trumpets at dawn:
All the proud cavalry trot out in line,
Ready to be gunned down.
Quizzical eyes
Gaze in the interglacial,
Trapped in lost words’ moraine.
What is this strange complicity?
The art of wasting away.
Horizon:
Mouth turned down at the corners,
All its oracles absurd.
Tried and found wanting. Seen and not seen. The ankh falls form my hand.Suprernal fiasco agitates the atmosphere.Fuitle crescendo.Galctic dust-clouds swirl in paranoid eyes.
Yours is the castle of trapdoors and false walls, of hidden stairways and corridors, and two-way mirrors.
103
My fish-mouth burbles underwater:
Time rushes through my gills.
I am the coelacanth of future days.
104
You burrow into marble,
Hide your smile in a tabernacle,
Mocking everything you hold sacred.
The sun sees through you,
The moon is full of scorn.
Keep going till ugliness and beauty
Are one, and contradictions merge
Into a kind of bliss.
Keep going till you find your city,
Your place of safety, or happy illusion,
In this age of broken violins.
105
To work without hope, or disappointment,
To give oneself to the unattainable,
Disciple of failure, murdered with mirrors and candles;
Thus, one learns the secret will.
O,this drunken sensation of falling,
Spread-eagled in stellar darkness,
Towards the brilliant planet.
106
A star falls into the fountain
And the garden blooms.
The seed sprouts in the sepulchre.
What fresh image forms now in the opal?
107
Summer’s orphan runs towards the sun
Singing in a brilliant shroud,
And the just-named river celebrates
With a festival of swans.
108
Curve of the possible:
I tally the days on my bones.
My mirror-mouth glitters in the night of peacocks,
The almond tree mines the earth for light.
The owl’s flight joins the dying stars.
I disappear into the faintest smile,
Voided at reason’s extreme.
The hour arrives and passes,
With hidden consequences.
Another hard day of boredom,
Drowning kittens in a sack.
Skimming stones across the water,
See them silhouetted against the sky.
O,purity of day polluted
By weird banalities!
No warning can keep you
From testing the poisonous thorn.
109
I turned around and expressionless faces
Stared at me out of the dark:
I quickened my pace, could not escape,
Relentless menace hard at my heels.
I woke somewhere in a strange room,
All the doors and windows locked,
Unable even to remember my name,
And a hollow voice boomed in my head:
Be still, and see, the time has come,
When dragons couple and kill.
110
So casulaly,left to my own devices,
I inhabit the unreal,
Nervous system attuned
To the inexpressible,
Days adding up
To some bizarre destiny.
111
Walking in a field of diamonds,
Walking in a dream,
She is nothing but herself,
With nothing to prove.
She draws the skies to her,
Flies like a sparrowhawk;
Pregnant with star-seed,
Gives birth to auroras.
Everything begins with her,
The seven hills’ Madonna,
Walking in a field of diamonds,
Walking in a dream.
112
Lovers without foresight,
Entranced, we merge,
Turning to Gregorian chant,
Wild as the purple mountains.
Vagrant dust of solar storms,
Ravishing the atmosphere,
We assume a tortuous shape,
Time’s figure-of-eight.
113
A burst of light, then nothing. a black pebble placed in the mouth.
Winter-transparent, I float over crow-winged fields.
I am a dark bacillus in the bloodstream of the year.
Human speech comes slowly to me: I discover odd syllables inside geodes, rooting through ripe shattered rocks. I cover my nakedness with thoughts.
114
Transcendence is just another word
Too long and pompous to be used or heard:
Benumbed, we sometimes ache a little
With unspeakable pain,suppressed,ignored.
Our minds, our lives, are not our own:
We struggle on, bruised slaves resigned
To oppression, scarcely able any more
To ask ourselves: “What does it mean?”
115
On wood and stone, I make these marks,coelbren and coelvain,metaphors for the invisible. I can read the rocks and speak the language of birds.
Is the heart of the labyrinth evil? Or ultimate good?
My fist,unclenching,revelas,a small incomprehensible stone.
116
We are the carnival, the ceremony, the perpetual migration.
Our fire forges metals, our water bathes wounds.
New violence comes through us, extreme and exact. Protean desire vibrates with electromagnetic geometry.
This is my parabola: to surpass myself in self-desrcution,attaining a rigorous grace.
Sumptuous indifferent memory consumes me. the virgin skies concentrate in beautiful crisis.
117
I have passed beyond words into stones,
Into the meteorology of a moment.
The meaning? There it is, between the lines,
-Can you see it?Oh,it’s gone.
Drifting in the streets, in the air,
Magisterial, insubstantial ,
Something of me exists without me,
Or so it seems.
Move along now, no loitering here!
118
A fine old rigmarole, and no mistake.
A devilish mess, no two ways about it.
What nonsense is this? Utter bullshit.
Master of ceremonies, take a bow!
119
My sleeves full of ruses,
I roam the scarecrow days,
Telling stories for children and madmen.
120
You ,in the future, piecing fragments together,
If it us you seek, then look in the mirror.
121
Into the night,
With hands full of fire,
Eyes torn from their sockets,
I vanish into nebulae,
Intoxixtaed by death;
Divine jokes burst about me,
Apocalyptic laughter.
Now everything becomes its opposite,
Retuned to the source.
To leap the chasm,
To conquer the void!
Emissary to the mountains,
I watch for shooting stars,
And gather the earth
Into my solitude.
I cast my stones
And kiss the sacrificial altar,
Black meteorite whose magnetism
Starts multitudes walking across the desert.
122
I feed on polymorphous fantasies bred out of turbulence, out of anger.
Experimental self, which do you prefer-order or disorder?
123
Coffee and croissants, daydreams in the afternoon sun,
Differences of opinion with one’s apparent destiny,
The languid disillusionment of the European soul…-
Connoisseur of rococo decomposition,
Forever on the verge of dissolution,
You await the end with studied indifference,
Your pale desire a repertoire of postures and complaints.
Ironical beauty tempts you to presume:
Some cryptic derision squints back from polished surfaces,
The syntax of ambiguity manipulates your tongue.
How many false premises enter into the commerce?
How many venture find fruition only in going astray?
Empty now, the coffee cup stands sullen in the void,
As if to say: Why ask too much? Sit back, enjoy the view,
Time is your own, and the swallows will soon be returning…
124
History’s dynamiters move in a trance. Silent explosions ripple outward. The embryo capitulates.
Dreams;mutations;geological displacements; one theory succeeds another; the primal syllable resounds;homo sapiens stands up on two legs and screams.
125
In my illuminated bestiary, I study the dipsas,the kraken, the manticore .
I read until my candle dies, and I fall back into the lake of rainbows.
The unicorn’s horn is hidden in the folds of my habit. The moon comes to rest in my hands.
126
What am I doing here, making maps of distant countries, accustoming myself to what may or may not exist?
All the signs point to a sleepwalkers’ Sabbath, a rendezvous with No-one in the cupboard under the stairs.
127
I flow with the crowd, anonymous, stupefied. Swarming faces blur into one mask. We speak no language, possess no soul. I take what I am given, strangely grateful. This is an exclusive club.
128
Always you expected evil, the stigmata of the damned, sniffing the air for foul emanations, for hints of horror disguised as beauty. Ravished by dread, you embraced the abyss. Where else could you be yourself, without effort, or fear of rejection?
What it is to be human, to thrive on the sun’s decay!
129
O,world of the unsatisfied!- those who fear the dark or loneliness or crowds or heights; those who dwell under stones or in the cracks in walls; those who writhe in their beds and wake in a cold sweat; those who mutilate themselves with knives; those with weak hearts and poor circulation; those who spy for paranoid gods; those who live in boredom and delusion in the suburbs of the soul; those on committees who bicker and repine; those who conquer other because they cannot conquer themselves; those who watch the clock but never know the time; those who sit bewildered in premature dotage.
My soul, it is time to acknowledge delusion, to cast off the dark hood and tear the cloak to shreds. Kiss the naked body of silence! Be one with the earth-star, one with the void.
O,pulse of rainbow light! I am life itself.
The fire has done its work:
These ashes are to remind us
To live in perfect meditation,
Believing only what birds’ wings
Write in the laughing sky.
130
This subversive tomfoolery, this tiger-snaring,chicken-pluckign art!
You there, you sidling grumbling shadow,alwas retreating into another haughty evasion, never any closer to the truth, what do you think you are doing?
This is the place of ejaculation under torture. What you cannot throw away, you will have to use.
131
Rain, cool delicious rain! A Mayan priest delivered of the sacrifice, I imbibe heaven’s milk and dissolve .I am weighless,selfless,disembodied,without north or south. I spiral irresistibly inward, toward the heart of the cosmos.
132
Ah,the smiling imbecile, Argonaut of idiocy! Pentecostal gibberish flames from his mouth. Miracles spill out of his threadbare pockets.
Where has he gone now? Has he fallen through a trapdoor in the mind?
133
The myrmidons assemble to hear the Leader speak. Their ears flap in the oracular wind, a convincing imitation of applause. Their eyes gleam with fanatical devotion at all the appropriate moments. Everything is going according to plan. Grave-faced surveyors are plotting out the Promised Land. Soon the Exodus will begin.
Onward, illustrious myrmidons, onward to glory! Dirt-cheap Paradise for all! Just follow the signs, and keep to the road, and complete the requisite forms without delay.Yur dream home awaits you, fully furnished and transparent.
134
Irony, my belladonna, how faithfully I have loved you! So many billets-doux in the form of bitter jests,Pantagruelian fanfares played on tarnished old trumpets, and mincing little airs on a tinker’s whistle.
Lead me, I beg you, to a cosy well-made grave, lined with white satin, and made to measure. Ply me with placebos and anaesthetics; lead me in the goat-dance of days.
135
Did you think you were the master? Did you think life was yours to manipulate?
The mirror blurs and invents another version of You. A beautiful monster, thriving on the unattainable, essence of this now-and-never world.
Failure is your vocation, your way to greatness.
A myriad distractions amount to a world.Rootless,the mind wavers in peril. Only the impenetrable can shine.
Tightrope-minded and malign, I dwell in lostness,for the love of no-one. The leper-bell thousand a soft voice croons a lullaby for the world.
Sterile Genesis programs infinities of artificial worlds. Cause and effect operate without a hitch, and no black cats are ever seen.Three cheers for the technicians, the titanium heroes!
We are left with nothing but memories of blind man’s buff. And yet we have our season, our sad desire’s small chance.
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