I walk, I wander
To penetrate the hidden:
Champollion of platitudes
In the Egyptian room of the Palazzo Massimo,
Amid crocodile pharaohs, sphinxes without riddles,
My scarab beetle mind rolling dungballs with delight,
Over hieroglyphic desert horizons,
While the secret tunnels and chambers
Of palm trees and pyramids
Initiate me into death;
Mine, too, the Casino di Pio IV in the Vatican gardens:
Sumptuous pavilions, a pope’s retreat,
A place to pace out
Rosaries of thoughts and ideas,
And dally with imaginary nymphs.
Never doubt the ringed hand’s machinations
And the devilish powers beneath a cardinal’s hat!
Door handles in the form of aeroplane wings,
Propeller-style ceiling lights,
And astronomical murals:
This is the Palazzo Aeronautica.
The basement wall is frescoed
With aviators’ paradise,
Fallen Fascist heroes seated amid the clouds,
Playing chess and drinking capuccino.
The Loggia in the Villa Madama:
Raphael’s luminosity
From wandering the ruins of the Domus Aurea,
Memories and visions commingled,
To illuminate the occult day.
The European man am I,
Anxious and audacious,
Taking whatever I can get.
There was a moment, whimsical and free,
Just before the days of war and dogma,
With the trains departing for the coast
From here, the Stazione di Porta San Paolo:
These walls bright with crabs and scallop shells,
Mermaids and sea beasts cavorting...
Trains that pulled away and never returned,
Disappearing into a permanent vacation,
Children building sandcastles
On the shore of a wishful smile.
I pace the walls
In the Museo Capitolino:
Sixty-six Roman emperors’ busts,
Arranged in chronological order,
The empire entire
Like a stamp collection.
Between creation and curation,
The world subsists.
In the Albergo degli Ambasciatori
The frescoes on the walls of the salone,
Veronesian and Tiepolesque,
The beau monde of the nineteen twenties,
Illuminated from below
By theatrical footlights,
And lo, a likeness among the faces
Of Mussolini’s mistress, Margherita Sarfatti,
An innocent faux pas by the painter,
That caused the angry duce
To order the picture draped and hidden.
The walls of the great swimming pool
In the Foro Italico
Boast titanic mosaics
Of virile sportsmen baring their bodies
In the performance of stupendous sporting feats,
Amid mythical sea monsters
And likeminded Greek heroes.
But what possessed Mussolini
To allow in his personal gymnasium,
A Cubist floor mosaic,
He,who so detested the avant-garde?
In the Convento di Santa Trinità dei Monti,
The anamorphic fresco in a passageway,
Painted in acute perspective:
From either end, Saint Francesco di Paola is clear to see,
But when you confront the work directly,
The phantom vanishes from sight,
Replaced by a mountainous Calabrian landscape
Stippled with miniature figures,
Enacting scenes from the saint’s life.
In the Stanza delle Rovine, by Clérisseau,
I am inside a trompe l’oeil
Of an ancient Roman chamber,
With exposed timbers, disintegrating masonry
And holes in the walls and ceiling
Providing views of the sky and an imaginary landscape;
This once served as a bedchamber,
Commissioned by a scientist-monk,
And contained a suite of furniture
In the form of architectural ruins.
In the church of Santa Maria Antiqua
I survey eighth-century frescoes,
Executed by artists from Constantinople
Who had fled to Rome in troubled times
Of iconoclasm in their native city;
Here, in the west they carried on
Their eastern tradition, indomitable
In the faith and love of images.
The Villa Berlingieri,:
All the grandiose affluence and optimism
Of the years just before the Great War,
Self-besotted, self-doomed;
Weird gilt and marble glister
Irradiates you, luxury out of control,
Surfeit of detail and dazzle,
Just about to tip into apocalyse.
In the Palazzo del Quirinale
The elliptical spiral staircase with coupled Doric columns
By Mascherino:
Looking down is vertiginous,
Down through repeated ovals, twisting the eye,
Whorling the sense through whirlpools,
Willing this to be infinite,
Exalted and sickened,
Down to the egg of light far below,
The white eye,
The empty mirror.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
A Bit Like Helsinki
Reckless in pleasure,
We held the nights close to our skins,
And fell with the seasons
To the deep core of the moon.
Fathomless tides overtook us,
Carried us far, far from shore,
Into the Ocean of Storms,
Masochists of love, anarchists of fear.
The wild and the human
Hold the dark in common;
Your face is a moon to steer by
In the midnight fury
And your heartbeat
Will lighthouse me home.
Oblivion’s minx,
I spidered the corners of your world
And wove little stars
For the void’s entertainment.
Death sang lullabies
Into the cot,
And nursery rhymes
Appeared in our fists.
We held the nights close to our skins,
And fell with the seasons
To the deep core of the moon.
Fathomless tides overtook us,
Carried us far, far from shore,
Into the Ocean of Storms,
Masochists of love, anarchists of fear.
The wild and the human
Hold the dark in common;
Your face is a moon to steer by
In the midnight fury
And your heartbeat
Will lighthouse me home.
Oblivion’s minx,
I spidered the corners of your world
And wove little stars
For the void’s entertainment.
Death sang lullabies
Into the cot,
And nursery rhymes
Appeared in our fists.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
To Whom It May Concern
Dearly I miss you in the deeps of a moment,
So far from my best days’ home
-Have I yet used up all my three wishes ,
Or will you please grant another? -
Haplessly I pine
In this void I call vocation,
This priesthood of sighs,
I can almost breathe you,across a thousand miles,
Telling myself how lucky I am
To have “known” you.
Did you ever-I think not-understand me?
Was there perhaps just a moment or two
When something holy
Broke free and broke through?
Or was it all the same confusion,
The vagaries of insubstantial hope?
I wanted you, and in a kind way,
My soul’s happy sister
Sent on a mission.
I wish you all good fortune,
The grace of days,and all your heart deserves,
But think of me sometimes,
And smile.
So far from my best days’ home
-Have I yet used up all my three wishes ,
Or will you please grant another? -
Haplessly I pine
In this void I call vocation,
This priesthood of sighs,
I can almost breathe you,across a thousand miles,
Telling myself how lucky I am
To have “known” you.
Did you ever-I think not-understand me?
Was there perhaps just a moment or two
When something holy
Broke free and broke through?
Or was it all the same confusion,
The vagaries of insubstantial hope?
I wanted you, and in a kind way,
My soul’s happy sister
Sent on a mission.
I wish you all good fortune,
The grace of days,and all your heart deserves,
But think of me sometimes,
And smile.
Tantrika
Ananda said to the Master, “Half of the holy life, O Lord, is friendship with the beautiful, association with the beautiful, communion with the beautiful.”
“It is not so, Ananda, it is not so,” said the Buddha, “It is not half of the holy life; it is the whole of the holy life.”
Samyutta Nikaya (V.2)
To be in the flesh,
To act,
But to transform flesh and action
Into spirit, into evolution,
That is the mystery, the vocation.
Not to renounce,
Not to withdraw,
Not to shrink from life,
But to open and embrace and accept
Every desire, every situation,
And offer it up as prayer.
Not to discover the unknown
But to know the known.
The Sanskrit root tan
Means to expand:
Through science and experiment
To open the mind.
Looking at a terracotta figurine from Harappa,
I recognize a yogic asana:
How ancient and primeval
Is this wisdom, this science,
Already there
At the source of civilisation.
Shiva-Shakti,
Purusha-Prakriti,
To make the two one.
Shakti mounted upon her lover,
Enthroned on the corpse of Shiva,
Closing the circuit,
Resurrecting him.
Woman,
Kinetic energy of the cosmos,
From you the world is born
And into you is dissolved.
Do you laugh to be called a goddess?
But you are.
Prime mover,
Womb of the world,
Eternal virgin,
Smiling hermaphrodite,
Universal yantra,
Substance of all.
To me you are infinite joy,
The liberator,
The queen.
I anoint you
And charge you
With mantras and mudras,
I become the poem,
The music,
The world.
Sattva:
Centripetal ascending,
Cohering
Towards unity,
Towards liberation.
Rajas:
Revolving,
Creating.
Tamas:
Centrifugal descending,
Decomposing,
Annihilating.
When the three are unbalanced
This is evolution,
The ceaseless cycle,
The world created anew,
All the forces
Combining and recombining,
Projecting the universe
In waves
Until it all begins
To revert to equilibrium.
Tamas, rajas and sattva
In balance:
No motion,
No manifestation,
No flux,
Only stillness,
Perfect stillness.
10 billion brain cells,
Each connected with 25,000 others,
More connections
Than there are atoms in the universe;
100 billion sensations a second,
5,000 signals a second.
And I feel the planets attracting,
The earth revolving,
The seasons calibrating,
The elements colliding,
The deep vibrations.
I am inside and outside,
With and without,
Here and there
And everywhere,
This and that
And nothing.
Serpent of light, arise,
Spiral god arise,
And realize,
Energize.
I rise as I fall,
Cartesian diver of the stars.
Through pleasure
To bliss,
I cling to my lover,
Stripping her down to the bone,
Climbing out of my skin.
Electric animals,
Demon-angels in the dark,
We separate the subtle
From the gross.
A:
Creation,
U:
Preservation,
M:
Dissolution.
Brahmanda,
The egg,
Salagrama,
The globe,
Shiva-linga,
The phallus.
I should like to gather
From the bed of the Narmada River
A perfect Brahmanda,
A stone egg
Sculpted and polished
By the currents,
Auspicious to the mind’s touch.
Her body
Is the yantra,
(The Sri Yantra,
To be contemplated for a lifetime
Until you become the yantra,
The total revelation)
Composed of point, line, circle,
Triangle, square and lotus,
Juxtaposing, combining, intersecting,
Repeating again and again,
Space and time, sound and energy
Expanding from the first vibration
From the first desire.
She I make my study
In cymatics,
Waves, vortices, hexagons, rectangles,
Overlapping patterns.
And at the center
The bindu,
The ultimate point
Beyond which there is nothing,
The seed of the cosmos
Into which all is condensed.
OM HRIM PRTHIVYAI HUM PHAT
OM HRIM ADBHYAH HUM PHAT
OM HRIM TEJASE HUM PHAT
OM HRIM VAYAVE HUM PHAT
OM HRIM AKASAYA HUM PHAT
When the divine life-stuff
Is about to put forth the universe,
The cosmic waters
Grow a thousand-petalled lotus
Of pure gold
Radiant as the sun,
The mouth of the universal womb.
A painting from 18th century Rajasthan,
Gouache on paper:
Kali the destroyer stands on Rati and Kama, the naked lovers,
Who lie entwined beneath her feet,
Copulating in a bed of flames,
A giant lotus rising from the waves,
Their lovemaking the primordial desire
Which gives rise to all Creation;
About her neck Kali wears
A garland of human heads,
About her waist a girdle of hands
Signifying Karma,
She sticks out a crimson tongue
Signifying the kinetic force
Which gives rise to all actions;
In one of her four hands she wields a sacrificial sword
And in another a severed head,
Symbols of dissolution and annihilation
Directing the sadhaka to shed his ego.
All life, all breath, all thought, all motion,
Is Prana,
From a speck of protoplasm
To the mind of Brahma.
“It is not so, Ananda, it is not so,” said the Buddha, “It is not half of the holy life; it is the whole of the holy life.”
Samyutta Nikaya (V.2)
To be in the flesh,
To act,
But to transform flesh and action
Into spirit, into evolution,
That is the mystery, the vocation.
Not to renounce,
Not to withdraw,
Not to shrink from life,
But to open and embrace and accept
Every desire, every situation,
And offer it up as prayer.
Not to discover the unknown
But to know the known.
The Sanskrit root tan
Means to expand:
Through science and experiment
To open the mind.
Looking at a terracotta figurine from Harappa,
I recognize a yogic asana:
How ancient and primeval
Is this wisdom, this science,
Already there
At the source of civilisation.
Shiva-Shakti,
Purusha-Prakriti,
To make the two one.
Shakti mounted upon her lover,
Enthroned on the corpse of Shiva,
Closing the circuit,
Resurrecting him.
Woman,
Kinetic energy of the cosmos,
From you the world is born
And into you is dissolved.
Do you laugh to be called a goddess?
But you are.
Prime mover,
Womb of the world,
Eternal virgin,
Smiling hermaphrodite,
Universal yantra,
Substance of all.
To me you are infinite joy,
The liberator,
The queen.
I anoint you
And charge you
With mantras and mudras,
I become the poem,
The music,
The world.
Sattva:
Centripetal ascending,
Cohering
Towards unity,
Towards liberation.
Rajas:
Revolving,
Creating.
Tamas:
Centrifugal descending,
Decomposing,
Annihilating.
When the three are unbalanced
This is evolution,
The ceaseless cycle,
The world created anew,
All the forces
Combining and recombining,
Projecting the universe
In waves
Until it all begins
To revert to equilibrium.
Tamas, rajas and sattva
In balance:
No motion,
No manifestation,
No flux,
Only stillness,
Perfect stillness.
10 billion brain cells,
Each connected with 25,000 others,
More connections
Than there are atoms in the universe;
100 billion sensations a second,
5,000 signals a second.
And I feel the planets attracting,
The earth revolving,
The seasons calibrating,
The elements colliding,
The deep vibrations.
I am inside and outside,
With and without,
Here and there
And everywhere,
This and that
And nothing.
Serpent of light, arise,
Spiral god arise,
And realize,
Energize.
I rise as I fall,
Cartesian diver of the stars.
Through pleasure
To bliss,
I cling to my lover,
Stripping her down to the bone,
Climbing out of my skin.
Electric animals,
Demon-angels in the dark,
We separate the subtle
From the gross.
A:
Creation,
U:
Preservation,
M:
Dissolution.
Brahmanda,
The egg,
Salagrama,
The globe,
Shiva-linga,
The phallus.
I should like to gather
From the bed of the Narmada River
A perfect Brahmanda,
A stone egg
Sculpted and polished
By the currents,
Auspicious to the mind’s touch.
Her body
Is the yantra,
(The Sri Yantra,
To be contemplated for a lifetime
Until you become the yantra,
The total revelation)
Composed of point, line, circle,
Triangle, square and lotus,
Juxtaposing, combining, intersecting,
Repeating again and again,
Space and time, sound and energy
Expanding from the first vibration
From the first desire.
She I make my study
In cymatics,
Waves, vortices, hexagons, rectangles,
Overlapping patterns.
And at the center
The bindu,
The ultimate point
Beyond which there is nothing,
The seed of the cosmos
Into which all is condensed.
OM HRIM PRTHIVYAI HUM PHAT
OM HRIM ADBHYAH HUM PHAT
OM HRIM TEJASE HUM PHAT
OM HRIM VAYAVE HUM PHAT
OM HRIM AKASAYA HUM PHAT
When the divine life-stuff
Is about to put forth the universe,
The cosmic waters
Grow a thousand-petalled lotus
Of pure gold
Radiant as the sun,
The mouth of the universal womb.
A painting from 18th century Rajasthan,
Gouache on paper:
Kali the destroyer stands on Rati and Kama, the naked lovers,
Who lie entwined beneath her feet,
Copulating in a bed of flames,
A giant lotus rising from the waves,
Their lovemaking the primordial desire
Which gives rise to all Creation;
About her neck Kali wears
A garland of human heads,
About her waist a girdle of hands
Signifying Karma,
She sticks out a crimson tongue
Signifying the kinetic force
Which gives rise to all actions;
In one of her four hands she wields a sacrificial sword
And in another a severed head,
Symbols of dissolution and annihilation
Directing the sadhaka to shed his ego.
All life, all breath, all thought, all motion,
Is Prana,
From a speck of protoplasm
To the mind of Brahma.
Thai Islands
Look through me;
What do you see?
Sea anemones,
Gobies and whale sharks,
Golden seahorse among the corals,
Shining nudibranchs,
Stingray in the sand,
Moray eel in its coral cave,
The stealth and strike of the scorpionfish,
Yellow mask angelfish,
The manta ray’s imperious glide.
This life is play, and dignity,
Laughing faces of the now-reborn,
The subtle and the indirect.
Thus speaks a monkey in a cage,
A shadow-puppet.
Bone to bone, muscle to muscle,
Breath to breath, the masseur
Racks and wrings me on the anvil,
Till the nerve-ends flower
And meridians sing,
And the waves turn to incense.
I write your body in Pali,
Suttas of flesh, muscle and bone,
Anointed your bhikkhu,
The new moon’s servant.
Why, even in the midst of desire,
Do I yearn for the extinction of all desire ?
Take this as another offering
Of lotusbuds, incense and candles.
Dance on the beach,
Crying : I am the Emerald Buddha !
Execute your old life, like a king deposed,
Beating it to death in a velvet sack
So that not a drop of blood touches the ground.
Clownfish, angelfish, butterflyfish,
I am any fish I choose to be,
Grazing the word-reef.
I am a hawksbill turtle
Under the waves’ Thai script.
What do you see?
Sea anemones,
Gobies and whale sharks,
Golden seahorse among the corals,
Shining nudibranchs,
Stingray in the sand,
Moray eel in its coral cave,
The stealth and strike of the scorpionfish,
Yellow mask angelfish,
The manta ray’s imperious glide.
This life is play, and dignity,
Laughing faces of the now-reborn,
The subtle and the indirect.
Thus speaks a monkey in a cage,
A shadow-puppet.
Bone to bone, muscle to muscle,
Breath to breath, the masseur
Racks and wrings me on the anvil,
Till the nerve-ends flower
And meridians sing,
And the waves turn to incense.
I write your body in Pali,
Suttas of flesh, muscle and bone,
Anointed your bhikkhu,
The new moon’s servant.
Why, even in the midst of desire,
Do I yearn for the extinction of all desire ?
Take this as another offering
Of lotusbuds, incense and candles.
Dance on the beach,
Crying : I am the Emerald Buddha !
Execute your old life, like a king deposed,
Beating it to death in a velvet sack
So that not a drop of blood touches the ground.
Clownfish, angelfish, butterflyfish,
I am any fish I choose to be,
Grazing the word-reef.
I am a hawksbill turtle
Under the waves’ Thai script.
Guatemala
I sit with my drink in the gloomy cantina,
Climbing volcanoes in my mind,
Thinking of Pedro de Alvarado, crushed to death beneath his horse,
Weary in the end of so much conquest and glory,
Disappointed with the plunder, arraigned by his own people,
Maddened into ever greater brutality.
He ruled this land as his personal fiefdom,
Desperate for adventure and wealth,
Enslaving and abusing the natives without mercy,
Crushing their rebellions with savage repression.
Was his God the same as ours?
And still the people eat shit and stones,
And are scorned and tortured for their pains,
And cast into unmarked graves without hesitation.
That is the way things are done.
The rich, after all, have their interests to protect;
To let a few peasants and troublemakers spoil the fun
Would be bad for business, bad for everyone.
And the bodies of the poor, at least, make excellent manure,
So their lives serve some purpose after all.
On the city streets rat-children scavenge,
Begging, thieving, selling their bodies for a few coins,
Numbing the hunger and despair with drugs,
Fleeing the guns and clubs of the police
Who beat and kill them as vermin,
And torture them with glee.
In air-conditioned shopping malls elegant ladies
Sip coffee and swap frivolities,
And crystal pyramids soar above slums.
On the outskirts stand the earthen mounds
Of Kaminaljuyu, which have yielded
A few nobles in their fineries, covered in cinnabar
And girt by human sacrifices and treasures,
Jade masks and fine pottery, quartz crystals and obsidian,
The stingray spines they used to draw their own blood,
Piercing penis, ears and tongue
To summon and placate the gods.
Why should the poor learn to read and write,
Just to read the lies in newspapers and books?
Better that they die in ignorance,
Educated by the boots and bullets of soldiers.
Once their forbears ruled this land with heaven’s blessing;
Now bats possess their ruined cities
While flocks of parakeets wheel around,
And howler monkeys holler across the treetops,
As dawn mist steams up from the forest.
A few quetzal birds still somehow survive,
Seeing the forest felled around them:
Caged, they pine for freedom and soon perish,
Preferring death to captivity, dreaming till their hearts break.
Fiesta: fireworks shatter the sky,
Swirl of marimbas, flutes and drums,
As drunken dancers whirl into oblivion,
Swaying and staggering, tumbling over each other,
Laughing and passing out.
I wade through mangrove swamps of reverie,
A glass of aguardiente in hand,
And hold my little life up to the light
Like the fabulous golden-green feather of the quetzal.
This world is wild tobacco smoke,mushroom’s flesh:
Spirits assail me,wherever I turn,
As I trail my totem animal, my blood brother, through jungle,through darkness,
To find whatever destiny decrees.
One night in the year, at Monterrico beach,
The turtles, compelled by the moon, emerge,
Haul their juggernaut bodies up the sand
And, toiling desperately against time,
Excavate nesting holes with their flippers,
Push their eggs out, bury the treasure,
Then race back like pirates to the waves,
Never to see their own eggs hatch,
And the tiny dinosaurs dig to the surface
And dash for the water, desperate to survive,
Swooped upon by ravening beaks in massed attack.
Lake Atitlan shifts through
Multifarious blues and greens as the sun traverses the sky,
Surrounded by steep hills and massive volcanoes,
In the morning the surface is calm and translucent,
But by afternoon the xocomil wind blows in,
Churning up dark turbulent waves.
Inside a little church on the shore,
Smoke and incense drift in the hush,
Amid the myriads of burning candles,
Drunken men and cigar-smoking women
Worship before San Simon,
And tearful whores come to beg his forgiveness,
Embracing his effigy, offering cigarettes and rum.
In Holy Week pilgrims take him down from his stand
And carry him in honour down to the shore,
Bathe him and dress him in Western clothes,
With a jaunty felt hat, and cigar stuck in his mouth,
And praise him for protecting the poor from their oppressors,
Praying that their suffering might at last find its reward.
Climbing volcanoes in my mind,
Thinking of Pedro de Alvarado, crushed to death beneath his horse,
Weary in the end of so much conquest and glory,
Disappointed with the plunder, arraigned by his own people,
Maddened into ever greater brutality.
He ruled this land as his personal fiefdom,
Desperate for adventure and wealth,
Enslaving and abusing the natives without mercy,
Crushing their rebellions with savage repression.
Was his God the same as ours?
And still the people eat shit and stones,
And are scorned and tortured for their pains,
And cast into unmarked graves without hesitation.
That is the way things are done.
The rich, after all, have their interests to protect;
To let a few peasants and troublemakers spoil the fun
Would be bad for business, bad for everyone.
And the bodies of the poor, at least, make excellent manure,
So their lives serve some purpose after all.
On the city streets rat-children scavenge,
Begging, thieving, selling their bodies for a few coins,
Numbing the hunger and despair with drugs,
Fleeing the guns and clubs of the police
Who beat and kill them as vermin,
And torture them with glee.
In air-conditioned shopping malls elegant ladies
Sip coffee and swap frivolities,
And crystal pyramids soar above slums.
On the outskirts stand the earthen mounds
Of Kaminaljuyu, which have yielded
A few nobles in their fineries, covered in cinnabar
And girt by human sacrifices and treasures,
Jade masks and fine pottery, quartz crystals and obsidian,
The stingray spines they used to draw their own blood,
Piercing penis, ears and tongue
To summon and placate the gods.
Why should the poor learn to read and write,
Just to read the lies in newspapers and books?
Better that they die in ignorance,
Educated by the boots and bullets of soldiers.
Once their forbears ruled this land with heaven’s blessing;
Now bats possess their ruined cities
While flocks of parakeets wheel around,
And howler monkeys holler across the treetops,
As dawn mist steams up from the forest.
A few quetzal birds still somehow survive,
Seeing the forest felled around them:
Caged, they pine for freedom and soon perish,
Preferring death to captivity, dreaming till their hearts break.
Fiesta: fireworks shatter the sky,
Swirl of marimbas, flutes and drums,
As drunken dancers whirl into oblivion,
Swaying and staggering, tumbling over each other,
Laughing and passing out.
I wade through mangrove swamps of reverie,
A glass of aguardiente in hand,
And hold my little life up to the light
Like the fabulous golden-green feather of the quetzal.
This world is wild tobacco smoke,mushroom’s flesh:
Spirits assail me,wherever I turn,
As I trail my totem animal, my blood brother, through jungle,through darkness,
To find whatever destiny decrees.
One night in the year, at Monterrico beach,
The turtles, compelled by the moon, emerge,
Haul their juggernaut bodies up the sand
And, toiling desperately against time,
Excavate nesting holes with their flippers,
Push their eggs out, bury the treasure,
Then race back like pirates to the waves,
Never to see their own eggs hatch,
And the tiny dinosaurs dig to the surface
And dash for the water, desperate to survive,
Swooped upon by ravening beaks in massed attack.
Lake Atitlan shifts through
Multifarious blues and greens as the sun traverses the sky,
Surrounded by steep hills and massive volcanoes,
In the morning the surface is calm and translucent,
But by afternoon the xocomil wind blows in,
Churning up dark turbulent waves.
Inside a little church on the shore,
Smoke and incense drift in the hush,
Amid the myriads of burning candles,
Drunken men and cigar-smoking women
Worship before San Simon,
And tearful whores come to beg his forgiveness,
Embracing his effigy, offering cigarettes and rum.
In Holy Week pilgrims take him down from his stand
And carry him in honour down to the shore,
Bathe him and dress him in Western clothes,
With a jaunty felt hat, and cigar stuck in his mouth,
And praise him for protecting the poor from their oppressors,
Praying that their suffering might at last find its reward.
The Man Who Wouldn't Dance
Today I feel so ill, so out of sorts,
Not coming out to play.
I appear to be sweating dark poisons.
Bone-delirious,
Goosepimples on the brain,
Shudder and shiver
You weird little imp!
Nothingness is yours
For the taking.
“In a lifetime the average person
spends the equivalent of a year on the toilet…”
A year, a year of my life
With my trousers round my ankles
Huddled on the pot…!
I am here,
The Count of Monte Cristo in his dungeon,
After God knows how many years,
And you, dear reader,
Is it you that makes that scratching noise
On the far side of the wall?
Scream, little baby,
Scream into the sky,
Breathe in the world
And scream.
Collapsed dead drunk the other night
Almost knocked some sense into myself…
My head still hurts,
But I’m no wiser.
The truth slips from my fingers
And dissolves
Like soap in the bath…
Can you feel
The unseen dimensions of time and space
Which distort gravitation,
The weird darkness somersaulting
And nonchalantly practising legerdemain?
Strange blue light
Irradiates
From the Andromeda galaxy’s core,
Where frenetic blue stars by the hundred
Race around a black hole's tiny circuit,
All hot, fierce and young.
Not coming out to play.
I appear to be sweating dark poisons.
Bone-delirious,
Goosepimples on the brain,
Shudder and shiver
You weird little imp!
Nothingness is yours
For the taking.
“In a lifetime the average person
spends the equivalent of a year on the toilet…”
A year, a year of my life
With my trousers round my ankles
Huddled on the pot…!
I am here,
The Count of Monte Cristo in his dungeon,
After God knows how many years,
And you, dear reader,
Is it you that makes that scratching noise
On the far side of the wall?
Scream, little baby,
Scream into the sky,
Breathe in the world
And scream.
Collapsed dead drunk the other night
Almost knocked some sense into myself…
My head still hurts,
But I’m no wiser.
The truth slips from my fingers
And dissolves
Like soap in the bath…
Can you feel
The unseen dimensions of time and space
Which distort gravitation,
The weird darkness somersaulting
And nonchalantly practising legerdemain?
Strange blue light
Irradiates
From the Andromeda galaxy’s core,
Where frenetic blue stars by the hundred
Race around a black hole's tiny circuit,
All hot, fierce and young.
Erik Satie at Le Chat Noir
The turn of a head,
The gesture of a hand,
Is mathematics,
A slight vibration resonating with the earth,
With time.
What is a human being?
And why does it exist?
Black waves of Normandy,
How many children have raced along the shore,
Skimming their lives like stones across the deep?
Sounds;
Modulations of a life,
Waves-
True to themselves.
A theatre set of massive chestnut benches,
Stained glass windows, pewter mugs and wrought-iron lamps,
The customers with glasses in hand, singing, yet mourning
Their lost illusions, sliding into mdness, suicide or despair.
It is the end of a century:
Morality wanes, crime flourishes, cretinism increases.
Statistics demonstrate the decline of society and the downfall of man.
And men with troubled sleep, troubled digestion, bad circulation, fatigue, neurasthenia,
Jaded palates and worn-out livers,
Melodrama holds the stage,
With shipwrecks, avalanches, volcanic eruptions;
Enervation, lassitude, physical degeneration, corruption
Spread through the water supply.
Boredom runs cockroach races for thee masses
Who place their debts with yawning gusto.
Strange maladies, new drugs are in fashion,
New forms of locomotion.
All the creatures of the coral reef battle for survival.
Society ladies congregate to exchange morphine injections,
Jewellers do a thriving trade in gold-plated syringes,
Mystics and charlatans reign,
In stained-glass hothouses of missals and lilies, black masses and black silks,
Crystal balls and ectoplasm.
On feast days villagers vie with one another
To be the first to kill, with a well-aimed stone,
A tethered fowl hung upside-down;
Others, for a few sous, bite rats to death.
People batter one another to death in rages,
With frying pans, hammers, sticks and spades;
Children kill their parents and throw them down wells.
The shadow theatre silhouettes
Act out comedies,tragedies and epics
In fine gradations of a single tone;
Satie sits numbering the bars of Gymnopédies,
Governed by the Golden Section.
Tobacco smoke and cabaret songs…
Everyone competing to be the most audacious, the most outrageous, the most avant-garde,
All the pranks and stunts, and disputes,
The wild irreverence…
Take it or leave it,
The puns and pranks that make a life,
The esoteric dressed up as the mundane,
The nonsensical aphorisms of truth and wisdom,
The shaggy dog stories of sublime beauty and delight…
The gesture of a hand,
Is mathematics,
A slight vibration resonating with the earth,
With time.
What is a human being?
And why does it exist?
Black waves of Normandy,
How many children have raced along the shore,
Skimming their lives like stones across the deep?
Sounds;
Modulations of a life,
Waves-
True to themselves.
A theatre set of massive chestnut benches,
Stained glass windows, pewter mugs and wrought-iron lamps,
The customers with glasses in hand, singing, yet mourning
Their lost illusions, sliding into mdness, suicide or despair.
It is the end of a century:
Morality wanes, crime flourishes, cretinism increases.
Statistics demonstrate the decline of society and the downfall of man.
And men with troubled sleep, troubled digestion, bad circulation, fatigue, neurasthenia,
Jaded palates and worn-out livers,
Melodrama holds the stage,
With shipwrecks, avalanches, volcanic eruptions;
Enervation, lassitude, physical degeneration, corruption
Spread through the water supply.
Boredom runs cockroach races for thee masses
Who place their debts with yawning gusto.
Strange maladies, new drugs are in fashion,
New forms of locomotion.
All the creatures of the coral reef battle for survival.
Society ladies congregate to exchange morphine injections,
Jewellers do a thriving trade in gold-plated syringes,
Mystics and charlatans reign,
In stained-glass hothouses of missals and lilies, black masses and black silks,
Crystal balls and ectoplasm.
On feast days villagers vie with one another
To be the first to kill, with a well-aimed stone,
A tethered fowl hung upside-down;
Others, for a few sous, bite rats to death.
People batter one another to death in rages,
With frying pans, hammers, sticks and spades;
Children kill their parents and throw them down wells.
The shadow theatre silhouettes
Act out comedies,tragedies and epics
In fine gradations of a single tone;
Satie sits numbering the bars of Gymnopédies,
Governed by the Golden Section.
Tobacco smoke and cabaret songs…
Everyone competing to be the most audacious, the most outrageous, the most avant-garde,
All the pranks and stunts, and disputes,
The wild irreverence…
Take it or leave it,
The puns and pranks that make a life,
The esoteric dressed up as the mundane,
The nonsensical aphorisms of truth and wisdom,
The shaggy dog stories of sublime beauty and delight…
Greenwich Observatory
Midwinter, the days short and dark,
And here, on this druidical hill, the star-citadel
Beacons to the city and the world beyond,
Calling all to the prime meridian of the heart.
Occult science drives initiates onwards
To reckon heaven and earth for men’s good,
As the gimbals planet turns revolutions
That map the void we all are falling towards.
Wise London knew me in my youth
And knows me now; as the calendar clocks,
And ships set out to sea or home into port,
I vow myself to the precious days left, so few.
Friends, have I honoured your generosity?
Family, have I served our altar with true faith?
See, the eternal flame burns here to guide us;
Its green bolt streaks across the night sky.
And here, on this druidical hill, the star-citadel
Beacons to the city and the world beyond,
Calling all to the prime meridian of the heart.
Occult science drives initiates onwards
To reckon heaven and earth for men’s good,
As the gimbals planet turns revolutions
That map the void we all are falling towards.
Wise London knew me in my youth
And knows me now; as the calendar clocks,
And ships set out to sea or home into port,
I vow myself to the precious days left, so few.
Friends, have I honoured your generosity?
Family, have I served our altar with true faith?
See, the eternal flame burns here to guide us;
Its green bolt streaks across the night sky.
Romantic Fool
Pain of me, thrust of me,
Into the deep womb of destruction;
Writhe of me, the risk, the inner crisis,
Ecstatic astride the dolphin in flight,
Vaulting electric-blue horizons!
Limb-locked in the moment supreme,
Lashed in mutual crucifixion,
Juddering with cosmic power,
Down and down we spiral, up and up!
A word in your ear, my love:
Envelop the seed,
Enshrine it in the dark hearth,
Make it grow.
The mercy of your thighs,
That you welcome e in
And I enter,
Stray dog sweating night-hunger
For everything.
Deep, so deep, where the dance is,
I murder myself, torn to the bone,
In frothing streams of blood.
Flesh is death, but the dream has no end;
Come, celebrate on the mountain,
Release the clenched earth.
Flesh for flesh: our hands uphold
The chalice at the horned altar’s height,
This world-wiving pride of rearing and taming
In bloom-frenzied fields where underground rivers hum.
Into the deep womb of destruction;
Writhe of me, the risk, the inner crisis,
Ecstatic astride the dolphin in flight,
Vaulting electric-blue horizons!
Limb-locked in the moment supreme,
Lashed in mutual crucifixion,
Juddering with cosmic power,
Down and down we spiral, up and up!
A word in your ear, my love:
Envelop the seed,
Enshrine it in the dark hearth,
Make it grow.
The mercy of your thighs,
That you welcome e in
And I enter,
Stray dog sweating night-hunger
For everything.
Deep, so deep, where the dance is,
I murder myself, torn to the bone,
In frothing streams of blood.
Flesh is death, but the dream has no end;
Come, celebrate on the mountain,
Release the clenched earth.
Flesh for flesh: our hands uphold
The chalice at the horned altar’s height,
This world-wiving pride of rearing and taming
In bloom-frenzied fields where underground rivers hum.
Along the Niger
Sinews of the brawny brown river, flexing and stressing,
Bending back and forth, around and about,
Churning back on itself at the edges,
Big blocks of water rushing past each other, upstream and down...
You seek its source, the watershed of a dream.
Phantasmagorical Africa,
Common portents everywhere in the light of day,
Weird as the white eyes of the river-blind...
The diseased body cohabits with its parasites,
Worms and viruses that fly by night
And home into the bloodstream...
Drums quake the earth, and women swim
Through you, pour over you, soak you to the bone,
Thrusting and swaying, the mellifluous orbs
Of their buttocks rub you up and down,
Their bodies flow over your stones.
The moon rises, wet and dripping,
And the women’s strong feet pound the ground
In the fateful rumba of life.
The river eats men,
Black whirlpools swallow everything,
Whatever is thrown into its jaws will vanish forever.
From a little jetty, village lads
Line up and hurl themselves in, naked and glistening,
Lauging with wild abandon,
Heedless of danger.
To be the hunter or the hunted; you choose.
The jungle is nothing but movement,
And you must tap its power, its breath, flow wht it,
Through branches and roots,
Believing in victory, in survival,
Before the ultimate inevitable defeat.
Bending back and forth, around and about,
Churning back on itself at the edges,
Big blocks of water rushing past each other, upstream and down...
You seek its source, the watershed of a dream.
Phantasmagorical Africa,
Common portents everywhere in the light of day,
Weird as the white eyes of the river-blind...
The diseased body cohabits with its parasites,
Worms and viruses that fly by night
And home into the bloodstream...
Drums quake the earth, and women swim
Through you, pour over you, soak you to the bone,
Thrusting and swaying, the mellifluous orbs
Of their buttocks rub you up and down,
Their bodies flow over your stones.
The moon rises, wet and dripping,
And the women’s strong feet pound the ground
In the fateful rumba of life.
The river eats men,
Black whirlpools swallow everything,
Whatever is thrown into its jaws will vanish forever.
From a little jetty, village lads
Line up and hurl themselves in, naked and glistening,
Lauging with wild abandon,
Heedless of danger.
To be the hunter or the hunted; you choose.
The jungle is nothing but movement,
And you must tap its power, its breath, flow wht it,
Through branches and roots,
Believing in victory, in survival,
Before the ultimate inevitable defeat.
Desert Elephants of Namibia
Silent and synchronous,
The herd take flight as one, for no obvious reason,
Or simultaneously raise their ears, frozen in their tracks,-
The air is throbbing with weird secret thunder,
Infrasonic rumbles across the distances,
And the mastodons’ brows vibrate in communication.
No sooner does a female come into oestrus
Than males converge from all directions and surround her,
Fighting and rutting,
Drawn by her irresistible song,
Her slow deep rumbles, gently rising,
Ever stronger and higher in pitch,
Then descending again into silence.
Proudly the desert elephants follow their ancestors’ voices
Over gravel plains and anfractuous mountains,
Across dunes, and down sere riverbeds
To the ancient wells that call them,
Led by the matriarchs of fabulous memory,
To dig and drink the nectar, as their forefathers did.
Tusks torn out by poachers lie in dust,
Emptied of immemorial experience,
Nothing remains but little white carvings
In ladies’ jewel boxes, anointed with lush scent.
The herd take flight as one, for no obvious reason,
Or simultaneously raise their ears, frozen in their tracks,-
The air is throbbing with weird secret thunder,
Infrasonic rumbles across the distances,
And the mastodons’ brows vibrate in communication.
No sooner does a female come into oestrus
Than males converge from all directions and surround her,
Fighting and rutting,
Drawn by her irresistible song,
Her slow deep rumbles, gently rising,
Ever stronger and higher in pitch,
Then descending again into silence.
Proudly the desert elephants follow their ancestors’ voices
Over gravel plains and anfractuous mountains,
Across dunes, and down sere riverbeds
To the ancient wells that call them,
Led by the matriarchs of fabulous memory,
To dig and drink the nectar, as their forefathers did.
Tusks torn out by poachers lie in dust,
Emptied of immemorial experience,
Nothing remains but little white carvings
In ladies’ jewel boxes, anointed with lush scent.
Bloomsbury in Autumn
Up steep steps to the portico’s gloom,
Corinthian pillars of a Hawksmoor:
Inside, the solid compression of space,
Cast like bronze in Roman stoic order.
Green squares’ wet gloss; tree-flicker;
Black branches dripping in winter;
Pharaonic terraces parade their fronts,
A literary Valley of the Kings.
Behind its iron cage, the British Museum
Crouches like a colossal Assyrian bull,
As the world’s scenes writhe and evanesce
In the obsidian of Dr Dee’s scrying glass.
Corinthian pillars of a Hawksmoor:
Inside, the solid compression of space,
Cast like bronze in Roman stoic order.
Green squares’ wet gloss; tree-flicker;
Black branches dripping in winter;
Pharaonic terraces parade their fronts,
A literary Valley of the Kings.
Behind its iron cage, the British Museum
Crouches like a colossal Assyrian bull,
As the world’s scenes writhe and evanesce
In the obsidian of Dr Dee’s scrying glass.
Andalucia
Gazing out across the blue waters from Algeciras to Gibraltar,
The bay is crowded with ferryboats, cruise liners and tramp steamers,
Fishing boats with felucca sails lean against the wind and current;
Once these straits were the western limits of the world,
And the Phoenicians were the first to pass through them,
And trade in the mineral riches of Tartessos;
For centuries they safeguarded their monopoly with mystery,
Their mariners telling tales in the harbours of the Aegean,
Warning of the terrible dangers beyond the Pillars of Hercules,
Describing the whirlpools round the sunken isle of Atlantis,
The impassable Sargasso weed choking the channels,
The deadly sea monsters lurking everywhere.
I sit outside a café, sipping sol y sombra, under stellar orange trees,
Absorbing the street scene, the incidents becoming dramas,
The striking of attitudes with histrionic sprezzatura;
O, Andalucia, vast peacock’s tail of light!
The jasmine-scented air reeks of joy and melancholy,
And to drink water here is the finest art and pleasure,
Directing a thin stream through the air into the mouth from the bota,
Savouring the delicious taste, a little at a time and slowly,
Lingering as one does over everything most loved.
The roses bloom all year round in Malaga,
Geraniums cascade from balconies, carnations and freesias shine,
Easter lilies appear among the olive trees and date palms,
And in the evening the whole turn turns out for the promenade,
Laughing couples, happy families, beautiful girls.
Here you will be as the dead stick thrust into the earth
That flowers against its will, overpowered by life;
You will ask for so little, and cherish it beyond price,
Sitting with friends over a glass of wine,
Talking for hours, forgetting everything of no account,
Relishing the bite of sardonic humour.
Walk along the beaches, and watch the catch being hauled in,
The boats drawn up on the sand with the magic eye on their prows,
And the fishermen grilling sardines over driftwood fires;
Ancient heaps of murex shells have been found here,
Remains of the dye-works where they made the tyrian purple
For the togas of the Caesars, the colour of the mountains at sunset,
And of the blood of the people dragged from their beds and shot
In the Civil War, when men became werewolves,
And all night there came the sound of gunshots in the darkness,
And in the morning dead bodies lay where they had fallen.
But listen to them now, the carefree peaceful citizens,
Blithely indifferent to politics and all that nonsense,
Burying bad memories in unmarked graves.
Peacocks cry on the Alcazaba’s battlements,
And the scent of hibiscus makes me dream,
The fig trees are sprouting and in a few weeks
Wild oleanders will cover the hillsides with white and pink blossom;
Orange and lemon groves cover the vale,
Wild mignonette, wild irises, conflowers, violets,
Rosemary, cistus, periwinkles, mallows, thyme, vetches,
Wild garlic, harebells, orchises, muscari, chionodoxas,
Gentians, borage, marjoram, alyssum, mesembryanthemum,
Wild ailanthus, scillas, heliotrope, peonies.
They say the malaguenas are the most beautiful girls in all Spain,
With their golden faces and the moist gleam of their eyes,
And something of the sea in their allure,
So graceful and vivacious, nonchalant and proud,
Shooting passionate glances from under their eyelids.
In a tavern room the guitarist sweeps the strings,
And the singer launches himself into cante jondo,
Eyes closed, oblivious to all else but the notes
As they form themselves spontaneously in his mind.
In Córdoba, I sit on a roof garden, looking out over the city at sunset,
Like Emir Abderrahman I surveying his new capital,
Having won a western throne for the Omayyads,
And suddenly the sun has disappeared behind the Sierra,
And the Guadalquivir flows slowly past Moorish water mills.
Entering the great Mosque, I scan the grave reflective gloom,
The myriad columns of porphyry, jasper and coloured marbles,
Built from the ransacked ruins of Carthage, Nimes and Seville.
In the days of the Caliphate the mosque was open to the courtyard
And the long rows of orange trees continued the lines of the pillars
And carried the presence of Allah into the open air,
Perfumed with the aromatic oils of four thousand lamps,
And forty thousand worshippers knelt here at Ramadan
While from the mihrab the Imam recited from the Koran.
Once this was the greatest city in all Europe,
Prre-eminent in size and splendour, wealth, art and learning,
Where the Moors ruled Spain with tolerance and wisdom,
Fusing the genius of Iberian, Visigoth, Jew and Arab
To create a new civilsation, magnificent and unique.
And west of the city I wander the ruins of Medina Azahara,
Built by Abderrahman III to celebrate the Glorious Caliphate
And to gratify his favourite wife, al-Zahra, the Orange Blossom;
Almond trees and pines grow out between broken marble pavement,
Bougainvillea tangles spread purple over crumbling walls;
A third of Andalucia’s revenues went to build the Flower City,
And ten thousand workmen laboured for twenty-five years;
The Great Hall’s walls and ceilings were sheathed in gold,
Its eight doors of gold and ebony were framed by crystal pillars,
And there hung from the ceiling a fabled pearl,
While down the middle ran a pool of quicksilver in a porphyry basin,
And when the Caliph wished to impress a foreign guest
He would have a slave agitate the quicksilver
So that dazzling reflections danced up and down the walls;
Here within this palace he would retire to his harem
And find there always among the thousands of beauties
His beloved and most cherished al-Zahra, most beautiful of all.
Yet this city stood for less than a hundred years,
Sacked and looted when the Caliphate fell;
Now I sit and contemplate the wild irises growing
Out of ruined pavement, as the wind sighs in the cypresses.
With the snowy Sierra Nevada behind, and the sunlit plain,
And the hilltops around crowned with Moorish castles,
Granada stands, and the Alhambra spreads out on its ridge
Against the snows, as the sun moves across the heavens,
Infusing the marble and alabaster stucco with light,
As innumerable rills course all over the majestic hill,
Through the woods and gardens and into the palace courts,
Cool, clear, brilliant water, the wine of enlightened souls,
Precious element that the Arabs could conjure from nowhere
With the magic of djinns, turning desert into paradise.
Here among the lightness and delicacy and surprise
A noble of the court, with pointed beard and hennaed fingernails,
Reclines on cushions, idly watching the jets of water
Sparkling in the sun, his eyes dark with the languid melancholy
Of knowing the transience of all this beauty;
In the distant Yemen his ancestors wore rough camel-hair,
While he wears silk and dwelt among houris and djinns,
Breathing the fragrance of mimosa and myrtle;
Putting out his hand, he caresses the slave-girl lying in his lap,
And, gazing at the sky, dreamily plucks his lute,
Reciting the names of its five magic strings,
Alziar, alchanzar, almetina, almithleta, albonzar…
This is the kingdom of the silkworm,
The mushrabiyyah of the soul,
The dice box of blue protective words,
The blind guitarist’s vision.
Light of my eye, you make me an oculist of dreams…
My retina is a rose window shattered by the dawn,
A noria turning in the light,
The saeta transverberates me,
The sebka of sounds draws me into endless mazes…
Who is the seneschal of this castle, your heart,
And whose eyes scan from the watchtower ?
I will hide under the skirts of Our Lady of the Snows,
Whose white fires burn my hopes to the bone,
Whose heart is the mihrab of aeons…
In Ronda, I look down from the bridge across the chasm
Into the river in the sunless channel far below
And think of how many have thrown themselves to their deaths
From this very spot, and in my heart I am the bull
Staring at the sword point’s killing star, and the matador
In his suit of lights, priest of the bread and wine,
Tracing the signs of sacrifice in the sand.
The procession enters to the sound of the paso doble,
Two constables on horseback, followed by the matadors,
And their teams of picadors and banderilleros;
Then comes the suerte de picar, when the picadors
Drive their lances into the charging bull’s neck,
To weaken and tire him, and make him drop his head,
While the black beast tries to gore the blindfolded horses
Whose vocal cords have been silenced
To prevent any terrified cries from alarming the crowd;
Then the banderilleros attract the bull’s attention,
And deftly place their barbed darts in the victim’s shoulders,
Then finally the matador appears to try his skill,
Using his cape to attract the exhausted animal,
Seeking to drive his sword between its shoulders
And pierce the heart with a single noble thrust;
But more often he will miss, and resort to a second sword
To cut the spinal cord and cause instant death;
Or perhaps, to his shame, he will even fail in this,
And instruct an assistant to drive his dagger into its nape
While the disgusted crowd whistles its derision.
Inside Seville Cathedral, they perform the Dance of the Seises:
The procession approaches the chancel in a cloud of incense,
Ten young boys led by the priests, dressed in opulent suits
Embroidered in white, red and gold, led by the priests,
And stand before the altar, carrying white hats with red plumes,
And turn to face each other in two lines,
And the orchestra strikes up an ancient air,
And the Seises don their hats and begin to dance a slow minuet,
Bringing their feet together at the end of each step
And rising on their toes, then, backi n line,
They finish each sequence with a sudden pirouette,
And at the climax the dancers produce their castanets
And complete their ritual to their staccato accompaniment,
Back in the land of Tarshish, in the kingdom of the bull.
The Feria is coming: even the blind man selling lottery tickets
Taps a flamenco rhythms with his white stick on the pavement,
And spring has arrived overnight, the squares on fire with roses,
And I sit beneath the orange trees, white bloosms falling on my head,
And in the evening amid the scent of jasmine, roses and orange-blossom,
The moon and Venus hover over the city,
The Giralda stands up against scudding clouds,
And the distant throbbing of castanets grows louder every day,
And the town-of-six-days is being constructed,
The avenues festive with fluttering banners and paper lanterns,
Five hundred bright pavilions are appearing out of nowhere;
At the fairground, streams of people ride and walk in the sunshine,
The senoritas in flamenco dresses, flounced and embroidered,
Flowers in their dark hair, as they stop here and there
To dance with impromptu passion on the pavement,
While their sweethearts strike up a tune on the guitar;
Endless cavalcade parades up and down the avenues
Under the acacias’ scented white blooms,
The men in black cordobes hats, frilled shirts and short jackets,
Their girls behind them in flamenco dress, sitting sideways
On the croup, holding them around the waist,
Guitars slung across their saddles, as they move in the rhythm;
A lissom gipsy girl dances in the pavilion, hand on hip,
Striding haughtily around, loosing gay burlerias,
Giving all she has, proud and sensual, exciting the crowd,
And in the casetas men and women dance the sevillana,
The splendid women turning and weaving, skirts swirling gracefully,
Arms twisting sinuously above their flowered heads,
In their ears the crescent moon of Astarte,
As they restrain their voluptuous vehemence to breaking,
Moved by the duende in their limbs,
And the blissful crowd swarms from bar to bar, nibbling tapas,
Washing it down with sherry and kisses,
And nobody sleeps for a week, dreaming on their feet like horses,
All sharing the same dream, the same paradise.
In Holy Week, everyone is on the streets carousing,
Great crowds follow the holy images, to dirges and drumbeats,
Andaluzas in tall combs aaand black lace mantillas,
Penitents in purple and white hoods, carrying a cross in their midst,
And banks of glittering candles process through the dark,
The Virgin sits beneath a canopy, in gold crown and jewel-encrusted robe,
Her dark blue velvet mantle embroidered with gold ands silver thread,
Her float borne on the shoulders of her sweating acolytes.
At Whitsun, for the Romeria del Rocio,
They bring the Virgin out of the church at Triana,
And install her in her portable shrine, decked with flowers,
The ox-drawn wagons move off, and beneath their decorative awnings
Groups of flamencas click castanets, exchanging witticisms
With the young men following on horseback,
And all along the country road they are joined by people
Coming from the villages, converging with the stream,
Until they stop and bivouac among the umbrella-pine groves,
And round the campfire they sing and dance
And pass the bota round from hand to hand,
And amorous couples stray into the depths of the pine forest;
And in the early hours of Pentecost Sunday,
When the revellers are staring in mystical frenzy
Or lie prostrate in inebriated stupor,
The statue of the Virgin is paraded before them.
In the Sierra Morena you will visit the Virgin’s shrines
Remote among chestnut orchards and forests of cork oaks,
Where black pigs graze on the fallen acorns,
And cold springs, hallowed since the days of the shamans
Who gathered the fly agaric from the woods here
That they might shed their skins and fly,
Still bubble up from the underworld.
At Arcos de la Frontera vultures circle above their nests in the cliff,
And the running of the Brandy Bull has come;
The main street is in uproar, pavements, balconies and roofs crowded,
Young maletillas showing off their prowess with an old red cloth on a stick
While a boy charges them with a pair of horns;
Young men serenade the pretty girls on the balconies,
A great roar goes up, when the bull is released at the bottom of the hill,
And charges all and sundry, knocking down maletillas trying to play it,
And bold girls try to get in right behind it
And touch its sacred testicles, to be blessed with fertility
And bear many sturdy children in the years to come;
But when the beast has reached the hilltop
He is already exhausted by the shouting ruck around,
And by the time they get down to the bottom
All the fight has gone out of him,
And in the bullring he is slaughtered, and its flesh
Cut up and sold by the butchers of the town.
Drinking fino at a tapas bar, I admire the pretty girls passing,
And you (you know it is you) are most beautiful of all,
Delicious as pears in wine with cinnamon;
I give you the shadows behind iron convent grilles,
The sweets made by the hands of nuns!
I give you saffron and raisins, and everything precious,
The silver of Tartessos, even, whatever you desire!
All for the scent of jacaranda and the moonlight on your skin!
Horses are galloping along the luminous white beach,
And the fierce light sings its saeta in the skin;
I feel like al-Mu’tadid himself, that pure poet,
Enlarging the Alcazar to house a harem of eight hundred women,
Decorating the terraces with flowers planted
In his decapitated enemies’ skulls.
Will you open to me the camarón?
Will you cense me with the mist and cloud of the sierras?
I bow to you as the mudejar to his Christian queen,
Worshipping my own desert God in my heart.
Come with me to the carnival of Cadiz,
That city of sad limestone crumbling in sea air,
And white marble Phoenician sarcophagi releasing their ghosts,
While musicians parade with lutes, guitars and mandolins,
Singing satirical songs about the famous,
And we, disguised in costume, will kiss in the swirling crowd,
Drunk on sangria, happy as wild horses.
The bay is crowded with ferryboats, cruise liners and tramp steamers,
Fishing boats with felucca sails lean against the wind and current;
Once these straits were the western limits of the world,
And the Phoenicians were the first to pass through them,
And trade in the mineral riches of Tartessos;
For centuries they safeguarded their monopoly with mystery,
Their mariners telling tales in the harbours of the Aegean,
Warning of the terrible dangers beyond the Pillars of Hercules,
Describing the whirlpools round the sunken isle of Atlantis,
The impassable Sargasso weed choking the channels,
The deadly sea monsters lurking everywhere.
I sit outside a café, sipping sol y sombra, under stellar orange trees,
Absorbing the street scene, the incidents becoming dramas,
The striking of attitudes with histrionic sprezzatura;
O, Andalucia, vast peacock’s tail of light!
The jasmine-scented air reeks of joy and melancholy,
And to drink water here is the finest art and pleasure,
Directing a thin stream through the air into the mouth from the bota,
Savouring the delicious taste, a little at a time and slowly,
Lingering as one does over everything most loved.
The roses bloom all year round in Malaga,
Geraniums cascade from balconies, carnations and freesias shine,
Easter lilies appear among the olive trees and date palms,
And in the evening the whole turn turns out for the promenade,
Laughing couples, happy families, beautiful girls.
Here you will be as the dead stick thrust into the earth
That flowers against its will, overpowered by life;
You will ask for so little, and cherish it beyond price,
Sitting with friends over a glass of wine,
Talking for hours, forgetting everything of no account,
Relishing the bite of sardonic humour.
Walk along the beaches, and watch the catch being hauled in,
The boats drawn up on the sand with the magic eye on their prows,
And the fishermen grilling sardines over driftwood fires;
Ancient heaps of murex shells have been found here,
Remains of the dye-works where they made the tyrian purple
For the togas of the Caesars, the colour of the mountains at sunset,
And of the blood of the people dragged from their beds and shot
In the Civil War, when men became werewolves,
And all night there came the sound of gunshots in the darkness,
And in the morning dead bodies lay where they had fallen.
But listen to them now, the carefree peaceful citizens,
Blithely indifferent to politics and all that nonsense,
Burying bad memories in unmarked graves.
Peacocks cry on the Alcazaba’s battlements,
And the scent of hibiscus makes me dream,
The fig trees are sprouting and in a few weeks
Wild oleanders will cover the hillsides with white and pink blossom;
Orange and lemon groves cover the vale,
Wild mignonette, wild irises, conflowers, violets,
Rosemary, cistus, periwinkles, mallows, thyme, vetches,
Wild garlic, harebells, orchises, muscari, chionodoxas,
Gentians, borage, marjoram, alyssum, mesembryanthemum,
Wild ailanthus, scillas, heliotrope, peonies.
They say the malaguenas are the most beautiful girls in all Spain,
With their golden faces and the moist gleam of their eyes,
And something of the sea in their allure,
So graceful and vivacious, nonchalant and proud,
Shooting passionate glances from under their eyelids.
In a tavern room the guitarist sweeps the strings,
And the singer launches himself into cante jondo,
Eyes closed, oblivious to all else but the notes
As they form themselves spontaneously in his mind.
In Córdoba, I sit on a roof garden, looking out over the city at sunset,
Like Emir Abderrahman I surveying his new capital,
Having won a western throne for the Omayyads,
And suddenly the sun has disappeared behind the Sierra,
And the Guadalquivir flows slowly past Moorish water mills.
Entering the great Mosque, I scan the grave reflective gloom,
The myriad columns of porphyry, jasper and coloured marbles,
Built from the ransacked ruins of Carthage, Nimes and Seville.
In the days of the Caliphate the mosque was open to the courtyard
And the long rows of orange trees continued the lines of the pillars
And carried the presence of Allah into the open air,
Perfumed with the aromatic oils of four thousand lamps,
And forty thousand worshippers knelt here at Ramadan
While from the mihrab the Imam recited from the Koran.
Once this was the greatest city in all Europe,
Prre-eminent in size and splendour, wealth, art and learning,
Where the Moors ruled Spain with tolerance and wisdom,
Fusing the genius of Iberian, Visigoth, Jew and Arab
To create a new civilsation, magnificent and unique.
And west of the city I wander the ruins of Medina Azahara,
Built by Abderrahman III to celebrate the Glorious Caliphate
And to gratify his favourite wife, al-Zahra, the Orange Blossom;
Almond trees and pines grow out between broken marble pavement,
Bougainvillea tangles spread purple over crumbling walls;
A third of Andalucia’s revenues went to build the Flower City,
And ten thousand workmen laboured for twenty-five years;
The Great Hall’s walls and ceilings were sheathed in gold,
Its eight doors of gold and ebony were framed by crystal pillars,
And there hung from the ceiling a fabled pearl,
While down the middle ran a pool of quicksilver in a porphyry basin,
And when the Caliph wished to impress a foreign guest
He would have a slave agitate the quicksilver
So that dazzling reflections danced up and down the walls;
Here within this palace he would retire to his harem
And find there always among the thousands of beauties
His beloved and most cherished al-Zahra, most beautiful of all.
Yet this city stood for less than a hundred years,
Sacked and looted when the Caliphate fell;
Now I sit and contemplate the wild irises growing
Out of ruined pavement, as the wind sighs in the cypresses.
With the snowy Sierra Nevada behind, and the sunlit plain,
And the hilltops around crowned with Moorish castles,
Granada stands, and the Alhambra spreads out on its ridge
Against the snows, as the sun moves across the heavens,
Infusing the marble and alabaster stucco with light,
As innumerable rills course all over the majestic hill,
Through the woods and gardens and into the palace courts,
Cool, clear, brilliant water, the wine of enlightened souls,
Precious element that the Arabs could conjure from nowhere
With the magic of djinns, turning desert into paradise.
Here among the lightness and delicacy and surprise
A noble of the court, with pointed beard and hennaed fingernails,
Reclines on cushions, idly watching the jets of water
Sparkling in the sun, his eyes dark with the languid melancholy
Of knowing the transience of all this beauty;
In the distant Yemen his ancestors wore rough camel-hair,
While he wears silk and dwelt among houris and djinns,
Breathing the fragrance of mimosa and myrtle;
Putting out his hand, he caresses the slave-girl lying in his lap,
And, gazing at the sky, dreamily plucks his lute,
Reciting the names of its five magic strings,
Alziar, alchanzar, almetina, almithleta, albonzar…
This is the kingdom of the silkworm,
The mushrabiyyah of the soul,
The dice box of blue protective words,
The blind guitarist’s vision.
Light of my eye, you make me an oculist of dreams…
My retina is a rose window shattered by the dawn,
A noria turning in the light,
The saeta transverberates me,
The sebka of sounds draws me into endless mazes…
Who is the seneschal of this castle, your heart,
And whose eyes scan from the watchtower ?
I will hide under the skirts of Our Lady of the Snows,
Whose white fires burn my hopes to the bone,
Whose heart is the mihrab of aeons…
In Ronda, I look down from the bridge across the chasm
Into the river in the sunless channel far below
And think of how many have thrown themselves to their deaths
From this very spot, and in my heart I am the bull
Staring at the sword point’s killing star, and the matador
In his suit of lights, priest of the bread and wine,
Tracing the signs of sacrifice in the sand.
The procession enters to the sound of the paso doble,
Two constables on horseback, followed by the matadors,
And their teams of picadors and banderilleros;
Then comes the suerte de picar, when the picadors
Drive their lances into the charging bull’s neck,
To weaken and tire him, and make him drop his head,
While the black beast tries to gore the blindfolded horses
Whose vocal cords have been silenced
To prevent any terrified cries from alarming the crowd;
Then the banderilleros attract the bull’s attention,
And deftly place their barbed darts in the victim’s shoulders,
Then finally the matador appears to try his skill,
Using his cape to attract the exhausted animal,
Seeking to drive his sword between its shoulders
And pierce the heart with a single noble thrust;
But more often he will miss, and resort to a second sword
To cut the spinal cord and cause instant death;
Or perhaps, to his shame, he will even fail in this,
And instruct an assistant to drive his dagger into its nape
While the disgusted crowd whistles its derision.
Inside Seville Cathedral, they perform the Dance of the Seises:
The procession approaches the chancel in a cloud of incense,
Ten young boys led by the priests, dressed in opulent suits
Embroidered in white, red and gold, led by the priests,
And stand before the altar, carrying white hats with red plumes,
And turn to face each other in two lines,
And the orchestra strikes up an ancient air,
And the Seises don their hats and begin to dance a slow minuet,
Bringing their feet together at the end of each step
And rising on their toes, then, backi n line,
They finish each sequence with a sudden pirouette,
And at the climax the dancers produce their castanets
And complete their ritual to their staccato accompaniment,
Back in the land of Tarshish, in the kingdom of the bull.
The Feria is coming: even the blind man selling lottery tickets
Taps a flamenco rhythms with his white stick on the pavement,
And spring has arrived overnight, the squares on fire with roses,
And I sit beneath the orange trees, white bloosms falling on my head,
And in the evening amid the scent of jasmine, roses and orange-blossom,
The moon and Venus hover over the city,
The Giralda stands up against scudding clouds,
And the distant throbbing of castanets grows louder every day,
And the town-of-six-days is being constructed,
The avenues festive with fluttering banners and paper lanterns,
Five hundred bright pavilions are appearing out of nowhere;
At the fairground, streams of people ride and walk in the sunshine,
The senoritas in flamenco dresses, flounced and embroidered,
Flowers in their dark hair, as they stop here and there
To dance with impromptu passion on the pavement,
While their sweethearts strike up a tune on the guitar;
Endless cavalcade parades up and down the avenues
Under the acacias’ scented white blooms,
The men in black cordobes hats, frilled shirts and short jackets,
Their girls behind them in flamenco dress, sitting sideways
On the croup, holding them around the waist,
Guitars slung across their saddles, as they move in the rhythm;
A lissom gipsy girl dances in the pavilion, hand on hip,
Striding haughtily around, loosing gay burlerias,
Giving all she has, proud and sensual, exciting the crowd,
And in the casetas men and women dance the sevillana,
The splendid women turning and weaving, skirts swirling gracefully,
Arms twisting sinuously above their flowered heads,
In their ears the crescent moon of Astarte,
As they restrain their voluptuous vehemence to breaking,
Moved by the duende in their limbs,
And the blissful crowd swarms from bar to bar, nibbling tapas,
Washing it down with sherry and kisses,
And nobody sleeps for a week, dreaming on their feet like horses,
All sharing the same dream, the same paradise.
In Holy Week, everyone is on the streets carousing,
Great crowds follow the holy images, to dirges and drumbeats,
Andaluzas in tall combs aaand black lace mantillas,
Penitents in purple and white hoods, carrying a cross in their midst,
And banks of glittering candles process through the dark,
The Virgin sits beneath a canopy, in gold crown and jewel-encrusted robe,
Her dark blue velvet mantle embroidered with gold ands silver thread,
Her float borne on the shoulders of her sweating acolytes.
At Whitsun, for the Romeria del Rocio,
They bring the Virgin out of the church at Triana,
And install her in her portable shrine, decked with flowers,
The ox-drawn wagons move off, and beneath their decorative awnings
Groups of flamencas click castanets, exchanging witticisms
With the young men following on horseback,
And all along the country road they are joined by people
Coming from the villages, converging with the stream,
Until they stop and bivouac among the umbrella-pine groves,
And round the campfire they sing and dance
And pass the bota round from hand to hand,
And amorous couples stray into the depths of the pine forest;
And in the early hours of Pentecost Sunday,
When the revellers are staring in mystical frenzy
Or lie prostrate in inebriated stupor,
The statue of the Virgin is paraded before them.
In the Sierra Morena you will visit the Virgin’s shrines
Remote among chestnut orchards and forests of cork oaks,
Where black pigs graze on the fallen acorns,
And cold springs, hallowed since the days of the shamans
Who gathered the fly agaric from the woods here
That they might shed their skins and fly,
Still bubble up from the underworld.
At Arcos de la Frontera vultures circle above their nests in the cliff,
And the running of the Brandy Bull has come;
The main street is in uproar, pavements, balconies and roofs crowded,
Young maletillas showing off their prowess with an old red cloth on a stick
While a boy charges them with a pair of horns;
Young men serenade the pretty girls on the balconies,
A great roar goes up, when the bull is released at the bottom of the hill,
And charges all and sundry, knocking down maletillas trying to play it,
And bold girls try to get in right behind it
And touch its sacred testicles, to be blessed with fertility
And bear many sturdy children in the years to come;
But when the beast has reached the hilltop
He is already exhausted by the shouting ruck around,
And by the time they get down to the bottom
All the fight has gone out of him,
And in the bullring he is slaughtered, and its flesh
Cut up and sold by the butchers of the town.
Drinking fino at a tapas bar, I admire the pretty girls passing,
And you (you know it is you) are most beautiful of all,
Delicious as pears in wine with cinnamon;
I give you the shadows behind iron convent grilles,
The sweets made by the hands of nuns!
I give you saffron and raisins, and everything precious,
The silver of Tartessos, even, whatever you desire!
All for the scent of jacaranda and the moonlight on your skin!
Horses are galloping along the luminous white beach,
And the fierce light sings its saeta in the skin;
I feel like al-Mu’tadid himself, that pure poet,
Enlarging the Alcazar to house a harem of eight hundred women,
Decorating the terraces with flowers planted
In his decapitated enemies’ skulls.
Will you open to me the camarón?
Will you cense me with the mist and cloud of the sierras?
I bow to you as the mudejar to his Christian queen,
Worshipping my own desert God in my heart.
Come with me to the carnival of Cadiz,
That city of sad limestone crumbling in sea air,
And white marble Phoenician sarcophagi releasing their ghosts,
While musicians parade with lutes, guitars and mandolins,
Singing satirical songs about the famous,
And we, disguised in costume, will kiss in the swirling crowd,
Drunk on sangria, happy as wild horses.
A Better Future for Ukraine
The violence of the edge
Calls you to your senses,
You feel the blow and learn,
Against your will…
There will always be a master,
A tormentor;
Freedom is not in the contract.
Drink to the bottom of the bottle,
And find what lies there,
But paradise it will not be.
Snowdrops in spring,
Smell of cabbage on the landing….
Like an old man playing chess
Against the ghosts,
I sit with my pen and paper,
Feeling with my mind
The naked body of a dancer….
The city is covered with dust,
As if already in ruins,
Another civilization expired.
Heathen devotions-
Indo-European roots,
Hieroglyphic as horses’ hooves-
I lay at the blue Virgin’s
Crimson-slippered feet,
(Byzantine empress of martyrdoms,
All those living dead buried
Under the steppe grass)
In Santa Sofia, offering sacrifice
To Jehovah, Yahweh, Perun.
Between Poland and Russia,
Baptized in the river,
Restless Cossack words
Saddle their nightmares and ride.
After all the rhetoric
The truth is as clear and deadly
As vodka, dark and weird
As the legends you raise
In a clanking old bucket
From a village well.
Calls you to your senses,
You feel the blow and learn,
Against your will…
There will always be a master,
A tormentor;
Freedom is not in the contract.
Drink to the bottom of the bottle,
And find what lies there,
But paradise it will not be.
Snowdrops in spring,
Smell of cabbage on the landing….
Like an old man playing chess
Against the ghosts,
I sit with my pen and paper,
Feeling with my mind
The naked body of a dancer….
The city is covered with dust,
As if already in ruins,
Another civilization expired.
Heathen devotions-
Indo-European roots,
Hieroglyphic as horses’ hooves-
I lay at the blue Virgin’s
Crimson-slippered feet,
(Byzantine empress of martyrdoms,
All those living dead buried
Under the steppe grass)
In Santa Sofia, offering sacrifice
To Jehovah, Yahweh, Perun.
Between Poland and Russia,
Baptized in the river,
Restless Cossack words
Saddle their nightmares and ride.
After all the rhetoric
The truth is as clear and deadly
As vodka, dark and weird
As the legends you raise
In a clanking old bucket
From a village well.
Vienna (Beautiful Corpses)
Spring in Vienna and the parks are heavy
With lilac and golden-rain,
Vinous lethargy plumps the air.
In the Wienerwald’s sweet-smelling heath grass
Bloom bee orchids, snake orchids, wild roses.
I go drinking new wine under the chestnut trees…
Curiosities in the Treasury of the Teutonic Knights :
A red coral salt-cellar tree hung with fossilized sharks’ teeth,
Thought to be adders’ tongues, able to detect poisoned food;
Bezoars from Persia with the power of healing,
A poisoned dagger with a handle carved out of rhino horn
Into the form of the Buddha, with sapphire eyes and ruby eyebrows…
In Vindobona, Marcus Aurelius sits at his desk,
Scratching out philosophy by lamplight,
While across the Danube the barbarians gather,
Wolfskinned warriors of the blood-red moon.
In glittering ballrooms the beautiful waltz to exhaustion,
While the Jewish vampire sucks the blood of his victims;
Johann Strauss, overwhelmed with female worshippers’ requests
For locks of his precious hair, resorts, with a smile,
To sending them clippings from his poodle.
With one eye laughing and one eye weeping,
I chase skirt, get drunk, tear myself apart,
Revelling in the delicacies of malice and intrigue,
Spying through the keyhole as a beautiful woman shits.
I lick the wet dark fanny of Death,
And disappear with a biting bon mot.
Why is it I only remember the bad dreams?
The suicide’s hand is writing in the dark,
And only the cruel and the crafty endure.
Show me any card ,and I will trump it;
Though I hate the game, I love to play;
Come to me, as to a disillusioned priest, who will hear
Your worst confession with an envious sigh.
In my mind I sculpt ecstatic Baroque,
Black pearls of madness, too fantastic for words,
And glorious women, Amazons on horseback,
Riding through the mist with operatic flair.
My doctor says, “It’s hopeless, but not serious,”
So I carry on as usual, refining my sad art,
Singing Requiems for every vagabond moment
With apocalyptic relish, a merry gravedigger.
I love only the gloomiest cafés, where death itself
Seems to wait upon one’s shoulder, guiding the hand
To the cup, and parading sights before one’s eyes
With the charlatan flair of a master showman,
Glorying in deception and legerdemain.
At the Kirche am Steinhof, ravaged minds
Embrace white marble and light, to be healed
By Him who has humbled and punished them,
Begging His mercy, to set them free,
To show them the way out of the wilderness,
And lead them to green meadows and clear streams.
In the Burial Museum, I peruse the exhibits,
The coffin with a bell pull for the prematurely buried,
The reusable coffin with trapdoor,
The stiletto for stabbing corpses before the lid is closed.
In the Red Room in the Hotel Orient,
The lovers rent each other’s body by the hour,
Exchanging masks in the mirror,
Molten gold flesh in electric danse macabre,
Ghosts from a seventeenth-century tavern,
Refusing to leave their old haunt.
In the Armoury Collection in the Neue Burg,
I imagine myself in the eagle armour
Of that bellicose dandy, Archduke Ferdinand of Tyrol,
A griffin in flight over the battlefield;
The embroidered saddle of Kara Mustafa
Conjures the magnificent defeated,
Attended by houris in Paradise.
In the coffeehouse, among chess players
And grumpy waiters, in the sullen afternoon,
With smoke-stained walls and faded velvet,
I weigh alternatives with refined disdain,
Multiplied by mirrors, to no conclusion.
I could linger all day in junk shops’ gloom,
Sniffing bygone glory’s autumn must,
Adding more dreams to my private collection.
Out in the Wienerwald,
Amid steep cliffs, thick forests, rushing rivers,
I took you from behind, up against a tree,-
If only I could live through my cock,
And run wild like a feral child !
In the Jüdisches Museum,
Prophecies from the Torah
Drip down the walls;
Here is the knob of Theodor Herzl’s walking stick,
And a picture of a man kicking an old Jew in the arse,
On a busy street, in the year 1911;
And here are Hanukkah candelabra
Rescued from the burnt embers of a vanished synagogue.
In the Michaelerkirche crypt,
I stumble past piles of paupers’ bones
And musty coffins with their lids off,
Desiccated bodies,
Still clothed and grimacing.
On the wall of an old house, in Judenplatz,
Besides a relief of the Baptism of Christ
Is the triumphant inscription :
By baptism in the River Jordan
Bodies are cleansed from disease and evil,
So all secret sinfulness takes flight.
Thus the flame rising furiously
Through the whole city in 1421
Purged the terrible crimes of the Hebrew dogs.
As the world was once purged by the flood,
So this time it was purged by fire.
Standing at the door of the Jesuitenkirche,
I gaze up,suitably impressed, at the dome above,
But as I approach the altar
The spectacle reveals itself as sham…
Nearby, one day in 1212,
A dreaded basilisk was discovered
At the bottom of a well,
And a baker’s apprentice volunteered
To climb down and capture the beast,
Taking a mirror with him;
The basilisk, seeing its own reflection
In the glass, turned to stone.
The Venus of Willendorf
Suckles us all at her drooping dugs,
Bears us all in her domed belly…
Walking through the Cemetery of the Nameless,
All the forgotten people fished out of the Danube,
Never identified,
I ask myself: who will be the next
To possess the Holy Lance
And hold the world’s destiny in his hands?
In the Academy of Fine Arts
Bosch’s Paradise, Last Judgment and Hell,
Bestial demons torturing sinners
With infinite ingenuity,
And a very few survivors
Making it to heaven…
I think of young Hitler kicking his heels on the steps,
A shabby little vagabond,
Brooding over his exclusion from Paradise,
“What the world has lost
Because of those fools in the Academy !
Or has fate reserved me for some other purpose ?”
In Dürer’s Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand,
The artist himself, clad in black,
Strolls, deep in conversation with his recently deceased friend Conrad Celtes,
Amid scenes of mass murder, oblivious…
In Cranach’s Stag hunt of Elector Frederick the Wise,
There is an air of careless jollity
As the stags are driven into the water
To be picked off by the nobles’ crossbows…
Rubens’ The Fur, a celebration
Of his sixteen-year-old second wife, Hélène Fourment,
A saucy little angel, no, a saint,
Who brought an old man so much pleasure…
In Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath,
The artist has painted his self-portrait
As the giant’s severed head…
In the Egyptian galleries,
Mummy cases and canopic jars,
And shabti figurines once placed
Inside tombs to perform any tasks the gods required,
And mummies of cats, falcons, snakes and crocodiles;
And the Reserve Head found at Giza,
Smooth limestone, serene and beautiful,
A surrogate vehicle for the ka;
And all the scarabs that were placed
Upon the chests of mummies,
Bearing a spell that implored the dead one’s heart
Not to bear witness against him
During the Judgment of Osiris;
And the miniature wooden pleasure boat
Built to sail the ka through eternity…
Down into the dark
My poem sinks,
A coffin with a bell inside,
For the prematurely buried to ring
Should he come back to life.
Oh, life, world, you make me feel
So hapless, like that doctor summoned
To the bedside of the dying Franz-Josef I,
Only to be reprimanded:
“Go home and dress correctly.”
(Perhaps in the fashions of the Imperial Army,
The best tailored in Europe,
Whose white and cream uniform won first prize
At the 1900 Paris Exhibition?)
I stand before the convertible
In which Archduke Franz Ferdinand
And his wife were shot dead
On June 28, 1914;
It still has a bullet hole in it;
Here, also, is the archduke’s bloodstained light-blue tunic
And unblemished hat with green feathers,
And the chaise-longue on which he died.
I walk the streets of the Innere Stadt,
Bewildered by Mozart’s peregrinations:
Thirteen addresses in ten years.
Yet I understand the urge.
Like Sacher-Masoch
Buying his mistress yet more furs,
I indulge my Muse
And accept the punishment,
Sure that such is my fate,
A Lippizaner,
Born brown, later turning white.
In the Prater
The Ferris wheel is turning
And hysterical laughter slides
Down the helter-skelter
Of a kiss-
What is this world to me?
Planetarium,
Puppet booth.
Fifteen million years ago
This was the floor of the Miocene Sea;
Now, a child with a lollipop in his mouth.
With lilac and golden-rain,
Vinous lethargy plumps the air.
In the Wienerwald’s sweet-smelling heath grass
Bloom bee orchids, snake orchids, wild roses.
I go drinking new wine under the chestnut trees…
Curiosities in the Treasury of the Teutonic Knights :
A red coral salt-cellar tree hung with fossilized sharks’ teeth,
Thought to be adders’ tongues, able to detect poisoned food;
Bezoars from Persia with the power of healing,
A poisoned dagger with a handle carved out of rhino horn
Into the form of the Buddha, with sapphire eyes and ruby eyebrows…
In Vindobona, Marcus Aurelius sits at his desk,
Scratching out philosophy by lamplight,
While across the Danube the barbarians gather,
Wolfskinned warriors of the blood-red moon.
In glittering ballrooms the beautiful waltz to exhaustion,
While the Jewish vampire sucks the blood of his victims;
Johann Strauss, overwhelmed with female worshippers’ requests
For locks of his precious hair, resorts, with a smile,
To sending them clippings from his poodle.
With one eye laughing and one eye weeping,
I chase skirt, get drunk, tear myself apart,
Revelling in the delicacies of malice and intrigue,
Spying through the keyhole as a beautiful woman shits.
I lick the wet dark fanny of Death,
And disappear with a biting bon mot.
Why is it I only remember the bad dreams?
The suicide’s hand is writing in the dark,
And only the cruel and the crafty endure.
Show me any card ,and I will trump it;
Though I hate the game, I love to play;
Come to me, as to a disillusioned priest, who will hear
Your worst confession with an envious sigh.
In my mind I sculpt ecstatic Baroque,
Black pearls of madness, too fantastic for words,
And glorious women, Amazons on horseback,
Riding through the mist with operatic flair.
My doctor says, “It’s hopeless, but not serious,”
So I carry on as usual, refining my sad art,
Singing Requiems for every vagabond moment
With apocalyptic relish, a merry gravedigger.
I love only the gloomiest cafés, where death itself
Seems to wait upon one’s shoulder, guiding the hand
To the cup, and parading sights before one’s eyes
With the charlatan flair of a master showman,
Glorying in deception and legerdemain.
At the Kirche am Steinhof, ravaged minds
Embrace white marble and light, to be healed
By Him who has humbled and punished them,
Begging His mercy, to set them free,
To show them the way out of the wilderness,
And lead them to green meadows and clear streams.
In the Burial Museum, I peruse the exhibits,
The coffin with a bell pull for the prematurely buried,
The reusable coffin with trapdoor,
The stiletto for stabbing corpses before the lid is closed.
In the Red Room in the Hotel Orient,
The lovers rent each other’s body by the hour,
Exchanging masks in the mirror,
Molten gold flesh in electric danse macabre,
Ghosts from a seventeenth-century tavern,
Refusing to leave their old haunt.
In the Armoury Collection in the Neue Burg,
I imagine myself in the eagle armour
Of that bellicose dandy, Archduke Ferdinand of Tyrol,
A griffin in flight over the battlefield;
The embroidered saddle of Kara Mustafa
Conjures the magnificent defeated,
Attended by houris in Paradise.
In the coffeehouse, among chess players
And grumpy waiters, in the sullen afternoon,
With smoke-stained walls and faded velvet,
I weigh alternatives with refined disdain,
Multiplied by mirrors, to no conclusion.
I could linger all day in junk shops’ gloom,
Sniffing bygone glory’s autumn must,
Adding more dreams to my private collection.
Out in the Wienerwald,
Amid steep cliffs, thick forests, rushing rivers,
I took you from behind, up against a tree,-
If only I could live through my cock,
And run wild like a feral child !
In the Jüdisches Museum,
Prophecies from the Torah
Drip down the walls;
Here is the knob of Theodor Herzl’s walking stick,
And a picture of a man kicking an old Jew in the arse,
On a busy street, in the year 1911;
And here are Hanukkah candelabra
Rescued from the burnt embers of a vanished synagogue.
In the Michaelerkirche crypt,
I stumble past piles of paupers’ bones
And musty coffins with their lids off,
Desiccated bodies,
Still clothed and grimacing.
On the wall of an old house, in Judenplatz,
Besides a relief of the Baptism of Christ
Is the triumphant inscription :
By baptism in the River Jordan
Bodies are cleansed from disease and evil,
So all secret sinfulness takes flight.
Thus the flame rising furiously
Through the whole city in 1421
Purged the terrible crimes of the Hebrew dogs.
As the world was once purged by the flood,
So this time it was purged by fire.
Standing at the door of the Jesuitenkirche,
I gaze up,suitably impressed, at the dome above,
But as I approach the altar
The spectacle reveals itself as sham…
Nearby, one day in 1212,
A dreaded basilisk was discovered
At the bottom of a well,
And a baker’s apprentice volunteered
To climb down and capture the beast,
Taking a mirror with him;
The basilisk, seeing its own reflection
In the glass, turned to stone.
The Venus of Willendorf
Suckles us all at her drooping dugs,
Bears us all in her domed belly…
Walking through the Cemetery of the Nameless,
All the forgotten people fished out of the Danube,
Never identified,
I ask myself: who will be the next
To possess the Holy Lance
And hold the world’s destiny in his hands?
In the Academy of Fine Arts
Bosch’s Paradise, Last Judgment and Hell,
Bestial demons torturing sinners
With infinite ingenuity,
And a very few survivors
Making it to heaven…
I think of young Hitler kicking his heels on the steps,
A shabby little vagabond,
Brooding over his exclusion from Paradise,
“What the world has lost
Because of those fools in the Academy !
Or has fate reserved me for some other purpose ?”
In Dürer’s Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand,
The artist himself, clad in black,
Strolls, deep in conversation with his recently deceased friend Conrad Celtes,
Amid scenes of mass murder, oblivious…
In Cranach’s Stag hunt of Elector Frederick the Wise,
There is an air of careless jollity
As the stags are driven into the water
To be picked off by the nobles’ crossbows…
Rubens’ The Fur, a celebration
Of his sixteen-year-old second wife, Hélène Fourment,
A saucy little angel, no, a saint,
Who brought an old man so much pleasure…
In Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath,
The artist has painted his self-portrait
As the giant’s severed head…
In the Egyptian galleries,
Mummy cases and canopic jars,
And shabti figurines once placed
Inside tombs to perform any tasks the gods required,
And mummies of cats, falcons, snakes and crocodiles;
And the Reserve Head found at Giza,
Smooth limestone, serene and beautiful,
A surrogate vehicle for the ka;
And all the scarabs that were placed
Upon the chests of mummies,
Bearing a spell that implored the dead one’s heart
Not to bear witness against him
During the Judgment of Osiris;
And the miniature wooden pleasure boat
Built to sail the ka through eternity…
Down into the dark
My poem sinks,
A coffin with a bell inside,
For the prematurely buried to ring
Should he come back to life.
Oh, life, world, you make me feel
So hapless, like that doctor summoned
To the bedside of the dying Franz-Josef I,
Only to be reprimanded:
“Go home and dress correctly.”
(Perhaps in the fashions of the Imperial Army,
The best tailored in Europe,
Whose white and cream uniform won first prize
At the 1900 Paris Exhibition?)
I stand before the convertible
In which Archduke Franz Ferdinand
And his wife were shot dead
On June 28, 1914;
It still has a bullet hole in it;
Here, also, is the archduke’s bloodstained light-blue tunic
And unblemished hat with green feathers,
And the chaise-longue on which he died.
I walk the streets of the Innere Stadt,
Bewildered by Mozart’s peregrinations:
Thirteen addresses in ten years.
Yet I understand the urge.
Like Sacher-Masoch
Buying his mistress yet more furs,
I indulge my Muse
And accept the punishment,
Sure that such is my fate,
A Lippizaner,
Born brown, later turning white.
In the Prater
The Ferris wheel is turning
And hysterical laughter slides
Down the helter-skelter
Of a kiss-
What is this world to me?
Planetarium,
Puppet booth.
Fifteen million years ago
This was the floor of the Miocene Sea;
Now, a child with a lollipop in his mouth.
Sands of the Sahel
It is all in this dust, these stones.
All you need to know.
Whiteout of sere scrub and shrivelled trees.
Emir of lost moments,
Sweat dripping in my eyes,
I reel as begging lepers
Circle me, all bleeding stumps
And weeping sores...
The harmattan fleeces the earth,
Red dust eclipses the sun,
Cracks treetrunks and sears the throat,
Burrows into the aching brain...
Slow Arabic ceremony
Of days, thoughts, lives,
Slippery mergings
Veiled like women...
“What is written is written.
We die when God wills.”
How many coded tongues
Are spoken here,
Flamboyant dialects
Guarding their secrets?
Head wrapped in kadmul,
I sit against an acacia,
Watching shooting stars
In the night sky.
The camel’s throat is slit,
It tumbles to the ground,
Choking on its own blood,
And is hacked into pieces,
So succulent and sweet.
What has been, what is and what
Will be, all merge into one,
And how will anyone know the difference?
Africa has been with me always,
Before I even knew its name.
All you need to know.
Whiteout of sere scrub and shrivelled trees.
Emir of lost moments,
Sweat dripping in my eyes,
I reel as begging lepers
Circle me, all bleeding stumps
And weeping sores...
The harmattan fleeces the earth,
Red dust eclipses the sun,
Cracks treetrunks and sears the throat,
Burrows into the aching brain...
Slow Arabic ceremony
Of days, thoughts, lives,
Slippery mergings
Veiled like women...
“What is written is written.
We die when God wills.”
How many coded tongues
Are spoken here,
Flamboyant dialects
Guarding their secrets?
Head wrapped in kadmul,
I sit against an acacia,
Watching shooting stars
In the night sky.
The camel’s throat is slit,
It tumbles to the ground,
Choking on its own blood,
And is hacked into pieces,
So succulent and sweet.
What has been, what is and what
Will be, all merge into one,
And how will anyone know the difference?
Africa has been with me always,
Before I even knew its name.
Thursday, May 01, 2008
Anton von Webern (1883-1945)
The lion rampant, sickle in one paw,
Grape-vine in the other,
And a fish poised, swimming upstream;
That was their coat of arms,
Tyrolean seigneurs, reared to duty and honour,
Among the hills of Lower Carinthia.
From the high meadows the lad would gaze out
Across the plains to the mountains,
Breathing pure serene space;
Occasionally, a rainbow soared above the earth,
And voluptuous forests lit with unearthly glow,
As he opened his arms wide to embrace the universe,
Laughing demi-god, in love with clarity and order.
At haymaking time, he toiled in the fields,
Transported by rhythm, in happy communion
With the workers,
Then rode home in the evening
Like a king, atop the laden wagon.
His mother sang in the gloaming,
Playing the piano, while he sat beside her, rapt,
Sure that he could never die, nor come to any harm.
Thin, stooped, and shy, like a librarian,
He hid the stillness of a saint,
Grey eyes introspecting intensely,
Never losing hope in the human.
The strictest discipline held the greatest freedom;
Thus he surrendered to a guru,
To be broken and recreated, shaped in his image,
Both loving and fearing, bound through the years,
As their little band of pioneers gathered, united,
Round the master, facing the world’s incomprehension,
Derided by philistines and fogies.
Each spring he would trek into the mountains,
Just to see the narcissus fields in bloom, and revel
In glaciers, and pine woods after rain,
And drink from cold clear streams and waterfalls,
And feel his mother’s presence, gently healing.
Hiking high and far, rucksack on back,
Doggedly driving himself upward and on,
He would seek out the rarest heights,
Breathing the pure air, the solitude,
Setting out each time to arrive somewhere new,
A new sound, a different space, music unheard-of,
Whatever summer’s harvest might bring from silence.
In nature he found the trance of love,
Absorbed in every detail, mesmerised
By longing for perfection.
Alone, he lived each hour with zest,
Floating in space, living each detail of his music,
In the rigorous search for truth,
Which one could never unriddle, only believe in.
Drenched in summer’s swell of grass and flowers,
He lay down, face to the ground,
Digging his hands into the soil,
Breathing deeply, enraptured,
Feeling the growth of all creatures, the fire in the roots,
Remorseless evolution’s harmonies.
Yet, always he returned to the village churchyard
To stand at his mother’s grave, grieving,
And dedicate each coming work to her.
War’s end, in a mountain village:
Remote from the world, never more naked
And alone, nor closer to God,
He gazed, from the bench behind the old church,
Above the headstones to the snowfields
And granite spires beyond,
And strolled though evergreens above the castle,
Contemplating mosses, lichens and fungi,
Thrilled by multiplicity and oneness.
September days held him blue and pure,
The quiet valley promising fresh music.
How could he know the mischance
Death was keeping for him,
A fatal mistake in the dark?
In just a few days he too would lie
In that churchyard, under the mountains,
Turning into rocks and trees and snow.
Grape-vine in the other,
And a fish poised, swimming upstream;
That was their coat of arms,
Tyrolean seigneurs, reared to duty and honour,
Among the hills of Lower Carinthia.
From the high meadows the lad would gaze out
Across the plains to the mountains,
Breathing pure serene space;
Occasionally, a rainbow soared above the earth,
And voluptuous forests lit with unearthly glow,
As he opened his arms wide to embrace the universe,
Laughing demi-god, in love with clarity and order.
At haymaking time, he toiled in the fields,
Transported by rhythm, in happy communion
With the workers,
Then rode home in the evening
Like a king, atop the laden wagon.
His mother sang in the gloaming,
Playing the piano, while he sat beside her, rapt,
Sure that he could never die, nor come to any harm.
Thin, stooped, and shy, like a librarian,
He hid the stillness of a saint,
Grey eyes introspecting intensely,
Never losing hope in the human.
The strictest discipline held the greatest freedom;
Thus he surrendered to a guru,
To be broken and recreated, shaped in his image,
Both loving and fearing, bound through the years,
As their little band of pioneers gathered, united,
Round the master, facing the world’s incomprehension,
Derided by philistines and fogies.
Each spring he would trek into the mountains,
Just to see the narcissus fields in bloom, and revel
In glaciers, and pine woods after rain,
And drink from cold clear streams and waterfalls,
And feel his mother’s presence, gently healing.
Hiking high and far, rucksack on back,
Doggedly driving himself upward and on,
He would seek out the rarest heights,
Breathing the pure air, the solitude,
Setting out each time to arrive somewhere new,
A new sound, a different space, music unheard-of,
Whatever summer’s harvest might bring from silence.
In nature he found the trance of love,
Absorbed in every detail, mesmerised
By longing for perfection.
Alone, he lived each hour with zest,
Floating in space, living each detail of his music,
In the rigorous search for truth,
Which one could never unriddle, only believe in.
Drenched in summer’s swell of grass and flowers,
He lay down, face to the ground,
Digging his hands into the soil,
Breathing deeply, enraptured,
Feeling the growth of all creatures, the fire in the roots,
Remorseless evolution’s harmonies.
Yet, always he returned to the village churchyard
To stand at his mother’s grave, grieving,
And dedicate each coming work to her.
War’s end, in a mountain village:
Remote from the world, never more naked
And alone, nor closer to God,
He gazed, from the bench behind the old church,
Above the headstones to the snowfields
And granite spires beyond,
And strolled though evergreens above the castle,
Contemplating mosses, lichens and fungi,
Thrilled by multiplicity and oneness.
September days held him blue and pure,
The quiet valley promising fresh music.
How could he know the mischance
Death was keeping for him,
A fatal mistake in the dark?
In just a few days he too would lie
In that churchyard, under the mountains,
Turning into rocks and trees and snow.
Nemeton/ Frithgaerd
The places in the mind
Become their own ritual.
In supermarkets, shopping malls, office blocks,
In hotels and airports and railway stations,
On motorways, enclosed in my car,
I lose touch with the human.
What is it, this passion to belong
To consecrate and own the land,
To beat the bounds of self
And defend it from the stranger?
There is only one way to view the world,
One truth, one reality, beyond contradiction;
All else is barbarism and superstition;
Danger must be neutered,
Turned to sentiment and nostalgia.
The eye’s inventions scape vistas
And perspectives of the lordly spirit
To enjoy its estate, gazing out from prospects
To make believe that all is fixed and timeless.
Did it all begin that bright May morning-
From the pen of Isaak Walton-
When the three-Piscator,Venator and Auceps-
Met on the road leading out of London
To trek to the River Lea,their recreation
The worship of God’s blessings to man?
Sound guides us inward to meaning;
In the Pyrenean caves of Ariège
At certain spots on the palaeolithic wallpaintings
If you sing or whistle at the correct pitch
It will trigger fantastic resonances,
Penetrating the cortex of the brrain;
At Hal Saflieni on Malta, speak
Into a special recess in the rock
And it resonates through the vaults
In multifarioustones, from whisper
To boom, to awe the worshipful;
And in Neolithic chambered tombs
When drums, chanting and singing
Is performed inside it sets up
A standing wave that plays against the rock
And conjures the uncanny, full
Of ventriloquism and godly harmonics…
Here, at the border, there is little we can know
For sure, it is all belief, some restless faith
Forever changing form, and every place
Is many, multiplying in waves.
So the game draws us in its figures,
Draws us inwards, to learn from the difference
Of each occasion, each cadence,
Whether or not we ever understand.
Become their own ritual.
In supermarkets, shopping malls, office blocks,
In hotels and airports and railway stations,
On motorways, enclosed in my car,
I lose touch with the human.
What is it, this passion to belong
To consecrate and own the land,
To beat the bounds of self
And defend it from the stranger?
There is only one way to view the world,
One truth, one reality, beyond contradiction;
All else is barbarism and superstition;
Danger must be neutered,
Turned to sentiment and nostalgia.
The eye’s inventions scape vistas
And perspectives of the lordly spirit
To enjoy its estate, gazing out from prospects
To make believe that all is fixed and timeless.
Did it all begin that bright May morning-
From the pen of Isaak Walton-
When the three-Piscator,Venator and Auceps-
Met on the road leading out of London
To trek to the River Lea,their recreation
The worship of God’s blessings to man?
Sound guides us inward to meaning;
In the Pyrenean caves of Ariège
At certain spots on the palaeolithic wallpaintings
If you sing or whistle at the correct pitch
It will trigger fantastic resonances,
Penetrating the cortex of the brrain;
At Hal Saflieni on Malta, speak
Into a special recess in the rock
And it resonates through the vaults
In multifarioustones, from whisper
To boom, to awe the worshipful;
And in Neolithic chambered tombs
When drums, chanting and singing
Is performed inside it sets up
A standing wave that plays against the rock
And conjures the uncanny, full
Of ventriloquism and godly harmonics…
Here, at the border, there is little we can know
For sure, it is all belief, some restless faith
Forever changing form, and every place
Is many, multiplying in waves.
So the game draws us in its figures,
Draws us inwards, to learn from the difference
Of each occasion, each cadence,
Whether or not we ever understand.
Mythology
Tell me what to desire;
Instruct me in mad distraction.
The more fantastical the trick, the more I applaud.
I see not the thing, but the idea.
The deep strange story resurfaces in glimmering parts
To drive us to our ends;
Each action is a phantom of itself,
The silhouettes of metaphors
Playing puppet epics on a screen.
The television speaks to me,
So far from real feeling, real life.
The newsreader, sober and friendly,
Utters objective truth to the tribe,
Hypnotizing like a snake.
What beauty our ingenious deceptions disrupt
We do not comprehend;
All we see is numbers, almighty facts,
Power growing with voracious greed,
Assuring us of its benefits.
Money-magic raises golems and servitors
To beguile the hooded mind,
The corporations of mountebank alchemists.
Time coming, pasing, going, being spent, being wasted,
Ahead or behind, approaching, flying by,
All I am is past,the offices of memory,
Fighting the not-me, the evil.
The noun instigates the verb,
Something or someone has to be there
To set things in motion,
Otherwise there is nothing,
Which cannot be.
Instruct me in mad distraction.
The more fantastical the trick, the more I applaud.
I see not the thing, but the idea.
The deep strange story resurfaces in glimmering parts
To drive us to our ends;
Each action is a phantom of itself,
The silhouettes of metaphors
Playing puppet epics on a screen.
The television speaks to me,
So far from real feeling, real life.
The newsreader, sober and friendly,
Utters objective truth to the tribe,
Hypnotizing like a snake.
What beauty our ingenious deceptions disrupt
We do not comprehend;
All we see is numbers, almighty facts,
Power growing with voracious greed,
Assuring us of its benefits.
Money-magic raises golems and servitors
To beguile the hooded mind,
The corporations of mountebank alchemists.
Time coming, pasing, going, being spent, being wasted,
Ahead or behind, approaching, flying by,
All I am is past,the offices of memory,
Fighting the not-me, the evil.
The noun instigates the verb,
Something or someone has to be there
To set things in motion,
Otherwise there is nothing,
Which cannot be.
Butterflies
Tears of the Virgin,
Do not fall on my behalf.
Souls of the dead,
Pass me by.
Shall I spend my life
Awaiting the black butterfly?
Painted Lady, Black Satyr, Cloudless Sulphur,
Fly on,fly on,
Eastern Comma, Goldenrod Stowaway, Marbled Fritillary,
Come and go, go and come,
Mourning Cloak and Paradise Birdwing, Small Postman and Southern Festoon,
Throw me some light from your wings.
Think how ants ally themselves with a myrmecophilous caterpillar,
Defending the host from enemies,
And in return are licensed to milk its “honeydew”.
Rapt as opium addicts, the myrmidons stroke that giant body,
And greedily sup the clear delicious elixir, loath to stop,
Until, at last, the caterpillar, impatient with their attentions,
Taps the ground to signal an end.
In Australia, the Bright Copper caterpillar
Reigns in a rich underground chamber built and maintained by ants;
Amid twenty butterfly larvae and ten pupae;
Day and night a single larva may be attended by twenty-five ants,
Like pages in the service of a queen,
Rewarded with sweet liquor, a heady cocktail.
In England, the Large Blue caterpillar
Is carried off to their underground chamber by wood ants,
There, she feasts on the ant grubs, their own precious offspring,
Which they willingly feed the honoured guest,
Then she pupates and the butterfly emerges,
And stands before the bewildered infuriated ants,
Her true nature revealed, her honey glands gone;
Pursued by her angry hosts, she escapes with a ruse,
Exuding sticky substance that entangles their feet;
Hurriedly the butterfly flees to the surface
Spreads her wings and flies off into the air.
Male apollo butterflies grab females in flight
Or capture them on the ground,
Drawn to the virgins’ scent as they hide in the grass,
And brutishly ravish them;
After mating, the jealous male secretes and glues
A sphragis over the female’s abdomen,
A heavy chastity belt meant to last a lifetime
And keep her from other suitors for the rest of her life.
Do not fall on my behalf.
Souls of the dead,
Pass me by.
Shall I spend my life
Awaiting the black butterfly?
Painted Lady, Black Satyr, Cloudless Sulphur,
Fly on,fly on,
Eastern Comma, Goldenrod Stowaway, Marbled Fritillary,
Come and go, go and come,
Mourning Cloak and Paradise Birdwing, Small Postman and Southern Festoon,
Throw me some light from your wings.
Think how ants ally themselves with a myrmecophilous caterpillar,
Defending the host from enemies,
And in return are licensed to milk its “honeydew”.
Rapt as opium addicts, the myrmidons stroke that giant body,
And greedily sup the clear delicious elixir, loath to stop,
Until, at last, the caterpillar, impatient with their attentions,
Taps the ground to signal an end.
In Australia, the Bright Copper caterpillar
Reigns in a rich underground chamber built and maintained by ants;
Amid twenty butterfly larvae and ten pupae;
Day and night a single larva may be attended by twenty-five ants,
Like pages in the service of a queen,
Rewarded with sweet liquor, a heady cocktail.
In England, the Large Blue caterpillar
Is carried off to their underground chamber by wood ants,
There, she feasts on the ant grubs, their own precious offspring,
Which they willingly feed the honoured guest,
Then she pupates and the butterfly emerges,
And stands before the bewildered infuriated ants,
Her true nature revealed, her honey glands gone;
Pursued by her angry hosts, she escapes with a ruse,
Exuding sticky substance that entangles their feet;
Hurriedly the butterfly flees to the surface
Spreads her wings and flies off into the air.
Male apollo butterflies grab females in flight
Or capture them on the ground,
Drawn to the virgins’ scent as they hide in the grass,
And brutishly ravish them;
After mating, the jealous male secretes and glues
A sphragis over the female’s abdomen,
A heavy chastity belt meant to last a lifetime
And keep her from other suitors for the rest of her life.
Avebury
Cretaceous landscape strikes its flints against the mind;
Here, stone clocks the long ceremony of the year
As light and water energize the earth’s limbs,
Bringing the giantess to bright fruition,
Where land and sky and underworld merge.
O, sanctuary of the seasons, hearth of the soul !
Sunrise and moonset align with the rivers
At the summer quarters, and the acts of the drama
Join in the round, mumming the cyclical play.
There was three men came out of the west,
Their fortunes for to try,
And these three men made a solemn vow,
John Barleycorn should die.
They ploughed, they sowed, they harrowed him in,
Throwed clods upon his head,
And these three men made a solemn vow
John Barleycorn was dead.
The Hag-Maiden is among us,
The corn dolly woven from the fall of the year.
West Kennet long barrow mothers the dead,
Her long hummock hugging the skyline
Along the hill’s electric spine;
Her eye watches everything, from every angle,
Surveying all four quarters, unblinking;
Her womb and vagina transform the loam-seed,
As she squats to drop her heavy load.
She is the ox ploughing deep furrows,
Turning with the heavens,
Fattened by the waxing moon.
Sere November stops the waters :
Nothing but stone and bone, and bare trees,
The bloodstream stilled, the power retracted,
Nothing but the skull-stare of empty skies.
The Winterbourne-Kennet snakes underground,
Sloughing its old skin in season,
And all is balanced on the horns of the ox.
Corpse with corpse, pot with skull,
The vibrant dead commune in dank chaos,
Seed-corn of the harvest to come.
In late October, the roebuck casts its antlers
And at once a new set starts to grow;
In late October, the doe is pursued in tight circle
By the buck around a tree, widdershins,
Flattening the grass,
Tracing a figure-of-eight.
The people drive the ox onto the bridge,
And drive his wounded body over the parapet,
Down, down into the river’s flow.
In the bridestone sockets myriads of snail shells
Lie buried, brought from the water,
Mazing the world in their spirals;
Again the spiral dance, the pacing
Of the grand design, the journey of the gods,
Into the eye of the storm.
The sacrifice lies crouched in foetal form,
Arms crossed in front of his face,
Lying on his right side, facing east,
A pot between his knees,
All his bones carefully broken,
And, placed on his body, the bones of a young ox.
Here the male and female are conjoined,
Riddling the serpentine maze,
Enacting the year’s procession,
Liturgy of earth and water.
What awesome energies writhe
In the serpent’s lengthy coils ?
The snake awakes from hibernation
And advances to the mating ground,
Swimming in the river of light.
Hail the ouroboros !
In spring the snakes writhe in lust;
By July the grass snake’s white eggs
And the adder’s young are everywhere,
Matching the harvest’s beginning.
The snake’s lidless eyes stare through you,
Unflinching,unblinking,never turning away.
The big-hipped bridestones dance like dervishes.
Their eyes and mouths are ever-open.
I make this fire from hazel, hawthorn and blackthorn.
Waden Hill stretches out her long body,
Where the white horse of the sky gallops along her back,
And the earth leaps like a hare.
The triangle of waters guards the seed.
Who will stop to drink from the fountain ?
At Swallowhead spring,
I feel the whole body of the Goddess,
Head, womb, anus and vulva,
Extended across the meadows.
Where streams meet and conceive the future,
Bride and groom come together
In midsummer marriage,
Exchanging golden rings.
The Devil’s Chair rears up high and wide,
Portal to other world,
Throne where the May maidens would sit
On May Day Eve, and make their wishes;
This mighty adderstone,
Congealed from the saliva
Of teeming vipers gathered together
At the high points of the year.
The twin snake heads meet in the henge,
Where the male snake inserts his head
Into the female’s jaws, and spurts his seed.
As I was walking out one morning, I met a buxom lass
Going to a dairyman, she had a field of grass,
It grew between mountains, at the foot of a spring,
She hired me to cut it down while the birds did sweetly sing.
Taurus rises over the henge at vernal equinox,
First the Pleiades, blessing the plough,
Bright Alcyone riding high on the Bull’s back.
Snakes coil under the marriage bed.
See the primeval mound risen from the waters,
The insular garden moated and fenced,
Home to Adam and Eve, Jesus and Mary.
Flint arrowhead pierces the sky
To let the rain through,
Flint sickle cuts the fattened corn
Under ox skull moon.
Tan Hill’s tender smooth pregnant swelling
Summons the spirit in prayer and exultation,
As the goddess squats in the fiery fields
And squeezes out the harvest in travail.
Every year a fair was held here on the summit,
On the feast of St Anne, under the August sun,
Blessed by the patroness of confinements,
When, in every village, a bowl of water
Would be placed on a stool by women,
To be used for divination, and hordes of people
Gathered on the hilltop, to trade horses, sheep and oxen,
Bartering and revelling with one gusto,
Drinking, dancing, sporting and brawling.
Here, stone clocks the long ceremony of the year
As light and water energize the earth’s limbs,
Bringing the giantess to bright fruition,
Where land and sky and underworld merge.
O, sanctuary of the seasons, hearth of the soul !
Sunrise and moonset align with the rivers
At the summer quarters, and the acts of the drama
Join in the round, mumming the cyclical play.
There was three men came out of the west,
Their fortunes for to try,
And these three men made a solemn vow,
John Barleycorn should die.
They ploughed, they sowed, they harrowed him in,
Throwed clods upon his head,
And these three men made a solemn vow
John Barleycorn was dead.
The Hag-Maiden is among us,
The corn dolly woven from the fall of the year.
West Kennet long barrow mothers the dead,
Her long hummock hugging the skyline
Along the hill’s electric spine;
Her eye watches everything, from every angle,
Surveying all four quarters, unblinking;
Her womb and vagina transform the loam-seed,
As she squats to drop her heavy load.
She is the ox ploughing deep furrows,
Turning with the heavens,
Fattened by the waxing moon.
Sere November stops the waters :
Nothing but stone and bone, and bare trees,
The bloodstream stilled, the power retracted,
Nothing but the skull-stare of empty skies.
The Winterbourne-Kennet snakes underground,
Sloughing its old skin in season,
And all is balanced on the horns of the ox.
Corpse with corpse, pot with skull,
The vibrant dead commune in dank chaos,
Seed-corn of the harvest to come.
In late October, the roebuck casts its antlers
And at once a new set starts to grow;
In late October, the doe is pursued in tight circle
By the buck around a tree, widdershins,
Flattening the grass,
Tracing a figure-of-eight.
The people drive the ox onto the bridge,
And drive his wounded body over the parapet,
Down, down into the river’s flow.
In the bridestone sockets myriads of snail shells
Lie buried, brought from the water,
Mazing the world in their spirals;
Again the spiral dance, the pacing
Of the grand design, the journey of the gods,
Into the eye of the storm.
The sacrifice lies crouched in foetal form,
Arms crossed in front of his face,
Lying on his right side, facing east,
A pot between his knees,
All his bones carefully broken,
And, placed on his body, the bones of a young ox.
Here the male and female are conjoined,
Riddling the serpentine maze,
Enacting the year’s procession,
Liturgy of earth and water.
What awesome energies writhe
In the serpent’s lengthy coils ?
The snake awakes from hibernation
And advances to the mating ground,
Swimming in the river of light.
Hail the ouroboros !
In spring the snakes writhe in lust;
By July the grass snake’s white eggs
And the adder’s young are everywhere,
Matching the harvest’s beginning.
The snake’s lidless eyes stare through you,
Unflinching,unblinking,never turning away.
The big-hipped bridestones dance like dervishes.
Their eyes and mouths are ever-open.
I make this fire from hazel, hawthorn and blackthorn.
Waden Hill stretches out her long body,
Where the white horse of the sky gallops along her back,
And the earth leaps like a hare.
The triangle of waters guards the seed.
Who will stop to drink from the fountain ?
At Swallowhead spring,
I feel the whole body of the Goddess,
Head, womb, anus and vulva,
Extended across the meadows.
Where streams meet and conceive the future,
Bride and groom come together
In midsummer marriage,
Exchanging golden rings.
The Devil’s Chair rears up high and wide,
Portal to other world,
Throne where the May maidens would sit
On May Day Eve, and make their wishes;
This mighty adderstone,
Congealed from the saliva
Of teeming vipers gathered together
At the high points of the year.
The twin snake heads meet in the henge,
Where the male snake inserts his head
Into the female’s jaws, and spurts his seed.
As I was walking out one morning, I met a buxom lass
Going to a dairyman, she had a field of grass,
It grew between mountains, at the foot of a spring,
She hired me to cut it down while the birds did sweetly sing.
Taurus rises over the henge at vernal equinox,
First the Pleiades, blessing the plough,
Bright Alcyone riding high on the Bull’s back.
Snakes coil under the marriage bed.
See the primeval mound risen from the waters,
The insular garden moated and fenced,
Home to Adam and Eve, Jesus and Mary.
Flint arrowhead pierces the sky
To let the rain through,
Flint sickle cuts the fattened corn
Under ox skull moon.
Tan Hill’s tender smooth pregnant swelling
Summons the spirit in prayer and exultation,
As the goddess squats in the fiery fields
And squeezes out the harvest in travail.
Every year a fair was held here on the summit,
On the feast of St Anne, under the August sun,
Blessed by the patroness of confinements,
When, in every village, a bowl of water
Would be placed on a stool by women,
To be used for divination, and hordes of people
Gathered on the hilltop, to trade horses, sheep and oxen,
Bartering and revelling with one gusto,
Drinking, dancing, sporting and brawling.
The Gnostic
This existence is all double-dealing:
Man and world, world and God,
Always confusion, always dread.
Cosmos, reveal yourself, with a vengeance!
What do you demand of us?
To whom do we owe allegiance?
By which stars to set our course?
How to know the Divine Will?
Self is the stranger, in all despite.
Either ignorance or knowledge
Presses us to venture and forage,
Acolytes of the lost pearl.
Into the night, torches held high,
We process-malign spirit of matter,
We defy you, lighten and rise.
Jerusalem’s siege will be lifted,
The tyranny of order reversed,
When man jumps down from the Cross.
Despotic stars curse your splendour!
Celestial spheres, I spit upon you!
I am the Alien, the Accursed.
The truth was my murderer:
When he struck me I toppled and died,
My blood ran in the gutter,
My body was stripped to the bone.
Phoney Empire, I am the dissident in your midst;
No cell can hold me,
I walk abroad in brilliant disguises.
Sophia, prey to her own folly,
Wanders in the void and darkness,
Searching, lamenting, suffering and repenting,
Labouring passion into matter, yearning into soul,
Vainglorious Creator, lording it over all,
You ask me to repent.
I say:
You first.
This oubliette we call home,
Down among the rats,
Our warders the tyrants of heaven,
Our chains the black iron of Fate.
How can the soul ascend when every gate is barred?
Falsehearted Demiurge,
Go trim your Old Testament beard!
Father Christmas of misery,
Don’t come dropping down my chimney!
The hermitage and the brothel are one,
The anchorite and the libertine.
Stranger, are you homesick?
Do you remember your birthplace and weep?
Your name is foreign
But your face seems familiar.
Go now to the mountain and behold the sunrise,
And know that you must leave this place.
This bubble world will break when tested.
The demons have no thrones.
We rebels shall seize back power
And march in arms on every citadel,
Felling walls and towers with words.
Try to count the heavens and your head will reel,
And all of them we must outwit.
Who has cast me into the sump?
Who has stifled me in flesh?
In this turbulence we cannot be still;
The good perish and the noble come to nothing;
The candle left unguarded is soon snuffed.
The Whole is asunder.
Come, be a mender,
A fetcher of fire.
Still the soul is sinking,
Heavy as a dwarf star,
Spiralling downward without end.
Who has abducted us from comfort?
Who has thrown us into evil?
Barefoot on hot stones, we wander,
Mocked by the demons above.
The man bitten by a mad dog
Wanders babbling on stony roads
And the judge calls it justice
And the priest calls it truth.
Bring more wine, we shall toast the world,
Drunkards together, needing nothing
But the mercy of forgetfulness-
Bring on the dancing girls; this night is for seduction,
And may we not content ourselves with false love?
Poison is mixed with your wine at the feast
Till the cup falls from your hand and you slumber-
Who would not love such deep endless sleep?
Who would not yearn for such rest?
The snare is set, and the creature approaches,
Sniffing the air, looking this way and that,
And, seeing what its senses crave,
Gladly steps into the cage.
The call comes and the willing hear
The toll of a distant bell above the bedlam,
Summoning the chosen home.
The Messenger arrives and his enemies gang against him,
Determined to give him no share;
They beat him with sticks, throw stones and curses,
But still he keeps walking,
Shakes the sleeping awake,
Restores their names to them,
Points the way to freedom with a smile.
Infants clinging to mother’s breast,
We dread the call to depart.
The way is long and arduous, the tolls so high,-
Why not sit safely at home?
Flesh, soul and spirit, I wander in the world,
Fashioned in the image of Primal Man,
With the appetites and passions of the Archons,
Among the fallen sparks.
Does the Saviour come yet,
His hands full of fire?
Now is the time of gathering in,
The hour of blissful return.
Who has bound us to the black earth of Egypt?
Who has put the serpent at our throats?
We shall shed our shrouds and cross the Red Sea,
Out to retrieve the lost pearl.
Boastful ignorant Demiurge,
Crowing that you alone created all,
That you alone exist and there is none above you,
How wrong you are, how stupid-
Look above you-
There is Man!
Archons, cheap creators of this gimcrack world,
Is this rubbish heap the best you could do?
You are subalterns all, not generals,
Jumped-up usurpers in ill-fitting crowns!
I must learn the secret names of my oppressors
And the passwords of their tollgates.
Evil brilliance of stars, vastness of space,
The music of the spheres is the hissing of snakes.
Where speech and reason fail,
There is God,
Inviting and thwarting the quest.
Man and world, world and God,
Always confusion, always dread.
Cosmos, reveal yourself, with a vengeance!
What do you demand of us?
To whom do we owe allegiance?
By which stars to set our course?
How to know the Divine Will?
Self is the stranger, in all despite.
Either ignorance or knowledge
Presses us to venture and forage,
Acolytes of the lost pearl.
Into the night, torches held high,
We process-malign spirit of matter,
We defy you, lighten and rise.
Jerusalem’s siege will be lifted,
The tyranny of order reversed,
When man jumps down from the Cross.
Despotic stars curse your splendour!
Celestial spheres, I spit upon you!
I am the Alien, the Accursed.
The truth was my murderer:
When he struck me I toppled and died,
My blood ran in the gutter,
My body was stripped to the bone.
Phoney Empire, I am the dissident in your midst;
No cell can hold me,
I walk abroad in brilliant disguises.
Sophia, prey to her own folly,
Wanders in the void and darkness,
Searching, lamenting, suffering and repenting,
Labouring passion into matter, yearning into soul,
Vainglorious Creator, lording it over all,
You ask me to repent.
I say:
You first.
This oubliette we call home,
Down among the rats,
Our warders the tyrants of heaven,
Our chains the black iron of Fate.
How can the soul ascend when every gate is barred?
Falsehearted Demiurge,
Go trim your Old Testament beard!
Father Christmas of misery,
Don’t come dropping down my chimney!
The hermitage and the brothel are one,
The anchorite and the libertine.
Stranger, are you homesick?
Do you remember your birthplace and weep?
Your name is foreign
But your face seems familiar.
Go now to the mountain and behold the sunrise,
And know that you must leave this place.
This bubble world will break when tested.
The demons have no thrones.
We rebels shall seize back power
And march in arms on every citadel,
Felling walls and towers with words.
Try to count the heavens and your head will reel,
And all of them we must outwit.
Who has cast me into the sump?
Who has stifled me in flesh?
In this turbulence we cannot be still;
The good perish and the noble come to nothing;
The candle left unguarded is soon snuffed.
The Whole is asunder.
Come, be a mender,
A fetcher of fire.
Still the soul is sinking,
Heavy as a dwarf star,
Spiralling downward without end.
Who has abducted us from comfort?
Who has thrown us into evil?
Barefoot on hot stones, we wander,
Mocked by the demons above.
The man bitten by a mad dog
Wanders babbling on stony roads
And the judge calls it justice
And the priest calls it truth.
Bring more wine, we shall toast the world,
Drunkards together, needing nothing
But the mercy of forgetfulness-
Bring on the dancing girls; this night is for seduction,
And may we not content ourselves with false love?
Poison is mixed with your wine at the feast
Till the cup falls from your hand and you slumber-
Who would not love such deep endless sleep?
Who would not yearn for such rest?
The snare is set, and the creature approaches,
Sniffing the air, looking this way and that,
And, seeing what its senses crave,
Gladly steps into the cage.
The call comes and the willing hear
The toll of a distant bell above the bedlam,
Summoning the chosen home.
The Messenger arrives and his enemies gang against him,
Determined to give him no share;
They beat him with sticks, throw stones and curses,
But still he keeps walking,
Shakes the sleeping awake,
Restores their names to them,
Points the way to freedom with a smile.
Infants clinging to mother’s breast,
We dread the call to depart.
The way is long and arduous, the tolls so high,-
Why not sit safely at home?
Flesh, soul and spirit, I wander in the world,
Fashioned in the image of Primal Man,
With the appetites and passions of the Archons,
Among the fallen sparks.
Does the Saviour come yet,
His hands full of fire?
Now is the time of gathering in,
The hour of blissful return.
Who has bound us to the black earth of Egypt?
Who has put the serpent at our throats?
We shall shed our shrouds and cross the Red Sea,
Out to retrieve the lost pearl.
Boastful ignorant Demiurge,
Crowing that you alone created all,
That you alone exist and there is none above you,
How wrong you are, how stupid-
Look above you-
There is Man!
Archons, cheap creators of this gimcrack world,
Is this rubbish heap the best you could do?
You are subalterns all, not generals,
Jumped-up usurpers in ill-fitting crowns!
I must learn the secret names of my oppressors
And the passwords of their tollgates.
Evil brilliance of stars, vastness of space,
The music of the spheres is the hissing of snakes.
Where speech and reason fail,
There is God,
Inviting and thwarting the quest.
Absinthe
Flamineo: Yes, yes, with wormwood water; you shall taste
Some of it presently.
The White Devil, John Webster
Absinthe, amaranth, nepenthe…
The green witch has got me,
She’s eating me alive…
There’s intrigue and furore under my skin,
Phantasmal voices, pyrotechnics,
Scorpio in the ascendant,
Glittering like the razor’s edge…
It is time for raising demons,
Time for walking in the fog.
My mind is a mountain storm.
Bend sinister is my heraldry,
And I crave the naked flame.
Dread and awe possess me, draw me in,
Twist my will in the mirror,
Writhe me like a diamond’s core.
Whom beauty menaces must choose
The nature of the sacrifice.
The ceremony of the opal calls:
Pour water into the elixir
And watch the decoction cloud
And quicken, billowing like a nebula
Into smaragdine, pure metonymy.
Wormwood, herb of Mars, hot and dry
In the third degree, kill the pests within,
Chase out demons and purge me
Of falsehood, leaving the bitter truth.
They say that wormwood first grew
In the track of the serpent as he crept
Out of Paradise; and after the Seventh Seal
Was opened, the star Wormwood fell
From the skies, and devastated the earth;
In ancient Rome after chariot races
The victor would be given a wormwood drink
To remind him that even victory
Is tinged with bitterness.
Anaesthesia, anastasis: the lull
Of endless waves, visions of heart’s ease,
All the lights are coming on,
All the fireflies in the mind…
Time catches its breath, hypnotized
By the cobra’s stare; my life
Is this Grail-castle of glass,
This pierced spoon balanced
And loaded with sugar,
And cool water pouring down
To roil the primal ocean
And bring forth dreaming monsters.
Judiciously, exquisitely, I drip
The heavy dewdrops from on high,
Contemplating smoky trails
Snaking and spiralling through.
Next stop: oblivion, Lucifer’s semen.
I stare through walls, so clear
And light, rising in a terpene swirl,
To imagine worlds and wonders
As easily as breathing, a winged horse
Soaring with ease, till I stumble
And fall, convulsed, clonic then tonic,
The evil world wailing in my ears.
Some of it presently.
The White Devil, John Webster
Absinthe, amaranth, nepenthe…
The green witch has got me,
She’s eating me alive…
There’s intrigue and furore under my skin,
Phantasmal voices, pyrotechnics,
Scorpio in the ascendant,
Glittering like the razor’s edge…
It is time for raising demons,
Time for walking in the fog.
My mind is a mountain storm.
Bend sinister is my heraldry,
And I crave the naked flame.
Dread and awe possess me, draw me in,
Twist my will in the mirror,
Writhe me like a diamond’s core.
Whom beauty menaces must choose
The nature of the sacrifice.
The ceremony of the opal calls:
Pour water into the elixir
And watch the decoction cloud
And quicken, billowing like a nebula
Into smaragdine, pure metonymy.
Wormwood, herb of Mars, hot and dry
In the third degree, kill the pests within,
Chase out demons and purge me
Of falsehood, leaving the bitter truth.
They say that wormwood first grew
In the track of the serpent as he crept
Out of Paradise; and after the Seventh Seal
Was opened, the star Wormwood fell
From the skies, and devastated the earth;
In ancient Rome after chariot races
The victor would be given a wormwood drink
To remind him that even victory
Is tinged with bitterness.
Anaesthesia, anastasis: the lull
Of endless waves, visions of heart’s ease,
All the lights are coming on,
All the fireflies in the mind…
Time catches its breath, hypnotized
By the cobra’s stare; my life
Is this Grail-castle of glass,
This pierced spoon balanced
And loaded with sugar,
And cool water pouring down
To roil the primal ocean
And bring forth dreaming monsters.
Judiciously, exquisitely, I drip
The heavy dewdrops from on high,
Contemplating smoky trails
Snaking and spiralling through.
Next stop: oblivion, Lucifer’s semen.
I stare through walls, so clear
And light, rising in a terpene swirl,
To imagine worlds and wonders
As easily as breathing, a winged horse
Soaring with ease, till I stumble
And fall, convulsed, clonic then tonic,
The evil world wailing in my ears.
White Man
Blue-eyed Christ
Breaking white bread in white hands,
Your body becomes the four quarters.
Your savannah obeah
Summons me here.
This world is the privilege of my eyes,
Lit by the glow of Greek statues,
From the Caucasus to the Congo.
We are the living ghosts
Walking across Africa,
The pale dead speaking in tongues.
To map the skin’s country
I pace and survey,
Measuring horizon’s gravity.
What do the gods desire of us ?
Ask the trees and rocks.
Fierce blood, dark in the vein,
Return me to stone,
Renew me again.
Nobody knows me,
Nobody has ever known me:
White shadows jitter and jag in my brain.
All this talk of flesh and spirit
Is driving me insane.
The darkness wills me to possess it,
Who am myself possessed.
Suffer and fall,
And count yourself blessed.
White on white,
Sly hues contend,
Portending the pure,
The exempt.
Here I am,
In the pink,
Waiting to be told
What to think.
Can I chase out the demons
With baptism, with confirmation,
With communion, with penance, with extreme unction,
With marriage, with white death ?
Get back to the mountains
Where the air is cold and clear,
And the eye can see forever.
Roll in the snow, get clean again,
Your body made of stars.
The ape exults in the forest,
Smelling the earth’s arousal,
And makes his prayers in blood
And bone, in hot spurting seed.
Asses’ milk or ceruse
Poison black Cleopatra,
Statuesque before her mirror
In a palace in Africa.
Dirt and sin call me
To confess myself in them,
To revel in their carnival
And laugh through tears.
This white shows the dirt all too clearly,
Yet flatters the self-deceiving.
This transparency you crave is all absence,
Chaste deadliness of Nothing incarnate,
Immaculate, impeccable,
Ecstasy of the unreal.
Light from above
Illuminates us against a white ground,
Conjuring spirits and angels
With its deft wand.
Breaking white bread in white hands,
Your body becomes the four quarters.
Your savannah obeah
Summons me here.
This world is the privilege of my eyes,
Lit by the glow of Greek statues,
From the Caucasus to the Congo.
We are the living ghosts
Walking across Africa,
The pale dead speaking in tongues.
To map the skin’s country
I pace and survey,
Measuring horizon’s gravity.
What do the gods desire of us ?
Ask the trees and rocks.
Fierce blood, dark in the vein,
Return me to stone,
Renew me again.
Nobody knows me,
Nobody has ever known me:
White shadows jitter and jag in my brain.
All this talk of flesh and spirit
Is driving me insane.
The darkness wills me to possess it,
Who am myself possessed.
Suffer and fall,
And count yourself blessed.
White on white,
Sly hues contend,
Portending the pure,
The exempt.
Here I am,
In the pink,
Waiting to be told
What to think.
Can I chase out the demons
With baptism, with confirmation,
With communion, with penance, with extreme unction,
With marriage, with white death ?
Get back to the mountains
Where the air is cold and clear,
And the eye can see forever.
Roll in the snow, get clean again,
Your body made of stars.
The ape exults in the forest,
Smelling the earth’s arousal,
And makes his prayers in blood
And bone, in hot spurting seed.
Asses’ milk or ceruse
Poison black Cleopatra,
Statuesque before her mirror
In a palace in Africa.
Dirt and sin call me
To confess myself in them,
To revel in their carnival
And laugh through tears.
This white shows the dirt all too clearly,
Yet flatters the self-deceiving.
This transparency you crave is all absence,
Chaste deadliness of Nothing incarnate,
Immaculate, impeccable,
Ecstasy of the unreal.
Light from above
Illuminates us against a white ground,
Conjuring spirits and angels
With its deft wand.
English Music
Hear the wolf’s sermon under the moon:
The waves in the blood.
How the conversation of angels
Takes such strange turns!
I was cut down, roots on end...
I was raised up as a rood…
I was all wet with blood…
Your eyes:
Spirals carved in sarsens,
And in cathedral stones.
Bind me a riddle, a charm,
To weave my word-web true.
I sign my name in rain,
Wind-walking over hills,
Cloud-clerk in a druid’s cape.
Heaven hear me,
Chanting with Tallis and Byrd
The whole world’s wyrd,
Neglecting no beauty,
Forsaking no dream.
Custom creates in the air,
Nesting under words’ eaves,
Cooing in the dreamer’s ear
The breath of other lives.
Wolfish passion for the mutable
Strolls about the landscape,
Sucking up the sodden earth,
Nourished at its breast.
Wistful swathes of mist and fog
Usher shades into the mind,
Opalescent messengers
Of atavistic omen.
Felicities, affinities
Find me out wherever,
Witching on a bat’s wings
In the evening glow.
Babooneries revel in the margins
Of illuminated hours;
My life: - a chalice, a tapestry,
Serpentine-ornate.
Harmony of idiosyncrasies,
Rising oratorio:
Riddle, puzzle,
Historiated initial.
This lacustrine stillness
Is Englishness,
Deep spirals reared to conjure
Rising-falling waves.
Jesting pirate, go now,
Steal the sun’s Golden Fleece;
Voyages and argosies
Await on the open sea.
English is to me Mayan glyphs
Or Linear B; limning its curves
I scratch out my being
On water, bark and stone.
Motley is my preference,
Setting life to dance like a bear
In reckless pandemonium,
Masque and anti-masque.
The waves in the blood.
How the conversation of angels
Takes such strange turns!
I was cut down, roots on end...
I was raised up as a rood…
I was all wet with blood…
Your eyes:
Spirals carved in sarsens,
And in cathedral stones.
Bind me a riddle, a charm,
To weave my word-web true.
I sign my name in rain,
Wind-walking over hills,
Cloud-clerk in a druid’s cape.
Heaven hear me,
Chanting with Tallis and Byrd
The whole world’s wyrd,
Neglecting no beauty,
Forsaking no dream.
Custom creates in the air,
Nesting under words’ eaves,
Cooing in the dreamer’s ear
The breath of other lives.
Wolfish passion for the mutable
Strolls about the landscape,
Sucking up the sodden earth,
Nourished at its breast.
Wistful swathes of mist and fog
Usher shades into the mind,
Opalescent messengers
Of atavistic omen.
Felicities, affinities
Find me out wherever,
Witching on a bat’s wings
In the evening glow.
Babooneries revel in the margins
Of illuminated hours;
My life: - a chalice, a tapestry,
Serpentine-ornate.
Harmony of idiosyncrasies,
Rising oratorio:
Riddle, puzzle,
Historiated initial.
This lacustrine stillness
Is Englishness,
Deep spirals reared to conjure
Rising-falling waves.
Jesting pirate, go now,
Steal the sun’s Golden Fleece;
Voyages and argosies
Await on the open sea.
English is to me Mayan glyphs
Or Linear B; limning its curves
I scratch out my being
On water, bark and stone.
Motley is my preference,
Setting life to dance like a bear
In reckless pandemonium,
Masque and anti-masque.
Stick or Twist
It dies with me, the secret I have not fathomed. Existence? Call it ceasing to exist. These moments of eternity float the All or Nothing.
I found strange succour among the dead,
Scouting round Père-Lachaise, guidebook in hand,
And an old woman lingering like a spirit asked: “Qui vous cherchez?”
“Apollinaire,” I said, and she pointed out a gravestone, smiling.
What is all this fanfarlo,
The overheard conversations of my heart,
The whispers and sighs?
Damned fate,
Will you let me get a word in?
Dear Lord of the Universe:
Is it true you unscrew your private parts and pop them in a jar of Sterident overnight?
No more 4 a.m. panics,
No more sordid excuses and betrayals,
No more futile neuroses,
No more cowardly dodges,
No more ludicrous bravado,
No more no more…
I only love the unseen, the untouched,
I who am neither seen nor touched,
I only love the love that is unseen and untouched,
I who am neither unseen nor untouched.
I proceed with my usual stupidities,
Exceed the proper limits,
Supersede myself again.
Et voilà!
It’s me again,
Saying I want this, I want that,
Things I don’t really want at all,
Things I have no use for,
And yet the charm of possession possesses me,
The image lingers in the mind…
For if one does not exist in others’ minds,
Does one even exist at all?
So excuse my bad jokes,
My idle follies,
Somehow I need them,
And they need me.
Listen to the whale songs of the heart,
Echoing across immensities,
Deep below the waves of my face…
One day I will learn to say No with joy,
And shake my corpse’s hand, laughing.
I found strange succour among the dead,
Scouting round Père-Lachaise, guidebook in hand,
And an old woman lingering like a spirit asked: “Qui vous cherchez?”
“Apollinaire,” I said, and she pointed out a gravestone, smiling.
What is all this fanfarlo,
The overheard conversations of my heart,
The whispers and sighs?
Damned fate,
Will you let me get a word in?
Dear Lord of the Universe:
Is it true you unscrew your private parts and pop them in a jar of Sterident overnight?
No more 4 a.m. panics,
No more sordid excuses and betrayals,
No more futile neuroses,
No more cowardly dodges,
No more ludicrous bravado,
No more no more…
I only love the unseen, the untouched,
I who am neither seen nor touched,
I only love the love that is unseen and untouched,
I who am neither unseen nor untouched.
I proceed with my usual stupidities,
Exceed the proper limits,
Supersede myself again.
Et voilà!
It’s me again,
Saying I want this, I want that,
Things I don’t really want at all,
Things I have no use for,
And yet the charm of possession possesses me,
The image lingers in the mind…
For if one does not exist in others’ minds,
Does one even exist at all?
So excuse my bad jokes,
My idle follies,
Somehow I need them,
And they need me.
Listen to the whale songs of the heart,
Echoing across immensities,
Deep below the waves of my face…
One day I will learn to say No with joy,
And shake my corpse’s hand, laughing.
Cave Painters of the Ice Age, c.40, 000 B.C.
When the first men came, they were makers and mages,
Hunters of the sacred beast within, gatherers of the season,
Out of endless glacial advances and retreats,
Out of millennial stagnation,
Suddenly there, growing out of all recognition,
With divine speed and audacity, becoming something other,
Something never seen before on earth,
Moving across the earth with invincible determination,
Settling the new lands of the spirit.
Clad in animal furs and hides against the cold,
They lived in bone huts covered with skins,
Expert tool-makers and flint-knappers crafting flint and bone
Into tools and weapons with brilliant ingenuity,
Continually experimenting, creating new kinds of objects
In antler, bone, ivory and flint, whatever they could find,
Suddenly expressing themselves in sculptures and engravings
Of humans and animals, and cave paintings.
They fashioned necklaces from animal teeth, seashells and stones,
And decorated their bodies with red ochre,
Tattooing their skin with fine bone needles;
They fashioned bone-whistles from reindeer toe bones
Pierced with a single hole through the centre,
And created bone flutes to play for fun and ritual.
They never rested in their search for beauty and utility,
Evolving new skills and techniques for working flint,
To create tools and blades of exquisite craftsmanship and beauty,
Achieved though patient dedication and invention.
Out on the grassy plains and wooded valleys,
They felt the world’s long seasons turn,
The warm times yielding to the cold, and back again,
As the grasslands teemed with reindeer, hroses, deer, bison, ibex, mammoth.
Their special quarry was the beloved reindeer,
That they followed with awe and fascination, learning
Their daily movements and behaviour,
Each year following the vast herds’ migrations in spring and autumn,
Hunting and herding the munificent creatures
Whose every bone and fibre were manna from heaven.
Nothing was wasted; meat, bone, fur, skin, thread, oil and grease,
All were turned to human boons and graces.
But always they feared to doom themselves
By driving the herds to extinction,
And in their time they knew both feats and famine,
And kept their numbers down with infanticide, abortion and feuding.
They walked with death, afraid to love one another too much,
Ruthless in preserving themselves and the band,
Hunting and sleeping, dreaming and dancing for the gods.
In their little nomad clans they pursued the game,
Trekking far through wilderness, camping in tents or huts,
The clans congregating and dispersing in season,
Exchanging information, precious objects and ideas,
The artists seeking out the scared caves to make their mark.
They groped their way down deep into the darkness,
Into the inner sanctum of the earth, squeezing through narrow gaps,
Crawling and scrambling into claustral chambers,
Slithering down perilous slopes, drawn to the inaccessible,
To make the tiniest most constricted chambers their chapels,
Scarcely large enough for one or two to enter at a time,
Where few and seldom would ever dare to come,
Braving the arduous descent and the soul’s hazards.
Therein, they worked their magic on the walls,
Their skill the glory of the whole tribe,
Painting by the glimmer of little tallow lamps;
Invoking the spirits and deities of the earth,
They prayed for success in the hunt and the harvest,
Carving and painting hosts of beasts over walls, niches and corners,
Hunting and gathering the icons in their minds.
There they enacted the ceremonies of transcendence,
Seekers of perfection, delighting in the surprise and wonder
Their images would evoke in the visitor,
These real presences, these transubstantiations,
These animals moving in the spirit realm.
Their expert eyes traced the unseen in the seen,
Venerating horse and bison, ox, mammoth, ibex, stag and deer,
And the symbols in dots, lines and abstract shapes,
Giving each cave its own unique identity and unity.
They left their handprints and footprints on the rocks,
And laid the bones and skulls of bears out in worship,
And sculpted bears and bison with intense incantation.
Everywhere, they ground out cup-shapes in the rock,
And held funeral feasts before laying the dead in caves
With food and accoutrements to accompany their travels,
Placing them in sleeping position, ready to awaken
In the other world, the magical realm of the bear.
They lived by the waxing and waning of the moon,
Recording the phases and seasons, marking the salmon runs,
The cuckoo calls and shedding of horns, the birds’ flight,
The calving of reindeer, and the opening of flowers,
Enacting in themselves the mysteries of resurrection.
Hunters of the sacred beast within, gatherers of the season,
Out of endless glacial advances and retreats,
Out of millennial stagnation,
Suddenly there, growing out of all recognition,
With divine speed and audacity, becoming something other,
Something never seen before on earth,
Moving across the earth with invincible determination,
Settling the new lands of the spirit.
Clad in animal furs and hides against the cold,
They lived in bone huts covered with skins,
Expert tool-makers and flint-knappers crafting flint and bone
Into tools and weapons with brilliant ingenuity,
Continually experimenting, creating new kinds of objects
In antler, bone, ivory and flint, whatever they could find,
Suddenly expressing themselves in sculptures and engravings
Of humans and animals, and cave paintings.
They fashioned necklaces from animal teeth, seashells and stones,
And decorated their bodies with red ochre,
Tattooing their skin with fine bone needles;
They fashioned bone-whistles from reindeer toe bones
Pierced with a single hole through the centre,
And created bone flutes to play for fun and ritual.
They never rested in their search for beauty and utility,
Evolving new skills and techniques for working flint,
To create tools and blades of exquisite craftsmanship and beauty,
Achieved though patient dedication and invention.
Out on the grassy plains and wooded valleys,
They felt the world’s long seasons turn,
The warm times yielding to the cold, and back again,
As the grasslands teemed with reindeer, hroses, deer, bison, ibex, mammoth.
Their special quarry was the beloved reindeer,
That they followed with awe and fascination, learning
Their daily movements and behaviour,
Each year following the vast herds’ migrations in spring and autumn,
Hunting and herding the munificent creatures
Whose every bone and fibre were manna from heaven.
Nothing was wasted; meat, bone, fur, skin, thread, oil and grease,
All were turned to human boons and graces.
But always they feared to doom themselves
By driving the herds to extinction,
And in their time they knew both feats and famine,
And kept their numbers down with infanticide, abortion and feuding.
They walked with death, afraid to love one another too much,
Ruthless in preserving themselves and the band,
Hunting and sleeping, dreaming and dancing for the gods.
In their little nomad clans they pursued the game,
Trekking far through wilderness, camping in tents or huts,
The clans congregating and dispersing in season,
Exchanging information, precious objects and ideas,
The artists seeking out the scared caves to make their mark.
They groped their way down deep into the darkness,
Into the inner sanctum of the earth, squeezing through narrow gaps,
Crawling and scrambling into claustral chambers,
Slithering down perilous slopes, drawn to the inaccessible,
To make the tiniest most constricted chambers their chapels,
Scarcely large enough for one or two to enter at a time,
Where few and seldom would ever dare to come,
Braving the arduous descent and the soul’s hazards.
Therein, they worked their magic on the walls,
Their skill the glory of the whole tribe,
Painting by the glimmer of little tallow lamps;
Invoking the spirits and deities of the earth,
They prayed for success in the hunt and the harvest,
Carving and painting hosts of beasts over walls, niches and corners,
Hunting and gathering the icons in their minds.
There they enacted the ceremonies of transcendence,
Seekers of perfection, delighting in the surprise and wonder
Their images would evoke in the visitor,
These real presences, these transubstantiations,
These animals moving in the spirit realm.
Their expert eyes traced the unseen in the seen,
Venerating horse and bison, ox, mammoth, ibex, stag and deer,
And the symbols in dots, lines and abstract shapes,
Giving each cave its own unique identity and unity.
They left their handprints and footprints on the rocks,
And laid the bones and skulls of bears out in worship,
And sculpted bears and bison with intense incantation.
Everywhere, they ground out cup-shapes in the rock,
And held funeral feasts before laying the dead in caves
With food and accoutrements to accompany their travels,
Placing them in sleeping position, ready to awaken
In the other world, the magical realm of the bear.
They lived by the waxing and waning of the moon,
Recording the phases and seasons, marking the salmon runs,
The cuckoo calls and shedding of horns, the birds’ flight,
The calving of reindeer, and the opening of flowers,
Enacting in themselves the mysteries of resurrection.
Bulgaria
From the city where stray dogs roam the streets in packs,
You head for Mount Vitosha’s pure water and fresh breezes,
Where the air is plum brandy that goes to your head,
And you witness the centuries as if you had lived through them.
St George rides the white steed, St Dimitar the red,
And the Thracian horseman lifts his spear and takes aim
To slay the serpent and deliver the kingdom from famine.
Bad omens appear in a bowl of water, in the clouds;
The villagers mark the new house’s foundations with blood;
Come, brother, scatter coins and wheat around the hearth.
I have seen the Arabic inscription on a Turkish fountain:
He who looks upon me and drinks my water
Shall possess the light of the eyes and of the soul.
At the Seven Lakes of the Rila Mountains the Danovisti
Gather on the shore to dance and worship the August sun;
Red, white and black is the bloom of Rila Monastery,
Angelic arches leaping like dolphins out at sea,
Stairways ascending to the balconies’ efflorescence,
And the mountains sombre and mysterious behind,
As you walk along the frescoes of Apocalypse and Hell,
Studying there the rich men quaffing wine around a table,
Ignoring the pleas of a begging leper whose thin legs
Are being gnawed by hungry dogs, while bat-winged demons
Flit about the fallen world, and over ruined Constantinople.
St John’s bones glow supernal within these precincts,
Blessing the true seeker who would heal himself and find
What always was closer than life’s tormented illusion,
If only one would dare to climb into the secret cave.
When will you journey to the Pirin Mountains,
To run free in the winds and storms of the Slavic god?
There you will drink the tarns’ pure water and receive
Prophecies of the world’s destiny, in rocks and trees,
Where healing wildflowers bloom briefly in high valleys,
And glacial cirques gleam azure among granite crags.
In you, too, is the seer, the healer, the chosen one,
Moving at will through the insubstantial world,
Reuniting the separated, and mending the broken.
Near the source of the River Madera, high on the cliff face
Looms the great bas-relief of the horseman, his mount
Trampling a lion, with his faithful greyhound at hand,
While in one hand he clutches a cup of wine;
His horse speaks in the language of the Underworld,
Addressing the dead with messages of comfort,
While the fields and orchards bloom with plenty,
Reborn out of bones and blood, out of worship,
And the sacred spring bubbles up from darkness
In the cave of saints, the martyr’s precious wound.
See them come, the Thracians, galloping across the plain,
Great archers and equestrians, tattooed with sacred signs,
Burning hemp seeds to inhale the narcotic smoke,
Dreaming of the land of heroes beyond the mountains,
Practising the Mysteries in ecstatic illumination,
Dying to be reborn, in the proud-breasted Goddess’s embrace,
Surrounded by their wives, their dogs and horses.
At the Thracian necropolis at Sveshtari, in the tomb,
The king and queen lay on stone couches, accompanied
By the horses, to ride together in the afterlife still,
Watched over by the mother goddess who offers
The mounted horseman in the fresco a hero’s wreath.
Elswehere, in another tomb, the painted dome looks down,
With procession of horses and servants approaching
The chieftain seated at the banqueting table, while his wife
Reposes on a throne beside him, face downcast in mourning,
Touching his hand in a tender gesture of farewell,
And the goddess extends to the dead man a bowl of fruit.
Racing chariots wheel around the apex oft the dome,
Celebrating the funerary games, with ecstatic exultation,
While the priests conduct great sacrifices and rituals,
Calling on the gods to protect and guide their lord.
Through shimmering heat haze on the Dobrudzha Plain,
I scan the parched barren steppe with dazzled eyes,
Thinking for a a moment that another barbarian horde
Is emerging out of the east, advancing on horseback
To conquer an empire, then find, to their dismay,
These badlands the hardest frontier to defend,
No man’s land of bandits, brigands and raiders.
So came the Bulgars, sweeping in from the Turkic steppe,
Shouting war-cries and appeals to their forefathers,
Their shamans urging them on in the language of birds,
People of the wolf, dancing under the red moon.
The smell of blood mingles with attar of roses,
And bagpipes and drums strike up for the feast
As firewalkers fall into trance and dance on hot embers;
The hesychast ascends the Mount of Transfiguration;
The Bogomil tears the mask from the bishop’s face
And stares into Satan’s eyes, the world’s corruption.
And so it was when the Turks massacred and enslaved,
And made serfs and beggars of a proud people,
Forcing them to kiss the sabre, and kneel before Allah,
And kidnapped young boys for the janissary corps,
And pillaged and destroyed precious monasteries,
And raped and robbed, cheated, and oppressed.
But in the Balkans’ fastness, in villages and monasteries,
Proud courageous spirits preserved the nation in trust,
Awaiting the day of deliverance, the justice of God.
They live among us, hellish fiends in human form,
Vampires that rise from their graves each night,
To feed off farmers’ flocks, and prey upon mortals,
Sucking their life-blood, leaving them listless and ill;
The vampire hunter, clairvoyant scion of werewolves,
Whose eyes could scry vampires among the crowd,
Hunts the evil spirit to bay with an icon held aloft,
Tricking it into a bottle, then throwing it onto a fire;
Or he spies out the creature’s grave in the churchyard,
The icon’s trembling showing him the dread spot
Where he must dig, ready with the hawthorn stake
To impale the monster’s heart, and burn its corpse.
You will walk in the Rhodope Mountains, listening
For panpipes’ eerie lilt, among rugged gorges and caves,
Dense pine forests and alpine pastures, where lizards
Lick the air’s vibrations, and bluebirds flash among the rocks,
While hawks and eagles ride the sky’s great hymn.
The Trigrad Gorge’s sheer walls overhang foaming river,
Disappearing into the stupendous cave, its hoarse cascade
Vanishing into the earth’s maw, into the Underworld,
And anything swept down there is never seen again;
Inside the cave, bats flit around the shaft of light admitted
By a fissure far above, here where Orpheus himself descended,
To find his beloved wife and bring her back into the light,
For why, if his lyre could so sway the enchanted earth,
Should it not also conquer Hades, conquer death itself?
Do you not hear him singing laments for lost Eurydice
As he wanders the mountains, bereft, cursing his own folly?
See, the maenads are even now tearing his body apart,
And his head, still singing, floats downriver to distant Lesbos,
To prophesy ever after to his priests and followers,
That they might free their souls from world and flesh.
You head for Mount Vitosha’s pure water and fresh breezes,
Where the air is plum brandy that goes to your head,
And you witness the centuries as if you had lived through them.
St George rides the white steed, St Dimitar the red,
And the Thracian horseman lifts his spear and takes aim
To slay the serpent and deliver the kingdom from famine.
Bad omens appear in a bowl of water, in the clouds;
The villagers mark the new house’s foundations with blood;
Come, brother, scatter coins and wheat around the hearth.
I have seen the Arabic inscription on a Turkish fountain:
He who looks upon me and drinks my water
Shall possess the light of the eyes and of the soul.
At the Seven Lakes of the Rila Mountains the Danovisti
Gather on the shore to dance and worship the August sun;
Red, white and black is the bloom of Rila Monastery,
Angelic arches leaping like dolphins out at sea,
Stairways ascending to the balconies’ efflorescence,
And the mountains sombre and mysterious behind,
As you walk along the frescoes of Apocalypse and Hell,
Studying there the rich men quaffing wine around a table,
Ignoring the pleas of a begging leper whose thin legs
Are being gnawed by hungry dogs, while bat-winged demons
Flit about the fallen world, and over ruined Constantinople.
St John’s bones glow supernal within these precincts,
Blessing the true seeker who would heal himself and find
What always was closer than life’s tormented illusion,
If only one would dare to climb into the secret cave.
When will you journey to the Pirin Mountains,
To run free in the winds and storms of the Slavic god?
There you will drink the tarns’ pure water and receive
Prophecies of the world’s destiny, in rocks and trees,
Where healing wildflowers bloom briefly in high valleys,
And glacial cirques gleam azure among granite crags.
In you, too, is the seer, the healer, the chosen one,
Moving at will through the insubstantial world,
Reuniting the separated, and mending the broken.
Near the source of the River Madera, high on the cliff face
Looms the great bas-relief of the horseman, his mount
Trampling a lion, with his faithful greyhound at hand,
While in one hand he clutches a cup of wine;
His horse speaks in the language of the Underworld,
Addressing the dead with messages of comfort,
While the fields and orchards bloom with plenty,
Reborn out of bones and blood, out of worship,
And the sacred spring bubbles up from darkness
In the cave of saints, the martyr’s precious wound.
See them come, the Thracians, galloping across the plain,
Great archers and equestrians, tattooed with sacred signs,
Burning hemp seeds to inhale the narcotic smoke,
Dreaming of the land of heroes beyond the mountains,
Practising the Mysteries in ecstatic illumination,
Dying to be reborn, in the proud-breasted Goddess’s embrace,
Surrounded by their wives, their dogs and horses.
At the Thracian necropolis at Sveshtari, in the tomb,
The king and queen lay on stone couches, accompanied
By the horses, to ride together in the afterlife still,
Watched over by the mother goddess who offers
The mounted horseman in the fresco a hero’s wreath.
Elswehere, in another tomb, the painted dome looks down,
With procession of horses and servants approaching
The chieftain seated at the banqueting table, while his wife
Reposes on a throne beside him, face downcast in mourning,
Touching his hand in a tender gesture of farewell,
And the goddess extends to the dead man a bowl of fruit.
Racing chariots wheel around the apex oft the dome,
Celebrating the funerary games, with ecstatic exultation,
While the priests conduct great sacrifices and rituals,
Calling on the gods to protect and guide their lord.
Through shimmering heat haze on the Dobrudzha Plain,
I scan the parched barren steppe with dazzled eyes,
Thinking for a a moment that another barbarian horde
Is emerging out of the east, advancing on horseback
To conquer an empire, then find, to their dismay,
These badlands the hardest frontier to defend,
No man’s land of bandits, brigands and raiders.
So came the Bulgars, sweeping in from the Turkic steppe,
Shouting war-cries and appeals to their forefathers,
Their shamans urging them on in the language of birds,
People of the wolf, dancing under the red moon.
The smell of blood mingles with attar of roses,
And bagpipes and drums strike up for the feast
As firewalkers fall into trance and dance on hot embers;
The hesychast ascends the Mount of Transfiguration;
The Bogomil tears the mask from the bishop’s face
And stares into Satan’s eyes, the world’s corruption.
And so it was when the Turks massacred and enslaved,
And made serfs and beggars of a proud people,
Forcing them to kiss the sabre, and kneel before Allah,
And kidnapped young boys for the janissary corps,
And pillaged and destroyed precious monasteries,
And raped and robbed, cheated, and oppressed.
But in the Balkans’ fastness, in villages and monasteries,
Proud courageous spirits preserved the nation in trust,
Awaiting the day of deliverance, the justice of God.
They live among us, hellish fiends in human form,
Vampires that rise from their graves each night,
To feed off farmers’ flocks, and prey upon mortals,
Sucking their life-blood, leaving them listless and ill;
The vampire hunter, clairvoyant scion of werewolves,
Whose eyes could scry vampires among the crowd,
Hunts the evil spirit to bay with an icon held aloft,
Tricking it into a bottle, then throwing it onto a fire;
Or he spies out the creature’s grave in the churchyard,
The icon’s trembling showing him the dread spot
Where he must dig, ready with the hawthorn stake
To impale the monster’s heart, and burn its corpse.
You will walk in the Rhodope Mountains, listening
For panpipes’ eerie lilt, among rugged gorges and caves,
Dense pine forests and alpine pastures, where lizards
Lick the air’s vibrations, and bluebirds flash among the rocks,
While hawks and eagles ride the sky’s great hymn.
The Trigrad Gorge’s sheer walls overhang foaming river,
Disappearing into the stupendous cave, its hoarse cascade
Vanishing into the earth’s maw, into the Underworld,
And anything swept down there is never seen again;
Inside the cave, bats flit around the shaft of light admitted
By a fissure far above, here where Orpheus himself descended,
To find his beloved wife and bring her back into the light,
For why, if his lyre could so sway the enchanted earth,
Should it not also conquer Hades, conquer death itself?
Do you not hear him singing laments for lost Eurydice
As he wanders the mountains, bereft, cursing his own folly?
See, the maenads are even now tearing his body apart,
And his head, still singing, floats downriver to distant Lesbos,
To prophesy ever after to his priests and followers,
That they might free their souls from world and flesh.
Tangier
White sepulchre of sex, bordello of death,
Labyrinth of weary souls gone to seed,
Is it true that any taste can be satisfied here, at a price?
What a fool I am, have always been,
To seek the Garden of the Hesperides.
Lassitude haunts the narcotic air.
We are all between the legs of this nonchalant old whore.
Here, no desire is unholy,
Delicious horror is yours to enjoy;
No petty rules inhibit, no shame dictates,
This is life, over-ripe, freefalling from the tree.
Only the quick and the hard survive.
This fabulous monster tolerates no weakness;
At the first scent of blood it moves in for the kill.
Too many influences in the blood
Confuse and debauch the listless mind;
Fever frenzies the spirit,
Chaos laughs in the throbbing stones.
Beneath the reckless gaiety:
The kef of sightless staring eyes.
Arrive in hope and expectation,
Find what you wish to find, believe what you wish to believe,
And, forgetting yourself, go astray and stay too long,
Until at last you realise what you have become,
A prisoner, a victim, lost to the world.
Smiling, the vampire fastens on your jugular
And sucks the life from your veins in blissful dream,
Making you one of his own.
This city was built with fantasies and intrigues,
Made to satisfy the polymorphous perversions
Of perpetual adolescents, embryos of men.
The only truth is your own delusion,
The only sanity the madhouse kind.
This is the edge, a place out of time,
Where nothing happens and days pass unnoticed,
Governed by black magic,
Beguiling the unwary with trompe l’oeil.
We are all actors here, reared on the impossible,
Walking lopsided on a tilted surface,
Drugged with sensation, jaded from the lifetime before.
Labyrinth of weary souls gone to seed,
Is it true that any taste can be satisfied here, at a price?
What a fool I am, have always been,
To seek the Garden of the Hesperides.
Lassitude haunts the narcotic air.
We are all between the legs of this nonchalant old whore.
Here, no desire is unholy,
Delicious horror is yours to enjoy;
No petty rules inhibit, no shame dictates,
This is life, over-ripe, freefalling from the tree.
Only the quick and the hard survive.
This fabulous monster tolerates no weakness;
At the first scent of blood it moves in for the kill.
Too many influences in the blood
Confuse and debauch the listless mind;
Fever frenzies the spirit,
Chaos laughs in the throbbing stones.
Beneath the reckless gaiety:
The kef of sightless staring eyes.
Arrive in hope and expectation,
Find what you wish to find, believe what you wish to believe,
And, forgetting yourself, go astray and stay too long,
Until at last you realise what you have become,
A prisoner, a victim, lost to the world.
Smiling, the vampire fastens on your jugular
And sucks the life from your veins in blissful dream,
Making you one of his own.
This city was built with fantasies and intrigues,
Made to satisfy the polymorphous perversions
Of perpetual adolescents, embryos of men.
The only truth is your own delusion,
The only sanity the madhouse kind.
This is the edge, a place out of time,
Where nothing happens and days pass unnoticed,
Governed by black magic,
Beguiling the unwary with trompe l’oeil.
We are all actors here, reared on the impossible,
Walking lopsided on a tilted surface,
Drugged with sensation, jaded from the lifetime before.
Urban Vampire
Amphibious desire is in the veins.
I see people dancing in slow motion,
Caught in a hurricane of sound.
Red is my favourite colour:
The open wound of woman and the world.
I need another adventure, a new ordeal,
Something to get my teeth into.
Do you know that a century can pass like a second
And mornings, afternoons and evenings
Be but whispers of oblivion?
See what galaxies whirl and flower
In a falling drop of blood.
My mysteries remain my own,
To conjure with and invoke the powers;
I have tasted the forbidden
And cannot wash the taste out of my mouth.
Who else will love my loneliness,
Cherish my sinfulness,
Without seeking total knowledge
And breaking the spell?
Visions, voices, dreams and diseases
Call me to the proving ground,
For all that suffers can be redeemed.
And what if evil is actually goodness
Testing itself against the night?
When the moon’s hearse processes
Across the heavens, and eternity
Presses a finger to my lips,
I bow to the dragon and coil with the snake.
I see people dancing in slow motion,
Caught in a hurricane of sound.
Red is my favourite colour:
The open wound of woman and the world.
I need another adventure, a new ordeal,
Something to get my teeth into.
Do you know that a century can pass like a second
And mornings, afternoons and evenings
Be but whispers of oblivion?
See what galaxies whirl and flower
In a falling drop of blood.
My mysteries remain my own,
To conjure with and invoke the powers;
I have tasted the forbidden
And cannot wash the taste out of my mouth.
Who else will love my loneliness,
Cherish my sinfulness,
Without seeking total knowledge
And breaking the spell?
Visions, voices, dreams and diseases
Call me to the proving ground,
For all that suffers can be redeemed.
And what if evil is actually goodness
Testing itself against the night?
When the moon’s hearse processes
Across the heavens, and eternity
Presses a finger to my lips,
I bow to the dragon and coil with the snake.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)