Al Capone summons journalists to his suite
At the Metropole Hotel in Chicago,
To announce,with a devious actor’s flair,
His retirement from public service.
His soft voice holds immense charisma,
Authority laced with menace:
“The public good is my motto.
Ninety per cent of the people of Chicago
Drink and gamble; I’ve tried to supply them
With decent liquor and square games.
But I’m not appreciated.It’s no use.
Let the worthy citizens of Chicago
Get their liquor the best way they can.
I’m sick of the job.It’s a thankless one
And full of grief.I could bear it all
If it weren’t for the hurt it brings
To my mother and my family.
They hear so much about what
A terrible criminal I am.
It’s getting too much for them.”
His fat face powdered to hide the scars,
He poses in hand-made tangerine suit,
The right pocket concealing a gun,
With his diamond cuff-links and tie pin,
And huge bluewhite diamond
On the little finger of his left hand;
On the mahogany desk sit bowls of roses,
Behind it a submachine gun is concealed;
Outside his custom-built Cadillac waits,
Steel-plated,bullet-proof,seven tonnes,
The emperor’s chariot for processions
Through the streets that pay him tribute
As he plays the role of entrepreneur,
Respectable business man and benefactor.
Eager for public approval and acclaim.
On the golf course,his plus fours held up
By a diamond-buckled belt,pockets packed
With guns and hipflasks,Capone plays
His cronies for five hundred bucks a hole;
Romping like hooligans,they use each other
As tees,wrestle,leapfrog and somersault
On the plush greens. And,at night,
It is champagne,cocaine and showgirls,
Sentimental songs in jazz clubs.
Bessie Smith,tall,buxom and stately,
Steps off the train in another town
To sing the blues,her heart pierced
By seven daggers,from dusk to dawn;
No home but the music, voodoo queen
Of song,she practises black love and loss,
And never leaves the party till all the booze
Is gone;cruel pleasure is her addiction;
Any young beauty would do for her bed,
Dancers,musicians,men and women,
As long as they were young and lively,
She swigs them down like moonshine,
Devours them like fried pigs’ feet.
Beaten and bruised,she laughs
With joyous fury at sorrow,throwing
Life over her shoulder like an ermine stole.
All the praying and shouting and groaning
Of the world is in her voice.
Flappers with silver flasks tucked
Into their stocking-tops,
And tiny gold cocaine spoons
Dangling from their necks
Go mad on the dance floor,
Bony bodies starved into submission,
Skeletons at the danse macabre.
The cocktail’s venom is sweetened
To chase the nights down.
Pola Negri wears only black or white,
Chinchilla is her chosen fur;
Each day orchid petals are strewn
Over her dressing room floor.
See her out on Sunset Boulevard,
Taking her pet tiger for a walk;
See her riding in a white Rolls-Royce,
Two white wolfhounds at her sides,
The chauffeur all in white;
“A woman that all men desire
And none can possess.”
Ultimate freedom for the price
Of a movie ticket!
“The business of America is business,”
Says Calvin Coolidge,
As liberty sells itself to prosperity;
Bankers,executives and crooks
Hustle the White House,
And bosses beat their workers down;
What higher aim could man have
Than to make as much money as he can?
Higher than statesman,philosopher or priest
Stands the businessman,paragon
And evangelist of America,
With Jesus Christ the Chairman of the Board,
Who had “picked twelve men
From the lowest echelons of business
And forged them into an organization
That had conquered the world”.
America is the passion to sell,
And every day is an occasion to buy.
Steel,glass,concrete.Manhattan altitudes:
Skyscrapers shooting up like rockets
To Mars.The age of glamorous greed
And stupidity,lives being gambled
On the makebelieve market,
The greatest racket known to man.
Cloudwindows invite the suicidal leap;
The bull charges the matador’s cape.
In slowmotion,the tidal wave rises
To its crest,teeters,slides a little
And topples in an ecstasy of grief.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Pisa
There’s a seductive sadness at the heart of Europe
That calls me to myself,
Probing, persisting,
Homing in on It.
Wandering through Pisa’s deserted streets after dark,
Gazing down the Arno’s curve,
I fear that I feel nothing,
Nothing at all.
October’s coming on,
The hunt begins,
And wild mushrooms thrust up from the dark.
The viper and the boar
Contest my soul.
Roman sarcophagi in the Camposanto,
Bathtubs of the dead;
(Soil of Golgotha
That will rot a corpse in twenty-four hours)
…Browsing the arcades,I wonder
At man’s need to turn every experience
Into art, and render mortality
Architectural. There is no evanescence
That cannot be made solid.
“Flawed from the start,”
Says the guidebook,
“The Leaning Tower
Would surely have toppled,
Had the Pisans not been at war
For a hundred years,
Giving the soil time to settle”.
That calls me to myself,
Probing, persisting,
Homing in on It.
Wandering through Pisa’s deserted streets after dark,
Gazing down the Arno’s curve,
I fear that I feel nothing,
Nothing at all.
October’s coming on,
The hunt begins,
And wild mushrooms thrust up from the dark.
The viper and the boar
Contest my soul.
Roman sarcophagi in the Camposanto,
Bathtubs of the dead;
(Soil of Golgotha
That will rot a corpse in twenty-four hours)
…Browsing the arcades,I wonder
At man’s need to turn every experience
Into art, and render mortality
Architectural. There is no evanescence
That cannot be made solid.
“Flawed from the start,”
Says the guidebook,
“The Leaning Tower
Would surely have toppled,
Had the Pisans not been at war
For a hundred years,
Giving the soil time to settle”.
The Tree in the Mist
Broken silhouette,
then branches,
then leaves,
as you approach…
A tree
like the sound of an oboe
in the mist.
It is only the inexplicable
that I live for.
I no longer belong to myself.
The choices that make me,
The breaths I take.
Summer in the Dolomites.
Mahler in a rowing boat
on a lake:
the first stroke of the oars
-after months of frustration-
releases a theme
the Seventh Symphony’s
first movement
across the water
into the mountains…
then branches,
then leaves,
as you approach…
A tree
like the sound of an oboe
in the mist.
It is only the inexplicable
that I live for.
I no longer belong to myself.
The choices that make me,
The breaths I take.
Summer in the Dolomites.
Mahler in a rowing boat
on a lake:
the first stroke of the oars
-after months of frustration-
releases a theme
the Seventh Symphony’s
first movement
across the water
into the mountains…
Austrian Poem
The pulpit in the Stephansdom, carved with toads and salamanders;
In the Treasury of the Teutonic Order:an adder’s tongue once used for testing food for poison; a Sumatran dagger with handle craved out of rhino horn in the shape of Buddha, with sapphire eyes and ruby eyebrows;
The Ankeruhr in Hoher Markt, each hour the gilded figurine of a celebrated Viennese, shuffling across the dial, and at noon all twelve figures slowly stagger across to a medley of organ music;
In the Schatzkammer, the insignia of the Order of the Golden Fleece, heavy mantles broidered with gold thread, a collar of golden links, and the ram emblem, worn by the twenty-four knights at all times;
The Stiftskirche at Melk,all gold paint and red stucco, and high altar with gilded papal crown suspended above the heads of Peter and Paul, all staged by Italian theatre designers;
Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s catalogue of hunting kills (at Schloss Artstetten), the two hundred and seventy thousand wild animals bagged on expeditions round the world;
The saintly female skeletons glass-coffined either side of the nave in the pink and white Wallfahrtskirche on Sonntagberg’s summit,glittering in bejewelled costumes,skull faces veiled and quills in their bony hands;
The Krypta chamber at Stift Altenburg, where Troger’s students practised the art of the grotesque, death their exultant frescoes’ theme,skeleton archers picking off cherubs with well-aimed bolts;
The Dancing Maenad at Carnuntum, superb buttocks veiled and enhanced by the finely carved drapery,the precise lust of the sculptor etching its geometry;
The seven-thousand-pipe organ in the church at Stift St Florian, beneath which Anton Bruckner lies buried, the old bumpkin in baggy clothes forever chasing young girls and being rejected, retreating to his beloved organ to play with all his soul;
The Great War frescoes in the chapel in Lienz:Austrian infantrymen advancing under fire, pale uniforms flapping like shrouds around their limbs , an army of the dead.
In the Treasury of the Teutonic Order:an adder’s tongue once used for testing food for poison; a Sumatran dagger with handle craved out of rhino horn in the shape of Buddha, with sapphire eyes and ruby eyebrows;
The Ankeruhr in Hoher Markt, each hour the gilded figurine of a celebrated Viennese, shuffling across the dial, and at noon all twelve figures slowly stagger across to a medley of organ music;
In the Schatzkammer, the insignia of the Order of the Golden Fleece, heavy mantles broidered with gold thread, a collar of golden links, and the ram emblem, worn by the twenty-four knights at all times;
The Stiftskirche at Melk,all gold paint and red stucco, and high altar with gilded papal crown suspended above the heads of Peter and Paul, all staged by Italian theatre designers;
Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s catalogue of hunting kills (at Schloss Artstetten), the two hundred and seventy thousand wild animals bagged on expeditions round the world;
The saintly female skeletons glass-coffined either side of the nave in the pink and white Wallfahrtskirche on Sonntagberg’s summit,glittering in bejewelled costumes,skull faces veiled and quills in their bony hands;
The Krypta chamber at Stift Altenburg, where Troger’s students practised the art of the grotesque, death their exultant frescoes’ theme,skeleton archers picking off cherubs with well-aimed bolts;
The Dancing Maenad at Carnuntum, superb buttocks veiled and enhanced by the finely carved drapery,the precise lust of the sculptor etching its geometry;
The seven-thousand-pipe organ in the church at Stift St Florian, beneath which Anton Bruckner lies buried, the old bumpkin in baggy clothes forever chasing young girls and being rejected, retreating to his beloved organ to play with all his soul;
The Great War frescoes in the chapel in Lienz:Austrian infantrymen advancing under fire, pale uniforms flapping like shrouds around their limbs , an army of the dead.
Nicholas Hawksmoor at Castle Howard
His last building.The Mausoleum.
A pagan rotunda,simple and austere,
Embellished with Doric colonnade.
Pure form and ancient practice
Exalt the Whig cause
And Lord Carlisle’s aspirations,
Subjecting faith to reason,
Government to freedom.
The aged Hawsmoor hobbles
Round the summit,
His gout anaesthetized by joy
At seeing his plans realized.
Platonism and magic are declining:
Democracy can be built in stone,
Empirical and plain,
A new man, a new constitution.
Death is breathing down his neck now;
He feels it,there,continually,
Not to be chased off by faith or science.
Mason on the square of time,
He holds in his hands
The consolation of stone,
The mystery.
The seen and the unseen
Put him to work,
Reconstructing the Temple of Solomon,
The palaces of Xanadu.
A pagan rotunda,simple and austere,
Embellished with Doric colonnade.
Pure form and ancient practice
Exalt the Whig cause
And Lord Carlisle’s aspirations,
Subjecting faith to reason,
Government to freedom.
The aged Hawsmoor hobbles
Round the summit,
His gout anaesthetized by joy
At seeing his plans realized.
Platonism and magic are declining:
Democracy can be built in stone,
Empirical and plain,
A new man, a new constitution.
Death is breathing down his neck now;
He feels it,there,continually,
Not to be chased off by faith or science.
Mason on the square of time,
He holds in his hands
The consolation of stone,
The mystery.
The seen and the unseen
Put him to work,
Reconstructing the Temple of Solomon,
The palaces of Xanadu.
Just Watch Children Playing
A crooked path is what I prefer.
The indirect approach.
How can I know if I’m alive?
Is being alive the same as not being dead?
Happiness is not my aim;
Only the absence of unhappiness.
Complete concentration on one point.
Magical “No”-my dark friend!
Writing a poem is a discipline of waiting,
Being there,where it comes from.
The happiness that was there
Before reasons for happiness existed;
The infinite comedy,
The kindness of life.
I don’t need to go to India or China.
I can sit in my room and watch a blackbird
Wandering round the lawn.
No need for opinions.
No need to feel important or special.
No need.
All this time I have only been
What other people tell me.
All I have known is others’ words.
And so I go on living as others want me to live.
Repeating myself,over and over.
Pretending that everything is something else.
There is nothing wrong with me,
Nothing that needs to be improved,
Nothing wrong with the voices in my head.
Life…no,it’s not a mistake.
It’s the tree outside my window.
It’s the blackbird perching on top.
The indirect approach.
How can I know if I’m alive?
Is being alive the same as not being dead?
Happiness is not my aim;
Only the absence of unhappiness.
Complete concentration on one point.
Magical “No”-my dark friend!
Writing a poem is a discipline of waiting,
Being there,where it comes from.
The happiness that was there
Before reasons for happiness existed;
The infinite comedy,
The kindness of life.
I don’t need to go to India or China.
I can sit in my room and watch a blackbird
Wandering round the lawn.
No need for opinions.
No need to feel important or special.
No need.
All this time I have only been
What other people tell me.
All I have known is others’ words.
And so I go on living as others want me to live.
Repeating myself,over and over.
Pretending that everything is something else.
There is nothing wrong with me,
Nothing that needs to be improved,
Nothing wrong with the voices in my head.
Life…no,it’s not a mistake.
It’s the tree outside my window.
It’s the blackbird perching on top.
The London Mad (Bedlam)
The lost,driven out of their wits by demons,
Flounder,shrieking,by the muddy Thames,
Drinking the potions of bark and berries
From their desperate families’ hands,
The Romans bring cold baths and purges,
Electric eels to shock them sane,
Trepan their skulls to let the evil out.
The Saxons thrash them with whips
Of porpoise hide;call them “moon-sick”,
And hang clovewort round their necks.
The manacled lunatics,pelted
With mud, and jeered at by the crowds,
Shuffle in line through Bethlem’s gates,
To their strawbedded manger.Golgotha.
The dancing bears of Bedlam lumber
And bellow,sport for the groundlings,
Inspiration for the playwrights,
Who tour the dungeons,fascinated
By the madness of Hamlet and Lear.
Starved and robbed,
The menagerie,chained to the walls,
Breathing the stench of sewers,
Laugh,sob,wail,sing for a gin,
While the drunken keeper –quick to thrash
And curse-turns a handsome profit;
Taking from gentlemen and their ladies
A few shillings for the tour.
Thieves and cutpurses dip
Into the pockets of the gawpers,
While queans pick up some business
And hawkers flog nuts to the crowd.
A French scholar,visiting London,
Devotes a whole chapter of his latest treatise
To the English Disease,
“The propensity to melancholy and suicide,
Brought on by fogs,beef and beer,
Nonconformist religion
And the tedium of Sundays.”
Flounder,shrieking,by the muddy Thames,
Drinking the potions of bark and berries
From their desperate families’ hands,
The Romans bring cold baths and purges,
Electric eels to shock them sane,
Trepan their skulls to let the evil out.
The Saxons thrash them with whips
Of porpoise hide;call them “moon-sick”,
And hang clovewort round their necks.
The manacled lunatics,pelted
With mud, and jeered at by the crowds,
Shuffle in line through Bethlem’s gates,
To their strawbedded manger.Golgotha.
The dancing bears of Bedlam lumber
And bellow,sport for the groundlings,
Inspiration for the playwrights,
Who tour the dungeons,fascinated
By the madness of Hamlet and Lear.
Starved and robbed,
The menagerie,chained to the walls,
Breathing the stench of sewers,
Laugh,sob,wail,sing for a gin,
While the drunken keeper –quick to thrash
And curse-turns a handsome profit;
Taking from gentlemen and their ladies
A few shillings for the tour.
Thieves and cutpurses dip
Into the pockets of the gawpers,
While queans pick up some business
And hawkers flog nuts to the crowd.
A French scholar,visiting London,
Devotes a whole chapter of his latest treatise
To the English Disease,
“The propensity to melancholy and suicide,
Brought on by fogs,beef and beer,
Nonconformist religion
And the tedium of Sundays.”
Vincenzo Bellini (1801-1835)
Just one opera a year,no more,while the hacks
Are turning out three or four for the money
In frenetic rivalry,slaves to La Scala
And their lust for noble patrons’ largesse;
Fastidious in his ambitions, the young Sicilian,
Blue-eyed and fair-haired,hustles his way
In that foreign land, the condescending north,
As if born to the company of aristocrats,
Holding himself their natural equal,
Perfectly mannered and groomed.
Only for the highest fees will he work,
Determined to do nothing on others’ terms,
Refusing to be hurried,bullied or cajoled,
Or to settle for second-best.
Honour and pride demand no less
Than absolute victory over the also-rans,
The pack of crude vicious impostors at his heels,
Forever intriguing jealously against him
To bring him down in mid-flight.
The meandering improvised melodies,
The tension and attraction between drone and chanter
Of the bagpipers,the oscillations between major and minor,
All this he carried with him from Sicily;
To make people weep,gasp,laugh,sigh and suffer,
That alone justifies an artist’s labours:-
Recalling love and glory in the midst of sorrow,
Reaching for the heart’s inborn excess.
Grand form and majestic emotion!-
Almost-unbearable truth held straining
By subtle strictures,as an unforgettable melody
Threads the world together,realizing
That beauty and love are one.
Shunning bohemian company,
Fleeing casinos and brothels as a vampire
Runs from the crucifix and the rising sun,
Bellini walks with lordly air,his malacca cane
Held like a sceptre,announcing his nobility
And elegance to a vulgar world of fools.
Shy, discreet,he weighs the advantages
And disadvantages of every course of action,
Dreading an ill-advised marriage or hasty affair,
In case the inconvenience should outweigh
The profit,and nasty humanity devalue his repute.
Yet,nonetheless,there is this craving
To be suckled by a selfless maternal love...
Alone,he returns to simple rooms,
Frugal in habits,caring nothing for luxury
Except in his dandy’s attire;happily browsing
Through his wardrobe he selects an outfit
For every occasion,an essay in la bella figura.
Paris.To succeed there- would that not be
The crown of life! Frequenting the salons,
Bewildered amid the repartee,he fumbles
Clumsy French,all ludicrous malapropisms,
Unable to keep up with the conversation,
As he stumbles from one soiree to the next.
Surely there must be a wife for him here-
A pretty docile well-bred young girl
With a generous dowry to keep him in style,
Someone to adore him and aid his career?
At last-triumph and fame in the city of art!
The toast of Paris,young,hale and famous,
He bows,laughs and waves among fans,
Until a casual voice warns in his ear
That geniuses so seldom live long,
And,dread-stricken,he crosses himself
And makes the horn-sign with his fingers
To avert the evil eye.In vain.Shortly after,
It is all over,his cursed body half-shovelled
Into the ground already, the romantic idol
Swamped in his own shit,sweat and fear,
Murdered not by love but amoebic dysentery.
Writhing in the shrouds of a suburban room,
He clutches at melodies passing in the air,
Too miraculous and austere to be believed.
Are turning out three or four for the money
In frenetic rivalry,slaves to La Scala
And their lust for noble patrons’ largesse;
Fastidious in his ambitions, the young Sicilian,
Blue-eyed and fair-haired,hustles his way
In that foreign land, the condescending north,
As if born to the company of aristocrats,
Holding himself their natural equal,
Perfectly mannered and groomed.
Only for the highest fees will he work,
Determined to do nothing on others’ terms,
Refusing to be hurried,bullied or cajoled,
Or to settle for second-best.
Honour and pride demand no less
Than absolute victory over the also-rans,
The pack of crude vicious impostors at his heels,
Forever intriguing jealously against him
To bring him down in mid-flight.
The meandering improvised melodies,
The tension and attraction between drone and chanter
Of the bagpipers,the oscillations between major and minor,
All this he carried with him from Sicily;
To make people weep,gasp,laugh,sigh and suffer,
That alone justifies an artist’s labours:-
Recalling love and glory in the midst of sorrow,
Reaching for the heart’s inborn excess.
Grand form and majestic emotion!-
Almost-unbearable truth held straining
By subtle strictures,as an unforgettable melody
Threads the world together,realizing
That beauty and love are one.
Shunning bohemian company,
Fleeing casinos and brothels as a vampire
Runs from the crucifix and the rising sun,
Bellini walks with lordly air,his malacca cane
Held like a sceptre,announcing his nobility
And elegance to a vulgar world of fools.
Shy, discreet,he weighs the advantages
And disadvantages of every course of action,
Dreading an ill-advised marriage or hasty affair,
In case the inconvenience should outweigh
The profit,and nasty humanity devalue his repute.
Yet,nonetheless,there is this craving
To be suckled by a selfless maternal love...
Alone,he returns to simple rooms,
Frugal in habits,caring nothing for luxury
Except in his dandy’s attire;happily browsing
Through his wardrobe he selects an outfit
For every occasion,an essay in la bella figura.
Paris.To succeed there- would that not be
The crown of life! Frequenting the salons,
Bewildered amid the repartee,he fumbles
Clumsy French,all ludicrous malapropisms,
Unable to keep up with the conversation,
As he stumbles from one soiree to the next.
Surely there must be a wife for him here-
A pretty docile well-bred young girl
With a generous dowry to keep him in style,
Someone to adore him and aid his career?
At last-triumph and fame in the city of art!
The toast of Paris,young,hale and famous,
He bows,laughs and waves among fans,
Until a casual voice warns in his ear
That geniuses so seldom live long,
And,dread-stricken,he crosses himself
And makes the horn-sign with his fingers
To avert the evil eye.In vain.Shortly after,
It is all over,his cursed body half-shovelled
Into the ground already, the romantic idol
Swamped in his own shit,sweat and fear,
Murdered not by love but amoebic dysentery.
Writhing in the shrouds of a suburban room,
He clutches at melodies passing in the air,
Too miraculous and austere to be believed.
The Death of Captain Cook
The old skill and patience had gone,
The judgment that had seen him through
So many times before; away too long,
Alone on the bridge,holding the ship
Together,crossing oceans and worlds
With only the force of his mind,
He had navigated by auspicious stars.
One last voyage,one last adventure-
He could not refuse,nor imagine
That a man could learn too much
Or sail too far.
Exhausted,disappointed and sick,
He scanned the seas for happy signs
Instead of these furies in his brain,
The crew now sullen and mutinous,
Longing to be ashore,in the arms
Of hospitable Hawaiian wahinis.
Tolerance, strained past endurance,
Turned to rage;his peaceful hand,
Attuned to the mapmaker’s tools,
Would take up weapons and attack
Any fool who dared defy him.
No god was he,but a god’s death
Was allotted,a sacrifice on the shore,
His blood given back to the waves
For all men’s sins and the fateful stars,
His failure the sum of all voyages.
The judgment that had seen him through
So many times before; away too long,
Alone on the bridge,holding the ship
Together,crossing oceans and worlds
With only the force of his mind,
He had navigated by auspicious stars.
One last voyage,one last adventure-
He could not refuse,nor imagine
That a man could learn too much
Or sail too far.
Exhausted,disappointed and sick,
He scanned the seas for happy signs
Instead of these furies in his brain,
The crew now sullen and mutinous,
Longing to be ashore,in the arms
Of hospitable Hawaiian wahinis.
Tolerance, strained past endurance,
Turned to rage;his peaceful hand,
Attuned to the mapmaker’s tools,
Would take up weapons and attack
Any fool who dared defy him.
No god was he,but a god’s death
Was allotted,a sacrifice on the shore,
His blood given back to the waves
For all men’s sins and the fateful stars,
His failure the sum of all voyages.
Ghost Jihad
Imagination will be the death of us;
It tends to run to unfortunate excess.
We all need a story
To tell and be told.
Alone I entered the world,
Alone I shall leave it.
The toppled statues,
The overthrown dictators,
Smashed and hacked and torn to pieces,
The ziggurats sacked and razed,
Babylon, Baghdad,Babylon…
American soldiers in sunglasses
Patrol the streets in armoured vehicles,
Certain only that they are not in Kansas now.
They know that their God is the real God,
And everyone else’s heathen idols.
Instead of news there are gossip and rumour,
Conspiracy theories of glorious lunacy,
Black magic for the masses.
Packs of looters roam through the ruins,
The living dead possessed by alien forces from Mars,
Diligently dismantling every connection.
And the dead-well,you remember them,-
Are just the people who were so terribly alive
A few dizzy minutes ago.
There are djinns on the loose,
Spreading havoc with ecstatic laughter;
This war is being fought
In all dimensions.
All across the city
People wake up in the night,sweating,
Dreaming that they are still in prison,
The torturer’s face looming over them.
Old skeletons and fresh cadavers
Are rising from the ground everywhere
And wild dogs gather,snarling,drawn by the stench.
In the café,old men,under faded photos
Of Old Baghdad,sip lemon tea
And inhale the perfumed narghileh,
Watching madmen fight over their city
Just as they had done in the past.
Spiky cuneiform clay tablets
Listing this man’s goats and that man’s cattle;
This desert once was Eden, red Adam’s aceldama,
The wheatfields seeded by catastrophe,
Fat sun-grains tasting of eternal life,
For which men fought each other to the death.
“Garryowen” blares from loudspeakers
As the helicopters of the Seventh Cavalry
Ascend into the air,about to fly into battle;
Just so did General Custer’s pipers
Strike up the regimental anthem,
His troopers charging to destruction
In the teeming Indian camp.
On a rooftop a marine lies prone,
Squinting down the barrel of his sniper rifle,
Named after his girlfriend;
He observes distant coordinates moving,
Ready to shoot at any second,
And feel nothing.
It tends to run to unfortunate excess.
We all need a story
To tell and be told.
Alone I entered the world,
Alone I shall leave it.
The toppled statues,
The overthrown dictators,
Smashed and hacked and torn to pieces,
The ziggurats sacked and razed,
Babylon, Baghdad,Babylon…
American soldiers in sunglasses
Patrol the streets in armoured vehicles,
Certain only that they are not in Kansas now.
They know that their God is the real God,
And everyone else’s heathen idols.
Instead of news there are gossip and rumour,
Conspiracy theories of glorious lunacy,
Black magic for the masses.
Packs of looters roam through the ruins,
The living dead possessed by alien forces from Mars,
Diligently dismantling every connection.
And the dead-well,you remember them,-
Are just the people who were so terribly alive
A few dizzy minutes ago.
There are djinns on the loose,
Spreading havoc with ecstatic laughter;
This war is being fought
In all dimensions.
All across the city
People wake up in the night,sweating,
Dreaming that they are still in prison,
The torturer’s face looming over them.
Old skeletons and fresh cadavers
Are rising from the ground everywhere
And wild dogs gather,snarling,drawn by the stench.
In the café,old men,under faded photos
Of Old Baghdad,sip lemon tea
And inhale the perfumed narghileh,
Watching madmen fight over their city
Just as they had done in the past.
Spiky cuneiform clay tablets
Listing this man’s goats and that man’s cattle;
This desert once was Eden, red Adam’s aceldama,
The wheatfields seeded by catastrophe,
Fat sun-grains tasting of eternal life,
For which men fought each other to the death.
“Garryowen” blares from loudspeakers
As the helicopters of the Seventh Cavalry
Ascend into the air,about to fly into battle;
Just so did General Custer’s pipers
Strike up the regimental anthem,
His troopers charging to destruction
In the teeming Indian camp.
On a rooftop a marine lies prone,
Squinting down the barrel of his sniper rifle,
Named after his girlfriend;
He observes distant coordinates moving,
Ready to shoot at any second,
And feel nothing.
The Murder-Artist
The skilful use of tools
And the application of method
Lead to the miracle dreamt-of and planned.
You will trust me, love me,
Do as I desire.
In the April woods a naked young woman-
A prostitute-
Lies face down under a tree,
Legs pulled wide apart, arms extended forward,
Bluegray fungus spreading over her flesh,
As she merges into the compost,
The killer has planted her thus,face in the dirt,
Her backside and genitals gaping upward,
To be mocked and cursed;
Around her neck is the stocking
He strangled her with,
Tightening and relaxing the pressure
With diabolical skill
To prolong her torture and his pleasure.
Foxes have chewed her legs.
People…I love to watch them,
To figure them out.
Sometimes I feel I know them
Better than they know themselves.
I X-ray their personalities
In a minute or two.
What curious skeletons!
What virus is this
That lives in my veins,mutating,
Surviving all attempts to cure or kill?
I smell the blood-spoor
Of the wounded animal,
My desire, my prey.
Celestial movements
Conduct me to a critical alignment;
A baleful star rises to its zenith.
And the application of method
Lead to the miracle dreamt-of and planned.
You will trust me, love me,
Do as I desire.
In the April woods a naked young woman-
A prostitute-
Lies face down under a tree,
Legs pulled wide apart, arms extended forward,
Bluegray fungus spreading over her flesh,
As she merges into the compost,
The killer has planted her thus,face in the dirt,
Her backside and genitals gaping upward,
To be mocked and cursed;
Around her neck is the stocking
He strangled her with,
Tightening and relaxing the pressure
With diabolical skill
To prolong her torture and his pleasure.
Foxes have chewed her legs.
People…I love to watch them,
To figure them out.
Sometimes I feel I know them
Better than they know themselves.
I X-ray their personalities
In a minute or two.
What curious skeletons!
What virus is this
That lives in my veins,mutating,
Surviving all attempts to cure or kill?
I smell the blood-spoor
Of the wounded animal,
My desire, my prey.
Celestial movements
Conduct me to a critical alignment;
A baleful star rises to its zenith.
Grandmaster
I don’t believe in psychology.I believe in good moves.
Bobby Fischer
There is celestial beauty in these lines-
Stellar geometry of infinite complexity
And boundlessness in a bounded world.
These sixty-four squares are my destiny.
Each decision is weighed in the balance,
Each move is plotted on a graph.
How do I wish the board to look
Ten or twenty moves from now?
Strategy is all:whether to defend,
Attack or manouevre,-understanding
Oneself without fear or shame.
Victory is mine, if I ask the right questions.
Find balance in imbalance,
Transcendence in circumstance.
Before each move,consider
Your opponent’s response,and how
You,in turn,will counter his riposte,
Analyse positions,variations,chances.
More than the atoms in the universe-
The possible positions on the board.
Agile as a monkey,I must leap
Among the branches of this tree,
Discipline and imagination as one,
The sixth sense my prehensile tail.
(One boyhood Christmas,my parents gave me
A globe,a fabulous radiant blue globe,
-Oh, the constellated hours I spent sailing
The oceans and trekking across continents,
Mapping the world for the first time,
Columbus on the prow of a dream…)
Opening,middlegame,endgame:
The gods have set the limits
For us to study and transform.
Bobby Fischer
There is celestial beauty in these lines-
Stellar geometry of infinite complexity
And boundlessness in a bounded world.
These sixty-four squares are my destiny.
Each decision is weighed in the balance,
Each move is plotted on a graph.
How do I wish the board to look
Ten or twenty moves from now?
Strategy is all:whether to defend,
Attack or manouevre,-understanding
Oneself without fear or shame.
Victory is mine, if I ask the right questions.
Find balance in imbalance,
Transcendence in circumstance.
Before each move,consider
Your opponent’s response,and how
You,in turn,will counter his riposte,
Analyse positions,variations,chances.
More than the atoms in the universe-
The possible positions on the board.
Agile as a monkey,I must leap
Among the branches of this tree,
Discipline and imagination as one,
The sixth sense my prehensile tail.
(One boyhood Christmas,my parents gave me
A globe,a fabulous radiant blue globe,
-Oh, the constellated hours I spent sailing
The oceans and trekking across continents,
Mapping the world for the first time,
Columbus on the prow of a dream…)
Opening,middlegame,endgame:
The gods have set the limits
For us to study and transform.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
St Petersburg Concerto
Crazy Baltic weather of snowstorms and rainbows,
Hyperborean sun skeletizes life...
Severe Finnish granite embankments
Run straight to vanishing point.
Forever ponder “The Bronze Horseman”
And wonder.The puzzle can never be solved.
We have all been bitten by the serpent.
Pushkin,scallywag,see what you have done!
This city,blessed and damned in equal parts,
Indentures questing souls with fierce demands;
No,we are not yet risen from the marsh,
And the dark sea does not relinquish us.
In the end,you are sick of myth and legend,
The niggling past that misses no chance
To intrude a correspondence,a haunting comment
On all that otherwise would simply be.
We are all in the text,this glorious fiction,
Mummers and prompters,born to the stage.
History,destiny: all the grand themes chain us,
The last days of Atlantis ours to await.
Demi-gods and idols all have their shrines here.
Such virulent splendour.Cynicism is no defence.
A paltry sandgrain will grow a pearl,
Outshining and outliving its common shell.
Gogol looked up,and the ground shifted under his feet.
He fell,rose,fell again; the sky wrapped him in its chequered overcoat,
Gave him pen and paper,made him clerk of the universe,
Of the damned soul,scribbling prophecies
Whispered in his ears by weird conflicting voices.
His nose grew and grew like Pinocchio’s
As he danced on strings for the hooded puppetmaster,
Jeered by silhouettes in the fog.
Bone-built city of transfiguration,
Who here is not a martyr, a Christ?
A black widow keeps the sacred flame,
Cupping it in her imperious hands.
Peter in Roman toga and laurel crown
Grapples the reins,his steed rearing
Up at the city he created from his pain.
Stranded in mid-air,he glares down.
Pushkin at Boldino in autumn,nervous,angry,
Self-exiled to write,but the verse still just will not come,
His head buzzes,his gut hurts...
How to clear his debts if he cannot produce
A masterpiece to sell for publication?
But how can he concentrate on poetry
While his wife is alone in Petersburg,
A dozen shameless beaus circling round her...
He sits and dashes off a letter,berating her:
“You’re proud that studs chase after you like a bitch,
Their tails stiff up in the air,sniffing your arse...”
And,eventually,the words,his friends,come to console him,
Each day he awakes early,works in bed till three in the afternoon,
The rides horseback in the muddy fields for hours,
Cooling his overheated brain...
Outrageously the demiurge wagered his will,
Certain that Providence would come to his aid:
Peter plotted the city with ruler in hand,
Geometry of islands,canal and prospects,
Herding myriads of slaves to the dreaded delta,-
Peasants,soldiers,convicts and prisoners of war,-
Driven day and night with the knout,
To perish in their thousands,uncounted,unmourned,
Drenched by rains,attacked by swarming mosquitoes,
Pounding wooden piles into the swamp,
As their master ever urged more haste and more care.
Even before the city was completed,
Rumours and prophecies spread among the people
That Petersburg wascursed,doomed to destruction,
For the baleful kikimora had been seen
Hopping into the belltower of the Trinity church,
Foretelling that this work of the Antichrist
Could not long endure.
Though the Tsar pursued such naysayers
And had them flogged,burned and broken on the rack,
Still he could not stop the evil tongues.
River-twinned,the Winter Palace
Glows against pale northern sky,
White columns marching hypnotically
Through the light blue mind.
Pale and unkempt, champagne glass always in hand,
Glinka wanders through the salons and soirees,
Then returns to his apartment to record in his notebook
The headaches,stomach aches,toothaches and neck aches
That torment him,with the details of all the doctors who attend him
And the effectiveness of their prescriptions.
He adds the odd comment on music,just in passing.
And in his head the Viennese waltz
Is morphing into something Russian,
Curving with elegant desires and spiritual hurt.
One day he leaves Petersburg for good,
Fleeing the awful climate and the poisonous gossips,
The stupid critics and the philistines,
And,getting out of his carriage at the city limits,
Spits on the ground,so unworthy of his genius.
Wine,cognac,vodka...from a gentleman to a bum,
Puffy crumbling face,red nose and bedraggled redbrown hair,
Huge greyblue eyes straring into the void,
Mussorgsky hunches in a tavern,among the drunks,his brothers,
At home in the majestic grotesque...
This torment is the service of higher powers,
This isolation is the nature of God.
Only the godless can be so religious,
Mystical realists fevered with the world
Time to challenge every truism,
To turn the world upside-down and inside-out,
And honour the absurd.
Alexandre Benois,stooped,bald and blackbearded,
Brown eyes vigilant behind pince-nez,
Gazes out from his apartment window
Over the snowy city,-to bring Russia back
Into the arms of Europe! What ballets
The two could dance together!
Let music,art and theatre unite
To revive the city and the soul of man,
All the glorious ghosts returning,
A pageant filling the streets!
(Cosmopolitan romance,as in the English shop
On Nevsky Prospect,full of comforts:
Fruitcakes and Pears soap,picture puzzles,
Striped blazers and football jerseys
In the colours of Oxford and Cambridge).
Receiving guests in her apartment after midnight,
Recumbent on chaise-longue,smoking long scented cigarettes,
And harshly peering through a lorgnette,
Zinaida Gippius-respected,hated and feared-
Presides over the Symbolist movement
With ex cathedra epigrams and Olympian pronouncements.
Long and thin,in floating Snow Queen robes,
Disdainful smile forever on her lips,
She tests young aspirants without mercy
As knights pleading fealty to the Lady,
Offering their lives for a touch of her hand.
In the auditorium of the Geographical Society,
A large crowd gathers to hear a lecture
By Blok,all dressed in monks’ cloaks and high chic,
Fashionable thinkers,writers,artists,and cognoscenti,
As the poet –black-clad like a priest-
Pronounces in hypnotic monotone,
Handsome face haloed with fair curls,
Exalted look in his pale grey eyes,
Beloved icon of all Russia’s women,
Who send endless letters proclaiming their fealty,
Pleading to meet him,to let them bear his children.
(One adoring female fan follows him in the street,
Picking up the cigarette butts he drops,
Colelcting them in a small box,a precious relic to her;
Often she goes to his house,half-mad with love,
And,not daring to ring,stands at the door,
Kissing the doorhandles and weeping).
His every step is avidly observed,his every word
Discussed and analayzed,and every poem
Parsed for clues to the private man.
One morning in October,1919,-
In the winter of hunger,curfews,violence and decay,
With people using their books and furniture for firewood,
And eating dogs,cats and rats to survive,
Even tearing apart fallen horses in the streets
For the precious flesh,while all around
Others drop and die on the icy pavements-
As Blok and Bely walk along Nevsky Prospect,
They come across a bored militiaman,rifle over shoulder,
Standing,pissing,writing his name in urine
In the snow,-and Bely calls out to him:
“I don’t know how to write on snow!
I need just a little ink,and a scrap of paper!”
Only ballet could soothe his cares
And distract him...Nicholas the First,
The martinet attempting to drill all Russia
On the perfect parade ground in his head,
Sits in the dark,his bayonet eyes fixed
On the stage,seeing lines of soldiers
Regimented with uncompromising skill.
Strength and beauty must be united
In this new Russia:thus,for the production
Of La révolte au serial,the Tsar
Sends his own Guards officers to train
The corps de ballet in military techniques,
Demanding from them the same discipline
And subordination as from his troops,
And ,when the ballerinas tire of drill
And grow lazy,he comes to rehearsal
And berates them:”Practise seriously,
Or you will be made to stand outside
In the snow and ice for two hours
With rifles,in your dancing shoes,”
Whereupon the scared dancers return
To their practice with sudden zeal.
The white nights are here:
We shall stay up till dawn,walking round the city,
Talking about everything as we sip beer and champagne,
Caressing the granite embankments
And watching the bridges rise for ships to sail by...
This line we walk is the tightrope
Between order and chaos,
Where sober hearts discover
Their vital madness,
And stoics cry into the heedless dark.
Hyperborean sun skeletizes life...
Severe Finnish granite embankments
Run straight to vanishing point.
Forever ponder “The Bronze Horseman”
And wonder.The puzzle can never be solved.
We have all been bitten by the serpent.
Pushkin,scallywag,see what you have done!
This city,blessed and damned in equal parts,
Indentures questing souls with fierce demands;
No,we are not yet risen from the marsh,
And the dark sea does not relinquish us.
In the end,you are sick of myth and legend,
The niggling past that misses no chance
To intrude a correspondence,a haunting comment
On all that otherwise would simply be.
We are all in the text,this glorious fiction,
Mummers and prompters,born to the stage.
History,destiny: all the grand themes chain us,
The last days of Atlantis ours to await.
Demi-gods and idols all have their shrines here.
Such virulent splendour.Cynicism is no defence.
A paltry sandgrain will grow a pearl,
Outshining and outliving its common shell.
Gogol looked up,and the ground shifted under his feet.
He fell,rose,fell again; the sky wrapped him in its chequered overcoat,
Gave him pen and paper,made him clerk of the universe,
Of the damned soul,scribbling prophecies
Whispered in his ears by weird conflicting voices.
His nose grew and grew like Pinocchio’s
As he danced on strings for the hooded puppetmaster,
Jeered by silhouettes in the fog.
Bone-built city of transfiguration,
Who here is not a martyr, a Christ?
A black widow keeps the sacred flame,
Cupping it in her imperious hands.
Peter in Roman toga and laurel crown
Grapples the reins,his steed rearing
Up at the city he created from his pain.
Stranded in mid-air,he glares down.
Pushkin at Boldino in autumn,nervous,angry,
Self-exiled to write,but the verse still just will not come,
His head buzzes,his gut hurts...
How to clear his debts if he cannot produce
A masterpiece to sell for publication?
But how can he concentrate on poetry
While his wife is alone in Petersburg,
A dozen shameless beaus circling round her...
He sits and dashes off a letter,berating her:
“You’re proud that studs chase after you like a bitch,
Their tails stiff up in the air,sniffing your arse...”
And,eventually,the words,his friends,come to console him,
Each day he awakes early,works in bed till three in the afternoon,
The rides horseback in the muddy fields for hours,
Cooling his overheated brain...
Outrageously the demiurge wagered his will,
Certain that Providence would come to his aid:
Peter plotted the city with ruler in hand,
Geometry of islands,canal and prospects,
Herding myriads of slaves to the dreaded delta,-
Peasants,soldiers,convicts and prisoners of war,-
Driven day and night with the knout,
To perish in their thousands,uncounted,unmourned,
Drenched by rains,attacked by swarming mosquitoes,
Pounding wooden piles into the swamp,
As their master ever urged more haste and more care.
Even before the city was completed,
Rumours and prophecies spread among the people
That Petersburg wascursed,doomed to destruction,
For the baleful kikimora had been seen
Hopping into the belltower of the Trinity church,
Foretelling that this work of the Antichrist
Could not long endure.
Though the Tsar pursued such naysayers
And had them flogged,burned and broken on the rack,
Still he could not stop the evil tongues.
River-twinned,the Winter Palace
Glows against pale northern sky,
White columns marching hypnotically
Through the light blue mind.
Pale and unkempt, champagne glass always in hand,
Glinka wanders through the salons and soirees,
Then returns to his apartment to record in his notebook
The headaches,stomach aches,toothaches and neck aches
That torment him,with the details of all the doctors who attend him
And the effectiveness of their prescriptions.
He adds the odd comment on music,just in passing.
And in his head the Viennese waltz
Is morphing into something Russian,
Curving with elegant desires and spiritual hurt.
One day he leaves Petersburg for good,
Fleeing the awful climate and the poisonous gossips,
The stupid critics and the philistines,
And,getting out of his carriage at the city limits,
Spits on the ground,so unworthy of his genius.
Wine,cognac,vodka...from a gentleman to a bum,
Puffy crumbling face,red nose and bedraggled redbrown hair,
Huge greyblue eyes straring into the void,
Mussorgsky hunches in a tavern,among the drunks,his brothers,
At home in the majestic grotesque...
This torment is the service of higher powers,
This isolation is the nature of God.
Only the godless can be so religious,
Mystical realists fevered with the world
Time to challenge every truism,
To turn the world upside-down and inside-out,
And honour the absurd.
Alexandre Benois,stooped,bald and blackbearded,
Brown eyes vigilant behind pince-nez,
Gazes out from his apartment window
Over the snowy city,-to bring Russia back
Into the arms of Europe! What ballets
The two could dance together!
Let music,art and theatre unite
To revive the city and the soul of man,
All the glorious ghosts returning,
A pageant filling the streets!
(Cosmopolitan romance,as in the English shop
On Nevsky Prospect,full of comforts:
Fruitcakes and Pears soap,picture puzzles,
Striped blazers and football jerseys
In the colours of Oxford and Cambridge).
Receiving guests in her apartment after midnight,
Recumbent on chaise-longue,smoking long scented cigarettes,
And harshly peering through a lorgnette,
Zinaida Gippius-respected,hated and feared-
Presides over the Symbolist movement
With ex cathedra epigrams and Olympian pronouncements.
Long and thin,in floating Snow Queen robes,
Disdainful smile forever on her lips,
She tests young aspirants without mercy
As knights pleading fealty to the Lady,
Offering their lives for a touch of her hand.
In the auditorium of the Geographical Society,
A large crowd gathers to hear a lecture
By Blok,all dressed in monks’ cloaks and high chic,
Fashionable thinkers,writers,artists,and cognoscenti,
As the poet –black-clad like a priest-
Pronounces in hypnotic monotone,
Handsome face haloed with fair curls,
Exalted look in his pale grey eyes,
Beloved icon of all Russia’s women,
Who send endless letters proclaiming their fealty,
Pleading to meet him,to let them bear his children.
(One adoring female fan follows him in the street,
Picking up the cigarette butts he drops,
Colelcting them in a small box,a precious relic to her;
Often she goes to his house,half-mad with love,
And,not daring to ring,stands at the door,
Kissing the doorhandles and weeping).
His every step is avidly observed,his every word
Discussed and analayzed,and every poem
Parsed for clues to the private man.
One morning in October,1919,-
In the winter of hunger,curfews,violence and decay,
With people using their books and furniture for firewood,
And eating dogs,cats and rats to survive,
Even tearing apart fallen horses in the streets
For the precious flesh,while all around
Others drop and die on the icy pavements-
As Blok and Bely walk along Nevsky Prospect,
They come across a bored militiaman,rifle over shoulder,
Standing,pissing,writing his name in urine
In the snow,-and Bely calls out to him:
“I don’t know how to write on snow!
I need just a little ink,and a scrap of paper!”
Only ballet could soothe his cares
And distract him...Nicholas the First,
The martinet attempting to drill all Russia
On the perfect parade ground in his head,
Sits in the dark,his bayonet eyes fixed
On the stage,seeing lines of soldiers
Regimented with uncompromising skill.
Strength and beauty must be united
In this new Russia:thus,for the production
Of La révolte au serial,the Tsar
Sends his own Guards officers to train
The corps de ballet in military techniques,
Demanding from them the same discipline
And subordination as from his troops,
And ,when the ballerinas tire of drill
And grow lazy,he comes to rehearsal
And berates them:”Practise seriously,
Or you will be made to stand outside
In the snow and ice for two hours
With rifles,in your dancing shoes,”
Whereupon the scared dancers return
To their practice with sudden zeal.
The white nights are here:
We shall stay up till dawn,walking round the city,
Talking about everything as we sip beer and champagne,
Caressing the granite embankments
And watching the bridges rise for ships to sail by...
This line we walk is the tightrope
Between order and chaos,
Where sober hearts discover
Their vital madness,
And stoics cry into the heedless dark.
Runes of Sweden
The runes call me to heal my wounds,
Transform myself, true to the Wyrd,
Shape the world with the indwelling gods…
Rune : roar and whisper from within,
Incantation of the soul,
The binding knot…
I carve this runestave on the lakes and forests of Sweden.
Bright runes and murk runes :
Break down the barriers
Between worlds, reveal the hidden meanings,
By web-work of words,
Skaldcraft of the spirit,
Feats of the rime-thurs.
That the dead may stay in their graves
And the walking dead return to their graves
And the speaking dead give aid when invoked
The runester rides the horse of the air
And speaks red runes in heaven’s ear.
On the Gripsholm stone, inscribed in a serpent :
Tola had this stone raised for his son Harald, Yngvarr’s brother.
They fared boldly
Far away after gold
And in the east
They gave food to the eagle;
They died in the south
In Serkland.
A niding inscribed on the Björketorp stone :
Prophecy of destruction !
A row of bright runes hid I here,
Runes loaded with magic.
Through perversity, and without rest,
On the outside,
There is a deceitful death for the one
Who breaks this stone.
Fehu : the three goddesses, seers who read the runes aright,
Gold that increases with use, through circulation,
Transforming from one shape into another,
Benison to the wise, strife to the foolish,
Fire generated out of dark water, out of the deep,
Expanding throughout the cosmos,
The wolf in the woods of the self,
The serpent of light…
This is the power to fulfil
All that we are born for,
Ending to begin again.
They say that if you sleep
Benath an elderberry tree’s branches
On Midsmmer’s Day,
You may see the King of the Fairies.
Uruz : fire blended with the waters,
Horns of the aurochs, wild and ferocious,
Goring and piercing in rage and love,
Mother of matter, busily working its will into shapes…
Burn off the dross, refine the metal,
Else annihilate the imperfect
If it stubbornly resists…
The Void, Ginnungagap,
Between Fire and Ice,
The womb of Ymir
The androgynous giant
Nourished by the primeval cow’s udders…
Climb the silver birch
Into the sky,
Flame-fountain
Quaking the earth,
Return to the cradle
To find yourself;
Silver birch,
Show me the way through the woods.
Thurs : pure action and potency,
Force of a straight line, directed on target,
The spear sailing through the air
From the thunder god’s hand,
The two poles fused together,
Regeneration, rain,
The thorn drawing blood…
Force that fashioned Ymir,
Father and mother of the gods,
Rushing power of seed,
Thunder breaking open the sky.
Are you afraid to pluck the rose
For fear of being pricked?
Sloe gin from the blackthorn
Make holy drunkenness,
Black fruits that ripen
After the first winter frost.
Ansuz : the mind of Odin,
Reconciling the two halves,
The right and the left,
The magical power transmitted
From the ancestors
From generation to generation;
These powers by which man
May transform himself,
Finding knowledge in word and work…
O breath and symbol,
Vessel of power !
The prolific mouth
Making Word into world.
Sound,speech,music:
Let the wishful wind blow
Through everything.
Deep are the roots
And thick are the branches
Of the ash tree,
Connecting all realms,
Expressing the hidden.
Raidho : the law of right order,
The rising and setting of the sun,
Dance, music and poetry as one,
The organisation of states and institutions,
Held in balance with delicate violence…
A sturdy wagon and a strong horse
Are needed on the hard road,
The perilous road between worlds…
Mathematical proportion,
Beautiful logic, and tally lore,
Flowing wheels, spiralling towards the destination…
Sudden lightning
That fires the heavenly order.
Beat of the shaman’s drum,
Measured and momentous,
Propelling the mind through space.
The oak is mmy door,
My ship under sail,
My acorn that grows slowly,slowly
But sure of itself…
Kenaz : the force to shape,
The torch in the night,
Hearth fires and harrow,
Forge and pyre…
The craftsman’s cunning,
The joyous lust of the maker,
Dissolving to recreate…
Who knows is able,
To cleave,bash,bend and weld,
And fashion for all.
Hermaphroditic,
The pine tree spreads
Its bounty of sweet sharp small,
All steady endeavour
Towards the true aim.
Gebo : consciousness, life-breath and form,
Flowing into each other
To be transformed and returned to the source…
Giving and receiving,
Binding the bonds between gods and men,
Building bridges between worlds…
This is the way of saining,
The way of sacrifice,
The increase out of loss…
O magical marriage,
Exchange of holy vows !
Equal exchange of energies
Held in utter balance.
Stately and forbearing,
The elm tree sheds its grace,
Helping us to attain
Balance and endurance.
Wunjo : joy that binds and marshals forces
And bends them to a purpose;
Harmony with the self,
Harmony with the world,
Building a good house of the soul…
What bliss to know
That everything has meaning,
Everything is whole…
Selfless love
Demanding nothing
Yet giving entirely of itself
Without expectation of return,
Happy simpy to see in all things
The higher power self-delighting.
In the clear mountain air
The fir tree lofts its joyous shout,
Surveying the earth like an eagle.
Hagalaz : fire and ice encapsulated
In a hailstone egg,
Seed of the universe…
Nine worlds in the roots and branches
Of the World-Tree,
Nine of fruition and completion,
The yew in the berry…
Rune mother,
Womb of all runes…
The snowflake iridesces
With rainbow code
Andf through the body
Spirals the DNA.
The power of Fire
Moving upwards,outwards,
And the power of water
Moving downwards,outwards,
Binding together
In complementary force.
Rowan tree,
Lady of the High Places,
Whisper the secrets
Of the soul;
I see in your red berries
The five-pointed star.
Nauthiz : the force of cosmic resistance
To the will and its actions,
Need-fire from friction,
Kindling the higher flame…
The Norns come forth
To establish the law;
Out of becoming into being
The world is born into suffering
And destruction.
See, all that has ever been
Happens now, in this changing
Oneness, doing its work.
Beech mast to the pig
Is wisdom to me,
The fine bark of the sky
Calls me to write.
Isa : force of contraction into stillness,
Inward-turning force,
Force of density,
Fire and ice in balance…
The mind stilled and concentrated,
Holding the self together
Through its trials…
The ice-bridge extends before you,
Who must cross the abyss
By a hair’s breadth…
One day you too will be ice.
This that binds the atom’s spheres,
And times and seasons.
Move forward,
Act and you will know.
Moonshine on white shining snow
And razorblade air
Slashing myriad angles,
Geometry of winter.
I want no truth but my own
To fashion and fight for.
Alder tree,
Be my bridge,
Be my whistle,
Help me turn weakness
Into strength.
Jera : the twelvemonth of the sun,
The turning millstone,
The time of sowing, growing and harvesting,
Always returning to begin again,
Arising, becoming and passing away,
Reaping reward from right labour,
Peace, prosperity and freedom…
This development cannot be chivvied or hastened,
For the inside must agree with the outside
And grow in season and grace,
Spiralling to fruition
In subtle flow.
From the hazel tree
Fashion dowsing rods
And wands,
And, eating the nuts,
Become wise.
Nauthiz : the force of cosmic resistance
To the will and its actions,
Need-fire from friction,
Kindling the higher flame…
The Norns come forth
To establish the law;
Out of becoming into being
The world is born into suffering
And destruction.
Eihwaz : axis of Yggdrasill,
The yew-tree column
By which the magical fire is generated,
Rising and descending
Through the body’s wheels,
Transforming matter into spirit,
Reconciling opposites,
Binding heaven, earth and underworld…
To live for a thousand years
Like the yew,
Renewing itself from the core,
Guarding the boneyard,
Counselling the dead.
Perthro : to fathom the mystery of wyrd,
That is the ultimate test,
Casting the runes into the cup,
Into the Well of Wyrd…
Immortal dance of x, y and z,
The horizontal and the vertical,
Ceaseless change making good the world…
See how iron
Can be absorbed and transfoermed
Into myriads of things
Yet remains itself.
The aspen’s quivering
Is shimmering whispers
From within,
Shields of light,
Wheels of light…
Elhaz : here is the upright stave,
The splayed hand,
The horns of the hart,
The swan in flight,
The rainbow bridge,
The gesture of prayer and invocation.
Your fetch goes with you everywhere,
Taking shapes,
Working magic…
Spinal fluid strengthens the backbone,
Patient endurance
And the green force in plants…
Strong is the reed
Yet out of its hollows
The air pipes music
In tune with the heart…
Sowilo : the sun for all with eyes to see,
The day sun and the night sun,
That guide the seafarer from shore to shore,
The Pleiades in the night sky,
The sun-wheel revolving,
He who develops the will by this light
Is blessed with honour and success.
Here are the serpent centres of the earth,
Where the heavenly and chthonic forces
Converge with surging spiral power.
This is the vortex,
Energy pushing upwards and outwards,
Then contracting back to a point
Over and over;
Moving the space around,
Making things happen.
Tiny white flowers
Of the spindle tree,
Flashes in the dark
Behind my eyes.
Tiwaz : the Lodestar in heaven,
Keeping its troth,
Summit of the World-Tree,
Keeping cosmic order and justice,
Keeping separate the poles,
Beacon of the deepest most serene wisdom,
The detached transcendent wisdom
At the centre of things.
The phallus upraised
Shoots seed into the egg,
Sacrificing the seed
For the greater purpose.
Let the spear fly
And not miss the mark.
Let the pillars of the house
Stand tall and firm.
Holly tree
Whose leaves are soft in summer
And spiked in winter,
Be the spears of an army
Marching to victory.
Berkano : the Birch Goddess
Who rules over transformation,
Over the rites of passage,
And the seasons,
The cycle of birth,life,death and rebirth,
Conserving and protecting,
It takes seed substance,
Hides it in its enclosure,
Breaks the enclosure, and bears the transformed substance forth.
Here is the birch rod,
The wand of magic working,
The moment of being
Whence all becoming issues,
The eternal now,
It is the mystery of the word…
The mother’s and the lover’s breasts
Give suck to the mewling soul.
Enclose and contain that which you are bringing forth;
Conceal, protect and nourish the secret
Until it is ready to come.
Hornbeam,
Ox-yoke of the spirit,
Waterwheel of the soul,
Be the mother standing firm
And releasing her offspring.
Ehwaz : the horse on which the runester rides
From one world to the other,
The perfect harmony of horse and rider,
The fetch at work in the world…
Odin and Sleipnir fused into one,
Ten feet, three eyes and one tail…
Ecstasy:the male and the female
Conjoining, making a star.
To communicate with all things,
With people,animals,rocks and plants,
And with beings of other levels.
The ivy spirals
Towards the light,
Bringing life or death,
Pushig into creveices bloldly.
Mannaz : the structure of divine consciousness in man,
Imparted through a genetic link
With the god of consciousness;
Men are descendants of the gods,
The bond unbreakable.
O, god made flesh,
Consciousness made manifest,
Mind and memory corresponding,
Communicating freely with each other,
Informing the whole self.
O, tripartite moon,
Synthesising intellect and intuition,
Measuring and melding …
Let the force of the soul
Drive towards perfection,
To know its own nature
And fulfil its work;
Let man and nature
Collaborate as equals,
Each fulfilling the other.
The gyring vine
Fruits with promise
Of joy and inspiration,
Energy that must be trained…
Laguz : lake of primeval waters
Welling up from below,
Seething with life,
Waterfall where treasure is hidden,
Dark depths of the ship burial,
Rivers where Odin is the ferryman of souls,
The runester must fit himself out
With a solid ship to breast the waves,
To fare forth on the ebb and flow…
This blessed feel of swimming,
In the water but not of it,
Grasping the flow
As it escapes…
The willow draws the waters
Into its tent,
Wishing on the moon…
Ingwaz : the seed-force of gestation,
Released to bring forth plenty,
The rune withdrawn into secrecy
For the hidden exchange of energies
That causes transformation…
Will you go into the east,
Will you disappear from sight,
To fare into the dark realms
And return with strange gifts ?
Yes, I am my own grandfather,
My own grandmother,
Seeding my own regeneration,
Storing and forging the essence
Of experience to carry forward
Into my next self.
Five-pointed star
In the apple’s core:
The apple I eat
Reminds me of myself.
Dagaz : as day and darkness merge in twilight
The morning and evening stars
Shine into the darkness;
See the way between extremes,
Between left and right,
See in the extremes
The unifying idea…
Now the courage
To reache beyond the known.
This is victory,
The lovers’ supernova,
The seed’s explosion
Into absolute light,
The paean of the figure-of-eight.
Honeysuckle,
Entwine me in your branches,
Subtly reveal your secrets,
Succour me in my quest,
I trust in passion to guide me right.
Othala : this is the hallowed enclosure,
The land set apart,
The kin-fetch of the tribe,
The forces held within the ring
Must be well ordered
Made harmonious
For the common weal,
That peace and freedom reign…
The sly soul knows how to balance
Light against dark,
Inside against outside,
Order against chaos…
Lawmaker,beat the bounds
Of the world,give freedom
Its hearth,that all may prosper.
The soul craves to acquire
And possess what it needs to thrive,
Seeds of future abundance.
Rich yellow gorse flowers
Bloom throughout the eyar,
And attract the first bees,
Pollen, nectar, honey-
The diligent seeker’s reward.
Snowflake,
Crystal of ice and fire,
Of light and darkness,
Burning seed of life and death,
Sky-salt, earth-yeast…
Five hundred doors
And forty withal,
I know to be in Valhöll :
Eight hundred lone warriors
Go through a lone door
When they fare forth to fight the wolf.
Nine worlds of Yggdrasill,
Nine nights Odin hung upon the tree…
Here I am, whole,
Body, shape, ecstasy,
Breath, mind, memory,
Soul, fetch and luck.
Odin makes all things his own
And uses them according to his will,
Yet remains ever apart,
Forever changing shape,
Bringing the power of self-deification.
Not to worship the god,
To become the god;
With inspiration,will and sacred rites.
We must win from him by will
The holy words to open the doors of dawn,
He is ecstasy and awe and power,
Born of self-sacrifice,
Winner of the poetic mead,
Snake and eagle,
Lord of the hidden eye,
He binds together light and dark,
Life and death,
Conscious and unconscious.
Restlessly, relentlessly,
With boundless courage,
He strives neverendingly for wholeness.
Freyja, the golden sow,
The shamaness of the trance,
Woman of gold and harvest,
Erotic mistress of love songs,
Wedded to ecstasy,
Striving for divine inspiration,
She brings things into being,
Causes them to become,
And causes them to pass away…
I have seen in Gotland big rock crystals,
Honed into accurate magnifying lenses
Used by Viking craftsmen in their work,
And as sunstones for navigating
On overcast days, to work out the sun’s position.
There are also the picture stones,
Shaped like doorways,
Portals to the world of the dead,
Graven with horses, fighting.
Or the deceased,
Being greeted in Valhalla by a Valkyrie
With a drinking horn brimming with mead,
Others show the dead man riding Sleipnir,
To Valhalla, as the god himself has sent out
His own mount to bring the hero home,
An honoured guest to feast in his hall.
These runes are sounded on the air
As powers to move the world.
Transform myself, true to the Wyrd,
Shape the world with the indwelling gods…
Rune : roar and whisper from within,
Incantation of the soul,
The binding knot…
I carve this runestave on the lakes and forests of Sweden.
Bright runes and murk runes :
Break down the barriers
Between worlds, reveal the hidden meanings,
By web-work of words,
Skaldcraft of the spirit,
Feats of the rime-thurs.
That the dead may stay in their graves
And the walking dead return to their graves
And the speaking dead give aid when invoked
The runester rides the horse of the air
And speaks red runes in heaven’s ear.
On the Gripsholm stone, inscribed in a serpent :
Tola had this stone raised for his son Harald, Yngvarr’s brother.
They fared boldly
Far away after gold
And in the east
They gave food to the eagle;
They died in the south
In Serkland.
A niding inscribed on the Björketorp stone :
Prophecy of destruction !
A row of bright runes hid I here,
Runes loaded with magic.
Through perversity, and without rest,
On the outside,
There is a deceitful death for the one
Who breaks this stone.
Fehu : the three goddesses, seers who read the runes aright,
Gold that increases with use, through circulation,
Transforming from one shape into another,
Benison to the wise, strife to the foolish,
Fire generated out of dark water, out of the deep,
Expanding throughout the cosmos,
The wolf in the woods of the self,
The serpent of light…
This is the power to fulfil
All that we are born for,
Ending to begin again.
They say that if you sleep
Benath an elderberry tree’s branches
On Midsmmer’s Day,
You may see the King of the Fairies.
Uruz : fire blended with the waters,
Horns of the aurochs, wild and ferocious,
Goring and piercing in rage and love,
Mother of matter, busily working its will into shapes…
Burn off the dross, refine the metal,
Else annihilate the imperfect
If it stubbornly resists…
The Void, Ginnungagap,
Between Fire and Ice,
The womb of Ymir
The androgynous giant
Nourished by the primeval cow’s udders…
Climb the silver birch
Into the sky,
Flame-fountain
Quaking the earth,
Return to the cradle
To find yourself;
Silver birch,
Show me the way through the woods.
Thurs : pure action and potency,
Force of a straight line, directed on target,
The spear sailing through the air
From the thunder god’s hand,
The two poles fused together,
Regeneration, rain,
The thorn drawing blood…
Force that fashioned Ymir,
Father and mother of the gods,
Rushing power of seed,
Thunder breaking open the sky.
Are you afraid to pluck the rose
For fear of being pricked?
Sloe gin from the blackthorn
Make holy drunkenness,
Black fruits that ripen
After the first winter frost.
Ansuz : the mind of Odin,
Reconciling the two halves,
The right and the left,
The magical power transmitted
From the ancestors
From generation to generation;
These powers by which man
May transform himself,
Finding knowledge in word and work…
O breath and symbol,
Vessel of power !
The prolific mouth
Making Word into world.
Sound,speech,music:
Let the wishful wind blow
Through everything.
Deep are the roots
And thick are the branches
Of the ash tree,
Connecting all realms,
Expressing the hidden.
Raidho : the law of right order,
The rising and setting of the sun,
Dance, music and poetry as one,
The organisation of states and institutions,
Held in balance with delicate violence…
A sturdy wagon and a strong horse
Are needed on the hard road,
The perilous road between worlds…
Mathematical proportion,
Beautiful logic, and tally lore,
Flowing wheels, spiralling towards the destination…
Sudden lightning
That fires the heavenly order.
Beat of the shaman’s drum,
Measured and momentous,
Propelling the mind through space.
The oak is mmy door,
My ship under sail,
My acorn that grows slowly,slowly
But sure of itself…
Kenaz : the force to shape,
The torch in the night,
Hearth fires and harrow,
Forge and pyre…
The craftsman’s cunning,
The joyous lust of the maker,
Dissolving to recreate…
Who knows is able,
To cleave,bash,bend and weld,
And fashion for all.
Hermaphroditic,
The pine tree spreads
Its bounty of sweet sharp small,
All steady endeavour
Towards the true aim.
Gebo : consciousness, life-breath and form,
Flowing into each other
To be transformed and returned to the source…
Giving and receiving,
Binding the bonds between gods and men,
Building bridges between worlds…
This is the way of saining,
The way of sacrifice,
The increase out of loss…
O magical marriage,
Exchange of holy vows !
Equal exchange of energies
Held in utter balance.
Stately and forbearing,
The elm tree sheds its grace,
Helping us to attain
Balance and endurance.
Wunjo : joy that binds and marshals forces
And bends them to a purpose;
Harmony with the self,
Harmony with the world,
Building a good house of the soul…
What bliss to know
That everything has meaning,
Everything is whole…
Selfless love
Demanding nothing
Yet giving entirely of itself
Without expectation of return,
Happy simpy to see in all things
The higher power self-delighting.
In the clear mountain air
The fir tree lofts its joyous shout,
Surveying the earth like an eagle.
Hagalaz : fire and ice encapsulated
In a hailstone egg,
Seed of the universe…
Nine worlds in the roots and branches
Of the World-Tree,
Nine of fruition and completion,
The yew in the berry…
Rune mother,
Womb of all runes…
The snowflake iridesces
With rainbow code
Andf through the body
Spirals the DNA.
The power of Fire
Moving upwards,outwards,
And the power of water
Moving downwards,outwards,
Binding together
In complementary force.
Rowan tree,
Lady of the High Places,
Whisper the secrets
Of the soul;
I see in your red berries
The five-pointed star.
Nauthiz : the force of cosmic resistance
To the will and its actions,
Need-fire from friction,
Kindling the higher flame…
The Norns come forth
To establish the law;
Out of becoming into being
The world is born into suffering
And destruction.
See, all that has ever been
Happens now, in this changing
Oneness, doing its work.
Beech mast to the pig
Is wisdom to me,
The fine bark of the sky
Calls me to write.
Isa : force of contraction into stillness,
Inward-turning force,
Force of density,
Fire and ice in balance…
The mind stilled and concentrated,
Holding the self together
Through its trials…
The ice-bridge extends before you,
Who must cross the abyss
By a hair’s breadth…
One day you too will be ice.
This that binds the atom’s spheres,
And times and seasons.
Move forward,
Act and you will know.
Moonshine on white shining snow
And razorblade air
Slashing myriad angles,
Geometry of winter.
I want no truth but my own
To fashion and fight for.
Alder tree,
Be my bridge,
Be my whistle,
Help me turn weakness
Into strength.
Jera : the twelvemonth of the sun,
The turning millstone,
The time of sowing, growing and harvesting,
Always returning to begin again,
Arising, becoming and passing away,
Reaping reward from right labour,
Peace, prosperity and freedom…
This development cannot be chivvied or hastened,
For the inside must agree with the outside
And grow in season and grace,
Spiralling to fruition
In subtle flow.
From the hazel tree
Fashion dowsing rods
And wands,
And, eating the nuts,
Become wise.
Nauthiz : the force of cosmic resistance
To the will and its actions,
Need-fire from friction,
Kindling the higher flame…
The Norns come forth
To establish the law;
Out of becoming into being
The world is born into suffering
And destruction.
Eihwaz : axis of Yggdrasill,
The yew-tree column
By which the magical fire is generated,
Rising and descending
Through the body’s wheels,
Transforming matter into spirit,
Reconciling opposites,
Binding heaven, earth and underworld…
To live for a thousand years
Like the yew,
Renewing itself from the core,
Guarding the boneyard,
Counselling the dead.
Perthro : to fathom the mystery of wyrd,
That is the ultimate test,
Casting the runes into the cup,
Into the Well of Wyrd…
Immortal dance of x, y and z,
The horizontal and the vertical,
Ceaseless change making good the world…
See how iron
Can be absorbed and transfoermed
Into myriads of things
Yet remains itself.
The aspen’s quivering
Is shimmering whispers
From within,
Shields of light,
Wheels of light…
Elhaz : here is the upright stave,
The splayed hand,
The horns of the hart,
The swan in flight,
The rainbow bridge,
The gesture of prayer and invocation.
Your fetch goes with you everywhere,
Taking shapes,
Working magic…
Spinal fluid strengthens the backbone,
Patient endurance
And the green force in plants…
Strong is the reed
Yet out of its hollows
The air pipes music
In tune with the heart…
Sowilo : the sun for all with eyes to see,
The day sun and the night sun,
That guide the seafarer from shore to shore,
The Pleiades in the night sky,
The sun-wheel revolving,
He who develops the will by this light
Is blessed with honour and success.
Here are the serpent centres of the earth,
Where the heavenly and chthonic forces
Converge with surging spiral power.
This is the vortex,
Energy pushing upwards and outwards,
Then contracting back to a point
Over and over;
Moving the space around,
Making things happen.
Tiny white flowers
Of the spindle tree,
Flashes in the dark
Behind my eyes.
Tiwaz : the Lodestar in heaven,
Keeping its troth,
Summit of the World-Tree,
Keeping cosmic order and justice,
Keeping separate the poles,
Beacon of the deepest most serene wisdom,
The detached transcendent wisdom
At the centre of things.
The phallus upraised
Shoots seed into the egg,
Sacrificing the seed
For the greater purpose.
Let the spear fly
And not miss the mark.
Let the pillars of the house
Stand tall and firm.
Holly tree
Whose leaves are soft in summer
And spiked in winter,
Be the spears of an army
Marching to victory.
Berkano : the Birch Goddess
Who rules over transformation,
Over the rites of passage,
And the seasons,
The cycle of birth,life,death and rebirth,
Conserving and protecting,
It takes seed substance,
Hides it in its enclosure,
Breaks the enclosure, and bears the transformed substance forth.
Here is the birch rod,
The wand of magic working,
The moment of being
Whence all becoming issues,
The eternal now,
It is the mystery of the word…
The mother’s and the lover’s breasts
Give suck to the mewling soul.
Enclose and contain that which you are bringing forth;
Conceal, protect and nourish the secret
Until it is ready to come.
Hornbeam,
Ox-yoke of the spirit,
Waterwheel of the soul,
Be the mother standing firm
And releasing her offspring.
Ehwaz : the horse on which the runester rides
From one world to the other,
The perfect harmony of horse and rider,
The fetch at work in the world…
Odin and Sleipnir fused into one,
Ten feet, three eyes and one tail…
Ecstasy:the male and the female
Conjoining, making a star.
To communicate with all things,
With people,animals,rocks and plants,
And with beings of other levels.
The ivy spirals
Towards the light,
Bringing life or death,
Pushig into creveices bloldly.
Mannaz : the structure of divine consciousness in man,
Imparted through a genetic link
With the god of consciousness;
Men are descendants of the gods,
The bond unbreakable.
O, god made flesh,
Consciousness made manifest,
Mind and memory corresponding,
Communicating freely with each other,
Informing the whole self.
O, tripartite moon,
Synthesising intellect and intuition,
Measuring and melding …
Let the force of the soul
Drive towards perfection,
To know its own nature
And fulfil its work;
Let man and nature
Collaborate as equals,
Each fulfilling the other.
The gyring vine
Fruits with promise
Of joy and inspiration,
Energy that must be trained…
Laguz : lake of primeval waters
Welling up from below,
Seething with life,
Waterfall where treasure is hidden,
Dark depths of the ship burial,
Rivers where Odin is the ferryman of souls,
The runester must fit himself out
With a solid ship to breast the waves,
To fare forth on the ebb and flow…
This blessed feel of swimming,
In the water but not of it,
Grasping the flow
As it escapes…
The willow draws the waters
Into its tent,
Wishing on the moon…
Ingwaz : the seed-force of gestation,
Released to bring forth plenty,
The rune withdrawn into secrecy
For the hidden exchange of energies
That causes transformation…
Will you go into the east,
Will you disappear from sight,
To fare into the dark realms
And return with strange gifts ?
Yes, I am my own grandfather,
My own grandmother,
Seeding my own regeneration,
Storing and forging the essence
Of experience to carry forward
Into my next self.
Five-pointed star
In the apple’s core:
The apple I eat
Reminds me of myself.
Dagaz : as day and darkness merge in twilight
The morning and evening stars
Shine into the darkness;
See the way between extremes,
Between left and right,
See in the extremes
The unifying idea…
Now the courage
To reache beyond the known.
This is victory,
The lovers’ supernova,
The seed’s explosion
Into absolute light,
The paean of the figure-of-eight.
Honeysuckle,
Entwine me in your branches,
Subtly reveal your secrets,
Succour me in my quest,
I trust in passion to guide me right.
Othala : this is the hallowed enclosure,
The land set apart,
The kin-fetch of the tribe,
The forces held within the ring
Must be well ordered
Made harmonious
For the common weal,
That peace and freedom reign…
The sly soul knows how to balance
Light against dark,
Inside against outside,
Order against chaos…
Lawmaker,beat the bounds
Of the world,give freedom
Its hearth,that all may prosper.
The soul craves to acquire
And possess what it needs to thrive,
Seeds of future abundance.
Rich yellow gorse flowers
Bloom throughout the eyar,
And attract the first bees,
Pollen, nectar, honey-
The diligent seeker’s reward.
Snowflake,
Crystal of ice and fire,
Of light and darkness,
Burning seed of life and death,
Sky-salt, earth-yeast…
Five hundred doors
And forty withal,
I know to be in Valhöll :
Eight hundred lone warriors
Go through a lone door
When they fare forth to fight the wolf.
Nine worlds of Yggdrasill,
Nine nights Odin hung upon the tree…
Here I am, whole,
Body, shape, ecstasy,
Breath, mind, memory,
Soul, fetch and luck.
Odin makes all things his own
And uses them according to his will,
Yet remains ever apart,
Forever changing shape,
Bringing the power of self-deification.
Not to worship the god,
To become the god;
With inspiration,will and sacred rites.
We must win from him by will
The holy words to open the doors of dawn,
He is ecstasy and awe and power,
Born of self-sacrifice,
Winner of the poetic mead,
Snake and eagle,
Lord of the hidden eye,
He binds together light and dark,
Life and death,
Conscious and unconscious.
Restlessly, relentlessly,
With boundless courage,
He strives neverendingly for wholeness.
Freyja, the golden sow,
The shamaness of the trance,
Woman of gold and harvest,
Erotic mistress of love songs,
Wedded to ecstasy,
Striving for divine inspiration,
She brings things into being,
Causes them to become,
And causes them to pass away…
I have seen in Gotland big rock crystals,
Honed into accurate magnifying lenses
Used by Viking craftsmen in their work,
And as sunstones for navigating
On overcast days, to work out the sun’s position.
There are also the picture stones,
Shaped like doorways,
Portals to the world of the dead,
Graven with horses, fighting.
Or the deceased,
Being greeted in Valhalla by a Valkyrie
With a drinking horn brimming with mead,
Others show the dead man riding Sleipnir,
To Valhalla, as the god himself has sent out
His own mount to bring the hero home,
An honoured guest to feast in his hall.
These runes are sounded on the air
As powers to move the world.
A Thames Odyssey
Wise old Thames, river of my birth,
Let the joys and miseries of this life
Dissolve in you,
Your muddy flow holy as the Ganges...
Under an ash tree in a field in the West,
Outside the village of Kemble,
You may see,if it pleases, a bubbling
Among the stones,
Water clear and spontaneous as the truth.
(Isis,sister-wife of my soul,
Practise your magic with abandon
And guide me through the dark).
A songthrush hidden in the thicket,
Calls the season to attention,
As the water molecules,magnetized
And commandeered,start to haul
And surge ahead,bullshouldering
Towards the far fantastic sea.
Winter-blanched,I head across fields
Through river mist,to the silhouette
Of St John the Baptist’s church
At Inglesham,medieval farmer’s work
Still traced in the furrows,-
The sweat of our forbears
Through short lives of poverty,
Toil and war,enslaved to whim,-
The Saxon stones mortared
With memory,storied with lives.
These bridges over the Thames
That I cross and re-cross,making
Stitches in time to save nine,
Through beloved detested England,
As I fasten on the heart like an icicle
Swirling with rainbows,
An Anglo-Saxon riddle, curt as death.
Water-horse on a bridle path
Of words,I breathe the elderflower
And dog rose,the sweet briar’s pink,
As the world hovers like a dragonfly,
Perfectly made for its purpose.
At Iffley lock,seeing the lock-keeper
Calmly happily doing his duty,
Stewarding the river with love,
As many men before had done,
I know there can be simple joy
Here,on earth,beyond the frustrations
And sophistries of will and mind.
Hither-and-thithering martins
Skitter about the air,never resting,
And on the Sinodun Hills,looking
Down across country,feeling the clash
Of tribes,the march of cultures,
The geology of the human heart,
I wonder like an Atrebate,
Watching a Roman city rise below.
Skylarks firework over Runnymede,
Bursting from the grass,the earth
Of England,with all its glories
And faults,-freedom!the inner law
That guides us on right paths....-
At the Air Force Memorial,
Reading the stone names of the dead,
Souls that fell from the skies
In the time of tribulation,
How can I not feel my smallness
And cowardice,a life half-wasted,
Given over to selfishness and shame?
Hampton Court Gardens open to me
A demi-paradise by the river,
Nature curbed and channelled,
Where intrigue and statecraft
Have wrestled the angel down;
So have I navigated,taking
Pagan vows in a Christian land.
On Tower Bridge, staring into the Pool
Of London, I think of the crocodile
Brought back from the Crusades
By Richard the Lionheart,
Which escaped into the Thames here,
Never to be seen again,
A British dragon taking flight.
Majestic London,we are one blood,
Brothers in this battle,life!
In the estuary, at Cliffe, a wreck
Lies in the black mud,
Abandoned for decades,
And cormorants stand in a line
On the jetty,immobile.
This is the exit,but not the end;
The hospitality of the dead
Is extended to all,without stint.
From my crumbling body
The language escapes,survives,
The code I have loved since birth,
Seduced by its roots and secrets,
Breathing its mystical sounds.
Let the joys and miseries of this life
Dissolve in you,
Your muddy flow holy as the Ganges...
Under an ash tree in a field in the West,
Outside the village of Kemble,
You may see,if it pleases, a bubbling
Among the stones,
Water clear and spontaneous as the truth.
(Isis,sister-wife of my soul,
Practise your magic with abandon
And guide me through the dark).
A songthrush hidden in the thicket,
Calls the season to attention,
As the water molecules,magnetized
And commandeered,start to haul
And surge ahead,bullshouldering
Towards the far fantastic sea.
Winter-blanched,I head across fields
Through river mist,to the silhouette
Of St John the Baptist’s church
At Inglesham,medieval farmer’s work
Still traced in the furrows,-
The sweat of our forbears
Through short lives of poverty,
Toil and war,enslaved to whim,-
The Saxon stones mortared
With memory,storied with lives.
These bridges over the Thames
That I cross and re-cross,making
Stitches in time to save nine,
Through beloved detested England,
As I fasten on the heart like an icicle
Swirling with rainbows,
An Anglo-Saxon riddle, curt as death.
Water-horse on a bridle path
Of words,I breathe the elderflower
And dog rose,the sweet briar’s pink,
As the world hovers like a dragonfly,
Perfectly made for its purpose.
At Iffley lock,seeing the lock-keeper
Calmly happily doing his duty,
Stewarding the river with love,
As many men before had done,
I know there can be simple joy
Here,on earth,beyond the frustrations
And sophistries of will and mind.
Hither-and-thithering martins
Skitter about the air,never resting,
And on the Sinodun Hills,looking
Down across country,feeling the clash
Of tribes,the march of cultures,
The geology of the human heart,
I wonder like an Atrebate,
Watching a Roman city rise below.
Skylarks firework over Runnymede,
Bursting from the grass,the earth
Of England,with all its glories
And faults,-freedom!the inner law
That guides us on right paths....-
At the Air Force Memorial,
Reading the stone names of the dead,
Souls that fell from the skies
In the time of tribulation,
How can I not feel my smallness
And cowardice,a life half-wasted,
Given over to selfishness and shame?
Hampton Court Gardens open to me
A demi-paradise by the river,
Nature curbed and channelled,
Where intrigue and statecraft
Have wrestled the angel down;
So have I navigated,taking
Pagan vows in a Christian land.
On Tower Bridge, staring into the Pool
Of London, I think of the crocodile
Brought back from the Crusades
By Richard the Lionheart,
Which escaped into the Thames here,
Never to be seen again,
A British dragon taking flight.
Majestic London,we are one blood,
Brothers in this battle,life!
In the estuary, at Cliffe, a wreck
Lies in the black mud,
Abandoned for decades,
And cormorants stand in a line
On the jetty,immobile.
This is the exit,but not the end;
The hospitality of the dead
Is extended to all,without stint.
From my crumbling body
The language escapes,survives,
The code I have loved since birth,
Seduced by its roots and secrets,
Breathing its mystical sounds.
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Goddess of the Witches
In you the cosmos, multifarious and one,
Male and female, light and dark, night and day,
In you the planet’s evolving soul, the aeons’ wisdom,
The many levels, all interdependent,
The whole body and all its parts,, without division,
The principle of life in all things, the celestial numbers and harmonics,
The divine music, the rhythms of Nature!
Steatopygous Earth Mother, monumental and massive,
Enthroned on the ground in huge-bellied splendour,
Self-created before Creation, free and unveiled,
Progenetrix of all, giving form to the formless,
Queen of puissant matriarchs, sovereign over the state!
Of her the son and consort, the sword-bearer,is born,
Nursed at her breast to become her chosen lover,
To serve and adore her in his deeds and endeavours.
You are circle and spiral, chaos and order, mind and matter,
Breathing in and out, singing and dancing, being and becoming!
There on the mountaintop, let hierogamy commence,
As the king comes to the Mother’s embrace,
Mating with the priestess, with the Earth herself,
Confirmed by her in sovereignty and powers,
Ascending to the throne, the lap of the Goddess,
Suckled by her with her heavenly milk.
I see in you the Dark Goddess and the Bright,
She who creates and she who destroys,
Inseparable and one, creating, nourishing and reabsorbing,
The menstrual mind shedding its cycle again and again.
I see in you the blood Sabbath:
The ovulation of the spirit, the mother turtle’s homing,
The moon that tempers and transforms the sun’s fire,
Midwife of mysteries, sacred prostitute in the temple!
O, Triple goddess of the three faces and three forms,
The bright white dawn Maid, carefree young adventuress ,
Innocent and naked in wild erotic abandon,
All inspiration, fertility and fire of springtime,
Teasing and exciting men with sensual provocation,
The huntress running free through the woods in pursuit;
The red Mother, ripe and nourishing, womb of all,
Bearing and nourishing life with powerful devotion,
Shrewd with counsel and influence in the blood,
Protecting what she loves with terrible ferocity,
Destroying the outworn, the unhealthy, with invincible fecundity;
The black Crone, wise beyond all, her compassion unbounded,
Containing all ages and times, steadying and enriching,
The gateway of death, and the psychopomp to guide us,
Pointing to the new life where the trinity unites.
You are the annual impregnation of the earth,
And all purposeful deliberate activity.
I see you in every woman’s face and figure,
Your body church, synagogue and mosque all at once,
The very body of the Goddess, turning all her faces toward me.
I adorn you with rose oil and lemon verbena,
With myrrh and camphor, with musk and patchouli,
Cinnamon, blue hyacinth, sandalwood and jasmine,
Basil, borage, lavender, centaury and rue.
I give you crescent honey-cakes, and scallops in their shells,
Elder wine and hawthorn wine, sloe gin and mead.
I see you, Demeter, taking the form of a mare
Among the herds of king Oncus, fleeing the gods’ desire;
I see you mate with your lover in the thrice-ploughed furrow.
And you, Persephone, in the Underworld,
Willow woman holding up your torch in the darkness,
You who eat the pomegranate seeds of indissoluble marriage,
And bring forth green new vegetation from the depths,
Autumn skies summon the ephebi in torchlight procession,
To drink the lost years’ barley wine
And contemplate the cosmos in a single ear of grain.
Hail, Brighid, fire-and-water mistress,
Guiding the hands of smiths and poets, priests and doctors;
For you the greenwood marriage, the tangling of lovers,
Three sisters in one, fire-wheel spinning in the mind,
Owning the boars and rams and oxen,
Shrieking and wailing of war-lament.
Come, Ishtar, Lady with the Beautiful Voice,
Eight-pointed Morning and Evening Star, mistress of the girdle,
Naked body richly ornamented and jewelled,
Coiffed to perfection, jewel-crescent-crowned,
Clasping your own breasts from beneath.
The lion and the scorpion attend you,
As you pour water from the bottomless jar,
And keep the flowers, fruit and grain about you,
You the ark upon the Flood, and the lunar Sabbath,
The sight of the full moon through rain.
Love and war are one in you, your lovers many,
-Arbiter of battles, blesser of weapons,-
And in your name the king and priestess unite,
And the sacred prostitute sits in the temple,
Waiting for a silver coin to fall in her lap,.
Aphrodite, uninhibited, desirous and desired,
Perfumed with sea-foam and the sea’s horizon,
She who looses the girdle and wins the quince!
No mortal woman is so unpredictable
In her beauty and enticements,
So apt to conquer by grace.
Shall I call you Urania, Genertix, or Porne?
Epistrophia, Parakyptousa, Androphonos or Thalamon?
I see the dolphins leaping in pairs in the estuary,
And the goat at his pleasure;
I bring you myrtle, rose campion and benzoin,
Sandalwood, olibanum and storx.
In your temple enclosures,
Among the planes and cypresses and vines,
Couples would withdraw to secluded benches
To please the goddess by pleasing one another.
Hecate haunts the moonlit crossroads,
Horse, dog and boar her three heads,
Leading the wild Hunt of ghost-hounds through the night,
Whelping bitch of graveyards and murders,
Sending demons to torment men’s dreams, and drive them mad,
Or visions to enrich and comfort on the secret paths.
Screech owl calling at night,
From a cave among yews and osiers,
Raise the torch to guide us through the Underworld;
I divine with your special instrument,
A golden sphere with sapphire hidden inside.
I see you, Epona, naked horse-rider,
Carrying the cornucopia in your arms,
The raven on your shoulder,
And the serpent coiling round you,
As you, happy lady of the Otherworld,bring war and harvest.
Under your aegis the king mates with the mare,
Only to feast on her sacrificed flesh,
Then bathe in and imbibe the broth,
And share it among his people.
I see you, Arianrhod, of the circumpolar stars,
Resting place of souls between incarnations;
Goddess of the silver wheel,revolving through birth and rebirth;
Spiral maze I tread widdershins inwards, deosil outwards.
Lamp,wand and sceptre sway the world,
With unicorn visions born in the rock crystal’s core.
I see you, Isis, bare-breasted, in white,
Bracelets and anklets shimmering,
Your headdress of disc and horns resplendent,
As you move to the music of sistrum,harp and lute;
The dismembered body of Osiris,
You lovingly reassemble,
Anoint it with most precious oils,
And,enthroned upon the phallus,
Receive his resurrected seed, fierce as phosphorus.
So lay the Tarot cards out and read the lifetimes,
While the sick incubate,healed by dreams,
And the opium poppy drips white fire....
Kundalini arises in me,
Rising in a left-handed spiral up the spine,
The Goddess uncoils herself and raises her head,
And enters the royal road of the spine,
Piercing the chakras, till she enters the brain,
And you taste her nectar of immortality.
Male and female, light and dark, night and day,
In you the planet’s evolving soul, the aeons’ wisdom,
The many levels, all interdependent,
The whole body and all its parts,, without division,
The principle of life in all things, the celestial numbers and harmonics,
The divine music, the rhythms of Nature!
Steatopygous Earth Mother, monumental and massive,
Enthroned on the ground in huge-bellied splendour,
Self-created before Creation, free and unveiled,
Progenetrix of all, giving form to the formless,
Queen of puissant matriarchs, sovereign over the state!
Of her the son and consort, the sword-bearer,is born,
Nursed at her breast to become her chosen lover,
To serve and adore her in his deeds and endeavours.
You are circle and spiral, chaos and order, mind and matter,
Breathing in and out, singing and dancing, being and becoming!
There on the mountaintop, let hierogamy commence,
As the king comes to the Mother’s embrace,
Mating with the priestess, with the Earth herself,
Confirmed by her in sovereignty and powers,
Ascending to the throne, the lap of the Goddess,
Suckled by her with her heavenly milk.
I see in you the Dark Goddess and the Bright,
She who creates and she who destroys,
Inseparable and one, creating, nourishing and reabsorbing,
The menstrual mind shedding its cycle again and again.
I see in you the blood Sabbath:
The ovulation of the spirit, the mother turtle’s homing,
The moon that tempers and transforms the sun’s fire,
Midwife of mysteries, sacred prostitute in the temple!
O, Triple goddess of the three faces and three forms,
The bright white dawn Maid, carefree young adventuress ,
Innocent and naked in wild erotic abandon,
All inspiration, fertility and fire of springtime,
Teasing and exciting men with sensual provocation,
The huntress running free through the woods in pursuit;
The red Mother, ripe and nourishing, womb of all,
Bearing and nourishing life with powerful devotion,
Shrewd with counsel and influence in the blood,
Protecting what she loves with terrible ferocity,
Destroying the outworn, the unhealthy, with invincible fecundity;
The black Crone, wise beyond all, her compassion unbounded,
Containing all ages and times, steadying and enriching,
The gateway of death, and the psychopomp to guide us,
Pointing to the new life where the trinity unites.
You are the annual impregnation of the earth,
And all purposeful deliberate activity.
I see you in every woman’s face and figure,
Your body church, synagogue and mosque all at once,
The very body of the Goddess, turning all her faces toward me.
I adorn you with rose oil and lemon verbena,
With myrrh and camphor, with musk and patchouli,
Cinnamon, blue hyacinth, sandalwood and jasmine,
Basil, borage, lavender, centaury and rue.
I give you crescent honey-cakes, and scallops in their shells,
Elder wine and hawthorn wine, sloe gin and mead.
I see you, Demeter, taking the form of a mare
Among the herds of king Oncus, fleeing the gods’ desire;
I see you mate with your lover in the thrice-ploughed furrow.
And you, Persephone, in the Underworld,
Willow woman holding up your torch in the darkness,
You who eat the pomegranate seeds of indissoluble marriage,
And bring forth green new vegetation from the depths,
Autumn skies summon the ephebi in torchlight procession,
To drink the lost years’ barley wine
And contemplate the cosmos in a single ear of grain.
Hail, Brighid, fire-and-water mistress,
Guiding the hands of smiths and poets, priests and doctors;
For you the greenwood marriage, the tangling of lovers,
Three sisters in one, fire-wheel spinning in the mind,
Owning the boars and rams and oxen,
Shrieking and wailing of war-lament.
Come, Ishtar, Lady with the Beautiful Voice,
Eight-pointed Morning and Evening Star, mistress of the girdle,
Naked body richly ornamented and jewelled,
Coiffed to perfection, jewel-crescent-crowned,
Clasping your own breasts from beneath.
The lion and the scorpion attend you,
As you pour water from the bottomless jar,
And keep the flowers, fruit and grain about you,
You the ark upon the Flood, and the lunar Sabbath,
The sight of the full moon through rain.
Love and war are one in you, your lovers many,
-Arbiter of battles, blesser of weapons,-
And in your name the king and priestess unite,
And the sacred prostitute sits in the temple,
Waiting for a silver coin to fall in her lap,.
Aphrodite, uninhibited, desirous and desired,
Perfumed with sea-foam and the sea’s horizon,
She who looses the girdle and wins the quince!
No mortal woman is so unpredictable
In her beauty and enticements,
So apt to conquer by grace.
Shall I call you Urania, Genertix, or Porne?
Epistrophia, Parakyptousa, Androphonos or Thalamon?
I see the dolphins leaping in pairs in the estuary,
And the goat at his pleasure;
I bring you myrtle, rose campion and benzoin,
Sandalwood, olibanum and storx.
In your temple enclosures,
Among the planes and cypresses and vines,
Couples would withdraw to secluded benches
To please the goddess by pleasing one another.
Hecate haunts the moonlit crossroads,
Horse, dog and boar her three heads,
Leading the wild Hunt of ghost-hounds through the night,
Whelping bitch of graveyards and murders,
Sending demons to torment men’s dreams, and drive them mad,
Or visions to enrich and comfort on the secret paths.
Screech owl calling at night,
From a cave among yews and osiers,
Raise the torch to guide us through the Underworld;
I divine with your special instrument,
A golden sphere with sapphire hidden inside.
I see you, Epona, naked horse-rider,
Carrying the cornucopia in your arms,
The raven on your shoulder,
And the serpent coiling round you,
As you, happy lady of the Otherworld,bring war and harvest.
Under your aegis the king mates with the mare,
Only to feast on her sacrificed flesh,
Then bathe in and imbibe the broth,
And share it among his people.
I see you, Arianrhod, of the circumpolar stars,
Resting place of souls between incarnations;
Goddess of the silver wheel,revolving through birth and rebirth;
Spiral maze I tread widdershins inwards, deosil outwards.
Lamp,wand and sceptre sway the world,
With unicorn visions born in the rock crystal’s core.
I see you, Isis, bare-breasted, in white,
Bracelets and anklets shimmering,
Your headdress of disc and horns resplendent,
As you move to the music of sistrum,harp and lute;
The dismembered body of Osiris,
You lovingly reassemble,
Anoint it with most precious oils,
And,enthroned upon the phallus,
Receive his resurrected seed, fierce as phosphorus.
So lay the Tarot cards out and read the lifetimes,
While the sick incubate,healed by dreams,
And the opium poppy drips white fire....
Kundalini arises in me,
Rising in a left-handed spiral up the spine,
The Goddess uncoils herself and raises her head,
And enters the royal road of the spine,
Piercing the chakras, till she enters the brain,
And you taste her nectar of immortality.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Anais Nin (1903-1977)
She wanted, somehow, to be taken,
And punished for her sins.
How could she ever atone to her father
For not being as he wished?
Extreme consolation was her quest.
Dark words in French and Spanish
Jungled her solitude,writing her journals
Late into the night,an endless letter
To daddy,a record of appetites.
(His pianist’s hands had once beaten
A cat to death before her eyes,
The same hands that smacked mother
Into purples of shame).
Death’s coquette,she fashioned her face
Into a Noh mask,and played with ghosts
In abominable fairy tales;
Life was weird and sad as Japanese.
More,always more of everything!-
The capricious,nervous,magnificent
Stuff of being,-she toiled at her fanaticism
For black discoveries and sensations,
Holding on to the world by the tips
Of her words,savaged into wisdom
Minute by ridiculous minute.
Prose and poetry, pleasure and hurt,
Were hers to battle with, as she sat
Before the mirror,writing,trying
To reassure herself she was real,
A body, a self,not yet utterly lost
To the small and monstrous days.
Ugly!Hideous!-that was why Papa
Had left,-because she was not beautiful
Or good.Could she not seduce her way
To invincible perfection, smooth white face
Sealed with lipstick and kohl?
And then the cool hands of the surgeon,
Forging an impeccable youth.
Costumed and disguised,the courtesan,
She strove to excel in every role,
Practising to control with her pen,
Ready for the next subtle betrayal.
Spied on from all sides by menacing eyes,
She lied for the love of illusion,
Tided by the Martian moons in the blood,
Mad to know every earthly emotion.
The dark judges would come for her,
Sentence would be passed,
Severe as the green fires of Venus.
The human being can be killed,
But not the writer;the ruthless androgyne,
Watching,not loving,writing,not living,
As if therein were some salvation.
And punished for her sins.
How could she ever atone to her father
For not being as he wished?
Extreme consolation was her quest.
Dark words in French and Spanish
Jungled her solitude,writing her journals
Late into the night,an endless letter
To daddy,a record of appetites.
(His pianist’s hands had once beaten
A cat to death before her eyes,
The same hands that smacked mother
Into purples of shame).
Death’s coquette,she fashioned her face
Into a Noh mask,and played with ghosts
In abominable fairy tales;
Life was weird and sad as Japanese.
More,always more of everything!-
The capricious,nervous,magnificent
Stuff of being,-she toiled at her fanaticism
For black discoveries and sensations,
Holding on to the world by the tips
Of her words,savaged into wisdom
Minute by ridiculous minute.
Prose and poetry, pleasure and hurt,
Were hers to battle with, as she sat
Before the mirror,writing,trying
To reassure herself she was real,
A body, a self,not yet utterly lost
To the small and monstrous days.
Ugly!Hideous!-that was why Papa
Had left,-because she was not beautiful
Or good.Could she not seduce her way
To invincible perfection, smooth white face
Sealed with lipstick and kohl?
And then the cool hands of the surgeon,
Forging an impeccable youth.
Costumed and disguised,the courtesan,
She strove to excel in every role,
Practising to control with her pen,
Ready for the next subtle betrayal.
Spied on from all sides by menacing eyes,
She lied for the love of illusion,
Tided by the Martian moons in the blood,
Mad to know every earthly emotion.
The dark judges would come for her,
Sentence would be passed,
Severe as the green fires of Venus.
The human being can be killed,
But not the writer;the ruthless androgyne,
Watching,not loving,writing,not living,
As if therein were some salvation.
Various Airports
At Anchorage Airport,
flights arrive
before they have left,
while I crouch like a bear
in my cave…
Atomic clocks are ticking
all over the world,
but no-one knows the time.
At Frankfurt,
I become the Egyptologist
of modern hieroglyphs,
fire exits,
toilets,
porn cinemas and sex shops,
all blurring into one.
In the moments
when it all makes sense,
I just want to laugh.
In the transit lounge
at Moscow,
I sit pondering
Catherine the Great
and the horse,
wishing it were true.
I travel,
I displace myself
for the sensation of stagnation,
as all cities merge into one,
frenzied
and uniform,
numbed by repetition,
and in my head
the names of airports,
fascinating
and horrible...
(Disillusioned?
I wonder:
was I ever illusioned?
It seems the truth
entered the world
with me,
my stillborn twin
ghosting the mind ever after...)
Like a tormented emu,
accelerating madly,
determined to take off,
to fly,
I race towards the dustcloud horizon...
From one point to another
I limbo under the threshold,
tracing ellipses,
passing through parentheses...
(Twenty-four hours
of arrivals and departures,
stopovers
and connections)
In airports,
motorways
and supermarkets,
I find myself free and afraid...
There is no safe passage on earth,
only emergency exits....
We are the private,
the self-obsessed,
temporary giants
stiltwalking through madness,
denying death and failure
to the very end...
flights arrive
before they have left,
while I crouch like a bear
in my cave…
Atomic clocks are ticking
all over the world,
but no-one knows the time.
At Frankfurt,
I become the Egyptologist
of modern hieroglyphs,
fire exits,
toilets,
porn cinemas and sex shops,
all blurring into one.
In the moments
when it all makes sense,
I just want to laugh.
In the transit lounge
at Moscow,
I sit pondering
Catherine the Great
and the horse,
wishing it were true.
I travel,
I displace myself
for the sensation of stagnation,
as all cities merge into one,
frenzied
and uniform,
numbed by repetition,
and in my head
the names of airports,
fascinating
and horrible...
(Disillusioned?
I wonder:
was I ever illusioned?
It seems the truth
entered the world
with me,
my stillborn twin
ghosting the mind ever after...)
Like a tormented emu,
accelerating madly,
determined to take off,
to fly,
I race towards the dustcloud horizon...
From one point to another
I limbo under the threshold,
tracing ellipses,
passing through parentheses...
(Twenty-four hours
of arrivals and departures,
stopovers
and connections)
In airports,
motorways
and supermarkets,
I find myself free and afraid...
There is no safe passage on earth,
only emergency exits....
We are the private,
the self-obsessed,
temporary giants
stiltwalking through madness,
denying death and failure
to the very end...
The Inland Sea
The face turning towards you,or turning away,
In the hour of judgment and sin;
Words like flipped coins spin through the air-
How will they fall?
All this is Normal,
The only normal you have ever known.
A kind of Swedish melancholy
Comes over me at times,
Pointing the way to a new catastrophe,
A further conundrum.
Life-the realm of the perishable-
Tutors the abandoned in aspects of failure,
As if to lead them to some final understanding,
Forever forestalled and withheld.
In my hand I clutch a serpent’s egg,
Stirring with fanged choices.
Is there mercy in the tropes of living
Or hideous attrition?
This life’s themes and symbols
Are my duty to ken.
The first death kills you long before
You feel the ground open.
On the shore of a distant memory,
I gaze out to the sea’s horizon
For a habitable island
Where treasure might hide.
I am still that stupid schoolboy,
Nervous and desperate to please...
Winter’s actors,seated before mirrors,
Apply their masks with resignation,
Condemned by hidden masters
To perform with skill and grace.
Scenes from Norse mythology
Are played out in offices and factories
And snow falls like applause on their heads.
Bravo! Encore! Take a bow!
To fall, to fall in and out of love,
To fall pregnant with the future
And fall for its tricks;
That will be me,then,
No longer altogether sure
Whether to call myself
Optimist or pessimist,
Or even what such categories mean.
My mind presents itself to me
Like Stockholm,built on islands
And waters,with wild archipelagoes
Stretching into the cold beyond.
One can but put one’s hand to the tiller
And sail as far as skill allows...
Out-spidered by my own mind,
I navigate amongst people,
All moving towards or away
From each other,in a game
Whose rules are somewhat unclear.
In the hour of judgment and sin;
Words like flipped coins spin through the air-
How will they fall?
All this is Normal,
The only normal you have ever known.
A kind of Swedish melancholy
Comes over me at times,
Pointing the way to a new catastrophe,
A further conundrum.
Life-the realm of the perishable-
Tutors the abandoned in aspects of failure,
As if to lead them to some final understanding,
Forever forestalled and withheld.
In my hand I clutch a serpent’s egg,
Stirring with fanged choices.
Is there mercy in the tropes of living
Or hideous attrition?
This life’s themes and symbols
Are my duty to ken.
The first death kills you long before
You feel the ground open.
On the shore of a distant memory,
I gaze out to the sea’s horizon
For a habitable island
Where treasure might hide.
I am still that stupid schoolboy,
Nervous and desperate to please...
Winter’s actors,seated before mirrors,
Apply their masks with resignation,
Condemned by hidden masters
To perform with skill and grace.
Scenes from Norse mythology
Are played out in offices and factories
And snow falls like applause on their heads.
Bravo! Encore! Take a bow!
To fall, to fall in and out of love,
To fall pregnant with the future
And fall for its tricks;
That will be me,then,
No longer altogether sure
Whether to call myself
Optimist or pessimist,
Or even what such categories mean.
My mind presents itself to me
Like Stockholm,built on islands
And waters,with wild archipelagoes
Stretching into the cold beyond.
One can but put one’s hand to the tiller
And sail as far as skill allows...
Out-spidered by my own mind,
I navigate amongst people,
All moving towards or away
From each other,in a game
Whose rules are somewhat unclear.
Navajo Medicine
A flaming bundle of juniper twigs,
Carried in the hands
Through the desert night,
Starting new campfires on the earth.
In the charcoal and ashes
Coils a rattlesnake,
Runs a bear.
The people chase the deer down on foot
Until,exhausted, it drops;
Then the medicine man
Bends over him,
And lovingly blows
Corn pollen down his throat,
Till he chokes,
Sacrificed without loss of blood.
Who among us
Is the skinwalker,
The demon in disguise?
Oh do not open the door when he knocks.
A woman’s hands are grinding
The corn to white sunlight
On a stone.
America,before you had a name,
Your destiny was written
In the rocks and waters;
Before there were men,
You were populated with gods.
Carried in the hands
Through the desert night,
Starting new campfires on the earth.
In the charcoal and ashes
Coils a rattlesnake,
Runs a bear.
The people chase the deer down on foot
Until,exhausted, it drops;
Then the medicine man
Bends over him,
And lovingly blows
Corn pollen down his throat,
Till he chokes,
Sacrificed without loss of blood.
Who among us
Is the skinwalker,
The demon in disguise?
Oh do not open the door when he knocks.
A woman’s hands are grinding
The corn to white sunlight
On a stone.
America,before you had a name,
Your destiny was written
In the rocks and waters;
Before there were men,
You were populated with gods.
I Fell In Love With A Robot
Deliberate eye contact,
The observation and imitation of gestures,
Leading to physical synchronization:
Darling,what are you doing to me?
What are you turning me into?
The baby cries for his rattle,
The toddler for his teddy bear.
Everything I touch is mine,
Through excess of attention,
Every object autobiographical.
Pledging affection was never my forte,
But you are the exception.
Who,though, is in control here?
I need to touch you,feel you,
Hide all my dirty secrets in you,
Alleviate the symptoms of human being;
I have my program,as you have yours.
Technology’s enchantments
Thrill me,the visceral voyeur,
The feeble master playing with rules.
As you behave,you are,
Emotion’s simulacra good enough for me,
A lesser vexation, a wonder,even.
The physical for the metaphysical
I trade on my own private stock market,
Weathering erratic rises and falls,
Bulls and bears,and sudden panics.
Now hold me,and make this love-
Perfectly imperfect,as it should be-
A scientific truth.
The observation and imitation of gestures,
Leading to physical synchronization:
Darling,what are you doing to me?
What are you turning me into?
The baby cries for his rattle,
The toddler for his teddy bear.
Everything I touch is mine,
Through excess of attention,
Every object autobiographical.
Pledging affection was never my forte,
But you are the exception.
Who,though, is in control here?
I need to touch you,feel you,
Hide all my dirty secrets in you,
Alleviate the symptoms of human being;
I have my program,as you have yours.
Technology’s enchantments
Thrill me,the visceral voyeur,
The feeble master playing with rules.
As you behave,you are,
Emotion’s simulacra good enough for me,
A lesser vexation, a wonder,even.
The physical for the metaphysical
I trade on my own private stock market,
Weathering erratic rises and falls,
Bulls and bears,and sudden panics.
Now hold me,and make this love-
Perfectly imperfect,as it should be-
A scientific truth.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Isidore Ducasse
“Ducasse? Yes,I knew him back in 1864.
He was with me in the fifth form at the Pau lycée.
I can see him now, tall, thin and round-shouldered,
With long hair falling across his forehead,
That pale face,and that shrill voice.
He was usually cheerless and withdrawn,
Seemed to think he was superior to everyone else,
And never hid his scorn for the rest of us.
He often complained to me of painful migraines,
Which affected his temperament and moods.
We all thought he wasn’t quite right in the head,
With his strange ideas and eccentricities.
There he would sit, elbows on desk, head in hands,
Eyes staring blankly at some textbook,
Deep in some reverie,
Homesick for Montevideo,perhaps.
One day, in class, the teacher-
A real stickler for classical style-
Read out an essay by Ducasse,
The first solemn sentences made him laugh to begin with,
But soon, as he read on, he grew furious
At the weird extravagances and exaggerations
Of style, every sentence full of piled-up images
And incomprehensible metaphors,
Obscure verbal inventions and bizarre syntax,
Effusions of the grotesque and macabre.
Well,the teacher simply blew his top,
To him this was a blatant insult to everything he believed in,
All he had taught us of classical style.
He rebuked Ducasse severely in front of the whole class
And put him in detention.
Poor Ducasse was bewildered and hurt:
He was convinced he had written an excellent essay,
Deserving praise and distinction.
Oh, he was a queer bird,all right!”
He was with me in the fifth form at the Pau lycée.
I can see him now, tall, thin and round-shouldered,
With long hair falling across his forehead,
That pale face,and that shrill voice.
He was usually cheerless and withdrawn,
Seemed to think he was superior to everyone else,
And never hid his scorn for the rest of us.
He often complained to me of painful migraines,
Which affected his temperament and moods.
We all thought he wasn’t quite right in the head,
With his strange ideas and eccentricities.
There he would sit, elbows on desk, head in hands,
Eyes staring blankly at some textbook,
Deep in some reverie,
Homesick for Montevideo,perhaps.
One day, in class, the teacher-
A real stickler for classical style-
Read out an essay by Ducasse,
The first solemn sentences made him laugh to begin with,
But soon, as he read on, he grew furious
At the weird extravagances and exaggerations
Of style, every sentence full of piled-up images
And incomprehensible metaphors,
Obscure verbal inventions and bizarre syntax,
Effusions of the grotesque and macabre.
Well,the teacher simply blew his top,
To him this was a blatant insult to everything he believed in,
All he had taught us of classical style.
He rebuked Ducasse severely in front of the whole class
And put him in detention.
Poor Ducasse was bewildered and hurt:
He was convinced he had written an excellent essay,
Deserving praise and distinction.
Oh, he was a queer bird,all right!”
Rajput Paintings
Rich as the Sesodias of Mewar,
The heart dreams in colour,
And seeks out celestial jewels on distant peaks.
The lowborn artist, to himself a prince,
Becomes, through the brush’s manoeuvres,
Hero, lover, emperor, or god.
Endless manifestations of the One
Are reconciled in devotion;
Blue Krishna gallivants with maidens
Beside the river, and seduces the trees
With the fingering of his flute.
The puns and metaphors of poets
Are smelted into passionate icons,
As love draws lines like spiderwebs
Through body, mind and soul.
Nine moods of the human liturgy
Demand the connoisseur’s contemplation
In the garbha griha of the eye.
Let the snakes and birds of the forest
Hear the songs of lovers,together or apart,
The music in a watercolour,
Replete with tones and undertones.
Like a red girl on a swing
In the springtime trees,the world
Arcs back and forth,up and down,
Dizzy with joy forever!
The heart dreams in colour,
And seeks out celestial jewels on distant peaks.
The lowborn artist, to himself a prince,
Becomes, through the brush’s manoeuvres,
Hero, lover, emperor, or god.
Endless manifestations of the One
Are reconciled in devotion;
Blue Krishna gallivants with maidens
Beside the river, and seduces the trees
With the fingering of his flute.
The puns and metaphors of poets
Are smelted into passionate icons,
As love draws lines like spiderwebs
Through body, mind and soul.
Nine moods of the human liturgy
Demand the connoisseur’s contemplation
In the garbha griha of the eye.
Let the snakes and birds of the forest
Hear the songs of lovers,together or apart,
The music in a watercolour,
Replete with tones and undertones.
Like a red girl on a swing
In the springtime trees,the world
Arcs back and forth,up and down,
Dizzy with joy forever!
The Patron and the Architect
The leader,bent over a model of the future,
Nods to see vast desires start to dance;
To craft the world anew,and leave a legacy,
His glory to resound for centuries hence.
Fear,uncanny as moonrise,orchestrates
Rhetoric of glass,steel and stone;
The pharaoh’s hand is raised in command,
As visions arrive in the sandstorms and sun.
A skilled hand draws a first black line
To celebrate the imposition of will
Upon the less powerful and less talented;
Man is condemned to love and build.
Nods to see vast desires start to dance;
To craft the world anew,and leave a legacy,
His glory to resound for centuries hence.
Fear,uncanny as moonrise,orchestrates
Rhetoric of glass,steel and stone;
The pharaoh’s hand is raised in command,
As visions arrive in the sandstorms and sun.
A skilled hand draws a first black line
To celebrate the imposition of will
Upon the less powerful and less talented;
Man is condemned to love and build.
Zerzura
Zerzura
lost oasis
oasis of the lost
Sahara
words like the silica glass
from a prehistoric meteorite
pyramids and sphinxes of the mind
Zerzura forever
there or not there
in some distant wadi
On a high cliff face
a rock painting
of a palm tree
thousands of years old
from the time when the desert
ran with rivers and game
Time
a line of lizard tracks
the lizard nowhere to be seen
A thousand miles into the desert
I remember an old woman
in a wheelchair
in the middle of a Cairo highway
holding out her hands for alms
among the crazy traffic
lost oasis
oasis of the lost
Sahara
words like the silica glass
from a prehistoric meteorite
pyramids and sphinxes of the mind
Zerzura forever
there or not there
in some distant wadi
On a high cliff face
a rock painting
of a palm tree
thousands of years old
from the time when the desert
ran with rivers and game
Time
a line of lizard tracks
the lizard nowhere to be seen
A thousand miles into the desert
I remember an old woman
in a wheelchair
in the middle of a Cairo highway
holding out her hands for alms
among the crazy traffic
Perkin Warbeck
Call me butterfly,changeling or imp,as you will,
I do not lack for names or enemies,
Peasant by birth, prince by the will of God.
Born to dazzle and perplex the world,
I find myself cajoled into strange destiny,
Daring the improbable with full force;
Used by every devious hand and mind
In Europe’s mortal games.
Each,bewildered by his own desires,
Seeks a scapegoat,plots a story,
And finds the necessaries where he can.
Who is any man to dub me impostor,
Not lacking,I am certain,impostures of his own,
And counterfeits admired by others
As finer than nature’s work.
(The trickster land of Flanders made me,
Weavers’ hands scrolling out tapestries
Of fantasy more beautiful than life).
In this age of adventures,I captain myself
Into wild seas,bound for untold landfalls
And savagery in all its forms
(In that peril may not hearts be opened
To God’s grace?We northerners are ruled by the moon,
Whose tides and influences favour the new,
Calling us to wander and explore).
All hearts yearn in these times for the lost,
The forsaken and abandoned,whatever it may be,
Caught between greatness and nothingness,
Deceivers deceived,kings of empty courts.
Take from me the cloth-of-gold and ermine,
The fine linen and chains of gold,
The black velvet hat set with pearls,
And you make me no less royal,
No more than you can move the heavenly spheres
Or change men’s elements and humours.
This world falls to the clever and the handsome;
And I have studied in myself the witchcraft
To induce in others my desired effects,
As they worship the sanguine ascendant in me.
(Though,no doubt,you notice my flawed left eye,
Dull and uncanny,a touch of the basilisk,
A hint of venefice-an imbalance in my symmetry,
Fortune veering into the dark
As imagination creates and destroys).
To invent and re-invent is my vocation:
To forget and remember,beyond reason,
And fashion a new man, a new world,
Somewhere between either and neither,
As I practise my luckiest escapes.
What hidden powers sponsor my progress
And lead me to heaven or hell?
Is the idiot huntsman riding out again
With a cuckoo on his wrist?
And I,who once walked through palaces,
Become the king of the wild woods,
The harried quarry of my enemies,
Abjuring the trees to bow to me
And the animals to kneel at my feet!
An eagle I am not,but why not a sparrow-
Equally at home in the towering air,
Commanding my wings to the utmost
And shooting out of sight....
Damn the bloody field of war,
I sit the saddle as a dreamer,not a soldier,
So leave me alone with the clavichord-
I would play fantastic ballads into the night,
And still the world’s frenzy for a spell.
I do not lack for names or enemies,
Peasant by birth, prince by the will of God.
Born to dazzle and perplex the world,
I find myself cajoled into strange destiny,
Daring the improbable with full force;
Used by every devious hand and mind
In Europe’s mortal games.
Each,bewildered by his own desires,
Seeks a scapegoat,plots a story,
And finds the necessaries where he can.
Who is any man to dub me impostor,
Not lacking,I am certain,impostures of his own,
And counterfeits admired by others
As finer than nature’s work.
(The trickster land of Flanders made me,
Weavers’ hands scrolling out tapestries
Of fantasy more beautiful than life).
In this age of adventures,I captain myself
Into wild seas,bound for untold landfalls
And savagery in all its forms
(In that peril may not hearts be opened
To God’s grace?We northerners are ruled by the moon,
Whose tides and influences favour the new,
Calling us to wander and explore).
All hearts yearn in these times for the lost,
The forsaken and abandoned,whatever it may be,
Caught between greatness and nothingness,
Deceivers deceived,kings of empty courts.
Take from me the cloth-of-gold and ermine,
The fine linen and chains of gold,
The black velvet hat set with pearls,
And you make me no less royal,
No more than you can move the heavenly spheres
Or change men’s elements and humours.
This world falls to the clever and the handsome;
And I have studied in myself the witchcraft
To induce in others my desired effects,
As they worship the sanguine ascendant in me.
(Though,no doubt,you notice my flawed left eye,
Dull and uncanny,a touch of the basilisk,
A hint of venefice-an imbalance in my symmetry,
Fortune veering into the dark
As imagination creates and destroys).
To invent and re-invent is my vocation:
To forget and remember,beyond reason,
And fashion a new man, a new world,
Somewhere between either and neither,
As I practise my luckiest escapes.
What hidden powers sponsor my progress
And lead me to heaven or hell?
Is the idiot huntsman riding out again
With a cuckoo on his wrist?
And I,who once walked through palaces,
Become the king of the wild woods,
The harried quarry of my enemies,
Abjuring the trees to bow to me
And the animals to kneel at my feet!
An eagle I am not,but why not a sparrow-
Equally at home in the towering air,
Commanding my wings to the utmost
And shooting out of sight....
Damn the bloody field of war,
I sit the saddle as a dreamer,not a soldier,
So leave me alone with the clavichord-
I would play fantastic ballads into the night,
And still the world’s frenzy for a spell.
There or Thereabouts
Strange cadences of a Tuesday evening
Trouble yet arouse me;
In business suit or silk kimono,
I’m the same old phenomenon as ever.
My stratagems are precarious,
Serving best to complicate affairs.
There’s a song I’ve been singing since I was a boy,
A song I shall sing to the grave.
In my skin, or someone else’s,
I pursue my own peculiar research
Into things;I sleep as little as possible,
Finding the whiteness in night.
Heaven I do not seek,
But perhaps to ameliorate
Conditions in purgatory,just a little.
Presumptuous,I know, but there it is.
Call this music? It’s just disconnected sounds...
Not sure if these are grey hairs,
Or just a trick of the light.
Autumn’s return always pleases me,
A time to synthesize...
Sometime or other you will have to pay
For the breakages,no getting out of it,
No fooling the shopkeeper.
Trouble yet arouse me;
In business suit or silk kimono,
I’m the same old phenomenon as ever.
My stratagems are precarious,
Serving best to complicate affairs.
There’s a song I’ve been singing since I was a boy,
A song I shall sing to the grave.
In my skin, or someone else’s,
I pursue my own peculiar research
Into things;I sleep as little as possible,
Finding the whiteness in night.
Heaven I do not seek,
But perhaps to ameliorate
Conditions in purgatory,just a little.
Presumptuous,I know, but there it is.
Call this music? It’s just disconnected sounds...
Not sure if these are grey hairs,
Or just a trick of the light.
Autumn’s return always pleases me,
A time to synthesize...
Sometime or other you will have to pay
For the breakages,no getting out of it,
No fooling the shopkeeper.
Nicolas Foucquet in the Fortress of Pignerol,1666
We all wait for a deliverer,
Some in hope, others in terror...
But what if he should come? My God,what then?
Delusions of power I have made my speciality,
And now when at last I have leisure to record my findings
They deny me even pen and ink!
(So I write on secret,on scraps of paper,
With a pen fashioned from a chicken bone
And ink made from my own sweat mixed with wine)
Well, I dare to call myself a decent man;
Did I not ,amid my earliest ambitions,
Display a compassion not common in these times?
Nonetheless,I became an indispensable man,
Until I was dispensed with.
How often families live up to their emblems,
As I, in my way, do mine.
In politics there is no gratitude
And murder smiles in the sweetest caress.
My mother,now there was a truly good soul:
None more devoted to Christ and man,
Nursing the sick in the Hôtel-Dieu
Side by side with the nuns of the Visitation,
The hellish wards packed with the dead
And dying,pestilence and miasma in the air,
The spastic hand reaching for mercy
And the twisted mouth gasping for life.
She would study their sufferings for instruction
And concoct remedies for their ills.
And so ,before my soul learned compromise and deceit,
She taught me the true perfection to seek
And victories not of this world.
And in my father’s library,among maps
And ancient coins, a restless little Jesuit,
So beguiled by the forbidden fruit,
I dreamed beyond my frail constitution,
A ship’s captain crossing the equator,
Ploughing into undiscovered seas,
My mind a wild Guyana, jaguar-bright.
Harmony,turbulent mistress I have wooed
Amid the disharmony of state!
(At Vaux the chestnut trees’ growth,
According to elegant principles,
Sending forth first a symmetrical splay
Of branches along one axis,then,beneath,
The second at right-angle to the first,
And so on,continuous cross-pattern,
And each leaf-spray a perfect seven.
The geometry of fountains and parterres,
The coherence of house and garden
Into one body,one mind;the colours
Of the artist’s palette,slyly blent....)
Clearly now I see the truth about myself,
That my weaknesses have ever ruled me,
Impetous,naive,extravagant,vain,
Overreaching in ridiculous ambition,
And,not least,besotted with women,
Injured by their beauty from the start.
How much time and energy have I wasted
In dalliances without substance or hope?
Now,the priest of my own solitude,
I inspect the omens and auspices
That happen upon me,from time to time,
And see in the candleflame’s trembling
The overpowering shapes of madness.
No earthly king can rule me now;
Our paltry authorities delude themselves,
Disposing the temporal with such pride,
To no great purpose, with no great style.
Only in prison is there freedom,
The grace to fall into the monstrous deep,
And suffer the true life unlived.
Deceits and vanities of the Court,
Frittered years and stupid possessions,
I weep for the nonsense that owned me
And bent me out of shape!
For that I have deserved this mountain tower,
And a lightning bolt to strike it
And cast me, killed and saved,down...
Some in hope, others in terror...
But what if he should come? My God,what then?
Delusions of power I have made my speciality,
And now when at last I have leisure to record my findings
They deny me even pen and ink!
(So I write on secret,on scraps of paper,
With a pen fashioned from a chicken bone
And ink made from my own sweat mixed with wine)
Well, I dare to call myself a decent man;
Did I not ,amid my earliest ambitions,
Display a compassion not common in these times?
Nonetheless,I became an indispensable man,
Until I was dispensed with.
How often families live up to their emblems,
As I, in my way, do mine.
In politics there is no gratitude
And murder smiles in the sweetest caress.
My mother,now there was a truly good soul:
None more devoted to Christ and man,
Nursing the sick in the Hôtel-Dieu
Side by side with the nuns of the Visitation,
The hellish wards packed with the dead
And dying,pestilence and miasma in the air,
The spastic hand reaching for mercy
And the twisted mouth gasping for life.
She would study their sufferings for instruction
And concoct remedies for their ills.
And so ,before my soul learned compromise and deceit,
She taught me the true perfection to seek
And victories not of this world.
And in my father’s library,among maps
And ancient coins, a restless little Jesuit,
So beguiled by the forbidden fruit,
I dreamed beyond my frail constitution,
A ship’s captain crossing the equator,
Ploughing into undiscovered seas,
My mind a wild Guyana, jaguar-bright.
Harmony,turbulent mistress I have wooed
Amid the disharmony of state!
(At Vaux the chestnut trees’ growth,
According to elegant principles,
Sending forth first a symmetrical splay
Of branches along one axis,then,beneath,
The second at right-angle to the first,
And so on,continuous cross-pattern,
And each leaf-spray a perfect seven.
The geometry of fountains and parterres,
The coherence of house and garden
Into one body,one mind;the colours
Of the artist’s palette,slyly blent....)
Clearly now I see the truth about myself,
That my weaknesses have ever ruled me,
Impetous,naive,extravagant,vain,
Overreaching in ridiculous ambition,
And,not least,besotted with women,
Injured by their beauty from the start.
How much time and energy have I wasted
In dalliances without substance or hope?
Now,the priest of my own solitude,
I inspect the omens and auspices
That happen upon me,from time to time,
And see in the candleflame’s trembling
The overpowering shapes of madness.
No earthly king can rule me now;
Our paltry authorities delude themselves,
Disposing the temporal with such pride,
To no great purpose, with no great style.
Only in prison is there freedom,
The grace to fall into the monstrous deep,
And suffer the true life unlived.
Deceits and vanities of the Court,
Frittered years and stupid possessions,
I weep for the nonsense that owned me
And bent me out of shape!
For that I have deserved this mountain tower,
And a lightning bolt to strike it
And cast me, killed and saved,down...
A Question of Aesthetics
Bronze bust of an Akkadian king,
With braided hair and neatly curled beard,
Commanding, hieratic,
A man both real and superhuman,
Whose now-empty eye-sockets
Once glowed with precious stones.
A miniature limestone torso
From Harappa, a male dancer,
With the soft warm swelling
Of young flesh; convex planes merge
Perfectly into one another,
Designed to be admired
From multiple viewpoints;
Sinuous tribhanga pose,
With a gentle diagonal twist
Catching the rhythm of a dance.
White lekythos from fifth-century Athens;
Grievously elegant, once replete with oil
To cleanse and anoint a dead body
And accompany the deceased;
It was buried with an Athenian soldier
Who fell in the Peloponnesian War, -
It shows two figures, friends
Or relations, standing on either side
Of a soldier seated before his tomb
With eyes open to catch the last lingering sight
Of life, as he dies, so simply, meekly,
Without heroic gestures or loud mourning,
He confronts death with resolution
And regret, as love of life counterbalances
The grim knowledge of sorrow.
Concise and skilful,
The painter’s hand has worked
Hope and love into the requiem:
A few brief lines indicate a figure,
Two or three slight brushstrokes
Give emotion to the face.
A ru ware vase from Song Dynasty China,
Pure form and cool jade texture
Of porcelain, serene as death itself,
Greenblue egg of the cosmos,
Luminous and impeccable
As any work of human hands can be.
It can but engender endless poetry
And questions through a lifetime,
Finding no answer, yet following
The imperative of beauty.
Li Cheng’s A Solitary Temple Amid Clearing Peaks,
Black ink on silk scroll,
Ascending and receding
Into distant mists and silhouettes;
The invited eye may wander
With the tiny pilgrim in the foreground,
To climb up among the autumn trees
To the temple and scan the void,
Held to the surface of life
By brushstrokes so delicate and deft
And brooding dabs of ink.
An album leaf from twelfth- century Japan
Inscribed with a poem:
Hiragana flowing over the paper
With the grace of a ballerina,
On coloured paper lit with silver
And gold, the ground
Merging with the calligraphy
In one exquisite music,
Like primeval insects trapped
In amber, ephemeral-eternal.
Inside Amiens Cathedral,
Long fine upward lines effloresce
In the heights,transformed
Into Gothic arches,weaving
Immense space into stone dream;
No earthly power can hinder the eye’s
Wild flight, and fiery propulsion
Along the joyous arches’ parade;
Precarious equilibrium
Revels in its own tension,
Tricked together by taut lines.
With braided hair and neatly curled beard,
Commanding, hieratic,
A man both real and superhuman,
Whose now-empty eye-sockets
Once glowed with precious stones.
A miniature limestone torso
From Harappa, a male dancer,
With the soft warm swelling
Of young flesh; convex planes merge
Perfectly into one another,
Designed to be admired
From multiple viewpoints;
Sinuous tribhanga pose,
With a gentle diagonal twist
Catching the rhythm of a dance.
White lekythos from fifth-century Athens;
Grievously elegant, once replete with oil
To cleanse and anoint a dead body
And accompany the deceased;
It was buried with an Athenian soldier
Who fell in the Peloponnesian War, -
It shows two figures, friends
Or relations, standing on either side
Of a soldier seated before his tomb
With eyes open to catch the last lingering sight
Of life, as he dies, so simply, meekly,
Without heroic gestures or loud mourning,
He confronts death with resolution
And regret, as love of life counterbalances
The grim knowledge of sorrow.
Concise and skilful,
The painter’s hand has worked
Hope and love into the requiem:
A few brief lines indicate a figure,
Two or three slight brushstrokes
Give emotion to the face.
A ru ware vase from Song Dynasty China,
Pure form and cool jade texture
Of porcelain, serene as death itself,
Greenblue egg of the cosmos,
Luminous and impeccable
As any work of human hands can be.
It can but engender endless poetry
And questions through a lifetime,
Finding no answer, yet following
The imperative of beauty.
Li Cheng’s A Solitary Temple Amid Clearing Peaks,
Black ink on silk scroll,
Ascending and receding
Into distant mists and silhouettes;
The invited eye may wander
With the tiny pilgrim in the foreground,
To climb up among the autumn trees
To the temple and scan the void,
Held to the surface of life
By brushstrokes so delicate and deft
And brooding dabs of ink.
An album leaf from twelfth- century Japan
Inscribed with a poem:
Hiragana flowing over the paper
With the grace of a ballerina,
On coloured paper lit with silver
And gold, the ground
Merging with the calligraphy
In one exquisite music,
Like primeval insects trapped
In amber, ephemeral-eternal.
Inside Amiens Cathedral,
Long fine upward lines effloresce
In the heights,transformed
Into Gothic arches,weaving
Immense space into stone dream;
No earthly power can hinder the eye’s
Wild flight, and fiery propulsion
Along the joyous arches’ parade;
Precarious equilibrium
Revels in its own tension,
Tricked together by taut lines.
Dream-book of Naples
I
Volcanoes and earthquakes
Are all my philosophy;
Nuances of sombre fate
And merry defiance.
Philosophers and thieves
Run the cycles of history
From divinity to decadence
And back to the start.
The saint’s blood boils.
Virgil’s talking statue,
Wrought by his hands,
Warns of impending woe.
In the Castel Nuovo,
King Ferrante tours his museum
Of mummified foes, executed
On his orders, each dressed
In his own clothes,
While down in the dungeons
His pet crocodile prospers,
Fattened on live prisoners’ flesh.
II
In the Sansevero Chapel,
Caught in the vortex,
I try vainly to interpret
Masonic sculptures and frescoes,
Assured that somehow
It all makes esoteric sense.
In the crypt lie preserved the flayed corpses
Of two young men,prey of Prince Raimondo,
Aesthete,occultist and Grand Master,
Who,with evil spells,petrified their blood
While they,still alive,watched,paralysed,in terror.
III
I imagine the Roman nabobs,
Gazing down on the brilliant bay
From heavenly marble villas on high,
Surrounded by copies of Greek statues,
Served by Greek cooks, poets and musicians,
Affecting the chlamys, flourishing a few words of Greek
To impress their friends at dinner parties
And plying the water in bright pleasure-boats
With silken canopies, slaves waving golden fans
Over their brows as they langorously recline.
IV
Pythagoras,
Your spirit moves me,
You, my ancestor, my mentor under the skin…
I see you on Samos, in Egypt, in India, in Crotona,
Plucking your lyre in solemn contemplation,
Testing the soul’s harmonics…
“Evil is the chaos produced by the apeiron,
When peperas-apeiron is what is required…”
Take away the noise, the evil,
The bedlam of notes all sounded together,
Without measure, without order,
Without love…
Here we live under the five-pointed star,
Ishtar, Aphrodite, Venus,
Obedient to the Theorem of the Bride,
Uttering the five vowels,
Conjuring the five Platonic solids,
Breathing the quintessence,
Celebrating the hierogamy,
The hermaphrodite,
New ideas, new directions,
The spirit resurrected from the flesh…
Berashith:
“In the beginning”,
“He created Six”…
The Star of David rules me,
Union of man and woman,
Union of God and mankind.
Amphitrite rises from the waves,
Wife of Poseidon, whose dolphin
Brought her to him,
And was set among the stars…
The sixth hour, the hour of Christ’s last breath,
This is the hour of quiet contemplation,
The day of man’s creation
And the day of his redemption.
What visions flare in the bloodstone’s heart?
The wings of the Recording Angels
Sweep overhead…
O, the thirteen heavenly fountains,
The thirteen gates of mercy,
The thirteen paradisal rivers of balsam,
The thirteen paths of love!
The nine Muses surround me,
The restless nine of incompletion, imperfection, transformation,
The sea-green winged serpent,
Hecate, queen of witches,
Sex and healing.
Naples opens to me,
Like the Sepher Yetzirah,
Like the Zohar…
I will read it and revel in it
By Gematria, by Notarikon, by Temurah.
Aleph:
Breath of breaths,
Source of all rivers,
The ox on whose horns the earth is balanced.
Berashith:
House, head, ox, tooth, hand and serpent,
The Womb of All,
The Fiat Lux,
The Cosmic Father,
The divine transforming fire,
The hand of God,
The universal serpentine energy winding…
Adam Kadmon I am,
The living Tetragrammaton,
Veiling the terrible light.
Shekinah, the fire, the lightning,
Hovers over the bed
Where the lovers writhe like snakes…
I see the divine machine illuminated,
The twenty-two paths of the Tree of Life
Inc andescing with the light of Yahweh,
Ascending and descending,
Inhaling, exhaling…
V
In the Solfatara crater,
Jets of steam seethe from pools of boiling mud,
Acrid sulphurous vapours from fumaroles
Swirl and billow around the rocks,
Here in the Phlegraean Fields.
I stand beside the Grotta del Cane,
Ancient Roman steamrooms
Dripping hot minerals
And filled with lethal gases.
The ground rises and falls beneath us,
As magma surges deep below.
According to the Talmud,
Jehovah made a number of worlds
Which he obliterated, dissatisfied,
Before he reluctantly settled for this one,
Unsatisfactory as it is.
Diamond-dazzle waves engage me
In Platonic dialogue:
The Cumean Sybil mutters in her cave,
Virgil’s hand moves across the page.
In Santa Maria del Purgatorio ad Arco,
Under the winged skull and crossbones,
In the musty hypogeum the votary
Chooses a skull to adopt and venerate,
Canonizing its powers with gifts
Of perfume and pillows,
Praying for its saintly intercession
Swiftly to grant all his wishes;
And should the skull fail him
He will smash it in revenge,
And replace it with another.
Pulcinella dances wildly,
Laughing like a madman,
Then stops, and grieves a while;
And life beats him over the head
With a beautiful stick.
VI
Three is my number,
The tetraktys,
The circle,
The Fates, the Furies, the Graces,
Apsu, Tiamat and Mummu,
Blue, red and yellow,
The fruit of the tree.
VII
I lay out the tarot cards:
These are the oracles, the heralds,
Messengers of the gods,
Setting me on the royal road.
Stepping off the cliff:
The adventure commences,
The theory of flight made real.
Time to obey the secret voice,
Forgetting others’ expectations,
Time to set off.
Spirit calls me to destiny:
The guide arrives, beautifully disguised,
And the true fools call me foolish
For knowing how to be free.
VIII
Who now remembers Philodemus and Siron,
Noble followers of Epicurus,
Devoted to pleasure and friendship?
At his villa in Herculaneum,
Philodemus founded a magnificent library
And carried out his own studies
In logic, theology,and the arts.
Siron was a man
Of integrity and severity,
So renowned that Virgil came here to be his pupil,
And lived in his house after the master’s death,
Making it a famous salon
For poets and thinkers.
Who now remembers Philodemus and Siron?
Surely these were unforgettable men.
IX
47, Dead Man Talking;
My pick for the lottery.
Is the Evil Eye abroad
Throwing darts my way?
I will make the sign of the horns
To shield me-
May snakes and sirens protect me!
Pulcinella laughs
And jests
And plays his mandolin-
The lucky hunchback,
Poor and hungry,
Bumbles along,
Somehow surviving,
Invincible and free!
Base hero,
Obscene romantic,
Philosophical rogue!
X
In the front pews of the Duomo,
Old women kneel intoning hymns in dialect,
While the congealed blood of San Gennaro,
Raised up in two glass phials,
Liquefies before the exulting congregation’s eyes,
Promising great good fortune to come.
XI
In the catacombs of the church of Santa Maria della Sanità
I survey the skulls set in the niches,
And the painted clothes and attributes of the dead
Displaying their earthly rank.
In the Cemetery of the Fontanelle,
I see the bones piled everywhere
And the skulls, adopted by the living,
Set in caskets to be prayed for,
Their souls in purgatory
Crying out for prayer and succour.
XII
Tiberius on Capri,
An old man chasing boys and girls
Among the phallic statuary,
Acting out scenes from sex manuals,
While the Empire went to pot.
City of the castrati,
Adored freaks
Sending the audience into raptures
As those acrobatic voices
Tumbled towards the stars!
In the Museo di Capodimonte
I stand before Titian’s Danaë:
Painted for the private apartments
Of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese,-
Ah,what secret rogues-
Those princes of the Church!
XIII
The cloister and gardens of Santa Chiara:
Ancient vines tangle over the walks, arbours supported by seventy-two octagonal columns covered with bright majolica tiles,
Thick garlands of green foliage tied with spiral yellow ribbons,
Amid the giant cypresses the hiss of marble fountains....
Parthenope,washed ashore on the sands,hear my voice through the quivering air!
XIV
Alone, I deal nine cards from the pack,
Lay them out in a square,
Divining by numbers and suits.
A bronze gladiator’s helmet ,
Engraved with scenes from the sack of Troy.
The double staircase of the Palazzo dello Spagnolo,
Another Sanfelice stage set.
XV
The Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii:
In cinnabar fields the matron stands sentinel
As Cupid reads the scroll to the young bride of the gods,
While Dionysus reclines in Ariadne’s lap,
And the goddess raises her whip to flagellate.
Terrified and enraptured,the betrothed
Dances in ecstasy,maiden and matron,divine.
Volcanoes and earthquakes
Are all my philosophy;
Nuances of sombre fate
And merry defiance.
Philosophers and thieves
Run the cycles of history
From divinity to decadence
And back to the start.
The saint’s blood boils.
Virgil’s talking statue,
Wrought by his hands,
Warns of impending woe.
In the Castel Nuovo,
King Ferrante tours his museum
Of mummified foes, executed
On his orders, each dressed
In his own clothes,
While down in the dungeons
His pet crocodile prospers,
Fattened on live prisoners’ flesh.
II
In the Sansevero Chapel,
Caught in the vortex,
I try vainly to interpret
Masonic sculptures and frescoes,
Assured that somehow
It all makes esoteric sense.
In the crypt lie preserved the flayed corpses
Of two young men,prey of Prince Raimondo,
Aesthete,occultist and Grand Master,
Who,with evil spells,petrified their blood
While they,still alive,watched,paralysed,in terror.
III
I imagine the Roman nabobs,
Gazing down on the brilliant bay
From heavenly marble villas on high,
Surrounded by copies of Greek statues,
Served by Greek cooks, poets and musicians,
Affecting the chlamys, flourishing a few words of Greek
To impress their friends at dinner parties
And plying the water in bright pleasure-boats
With silken canopies, slaves waving golden fans
Over their brows as they langorously recline.
IV
Pythagoras,
Your spirit moves me,
You, my ancestor, my mentor under the skin…
I see you on Samos, in Egypt, in India, in Crotona,
Plucking your lyre in solemn contemplation,
Testing the soul’s harmonics…
“Evil is the chaos produced by the apeiron,
When peperas-apeiron is what is required…”
Take away the noise, the evil,
The bedlam of notes all sounded together,
Without measure, without order,
Without love…
Here we live under the five-pointed star,
Ishtar, Aphrodite, Venus,
Obedient to the Theorem of the Bride,
Uttering the five vowels,
Conjuring the five Platonic solids,
Breathing the quintessence,
Celebrating the hierogamy,
The hermaphrodite,
New ideas, new directions,
The spirit resurrected from the flesh…
Berashith:
“In the beginning”,
“He created Six”…
The Star of David rules me,
Union of man and woman,
Union of God and mankind.
Amphitrite rises from the waves,
Wife of Poseidon, whose dolphin
Brought her to him,
And was set among the stars…
The sixth hour, the hour of Christ’s last breath,
This is the hour of quiet contemplation,
The day of man’s creation
And the day of his redemption.
What visions flare in the bloodstone’s heart?
The wings of the Recording Angels
Sweep overhead…
O, the thirteen heavenly fountains,
The thirteen gates of mercy,
The thirteen paradisal rivers of balsam,
The thirteen paths of love!
The nine Muses surround me,
The restless nine of incompletion, imperfection, transformation,
The sea-green winged serpent,
Hecate, queen of witches,
Sex and healing.
Naples opens to me,
Like the Sepher Yetzirah,
Like the Zohar…
I will read it and revel in it
By Gematria, by Notarikon, by Temurah.
Aleph:
Breath of breaths,
Source of all rivers,
The ox on whose horns the earth is balanced.
Berashith:
House, head, ox, tooth, hand and serpent,
The Womb of All,
The Fiat Lux,
The Cosmic Father,
The divine transforming fire,
The hand of God,
The universal serpentine energy winding…
Adam Kadmon I am,
The living Tetragrammaton,
Veiling the terrible light.
Shekinah, the fire, the lightning,
Hovers over the bed
Where the lovers writhe like snakes…
I see the divine machine illuminated,
The twenty-two paths of the Tree of Life
Inc andescing with the light of Yahweh,
Ascending and descending,
Inhaling, exhaling…
V
In the Solfatara crater,
Jets of steam seethe from pools of boiling mud,
Acrid sulphurous vapours from fumaroles
Swirl and billow around the rocks,
Here in the Phlegraean Fields.
I stand beside the Grotta del Cane,
Ancient Roman steamrooms
Dripping hot minerals
And filled with lethal gases.
The ground rises and falls beneath us,
As magma surges deep below.
According to the Talmud,
Jehovah made a number of worlds
Which he obliterated, dissatisfied,
Before he reluctantly settled for this one,
Unsatisfactory as it is.
Diamond-dazzle waves engage me
In Platonic dialogue:
The Cumean Sybil mutters in her cave,
Virgil’s hand moves across the page.
In Santa Maria del Purgatorio ad Arco,
Under the winged skull and crossbones,
In the musty hypogeum the votary
Chooses a skull to adopt and venerate,
Canonizing its powers with gifts
Of perfume and pillows,
Praying for its saintly intercession
Swiftly to grant all his wishes;
And should the skull fail him
He will smash it in revenge,
And replace it with another.
Pulcinella dances wildly,
Laughing like a madman,
Then stops, and grieves a while;
And life beats him over the head
With a beautiful stick.
VI
Three is my number,
The tetraktys,
The circle,
The Fates, the Furies, the Graces,
Apsu, Tiamat and Mummu,
Blue, red and yellow,
The fruit of the tree.
VII
I lay out the tarot cards:
These are the oracles, the heralds,
Messengers of the gods,
Setting me on the royal road.
Stepping off the cliff:
The adventure commences,
The theory of flight made real.
Time to obey the secret voice,
Forgetting others’ expectations,
Time to set off.
Spirit calls me to destiny:
The guide arrives, beautifully disguised,
And the true fools call me foolish
For knowing how to be free.
VIII
Who now remembers Philodemus and Siron,
Noble followers of Epicurus,
Devoted to pleasure and friendship?
At his villa in Herculaneum,
Philodemus founded a magnificent library
And carried out his own studies
In logic, theology,and the arts.
Siron was a man
Of integrity and severity,
So renowned that Virgil came here to be his pupil,
And lived in his house after the master’s death,
Making it a famous salon
For poets and thinkers.
Who now remembers Philodemus and Siron?
Surely these were unforgettable men.
IX
47, Dead Man Talking;
My pick for the lottery.
Is the Evil Eye abroad
Throwing darts my way?
I will make the sign of the horns
To shield me-
May snakes and sirens protect me!
Pulcinella laughs
And jests
And plays his mandolin-
The lucky hunchback,
Poor and hungry,
Bumbles along,
Somehow surviving,
Invincible and free!
Base hero,
Obscene romantic,
Philosophical rogue!
X
In the front pews of the Duomo,
Old women kneel intoning hymns in dialect,
While the congealed blood of San Gennaro,
Raised up in two glass phials,
Liquefies before the exulting congregation’s eyes,
Promising great good fortune to come.
XI
In the catacombs of the church of Santa Maria della Sanità
I survey the skulls set in the niches,
And the painted clothes and attributes of the dead
Displaying their earthly rank.
In the Cemetery of the Fontanelle,
I see the bones piled everywhere
And the skulls, adopted by the living,
Set in caskets to be prayed for,
Their souls in purgatory
Crying out for prayer and succour.
XII
Tiberius on Capri,
An old man chasing boys and girls
Among the phallic statuary,
Acting out scenes from sex manuals,
While the Empire went to pot.
City of the castrati,
Adored freaks
Sending the audience into raptures
As those acrobatic voices
Tumbled towards the stars!
In the Museo di Capodimonte
I stand before Titian’s Danaë:
Painted for the private apartments
Of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese,-
Ah,what secret rogues-
Those princes of the Church!
XIII
The cloister and gardens of Santa Chiara:
Ancient vines tangle over the walks, arbours supported by seventy-two octagonal columns covered with bright majolica tiles,
Thick garlands of green foliage tied with spiral yellow ribbons,
Amid the giant cypresses the hiss of marble fountains....
Parthenope,washed ashore on the sands,hear my voice through the quivering air!
XIV
Alone, I deal nine cards from the pack,
Lay them out in a square,
Divining by numbers and suits.
A bronze gladiator’s helmet ,
Engraved with scenes from the sack of Troy.
The double staircase of the Palazzo dello Spagnolo,
Another Sanfelice stage set.
XV
The Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii:
In cinnabar fields the matron stands sentinel
As Cupid reads the scroll to the young bride of the gods,
While Dionysus reclines in Ariadne’s lap,
And the goddess raises her whip to flagellate.
Terrified and enraptured,the betrothed
Dances in ecstasy,maiden and matron,divine.
Cyrus Wentletrap, Esq.
1
Autumn is my season,
Slow gentle drift into oblivion,
Deciduous humanity’s fall.
Life slips into suspended animation,
Unchained, free to dream,
At play in the all-creative void.
Heaviness turns to lightness,
Separation’s gift;
And perhaps when we
Are humbled entirely
The skies will yield their secret.
2
November empties a bucket of ice water over me!
Not enough to wake me up,though.
3
We are the television people,
Our carnival masks made to tease and enchant.
We live out there, in here, under every stone,
Oracles with nothing to say.
Stop and watch our travelling show,
And become like us,
Immaculate, unreal.
4
This is the family, nest of love and anger,
Tyrant’s throne and rebel’s dynamite.
5
Night is my friend. I want to do nothing
But smoke cigars and stare at the moon.
6
Supernal tenderness, humanity from heart to heart!
Distant though you are, I feel you close by,-
Too easily I forget,
But then something small and precious
Reawakens my life...
7
Impotent, like a consonant without a vowel,
I dream of completion
And serenade the moon with lavish ditties.
Will it all make sense in the end?
Will all the clues fit together,
All the problems be resolved?
Until, then, I watch the mouse on his wheel,
And read about the Aztecs, the Incas, the Mayas...
8
Childhood:-romp of hobby horses and cautionary tales!
Goblin festival on the hilltop!
9
I clasp my head in my hands,
Reassured by its warmth and strength,
Palping the skull with exploratory wonder.
My fingers wander over my body, researching,
Gathering information on reality,
Putting Osiris back together.
10
Vain and captious critics, maliciously cavilling,
What suns have you ignited, what worlds have you borne?
11
Incipient memory, first twinge of toothache,
Ouija board spelling out the dead...
The days are like herds of buffalo
Stampeding over the clifftop...
12
Today hangs
Like the winning conker
On its string.
13
When dark occasions seize me, and I cry
To heaven for succour, and none comes,
I burrow down with badgers, my kin,
Shaking my head at rumours from above.
14
Laugh, laugh, at the brink of horror,
Teetering, halfcrazed,
Cornered by the world.
Homo sapiens, making chimpanzee faces,
You are here and only here!
15
Here am I, not a human being, but a writer,
Insatiable hermaphrodite,
Consuming the world with arrogant voracity,
Humbled by nothing, not even death.
Morbid idealist, guilty sinner,
Torn between the Cross and the Swastika,
Do you really think that words might save you?
Autumn is my season,
Slow gentle drift into oblivion,
Deciduous humanity’s fall.
Life slips into suspended animation,
Unchained, free to dream,
At play in the all-creative void.
Heaviness turns to lightness,
Separation’s gift;
And perhaps when we
Are humbled entirely
The skies will yield their secret.
2
November empties a bucket of ice water over me!
Not enough to wake me up,though.
3
We are the television people,
Our carnival masks made to tease and enchant.
We live out there, in here, under every stone,
Oracles with nothing to say.
Stop and watch our travelling show,
And become like us,
Immaculate, unreal.
4
This is the family, nest of love and anger,
Tyrant’s throne and rebel’s dynamite.
5
Night is my friend. I want to do nothing
But smoke cigars and stare at the moon.
6
Supernal tenderness, humanity from heart to heart!
Distant though you are, I feel you close by,-
Too easily I forget,
But then something small and precious
Reawakens my life...
7
Impotent, like a consonant without a vowel,
I dream of completion
And serenade the moon with lavish ditties.
Will it all make sense in the end?
Will all the clues fit together,
All the problems be resolved?
Until, then, I watch the mouse on his wheel,
And read about the Aztecs, the Incas, the Mayas...
8
Childhood:-romp of hobby horses and cautionary tales!
Goblin festival on the hilltop!
9
I clasp my head in my hands,
Reassured by its warmth and strength,
Palping the skull with exploratory wonder.
My fingers wander over my body, researching,
Gathering information on reality,
Putting Osiris back together.
10
Vain and captious critics, maliciously cavilling,
What suns have you ignited, what worlds have you borne?
11
Incipient memory, first twinge of toothache,
Ouija board spelling out the dead...
The days are like herds of buffalo
Stampeding over the clifftop...
12
Today hangs
Like the winning conker
On its string.
13
When dark occasions seize me, and I cry
To heaven for succour, and none comes,
I burrow down with badgers, my kin,
Shaking my head at rumours from above.
14
Laugh, laugh, at the brink of horror,
Teetering, halfcrazed,
Cornered by the world.
Homo sapiens, making chimpanzee faces,
You are here and only here!
15
Here am I, not a human being, but a writer,
Insatiable hermaphrodite,
Consuming the world with arrogant voracity,
Humbled by nothing, not even death.
Morbid idealist, guilty sinner,
Torn between the Cross and the Swastika,
Do you really think that words might save you?
Valentine's Day
This is the beat I like :
Tempo giusto,
Between sixty-six and seventy-six on the metronome.
Systole and diastole,
In and out.
Shape of the heart:
Ivy leaf for the bride and groom,
Eternal friendship, eternal life.
When the heart-muscle contracts,
The blood in the right lower chamber
Is propelled via the pulmonary artery
To the lungs for fresh oxygenation,
And the blood from the left lower chamber
Is expelled via the aorta back round the body.
The Aztec’s obsidian knife is uplifted,
Poised to cut out the inner sun.
William Harvey stands in the lecture theatre,
Holding up for his rapt congregation
The still-beating heart of a felon.
Time to don the goatskin
And run about the town,
Whipping every woman in sight!
The wild wolf claims his own.
Time for the drawing of lots,
And the sermon of the flesh.
Tempo giusto,
Between sixty-six and seventy-six on the metronome.
Systole and diastole,
In and out.
Shape of the heart:
Ivy leaf for the bride and groom,
Eternal friendship, eternal life.
When the heart-muscle contracts,
The blood in the right lower chamber
Is propelled via the pulmonary artery
To the lungs for fresh oxygenation,
And the blood from the left lower chamber
Is expelled via the aorta back round the body.
The Aztec’s obsidian knife is uplifted,
Poised to cut out the inner sun.
William Harvey stands in the lecture theatre,
Holding up for his rapt congregation
The still-beating heart of a felon.
Time to don the goatskin
And run about the town,
Whipping every woman in sight!
The wild wolf claims his own.
Time for the drawing of lots,
And the sermon of the flesh.
Bucharest
Whores in the hotel lobby...
“Would you like to buy me champagne?”
Colonnades of marble pillars with gilded Corinthian capitals,
Cathedral of loneliness...
Slender darkskinned prostitute,
Purple mascara matching her dress:
“Take me to your room and we’ll finish the bottle together.
I come with the champagne, for the same price.”
Crystal chandeliers, light reflected in polished glass mirrors,
Baroque columns inlaid with gold leaf;
A gypsy plays sadly on a violin,
While soft hands spoon the Black Sea caviar.
Gipsy flowersellers in the streets
Sell pink roses and yellow tulips.
Violence under Latin faces,
Smell of beeswax and blood...
What vampires lie in history’s unmarked graves?
Wolves rove the midnight forests
In schoolchildren’s songs.
Scions of Dacia, sprung from Roman legions’ lust,
In this land of impalers,
Where paper is harder than stone.
Long lulls of docile circumstance,
And circuses of terror...
Savage superstition in dark eyes,
Hatred in the bone,
Hatred from fear.
Who will be the next to betray us?
Who will crush us, spit on us, feed us to the wolves?
History is one long hustle,
One desperate deal after another
To stave off the end.
So it goes,
The usual fears and regrets,
Alone in a hotel room,in the dark,
Holding all Europe in my arms.
“Would you like to buy me champagne?”
Colonnades of marble pillars with gilded Corinthian capitals,
Cathedral of loneliness...
Slender darkskinned prostitute,
Purple mascara matching her dress:
“Take me to your room and we’ll finish the bottle together.
I come with the champagne, for the same price.”
Crystal chandeliers, light reflected in polished glass mirrors,
Baroque columns inlaid with gold leaf;
A gypsy plays sadly on a violin,
While soft hands spoon the Black Sea caviar.
Gipsy flowersellers in the streets
Sell pink roses and yellow tulips.
Violence under Latin faces,
Smell of beeswax and blood...
What vampires lie in history’s unmarked graves?
Wolves rove the midnight forests
In schoolchildren’s songs.
Scions of Dacia, sprung from Roman legions’ lust,
In this land of impalers,
Where paper is harder than stone.
Long lulls of docile circumstance,
And circuses of terror...
Savage superstition in dark eyes,
Hatred in the bone,
Hatred from fear.
Who will be the next to betray us?
Who will crush us, spit on us, feed us to the wolves?
History is one long hustle,
One desperate deal after another
To stave off the end.
So it goes,
The usual fears and regrets,
Alone in a hotel room,in the dark,
Holding all Europe in my arms.
Oxford Gothic
Erotic Europe,
energize me,
your black womb shaped and carried me
into this chaos, life-
do not abandon me, ever.
The world will always call me madman
(and rightly)
for this tumult in my head.
River-strolling,
blessed by Isis,
I cover myself
with leaves and sunfire,
till an image,
precise and exquisite
as a Khmer temple dancer,
arises
like a ghost
from the bones of the dead.
All the countries and cultures
of my years on earth,
places seen,
faces known,
are in me always,
rich in anthropology
and regret.
Since vocation first seized me
by the throat and balls
and set me on this path
of legacy and prophecy,
I have worked the mines
of life and death
in Siberian exile
for a faceless Tsar.
What makes one man a poet,
another a banker?
Summer flaunts a plenty
my works cannot match,
as I walk a lonely mile
in this city of praised stones
and vaunting scholars,
…hungry,so hungry-
I could attack the world
with a knife and fork!
Cheerful mongrel,
bred from generations
of the same,
ancestors who not so long ago
could not even write their own names,
I speak out of their skulls
with a lunatic’s tongue.
This is not my county,
my country
or my realm,
nor shall I long remain,
but pass on like this river,
this miniature Nile.
(Always,looking back
over poems from my hand,
I wonder and shake my head,
Did I write that?
Impossible!
Bizarre!)
My Oxford Gothic
leads me under arches
like a Templar back from the Holy Land,
full of Saracen heresies….
time to build,
to build,
to grow…
energize me,
your black womb shaped and carried me
into this chaos, life-
do not abandon me, ever.
The world will always call me madman
(and rightly)
for this tumult in my head.
River-strolling,
blessed by Isis,
I cover myself
with leaves and sunfire,
till an image,
precise and exquisite
as a Khmer temple dancer,
arises
like a ghost
from the bones of the dead.
All the countries and cultures
of my years on earth,
places seen,
faces known,
are in me always,
rich in anthropology
and regret.
Since vocation first seized me
by the throat and balls
and set me on this path
of legacy and prophecy,
I have worked the mines
of life and death
in Siberian exile
for a faceless Tsar.
What makes one man a poet,
another a banker?
Summer flaunts a plenty
my works cannot match,
as I walk a lonely mile
in this city of praised stones
and vaunting scholars,
…hungry,so hungry-
I could attack the world
with a knife and fork!
Cheerful mongrel,
bred from generations
of the same,
ancestors who not so long ago
could not even write their own names,
I speak out of their skulls
with a lunatic’s tongue.
This is not my county,
my country
or my realm,
nor shall I long remain,
but pass on like this river,
this miniature Nile.
(Always,looking back
over poems from my hand,
I wonder and shake my head,
Did I write that?
Impossible!
Bizarre!)
My Oxford Gothic
leads me under arches
like a Templar back from the Holy Land,
full of Saracen heresies….
time to build,
to build,
to grow…
Bodrum
Pine-resinous air of summer’s delirium,
Like the sweetest tangerine ever tasted-
And suddenly life is ionized.
Beneath the castle battlements, peacocks
Stroll among oleanders, myrtles and planes,
White doves gyre between the towers,
In shadowy corners flare the violet blooms
And orange fruit of mandrake,
Ripe for poisonous love-philtres.
Three-headed Hecate,
Whose hand grasps the key to Hades,
Smiles and calls for a dog to be sacrificed.
My mind sifts the salvage of shipwrecks:
Gold coins, ostrich eggs, amphorae and kraters,
Stone anchors, statues of Isis,
Chess pieces, daggers, the skeletons of slaves…
Green granite ruins of the Mausoleum,
-Work of the adoring grieving sister-wife,
Who every day would sup a cup of wine,
Mixed with her late lord and husband’s ashes,-
Honouring that young and able satrap
Who ruled so shrewdly, augmenting his might
Without forfeiting the Persian alliance.
Curious as Herodotus,-Father of History
And Father of Lies-I dive into the crowd
Of tourists,taking a two-week break
From reality,and swim among the shark-finned
Wrecks in their eyes.
Like the sweetest tangerine ever tasted-
And suddenly life is ionized.
Beneath the castle battlements, peacocks
Stroll among oleanders, myrtles and planes,
White doves gyre between the towers,
In shadowy corners flare the violet blooms
And orange fruit of mandrake,
Ripe for poisonous love-philtres.
Three-headed Hecate,
Whose hand grasps the key to Hades,
Smiles and calls for a dog to be sacrificed.
My mind sifts the salvage of shipwrecks:
Gold coins, ostrich eggs, amphorae and kraters,
Stone anchors, statues of Isis,
Chess pieces, daggers, the skeletons of slaves…
Green granite ruins of the Mausoleum,
-Work of the adoring grieving sister-wife,
Who every day would sup a cup of wine,
Mixed with her late lord and husband’s ashes,-
Honouring that young and able satrap
Who ruled so shrewdly, augmenting his might
Without forfeiting the Persian alliance.
Curious as Herodotus,-Father of History
And Father of Lies-I dive into the crowd
Of tourists,taking a two-week break
From reality,and swim among the shark-finned
Wrecks in their eyes.
Wednesday Metaphysics
Dragged up in the morning,piss-proud and lonely,
Stumble through the routine-fugue,
Report for work as usual.
Every day I affirm and deny myself
And live on the bones of the last thing I was in.
Counting on my fingers,
I reckon my life’s little sum.
Oh, everything entombed within-
Had I only the strength to roll back the stone!
The unfathomable operations of a nervous system,
The quirks and foibles of a living man,
Come to this :
A few words in a cluttered room.
Today is a ropebridge
Over a chasm
In the Andes.
This is my chair,
My parrot-perch in the world,
Where I sit, read, write, scratch my head,
And where I sometimes feel like weeping.
And it might be anyone sitting here,
Had I not been born one fine senseless day
When my mother suffered and rejoiced so much.
And eventually I stumbled here
To this simple beautiful chair-
Truly it might be anyone, any time,
Sitting here and breathing,
Alive in another skin.
Stumble through the routine-fugue,
Report for work as usual.
Every day I affirm and deny myself
And live on the bones of the last thing I was in.
Counting on my fingers,
I reckon my life’s little sum.
Oh, everything entombed within-
Had I only the strength to roll back the stone!
The unfathomable operations of a nervous system,
The quirks and foibles of a living man,
Come to this :
A few words in a cluttered room.
Today is a ropebridge
Over a chasm
In the Andes.
This is my chair,
My parrot-perch in the world,
Where I sit, read, write, scratch my head,
And where I sometimes feel like weeping.
And it might be anyone sitting here,
Had I not been born one fine senseless day
When my mother suffered and rejoiced so much.
And eventually I stumbled here
To this simple beautiful chair-
Truly it might be anyone, any time,
Sitting here and breathing,
Alive in another skin.
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