The Lost Books

I have read them all, the lost books:

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

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

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


No words you will ever read could be as marvellous

As those, forever invisible,

Wyverns and griffons in the ether.


Literature began with a savage laugh.

Margites the human monster, the absurd puppet,

Blunders along, ignorant and inept,

A fool worthy of his own epic,

Still amusing the blind old entertainer in his old age.


The silent voices cry out

Like the two hundred and sixty Confucian scholars

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

To prevent them from reconstructing the classics from memory.


One thinks of the precious box of papers

Flaubert buried in his garden at Croisset

As the Prussian army advanced across France;

Letters ,notes and drafts for unwritten works,

Perhaps the proposed satire on socialism

Or his Second Empire novel.


And Rimbaud’s notebook,

Misplaced by the friend to whom it was entrusted,

With fifty or sixty unpublished poems,

The only one of which he could recall

"Something about geese and ducks

Splashing around in a pond.”

Astronomy for the Damned (The Lonely Astronaut)

From the atmospheres and oceans of the primeval Earth

These molecules of me...

Here is the information, the nucleic acids of words.

This instant in the billionfold history of a planet.

The instincts of the hunter-gatherer.

Climb the steps of the ziggurat, astronaut,

Ascend into the cockpit of time.

Listen to the stars,

Speaking in the language of dolphins.


Stars,nurses of life and death,

We are your holy barbarians.

Fish,reptile,mammal,human,

An embryo is evolving in the womb.

The thoughts of every animal on earth

Are in my brain.

Can the elegance of science

Redeem me?


To hike the mountains of Mars

Is my vocation;

Gas, dust and stars,

Billions on billions of stars,

Spin me a galaxy

To call my own.


Golden-helmeted for the crusade,

Jousting with stellar invaders,

I breathe the artificial air

Of unread poems.


Death and time work their magic

On my secret evolution;

The chemistry of proteins,

The neurology of brains-

My poetry!

(Lightning and ultraviolet

Breaking apart the simple molecules

Of the primitive atmosphere,

The fragments recombining

Into ever more complexity,

Then dissolving in the oceans...)


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

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

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

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

Carbon-pirates flying the skull and crossbones,

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

Inhaling and exhaling one another,

We suckle at the same teats.

Into the cell’s subtle labyrinth I voyage-

A galaxy evolved over aeons,

Self-maintaining, transforming molecules,

Storing energy, plotting its own reproduction,

A microdot of frenzy and patience.

Hectic nucleus, whirling coils and strands,

Is there any end to your wisdom?

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

Limitless combinations await us,

The undreamt faces and minds in the core,

Future monarchs of mankind!


The nebulae are on fire with death;

Defunct wraith-worlds drift near the core-star,

The remnant sun a small hot star,

Collapsed to unimaginable density,

Cooling with degenerate indifference

To a black dwarf.


Rorschach blobs of galaxies,

Exist for just a few seconds

Then dissolve,only to reform,

Dying, or committing suicide.

Star-clusters plunge through the Milky Way plane

And out the other side,

To slow,reverse and hurtle back again.

Hot newborn stars squawl in the spiral arms.

Behind my eyes.

In the cerebral cortex.

August Afternoon in Paris

Beloved Sunday, the soul’s respite...

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

Empty chairs around the fountain in the park.

The waiter almost smiles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No time, no time.

Zinc Cafe (2ieme Arrondissement)

A ballon of rosé, and an oeuf mayonnaise,

That’s all.

I sit staring into space.

Space stares into me.

The waiters practice the art of indifference

With supercilious expertise.

I am part of the furniture,

Not here at all,

Yet so ridiculously alive.

Believe it or not,

My greatest lies have been my greatest truths.

Keep it simple, I tell myself,

Keep out of trouble, can’t you?


The glistening leaves on the pavement

After the autumn rain,

The leaf-smell in my nostrils,

Heady as cocaine...-

That child’s sailboat launched

In a Tuileries fountain

One bright afternoon...

Translator

To live is to translate.

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

Impossible exactitude drives me on,

Endlessly rewriting the world,

To resemble some perfect original.

Normality conspires to reclaim

The oddness in these words,

To turn a carnival into a shopping centre.

Can I catch here and there a motif, a refrain

From out of the chaos?

What will foreign eyes appropriate,

What will they assimilate of this?

Find a style of being,

Such is my imperative since birth,

And the knack is not easily won.

What is my natural habitat?

I have not found it yet,

Not on these streets or in these days

Or in this country or any other.

A life spent at the borders,

Busy with espionage and contraband,

Is my calling; the world hangs

On a semi-colon.

Have I misread the situation again?

Misunderstanding is a way of life,

A way of getting by.

Too many compromises

Hedge me in my neverland,

But I press on towards the next crossroads.

Fascists

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

Randolph Churchill



What did they know or care about Spain?

The cause was much greater than that.

Conservatives,monarchists,Catholics,

Paladins saddling up to slay the dragon,

They brought their rage from many lands,

To the proving ground.


In Toledo Republican militiamen,

Purging the city of their enemies,

Search the house of Roy Campbell,

And rooting through his library

Seize on a copy of the Divine Comedy

Shouting, “Italian!Fascist!”

The squad levell their rifles

At the foreigner, eager to shoot.

Quick-wittedly,the poet

Grabs a Dostoyevsky novel

Off another shelf,and roars back,

“Russian!Communist!”

A sticky moment.

Then fingers ease off triggers,

And the militia,

Deciding he must be neutral,

Turn and leave the house.

Outside in the street

Slaughtered Carmelite monks lie in a row

Under a tarpaulin.

Rua dos Douradores (With Pessoa)

Night falls on the street of sour oranges.

The street of the soul’s accountant,

The man with so many alter egos

He forgot the name he had been born with.

This simple unremarkable street

Was all he required,

More marvellous than any argosy

Undertaken by Vasco da Gama,

He loathed the very idea of travel,

Scorned the vulgarity of packing a suitcase,

Despised the mindlessness

Of those who must displace themselves

In order to see and feel.


One city, one unicorn forest.

One language, finite yet infinite.

To walk the length of this street

Is to circumambulate the world.

Each step is a poem, a breath.

Hermann Hesse in Maulbronn

Through the gate in the high wall, he entered,

Into the silent square,

And saw the water rising from the fountain

And falling in exquisite threads,

From level to level,

And the gracious Cistercian monastery complex,

The pale brick walls and high arched windows,

The terraced slopes with ordered vines.

He wandered through empty halls,

Through sunlight and shadow,

And impossible harmonies

Menaced his soul.


A schoolboy about to crack up,

He could hear the forest in his veins.

The goal,too simple and brutal,

The freedom he held like a grasshopper in his hands,

Terrorized him with its mathematics.

The church organ suddenly started,

And called out stronger and stronger,

Profound rumbling chords

Interlacing with the lightest harmonics,

And all he could do was walk towards it,

Over the cliff of sound.

Cartagena

There’s something surely to be said

For gold,sugar and slaves

If they could build such walls as these,

Which,in 1741,so the guidebook informs me,

Held off an unprecedented armada

Of almost two hundred British ships.

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

To the torture instruments

In the Museum of the Inquisition

And to gawp at the denunciation window

At horseback height outside,

Where anyone with a grudge

Could slip the name of a “heretic”

Through the iron grille.

Had I lived in those times,no doubt I myself

Should have been accused

Of a little witchcraft or blasphemy,

And well would I have deserved

My rather painful death.

Cream walls and cobalt balconies,

Mansions yellow,pink and red,

Lavender,sienna or tangerine,

Absorb me in their reverie.

On narrow streets loitering men

Ogle the passing beauties

Who float like runway models,

Half-madonna,half-whore.

In the mornings, the streets smell of dust,

In the afternoons, the salty trade winds blow

Through the palm fronds and ferns,

And the air smells damp and leafy.

From a rooftop I look out over

The pantile roofs,and the Caribbean,

And the courtyards,each with a fountain

Playing different music,

Why did I come here? I’m not sure,

Not sure of anything,

But perhaps I had to go somewhere.

And,as these people so wisely say,

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

Even though he sells candles.”

The Jew of Cordoba

Drumbeat in the dark, ever louder,

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

Huge twisted golden serpent candelabra

Guard the velvet float,all candlesmoke and incense,

The Virgin,serene and cerulean,in the centre,

Lilies flaming all around her,

As she rides on the shoulders of her sweating devotees

And an old priest walks ahead,

Holding the gold crucifix high.


Café con leche and tostón for breakfast:

Olive oil from the Romans,

Sugar and cinnamon brought by the Moors.

Oh sweet scent of tiny white orange blossoms…

In the heart’s mihrab I turn to face

The Mecca of memory and yearning…

I prefer the impure, in all things.


In the only remaining synagogue,

I tour the white marble walls,so intricately carved,

Long plastered over after the building

Had been converted into a hospital; for hydrophobes.

Here,in this tiny space, the wretches

Screamed and writhed and begged God’s mercy.


On the shady patio,in a tiled mihrab,

Pink and yellow rose petals float

In a marble water basin;

Flowering gardenias and banana trees

Encircle the fountain,

And the only sounds

Are birds and water...

My greedy fingers reach for pistachio halva

Perfumed with essence of roses,

And plump sticky dates.

Berlin Nights

Nadja dances every night at the KitKat Club,

Without shame or .fear.

Desire is her art, her vocation.

It has always been this way.

Here,in the musty dark,

Successes are failures,

Failures are successes

And all are united

In the flesh.

In the witching hour

All the freaks come out

To work their magic

And no one is unwanted or unloved.

Down the stairs she enters,

And sheds her silver dress and cape,

To dance like a Babylonian priestess

Then leads her chosen partner

To the canopied bed.

Papa Hemingway's Cuba

The first time he came here

Hemingway caught nineteen marlin and three sailfish

And after that he was in love forever.

He drank mojitos at La Bodeguita

And daiquiris at El Floridita.

Many mojitos, many daiquiris.

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

I walk the narrow cobbled streets,

Past peeing dogs and begging urchins,

And grand buildings rotting away.

In the house outside Havana,

His fishing cap lies on the bed,

Shotgun shells stand in rows on the desk,

And stuffed heads of African beasts adorn the walls.

Another tourist bus is pulling into the parking lot.

The waters are fished out now.

The man who lived here belonged to no country,

Belonged to no-one and nothing but his work,

His tender furies remain in the land and sea.

Shotgun shells stand in rows on the desk.

Another tourist bus is pulling into the parking lot.

The Walking Wounded: Weimar Cinema

The silent ones, the survivors,

With catatonic stares...

Red taboo is on their hands.

Memory is working them over

Brutally, thoroughly.

Too many ghosts walk among the living,

Reminding ,accusing.

Tics and tremors and convulsions

Quake the sobbing days

And every shadowed street is no man’s land.

All these corpses-

Do you call it murder or fate?

Dr Caligari stalks the asylum,

A charlatan-messiah

Who can hypnotize the absent

Back to life.

Use all your science, all your intuition,

This world will leave you guessing anyway.


F.W.Murnau sits reading letters

From his dead love

And Nosferatu’s shadow creeps across the wall.

The séance of cinema

Commences in the dark.

Fever dream documentary

Records the voodoo rat scampering

And vanishing through the moon’s trenches.

Murnau,his mind like a Balkan castle,

Stands observing a painting

By Caspar David Friedrich,

The solitary figure with back to the viewer,

Absorbed in a vast emptiness.


It is the age of the dybbuk,

Somnambulists’ paradise.

The envious dead wreak their frustration on the living,

Warriors lie impotent in their marital beds.

Slowly, implacably, the Venus fly trap closes.


As archaeologists uncover the ruins of Babylon

And reconstruct the Tower of Babel,

Fritz Lang- pirate’s eyepatch covering

The lethal glare of a heathen god-

Sketches designs for Metropolis,

The revolutionary mob rushing onward

To pull down the citadel.

Chinese Calligraphy

The Xuan paper sucks the black ink deep inside,

Each magic square drawn

From the heart’s grimoire,

Black and white harmonies

Balanced on a rabbit’s hair brushtip.

Dots and strokes

Dance to secret rhythms;

Water and air are married

In the flow of the hand.

One comes to love the spaces between characters

More than the characters themselves.


Lei Jianfu of the Song Dynasty

Learned how to move his brush

By listening to the sound of running water

And letting his hand swim

With the waves.


Su Shi said that to write

Was like playing a game of chess

With the strokes.

Cosmetic Surgery

Disfigured.Imperfect.

Intervene in destiny

And change it before it’s too late,

Before you lose everything-

Love and money and success.

Look in the mirror-

Where the voodoo begins.

The cutter has come

To make blood flow,

To correct the damage nature has done.

Does he love or does he hate?

Do his hands heal or attack?


Beauty’s dispute takes the soul for prey.

Bodies are just bits and pieces-

Who owns them,in the end?

A doctored smile in a magazine

Is suddenly discarded, crumpled, in the bin.


All the bumps and scars and anomalies

Of my weird geography

Terrorize my waking dreams.

Between ugliness and splendour

Is a mere fraction.

This body is nothing

But the image of what it might become.

I am an impersonator,

Never off the stage.


More real is the photograph,

The beloved monster

I serve and emulate.

The inescapable spectre.

All those mug shots on the police station wall.

All those movie star pin-ups.


What will emerge

From this face-cocoon?

Another mask.

New life,bruised and swollen.

The scalpel’s kiss

Tells me I am loved.


Laid out again on the operating table,

I wait for the cold hands to manipulate me

And annihilate the unwanted;

The morphine of anguish

Puts me under once more;

Sailing like a pharaoh on his solar barque

Through the underworld,

To meet my birth-star,

I struggle up again,reborn, victorious;

I turn to face the mirror,

And try to interpret

The stranger

Risen like a volcanic island

From chaotic seas.

Consumers

“The richest 1 per cent of the world’s population

Owns 40 per cent of the planet’s wealth.

The richest 10 per cent own over 85 per cent of the world’s assets,

With over half the world’s population

Owning barely 1 per cent of the global wealth.

This is a world in which over 800 million people

Go to bed hungry every night.”

I register the statistics then go back to my business,

The routine art of transformation,

My thoughts as luxurious and superfluous as billionaires’ yachts,

My suburban life a private Caribbean island

Designed to my own blueprint.


Spaces,lifestyles,relationships,identities,bodies,

All mutate in my hands,

As my dying flesh dreams of ever vaster sensations,

Ever greater proof of itself, of God.

Maintain, repair,improve your body, your life:

Turn yourself into a deluxe product.

A life on credit,

Overstretched.


The zero game of freedom

Snares me in machines.

Seduce me, manipulate me,

Turn me inside-out.

We are the wasters, the destroyers,

Used up as we abuse.

Excess is our damnable pleasure,

Puritan libertines.


From ecstasy to anomie,

I plot the graph.

My unimaginable death reinvents itself

As games,art,religion and war.

On with the tournament,

The carnival of fools!

Everywhere I turn I see masks and costumes:

On the streets and in the shopping centres,


I take my fantasies for a stroll,

Random memories striking like asteroids,

Battering me into a derelict Mars.

Arts become industries,

Objects become photographs,

Reality’s hallucination is screened on my solitude,

Rich in false intensity.

How could I survive without these fictions?

Under the surveillance cameras’ eyes,

I toy with self-control,

Observing without being observed,

Excited and blasé.

History means nothing to me now

And I still prefer the Old Testament to the New.

I will never be part of the Universal;

I do not have heroes any more.


Schizophrenic, can you join the dots

And call it truth? A child’s drawing,

With stick-people and massive suns.

Mysterious oppressive fragments of time

Fall from your fingers,-

Did you break your toys again?

Everything breaks down in the end;

Disappointment sets in early.

I can’t understand the world but I know it hurts.


I like to look at objects from a distance,

Without judgment or taste.

Depth and perspective are superfluous now.

The most beautiful people are actually circus freaks.

Take me to the fair, take me to the theatre,

Show me the monsters,

Let me live again!

The dandies are in charge now,

If anyone is.

The Love Hotel

One after the other, they enter the love hotel:

An old man with a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl,

Ready for a quick commercial exchange;

A middle-aged couple darting inside, guiltily hiding their faces;

A teenage couple sauntering in as if it were a fast food restaurant.

Every illusion is doubled in the rational society,

Hallucination of capital and form.

Is this the “floating world”? Or just a reference in a book?

City-collage, metropolis of scattered symbols,

We go through the kata,

Medieval futurists and conservative anarchists,

Looking for strongpoints to be.

I am a backstreets man,

Making knight’s moves to swerve into other dimensions,

Drifting with aleatory pleasure,

Negotiating convoluted entrances and exits.

The street slows and focuses

As the maze leads you in

To the Shinto shrine,the moated castle,

Through decisions and dilemmas

Of pleasure and prayer.

Out here is the edge,

An infinity of edges,

And whatever paths you find around them.

This is my riverbank,my trading post,my graveyard,

Asylum for a vagrant soul,

Exploring its own rituals and forces.

Confusion is my district:

Mapping it is my profession.

Choose your room and enter:

The forbidden chamber of fairytales,

A fantasy, but no happy-ever-after,

A sense of incompletion, not closure.

Now you will play and masquerade

For secret deities, as if to ease unease

And neutralise dread.

Please pay close attention to the instructions

As to correct use of toys and equipment,;

And vacate the room at the allotted time,

So as to allow the professional cleaning team

To prepare it for the next customers.

The Bukovina Frescoes

Thirty-six battles King Stephen the Great

Fought against the Ottoman Empire,

Winning all but two,

And after each victory he built churches

Among the wooded vales.

His bastard son Petru Rares, ruling after him,

Commissioned artists to fresco their walls,

Small Gothic churches in brilliant colours,

Covered all over with paintings

To catechize the illiterate.

Teams of four or five-

Men whose names are now forgotten-

Would even out the rough stone walls

With mortar,then smooth on a fine layer

Of lime plaster mixed with straw,

And then they had just a few hours

To paint with quick sure hands,as one ,

Before the plaster dried out.

So they laid on pigments mixed

From rare clays,semiprecious stones

And minerals, that soaked in and fixed.

In the Last Judgment,heaven-homing souls

Wear embroidered Bukovinian cloths;

Announcing angels sound shepherd's horns;

And King David plays a cobza,

Calm, beatific figures are being burned alive,

Dragged behind horses,

Thrown over castle walls,

Strangled, boiled and beheaded.

By tormentors dressed as Turks.

Molotov's Library

In a grand Moscow apartment,late into the night,

Amid Persian carpets,Chinese jades

And sentimental gilt-framed genre paintings of peasants,

The round-headed imperturbable killer

Sits, reading and annotating books,

Diligently cataloguing thousands of works,

From his rich eclectic private library,

Studying his beloved Chekhov with particular passion,

And opening signed first editions by authors

Whom one day soon he will send to the Gulag.

There is always another title he must have:

He reads constantly, methodically, slowly,

Making endless notes in the margins,

With the same pen that signs death warrants,

Careful to limit his poetry-reading

Lest the love of dreams and beauty seduce him

Away from the discipline of fact and prose,

And the perfect society to come.

“The best filing clerk in Russia”,Lenin dubbed him,

And still the jibe hurts;his enemies will not laugh long,

He will outmanoeuvre and outlast them all;

Until they,too, are reduced to footnotes.

Piero's Province

The quiet church, the stillness and the cool,

And the Battle of Heraclius and Chosroes,

My eye being cleverly conducted

Through the packed composition

By the angle of a horse’s head,

The tilt of a shield,a speartip...

All this order I struggle to encompass.

Outside, in the piazza, a young couple

Stroll past,kissing, eyes closed in kef;

They stumble yet stay upright.


On a hotel veranda in Sansepolcro,

As twilight seeps through,

I see Renaissance paintings emerge

From the landscape,and fade back-

Geometryand chaos in continual battle,-

And remember the pregnant Madonna,

Young beauty,eyes downcast,

So timid and sombre her mien,

Her fingertips lightly brushing

Her swollen belly,bearing her destiny

With exquisite resignation.

Qualia

The properties of objects, the nature of the given-

Sensations and perceptions I am,I am,

Private detective sniffing out the clues...

How can I tell you what red is?

It is all so implausible, the real.

Before the melody ends I can sense its wave,

The square root of minus one.

I only know what I think I know.


What does hurting? It is,was,will be,that’s all.

Changes,all changes,the day,the hour, the minute-

Oh so clumsily I express my expressions,-

Where is the information?

The maps are full of errors.

There are no ifs or buts,no maybes

Here in Maybeland.

I must maintain philosophical equilibrium.

I must keep to principles, whatever they are.


You cannot explain all this away.

You cannot explain me away.

That grey squirrel in the branches outside

Is the square root of minus one.

The Forest Philosopher

As Nietzsche -in the sudden clarity of madness-

Threw his arms around a horse’s neck

And would not let go,

So must he cling to the world.

Walking, talking and dressing

Like some country bumpkin,

The philosopher-king,

From his simple hut on a Black Forest hillside,

Gazed out across the valley to the Alps beyond.

His tools were all around him,

As he walked the wooded paths,

Through glades and clearings,

And skied downslope in winter.

Alone with his books and the nightstorms,

A Pre-Socratic, crabbed and hungry

For the sources, the roots of things,,

He built,like a voyageur his canoe,

A mountaindweller’s dialect all his own.

He must remember what the world had forgotten,

Work like a woodcutter at his task

And give no quarter to fools.

Forking and reforking, the path

Led through dark firs,on Death Mountain,

Where a sad and sovereign intellect,

Refusing the world’s interference,

Could run to its own cruel limits

Pretending that knowledge was love.

Celts and Romans

Rain dripping from a leaf is the history of the island.

A good place to pick a fight and win a useful war: so the Roman emperors calculate, delightedly sticking pins in maps and juggling the exotic names of tribes.

The eagle-bearer of the tenth legion takes shape under Caesar’s pen, a vivid cartoon; that boar-tusked name Casivellaunus- a handy chimera-struts onstage with barbarian flourish, stinking of uninhabitable forests and revolting customs.

Words-gold coins engraved with wild boars and horses-weapon the hand-to-mouth storytellers.

Facts: hillforts to be taken by storm, by the discipline of imagination.The victorious shall reside in fancy villas,painted with mythological frescoes, enjoying imported wines and costly delicacies.

Cunobelinus poses for his coins,in imitation of Augustus,clean-shaven and laurel-wreathed in Roman tunic,flattering his foreign patrons and absorbing their power, as his chariots race across country to force rival tribes to their knees.

Black Russian

The ice.Always the ice.The dark mother.

So little grain from the brief season.

The peasants suspicious and grumbling,

Hating the merchants’ rapacity.

What might come riding out of the plains,

Tatars from the east, Germans from the west?

The backward, the resentful, the disillusioned

Have a special wisdom.

Why must there always be a false utopia

To yearn for, to leap at- and fail?

Perhaps contradictions need not be resolved.

Let them be, let them breed, and be free.

Empire and chaos hold sway

Over the serfs, always crumbling back

Into the dirt,as thunderclouds mass

In the steppe heavens,and hunters

Kiss their lucky charms,setting out.

Whatever they may say, the people

Favour the black horse over the white.

This struggle,futile and fatiguing,leading

Through catastrophe,again and again,

Will never be abandoned,for the damned

Are romantics and believers to the end.

The Potter's Wheel

I throw my life upon the wheel,

Not at the centre of anything,

But part of the movement,

The rhythm and the noise...

The wheel is gathering momentum

And the clay domes in my hands;

You can feel every change

Right in the fingertips.

Again and again on the treadle,

As the shape grows,

Catching ambient sound

In its hollow,

Resonating like a seashell.

Hunched and twisted,

I suffer the torments

When the euphoria is gone.

Here, there is no thinking,

Only doing,

All I am is what my hands know,

What they remember.

Fascination

So beautiful is the illusion

Why should one wish for the real ?

Elements forever in commotion,

Repelling or attracting,

Have no choice but to create.

Where parallels join,beyond the horizon,

Infinite triangles irradiate.

And,in the cathedral,

Caught in the rose window’s tractor beam,

You automatically start walking

Eastwards,into sunrise,

Anchored yet free…

Fire,earth,air and water

Combine in the glass,

Colours changing ceaselessly ;

This world which you must leave

Is fascination.

Alfred Wegener

Pangaea breaking up

a raindrop forming

ice crystal halo arcs appearing opposite the sun

a man

crossing hundreds of miles

of Greenland snow and ice

You maintain equilibrium

by isostasy

feeling the ground

move beneath your feet

blue-eyed Viking raider of the sky

Savaged by critics and enemies

listening totheir sarcastic tirades

he sits silently

without responding

smoking his pipe

They found him dead

lying on a reindeer skin

inside his tent

on the Greenland icecap

face calm and peaceful

almost smiling

and over him his friends

raised an ice mausoleum

Japanese Aesthetics

From nothingness to nothingness

the waves the waves

the simple weathered things I love

imperfect

impermanent

incomplete

that which comes and goes I cherish

discernible only to a cultivated eye

a quiet mind

What makes these tears start

out of nowhere?

Year after year

the karateka practises the kata

until suddenly one day

the unnatural becomes natural

the rehearsed becomes spontaneous

The ikebana artist

cuts a flower

precisely in order to make it live

to return it to itself

The Nō actor

slides his raised-toe foot along the stage

then abruptly cuts off the movement

lowering his toes to the floor-

a pause between inhalation and exhalation-

and at the exact same instant

his other foot slides forward

The poet’s brush

strikes a cut

between two images

in a haiku

walling in a rock garden

of white gravel and black stones

where the only motion

is shadows cast by sun and moon

The Singing Fish of Sri Lanka

To the shores of Serendib a lonely sailor

With words and worlds to trade...

Gondwanaland:my mind!

A dancer’s movement-

Just the slightest gesture of a hand-

Sets worlds spinning , in space.

A firewalker’s balance

Holds the planets in orbit.


From here to Paradise,they say,is just forty miles;

One can hear the sound of its fountains.

Broken orange pekoe fumes rich malty coppery tones

As I lift the chipped cup.

Like a colossal stone Buddha

I lie down on my side to sleep,

Ready for my next unenlightened incarnation.


On April full moon nights the fish are said to sing

Off the coast of Batti;

One must stick an oar into the water

And hold the other end to one’s ear.

From the Reign of Shah Abbas

The world’s embassies and caravans converge on alchemical Isfahan.A style and a kingdom united;one purpose in politics and art.

Shah Abbas’s sabre:a broad single-edged damascus blade,with walrus ivory hilt,and watered steel mounts adorned with gold inlay;signed in the cartouche “Abbas the slave of the Lord of Holiness”,with the lion-sun motif.

Conversant with all mechanical crafts, the Shah loved making scimitars,arquebuses and saddles. Encouraged by “The Mirror of Princes” he had read as a boy,he proudly emulated the workshops of Timur and Uzan Hasan.

Inside the Shaykh Lutfullah Mosque:walls and dome on fire with blue,yellow,white and turquoise tiles,all intricate arabesques,cartouches and geometric designs;light on light,light within light,luminescence self-reflecting into infinity, the wordless serene.

A golden album page of calligraphy (breathed onto the paper by an assassinated poet), and carpets of silk and gold;such crafts are prized by the wise.

Golden dome,golden minaret,golden portal of the Imam Riza Shrine at Mashhad,illuminated in the malachite night:time and again the Shah came here to worship, kiss the holy ground and weep and pray, giving thanks for victories won and beseeching Allah for fresh conquests.

An elegant brass ewer, incised with palmette arabesques, intertwining vines and cypresses, blossoms and trefoils, the long slender neck and the bulbous body,-all the feminine volume of the earth is shaped into function.

A watercolour portrait of Shah Abbas as an old man,being served wine by an adolescent boy,almost embracing,-he, great king and conqueror,who had killed or blinded his own sons, still craved affection from young men.

Victor Segalen

The discovery of difference

Requires intensive practice;

Apprehension is refined by its limits.

The human is always and everywhere

Primitive and exotic.

One colonises sadly,sure to be one day overthrown.


In nightmares he could see the uniform hordes

Marching in sexless lifeless lock step,

Democratic serfs, sophisticated cretins.

He built his own Forbidden City,

Bridges, temples and pavilions aligned

With the heavens and earth.


Hiking in the Breton forest,

He fell, badly injured,to lay for days,alone,

And when his dead body was found

A copy of Hamlet lay open beside him.

The Madeleines of Georges de la Tour

The light, the candlelight and the shadow,

The shadow and the light,the shadow,

The candlelight.

Night is the time for secrets,

Revealed and unrevealed.

Do not mistake these glimpses

For irrefutable insights,

Do not speak of epiphanies,

Do not speak.

I love only the silent, the silent and grave.

Do not speak of redemption,

No, do not speak.


She turns to the mirror,

Finding a reflection and a flame.

To see what no-one else can see,

What no-one else has seen,

What may or may not even be there,

Such is the secret.

I love only the sorrowful and resigned.

I love the speechless witness.

Maps

Someone drew a line in the dirt with his finger,

Then another,and another,

Making magic.

And the line became his master.


Somewhere in the Congo,

A Luba initiate

Is led into the meeting house

To memorize the wall maps drawn by the elders

Depicting the guardian spirits’ houses

And the ancestral migratory paths.

Then he is shown the memory board,

And,studying its beads and cowrie shells,

Witnesses spirit capitals,

Migratory routes and chieftaincies.

And the elders sing their way round the board,

Celebrating the king and his journeys

And the sites of holy trees and lakes.


Suddenly, I am gone,

Leaving only

A bark painting or a sand sculpture

In the middle of Australia.

The Portuguese Cartographer

It was the year Columbus crossed the Atlantic,

The year the Jews were expelled from Spain.

Alone, in Lisbon,in a sea-lit room,

A man of whom nothing much is known

Sat and drew a map such as the world had never seen,

Tracing the coasts of Europe and the Mediterraean,

The Black Sea and West Africa.

With sinuous rococo arabesques,

He voyaged about shores compassed together

From fragments,his mariner’s hand

Carried on mysterious currents,

Through secret tempests and wrecks,

Undulating all around the parchment.

And when he had finished, he wrote upon it:

“Jorge de Aguiar made me in Lisbon

In the year of Our Lord Jesus Christ 1492.”

Who was he? A sea captain? Or perhaps a Sephardi?

Navigating southward the African coast,

One manoeuvred against the winds and waves,

Puzzling out the contours of dreams and terrors.

He had found his own magnetic north

And must sail to the limits of faith and reason,

Damned to new diseases,and the avarice

In merchants’ and slavers’ eyes.

Surfing

Feel what the wave is doing, saying,

Let it go, go with it.

Everything breaks, is rising and breaking

All the time, all over,

To the shore.

Life, savagely gentle,recalls you

To a place you never truly left.

The circles, the circles.

Do we have to believe in limits

To be followers of the Law?

If you fear drowning,

If you fear it,

Do not go out to sea at all.

A body,

All you are is a body,

And yet this body

Is not you at all.

Enter the wave,

Roll with the moment,

With no beginning and no end.

No more eternal, no more fixed.

Sympathy will see you through,

Sympathy for everything.

Live the intuition,

The sensation

Of air and water in motion.

From conduction

To convection

To turbulence,

You fall into the flow,

Always turning into something else.

There is nothing you cannot negotiate

With perfect manoeuvres,

Feeling what is right. what works.



It is all about differences,

Gradations of pressure and temperature,

Nuances of mind.

Desire will lead you

To no desire.

Master Pinzel

He may have come from Bohemia,or Silesia, or Bavaria,

Or Italy,even. Was he Swiss, Ukrainian, or Polish?

Gradually, he became a country of his own,

As weird and influential as the moon.

He belonged to the periphery,

To the streets of Lviv,

His face the face of everyone in the crowd,

The preachers,scoundrels,criminals,craftsmen,,

Heretics, spies,lotharios and plain decent folk.

The deviants of the north and south.

Might he have been as exteme as any Sarmatian,

Or made himself a Masonic lodge of one?

Nothing is so occult as the self.

He saw angels in Venetian carnival masks,

The beatific smile turning instantly

Into a macabre grin.

Hypertrophied irony was the mountebank in his head.

He had no use for marble

When wood felt so true in his grasp,

A living dying thing,

Convulsive, gesticulating,twisting

Through ellipses and vortices.

Those remote half-heathen provinces of belief

Held him to the grace of sacrilege,

Sarcastically loving, tenderly hating.

The End of Genghis Khan

The Mongol hordes overrun Khurasan,

Burning crops, razing cities, slaughtering populations.

Returning home along the path of his invasion,

Genghis Khan pauses to erect a stone pillar

And dictate the inscription:

“I turn to simplicity; I turn again to purity.”


Jebe Noyan and Subedei Bahadur

Dine on a box-shaped table in camp,

The Prince of Kiev suffocating to death inside it.


At winter’s onset, in peacetime, the Great Hunt begins:

The entire army, at a signal from the Khan,

Canters forward, in battle array,

For three months on horseback,

Driving the game relentlessly before them.

Bone-chafed, weather-drenched and sore,

The army’s wings advance in harmony,

Slowly closing to encircle the prey,

Until the two ends meet, and the circle contracts

Like a whitehot horsehoe quenched in water.

Terrified animals by the thousand

Are herded together, trapped in the killing zone,

Not a single beast, big or small, permitted to escape,

On the last day, seeking to outdo one another

In the eyes of their comrades, and their Khan,

Men fight with sword or hunt on foot,

And throw themselves into danger,

So that some even die wrestling tigers barehanded.


Troubled by ill omens, the Great Khan

Sets out to avenge himself on the insolent Tanguts.

Out hunting, during the campaign,,

He tumbles from his mount,

But carries on, hiding the haemorrhage pain in his guts.

Weaker and weaker, through narrowed eyes,

He watches his soldiers lay waste to the land,

Soothed, as always, by the smell of destruction.

On the frozen banks of the flooded Yellow River,

The Tangut cavalry, charging headlong,

Slide haywire, crashing, jumbled in heaps,

Taken in the flank and massacred

By the dauntless Mongols, their horses shod with felt,

And lavish crimson smears the ice.


Shrouded in furs, huddled, shivering in his tent,

Genghis, delirious and despairing,

Cries out to any who will hear:

“My descendants will wear gold

And eat the choicest meats;

They will ride the finest horses,

Hold in their arms the loveliest women,

Forgetting to whom they owe it all.”

He repeats to his sons the fable

Of the snake with many heads that argued amongst themselves;

He reminds them that one arrow is easily broken,

But a bundle of arrows never.

Soon afterwards he died.

In fertile mountains, where three rivers start,

In a few years the great leader’s grave was overgrown and forgotten,

And who now even remembers which peak it was on?

Cumbria

Water and stone. Water is stone is water.

Stone jutting, thusting in pinnacles.

Stone quivering in fragments on shilly-beds.

Stone gouged and chiselled by glaciers,

Weathered into grotesques.

Stone hewn and hauled into sacred circles.

Stone packed into walls and roads.

Handled by generations of dalesmen

For sheepfolds, farmsteads, bridges, churches, mills.

Stones in tranquil valley bottoms.

Stones clustered on ledges and in gulleys.

Crouched in millions on stormy summits.

Skygazing as seasons pass.

England’s landscape garden

Is a masterpiece of trompe l’oeil.


A spread map conjures Nordic gutturals:

Fells, becks, gills and tarns,

Brant slopes and flou brooks,

Slacks, hauses, grains and scars.

Somewhere, a sheep, binked on a ledge,

Sends loose pebbles skittering,

And an overfeagued hiker, blister-hirpled,

Toils, stark-thewed, through clotted mist.


Nineteenth-century Tourists circulate,

Browsers in a gallery, comparing

Pictures and frames.

They fill notebooks with classical allusions,

And aim Claude-glasses tinted to an antique glow,

Shrinking unwieldy views to Lilliputian perfection.

Regattas resound on the meres,

Cannon salvoes from mock naval battles

Echoing among the peaks.


Near Gosforth the Esk and Mitre

Coalesce in a sad estuary,

Stillness slashed by seabirds’ cries,

Sand, sky and water melting into silver-amber blur.

Enter into the sand-dunes, the sere grass hummocks,

The long glisk of firth beyond.

Blink at the black ships approaching in line,

Riding low and flatbacked, prows reared high,

Sea-dragons charging to battle.

In Gosforth churchyard an Anglo-Viking cross

Rises, Christ-tree and Yggdrasil,

Its roots deep in the ocean’s floor,

Girdled by the coils of the Midgardsworm

That catches its own tail in its teeth.

One wolf swallows the Moon, another the Sun.

Loki writhes, bound, the adder round his neck,

Punished for his dirty tricks and jibes.

“An axe age, a sword age,

Shields shall be cloven,

A wind age, a wolf age,

Ere the world sinks...”

Odin on Sleipnir, upside-down,

Gallops down to Mimir’s well to consult the oracle.

The Magdalene gazes upwards

At her crucified love,

Dying at the juncture of two worlds;

Underneath, two wolf-headed ogres

Thrash in mortal combat.

Sumo

Three white-robed referees step into the ring,

Where seven wands lie in zigzag pattern.

The solemn chief pronounces:

“Everlasting life to heaven, long life to earth,

And may the winds and rains be seasonable.”

Lucky emblems in an earthenware pot

Lie blessed and buried in the middle.

The ring is consecrated with salt and sake,

And three circuits the attendants march,

Lacquered drums suspended from poles.


First quarter of the new moon:

River spirits will fasten on bathers

And wrestle them down to their deaths.

Kites are flying, horses running,

Sumo wrestlers wobble to the clash.


On the Day of the Chrysanthemum, the Double Sun,

At the Kamo shrine two large circles are traced in dust.

The male-crow priest hops to the sand-mound at one circle’s centre

And the female-crow priest hops to her circle’s centre,

Three times with three hops, there and back,

They journey to and from their little mountains,

Bearing a mat, a bow and arrow, a sword and a fan.

The male crow on the left calls to the female on the right;

Three times he calls and she responds.

Three times clockwise round the left mound

Boy sumo wrestlers circle;

Counterclockwise round the other their opponents troop.


It is time for the rice to be planted.

A sumo wrestler stands in the ring,

Before the sacred ricefield at the shrine.

He stamps his feet, rinses his mouth with water,

Scatters salt, crouches then stands up,

Circumambulates the ring widdershins,

Straining against an invisible foe.

Suddenly his legs are seized-he is thrown!

He staggers up, valiantly grapples the air again,

And is toppled to the ground.

Aztec Gods

Huitzilopochtli, Southern Hummingbird, aloft, aloft,

Patron lord of the Mexica,-

We who trekked in exodus to the site foretold,

The eagle perched on a cactus,

Small birds feathers scattered around-

Make us a rainbow!

Fallen warriors escort the risen sun,

Beating their wings to frisk the skies for rain.

Come, strict fruition, in strife and immolation,

Implacable daystar, be nourished with blood,

The red of sacred terror in men’s veins...

Tlazolteotl, excremental goddess,

Hears confessions from the dying,

Their evil whispered in her ear.

Spare us, spare us- we who believe!

The rabbit moon leaps. The pulque-gods seethe.

Tezcatlipoca, Smoking Mirror,

Sleek black jaguar padding across the heavens,

Our sorcerers will feed your maw

With trembling incantation.


New Fire is unsheathed on the Hill of the Star,

Fire-drill swivelled in the sacrifice’s breast;

A slash, a yank and a live throbbing heart

Is offered to the saviour flame.

The Flayed God sniffs the iron reek,

The Sunstone revolves, world after world

Destroying themselves in hopeless succession.

Whittled jaguar-bone in hand, the ruler

Gladly stabs his own ears and thighs,

Red flowers blooming for his people.


A comet scorches the heavens. A temple burns.

On a calm day the lagoon seethes like a cauldron.

Phantasmal women wail beneath the moon,

Prophesying unavoidable disaster.

Hunters come before Moctezuma,

Bringing a wondrous, unnameable fowl,

A circular speculum set in its head.

Peering therein, the Emperor sees

The stars by day, and, looking again,

A bizarre fearsome horde, drawn up

In squadrons, advancing to war,

Creatures half-man, half-deer.

A runner comes up, babbling of a mountain

In the sea, erupting in fiery monition.


The white god has returned from the east,

Not seen on these shores since the Toltecs’ demise.

Aztec envoys, coming down to the harbour,

Place the turquoise serpent mask upon

The face of a hard-bitten Spanish hidalgo.

Quetzalcoatl throws a thunderbolt from his hand,

-A cannon fired in brisk ceremonial salute,-

And the Aztec deputation fall, terrified, to the ground.

Picking them up, the bemused Spaniards

Restore these ridiculous little creatures with wine.

What witchcraft is this, the Aztecs ask themselves,

Clutching their heads, feeling their souls

Imprisoned, so sluggish, befuddled, dehumanised.

Pathfinders

These are the maps, the palimpsests,

Criss-cross routes congealing into lands.

Imaginary dialogues with potential objects

Hasten the explorer through his expanded self.

The itinerant cartographer, subtly violent,

Draws metaphors into his passage,

Bringing the invisible into focus.

He cherishes occasions,

Places that are means to travel more,

Experiments in ignorance and knowledge.

The centre is everywhere and nowhere.

These places are not their names,

Nor are their names translations.


Following dumb unlettered rivers,

Seeking out their sources,

The pathfinders surrender to a new syntax.

Armed with ambiguous terminology,

They slowly assemble landscapes,

Yielding to the lie of the language.

Naming, they inaugurate a history,

A sense of centres, edges and vectors;

Everywhere they tread is borderland.

A Meeting In The Arctic

August 10, 1818


Commander John Ross and Lieutenant William Parry,

Officers of the Royal British Navy,

Stand resplendent in cocked hats and tailcoats,

White-gloved, with swords at their belts,

Buckled shoes sinking into the snow

As they stand meeting a band of Eskimos

In Melville Bay, Greenland,

Their two square-rigged ships at anchor behind,

As they shiver in regulation wool and broadcloth.

The icebound sea coruscates with palaces

And castles, weird statues and phantom monuments,

Slightly out of focus, perhaps only a dream,

Emerald, azure, indigo and alabaster.


The Englishmen and the Eskimos stand staring,

Equally amazed at each other,

And the Eskimos ask, in a dialect so obscure

The interpreter can barely understand it:

“Where are you from? The sun or the moon?”

Then they address the ships as living beings

For they have seen their wings move.

They spit out the biscuit they are offered,

And shrink from their reflections in a hand-mirror,-

What kind of monster is this?

Shown a watch, they wonder if it is alive,

And is it good to eat?

The interpreter makes them doff their caps

In deference to the Englishmen,

And they obey cheerfully, mystified by the ritual.

Meanwhile, the navy men, wandering round,

Find themselves drawn hypnotically

To certain stones in view, bewildered

When what seems half a mile away

Turns out to be a minute’s stroll.


Pink blush of a hard frost, and pastel shades

Of the northern heavens, where the aurora

Showers, trickles and pulsates down the darkness,

Huge illuminations streaming and shooting,

Silently rushing...

Icebergs seem to float in mid-air,

Other icebergs upside-down on top of them,

Protean apparitions proliferate on all sides.

Ships float in the concave of a vast sphere

And doppelgangers wander through the mind.

Whirlwinds shoot skyward from hilltops,

Spraying white clouds into the air.

Solid foam-masses lash the capes,

Breaking over icebergs, fogging the sea,

Rising and falling with each gust.

Arctic Circles

Malemutes stretch taut their leashes,

Brown eyes ensorcelled by the master’s legerdemain,

Leaping to snatch hunks of meat in mid-flight-

A clack of the mandibles, one gulp, all gone.

The head dog stands apart, calmly waiting,

Reprimanding his fellows with tactical nips.


Summer’s smoke soon drifts away.

Fishing-lines sink in salmon torrents.

Children gather huckleberries by the handful.

Seabirds are crying, preparing to leave.

Languid boys stretch out on springy tundra,

Watching clouds in a suspended world.

Offshore, glacier and rock blend in blue expanse.

One freakish night transfigures the world with white,

Iron earth thuds underfoot.


The mountain resounds with harsh inhuman yelps.

A fox trots along the crest, tail extended,

Pace even and brisk, a thing possessed.

He sits and perks triangular ears,

Pointed little head alert to all vibrations,

And, hoarsely, with double-triple quavers,

Calls to his mate, to the empty tundra and the wind...


Sand and stone. Rocks through fractured earth.

Space...space...white pebble valleys...desolate peaks...

Tawny slopes freaked with snow...

Glacier gleaming, king of the wilderness...

Emptiness thrills to odd noises-

Creaks, wingbeats, gullshrieks, muffled crunching,

Gunshot crack of icebergs calving.


An Inuit shaman intones in his igloo,

Fidgets, frets, grimaces, grunts and trembles,

Cries out , panting, in a strange jerky tongue,

Petitioning the stealthy powers of the air.

Down he buckles, a dead heap, dreaming,

Swimming with the goddess under the ice,

Caressing her, untangling her tresses,

Wedded in the holy sight of the dead.

How long, he asks her, will the warm spell last?

When will seals leave and narwhals return?


Happy smell of animal skins and grease...

Thawing earth steams. Excited birds circle.

Obsidian sea without a ripple shimmers

From iceberg to iceberg, mesmeric mirages.

Cheery, the hunters recite each landmark:

Here, one set his traps for triumph;

There, another made love under a tent.

The kayak takes after a red-eyed walrus,

One Eskimo imitating its cry...

One-two-strike! The harpoon shudders,-

A widening blood-circle on the water...


Days draw shorter. The flushed sun, bidding adieu,

Tracks along the dazzle-cliff, sinking at last.

Fleeting twilight. Horizon, emerald-white,

Flares orange-purple. Southwest is yellow sky,

Translucent clouds and weird shadows on cliffs.

Hibernal wind corrugates ferruginous screes.

The ocean contracts in black gelatinous paste.

People languish, morose, enraged over niggles.

Hysterical, a woman runs riot with a knife,

Boggle-eyed with superhuman wrath.

A crazed hound yelps and zigzags, staring blindly,

Collapses, spitting froth, jaw agape.


A sledge flies smoothly along,-gallant malemutes!

Brothers to the Eskimo, their skullbones alike,

The pack united by quarrels and amours-

This bitch venting her menstrual potion,

That dog running his flatulence out...



Polar night. The dogs on their haunches

Tilt their heads towards the moon, eyes half-closed,

And yowl in unison, modulating some desperate

Propitiatory appeal.

Far away, to the south,

A pale solar halo arises. Men moving about

Are silhouettes darker than dark.

Day explodes in multicoloured space,

The ocean unshackled, carousing,

Heated birds shuttling to and fro.

Now let the blood thaw in venery’s season!


The storyteller’s eyes gaze inwards,

Voice grave as he draws listeners

Into the iceblink dream, their secrets

Inscribed on the air.

All men are shapeshifters,

Genies made of ice.


Agile hands flutter in a string game,

Knotting little pictures to tease the air;-

See,-a penis embedded in a tight vagina;

And now-a defecating woman venting a fart.

The strong deride the weak. The lazy are damned.

The winning wrestler pisses on his victim.


A hunter returns, snorting, coughing, saying nothing,

Unharnesses the team, the dogs whimpering with pleasure,

Flattering him with a show of female weakness.

He works alone, weary but proud,

Then trudges to his place amid feigned indifference,

Cherishing his mystery intact within,

He stretches out, putting on a solemn face,

As his canny wife simply hands him a bowl of water.

He slurps, wipes his mouth on his sleeve,

And only then, eyes lowered, does he utter,

Allowing his tale to run forth like a sledge,

Gathering speed on bumpy ice,

As he recalls aloud all the details of his journey,

The changing colours of the land and sky,

And all he saw thought and felt...


A mother licks her newborn child

That cries out to be recognised and named.

“Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry,

The big black crow will peck out your eyes...”


The men, clustered together, laugh as they discuss

The women’s vaginas: whose is the best shape,

Which one is best lubricated,

How well this or that one fits.

Meanwhile, their wives, gathered elsewhere,

Gossip about the men just the same,

Scorning this one’s “maggot”, that one’s ineptitude.


The people sniff the breeze, the peaty summer earth,

Appraise the ice-crack’s intonation,

The snow-pile’s dampness, the animals’ moods,

Lunar haloes and the plucked strings of the air...

To be vigilant and furtive, not to force anything,

But serve the moment, part of whatever one witnesses-

That is the way to succeed.


Morbid anxieties haunt the sleeper as he wakes,

Nightmares of sickness, debility and starvation,

Baleful spirits’ machinations...

A man has died and the village dogs are howling,

Muzzles all pointed like guns at the empty sky...

A corpse lies buried, sewn up in a skin,

Head turned towards the sun.

Relatives rotate with the heavens around him,

Fearing vengeful visitations;

Uneasy minds recall slighted taboos,

Murders and malicious tricks, calumnies, deceptions...

These are dangerous days, a blizzard of conscience,

When the heart may lose all pleasure in living.


Expectant, the air hums with spring’s inception;

Fertile steam puffs from ice-breaches,

Slipped rocks thud, jockeying ice-slabs crunch,

Muffled echoes come from precarious snow-slopes.

Barnacle geese cackle down the coast,

Seagulls’ throbbing whistle resonates.

Leprous snow gutters, rivulets trickling, massing,

Diaphanous radiance swells and spangles the air.

Incendiary blossoms flare up all over,

Saxifrage and campion and cochlearia.

White hares caper on a talus.


Sinuous, a polar bear sneaks up on an indolent seal,

Smashes its skull with one immaculate wallop.

A barking, bobbing Eskimo hunter edges

Towards the colony, lulling the plump black prey

As they slumber, too slow to recognise him as a man.


Bluegreen moonlight. Shadows steal over hummocks.

Parallel snow-lashes pummel the quaking ground.

Whirlwinds tower up in white-fumed darkness.

The tragic wind hisses and rattles its grief,

Making free with eerie screens and ballistic rocks.


As the hunter returns from long absence,

The village children greet him with the ritual phrase:

“Are you a spirit or a man?”

Belarus

Thousands and thousands, the storks are flying...

Their nests hang on rooves and birch trees,

On chapels amid the green rye.

Hushed plains tremble with the tread of bison herds.

These lands alone withstood the Tatars

And repulsed them.


Hills spiked with towns,

Humpback streets and lime groves,

The lakes resplendent on summer evenings,

Reflecting dark ursine forest upside-down.

Along the Neman ruined castles loom

Like mammoths buried, huge worn tusks

Protruding from the ground,

Ancient oaks like green thunderheads

Glower over the quiet banks...


In the east, moraine ridges and peat bogs,

Cranberries in autumn are gatehredwith scoops,

Pungent pine forests point to the sky,

the mushrooms are too numerous to gather.

in the southern swamps mating cranes

Dance in the springtime, hopping,

And gloomy forests stretch forever,

Pierced only here and there by sunbeams,

The ground steaming light vapour,

Primeval aurochs wandering in dream...

In the Dnieper lands are ancient towns

Overgrown with gnarled oaks, roses and sweetbriar,

And ducks take flight from old riverbeds.


Morning mist over the river.

splash of a beaver flopping into the water,

barking of village dogs at night...

a waterwheel murmurs as it turns

And swallows skim the fish-pond at evening.

Mistletoe’s sticky pearls hang in the woods.

The cried of wild geese pierce the soul.

The and oozes with springs, ponds and swamps,

Rivers, lakes and streams...


In spring cannonade sound above the river,

Ice floes star to shift ad crack up, clambering

Onto each other, ice castles, towers and walls

Appear and disappear instantaneously,

Ice masses battering against the banks

Desperate to bust free...

Once the villagers say they saw

A whole wooden chapel drifting on the April flood,

Celebrating Mass as it sailed away...

In the dark fir forest the wood-grouse

Utters its calls, a sound like the dripping

Of thawing snow...


In summer the orioles whistle,

The nightingales trill,

Hawks and golden eagles plane

Over the water meadows,

Cranes dance in the swamp mists,

The cuckoo foretells long life for him

Who approaches with good will...

At dawn huge pike splash among waterlilies...

The Fens

Slowly the sun moves towards the world’s edge

In early summer, before the grain hardens,

When the earth stares into space, expectant.

Herons take up their posts on their river;

Only their eyes move, hypnotizing fish.

Swifts and swallows tangle with the sky.

The opiate sun fades, shedding red petals.

Distant spires disappear into night.

The earth rocks like an open boat,

Constellations foaming over.

Tiny lights perforate the distance.

Will the sea someday return here,

The old foe bent on revenge?


The river’s a steel sword snug in scabbard.

Sparrows chip at morning silence,

Chiselling electric blue.

You can almost hear excited roots pushing

And barley thickening to burst.

Straight roads skip and run on ahead.

Skylarks strive upwards and release

With parachute exhilaration.

Church spires conduct hidden lightnings.

Seductive space opens up to be loved.


August sunset over the flat lands:

Coral reefs of fires fanfare the sky.

White buildings shine like icebergs.

Dervish weathervanes swivel and whoop.

Thunder avalanches: shards and splinters

Explode from the shattered pane.


Autumn strings up glistening webs

From hedge to hedge, and telepathic mist

Creeps through trees and people.

Primeval pungency of damp vegetation...

Fish-bubbles break the river’s still.

A clock ticks in an empty house.

Fleets of churches sail across fenlands,

And a solitary walker throws back his head,

Swallowing rain like sloe gin.


Rimy grass crunches like glass-splinters.

Winter chill wrings out the bladder.

Dead moles hang in a line on a fence,

Thirty-seven little peat-black corpses.


Spring looses bright serpents in the air.

No time now, no limits.

Only iridescence .A kingfisher’s wing.

Budapest, 1900

In violet twilight the lights come on

Along the boulevards.

Raucous energy surges:

Juvenile metropolis thrashes back and forth,

Sophisticated and coarse.

Chestnuts dropping on Castle Walk

Echo the autumn forlornly.

A lonely cello complains.


Clear skies rise again in December,

Paler gold of a winter sun

Refracted through crystalline cold.

Festive innocence falls with the snow:

Rich women prance along, snuggled in furs,

Emerging from confectioneries,

Fondling dainty parcels, a joy to unwrap.

Day’s blue diamond sings fire and ice.

Skating rinks and ballrooms ring

With pleasure, crisp as snow-crunch.


In March, the river’s rising thrills

With ripe commotion, swirling increase.

By April, the quays and bridges

Quaver in mother-of-pearl.

Acacias, apricots and lilacs in May

Charge the atmosphere with sex,

Some wild transcendence in the bone,

Elusive as the sinuous smiling motions

Of pagan brides in light frocks.

Summer thunders with gypsy bravura,

Dishes clatter in open-air restaurants,

Young wives throw open their windows

And lean out into the sun.


The city initiates its strolling neophytes,

Writers beginning in media res.

Outbreaks of appetite exuberate in sorrow,

Breaking up the slow sad music

Of futility, prolific with schemes.

New forms, new expression! Coffee houses

Seethe with a bold pioneer generation;

Brief lurid straw-fire flares into ashes.

Beneath the clamour, a wistful knowing tone

Strangely illuminates the night.

Gandhi

In Hardwar, amid the pilgrim swarm,

The returned exile roams the streets,

Appalled by the credulity, hypocrisy and dirt

Going by the name of religion.

Can one man, one soul among myriads,

Redeem, through virtue, the sins of all?


A spinning wheel turns in a prison cell

As Gandhi meditates on his sorrow:

If his penance were perfect,

Would India’s violence not cease?

The world thwarts and destroys itself as before,

Yet, staring into the wheel, he smiles,

For he cannot but see love in its revolutions.


Leading a pilgrim host to the salt shores,

The Mahatma marches through villages

And towns, drawing crowds to his side,

A frail little man, more powerful than armies.

To the sea! In joy and triumph, to the sea!

Let this gathered salt be the sign of hope.

Mozart

A coach speeds along the roads of Europe,

Little Mozart enthroned inside, exhilarated,

Watching the landscape vanish behind,

Into Backwardsland, his private kingdom,

Complete with its own geography and laws,

A realm of children, all happy and good...

So he muses, as the coach clatters onward,

With Papa, his faithful ervant, at his side.

Vast operas swell within the boy’s heart,

Tales of exotic prince and their courts,

With he the benevolent castle-building autocrat.

His finger picks out just the right note on the clavier,

His tongue tosses out the exact unsurpassable word!


Quartets: pure unearthly realms of sound,

Eddying energy, growling agitation, radiant streams,

Violins etching diamond-point moments

On glass, and behind it all a solemn stillness,

Simple as a morning cobweb in the sun...


Dead...dead...his father, Leopold,-dead!

His own growth was dear Papa’s decline...

How many times had father accused him

Of hastening his death with his waywardness,

As the old man waited, paced, fretted, waited

For ever rarer, ever briefer letters from his son?

All too often Wolfgang had failed the one

Who had created him ,loved him, encouraged

Each step, sacrificed so much for his sake,

Infusing him with all his knowledge and pride.

And now there is guilty relief and terrible freedom-

Never, never, never to hear that voice again,

Offering encouragement and counsel...


Symphonies ascend out of chaos

As the bailiff world beats down the door...

Bent over the final chorus of Die Zauberflöte,

Mozart strains after a serene simplicity,

Earth made heaven in rippling auroras,

Each instrument soaring to curtain-fall,

Death confronted, converted, overcome.


As Mozart lies dying, his pet canary strikes up

Innocently trilling merry tunes by its master,

A mockery too cruel that strains his fevered nerves

Until the offending bird is removed.

On the desk the Requiem lies unfinished,

Leopold, the hooded judge, betrayed by his son,

Looms before him now, a dire revenant,

Bringing black sobbing tremors and clamour,

The crushed soul weeping in penitence.

The clock strikes: he slips into oblivion,

Lips mouthing a last breath of music,

Some indistinguishable irrepressible phrase.

Madoc

It is told how Madoc, son of Prince Owain Gwynedd,

Sick of fighting his brethren,

Took leave of the homeland, and prepared ships

With men and munitions,

To seek far shores, sailing west,

Until he came to a land unknown,

Where many strange things were revealed.

A man much changed, he returned

To Britain, declaring the wonders he had seen,

To any who would listen,

And drew to him such men and women

As would quit the quarrelsome wasp-nest, Wales,

For a bounteous and peaceable demesne.

Thus, bidding farewell forever, he voyaged

Again into the West, never seen on these islands again.

It is said by those who have knowledge

That he and his people settled in that distant country

And prospered there, learning its customs and speech.


In a cottage in a haunted vale in South Wales,

Iolo Morganwg bends over precious maps,

Shuffles notes and draws lines with a ruler,

Scribbles calculations, specifying the lineaments

Of a dream, until, at last, his hovering finger

Comes down on that empty space

In the American heartland.


These are the First Men, who grew out of the ground,

The Mandans, at the heart of the world.

And, at the village centre, stands the shrine to the Lone Man:

Cottonwood palisade, bound with willow thong,

To mark the water level of the Deluge,

And a red cedar enclosed within.

When the willow leaf is full, the ceremony commences:

Gourds like upturned tortoises are brought,

Filled with water from the four quarters.

The villagers rush to see the Lone Man coming:

White-clay-covered, descending from the western hills,

He marches among the houses and people,

And opens up the medicine lodge.

Just as, at the time of the Flood, he had saved the Mandans

From drowning, landing his big canoe on a mountain

And bringing all good things in his hands.


The Welsh Indians? Everyone knows they exist.

They must be a little further on, beynd the next mountain.

If not the Delawares, they might be the Shawnees,

Or the Pawnees, no, not the Pawnees, the Comanches, then,

The Padoucas, perhaps...but they must be somewhere,

Those elusive whiteskinned Indians,

Gabbling and crooning in Welsh.


Out beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains,

A certain intrepid Evan Williams of Colcoed

Comes across Indians bantering in Welsh-

North Walian at that, and no mistake!

Wide-eyed and earnest, he addresses them politely,

Breathless as they blink dn respond,

In a queer yet familiar gab, Welsh and un-Welsh,

So they all stand there, gawping, bewildered,

Excitedly trying to communicate,

Expecting any minute an intelligible sentence...

Dogfaces

Now the past means nothing. It does not exist.

For a body trained to react without question,

A body renunciant, submissive to fate.

Now there is nothing but day-to-day detail,

Instructors’ incantations, catechism of fear.

Accept your death as simple and correct.


Black rain. Drenched to the slimy root bone.

Everything soiled in the glutinous morass.

Reek of flesh and dung. Vegetable putrescence.

Foxholes full of slop and dusk all hours.

The jungle thinks evil every second,

Concocting infection, fever and death.


Weary automata, -scared shitless,-dig, dig, dig.

Benumbed in every fibre, they curse and pray,

Pray and curse. Blistered, bombarded, shaken

Apart. Up to the line the veterans sleepwalk,

Indifferent as workers through factory gates.

Their world is superstition and random doom.


Bone-brittling terror. Twitching sinews and minds.

Clenched guts. Clamped jaws. No mouth, just void.

The entire world a rising nausea, a maddened pulse.

Idiots, idiots, why do you return from the dead?

You should sleep and find some ease, some love,

Under the ground, beyond misery and disgrace.

Boris Pasternak

The lilacs were in bloom on the day of your death.

Consecrated by Moscow’s golden cupolas,

You boomed and sang, the storm’s hierophant,

Tenderness and courage in those huge amber eyes.

That sovereign stallion’s head, alert to vibrations,

Shot out laser glances at the strangest tangents,

Catching nature unawares. Erupting in centrifugal

Genesis, you stormed the silence with ecstasies,

Obedient to destiny’s strictures, never failing

To praise life with an awkward seraph’s joy.

Petra

The road curls and curls into the hills,

Fragile gamble across bare shimmering distances,

Rock-scumbled wastes of russet dust that dip

And fold, concealing desiccated wadi beds.

In winter, glacial winds drive sleet-blizzards

And crouched rocks glint in the sombre light.

In summer, shrill silence and shrinking heat

Invest the motionless air with expectation;

Bleached earth phases from ochre to violet,

Faraway horizons vibrate with cobalt glare.


White rocks in the Bab el Siq irradiate white light,

Still but for the rattle of stones underfoot,

As the hills close in stealthily around;

Deeper, narrower the high gorge plunges...

Squinting little wadis, glutted with tumble-boulders,

Intersect at intervals from either side,

And sometimes a tantalizing flight of worn steps

Rises, leading to nowhere at all.


Towering rock-walls glow with stratified hues,

Ranging from pearlwhite to mellowest yellow,

Gold and madder, red, carmine and mauve.

One moment, exploratory sunlight slants down

Across a curving pirouetting surface,

Nubbed pinnacles conspiring with the sky;

The next, all is horrible shadow, sullen shades

Convulsed, pining for light, as the traveller

Stumbles on, disheartened.Suddenly, the chasm

Opens wide onto vivid greenery and white blooms,

But instantly the rocks press in again, relentless,

Higher, tighter, more menacing even than before.


Near its end, the intestinal ravine clamps deadly

In doomy twilight, where the echo of scuttling

Boot-crunched stones rebounds .Ahead, a squinting

Sunlight-fissure glints, with weird contortions,

A keyhole to be picked or unlocked.

Black-framed, a classical façade, a quester’s castle

Rises up, revealed, as you exit, transfigured,

Into miraculous dazzle, blinking at the peach-coloured

Treasury’s hallucination, chiselled into rock.


From the High Place of Sacrifice, you look out

Over the deserted city’s eerie mysterious maze,

North to rumbling uplands, south to low sere hills.

At nightfall, waiting spectres emerge among the stones

That mortal hands once touched and cherished,

Gathering at the altar, eager to clutch at your arm

In the chill, to greet you and explain themselves.

Under the Nabateans’ dolphin stars, nightsurfing,

Empty tombs disintegrate into darkness,

Secrets easily reclaimed by the desert air.

Human Evolution

Comes Cro-Magnon, tall, young, invincible,

Hunter-warrior, rich priest of flints,

The sun’s disciple, born to summer plains,

Falling in anger upon the runts,

The ugly Neanderthals, beasts of night,

Blood-drinking lunatics, who, offering submission,

Present their hairy behinds.

Ochre-ruddled corpses gestate in the earthwomb,

Bone-notches mark the teething moon’s indenture.


Red Ochre Men stalk across Australia,

Inquisitors hunting down the blasphemer,

The traitor to ceremony and myth.


Cretan dancers romp in the sevenfold maze’s spiral:

Seven maidens and seven youths

Offer their throats to the strangler’s cord.

The horned altar waxes with the moon.


Spiral Castle, the revolving isle,

-Grave of the expired king,

Fallen sun’s haven,-

Glints in the mind when cranes are in flight.

The penitent, offering prayers as he steps,

Negotiates the maze inlaid on a church floor.


The spider moon shuttles with threads of intent.

Shaman’s garter-cord, sutra and cincture

All fasten in bondage to the crux quadrata.


Three strands twist the umbilical,

The baby a spider suspended by a filament.

Leftward the moon blooms and perishes.


A centrifugal spider throws out radial threads,

Enunciating a sinistral spiral,

And turns back at the outer edge,

Back towards the centre,

Coming home to symmetry.

His octagonal sanctum awaits a sacrifice.

The moon turns white, then red, then black;

First, a virgin, sealed in immaculate reveries,

Then a blushing flirt deflowered, making monthly blood-libation,

Bringing forth the red-blessed babe,

And, lastly, the venerable dame entombed,

Pending a glorified body.


Thirteen moons stir the cauldron of space,

Brewing fire and rain.

See what burns in the water’s eye:

Tiny salt-stars from the sea.


Left-handed shadows walk backwards forever,

Upside-down in the trancetime of the dead.


Midsummer. The spent king, mead-sodden,

Enters the megalithic circle of thirteen.

Lashed to the cross-oak, flayed, blinded, gelded,

Hacked into joints, he roasts over fires,

And twelve celebrants dance the figure-of-eight,

Tearing his flesh with their teeth.

An alderwood boat floats downriver to the island,

Bearing the genitals and the oracular head.