The violence of the edge
Calls you to your senses,
You feel the blow and learn,
Against your will…
There will always be a master,
A tormentor;
Freedom is not in the contract.
Drink to the bottom of the bottle,
And find what lies there,
But paradise it will not be.
Snowdrops in spring,
Smell of cabbage on the landing….
Like an old man playing chess
Against the ghosts,
I sit with my pen and paper,
Feeling with my mind
The naked body of a dancer….
The city is covered with dust,
As if already in ruins,
Another civilization expired.
Heathen devotions-
Indo-European roots,
Hieroglyphic as horses’ hooves-
I lay at the blue Virgin’s
Crimson-slippered feet,
(Byzantine empress of martyrdoms,
All those living dead buried
Under the steppe grass)
In Santa Sofia, offering sacrifice
To Jehovah, Yahweh, Perun.
Between Poland and Russia,
Baptized in the river,
Restless Cossack words
Saddle their nightmares and ride.
After all the rhetoric
The truth is as clear and deadly
As vodka, dark and weird
As the legends you raise
In a clanking old bucket
From a village well.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Vienna (Beautiful Corpses)
Spring in Vienna and the parks are heavy
With lilac and golden-rain,
Vinous lethargy plumps the air.
In the Wienerwald’s sweet-smelling heath grass
Bloom bee orchids, snake orchids, wild roses.
I go drinking new wine under the chestnut trees…
Curiosities in the Treasury of the Teutonic Knights :
A red coral salt-cellar tree hung with fossilized sharks’ teeth,
Thought to be adders’ tongues, able to detect poisoned food;
Bezoars from Persia with the power of healing,
A poisoned dagger with a handle carved out of rhino horn
Into the form of the Buddha, with sapphire eyes and ruby eyebrows…
In Vindobona, Marcus Aurelius sits at his desk,
Scratching out philosophy by lamplight,
While across the Danube the barbarians gather,
Wolfskinned warriors of the blood-red moon.
In glittering ballrooms the beautiful waltz to exhaustion,
While the Jewish vampire sucks the blood of his victims;
Johann Strauss, overwhelmed with female worshippers’ requests
For locks of his precious hair, resorts, with a smile,
To sending them clippings from his poodle.
With one eye laughing and one eye weeping,
I chase skirt, get drunk, tear myself apart,
Revelling in the delicacies of malice and intrigue,
Spying through the keyhole as a beautiful woman shits.
I lick the wet dark fanny of Death,
And disappear with a biting bon mot.
Why is it I only remember the bad dreams?
The suicide’s hand is writing in the dark,
And only the cruel and the crafty endure.
Show me any card ,and I will trump it;
Though I hate the game, I love to play;
Come to me, as to a disillusioned priest, who will hear
Your worst confession with an envious sigh.
In my mind I sculpt ecstatic Baroque,
Black pearls of madness, too fantastic for words,
And glorious women, Amazons on horseback,
Riding through the mist with operatic flair.
My doctor says, “It’s hopeless, but not serious,”
So I carry on as usual, refining my sad art,
Singing Requiems for every vagabond moment
With apocalyptic relish, a merry gravedigger.
I love only the gloomiest cafés, where death itself
Seems to wait upon one’s shoulder, guiding the hand
To the cup, and parading sights before one’s eyes
With the charlatan flair of a master showman,
Glorying in deception and legerdemain.
At the Kirche am Steinhof, ravaged minds
Embrace white marble and light, to be healed
By Him who has humbled and punished them,
Begging His mercy, to set them free,
To show them the way out of the wilderness,
And lead them to green meadows and clear streams.
In the Burial Museum, I peruse the exhibits,
The coffin with a bell pull for the prematurely buried,
The reusable coffin with trapdoor,
The stiletto for stabbing corpses before the lid is closed.
In the Red Room in the Hotel Orient,
The lovers rent each other’s body by the hour,
Exchanging masks in the mirror,
Molten gold flesh in electric danse macabre,
Ghosts from a seventeenth-century tavern,
Refusing to leave their old haunt.
In the Armoury Collection in the Neue Burg,
I imagine myself in the eagle armour
Of that bellicose dandy, Archduke Ferdinand of Tyrol,
A griffin in flight over the battlefield;
The embroidered saddle of Kara Mustafa
Conjures the magnificent defeated,
Attended by houris in Paradise.
In the coffeehouse, among chess players
And grumpy waiters, in the sullen afternoon,
With smoke-stained walls and faded velvet,
I weigh alternatives with refined disdain,
Multiplied by mirrors, to no conclusion.
I could linger all day in junk shops’ gloom,
Sniffing bygone glory’s autumn must,
Adding more dreams to my private collection.
Out in the Wienerwald,
Amid steep cliffs, thick forests, rushing rivers,
I took you from behind, up against a tree,-
If only I could live through my cock,
And run wild like a feral child !
In the Jüdisches Museum,
Prophecies from the Torah
Drip down the walls;
Here is the knob of Theodor Herzl’s walking stick,
And a picture of a man kicking an old Jew in the arse,
On a busy street, in the year 1911;
And here are Hanukkah candelabra
Rescued from the burnt embers of a vanished synagogue.
In the Michaelerkirche crypt,
I stumble past piles of paupers’ bones
And musty coffins with their lids off,
Desiccated bodies,
Still clothed and grimacing.
On the wall of an old house, in Judenplatz,
Besides a relief of the Baptism of Christ
Is the triumphant inscription :
By baptism in the River Jordan
Bodies are cleansed from disease and evil,
So all secret sinfulness takes flight.
Thus the flame rising furiously
Through the whole city in 1421
Purged the terrible crimes of the Hebrew dogs.
As the world was once purged by the flood,
So this time it was purged by fire.
Standing at the door of the Jesuitenkirche,
I gaze up,suitably impressed, at the dome above,
But as I approach the altar
The spectacle reveals itself as sham…
Nearby, one day in 1212,
A dreaded basilisk was discovered
At the bottom of a well,
And a baker’s apprentice volunteered
To climb down and capture the beast,
Taking a mirror with him;
The basilisk, seeing its own reflection
In the glass, turned to stone.
The Venus of Willendorf
Suckles us all at her drooping dugs,
Bears us all in her domed belly…
Walking through the Cemetery of the Nameless,
All the forgotten people fished out of the Danube,
Never identified,
I ask myself: who will be the next
To possess the Holy Lance
And hold the world’s destiny in his hands?
In the Academy of Fine Arts
Bosch’s Paradise, Last Judgment and Hell,
Bestial demons torturing sinners
With infinite ingenuity,
And a very few survivors
Making it to heaven…
I think of young Hitler kicking his heels on the steps,
A shabby little vagabond,
Brooding over his exclusion from Paradise,
“What the world has lost
Because of those fools in the Academy !
Or has fate reserved me for some other purpose ?”
In Dürer’s Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand,
The artist himself, clad in black,
Strolls, deep in conversation with his recently deceased friend Conrad Celtes,
Amid scenes of mass murder, oblivious…
In Cranach’s Stag hunt of Elector Frederick the Wise,
There is an air of careless jollity
As the stags are driven into the water
To be picked off by the nobles’ crossbows…
Rubens’ The Fur, a celebration
Of his sixteen-year-old second wife, Hélène Fourment,
A saucy little angel, no, a saint,
Who brought an old man so much pleasure…
In Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath,
The artist has painted his self-portrait
As the giant’s severed head…
In the Egyptian galleries,
Mummy cases and canopic jars,
And shabti figurines once placed
Inside tombs to perform any tasks the gods required,
And mummies of cats, falcons, snakes and crocodiles;
And the Reserve Head found at Giza,
Smooth limestone, serene and beautiful,
A surrogate vehicle for the ka;
And all the scarabs that were placed
Upon the chests of mummies,
Bearing a spell that implored the dead one’s heart
Not to bear witness against him
During the Judgment of Osiris;
And the miniature wooden pleasure boat
Built to sail the ka through eternity…
Down into the dark
My poem sinks,
A coffin with a bell inside,
For the prematurely buried to ring
Should he come back to life.
Oh, life, world, you make me feel
So hapless, like that doctor summoned
To the bedside of the dying Franz-Josef I,
Only to be reprimanded:
“Go home and dress correctly.”
(Perhaps in the fashions of the Imperial Army,
The best tailored in Europe,
Whose white and cream uniform won first prize
At the 1900 Paris Exhibition?)
I stand before the convertible
In which Archduke Franz Ferdinand
And his wife were shot dead
On June 28, 1914;
It still has a bullet hole in it;
Here, also, is the archduke’s bloodstained light-blue tunic
And unblemished hat with green feathers,
And the chaise-longue on which he died.
I walk the streets of the Innere Stadt,
Bewildered by Mozart’s peregrinations:
Thirteen addresses in ten years.
Yet I understand the urge.
Like Sacher-Masoch
Buying his mistress yet more furs,
I indulge my Muse
And accept the punishment,
Sure that such is my fate,
A Lippizaner,
Born brown, later turning white.
In the Prater
The Ferris wheel is turning
And hysterical laughter slides
Down the helter-skelter
Of a kiss-
What is this world to me?
Planetarium,
Puppet booth.
Fifteen million years ago
This was the floor of the Miocene Sea;
Now, a child with a lollipop in his mouth.
With lilac and golden-rain,
Vinous lethargy plumps the air.
In the Wienerwald’s sweet-smelling heath grass
Bloom bee orchids, snake orchids, wild roses.
I go drinking new wine under the chestnut trees…
Curiosities in the Treasury of the Teutonic Knights :
A red coral salt-cellar tree hung with fossilized sharks’ teeth,
Thought to be adders’ tongues, able to detect poisoned food;
Bezoars from Persia with the power of healing,
A poisoned dagger with a handle carved out of rhino horn
Into the form of the Buddha, with sapphire eyes and ruby eyebrows…
In Vindobona, Marcus Aurelius sits at his desk,
Scratching out philosophy by lamplight,
While across the Danube the barbarians gather,
Wolfskinned warriors of the blood-red moon.
In glittering ballrooms the beautiful waltz to exhaustion,
While the Jewish vampire sucks the blood of his victims;
Johann Strauss, overwhelmed with female worshippers’ requests
For locks of his precious hair, resorts, with a smile,
To sending them clippings from his poodle.
With one eye laughing and one eye weeping,
I chase skirt, get drunk, tear myself apart,
Revelling in the delicacies of malice and intrigue,
Spying through the keyhole as a beautiful woman shits.
I lick the wet dark fanny of Death,
And disappear with a biting bon mot.
Why is it I only remember the bad dreams?
The suicide’s hand is writing in the dark,
And only the cruel and the crafty endure.
Show me any card ,and I will trump it;
Though I hate the game, I love to play;
Come to me, as to a disillusioned priest, who will hear
Your worst confession with an envious sigh.
In my mind I sculpt ecstatic Baroque,
Black pearls of madness, too fantastic for words,
And glorious women, Amazons on horseback,
Riding through the mist with operatic flair.
My doctor says, “It’s hopeless, but not serious,”
So I carry on as usual, refining my sad art,
Singing Requiems for every vagabond moment
With apocalyptic relish, a merry gravedigger.
I love only the gloomiest cafés, where death itself
Seems to wait upon one’s shoulder, guiding the hand
To the cup, and parading sights before one’s eyes
With the charlatan flair of a master showman,
Glorying in deception and legerdemain.
At the Kirche am Steinhof, ravaged minds
Embrace white marble and light, to be healed
By Him who has humbled and punished them,
Begging His mercy, to set them free,
To show them the way out of the wilderness,
And lead them to green meadows and clear streams.
In the Burial Museum, I peruse the exhibits,
The coffin with a bell pull for the prematurely buried,
The reusable coffin with trapdoor,
The stiletto for stabbing corpses before the lid is closed.
In the Red Room in the Hotel Orient,
The lovers rent each other’s body by the hour,
Exchanging masks in the mirror,
Molten gold flesh in electric danse macabre,
Ghosts from a seventeenth-century tavern,
Refusing to leave their old haunt.
In the Armoury Collection in the Neue Burg,
I imagine myself in the eagle armour
Of that bellicose dandy, Archduke Ferdinand of Tyrol,
A griffin in flight over the battlefield;
The embroidered saddle of Kara Mustafa
Conjures the magnificent defeated,
Attended by houris in Paradise.
In the coffeehouse, among chess players
And grumpy waiters, in the sullen afternoon,
With smoke-stained walls and faded velvet,
I weigh alternatives with refined disdain,
Multiplied by mirrors, to no conclusion.
I could linger all day in junk shops’ gloom,
Sniffing bygone glory’s autumn must,
Adding more dreams to my private collection.
Out in the Wienerwald,
Amid steep cliffs, thick forests, rushing rivers,
I took you from behind, up against a tree,-
If only I could live through my cock,
And run wild like a feral child !
In the Jüdisches Museum,
Prophecies from the Torah
Drip down the walls;
Here is the knob of Theodor Herzl’s walking stick,
And a picture of a man kicking an old Jew in the arse,
On a busy street, in the year 1911;
And here are Hanukkah candelabra
Rescued from the burnt embers of a vanished synagogue.
In the Michaelerkirche crypt,
I stumble past piles of paupers’ bones
And musty coffins with their lids off,
Desiccated bodies,
Still clothed and grimacing.
On the wall of an old house, in Judenplatz,
Besides a relief of the Baptism of Christ
Is the triumphant inscription :
By baptism in the River Jordan
Bodies are cleansed from disease and evil,
So all secret sinfulness takes flight.
Thus the flame rising furiously
Through the whole city in 1421
Purged the terrible crimes of the Hebrew dogs.
As the world was once purged by the flood,
So this time it was purged by fire.
Standing at the door of the Jesuitenkirche,
I gaze up,suitably impressed, at the dome above,
But as I approach the altar
The spectacle reveals itself as sham…
Nearby, one day in 1212,
A dreaded basilisk was discovered
At the bottom of a well,
And a baker’s apprentice volunteered
To climb down and capture the beast,
Taking a mirror with him;
The basilisk, seeing its own reflection
In the glass, turned to stone.
The Venus of Willendorf
Suckles us all at her drooping dugs,
Bears us all in her domed belly…
Walking through the Cemetery of the Nameless,
All the forgotten people fished out of the Danube,
Never identified,
I ask myself: who will be the next
To possess the Holy Lance
And hold the world’s destiny in his hands?
In the Academy of Fine Arts
Bosch’s Paradise, Last Judgment and Hell,
Bestial demons torturing sinners
With infinite ingenuity,
And a very few survivors
Making it to heaven…
I think of young Hitler kicking his heels on the steps,
A shabby little vagabond,
Brooding over his exclusion from Paradise,
“What the world has lost
Because of those fools in the Academy !
Or has fate reserved me for some other purpose ?”
In Dürer’s Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand,
The artist himself, clad in black,
Strolls, deep in conversation with his recently deceased friend Conrad Celtes,
Amid scenes of mass murder, oblivious…
In Cranach’s Stag hunt of Elector Frederick the Wise,
There is an air of careless jollity
As the stags are driven into the water
To be picked off by the nobles’ crossbows…
Rubens’ The Fur, a celebration
Of his sixteen-year-old second wife, Hélène Fourment,
A saucy little angel, no, a saint,
Who brought an old man so much pleasure…
In Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath,
The artist has painted his self-portrait
As the giant’s severed head…
In the Egyptian galleries,
Mummy cases and canopic jars,
And shabti figurines once placed
Inside tombs to perform any tasks the gods required,
And mummies of cats, falcons, snakes and crocodiles;
And the Reserve Head found at Giza,
Smooth limestone, serene and beautiful,
A surrogate vehicle for the ka;
And all the scarabs that were placed
Upon the chests of mummies,
Bearing a spell that implored the dead one’s heart
Not to bear witness against him
During the Judgment of Osiris;
And the miniature wooden pleasure boat
Built to sail the ka through eternity…
Down into the dark
My poem sinks,
A coffin with a bell inside,
For the prematurely buried to ring
Should he come back to life.
Oh, life, world, you make me feel
So hapless, like that doctor summoned
To the bedside of the dying Franz-Josef I,
Only to be reprimanded:
“Go home and dress correctly.”
(Perhaps in the fashions of the Imperial Army,
The best tailored in Europe,
Whose white and cream uniform won first prize
At the 1900 Paris Exhibition?)
I stand before the convertible
In which Archduke Franz Ferdinand
And his wife were shot dead
On June 28, 1914;
It still has a bullet hole in it;
Here, also, is the archduke’s bloodstained light-blue tunic
And unblemished hat with green feathers,
And the chaise-longue on which he died.
I walk the streets of the Innere Stadt,
Bewildered by Mozart’s peregrinations:
Thirteen addresses in ten years.
Yet I understand the urge.
Like Sacher-Masoch
Buying his mistress yet more furs,
I indulge my Muse
And accept the punishment,
Sure that such is my fate,
A Lippizaner,
Born brown, later turning white.
In the Prater
The Ferris wheel is turning
And hysterical laughter slides
Down the helter-skelter
Of a kiss-
What is this world to me?
Planetarium,
Puppet booth.
Fifteen million years ago
This was the floor of the Miocene Sea;
Now, a child with a lollipop in his mouth.
Sands of the Sahel
It is all in this dust, these stones.
All you need to know.
Whiteout of sere scrub and shrivelled trees.
Emir of lost moments,
Sweat dripping in my eyes,
I reel as begging lepers
Circle me, all bleeding stumps
And weeping sores...
The harmattan fleeces the earth,
Red dust eclipses the sun,
Cracks treetrunks and sears the throat,
Burrows into the aching brain...
Slow Arabic ceremony
Of days, thoughts, lives,
Slippery mergings
Veiled like women...
“What is written is written.
We die when God wills.”
How many coded tongues
Are spoken here,
Flamboyant dialects
Guarding their secrets?
Head wrapped in kadmul,
I sit against an acacia,
Watching shooting stars
In the night sky.
The camel’s throat is slit,
It tumbles to the ground,
Choking on its own blood,
And is hacked into pieces,
So succulent and sweet.
What has been, what is and what
Will be, all merge into one,
And how will anyone know the difference?
Africa has been with me always,
Before I even knew its name.
All you need to know.
Whiteout of sere scrub and shrivelled trees.
Emir of lost moments,
Sweat dripping in my eyes,
I reel as begging lepers
Circle me, all bleeding stumps
And weeping sores...
The harmattan fleeces the earth,
Red dust eclipses the sun,
Cracks treetrunks and sears the throat,
Burrows into the aching brain...
Slow Arabic ceremony
Of days, thoughts, lives,
Slippery mergings
Veiled like women...
“What is written is written.
We die when God wills.”
How many coded tongues
Are spoken here,
Flamboyant dialects
Guarding their secrets?
Head wrapped in kadmul,
I sit against an acacia,
Watching shooting stars
In the night sky.
The camel’s throat is slit,
It tumbles to the ground,
Choking on its own blood,
And is hacked into pieces,
So succulent and sweet.
What has been, what is and what
Will be, all merge into one,
And how will anyone know the difference?
Africa has been with me always,
Before I even knew its name.
Thursday, May 01, 2008
Anton von Webern (1883-1945)
The lion rampant, sickle in one paw,
Grape-vine in the other,
And a fish poised, swimming upstream;
That was their coat of arms,
Tyrolean seigneurs, reared to duty and honour,
Among the hills of Lower Carinthia.
From the high meadows the lad would gaze out
Across the plains to the mountains,
Breathing pure serene space;
Occasionally, a rainbow soared above the earth,
And voluptuous forests lit with unearthly glow,
As he opened his arms wide to embrace the universe,
Laughing demi-god, in love with clarity and order.
At haymaking time, he toiled in the fields,
Transported by rhythm, in happy communion
With the workers,
Then rode home in the evening
Like a king, atop the laden wagon.
His mother sang in the gloaming,
Playing the piano, while he sat beside her, rapt,
Sure that he could never die, nor come to any harm.
Thin, stooped, and shy, like a librarian,
He hid the stillness of a saint,
Grey eyes introspecting intensely,
Never losing hope in the human.
The strictest discipline held the greatest freedom;
Thus he surrendered to a guru,
To be broken and recreated, shaped in his image,
Both loving and fearing, bound through the years,
As their little band of pioneers gathered, united,
Round the master, facing the world’s incomprehension,
Derided by philistines and fogies.
Each spring he would trek into the mountains,
Just to see the narcissus fields in bloom, and revel
In glaciers, and pine woods after rain,
And drink from cold clear streams and waterfalls,
And feel his mother’s presence, gently healing.
Hiking high and far, rucksack on back,
Doggedly driving himself upward and on,
He would seek out the rarest heights,
Breathing the pure air, the solitude,
Setting out each time to arrive somewhere new,
A new sound, a different space, music unheard-of,
Whatever summer’s harvest might bring from silence.
In nature he found the trance of love,
Absorbed in every detail, mesmerised
By longing for perfection.
Alone, he lived each hour with zest,
Floating in space, living each detail of his music,
In the rigorous search for truth,
Which one could never unriddle, only believe in.
Drenched in summer’s swell of grass and flowers,
He lay down, face to the ground,
Digging his hands into the soil,
Breathing deeply, enraptured,
Feeling the growth of all creatures, the fire in the roots,
Remorseless evolution’s harmonies.
Yet, always he returned to the village churchyard
To stand at his mother’s grave, grieving,
And dedicate each coming work to her.
War’s end, in a mountain village:
Remote from the world, never more naked
And alone, nor closer to God,
He gazed, from the bench behind the old church,
Above the headstones to the snowfields
And granite spires beyond,
And strolled though evergreens above the castle,
Contemplating mosses, lichens and fungi,
Thrilled by multiplicity and oneness.
September days held him blue and pure,
The quiet valley promising fresh music.
How could he know the mischance
Death was keeping for him,
A fatal mistake in the dark?
In just a few days he too would lie
In that churchyard, under the mountains,
Turning into rocks and trees and snow.
Grape-vine in the other,
And a fish poised, swimming upstream;
That was their coat of arms,
Tyrolean seigneurs, reared to duty and honour,
Among the hills of Lower Carinthia.
From the high meadows the lad would gaze out
Across the plains to the mountains,
Breathing pure serene space;
Occasionally, a rainbow soared above the earth,
And voluptuous forests lit with unearthly glow,
As he opened his arms wide to embrace the universe,
Laughing demi-god, in love with clarity and order.
At haymaking time, he toiled in the fields,
Transported by rhythm, in happy communion
With the workers,
Then rode home in the evening
Like a king, atop the laden wagon.
His mother sang in the gloaming,
Playing the piano, while he sat beside her, rapt,
Sure that he could never die, nor come to any harm.
Thin, stooped, and shy, like a librarian,
He hid the stillness of a saint,
Grey eyes introspecting intensely,
Never losing hope in the human.
The strictest discipline held the greatest freedom;
Thus he surrendered to a guru,
To be broken and recreated, shaped in his image,
Both loving and fearing, bound through the years,
As their little band of pioneers gathered, united,
Round the master, facing the world’s incomprehension,
Derided by philistines and fogies.
Each spring he would trek into the mountains,
Just to see the narcissus fields in bloom, and revel
In glaciers, and pine woods after rain,
And drink from cold clear streams and waterfalls,
And feel his mother’s presence, gently healing.
Hiking high and far, rucksack on back,
Doggedly driving himself upward and on,
He would seek out the rarest heights,
Breathing the pure air, the solitude,
Setting out each time to arrive somewhere new,
A new sound, a different space, music unheard-of,
Whatever summer’s harvest might bring from silence.
In nature he found the trance of love,
Absorbed in every detail, mesmerised
By longing for perfection.
Alone, he lived each hour with zest,
Floating in space, living each detail of his music,
In the rigorous search for truth,
Which one could never unriddle, only believe in.
Drenched in summer’s swell of grass and flowers,
He lay down, face to the ground,
Digging his hands into the soil,
Breathing deeply, enraptured,
Feeling the growth of all creatures, the fire in the roots,
Remorseless evolution’s harmonies.
Yet, always he returned to the village churchyard
To stand at his mother’s grave, grieving,
And dedicate each coming work to her.
War’s end, in a mountain village:
Remote from the world, never more naked
And alone, nor closer to God,
He gazed, from the bench behind the old church,
Above the headstones to the snowfields
And granite spires beyond,
And strolled though evergreens above the castle,
Contemplating mosses, lichens and fungi,
Thrilled by multiplicity and oneness.
September days held him blue and pure,
The quiet valley promising fresh music.
How could he know the mischance
Death was keeping for him,
A fatal mistake in the dark?
In just a few days he too would lie
In that churchyard, under the mountains,
Turning into rocks and trees and snow.
Nemeton/ Frithgaerd
The places in the mind
Become their own ritual.
In supermarkets, shopping malls, office blocks,
In hotels and airports and railway stations,
On motorways, enclosed in my car,
I lose touch with the human.
What is it, this passion to belong
To consecrate and own the land,
To beat the bounds of self
And defend it from the stranger?
There is only one way to view the world,
One truth, one reality, beyond contradiction;
All else is barbarism and superstition;
Danger must be neutered,
Turned to sentiment and nostalgia.
The eye’s inventions scape vistas
And perspectives of the lordly spirit
To enjoy its estate, gazing out from prospects
To make believe that all is fixed and timeless.
Did it all begin that bright May morning-
From the pen of Isaak Walton-
When the three-Piscator,Venator and Auceps-
Met on the road leading out of London
To trek to the River Lea,their recreation
The worship of God’s blessings to man?
Sound guides us inward to meaning;
In the Pyrenean caves of Ariège
At certain spots on the palaeolithic wallpaintings
If you sing or whistle at the correct pitch
It will trigger fantastic resonances,
Penetrating the cortex of the brrain;
At Hal Saflieni on Malta, speak
Into a special recess in the rock
And it resonates through the vaults
In multifarioustones, from whisper
To boom, to awe the worshipful;
And in Neolithic chambered tombs
When drums, chanting and singing
Is performed inside it sets up
A standing wave that plays against the rock
And conjures the uncanny, full
Of ventriloquism and godly harmonics…
Here, at the border, there is little we can know
For sure, it is all belief, some restless faith
Forever changing form, and every place
Is many, multiplying in waves.
So the game draws us in its figures,
Draws us inwards, to learn from the difference
Of each occasion, each cadence,
Whether or not we ever understand.
Become their own ritual.
In supermarkets, shopping malls, office blocks,
In hotels and airports and railway stations,
On motorways, enclosed in my car,
I lose touch with the human.
What is it, this passion to belong
To consecrate and own the land,
To beat the bounds of self
And defend it from the stranger?
There is only one way to view the world,
One truth, one reality, beyond contradiction;
All else is barbarism and superstition;
Danger must be neutered,
Turned to sentiment and nostalgia.
The eye’s inventions scape vistas
And perspectives of the lordly spirit
To enjoy its estate, gazing out from prospects
To make believe that all is fixed and timeless.
Did it all begin that bright May morning-
From the pen of Isaak Walton-
When the three-Piscator,Venator and Auceps-
Met on the road leading out of London
To trek to the River Lea,their recreation
The worship of God’s blessings to man?
Sound guides us inward to meaning;
In the Pyrenean caves of Ariège
At certain spots on the palaeolithic wallpaintings
If you sing or whistle at the correct pitch
It will trigger fantastic resonances,
Penetrating the cortex of the brrain;
At Hal Saflieni on Malta, speak
Into a special recess in the rock
And it resonates through the vaults
In multifarioustones, from whisper
To boom, to awe the worshipful;
And in Neolithic chambered tombs
When drums, chanting and singing
Is performed inside it sets up
A standing wave that plays against the rock
And conjures the uncanny, full
Of ventriloquism and godly harmonics…
Here, at the border, there is little we can know
For sure, it is all belief, some restless faith
Forever changing form, and every place
Is many, multiplying in waves.
So the game draws us in its figures,
Draws us inwards, to learn from the difference
Of each occasion, each cadence,
Whether or not we ever understand.
Mythology
Tell me what to desire;
Instruct me in mad distraction.
The more fantastical the trick, the more I applaud.
I see not the thing, but the idea.
The deep strange story resurfaces in glimmering parts
To drive us to our ends;
Each action is a phantom of itself,
The silhouettes of metaphors
Playing puppet epics on a screen.
The television speaks to me,
So far from real feeling, real life.
The newsreader, sober and friendly,
Utters objective truth to the tribe,
Hypnotizing like a snake.
What beauty our ingenious deceptions disrupt
We do not comprehend;
All we see is numbers, almighty facts,
Power growing with voracious greed,
Assuring us of its benefits.
Money-magic raises golems and servitors
To beguile the hooded mind,
The corporations of mountebank alchemists.
Time coming, pasing, going, being spent, being wasted,
Ahead or behind, approaching, flying by,
All I am is past,the offices of memory,
Fighting the not-me, the evil.
The noun instigates the verb,
Something or someone has to be there
To set things in motion,
Otherwise there is nothing,
Which cannot be.
Instruct me in mad distraction.
The more fantastical the trick, the more I applaud.
I see not the thing, but the idea.
The deep strange story resurfaces in glimmering parts
To drive us to our ends;
Each action is a phantom of itself,
The silhouettes of metaphors
Playing puppet epics on a screen.
The television speaks to me,
So far from real feeling, real life.
The newsreader, sober and friendly,
Utters objective truth to the tribe,
Hypnotizing like a snake.
What beauty our ingenious deceptions disrupt
We do not comprehend;
All we see is numbers, almighty facts,
Power growing with voracious greed,
Assuring us of its benefits.
Money-magic raises golems and servitors
To beguile the hooded mind,
The corporations of mountebank alchemists.
Time coming, pasing, going, being spent, being wasted,
Ahead or behind, approaching, flying by,
All I am is past,the offices of memory,
Fighting the not-me, the evil.
The noun instigates the verb,
Something or someone has to be there
To set things in motion,
Otherwise there is nothing,
Which cannot be.
Butterflies
Tears of the Virgin,
Do not fall on my behalf.
Souls of the dead,
Pass me by.
Shall I spend my life
Awaiting the black butterfly?
Painted Lady, Black Satyr, Cloudless Sulphur,
Fly on,fly on,
Eastern Comma, Goldenrod Stowaway, Marbled Fritillary,
Come and go, go and come,
Mourning Cloak and Paradise Birdwing, Small Postman and Southern Festoon,
Throw me some light from your wings.
Think how ants ally themselves with a myrmecophilous caterpillar,
Defending the host from enemies,
And in return are licensed to milk its “honeydew”.
Rapt as opium addicts, the myrmidons stroke that giant body,
And greedily sup the clear delicious elixir, loath to stop,
Until, at last, the caterpillar, impatient with their attentions,
Taps the ground to signal an end.
In Australia, the Bright Copper caterpillar
Reigns in a rich underground chamber built and maintained by ants;
Amid twenty butterfly larvae and ten pupae;
Day and night a single larva may be attended by twenty-five ants,
Like pages in the service of a queen,
Rewarded with sweet liquor, a heady cocktail.
In England, the Large Blue caterpillar
Is carried off to their underground chamber by wood ants,
There, she feasts on the ant grubs, their own precious offspring,
Which they willingly feed the honoured guest,
Then she pupates and the butterfly emerges,
And stands before the bewildered infuriated ants,
Her true nature revealed, her honey glands gone;
Pursued by her angry hosts, she escapes with a ruse,
Exuding sticky substance that entangles their feet;
Hurriedly the butterfly flees to the surface
Spreads her wings and flies off into the air.
Male apollo butterflies grab females in flight
Or capture them on the ground,
Drawn to the virgins’ scent as they hide in the grass,
And brutishly ravish them;
After mating, the jealous male secretes and glues
A sphragis over the female’s abdomen,
A heavy chastity belt meant to last a lifetime
And keep her from other suitors for the rest of her life.
Do not fall on my behalf.
Souls of the dead,
Pass me by.
Shall I spend my life
Awaiting the black butterfly?
Painted Lady, Black Satyr, Cloudless Sulphur,
Fly on,fly on,
Eastern Comma, Goldenrod Stowaway, Marbled Fritillary,
Come and go, go and come,
Mourning Cloak and Paradise Birdwing, Small Postman and Southern Festoon,
Throw me some light from your wings.
Think how ants ally themselves with a myrmecophilous caterpillar,
Defending the host from enemies,
And in return are licensed to milk its “honeydew”.
Rapt as opium addicts, the myrmidons stroke that giant body,
And greedily sup the clear delicious elixir, loath to stop,
Until, at last, the caterpillar, impatient with their attentions,
Taps the ground to signal an end.
In Australia, the Bright Copper caterpillar
Reigns in a rich underground chamber built and maintained by ants;
Amid twenty butterfly larvae and ten pupae;
Day and night a single larva may be attended by twenty-five ants,
Like pages in the service of a queen,
Rewarded with sweet liquor, a heady cocktail.
In England, the Large Blue caterpillar
Is carried off to their underground chamber by wood ants,
There, she feasts on the ant grubs, their own precious offspring,
Which they willingly feed the honoured guest,
Then she pupates and the butterfly emerges,
And stands before the bewildered infuriated ants,
Her true nature revealed, her honey glands gone;
Pursued by her angry hosts, she escapes with a ruse,
Exuding sticky substance that entangles their feet;
Hurriedly the butterfly flees to the surface
Spreads her wings and flies off into the air.
Male apollo butterflies grab females in flight
Or capture them on the ground,
Drawn to the virgins’ scent as they hide in the grass,
And brutishly ravish them;
After mating, the jealous male secretes and glues
A sphragis over the female’s abdomen,
A heavy chastity belt meant to last a lifetime
And keep her from other suitors for the rest of her life.
Avebury
Cretaceous landscape strikes its flints against the mind;
Here, stone clocks the long ceremony of the year
As light and water energize the earth’s limbs,
Bringing the giantess to bright fruition,
Where land and sky and underworld merge.
O, sanctuary of the seasons, hearth of the soul !
Sunrise and moonset align with the rivers
At the summer quarters, and the acts of the drama
Join in the round, mumming the cyclical play.
There was three men came out of the west,
Their fortunes for to try,
And these three men made a solemn vow,
John Barleycorn should die.
They ploughed, they sowed, they harrowed him in,
Throwed clods upon his head,
And these three men made a solemn vow
John Barleycorn was dead.
The Hag-Maiden is among us,
The corn dolly woven from the fall of the year.
West Kennet long barrow mothers the dead,
Her long hummock hugging the skyline
Along the hill’s electric spine;
Her eye watches everything, from every angle,
Surveying all four quarters, unblinking;
Her womb and vagina transform the loam-seed,
As she squats to drop her heavy load.
She is the ox ploughing deep furrows,
Turning with the heavens,
Fattened by the waxing moon.
Sere November stops the waters :
Nothing but stone and bone, and bare trees,
The bloodstream stilled, the power retracted,
Nothing but the skull-stare of empty skies.
The Winterbourne-Kennet snakes underground,
Sloughing its old skin in season,
And all is balanced on the horns of the ox.
Corpse with corpse, pot with skull,
The vibrant dead commune in dank chaos,
Seed-corn of the harvest to come.
In late October, the roebuck casts its antlers
And at once a new set starts to grow;
In late October, the doe is pursued in tight circle
By the buck around a tree, widdershins,
Flattening the grass,
Tracing a figure-of-eight.
The people drive the ox onto the bridge,
And drive his wounded body over the parapet,
Down, down into the river’s flow.
In the bridestone sockets myriads of snail shells
Lie buried, brought from the water,
Mazing the world in their spirals;
Again the spiral dance, the pacing
Of the grand design, the journey of the gods,
Into the eye of the storm.
The sacrifice lies crouched in foetal form,
Arms crossed in front of his face,
Lying on his right side, facing east,
A pot between his knees,
All his bones carefully broken,
And, placed on his body, the bones of a young ox.
Here the male and female are conjoined,
Riddling the serpentine maze,
Enacting the year’s procession,
Liturgy of earth and water.
What awesome energies writhe
In the serpent’s lengthy coils ?
The snake awakes from hibernation
And advances to the mating ground,
Swimming in the river of light.
Hail the ouroboros !
In spring the snakes writhe in lust;
By July the grass snake’s white eggs
And the adder’s young are everywhere,
Matching the harvest’s beginning.
The snake’s lidless eyes stare through you,
Unflinching,unblinking,never turning away.
The big-hipped bridestones dance like dervishes.
Their eyes and mouths are ever-open.
I make this fire from hazel, hawthorn and blackthorn.
Waden Hill stretches out her long body,
Where the white horse of the sky gallops along her back,
And the earth leaps like a hare.
The triangle of waters guards the seed.
Who will stop to drink from the fountain ?
At Swallowhead spring,
I feel the whole body of the Goddess,
Head, womb, anus and vulva,
Extended across the meadows.
Where streams meet and conceive the future,
Bride and groom come together
In midsummer marriage,
Exchanging golden rings.
The Devil’s Chair rears up high and wide,
Portal to other world,
Throne where the May maidens would sit
On May Day Eve, and make their wishes;
This mighty adderstone,
Congealed from the saliva
Of teeming vipers gathered together
At the high points of the year.
The twin snake heads meet in the henge,
Where the male snake inserts his head
Into the female’s jaws, and spurts his seed.
As I was walking out one morning, I met a buxom lass
Going to a dairyman, she had a field of grass,
It grew between mountains, at the foot of a spring,
She hired me to cut it down while the birds did sweetly sing.
Taurus rises over the henge at vernal equinox,
First the Pleiades, blessing the plough,
Bright Alcyone riding high on the Bull’s back.
Snakes coil under the marriage bed.
See the primeval mound risen from the waters,
The insular garden moated and fenced,
Home to Adam and Eve, Jesus and Mary.
Flint arrowhead pierces the sky
To let the rain through,
Flint sickle cuts the fattened corn
Under ox skull moon.
Tan Hill’s tender smooth pregnant swelling
Summons the spirit in prayer and exultation,
As the goddess squats in the fiery fields
And squeezes out the harvest in travail.
Every year a fair was held here on the summit,
On the feast of St Anne, under the August sun,
Blessed by the patroness of confinements,
When, in every village, a bowl of water
Would be placed on a stool by women,
To be used for divination, and hordes of people
Gathered on the hilltop, to trade horses, sheep and oxen,
Bartering and revelling with one gusto,
Drinking, dancing, sporting and brawling.
Here, stone clocks the long ceremony of the year
As light and water energize the earth’s limbs,
Bringing the giantess to bright fruition,
Where land and sky and underworld merge.
O, sanctuary of the seasons, hearth of the soul !
Sunrise and moonset align with the rivers
At the summer quarters, and the acts of the drama
Join in the round, mumming the cyclical play.
There was three men came out of the west,
Their fortunes for to try,
And these three men made a solemn vow,
John Barleycorn should die.
They ploughed, they sowed, they harrowed him in,
Throwed clods upon his head,
And these three men made a solemn vow
John Barleycorn was dead.
The Hag-Maiden is among us,
The corn dolly woven from the fall of the year.
West Kennet long barrow mothers the dead,
Her long hummock hugging the skyline
Along the hill’s electric spine;
Her eye watches everything, from every angle,
Surveying all four quarters, unblinking;
Her womb and vagina transform the loam-seed,
As she squats to drop her heavy load.
She is the ox ploughing deep furrows,
Turning with the heavens,
Fattened by the waxing moon.
Sere November stops the waters :
Nothing but stone and bone, and bare trees,
The bloodstream stilled, the power retracted,
Nothing but the skull-stare of empty skies.
The Winterbourne-Kennet snakes underground,
Sloughing its old skin in season,
And all is balanced on the horns of the ox.
Corpse with corpse, pot with skull,
The vibrant dead commune in dank chaos,
Seed-corn of the harvest to come.
In late October, the roebuck casts its antlers
And at once a new set starts to grow;
In late October, the doe is pursued in tight circle
By the buck around a tree, widdershins,
Flattening the grass,
Tracing a figure-of-eight.
The people drive the ox onto the bridge,
And drive his wounded body over the parapet,
Down, down into the river’s flow.
In the bridestone sockets myriads of snail shells
Lie buried, brought from the water,
Mazing the world in their spirals;
Again the spiral dance, the pacing
Of the grand design, the journey of the gods,
Into the eye of the storm.
The sacrifice lies crouched in foetal form,
Arms crossed in front of his face,
Lying on his right side, facing east,
A pot between his knees,
All his bones carefully broken,
And, placed on his body, the bones of a young ox.
Here the male and female are conjoined,
Riddling the serpentine maze,
Enacting the year’s procession,
Liturgy of earth and water.
What awesome energies writhe
In the serpent’s lengthy coils ?
The snake awakes from hibernation
And advances to the mating ground,
Swimming in the river of light.
Hail the ouroboros !
In spring the snakes writhe in lust;
By July the grass snake’s white eggs
And the adder’s young are everywhere,
Matching the harvest’s beginning.
The snake’s lidless eyes stare through you,
Unflinching,unblinking,never turning away.
The big-hipped bridestones dance like dervishes.
Their eyes and mouths are ever-open.
I make this fire from hazel, hawthorn and blackthorn.
Waden Hill stretches out her long body,
Where the white horse of the sky gallops along her back,
And the earth leaps like a hare.
The triangle of waters guards the seed.
Who will stop to drink from the fountain ?
At Swallowhead spring,
I feel the whole body of the Goddess,
Head, womb, anus and vulva,
Extended across the meadows.
Where streams meet and conceive the future,
Bride and groom come together
In midsummer marriage,
Exchanging golden rings.
The Devil’s Chair rears up high and wide,
Portal to other world,
Throne where the May maidens would sit
On May Day Eve, and make their wishes;
This mighty adderstone,
Congealed from the saliva
Of teeming vipers gathered together
At the high points of the year.
The twin snake heads meet in the henge,
Where the male snake inserts his head
Into the female’s jaws, and spurts his seed.
As I was walking out one morning, I met a buxom lass
Going to a dairyman, she had a field of grass,
It grew between mountains, at the foot of a spring,
She hired me to cut it down while the birds did sweetly sing.
Taurus rises over the henge at vernal equinox,
First the Pleiades, blessing the plough,
Bright Alcyone riding high on the Bull’s back.
Snakes coil under the marriage bed.
See the primeval mound risen from the waters,
The insular garden moated and fenced,
Home to Adam and Eve, Jesus and Mary.
Flint arrowhead pierces the sky
To let the rain through,
Flint sickle cuts the fattened corn
Under ox skull moon.
Tan Hill’s tender smooth pregnant swelling
Summons the spirit in prayer and exultation,
As the goddess squats in the fiery fields
And squeezes out the harvest in travail.
Every year a fair was held here on the summit,
On the feast of St Anne, under the August sun,
Blessed by the patroness of confinements,
When, in every village, a bowl of water
Would be placed on a stool by women,
To be used for divination, and hordes of people
Gathered on the hilltop, to trade horses, sheep and oxen,
Bartering and revelling with one gusto,
Drinking, dancing, sporting and brawling.
The Gnostic
This existence is all double-dealing:
Man and world, world and God,
Always confusion, always dread.
Cosmos, reveal yourself, with a vengeance!
What do you demand of us?
To whom do we owe allegiance?
By which stars to set our course?
How to know the Divine Will?
Self is the stranger, in all despite.
Either ignorance or knowledge
Presses us to venture and forage,
Acolytes of the lost pearl.
Into the night, torches held high,
We process-malign spirit of matter,
We defy you, lighten and rise.
Jerusalem’s siege will be lifted,
The tyranny of order reversed,
When man jumps down from the Cross.
Despotic stars curse your splendour!
Celestial spheres, I spit upon you!
I am the Alien, the Accursed.
The truth was my murderer:
When he struck me I toppled and died,
My blood ran in the gutter,
My body was stripped to the bone.
Phoney Empire, I am the dissident in your midst;
No cell can hold me,
I walk abroad in brilliant disguises.
Sophia, prey to her own folly,
Wanders in the void and darkness,
Searching, lamenting, suffering and repenting,
Labouring passion into matter, yearning into soul,
Vainglorious Creator, lording it over all,
You ask me to repent.
I say:
You first.
This oubliette we call home,
Down among the rats,
Our warders the tyrants of heaven,
Our chains the black iron of Fate.
How can the soul ascend when every gate is barred?
Falsehearted Demiurge,
Go trim your Old Testament beard!
Father Christmas of misery,
Don’t come dropping down my chimney!
The hermitage and the brothel are one,
The anchorite and the libertine.
Stranger, are you homesick?
Do you remember your birthplace and weep?
Your name is foreign
But your face seems familiar.
Go now to the mountain and behold the sunrise,
And know that you must leave this place.
This bubble world will break when tested.
The demons have no thrones.
We rebels shall seize back power
And march in arms on every citadel,
Felling walls and towers with words.
Try to count the heavens and your head will reel,
And all of them we must outwit.
Who has cast me into the sump?
Who has stifled me in flesh?
In this turbulence we cannot be still;
The good perish and the noble come to nothing;
The candle left unguarded is soon snuffed.
The Whole is asunder.
Come, be a mender,
A fetcher of fire.
Still the soul is sinking,
Heavy as a dwarf star,
Spiralling downward without end.
Who has abducted us from comfort?
Who has thrown us into evil?
Barefoot on hot stones, we wander,
Mocked by the demons above.
The man bitten by a mad dog
Wanders babbling on stony roads
And the judge calls it justice
And the priest calls it truth.
Bring more wine, we shall toast the world,
Drunkards together, needing nothing
But the mercy of forgetfulness-
Bring on the dancing girls; this night is for seduction,
And may we not content ourselves with false love?
Poison is mixed with your wine at the feast
Till the cup falls from your hand and you slumber-
Who would not love such deep endless sleep?
Who would not yearn for such rest?
The snare is set, and the creature approaches,
Sniffing the air, looking this way and that,
And, seeing what its senses crave,
Gladly steps into the cage.
The call comes and the willing hear
The toll of a distant bell above the bedlam,
Summoning the chosen home.
The Messenger arrives and his enemies gang against him,
Determined to give him no share;
They beat him with sticks, throw stones and curses,
But still he keeps walking,
Shakes the sleeping awake,
Restores their names to them,
Points the way to freedom with a smile.
Infants clinging to mother’s breast,
We dread the call to depart.
The way is long and arduous, the tolls so high,-
Why not sit safely at home?
Flesh, soul and spirit, I wander in the world,
Fashioned in the image of Primal Man,
With the appetites and passions of the Archons,
Among the fallen sparks.
Does the Saviour come yet,
His hands full of fire?
Now is the time of gathering in,
The hour of blissful return.
Who has bound us to the black earth of Egypt?
Who has put the serpent at our throats?
We shall shed our shrouds and cross the Red Sea,
Out to retrieve the lost pearl.
Boastful ignorant Demiurge,
Crowing that you alone created all,
That you alone exist and there is none above you,
How wrong you are, how stupid-
Look above you-
There is Man!
Archons, cheap creators of this gimcrack world,
Is this rubbish heap the best you could do?
You are subalterns all, not generals,
Jumped-up usurpers in ill-fitting crowns!
I must learn the secret names of my oppressors
And the passwords of their tollgates.
Evil brilliance of stars, vastness of space,
The music of the spheres is the hissing of snakes.
Where speech and reason fail,
There is God,
Inviting and thwarting the quest.
Man and world, world and God,
Always confusion, always dread.
Cosmos, reveal yourself, with a vengeance!
What do you demand of us?
To whom do we owe allegiance?
By which stars to set our course?
How to know the Divine Will?
Self is the stranger, in all despite.
Either ignorance or knowledge
Presses us to venture and forage,
Acolytes of the lost pearl.
Into the night, torches held high,
We process-malign spirit of matter,
We defy you, lighten and rise.
Jerusalem’s siege will be lifted,
The tyranny of order reversed,
When man jumps down from the Cross.
Despotic stars curse your splendour!
Celestial spheres, I spit upon you!
I am the Alien, the Accursed.
The truth was my murderer:
When he struck me I toppled and died,
My blood ran in the gutter,
My body was stripped to the bone.
Phoney Empire, I am the dissident in your midst;
No cell can hold me,
I walk abroad in brilliant disguises.
Sophia, prey to her own folly,
Wanders in the void and darkness,
Searching, lamenting, suffering and repenting,
Labouring passion into matter, yearning into soul,
Vainglorious Creator, lording it over all,
You ask me to repent.
I say:
You first.
This oubliette we call home,
Down among the rats,
Our warders the tyrants of heaven,
Our chains the black iron of Fate.
How can the soul ascend when every gate is barred?
Falsehearted Demiurge,
Go trim your Old Testament beard!
Father Christmas of misery,
Don’t come dropping down my chimney!
The hermitage and the brothel are one,
The anchorite and the libertine.
Stranger, are you homesick?
Do you remember your birthplace and weep?
Your name is foreign
But your face seems familiar.
Go now to the mountain and behold the sunrise,
And know that you must leave this place.
This bubble world will break when tested.
The demons have no thrones.
We rebels shall seize back power
And march in arms on every citadel,
Felling walls and towers with words.
Try to count the heavens and your head will reel,
And all of them we must outwit.
Who has cast me into the sump?
Who has stifled me in flesh?
In this turbulence we cannot be still;
The good perish and the noble come to nothing;
The candle left unguarded is soon snuffed.
The Whole is asunder.
Come, be a mender,
A fetcher of fire.
Still the soul is sinking,
Heavy as a dwarf star,
Spiralling downward without end.
Who has abducted us from comfort?
Who has thrown us into evil?
Barefoot on hot stones, we wander,
Mocked by the demons above.
The man bitten by a mad dog
Wanders babbling on stony roads
And the judge calls it justice
And the priest calls it truth.
Bring more wine, we shall toast the world,
Drunkards together, needing nothing
But the mercy of forgetfulness-
Bring on the dancing girls; this night is for seduction,
And may we not content ourselves with false love?
Poison is mixed with your wine at the feast
Till the cup falls from your hand and you slumber-
Who would not love such deep endless sleep?
Who would not yearn for such rest?
The snare is set, and the creature approaches,
Sniffing the air, looking this way and that,
And, seeing what its senses crave,
Gladly steps into the cage.
The call comes and the willing hear
The toll of a distant bell above the bedlam,
Summoning the chosen home.
The Messenger arrives and his enemies gang against him,
Determined to give him no share;
They beat him with sticks, throw stones and curses,
But still he keeps walking,
Shakes the sleeping awake,
Restores their names to them,
Points the way to freedom with a smile.
Infants clinging to mother’s breast,
We dread the call to depart.
The way is long and arduous, the tolls so high,-
Why not sit safely at home?
Flesh, soul and spirit, I wander in the world,
Fashioned in the image of Primal Man,
With the appetites and passions of the Archons,
Among the fallen sparks.
Does the Saviour come yet,
His hands full of fire?
Now is the time of gathering in,
The hour of blissful return.
Who has bound us to the black earth of Egypt?
Who has put the serpent at our throats?
We shall shed our shrouds and cross the Red Sea,
Out to retrieve the lost pearl.
Boastful ignorant Demiurge,
Crowing that you alone created all,
That you alone exist and there is none above you,
How wrong you are, how stupid-
Look above you-
There is Man!
Archons, cheap creators of this gimcrack world,
Is this rubbish heap the best you could do?
You are subalterns all, not generals,
Jumped-up usurpers in ill-fitting crowns!
I must learn the secret names of my oppressors
And the passwords of their tollgates.
Evil brilliance of stars, vastness of space,
The music of the spheres is the hissing of snakes.
Where speech and reason fail,
There is God,
Inviting and thwarting the quest.
Absinthe
Flamineo: Yes, yes, with wormwood water; you shall taste
Some of it presently.
The White Devil, John Webster
Absinthe, amaranth, nepenthe…
The green witch has got me,
She’s eating me alive…
There’s intrigue and furore under my skin,
Phantasmal voices, pyrotechnics,
Scorpio in the ascendant,
Glittering like the razor’s edge…
It is time for raising demons,
Time for walking in the fog.
My mind is a mountain storm.
Bend sinister is my heraldry,
And I crave the naked flame.
Dread and awe possess me, draw me in,
Twist my will in the mirror,
Writhe me like a diamond’s core.
Whom beauty menaces must choose
The nature of the sacrifice.
The ceremony of the opal calls:
Pour water into the elixir
And watch the decoction cloud
And quicken, billowing like a nebula
Into smaragdine, pure metonymy.
Wormwood, herb of Mars, hot and dry
In the third degree, kill the pests within,
Chase out demons and purge me
Of falsehood, leaving the bitter truth.
They say that wormwood first grew
In the track of the serpent as he crept
Out of Paradise; and after the Seventh Seal
Was opened, the star Wormwood fell
From the skies, and devastated the earth;
In ancient Rome after chariot races
The victor would be given a wormwood drink
To remind him that even victory
Is tinged with bitterness.
Anaesthesia, anastasis: the lull
Of endless waves, visions of heart’s ease,
All the lights are coming on,
All the fireflies in the mind…
Time catches its breath, hypnotized
By the cobra’s stare; my life
Is this Grail-castle of glass,
This pierced spoon balanced
And loaded with sugar,
And cool water pouring down
To roil the primal ocean
And bring forth dreaming monsters.
Judiciously, exquisitely, I drip
The heavy dewdrops from on high,
Contemplating smoky trails
Snaking and spiralling through.
Next stop: oblivion, Lucifer’s semen.
I stare through walls, so clear
And light, rising in a terpene swirl,
To imagine worlds and wonders
As easily as breathing, a winged horse
Soaring with ease, till I stumble
And fall, convulsed, clonic then tonic,
The evil world wailing in my ears.
Some of it presently.
The White Devil, John Webster
Absinthe, amaranth, nepenthe…
The green witch has got me,
She’s eating me alive…
There’s intrigue and furore under my skin,
Phantasmal voices, pyrotechnics,
Scorpio in the ascendant,
Glittering like the razor’s edge…
It is time for raising demons,
Time for walking in the fog.
My mind is a mountain storm.
Bend sinister is my heraldry,
And I crave the naked flame.
Dread and awe possess me, draw me in,
Twist my will in the mirror,
Writhe me like a diamond’s core.
Whom beauty menaces must choose
The nature of the sacrifice.
The ceremony of the opal calls:
Pour water into the elixir
And watch the decoction cloud
And quicken, billowing like a nebula
Into smaragdine, pure metonymy.
Wormwood, herb of Mars, hot and dry
In the third degree, kill the pests within,
Chase out demons and purge me
Of falsehood, leaving the bitter truth.
They say that wormwood first grew
In the track of the serpent as he crept
Out of Paradise; and after the Seventh Seal
Was opened, the star Wormwood fell
From the skies, and devastated the earth;
In ancient Rome after chariot races
The victor would be given a wormwood drink
To remind him that even victory
Is tinged with bitterness.
Anaesthesia, anastasis: the lull
Of endless waves, visions of heart’s ease,
All the lights are coming on,
All the fireflies in the mind…
Time catches its breath, hypnotized
By the cobra’s stare; my life
Is this Grail-castle of glass,
This pierced spoon balanced
And loaded with sugar,
And cool water pouring down
To roil the primal ocean
And bring forth dreaming monsters.
Judiciously, exquisitely, I drip
The heavy dewdrops from on high,
Contemplating smoky trails
Snaking and spiralling through.
Next stop: oblivion, Lucifer’s semen.
I stare through walls, so clear
And light, rising in a terpene swirl,
To imagine worlds and wonders
As easily as breathing, a winged horse
Soaring with ease, till I stumble
And fall, convulsed, clonic then tonic,
The evil world wailing in my ears.
White Man
Blue-eyed Christ
Breaking white bread in white hands,
Your body becomes the four quarters.
Your savannah obeah
Summons me here.
This world is the privilege of my eyes,
Lit by the glow of Greek statues,
From the Caucasus to the Congo.
We are the living ghosts
Walking across Africa,
The pale dead speaking in tongues.
To map the skin’s country
I pace and survey,
Measuring horizon’s gravity.
What do the gods desire of us ?
Ask the trees and rocks.
Fierce blood, dark in the vein,
Return me to stone,
Renew me again.
Nobody knows me,
Nobody has ever known me:
White shadows jitter and jag in my brain.
All this talk of flesh and spirit
Is driving me insane.
The darkness wills me to possess it,
Who am myself possessed.
Suffer and fall,
And count yourself blessed.
White on white,
Sly hues contend,
Portending the pure,
The exempt.
Here I am,
In the pink,
Waiting to be told
What to think.
Can I chase out the demons
With baptism, with confirmation,
With communion, with penance, with extreme unction,
With marriage, with white death ?
Get back to the mountains
Where the air is cold and clear,
And the eye can see forever.
Roll in the snow, get clean again,
Your body made of stars.
The ape exults in the forest,
Smelling the earth’s arousal,
And makes his prayers in blood
And bone, in hot spurting seed.
Asses’ milk or ceruse
Poison black Cleopatra,
Statuesque before her mirror
In a palace in Africa.
Dirt and sin call me
To confess myself in them,
To revel in their carnival
And laugh through tears.
This white shows the dirt all too clearly,
Yet flatters the self-deceiving.
This transparency you crave is all absence,
Chaste deadliness of Nothing incarnate,
Immaculate, impeccable,
Ecstasy of the unreal.
Light from above
Illuminates us against a white ground,
Conjuring spirits and angels
With its deft wand.
Breaking white bread in white hands,
Your body becomes the four quarters.
Your savannah obeah
Summons me here.
This world is the privilege of my eyes,
Lit by the glow of Greek statues,
From the Caucasus to the Congo.
We are the living ghosts
Walking across Africa,
The pale dead speaking in tongues.
To map the skin’s country
I pace and survey,
Measuring horizon’s gravity.
What do the gods desire of us ?
Ask the trees and rocks.
Fierce blood, dark in the vein,
Return me to stone,
Renew me again.
Nobody knows me,
Nobody has ever known me:
White shadows jitter and jag in my brain.
All this talk of flesh and spirit
Is driving me insane.
The darkness wills me to possess it,
Who am myself possessed.
Suffer and fall,
And count yourself blessed.
White on white,
Sly hues contend,
Portending the pure,
The exempt.
Here I am,
In the pink,
Waiting to be told
What to think.
Can I chase out the demons
With baptism, with confirmation,
With communion, with penance, with extreme unction,
With marriage, with white death ?
Get back to the mountains
Where the air is cold and clear,
And the eye can see forever.
Roll in the snow, get clean again,
Your body made of stars.
The ape exults in the forest,
Smelling the earth’s arousal,
And makes his prayers in blood
And bone, in hot spurting seed.
Asses’ milk or ceruse
Poison black Cleopatra,
Statuesque before her mirror
In a palace in Africa.
Dirt and sin call me
To confess myself in them,
To revel in their carnival
And laugh through tears.
This white shows the dirt all too clearly,
Yet flatters the self-deceiving.
This transparency you crave is all absence,
Chaste deadliness of Nothing incarnate,
Immaculate, impeccable,
Ecstasy of the unreal.
Light from above
Illuminates us against a white ground,
Conjuring spirits and angels
With its deft wand.
English Music
Hear the wolf’s sermon under the moon:
The waves in the blood.
How the conversation of angels
Takes such strange turns!
I was cut down, roots on end...
I was raised up as a rood…
I was all wet with blood…
Your eyes:
Spirals carved in sarsens,
And in cathedral stones.
Bind me a riddle, a charm,
To weave my word-web true.
I sign my name in rain,
Wind-walking over hills,
Cloud-clerk in a druid’s cape.
Heaven hear me,
Chanting with Tallis and Byrd
The whole world’s wyrd,
Neglecting no beauty,
Forsaking no dream.
Custom creates in the air,
Nesting under words’ eaves,
Cooing in the dreamer’s ear
The breath of other lives.
Wolfish passion for the mutable
Strolls about the landscape,
Sucking up the sodden earth,
Nourished at its breast.
Wistful swathes of mist and fog
Usher shades into the mind,
Opalescent messengers
Of atavistic omen.
Felicities, affinities
Find me out wherever,
Witching on a bat’s wings
In the evening glow.
Babooneries revel in the margins
Of illuminated hours;
My life: - a chalice, a tapestry,
Serpentine-ornate.
Harmony of idiosyncrasies,
Rising oratorio:
Riddle, puzzle,
Historiated initial.
This lacustrine stillness
Is Englishness,
Deep spirals reared to conjure
Rising-falling waves.
Jesting pirate, go now,
Steal the sun’s Golden Fleece;
Voyages and argosies
Await on the open sea.
English is to me Mayan glyphs
Or Linear B; limning its curves
I scratch out my being
On water, bark and stone.
Motley is my preference,
Setting life to dance like a bear
In reckless pandemonium,
Masque and anti-masque.
The waves in the blood.
How the conversation of angels
Takes such strange turns!
I was cut down, roots on end...
I was raised up as a rood…
I was all wet with blood…
Your eyes:
Spirals carved in sarsens,
And in cathedral stones.
Bind me a riddle, a charm,
To weave my word-web true.
I sign my name in rain,
Wind-walking over hills,
Cloud-clerk in a druid’s cape.
Heaven hear me,
Chanting with Tallis and Byrd
The whole world’s wyrd,
Neglecting no beauty,
Forsaking no dream.
Custom creates in the air,
Nesting under words’ eaves,
Cooing in the dreamer’s ear
The breath of other lives.
Wolfish passion for the mutable
Strolls about the landscape,
Sucking up the sodden earth,
Nourished at its breast.
Wistful swathes of mist and fog
Usher shades into the mind,
Opalescent messengers
Of atavistic omen.
Felicities, affinities
Find me out wherever,
Witching on a bat’s wings
In the evening glow.
Babooneries revel in the margins
Of illuminated hours;
My life: - a chalice, a tapestry,
Serpentine-ornate.
Harmony of idiosyncrasies,
Rising oratorio:
Riddle, puzzle,
Historiated initial.
This lacustrine stillness
Is Englishness,
Deep spirals reared to conjure
Rising-falling waves.
Jesting pirate, go now,
Steal the sun’s Golden Fleece;
Voyages and argosies
Await on the open sea.
English is to me Mayan glyphs
Or Linear B; limning its curves
I scratch out my being
On water, bark and stone.
Motley is my preference,
Setting life to dance like a bear
In reckless pandemonium,
Masque and anti-masque.
Stick or Twist
It dies with me, the secret I have not fathomed. Existence? Call it ceasing to exist. These moments of eternity float the All or Nothing.
I found strange succour among the dead,
Scouting round Père-Lachaise, guidebook in hand,
And an old woman lingering like a spirit asked: “Qui vous cherchez?”
“Apollinaire,” I said, and she pointed out a gravestone, smiling.
What is all this fanfarlo,
The overheard conversations of my heart,
The whispers and sighs?
Damned fate,
Will you let me get a word in?
Dear Lord of the Universe:
Is it true you unscrew your private parts and pop them in a jar of Sterident overnight?
No more 4 a.m. panics,
No more sordid excuses and betrayals,
No more futile neuroses,
No more cowardly dodges,
No more ludicrous bravado,
No more no more…
I only love the unseen, the untouched,
I who am neither seen nor touched,
I only love the love that is unseen and untouched,
I who am neither unseen nor untouched.
I proceed with my usual stupidities,
Exceed the proper limits,
Supersede myself again.
Et voilà!
It’s me again,
Saying I want this, I want that,
Things I don’t really want at all,
Things I have no use for,
And yet the charm of possession possesses me,
The image lingers in the mind…
For if one does not exist in others’ minds,
Does one even exist at all?
So excuse my bad jokes,
My idle follies,
Somehow I need them,
And they need me.
Listen to the whale songs of the heart,
Echoing across immensities,
Deep below the waves of my face…
One day I will learn to say No with joy,
And shake my corpse’s hand, laughing.
I found strange succour among the dead,
Scouting round Père-Lachaise, guidebook in hand,
And an old woman lingering like a spirit asked: “Qui vous cherchez?”
“Apollinaire,” I said, and she pointed out a gravestone, smiling.
What is all this fanfarlo,
The overheard conversations of my heart,
The whispers and sighs?
Damned fate,
Will you let me get a word in?
Dear Lord of the Universe:
Is it true you unscrew your private parts and pop them in a jar of Sterident overnight?
No more 4 a.m. panics,
No more sordid excuses and betrayals,
No more futile neuroses,
No more cowardly dodges,
No more ludicrous bravado,
No more no more…
I only love the unseen, the untouched,
I who am neither seen nor touched,
I only love the love that is unseen and untouched,
I who am neither unseen nor untouched.
I proceed with my usual stupidities,
Exceed the proper limits,
Supersede myself again.
Et voilà!
It’s me again,
Saying I want this, I want that,
Things I don’t really want at all,
Things I have no use for,
And yet the charm of possession possesses me,
The image lingers in the mind…
For if one does not exist in others’ minds,
Does one even exist at all?
So excuse my bad jokes,
My idle follies,
Somehow I need them,
And they need me.
Listen to the whale songs of the heart,
Echoing across immensities,
Deep below the waves of my face…
One day I will learn to say No with joy,
And shake my corpse’s hand, laughing.
Cave Painters of the Ice Age, c.40, 000 B.C.
When the first men came, they were makers and mages,
Hunters of the sacred beast within, gatherers of the season,
Out of endless glacial advances and retreats,
Out of millennial stagnation,
Suddenly there, growing out of all recognition,
With divine speed and audacity, becoming something other,
Something never seen before on earth,
Moving across the earth with invincible determination,
Settling the new lands of the spirit.
Clad in animal furs and hides against the cold,
They lived in bone huts covered with skins,
Expert tool-makers and flint-knappers crafting flint and bone
Into tools and weapons with brilliant ingenuity,
Continually experimenting, creating new kinds of objects
In antler, bone, ivory and flint, whatever they could find,
Suddenly expressing themselves in sculptures and engravings
Of humans and animals, and cave paintings.
They fashioned necklaces from animal teeth, seashells and stones,
And decorated their bodies with red ochre,
Tattooing their skin with fine bone needles;
They fashioned bone-whistles from reindeer toe bones
Pierced with a single hole through the centre,
And created bone flutes to play for fun and ritual.
They never rested in their search for beauty and utility,
Evolving new skills and techniques for working flint,
To create tools and blades of exquisite craftsmanship and beauty,
Achieved though patient dedication and invention.
Out on the grassy plains and wooded valleys,
They felt the world’s long seasons turn,
The warm times yielding to the cold, and back again,
As the grasslands teemed with reindeer, hroses, deer, bison, ibex, mammoth.
Their special quarry was the beloved reindeer,
That they followed with awe and fascination, learning
Their daily movements and behaviour,
Each year following the vast herds’ migrations in spring and autumn,
Hunting and herding the munificent creatures
Whose every bone and fibre were manna from heaven.
Nothing was wasted; meat, bone, fur, skin, thread, oil and grease,
All were turned to human boons and graces.
But always they feared to doom themselves
By driving the herds to extinction,
And in their time they knew both feats and famine,
And kept their numbers down with infanticide, abortion and feuding.
They walked with death, afraid to love one another too much,
Ruthless in preserving themselves and the band,
Hunting and sleeping, dreaming and dancing for the gods.
In their little nomad clans they pursued the game,
Trekking far through wilderness, camping in tents or huts,
The clans congregating and dispersing in season,
Exchanging information, precious objects and ideas,
The artists seeking out the scared caves to make their mark.
They groped their way down deep into the darkness,
Into the inner sanctum of the earth, squeezing through narrow gaps,
Crawling and scrambling into claustral chambers,
Slithering down perilous slopes, drawn to the inaccessible,
To make the tiniest most constricted chambers their chapels,
Scarcely large enough for one or two to enter at a time,
Where few and seldom would ever dare to come,
Braving the arduous descent and the soul’s hazards.
Therein, they worked their magic on the walls,
Their skill the glory of the whole tribe,
Painting by the glimmer of little tallow lamps;
Invoking the spirits and deities of the earth,
They prayed for success in the hunt and the harvest,
Carving and painting hosts of beasts over walls, niches and corners,
Hunting and gathering the icons in their minds.
There they enacted the ceremonies of transcendence,
Seekers of perfection, delighting in the surprise and wonder
Their images would evoke in the visitor,
These real presences, these transubstantiations,
These animals moving in the spirit realm.
Their expert eyes traced the unseen in the seen,
Venerating horse and bison, ox, mammoth, ibex, stag and deer,
And the symbols in dots, lines and abstract shapes,
Giving each cave its own unique identity and unity.
They left their handprints and footprints on the rocks,
And laid the bones and skulls of bears out in worship,
And sculpted bears and bison with intense incantation.
Everywhere, they ground out cup-shapes in the rock,
And held funeral feasts before laying the dead in caves
With food and accoutrements to accompany their travels,
Placing them in sleeping position, ready to awaken
In the other world, the magical realm of the bear.
They lived by the waxing and waning of the moon,
Recording the phases and seasons, marking the salmon runs,
The cuckoo calls and shedding of horns, the birds’ flight,
The calving of reindeer, and the opening of flowers,
Enacting in themselves the mysteries of resurrection.
Hunters of the sacred beast within, gatherers of the season,
Out of endless glacial advances and retreats,
Out of millennial stagnation,
Suddenly there, growing out of all recognition,
With divine speed and audacity, becoming something other,
Something never seen before on earth,
Moving across the earth with invincible determination,
Settling the new lands of the spirit.
Clad in animal furs and hides against the cold,
They lived in bone huts covered with skins,
Expert tool-makers and flint-knappers crafting flint and bone
Into tools and weapons with brilliant ingenuity,
Continually experimenting, creating new kinds of objects
In antler, bone, ivory and flint, whatever they could find,
Suddenly expressing themselves in sculptures and engravings
Of humans and animals, and cave paintings.
They fashioned necklaces from animal teeth, seashells and stones,
And decorated their bodies with red ochre,
Tattooing their skin with fine bone needles;
They fashioned bone-whistles from reindeer toe bones
Pierced with a single hole through the centre,
And created bone flutes to play for fun and ritual.
They never rested in their search for beauty and utility,
Evolving new skills and techniques for working flint,
To create tools and blades of exquisite craftsmanship and beauty,
Achieved though patient dedication and invention.
Out on the grassy plains and wooded valleys,
They felt the world’s long seasons turn,
The warm times yielding to the cold, and back again,
As the grasslands teemed with reindeer, hroses, deer, bison, ibex, mammoth.
Their special quarry was the beloved reindeer,
That they followed with awe and fascination, learning
Their daily movements and behaviour,
Each year following the vast herds’ migrations in spring and autumn,
Hunting and herding the munificent creatures
Whose every bone and fibre were manna from heaven.
Nothing was wasted; meat, bone, fur, skin, thread, oil and grease,
All were turned to human boons and graces.
But always they feared to doom themselves
By driving the herds to extinction,
And in their time they knew both feats and famine,
And kept their numbers down with infanticide, abortion and feuding.
They walked with death, afraid to love one another too much,
Ruthless in preserving themselves and the band,
Hunting and sleeping, dreaming and dancing for the gods.
In their little nomad clans they pursued the game,
Trekking far through wilderness, camping in tents or huts,
The clans congregating and dispersing in season,
Exchanging information, precious objects and ideas,
The artists seeking out the scared caves to make their mark.
They groped their way down deep into the darkness,
Into the inner sanctum of the earth, squeezing through narrow gaps,
Crawling and scrambling into claustral chambers,
Slithering down perilous slopes, drawn to the inaccessible,
To make the tiniest most constricted chambers their chapels,
Scarcely large enough for one or two to enter at a time,
Where few and seldom would ever dare to come,
Braving the arduous descent and the soul’s hazards.
Therein, they worked their magic on the walls,
Their skill the glory of the whole tribe,
Painting by the glimmer of little tallow lamps;
Invoking the spirits and deities of the earth,
They prayed for success in the hunt and the harvest,
Carving and painting hosts of beasts over walls, niches and corners,
Hunting and gathering the icons in their minds.
There they enacted the ceremonies of transcendence,
Seekers of perfection, delighting in the surprise and wonder
Their images would evoke in the visitor,
These real presences, these transubstantiations,
These animals moving in the spirit realm.
Their expert eyes traced the unseen in the seen,
Venerating horse and bison, ox, mammoth, ibex, stag and deer,
And the symbols in dots, lines and abstract shapes,
Giving each cave its own unique identity and unity.
They left their handprints and footprints on the rocks,
And laid the bones and skulls of bears out in worship,
And sculpted bears and bison with intense incantation.
Everywhere, they ground out cup-shapes in the rock,
And held funeral feasts before laying the dead in caves
With food and accoutrements to accompany their travels,
Placing them in sleeping position, ready to awaken
In the other world, the magical realm of the bear.
They lived by the waxing and waning of the moon,
Recording the phases and seasons, marking the salmon runs,
The cuckoo calls and shedding of horns, the birds’ flight,
The calving of reindeer, and the opening of flowers,
Enacting in themselves the mysteries of resurrection.
Bulgaria
From the city where stray dogs roam the streets in packs,
You head for Mount Vitosha’s pure water and fresh breezes,
Where the air is plum brandy that goes to your head,
And you witness the centuries as if you had lived through them.
St George rides the white steed, St Dimitar the red,
And the Thracian horseman lifts his spear and takes aim
To slay the serpent and deliver the kingdom from famine.
Bad omens appear in a bowl of water, in the clouds;
The villagers mark the new house’s foundations with blood;
Come, brother, scatter coins and wheat around the hearth.
I have seen the Arabic inscription on a Turkish fountain:
He who looks upon me and drinks my water
Shall possess the light of the eyes and of the soul.
At the Seven Lakes of the Rila Mountains the Danovisti
Gather on the shore to dance and worship the August sun;
Red, white and black is the bloom of Rila Monastery,
Angelic arches leaping like dolphins out at sea,
Stairways ascending to the balconies’ efflorescence,
And the mountains sombre and mysterious behind,
As you walk along the frescoes of Apocalypse and Hell,
Studying there the rich men quaffing wine around a table,
Ignoring the pleas of a begging leper whose thin legs
Are being gnawed by hungry dogs, while bat-winged demons
Flit about the fallen world, and over ruined Constantinople.
St John’s bones glow supernal within these precincts,
Blessing the true seeker who would heal himself and find
What always was closer than life’s tormented illusion,
If only one would dare to climb into the secret cave.
When will you journey to the Pirin Mountains,
To run free in the winds and storms of the Slavic god?
There you will drink the tarns’ pure water and receive
Prophecies of the world’s destiny, in rocks and trees,
Where healing wildflowers bloom briefly in high valleys,
And glacial cirques gleam azure among granite crags.
In you, too, is the seer, the healer, the chosen one,
Moving at will through the insubstantial world,
Reuniting the separated, and mending the broken.
Near the source of the River Madera, high on the cliff face
Looms the great bas-relief of the horseman, his mount
Trampling a lion, with his faithful greyhound at hand,
While in one hand he clutches a cup of wine;
His horse speaks in the language of the Underworld,
Addressing the dead with messages of comfort,
While the fields and orchards bloom with plenty,
Reborn out of bones and blood, out of worship,
And the sacred spring bubbles up from darkness
In the cave of saints, the martyr’s precious wound.
See them come, the Thracians, galloping across the plain,
Great archers and equestrians, tattooed with sacred signs,
Burning hemp seeds to inhale the narcotic smoke,
Dreaming of the land of heroes beyond the mountains,
Practising the Mysteries in ecstatic illumination,
Dying to be reborn, in the proud-breasted Goddess’s embrace,
Surrounded by their wives, their dogs and horses.
At the Thracian necropolis at Sveshtari, in the tomb,
The king and queen lay on stone couches, accompanied
By the horses, to ride together in the afterlife still,
Watched over by the mother goddess who offers
The mounted horseman in the fresco a hero’s wreath.
Elswehere, in another tomb, the painted dome looks down,
With procession of horses and servants approaching
The chieftain seated at the banqueting table, while his wife
Reposes on a throne beside him, face downcast in mourning,
Touching his hand in a tender gesture of farewell,
And the goddess extends to the dead man a bowl of fruit.
Racing chariots wheel around the apex oft the dome,
Celebrating the funerary games, with ecstatic exultation,
While the priests conduct great sacrifices and rituals,
Calling on the gods to protect and guide their lord.
Through shimmering heat haze on the Dobrudzha Plain,
I scan the parched barren steppe with dazzled eyes,
Thinking for a a moment that another barbarian horde
Is emerging out of the east, advancing on horseback
To conquer an empire, then find, to their dismay,
These badlands the hardest frontier to defend,
No man’s land of bandits, brigands and raiders.
So came the Bulgars, sweeping in from the Turkic steppe,
Shouting war-cries and appeals to their forefathers,
Their shamans urging them on in the language of birds,
People of the wolf, dancing under the red moon.
The smell of blood mingles with attar of roses,
And bagpipes and drums strike up for the feast
As firewalkers fall into trance and dance on hot embers;
The hesychast ascends the Mount of Transfiguration;
The Bogomil tears the mask from the bishop’s face
And stares into Satan’s eyes, the world’s corruption.
And so it was when the Turks massacred and enslaved,
And made serfs and beggars of a proud people,
Forcing them to kiss the sabre, and kneel before Allah,
And kidnapped young boys for the janissary corps,
And pillaged and destroyed precious monasteries,
And raped and robbed, cheated, and oppressed.
But in the Balkans’ fastness, in villages and monasteries,
Proud courageous spirits preserved the nation in trust,
Awaiting the day of deliverance, the justice of God.
They live among us, hellish fiends in human form,
Vampires that rise from their graves each night,
To feed off farmers’ flocks, and prey upon mortals,
Sucking their life-blood, leaving them listless and ill;
The vampire hunter, clairvoyant scion of werewolves,
Whose eyes could scry vampires among the crowd,
Hunts the evil spirit to bay with an icon held aloft,
Tricking it into a bottle, then throwing it onto a fire;
Or he spies out the creature’s grave in the churchyard,
The icon’s trembling showing him the dread spot
Where he must dig, ready with the hawthorn stake
To impale the monster’s heart, and burn its corpse.
You will walk in the Rhodope Mountains, listening
For panpipes’ eerie lilt, among rugged gorges and caves,
Dense pine forests and alpine pastures, where lizards
Lick the air’s vibrations, and bluebirds flash among the rocks,
While hawks and eagles ride the sky’s great hymn.
The Trigrad Gorge’s sheer walls overhang foaming river,
Disappearing into the stupendous cave, its hoarse cascade
Vanishing into the earth’s maw, into the Underworld,
And anything swept down there is never seen again;
Inside the cave, bats flit around the shaft of light admitted
By a fissure far above, here where Orpheus himself descended,
To find his beloved wife and bring her back into the light,
For why, if his lyre could so sway the enchanted earth,
Should it not also conquer Hades, conquer death itself?
Do you not hear him singing laments for lost Eurydice
As he wanders the mountains, bereft, cursing his own folly?
See, the maenads are even now tearing his body apart,
And his head, still singing, floats downriver to distant Lesbos,
To prophesy ever after to his priests and followers,
That they might free their souls from world and flesh.
You head for Mount Vitosha’s pure water and fresh breezes,
Where the air is plum brandy that goes to your head,
And you witness the centuries as if you had lived through them.
St George rides the white steed, St Dimitar the red,
And the Thracian horseman lifts his spear and takes aim
To slay the serpent and deliver the kingdom from famine.
Bad omens appear in a bowl of water, in the clouds;
The villagers mark the new house’s foundations with blood;
Come, brother, scatter coins and wheat around the hearth.
I have seen the Arabic inscription on a Turkish fountain:
He who looks upon me and drinks my water
Shall possess the light of the eyes and of the soul.
At the Seven Lakes of the Rila Mountains the Danovisti
Gather on the shore to dance and worship the August sun;
Red, white and black is the bloom of Rila Monastery,
Angelic arches leaping like dolphins out at sea,
Stairways ascending to the balconies’ efflorescence,
And the mountains sombre and mysterious behind,
As you walk along the frescoes of Apocalypse and Hell,
Studying there the rich men quaffing wine around a table,
Ignoring the pleas of a begging leper whose thin legs
Are being gnawed by hungry dogs, while bat-winged demons
Flit about the fallen world, and over ruined Constantinople.
St John’s bones glow supernal within these precincts,
Blessing the true seeker who would heal himself and find
What always was closer than life’s tormented illusion,
If only one would dare to climb into the secret cave.
When will you journey to the Pirin Mountains,
To run free in the winds and storms of the Slavic god?
There you will drink the tarns’ pure water and receive
Prophecies of the world’s destiny, in rocks and trees,
Where healing wildflowers bloom briefly in high valleys,
And glacial cirques gleam azure among granite crags.
In you, too, is the seer, the healer, the chosen one,
Moving at will through the insubstantial world,
Reuniting the separated, and mending the broken.
Near the source of the River Madera, high on the cliff face
Looms the great bas-relief of the horseman, his mount
Trampling a lion, with his faithful greyhound at hand,
While in one hand he clutches a cup of wine;
His horse speaks in the language of the Underworld,
Addressing the dead with messages of comfort,
While the fields and orchards bloom with plenty,
Reborn out of bones and blood, out of worship,
And the sacred spring bubbles up from darkness
In the cave of saints, the martyr’s precious wound.
See them come, the Thracians, galloping across the plain,
Great archers and equestrians, tattooed with sacred signs,
Burning hemp seeds to inhale the narcotic smoke,
Dreaming of the land of heroes beyond the mountains,
Practising the Mysteries in ecstatic illumination,
Dying to be reborn, in the proud-breasted Goddess’s embrace,
Surrounded by their wives, their dogs and horses.
At the Thracian necropolis at Sveshtari, in the tomb,
The king and queen lay on stone couches, accompanied
By the horses, to ride together in the afterlife still,
Watched over by the mother goddess who offers
The mounted horseman in the fresco a hero’s wreath.
Elswehere, in another tomb, the painted dome looks down,
With procession of horses and servants approaching
The chieftain seated at the banqueting table, while his wife
Reposes on a throne beside him, face downcast in mourning,
Touching his hand in a tender gesture of farewell,
And the goddess extends to the dead man a bowl of fruit.
Racing chariots wheel around the apex oft the dome,
Celebrating the funerary games, with ecstatic exultation,
While the priests conduct great sacrifices and rituals,
Calling on the gods to protect and guide their lord.
Through shimmering heat haze on the Dobrudzha Plain,
I scan the parched barren steppe with dazzled eyes,
Thinking for a a moment that another barbarian horde
Is emerging out of the east, advancing on horseback
To conquer an empire, then find, to their dismay,
These badlands the hardest frontier to defend,
No man’s land of bandits, brigands and raiders.
So came the Bulgars, sweeping in from the Turkic steppe,
Shouting war-cries and appeals to their forefathers,
Their shamans urging them on in the language of birds,
People of the wolf, dancing under the red moon.
The smell of blood mingles with attar of roses,
And bagpipes and drums strike up for the feast
As firewalkers fall into trance and dance on hot embers;
The hesychast ascends the Mount of Transfiguration;
The Bogomil tears the mask from the bishop’s face
And stares into Satan’s eyes, the world’s corruption.
And so it was when the Turks massacred and enslaved,
And made serfs and beggars of a proud people,
Forcing them to kiss the sabre, and kneel before Allah,
And kidnapped young boys for the janissary corps,
And pillaged and destroyed precious monasteries,
And raped and robbed, cheated, and oppressed.
But in the Balkans’ fastness, in villages and monasteries,
Proud courageous spirits preserved the nation in trust,
Awaiting the day of deliverance, the justice of God.
They live among us, hellish fiends in human form,
Vampires that rise from their graves each night,
To feed off farmers’ flocks, and prey upon mortals,
Sucking their life-blood, leaving them listless and ill;
The vampire hunter, clairvoyant scion of werewolves,
Whose eyes could scry vampires among the crowd,
Hunts the evil spirit to bay with an icon held aloft,
Tricking it into a bottle, then throwing it onto a fire;
Or he spies out the creature’s grave in the churchyard,
The icon’s trembling showing him the dread spot
Where he must dig, ready with the hawthorn stake
To impale the monster’s heart, and burn its corpse.
You will walk in the Rhodope Mountains, listening
For panpipes’ eerie lilt, among rugged gorges and caves,
Dense pine forests and alpine pastures, where lizards
Lick the air’s vibrations, and bluebirds flash among the rocks,
While hawks and eagles ride the sky’s great hymn.
The Trigrad Gorge’s sheer walls overhang foaming river,
Disappearing into the stupendous cave, its hoarse cascade
Vanishing into the earth’s maw, into the Underworld,
And anything swept down there is never seen again;
Inside the cave, bats flit around the shaft of light admitted
By a fissure far above, here where Orpheus himself descended,
To find his beloved wife and bring her back into the light,
For why, if his lyre could so sway the enchanted earth,
Should it not also conquer Hades, conquer death itself?
Do you not hear him singing laments for lost Eurydice
As he wanders the mountains, bereft, cursing his own folly?
See, the maenads are even now tearing his body apart,
And his head, still singing, floats downriver to distant Lesbos,
To prophesy ever after to his priests and followers,
That they might free their souls from world and flesh.
Tangier
White sepulchre of sex, bordello of death,
Labyrinth of weary souls gone to seed,
Is it true that any taste can be satisfied here, at a price?
What a fool I am, have always been,
To seek the Garden of the Hesperides.
Lassitude haunts the narcotic air.
We are all between the legs of this nonchalant old whore.
Here, no desire is unholy,
Delicious horror is yours to enjoy;
No petty rules inhibit, no shame dictates,
This is life, over-ripe, freefalling from the tree.
Only the quick and the hard survive.
This fabulous monster tolerates no weakness;
At the first scent of blood it moves in for the kill.
Too many influences in the blood
Confuse and debauch the listless mind;
Fever frenzies the spirit,
Chaos laughs in the throbbing stones.
Beneath the reckless gaiety:
The kef of sightless staring eyes.
Arrive in hope and expectation,
Find what you wish to find, believe what you wish to believe,
And, forgetting yourself, go astray and stay too long,
Until at last you realise what you have become,
A prisoner, a victim, lost to the world.
Smiling, the vampire fastens on your jugular
And sucks the life from your veins in blissful dream,
Making you one of his own.
This city was built with fantasies and intrigues,
Made to satisfy the polymorphous perversions
Of perpetual adolescents, embryos of men.
The only truth is your own delusion,
The only sanity the madhouse kind.
This is the edge, a place out of time,
Where nothing happens and days pass unnoticed,
Governed by black magic,
Beguiling the unwary with trompe l’oeil.
We are all actors here, reared on the impossible,
Walking lopsided on a tilted surface,
Drugged with sensation, jaded from the lifetime before.
Labyrinth of weary souls gone to seed,
Is it true that any taste can be satisfied here, at a price?
What a fool I am, have always been,
To seek the Garden of the Hesperides.
Lassitude haunts the narcotic air.
We are all between the legs of this nonchalant old whore.
Here, no desire is unholy,
Delicious horror is yours to enjoy;
No petty rules inhibit, no shame dictates,
This is life, over-ripe, freefalling from the tree.
Only the quick and the hard survive.
This fabulous monster tolerates no weakness;
At the first scent of blood it moves in for the kill.
Too many influences in the blood
Confuse and debauch the listless mind;
Fever frenzies the spirit,
Chaos laughs in the throbbing stones.
Beneath the reckless gaiety:
The kef of sightless staring eyes.
Arrive in hope and expectation,
Find what you wish to find, believe what you wish to believe,
And, forgetting yourself, go astray and stay too long,
Until at last you realise what you have become,
A prisoner, a victim, lost to the world.
Smiling, the vampire fastens on your jugular
And sucks the life from your veins in blissful dream,
Making you one of his own.
This city was built with fantasies and intrigues,
Made to satisfy the polymorphous perversions
Of perpetual adolescents, embryos of men.
The only truth is your own delusion,
The only sanity the madhouse kind.
This is the edge, a place out of time,
Where nothing happens and days pass unnoticed,
Governed by black magic,
Beguiling the unwary with trompe l’oeil.
We are all actors here, reared on the impossible,
Walking lopsided on a tilted surface,
Drugged with sensation, jaded from the lifetime before.
Urban Vampire
Amphibious desire is in the veins.
I see people dancing in slow motion,
Caught in a hurricane of sound.
Red is my favourite colour:
The open wound of woman and the world.
I need another adventure, a new ordeal,
Something to get my teeth into.
Do you know that a century can pass like a second
And mornings, afternoons and evenings
Be but whispers of oblivion?
See what galaxies whirl and flower
In a falling drop of blood.
My mysteries remain my own,
To conjure with and invoke the powers;
I have tasted the forbidden
And cannot wash the taste out of my mouth.
Who else will love my loneliness,
Cherish my sinfulness,
Without seeking total knowledge
And breaking the spell?
Visions, voices, dreams and diseases
Call me to the proving ground,
For all that suffers can be redeemed.
And what if evil is actually goodness
Testing itself against the night?
When the moon’s hearse processes
Across the heavens, and eternity
Presses a finger to my lips,
I bow to the dragon and coil with the snake.
I see people dancing in slow motion,
Caught in a hurricane of sound.
Red is my favourite colour:
The open wound of woman and the world.
I need another adventure, a new ordeal,
Something to get my teeth into.
Do you know that a century can pass like a second
And mornings, afternoons and evenings
Be but whispers of oblivion?
See what galaxies whirl and flower
In a falling drop of blood.
My mysteries remain my own,
To conjure with and invoke the powers;
I have tasted the forbidden
And cannot wash the taste out of my mouth.
Who else will love my loneliness,
Cherish my sinfulness,
Without seeking total knowledge
And breaking the spell?
Visions, voices, dreams and diseases
Call me to the proving ground,
For all that suffers can be redeemed.
And what if evil is actually goodness
Testing itself against the night?
When the moon’s hearse processes
Across the heavens, and eternity
Presses a finger to my lips,
I bow to the dragon and coil with the snake.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
The Childhood of Natasha,1912-1920
Based on "The House By the Dvina" by Eugenie Fraser
1912
Forever and ever, the once-upon-a-time train
Chunters on and on, past endless forests and snows,
Flat fields and poor dark cottages sunk in drifts,
Small grey stations flashing by...
Northward rolls the train, into darkness,
Little Natasha sits dangling her legs
Over the top bunk’s edge, trying to grasp
The flow of grown-up talk beyond her ken,
Conversation, drollery and laughter....
Now and then one of the men glances up at her,
With a wink and a smile, as if sharing a secret.
The windows frost over with fairy rings,
And the wheels keep repeating
Something lonely and sad, into the night...
They open hampers of pirozhki and vatrushki,
And delectable spiced biscuits,
And one man fetches out a balalaika,
Strums and sings a plaintive folksong.
Tatiana lies back, clutching her doll:
Little Red Riding Hood, basket in hand,
Fiel with tiny loaf, apples, oranges
And a bottle of wine-oblivious
To the wolf hiding in pine branches
Behind, only his glowing eyes visible.
Pale morning sunlight fires the carriage,
Warm glow, and she wakes to the tinkling
Of tea-glasses, giant snowflakes cling
To the windows, and a startled bird flies up
Over the vanishing birches and pines....
And at last the station, rich and poor
All hurrying, jostling back and forth,
Breathing steamclouds, peasants
In bulky gear, rugged and longsuffering,
Opulent merchants and their wives,
Proud ladies and gentleman of bored mien,
Debonair young officers in white gloves,
The cabbage smell of Russia...
Dazzling-wide the river stretches before her,
The sun lighting up the city’s pastel buildings,
Golden church dome crosses glinting,
And the clean smell of snow...
Shawl-muffled in the sledge she sits,
The horses break into a gallop, heads
Thrown back, bells jingling...
Natasha sits by Babushka, laughing for joy....
Creaking of runners and the sudden cry
Of a crow in flight...the sledge turns
Into the familiar street, races through
The gates to the house, and stops,
And Babushka leads her in through door
Into a warm and loving embrace...
All winter the house is closed and intimate,
Soft light pools on tables, lampadas
Flickering on the faces in icons,
Sweet humming samovar,
Fragrance of birch and pine logs
In stoves...she dares not look
Into the dark fathomless eyes
Of St Nicholas, miraculous icon....
Wind pounds the windowpanes,
And Natasha lies curled up on the bed,
Watching and listening, listening,
Babushka brushes she hair in the mirror
And talks, talks of the past,
Her face glowing in the lamplight,
As she recalls her younger days,
And the journey she made once
By troika to St Petersburg, to see the tsar;
The snowshimmering birches,
Squirrels dancing on pine boughs in the sun,
Snowdrifts turning pale rose as the sun
Descended, and the small green eyes
Of wolves weaving through the trees
At night, as the fearmaddened horses
Starting to race, the kibitka bumping
Over frozen ruts, -it could turn over
Any second, - the passengers saying prayers
To ward off evil, until the barking
Of dogs leads them into a safe village,
And the horses stand trembling in clouds,
Foam dripping from their muzzles...
Uncle Misha has a beard as long as a saint’s.
He wears a peasant shirt and long boots.
Drunk, he rages and wrecks whole rooms,
Broken china and chairs scattered all over,
Mirrors shattered, trampled into the floor...
The next day he grovels at Babushka’s feet,
Beseeching her forgiveness, once again.
Once he had even joined a revolutionary march,
Full of bravado, carrying a red flag,
Proclaiming the slogans in full voice,
Side by side with workers,
Then suddenly a troop of Cossacks had appeared
And charged at the gallop-the procession
Scattered, in panic, and Uncle Misha
Threw aside his banner and leapt into the river;
Clinging to the bridge, in the cold water,
He waited as the hooves boomed overhead,
Then swam ashore and crept back to the house,
Creeping in, drenched, through the back door.
Snow lies thick in the garden, burying the gate.
Spangled drifts on bowed pine branches
Powder the glittering birch twigs.
The whole garden scinillates.Nothing moves. Silence.
Golden beams play on cherry trees’ trunks.
The summerhouse, “The Fairy Castle”,
Is snowed up, Natasha cannot get in.,
But the tress around are protecting it,
Guarding the sleeping princess within
Who will awake when spring returns.
At Christmas, the floors and mirrors are polished
Till they shine; and all over the house
Mysterious preparations are afoot...
All the lights are extinguished;
The ballroom doors are thrown open,
There in the darkness rises the tree,
Stretching up to the ceiling, ablaze
With glorious lights, the snow queen
On her sledge with silver reindeer,
The princess in a diamond coronet,
The evil witch beside her grotesque cottage,
The crystal icicles tinkling,
Layer on layer of brilliant candles,
Each pointed flame haloed like a saint....
1913
Epiphany. High snowdrifts. Empty streets.
Darkened windows and eerie silence.
The family play games of divination:
In an empty room a mirror is set
On a table, a lighted candle on either side.
Draping a sheet over her shoulders, a girl
Sits down, another mirror right behind her.
Darkness. The mirrors reflect her face
And shoulders in the flickering lights,
The candles multiplied by the mirrors-
Uncanny gallery of infinite lights.
There she sits, immobile, meditating,
Till shadow forms and faces take shape,
And whole scenes emerge in the air....
All of a sudden, she turns white, rushes
Out of the room, shaking and crying,
And will not say what she has seen.
Shrovetide. Children toboggan down hills,
Tumbling and rolling in snowdrifts.
Evening and the snow changes hue
From gold to crimson to lilac.
Babushka deftly conjures a golden tower
Of pancakes, light and delicious;
The moon vanishes, as snowflakes fall
Thicker and thicker, and troikas appear,
Dark formless shades in the haze.
Easter. In church, the candles are put out,
And the choir’s poignant singing
Rises, possessing all hearts.
Christ’s body is taken down fro the Cross:
Worshippers lay flowers beside the icon.
At home, they mix the sweet cheeses,
Bake the kulich and rumbabas.
Hams are decorated, joints of veal
Are glazed, baby sturgeons arranged
In aspic, zakuski laid out on fine plates.
In the centre of the table rises a pyramid
Of eggs in so many vivid colours,
Blue, crimson, gold and green.
Spring. The river’s white is tinged with lilac;
A dark ribbon appears in the middle and widens;
Suddenly the ice breaks; broken floes, borne
By churning waters, rush towards the sea,
Clambering over each other, rearing and collapsing,
Showering ice splinters high.
In the garden, grass spurts through the snow,
The black birch twigs show green tinges;
Rooftop snow starts to slide and crash
Down onto pavements. The windows are unsealed
And noises burst in-the whole earth
Chirping and cawing and barking...
Natasha wakes to summer morning,
Watching strange shadows glide across the wall,
Opposite the wide-open windows....
She catches the drifting pollen of light
And clasps it to her smiling face.
The summerhouse is open again:
Hurry, hurry! Baba Yaga is hiding in the bushes!
The garden is marvellous and sinister,
Glaring with newfound force...
Down on the riverfront people stroll,
And bands strike up in the park.
A little crowd is gathered,
Trying to revive a drowned man.
Uncle Dima returns like a prince,
Thin and still, full of goodness,
Having trekked across Siberia, alone.
He sits smiling benignly,
Loving all animals, flowers and trees.
He describes the wondrous steppe in spring,
Flowers as far as the eye can see;
In his hands he holds seeds and bulbs
From the Far East, and little icons
And crosses from far-off monasteries.
It is Aniushka’s coming-out ball.
When the dancing starts, little Natasha
Hides behind a curtain, watching
As the dancers form pairs and glide
Hand in hand around the floor,
Forming a great circle and breaking into pairs.
Aniushka, in white chiffon, flashes past,
Held by an office, smiling down at her,
She as ever looked so beautiful, so happy!
Creeping back to bed, Natasha cannot sleep:
Lies listening to the strains of waltzes,
Voices and laughter rising up the stairs,
And somehow she feels strangely sad....
1914
All too soon the summer is over.
Natasha and playmates go fishing
In the pond, but the hideous old carp
Are far too wily, impoosibet to catch.
They gather berries and mushrooms
In the cool pungent wood,
Where sunbeams splash sombre pines,
Doves coo, and capercaillies call.
The villagers are in the fields,
Harvesting the crops, when a stranger
Arrives and pins a notice to a post:
Germany has declared war on Russia.
Women congregate round tables,
Making bandages from gauze,
While Tsar Nicholas looks down
From the wall, his eyes benign,
A faint smile on his lips.
In the banya the naked women
Whip themselves with birch twigs,
And scrub in the furious haze,
And Natasha throws basins of water around,
And lies on the floor to peep
Through the drainhole at the bare feet
Of the men next door-
And occasionally she is confronted
By a pair of curious eyes
Staring from the other side.
A letter comes for Dasha. Her husband
Has been killed in action. She holds
His little medal in her hand.
In church, Natasha stands with her candle,
Remembering his handsome face,
And the wedding day, when the salt cellar
Had toppled and smashed on the floor
When the bread and sat was brought,
And how everyone has gasped
At the evil omen, and poor Dasha
Had wept with dread at what might be.
1917
One March morning, walking through slush
To school, Natasha sees a procession
Of men and women tramping along the road,
Waving crimson flags, and singing the Marseillaise.
In school, on walls where only yesterday
Hung portraits of the Imperial family,
Now there are blank spaces.
The children are putting on a play:
When the curtain raises, Old Mother Russia-
A wicked old crone in black-
Slowly sinks, banished by greater magic,
Through the floor into Hell,
While a beautiful young girl, dressed
In red sarafan, rises through the same trapdoor,
Struggling under an unwieldy red flag.
It is the Festival of the Assumption
And the convent is crowded with worshippers;
Natasha, clinging to Babushka’s side,
Sees the people coming to beg
Blessings from the resident saint,
A shrunken crone in black cloak
Of skull and crossbones, risen
From the depths where she dwells,
Living on bread and water, and sleeping
In a coffin; mechanically, she raises
Her claw to make the sign of the cross
Over each supplicant in turn,
Her shrivelled deathly face half hidden
By a dark hood, her eyes inhuman.
After dark the nuns and villagers
Circumambulate, chanting, in torchlight procession
The ancient convent walls
Lifting their brands to heaven, showering
Clouds of sparks like fireflies,
Glazing the moat with rippling light.
Seryozha returns from the front,
Carried on the flood of deserters,
Rushing back, pillaging estates on the way.
He has walked for days, and travelled
On packed diseased trains
Where the dead were thrown out
At every station. Now he enters again
The gates of his beloved home,
Hollow-eyed and filthy, in tattered uniform,
No more the merry lad, the patriot,
But a cynical grieving old man.
The family bring down the old bathtub
From the garret, and he scrubs himself
In the kitchen, for hours on end, as if somehow
He could scrub himself clean as a baby,
Free of dirt and war and death.
1918
Shura’s house is a magic realm, her room
With pictures of fairytales on the walls,
The cat following her round everywhere....
Shura! Everything Natasha is not-
Talented at the piano and guitar,
Dancing and singing in fine contralto,
The cleverest pupil, with beautiful face
And large calm grey eyes...-
And yet they are the best of friends.
All their life they will both remember
And delight in the time they appeared
Together in the school play, and Shura
Starred as the wicked princess
Who suddenly sees her true reflection
In the mirror, and realizes what she is.
After the thunderstorm, the garden reeks
Of sweet lilac, deep purple blossoms
Opening their petals to the sun;
Raindrops sparkle on lacy twigs.
Upriver, battles are being fought
In woods and villages, the rumour
Of gunfire and voices carries on the air.
Poor Uncle Dima, -who crossed Siberia
And survived so many adventures,-
Is found dead one morning,buried
By a blizzard, not far from his home.
And in his hand,frozen into a fist,
He clutches a tiny flower..
1920
In the evening dark shadows pass
The windows, fleeing north. The White Army
Is falling back, the Reds are winning...
Crouching at a window, Natasha sees
Horsemen galloping after ragtag groups
Of soldiers, tattered and barefoot,
Heedless of the snow and frost.
Running like madmen from the Devil.
Staving wretches burst into the house,
And devour the family’s only meal
While they stand by, helpless, shocked.
In school, the boys and girls join hands
And move in a chanting circle, dancing
The khorovod, around a singe figure;
Natasha has her turn at the centre,
And as she dances, notices Alexei,
The boy she has had her eye on for so long-
She rushes up and kisses his cheek,
Choosing him to stand in the middle-
With a laugh, he in turn takes her place,
And the khorovod starts up again,
But, next time, when his choice comes,
He selects not Natasha but Shura
While Natasha looks on with jealous chagrin.
In spring, when icicles shatter on pavements
And firs shake the hoarfrost from their boughs,
On the outskirts of town the sounds
Of shots are heard, as prisoners are taken
To the woods, and executed by the Reds.
Bolsheviks trample through the house,
Search for treasure, turning out pillows
And cushions, destroying the rare plants
In the greenhouse, and hauling off
The old family piano in a cart.
Day by day the old routines are crumbling,
And few gather anymore around the samovar
To drink its comfort and love.
One day on the street Natasha sees
Prisoners tramping by under guard,
Haggard and unshaven, carrying spades,
Not giving a sideways glance as they pass.
In the woods, gathering berries, the children
Hear distant shots, and a flock of birds
Whurries, frightened, overhead.
Later, walking home, with baskets full,
They meet the same guards, briskly marching,
But no prisoners with them, bundles
Of clothing thrown over their shoulders.
The family gather, ready to leave for the ship.
Natasha runs out into the garden
To say goodbye to the trees,
The dropping poplars, the summerhouse
Now shabby and forlorn.
As the ship moves downriver, she
Leans against the railing on deck,
Watching the familiar places slip by,
An suddenly she sees the house,
Lit up by the setting sun,
Before it vanishes forever.
1912
Forever and ever, the once-upon-a-time train
Chunters on and on, past endless forests and snows,
Flat fields and poor dark cottages sunk in drifts,
Small grey stations flashing by...
Northward rolls the train, into darkness,
Little Natasha sits dangling her legs
Over the top bunk’s edge, trying to grasp
The flow of grown-up talk beyond her ken,
Conversation, drollery and laughter....
Now and then one of the men glances up at her,
With a wink and a smile, as if sharing a secret.
The windows frost over with fairy rings,
And the wheels keep repeating
Something lonely and sad, into the night...
They open hampers of pirozhki and vatrushki,
And delectable spiced biscuits,
And one man fetches out a balalaika,
Strums and sings a plaintive folksong.
Tatiana lies back, clutching her doll:
Little Red Riding Hood, basket in hand,
Fiel with tiny loaf, apples, oranges
And a bottle of wine-oblivious
To the wolf hiding in pine branches
Behind, only his glowing eyes visible.
Pale morning sunlight fires the carriage,
Warm glow, and she wakes to the tinkling
Of tea-glasses, giant snowflakes cling
To the windows, and a startled bird flies up
Over the vanishing birches and pines....
And at last the station, rich and poor
All hurrying, jostling back and forth,
Breathing steamclouds, peasants
In bulky gear, rugged and longsuffering,
Opulent merchants and their wives,
Proud ladies and gentleman of bored mien,
Debonair young officers in white gloves,
The cabbage smell of Russia...
Dazzling-wide the river stretches before her,
The sun lighting up the city’s pastel buildings,
Golden church dome crosses glinting,
And the clean smell of snow...
Shawl-muffled in the sledge she sits,
The horses break into a gallop, heads
Thrown back, bells jingling...
Natasha sits by Babushka, laughing for joy....
Creaking of runners and the sudden cry
Of a crow in flight...the sledge turns
Into the familiar street, races through
The gates to the house, and stops,
And Babushka leads her in through door
Into a warm and loving embrace...
All winter the house is closed and intimate,
Soft light pools on tables, lampadas
Flickering on the faces in icons,
Sweet humming samovar,
Fragrance of birch and pine logs
In stoves...she dares not look
Into the dark fathomless eyes
Of St Nicholas, miraculous icon....
Wind pounds the windowpanes,
And Natasha lies curled up on the bed,
Watching and listening, listening,
Babushka brushes she hair in the mirror
And talks, talks of the past,
Her face glowing in the lamplight,
As she recalls her younger days,
And the journey she made once
By troika to St Petersburg, to see the tsar;
The snowshimmering birches,
Squirrels dancing on pine boughs in the sun,
Snowdrifts turning pale rose as the sun
Descended, and the small green eyes
Of wolves weaving through the trees
At night, as the fearmaddened horses
Starting to race, the kibitka bumping
Over frozen ruts, -it could turn over
Any second, - the passengers saying prayers
To ward off evil, until the barking
Of dogs leads them into a safe village,
And the horses stand trembling in clouds,
Foam dripping from their muzzles...
Uncle Misha has a beard as long as a saint’s.
He wears a peasant shirt and long boots.
Drunk, he rages and wrecks whole rooms,
Broken china and chairs scattered all over,
Mirrors shattered, trampled into the floor...
The next day he grovels at Babushka’s feet,
Beseeching her forgiveness, once again.
Once he had even joined a revolutionary march,
Full of bravado, carrying a red flag,
Proclaiming the slogans in full voice,
Side by side with workers,
Then suddenly a troop of Cossacks had appeared
And charged at the gallop-the procession
Scattered, in panic, and Uncle Misha
Threw aside his banner and leapt into the river;
Clinging to the bridge, in the cold water,
He waited as the hooves boomed overhead,
Then swam ashore and crept back to the house,
Creeping in, drenched, through the back door.
Snow lies thick in the garden, burying the gate.
Spangled drifts on bowed pine branches
Powder the glittering birch twigs.
The whole garden scinillates.Nothing moves. Silence.
Golden beams play on cherry trees’ trunks.
The summerhouse, “The Fairy Castle”,
Is snowed up, Natasha cannot get in.,
But the tress around are protecting it,
Guarding the sleeping princess within
Who will awake when spring returns.
At Christmas, the floors and mirrors are polished
Till they shine; and all over the house
Mysterious preparations are afoot...
All the lights are extinguished;
The ballroom doors are thrown open,
There in the darkness rises the tree,
Stretching up to the ceiling, ablaze
With glorious lights, the snow queen
On her sledge with silver reindeer,
The princess in a diamond coronet,
The evil witch beside her grotesque cottage,
The crystal icicles tinkling,
Layer on layer of brilliant candles,
Each pointed flame haloed like a saint....
1913
Epiphany. High snowdrifts. Empty streets.
Darkened windows and eerie silence.
The family play games of divination:
In an empty room a mirror is set
On a table, a lighted candle on either side.
Draping a sheet over her shoulders, a girl
Sits down, another mirror right behind her.
Darkness. The mirrors reflect her face
And shoulders in the flickering lights,
The candles multiplied by the mirrors-
Uncanny gallery of infinite lights.
There she sits, immobile, meditating,
Till shadow forms and faces take shape,
And whole scenes emerge in the air....
All of a sudden, she turns white, rushes
Out of the room, shaking and crying,
And will not say what she has seen.
Shrovetide. Children toboggan down hills,
Tumbling and rolling in snowdrifts.
Evening and the snow changes hue
From gold to crimson to lilac.
Babushka deftly conjures a golden tower
Of pancakes, light and delicious;
The moon vanishes, as snowflakes fall
Thicker and thicker, and troikas appear,
Dark formless shades in the haze.
Easter. In church, the candles are put out,
And the choir’s poignant singing
Rises, possessing all hearts.
Christ’s body is taken down fro the Cross:
Worshippers lay flowers beside the icon.
At home, they mix the sweet cheeses,
Bake the kulich and rumbabas.
Hams are decorated, joints of veal
Are glazed, baby sturgeons arranged
In aspic, zakuski laid out on fine plates.
In the centre of the table rises a pyramid
Of eggs in so many vivid colours,
Blue, crimson, gold and green.
Spring. The river’s white is tinged with lilac;
A dark ribbon appears in the middle and widens;
Suddenly the ice breaks; broken floes, borne
By churning waters, rush towards the sea,
Clambering over each other, rearing and collapsing,
Showering ice splinters high.
In the garden, grass spurts through the snow,
The black birch twigs show green tinges;
Rooftop snow starts to slide and crash
Down onto pavements. The windows are unsealed
And noises burst in-the whole earth
Chirping and cawing and barking...
Natasha wakes to summer morning,
Watching strange shadows glide across the wall,
Opposite the wide-open windows....
She catches the drifting pollen of light
And clasps it to her smiling face.
The summerhouse is open again:
Hurry, hurry! Baba Yaga is hiding in the bushes!
The garden is marvellous and sinister,
Glaring with newfound force...
Down on the riverfront people stroll,
And bands strike up in the park.
A little crowd is gathered,
Trying to revive a drowned man.
Uncle Dima returns like a prince,
Thin and still, full of goodness,
Having trekked across Siberia, alone.
He sits smiling benignly,
Loving all animals, flowers and trees.
He describes the wondrous steppe in spring,
Flowers as far as the eye can see;
In his hands he holds seeds and bulbs
From the Far East, and little icons
And crosses from far-off monasteries.
It is Aniushka’s coming-out ball.
When the dancing starts, little Natasha
Hides behind a curtain, watching
As the dancers form pairs and glide
Hand in hand around the floor,
Forming a great circle and breaking into pairs.
Aniushka, in white chiffon, flashes past,
Held by an office, smiling down at her,
She as ever looked so beautiful, so happy!
Creeping back to bed, Natasha cannot sleep:
Lies listening to the strains of waltzes,
Voices and laughter rising up the stairs,
And somehow she feels strangely sad....
1914
All too soon the summer is over.
Natasha and playmates go fishing
In the pond, but the hideous old carp
Are far too wily, impoosibet to catch.
They gather berries and mushrooms
In the cool pungent wood,
Where sunbeams splash sombre pines,
Doves coo, and capercaillies call.
The villagers are in the fields,
Harvesting the crops, when a stranger
Arrives and pins a notice to a post:
Germany has declared war on Russia.
Women congregate round tables,
Making bandages from gauze,
While Tsar Nicholas looks down
From the wall, his eyes benign,
A faint smile on his lips.
In the banya the naked women
Whip themselves with birch twigs,
And scrub in the furious haze,
And Natasha throws basins of water around,
And lies on the floor to peep
Through the drainhole at the bare feet
Of the men next door-
And occasionally she is confronted
By a pair of curious eyes
Staring from the other side.
A letter comes for Dasha. Her husband
Has been killed in action. She holds
His little medal in her hand.
In church, Natasha stands with her candle,
Remembering his handsome face,
And the wedding day, when the salt cellar
Had toppled and smashed on the floor
When the bread and sat was brought,
And how everyone has gasped
At the evil omen, and poor Dasha
Had wept with dread at what might be.
1917
One March morning, walking through slush
To school, Natasha sees a procession
Of men and women tramping along the road,
Waving crimson flags, and singing the Marseillaise.
In school, on walls where only yesterday
Hung portraits of the Imperial family,
Now there are blank spaces.
The children are putting on a play:
When the curtain raises, Old Mother Russia-
A wicked old crone in black-
Slowly sinks, banished by greater magic,
Through the floor into Hell,
While a beautiful young girl, dressed
In red sarafan, rises through the same trapdoor,
Struggling under an unwieldy red flag.
It is the Festival of the Assumption
And the convent is crowded with worshippers;
Natasha, clinging to Babushka’s side,
Sees the people coming to beg
Blessings from the resident saint,
A shrunken crone in black cloak
Of skull and crossbones, risen
From the depths where she dwells,
Living on bread and water, and sleeping
In a coffin; mechanically, she raises
Her claw to make the sign of the cross
Over each supplicant in turn,
Her shrivelled deathly face half hidden
By a dark hood, her eyes inhuman.
After dark the nuns and villagers
Circumambulate, chanting, in torchlight procession
The ancient convent walls
Lifting their brands to heaven, showering
Clouds of sparks like fireflies,
Glazing the moat with rippling light.
Seryozha returns from the front,
Carried on the flood of deserters,
Rushing back, pillaging estates on the way.
He has walked for days, and travelled
On packed diseased trains
Where the dead were thrown out
At every station. Now he enters again
The gates of his beloved home,
Hollow-eyed and filthy, in tattered uniform,
No more the merry lad, the patriot,
But a cynical grieving old man.
The family bring down the old bathtub
From the garret, and he scrubs himself
In the kitchen, for hours on end, as if somehow
He could scrub himself clean as a baby,
Free of dirt and war and death.
1918
Shura’s house is a magic realm, her room
With pictures of fairytales on the walls,
The cat following her round everywhere....
Shura! Everything Natasha is not-
Talented at the piano and guitar,
Dancing and singing in fine contralto,
The cleverest pupil, with beautiful face
And large calm grey eyes...-
And yet they are the best of friends.
All their life they will both remember
And delight in the time they appeared
Together in the school play, and Shura
Starred as the wicked princess
Who suddenly sees her true reflection
In the mirror, and realizes what she is.
After the thunderstorm, the garden reeks
Of sweet lilac, deep purple blossoms
Opening their petals to the sun;
Raindrops sparkle on lacy twigs.
Upriver, battles are being fought
In woods and villages, the rumour
Of gunfire and voices carries on the air.
Poor Uncle Dima, -who crossed Siberia
And survived so many adventures,-
Is found dead one morning,buried
By a blizzard, not far from his home.
And in his hand,frozen into a fist,
He clutches a tiny flower..
1920
In the evening dark shadows pass
The windows, fleeing north. The White Army
Is falling back, the Reds are winning...
Crouching at a window, Natasha sees
Horsemen galloping after ragtag groups
Of soldiers, tattered and barefoot,
Heedless of the snow and frost.
Running like madmen from the Devil.
Staving wretches burst into the house,
And devour the family’s only meal
While they stand by, helpless, shocked.
In school, the boys and girls join hands
And move in a chanting circle, dancing
The khorovod, around a singe figure;
Natasha has her turn at the centre,
And as she dances, notices Alexei,
The boy she has had her eye on for so long-
She rushes up and kisses his cheek,
Choosing him to stand in the middle-
With a laugh, he in turn takes her place,
And the khorovod starts up again,
But, next time, when his choice comes,
He selects not Natasha but Shura
While Natasha looks on with jealous chagrin.
In spring, when icicles shatter on pavements
And firs shake the hoarfrost from their boughs,
On the outskirts of town the sounds
Of shots are heard, as prisoners are taken
To the woods, and executed by the Reds.
Bolsheviks trample through the house,
Search for treasure, turning out pillows
And cushions, destroying the rare plants
In the greenhouse, and hauling off
The old family piano in a cart.
Day by day the old routines are crumbling,
And few gather anymore around the samovar
To drink its comfort and love.
One day on the street Natasha sees
Prisoners tramping by under guard,
Haggard and unshaven, carrying spades,
Not giving a sideways glance as they pass.
In the woods, gathering berries, the children
Hear distant shots, and a flock of birds
Whurries, frightened, overhead.
Later, walking home, with baskets full,
They meet the same guards, briskly marching,
But no prisoners with them, bundles
Of clothing thrown over their shoulders.
The family gather, ready to leave for the ship.
Natasha runs out into the garden
To say goodbye to the trees,
The dropping poplars, the summerhouse
Now shabby and forlorn.
As the ship moves downriver, she
Leans against the railing on deck,
Watching the familiar places slip by,
An suddenly she sees the house,
Lit up by the setting sun,
Before it vanishes forever.
Stendhal,1783-1842
Spring in Italy, and a raw young subaltern
Rides across the Saint-Bernard, joining Napoleon’s army,
Under fire for the first time, bewildered, exulting.
In June, in Ivrea, Cimarosa’s Matrimonio Segreto
Bursts over him, divine thunderstorm,
Purifying the heart of worries and distractions;
Reborn, he wanders, in a blissful trance…
One champagne morning, the eve of Marengo,
He first rides into Milan, through cheering throngs,
An instant hero in the Liberator’s legion,
Caught up in love for this magnificent city,
And betrothed to Itlay, his one true bride,
Loved and cherished with enduring passion,
Where a nonchalant goddess smiles upon him.
Angela Pietragrua-marble statue-cantering mare-
To whom he dares not even reveal himself,
Only yearn and worship at the threshold.
Racked on his bed in syphilitic fever, Beyle
Dreams the ideal unattainable one, the vision
Sought for years, indifferent to his pleas;
His forlorn voice echoes in her silence.
Love is rank and disgusting, seen close: -
Where else then find happiness but in glory,
Carriages and servants at your beck and call?
On Bastille Day, in the crowd outside the Tuileries,
Beyle watches, intent, as Bonaparte passes,
Resplendent on white steed, saluting and smiling-
Ah, but that smile is theatrical, false-
Has no-one else noticed that the great man’s eyes
Do not accord with the set of his mouth?
Short, flaccid, ugly, with plebeian prognathous face,
Small eyes emanating inexplicable charisma,
Beyle fumbles and twitches, an awkward provincial
Longing for the Parisian’s instinctive poise.
Composing his conduct with worldly calculation,
He anticipates posterity even in his private letters,
Projecting an image with studied effect.
His mother died perfect and adored,
That serene noble spirit with vivacious smile,
Whose plump nude body the boy had longed to kiss
From top to toe, in slow shared reverie.
As for his father-when would the old bastard
Die, and cough up his inheritance? -
Then he might serve some purpose after all!
One August noon in a vale outside Marseilles,
Picnicking with a beautiful mistress,
Where a river runs through the haze,
Beyle, gazing upward, spies the towers
Of a château, above the chestnut trees,
Grail Castle of a chivalrous knight and his lady,
And he wanders, tall and immortal,
Senses blending in rapt fantasia,
Looking down on the earth from on high.
To scrutinize the facts-and thus rise above them!
Nightlong at his table, Beyle dips his pen in life,
Classifies the passions, interrogates the soul,
Forcing plain words to express the inexpressible.
Milan again, and Angela…-all the years between
She has haunted him with pleasure and sorrow…
Blithe Italy washes the Parisian acid away…
Proud turbulence-a woman and a city,
Enchantment enough to burst the sky apart!
Summoned into Angela’s box at La Scala,
The very womb and cloister of love,
He sits like a god, presiding over Creation,
Among the women, so indolent and graceful,
Sipping ices and giggling over tarok.
It comes to a mortal to seduce the goddess! -
As they wander together through the picture gallery,
Whenever, by chance, their hands touch, they clasp,
In needy recognition, -this, the shock and disaster
Of love, -a thousand charming details, a thousand
Glad memories and associations, all now
Dull, vacant, irrelevant to the heart
Overtaken by tyrannical passion, -
In imagination only can he lose himself entirely,
And in love is still the critical observer,
Silently mocking his own extravagances,
In a world less real than his own fictions.
Ah, how beautiful, how Italian he feels now! -
Standing alone in the Coliseum, blessed
By birds singing in the arcades, he gasps
And cannot restrain the tears that flow.
Like leopards in diamond collars, they stroll as one
Through the Milanese streets, in evening’s candleglow…
Such sibylline beauty in Angela’s visage-
Can those eyes not dive the soul’s Marianas trench
And fish out the monsters swimming there?
(Yes, she, faithless whore, every popinjay’s bedmate,
Rubbing and grunting in sty and stall-
But that he is not to know, not till later)
With the Emperor’s headquarters in Russia,
Beyle, stumbling through mud under blank sky,
Curses this whole barbarous purgatory
And longs for Italy, bel canto of spring.
Silently he watches Moscow burn,
Pyramid of fire reaching up to the moon,
His face impassive, fascinated how to make
This spectacle of history into art.
Lumbering away in flight towards Smolensk,
Amid bedraggled convoy in endless retreat,
Each night pitching camp in bone-cracking cold,
Fending off ambushes out of the wilds,
Marching on at dawn through demonic fog,
Beyle, in his barouche, reads and dreams,
Flushed with fecund excitement, watching
Wondrous ideas rise and vanish in his mind,
Like visions in an opium trance.
Standing on a hilltop at Bautzen, Beyle,
Straining, through opera glasses, to make sense
Of the chaos in the valley below, as the army
Swarms across the river into battle,
Panoramic pantomime of world’s absurdity,
He sighs with weary disgust, yet thrills
To the majesty, the terror, in the din.
Introduced at a dinner party to Lord Byron,
Beyle, embarrassed bourgeois, greedy for approval,
Regales the English idol with invented anecdotes
Of his close acquaintance with Napoleon himself,
“And then the Emperor turned to me and said…”
Matilde! That oval Lombard face and brooding eyes-
She, with passionate majesty restrained,
Holds him severely beyond her embrace,
Till imploring desire redoubles and kills,
As he bumbles around her like a hobbled satyr,
Breaking his own rules, despising his folly.
Inventive despair composes operas in his mind,
Building rich arias on a single word or gesture-
Her voice, her glance, the slightest movement,
The brusque, delicious disdain she bestows!
More than copulation he craves reverie,
Moments of music and light across the earth.
In the glow of Roman orange trees, he stands
By a window, musing on the novelist’s science;
To solve what cannot be solved in life,
Experiments in enchantment and revolt.
All his life he has sacrificed the real for the ideal,
Aspiring to the highest, the most remote.
Arriving awkwardly at some salon, he launches,
Into one of his notorious mystifications,
And scarcely notices his straightfaced listeners
Sniggering up their sleeves, -how uncouth
He is, this squat balding parvenu, -and so pretentious!
Rides across the Saint-Bernard, joining Napoleon’s army,
Under fire for the first time, bewildered, exulting.
In June, in Ivrea, Cimarosa’s Matrimonio Segreto
Bursts over him, divine thunderstorm,
Purifying the heart of worries and distractions;
Reborn, he wanders, in a blissful trance…
One champagne morning, the eve of Marengo,
He first rides into Milan, through cheering throngs,
An instant hero in the Liberator’s legion,
Caught up in love for this magnificent city,
And betrothed to Itlay, his one true bride,
Loved and cherished with enduring passion,
Where a nonchalant goddess smiles upon him.
Angela Pietragrua-marble statue-cantering mare-
To whom he dares not even reveal himself,
Only yearn and worship at the threshold.
Racked on his bed in syphilitic fever, Beyle
Dreams the ideal unattainable one, the vision
Sought for years, indifferent to his pleas;
His forlorn voice echoes in her silence.
Love is rank and disgusting, seen close: -
Where else then find happiness but in glory,
Carriages and servants at your beck and call?
On Bastille Day, in the crowd outside the Tuileries,
Beyle watches, intent, as Bonaparte passes,
Resplendent on white steed, saluting and smiling-
Ah, but that smile is theatrical, false-
Has no-one else noticed that the great man’s eyes
Do not accord with the set of his mouth?
Short, flaccid, ugly, with plebeian prognathous face,
Small eyes emanating inexplicable charisma,
Beyle fumbles and twitches, an awkward provincial
Longing for the Parisian’s instinctive poise.
Composing his conduct with worldly calculation,
He anticipates posterity even in his private letters,
Projecting an image with studied effect.
His mother died perfect and adored,
That serene noble spirit with vivacious smile,
Whose plump nude body the boy had longed to kiss
From top to toe, in slow shared reverie.
As for his father-when would the old bastard
Die, and cough up his inheritance? -
Then he might serve some purpose after all!
One August noon in a vale outside Marseilles,
Picnicking with a beautiful mistress,
Where a river runs through the haze,
Beyle, gazing upward, spies the towers
Of a château, above the chestnut trees,
Grail Castle of a chivalrous knight and his lady,
And he wanders, tall and immortal,
Senses blending in rapt fantasia,
Looking down on the earth from on high.
To scrutinize the facts-and thus rise above them!
Nightlong at his table, Beyle dips his pen in life,
Classifies the passions, interrogates the soul,
Forcing plain words to express the inexpressible.
Milan again, and Angela…-all the years between
She has haunted him with pleasure and sorrow…
Blithe Italy washes the Parisian acid away…
Proud turbulence-a woman and a city,
Enchantment enough to burst the sky apart!
Summoned into Angela’s box at La Scala,
The very womb and cloister of love,
He sits like a god, presiding over Creation,
Among the women, so indolent and graceful,
Sipping ices and giggling over tarok.
It comes to a mortal to seduce the goddess! -
As they wander together through the picture gallery,
Whenever, by chance, their hands touch, they clasp,
In needy recognition, -this, the shock and disaster
Of love, -a thousand charming details, a thousand
Glad memories and associations, all now
Dull, vacant, irrelevant to the heart
Overtaken by tyrannical passion, -
In imagination only can he lose himself entirely,
And in love is still the critical observer,
Silently mocking his own extravagances,
In a world less real than his own fictions.
Ah, how beautiful, how Italian he feels now! -
Standing alone in the Coliseum, blessed
By birds singing in the arcades, he gasps
And cannot restrain the tears that flow.
Like leopards in diamond collars, they stroll as one
Through the Milanese streets, in evening’s candleglow…
Such sibylline beauty in Angela’s visage-
Can those eyes not dive the soul’s Marianas trench
And fish out the monsters swimming there?
(Yes, she, faithless whore, every popinjay’s bedmate,
Rubbing and grunting in sty and stall-
But that he is not to know, not till later)
With the Emperor’s headquarters in Russia,
Beyle, stumbling through mud under blank sky,
Curses this whole barbarous purgatory
And longs for Italy, bel canto of spring.
Silently he watches Moscow burn,
Pyramid of fire reaching up to the moon,
His face impassive, fascinated how to make
This spectacle of history into art.
Lumbering away in flight towards Smolensk,
Amid bedraggled convoy in endless retreat,
Each night pitching camp in bone-cracking cold,
Fending off ambushes out of the wilds,
Marching on at dawn through demonic fog,
Beyle, in his barouche, reads and dreams,
Flushed with fecund excitement, watching
Wondrous ideas rise and vanish in his mind,
Like visions in an opium trance.
Standing on a hilltop at Bautzen, Beyle,
Straining, through opera glasses, to make sense
Of the chaos in the valley below, as the army
Swarms across the river into battle,
Panoramic pantomime of world’s absurdity,
He sighs with weary disgust, yet thrills
To the majesty, the terror, in the din.
Introduced at a dinner party to Lord Byron,
Beyle, embarrassed bourgeois, greedy for approval,
Regales the English idol with invented anecdotes
Of his close acquaintance with Napoleon himself,
“And then the Emperor turned to me and said…”
Matilde! That oval Lombard face and brooding eyes-
She, with passionate majesty restrained,
Holds him severely beyond her embrace,
Till imploring desire redoubles and kills,
As he bumbles around her like a hobbled satyr,
Breaking his own rules, despising his folly.
Inventive despair composes operas in his mind,
Building rich arias on a single word or gesture-
Her voice, her glance, the slightest movement,
The brusque, delicious disdain she bestows!
More than copulation he craves reverie,
Moments of music and light across the earth.
In the glow of Roman orange trees, he stands
By a window, musing on the novelist’s science;
To solve what cannot be solved in life,
Experiments in enchantment and revolt.
All his life he has sacrificed the real for the ideal,
Aspiring to the highest, the most remote.
Arriving awkwardly at some salon, he launches,
Into one of his notorious mystifications,
And scarcely notices his straightfaced listeners
Sniggering up their sleeves, -how uncouth
He is, this squat balding parvenu, -and so pretentious!
The Uses of War
Heavy as fate itself is war.
Who can divine its meaning?
Once you enter therein,
You will never come back,
For how can one recover from a myth?
In battle’s procedures, the gods are most visible,
Directing action and fortune,
Fashioning destinies, inexplicably.
You may muster all the facts
And marshal every science,
But no answer will you find
Except in love.
A million bushels of men and horses
Were harvested from the battlefields
Of the Napoleonic Wars,
Shipped to England and ground into bone meal
By factory workers,
Toiling to feed their families.
Name the enemy
And let violence begin.
Think of General Patton,
Gloomy as his war was ending,
-What would he do now?
Until he discovered,
With joy and relief,
A new and worthy foe,
Savages from the East.
Picture of the Week
In Life Magazine, May 1944:
An attractive young woman
Writing a thank-you letter
To her boyfriend in the Navy,
Smiling at his beautiful gift,
Set upon her desk:
The skull of a Japanese soldier,
Autographed by him
And his pals.
So much is buried in the earth
To make it vengeful;
The god of the chariot
Also drives the plough.
Splendour of another order
Flourishes in the horror;
Those who perish
Also exult.
“The Battle of Lookout Mountain,”
Said General Grant,
“Was no battle at all,
But poetry, all poetry”.
Like the blonde merkins
Italian prostitutes wore
For their Yankee soldier boys
In the Great War.
Who can divine its meaning?
Once you enter therein,
You will never come back,
For how can one recover from a myth?
In battle’s procedures, the gods are most visible,
Directing action and fortune,
Fashioning destinies, inexplicably.
You may muster all the facts
And marshal every science,
But no answer will you find
Except in love.
A million bushels of men and horses
Were harvested from the battlefields
Of the Napoleonic Wars,
Shipped to England and ground into bone meal
By factory workers,
Toiling to feed their families.
Name the enemy
And let violence begin.
Think of General Patton,
Gloomy as his war was ending,
-What would he do now?
Until he discovered,
With joy and relief,
A new and worthy foe,
Savages from the East.
Picture of the Week
In Life Magazine, May 1944:
An attractive young woman
Writing a thank-you letter
To her boyfriend in the Navy,
Smiling at his beautiful gift,
Set upon her desk:
The skull of a Japanese soldier,
Autographed by him
And his pals.
So much is buried in the earth
To make it vengeful;
The god of the chariot
Also drives the plough.
Splendour of another order
Flourishes in the horror;
Those who perish
Also exult.
“The Battle of Lookout Mountain,”
Said General Grant,
“Was no battle at all,
But poetry, all poetry”.
Like the blonde merkins
Italian prostitutes wore
For their Yankee soldier boys
In the Great War.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)