Waltzing the Danube

Staring out of a train window

As it hurtles through the countryside,

One knows that life eludes all taxonomies

Can never be reduced to diagrams.

You raise your face to the breeze,

Life’s essence passes through you

And seeps into the bones.


Where is the river’s source?

Is it on Mt Abnoba?In Hesperia?

In the land of the Hyperboreans?

This is the zone of hybrids and metamorphoses.

In a small dip in the hillside the Breg

Bubbles up from underground;the meadow

Is steeped in water,sodden and flooded

By countless rivulets...

Once the primeval Danube flowed

Into the Gulf of Thetis,into the Sarmatic Sea,

Its mouth where Vienna now stands.


In the Clock Museum at Furtwanger,

Timepieces by the thousand tick off the hours

In a dream of perpetual motion,pendulums

And cogwheels dividing eternity

Into mathematical units,while life

Flies up and down and in and out

And all around...The relief of science,

Distracting us from our inner torment,

Turning our gaze to the world outside!

Perhaps ths way we will keep our heads,

Discover a world secure and structured,

A home for the self-tormented spirit.


Stations I pass through,words I write...

The struggle to fill in the blank spaces,

Annul the nullity, escape from insignificance...

Why did it all turn out as it did-myself

And the world-from the beginning till now?

Keep moving bravely forward,do not rest.

The mystery of the Hapsburg Empire

Draws me in,through paradox and oxymoron,

The irreconcilable contradiction,the puzzle

Never to be solved,too many pieces missing,

The synthesis that cannot be achieved.

This is my future,forever postponed,

My mind,like a Klein bottle.


Must one believe in God to have faith in the world?

Very early I began to doubt priests’ words

And see in their rites mere theatre.

One must love the created world,all the same,

Be it underwritten by the heavens

Or by ourselves alone.


The Danube is, with no need of affirmation,

Promising nothing,flowing on, oblivious;

I will bridge and ford it however I can,

Accept my destiny as the seasons determine.

A parasite on the hide of Europe,

A parasite feeding on the ideas and emotions

Of the living and the dead,I mime a life

Inside a carapace of rhetoric.


Am I Roman or barbarian? I am drawn

To the empire’s crumbled stone frontier,

Dividing and defining all the way to the Black Sea.

In Ulm, the sparrow’s nest,the shrine

Of Ahasuerus’s shoe,German law and custom

Bless the sad clerks at their desks,

Their hidden passions distorted by convention,

Rendered pitiful and grotesque.

Close,so close to perdition,I dig into the black roots

Of a language I cannot speak,a culture

Far from my birth,and maunder on,

Sure,at least,of desire’s ordeal,

That binds me to the indescribable beloved,

That face,those hips, those shoulders...


Triple-rivered Passau,floating and flowing

Away on the current,gold and carnation marble

Palaces and churches ,streets winding beneath

Arches,domes and colonnades-a cosmos

Of curves,spheres,circles and ellipses-

The nearest is the furthest away,

The simplest is the most mysterious,

As we seek a home on earth, a hearth

To tend with care and hope,

Discovering grace before nothingness.


Smell of snow in Linz,the hills and river

Heraldic in the still-the imperial AEIOU

Spells infinitely receding possibility

To the heart.To break out

Of this landlocked desolation and reach

The sea!-There we might be happy

As humans, as animals,as gods.

Ochre and orange buildings fade

Into the evening’s watercolour,


In Artstetten Castle crypt,they lie,

Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his Sophie,

Their idiocies annulled by martyrdom.

The old Europe died in their arms,

As they died in each other’s,

Pulling the whole world down with them

Into the bottomless wishing well,

Keeping forever their lovers’ secrets

Deadlier than bullets or bombs.

The first blood flowed out onto his blue tunic,

From the sleeve and chest,as his hat

With huge green feathers fell unharmed.


In Vienna’s Cemetery of the Nameless,

Treading over the Danube’s sacrificial victims,

I watch big crows rise on the wing,

Inhale the simple joy of morning.

How hard it is to tell the real from the unreal,

Fact from feeling,life from death.

In the Museum of Medicine,among

Anatomical models sectioned to reveal

The madness of muscles,organs,arteries

And nerves,I stop before a beautiful

Colourless male head,the lips drawn

Into the smile of a kouros,the skull

Exposing,in median sagittal section,

The cerebellum’s tree of life.

A woman with abdominal walls removed

To lay the genital organs open

Lies serenely prone,in a blonde wig,

A necklace round her waxen throat.


Plump white hands of Hungarian princes,

Earthen hands of Slovakian peasants;

Renaissance palaces winged like griffins,

Hovels made from straw and dung;

Only the trees and stones know

The lives that have gone into this soil.

Wave on wave of invasions, superimposed

Upon one another, have steeped

The earth with Eurasian dreams.

Solitude is their birthright,these souls

Abandoned to the horsemen’s plains,

Forever,even in victory,defeated.

In an open-air cafe in Budapest,I spoon

Icecream into my lying mouth,and watch

The Danube run beneath titanic bridges,

To some unseen horizon,which the spirit,

Fed on books and pictures,can reach for

But never,to its anguish,attain.

Powerless in a marginal province,

One hears the muffled cries of lives

Unknown, destinies arbitrated elsewhere.


Sunflowers and maize cover Mohács field,

Wooden statues planted in the ground

To mark the battle,men and horses.

Faces contorted with ferocious agony,

Crosses and crescents opposed;

The day when the olive tree at Pécs

Turned barren,and King Louis II,

Egged on by his nobles,shrugged

And gave the accursed order for battle.


Like Gaius Scribonius,unwilling

To advance his army into the dark forests

On the other shore,clinging to the pure

And noble Latin tongue as his shield,

I plot strategic victories of speech.

In Bulgaria,-no man’s land of heretics,

Among late nations half-mapped

By Western arrogance,where the dark

Vowels of Old Church Slavonic swung

Their bronze bells in high towers,-

I spy on a church wall an anathema

Against the Bogomils,the peasants’ friends,

Who denounced the satanic princes

Of the earth, its irredeemable evil

Perpetuated through human lust.

Forward the Thracian horseman

Charges,serene in the face of death,

Cloak-wings flying out in the wind.


At the gibbeted crossroads,in the path

Of evil,Romania lures me in where many

Gods have been created then sacrificed.

Only the most fallen, the most corrupt

Can long so for redemption,-

The swarming world,condemned

By sensual delusion,staggers

Under its own desire’s burden.

The delta ravels its secrets before me:

Stream on stream,ramified rivulets

Feeding the great dissolution,

The terminus of death and rebirth.

Nature’s bass note booms through me,

Amid the vast jungle of land and water

Merged,the cavernous shadows

Of overhanging trees, the deep bays

Where time moors,like the Argo returning.

Loosen,release,abandon to the flow!-

Gulls and herons crowd the evening air,

Shouting madly to the sea’s horizon.

Mesopotamia

Between two rivers, between drought and flood,

Alluvial civilisation accretes.

Mudtowns obliterated by disaster:

The wind piles sand against their ruins,

Filling in their streets,while the rain

Smooths forlorn heaps into mammary mounds.


Ur lies in ruins,its people dispersed,

Wife abandoned,daughter abandoned,

Walls broken,houses burnt down,

The dead like potsherds scattered

And turning to sand.


In Uruk,home of Anu and Inanna,

Temple cone-mosaic facades

Gleam red,white and black in the glare.

Hunched Sumerian scribes etch pictograms

Into clay tablets,agglutinative thought

Made flesh.They are heaven’s liege-men

On this flat disc surrounded by mountains,

Floating ensphered on a sweetwater ocean,

The terrifying Netherworld groaning below.

Here,where a sudden blinding cloudburst

Turns dusty plain to malebolge,

And a sandstorm candevastate the brightest day,

What should men do but placate the gods

And labour to win their goodwill?

To the gods the ziggurats extend

An invitation to descend;men they command

To shed their shells and ascend.


The temple doors are opened:

The gods gilded statue shines forth

In the shrine’s semi-darkness,

Washed,anointed,perfumed,dressed and fed,

Incense and flowers at his feet.

The air vibrates with music and incantation,

Bread,cakes,butter,fruit and honey on the altar,

The smoke of roasting flesh commingled

With cedarwood and cypress fumes.

Whisper the prayer through a reed tube

In Sumerian into the bull’s right ear,

In Akkadian into the left.


The king lives in harmony.His palace is harmonious,

The sun-gloried courtyard paved with gypsum slabs,

And,inside,the long proud flight of steps

To the throne-room, to the dais

Where His Majesty sits,

His justice as simple as a handful of flour and dates.

In the narrow dusty rubbish-clogged streets,

Pedlars and shoppers walk in the walls’ shade

And a crowd gathers at the crossroads

To hear a storyteller recite “Gilgamesh”.


Ashurnasirpal, King of Assyria,

No pity,no piety in his beaked image,

The straight-staring eyes of total power,

Proclaims: “I built a pillar and covered it

With the skins of rebellious chiefs I had flayed.

Some I walled up inside the pillar,

Some I impaled upon the pillar.

Others I had bound to stakes around it.”

Returning in triumph from campaigns of conquest,

He brings with him strange beasts in cages

And unknown seeds to plant in his gardens.


At Nineveh the omens are reported;

Mathematicians and astronomers plot the heavens

And some already wake from horrible dreams,

Having witnessed the seat of the gods in flames.


In Babylon the New Year’s Festival commences.

A priest unlocks the Temple gate,

Opening the courtyard for prayer.

Purify the precinct with Tigris water,

Smear the walls with cedar resin.

The ceremonial slaughterer with dripping hands

Casts the decapitated sheep into the river

And the old year’s sins are carried away.

The penitent king surrenders his insignia,

The priest strikes his cheek and he bows to the god,

“I did not sin, I protected Babylon.

Neither did I neglect the rites

Or punish without reason.”

Then he rises,purged and blessed,

And once more puts authority on,

Heaven’s chosen Lord of Men.

Catch Me Before I Kill Again

The panic in my veins is the chaos on the streets.

Repetition.My black muse.My love.

Do you fear the wolf? I do. His terrifying grace.

The news is full of menace and alarm,

The same old decadence about to receive

Its comeuppance,as the evil omens accumulate.

God help me, I live among cannibals and beasts

Who cannot control themselves,cannot stop

Doing the same things over and over,committing

The same accursed mistakes,to no purpose,

In love with their own nameless demons.

Protestant sermons and Catholic rituals

Bedevil my solitude.How we need our monsters!

Dear God, control me,control us,keep order

On earth; all this free will is killing me.

Mourning

My death has already taken place,

Somewhere out there, in the future,

While , here,I haunt myself and mourn myself.


I am human technology,

The melancholy android,unsure of its place

Among all the exquisite objects in the universe.


Graphs, flow charts and probabilities

Replace imagination among the elect,

Desperate to manage every detail, every illusion.


Our science is, in truth, science fiction.

Save me,cries the soul,that mad machine,

Superbly engineered by demons and angels


All knowledge is glorified uncertainty

I find;no two testimonies completely agree;

Belief itself is all I can believe in.

Angler

Out from the house, the slim quick supple wand

Tremulous with anticipation in your hand,

You hurry down by dandelions to the lake,

Summer’s idle prince coming into his kingdom.

A woodpecker beats time in a treetop,

Frankincense languor seeps through the pores,

Moody water overhung with alders and willows,

Where the tall float’s quizzical antenna drifts

And bobs, pricking at a sotto voce omen.

Thrilling through refractions, the rudd

Come plunging and fighting to the net,

Gilt flanks minted in the evening gleam.

Time and again, the spry float dashes

Across black meniscus in hesitant trickles.

Discreetly abundant,a Gioconda moon

Perches, approving,in an old ash tree.

Wending home, holy Lord of Animals,

You breathe the dew-spongeing lane and smile.

African Dream

War-drums are beating...

Red sun rises in the bush of ghosts...

War-drums are beating...

A knife cuts the black goat’s neck.


Blood flows on the breathless dust.

The chant moves slowly through the trees.

It stirs the bones, our ancestors,

Joins them together till they rise

And dance for the moon’s delight.


The wells are poisoned, there is nowhere to go.

Bullet holes in village walls

Gape like starving children’s mouths.

Emaciated earth has no breath to gasp.


Bibles and Korans fall from the sky.

Round and round a madman dances,

Crying like a strangled chicken.


Here come the bankers in black suits,

Undertakers to bury the living,

Cannibals with shiny shoes and small lifeless eyes.


The weapons have been chosen:

Pencils and rulers, drawing lines on a map;

Bullets tipped with promises and lies.


Through the Great Rift Valley they walked,

The first human beings,under the blue cones

Of a thousand volcanic peaks,

Their minds drifting like the herds of elands and zebra,

Their hands as busy as the monkeys’ and baboons’.

No-one had told them this was Eden.

They cooked their words over night fires.

Wild Swimming

Pagan me, wild water’s lover-worshipper,

Taking the cold deep inside me

To feel like an animal-god.

Celebrate in the shivering skin,

Plunging into another nervous dimension,

Where you scoop out revelations

With hands turning into flippers.

There is always this moment’s dithering

On the edge,goosebumped flesh

And brain,asking “Am I crazy?”-then the rush,

The fall, the surrender-a memory of birth.

Life stares through me,dark as a seal’s eye.

Black Pearls

Not order, not measure, but the wild and subtle arguments

Of wistful minds, impossible explorers,

Whose geometry is unorthodox, whose theses

Are exotic, esoteric, prone to the vast diverse panorama....


The soul’s academy drives them to plutonic dialogues,

Theologians of their own imagined deaths,

Wagering all they are on salvation, in an age

Of exile and destruction, divided against itself.

Skimming Stones

A flat round stone will serve you best.

With a sidearm toss and a flick of the wrist

The trick is to hit the surface

At twenty degrees precisely.

The force from the water

Is proportional to the squared speed of the stone.


A game of ducks and drakes

Is what draws me to the shore,

A practised squanderer wondering

How many bounces I will manage this time.

There is always this stillness

When I am throwing my stones.


A mathematical formula

To describe my life has not yet been found,

Although it may exist.From what I read,

Numbers are capable of limitless feats.

Meanwhile,it’s back to the seashore for me,

And practise,practise,practise.

Cruelty

We are the cruel;in cruelty is our truth,

The ingenuity of the self-despising,

Born needlessly into difficult flesh

To suffer and make others suffer.


We busy ourselves with dark accounts:

One must balance the books somehow.

“God is love” they taught us in church,

Shadowed by priests’ black wings.


Sanctioned by deliberate reason,

An ordinary man goes about his work,

Eviscerating the enemy,the scapegoat,

With infinite pleasure and disgust.


The fiendish other is always there,

Projecting the evil eye upon us,

Innocents ill-used by life and fate,

Overcoming only by delicious revenge.


The warring actions of my brain

Poise fury and love in the scales;

Mad calculus chases the infinite

Through the bones of the condemned.


Fatal unfathomable mind –vortex

Of countless precise events

From the womb to this wild minute-

Drives every cell in my body;


Keeps Hell’s bureaucracy at work

Classifying and justifying;

Adds skull to skull upon a pile

Joining earth and heaven.

Biographies of Hitler

So I sit reading biographies of Hitler,

All the crazy confused verdicts in my head,

Fretting at history’s Mephistophelean games,

Solemn and absurd turned inside out.


The carnival dead survive us all,

Reborn to baffle,seduce and damn,

Their minds escape with their bodies,

Leaving empty skulls in our hands.


Rumour,legend,myth and deceit:

Conflicting testimonies map the vertiginous

Terra incognita where scholars wander,

Shades in purgatory,abandoned to pain;


Nothing is settled, all conclusions vex;

May, might and could run the masquerade;

Back and forth horned questions hunt us,

Scorning this guilty lust to explain.

Pythagoras Alone

Pythagoras sits tuning his seven-stringed lyre,-

The little boy who climbed the forested mountains of Samos,

The merchant seaman’s son born from the waves,

The wanderer who surveyed the stars from Egyptian temple roofs-

And arranges pebbles into triangles and squares on the ground

As the sun tracks across the sky.

Now he knows the object of science is joy;

He is building his pyramid of life and death

To ascend beyond calculation and feeling.

Albatrosses

Bones, muscles, feathers and wind;

They glide for hundreds of miles without a flap,

Wings locked wide, catching the sky

And sailing upwards, then hugging gravity

To plane seaward, in effortless undulations.

Never touching earth for months on end,

They hurtle up, or weave downwind,

Catch the crosswind and head for the sun

Then turn down into the veering breeze,

Riding out tempests and blizzards, undaunted,

The Innocent

Sitting in Liverpool Street Station,befuddled by hubbub,the toing and froing of anonymous bodies in suspension,strange flesh and alien consciousness blurring into chaos and occasionally resolving itself into harmonies and patterns,I drift in a fog,benumbed,inhuman.

Walking through rain,I am invisible,absorbed into the plangent puddle streets.When will the hidden be uncovered? When will suffering be redeemed? I have pawned my days in the backstreets of the mind,with no hope of recovery.

Glance from a girl on a tube train sparks through Babylonian darkness,excites cruel fantasies.Insular under a clean white shirt and well-pressed suit, my plump white flesh quivers with embarrassed pride.

The World Is Incomplete

Born on the lion-crowned heights of summer,

I fell into a season of rich decay.


I don’t know why, but I can remember

Conversations I had many years ago,-

Ordinary conversations, in all kinds of places-

Seeming now prophetic and uncanny…


I love the nowhereness of motorways,

Being a direction and nothing more,

A world of signs, seen through the windscreen,

Points on a map.

In the lonely service station,

I pay in strange currency,

And move on.


English, impure tongue of the semi-savage,

My coarse blood’s birthright,

Pun these bones into extinction

With extremes of delight.


Solitary hitchhiker on the back roads of life,

I follow the sun,

Awaiting my next ride.

What I Do

My ballet days are over.

And I seldom play much Chopin any more.

There is nothing to build with,

Nothing to express.

It just is.


Stare deep into the poem

Until it recognises you

And comes right.


The day is not far off,

The day is very near,

When a loss more immeasurable than galaxies or language

Will stroll into your room, very matter-of-fact,

And kill you, almost kill you.


To be neither one thing nor the other,

Or both at once,

My Japanese trick;

I collect new selves

And paste them into my album.

This moment’s actor,

I play for the sky’s sake,

Juxtaposing images

In vertiginous collage,

Lines in a haiku.

My Life on Trains and Buses

Dead time

Hanging around

Waiting for life to begin

Waiting for the bus

The train


Escape, escape the state,

That administers you out of existence,

Herds and milks you, for its own profit,

Wastes half your money and steals the rest,

Knowing you to be stupid, placid and weak.


Who rules here and who is ruled?

Who holds power and for what is it used?


The stupid English, laughing through gritted teeth

At the life they feel impotent to change,

Strangling their own unfeasible aspirations

With twists of irony, as if wringing chicken’s necks.


Some chemical compounds

Smell-at low intensities-like flowers,

And-at high intensities-like shit.


Red wolves of lust chase through the star-forest, ravenous for the absolute.


Just wait till time drops the other shoe.


Perverse desire, why fasten so on unattainables,

When the real is here and now, yours to adore?


Raindrops like shooting stars slide diagonally across the pane of the moving bus.


My life seems such an oddity,

Bizarre, disjointed,

Half-genius, half-nonsense.


Should I fall into the sun,

Or make a break for the outer darkness?

The Reluctant Lover

Columbus wasn’t looking for America.

Nor I for you.


The world belongs to jesters and dancing bears.

So jest. Dance.


This game of blindfold chess

Is the only vocation I can manage.


A tricky fugler, I lime the branches of my mind

To see what I might catch.


Your face in the crowd I could never mistake;

I can feel your eyes a mile away;

And it pulls, the current, it pulls me under.

Drowning seems like fun.


We shall go on like this, until we can go on

No longer.

Memoranda

1


There is a city you abstain from visiting,

A pilgrimage you delay,

It would mean too much to you,

A truth from which you might never recover.


You and your memories,

Secret certificates of humanity,

Torn-up treasure maps full of imaginary isles,

Do you presume to master the future?


Connoisseur of disasters,

I relish the fatal conjunction of planets,

The syllables of nemesis.


2


John came, offering water,

And Jesus came, offering fire.

And I walked between them

And walked on.


To see the fires of Pentecost

In an English village,

And pray, pray for redemption,

To endure the rigour

Of exaltation,

Joy demanding compassion,

To recognize the whole

By the smallest part,

And the part by the whole,

To take the sacrament

On one’s tongue,

To celebrate without cease,

Never failing in courage,

To be the bridegroom

Walking up the lane.


3


“Women,” he said,

“They’re all pink inside,”

And frowned into his glass.


Gold-mining the darkness of her eyes,

I discovered California again.

I made her a statue in my mind,

Then smashed it into pieces.


4

In fear of masks and broken hinges,

In fear of doors impossible to open,

I look for lost friends under bridges

And stitch the sky with smiles.


Warm bread from the murderer’s oven!

Unknowing is a mouthful of snow.

The lean gods in their eyries

Play dice with discontinued stars.


Who sews mailbags for alien gaolers?

Who hides up his mother’s sleeve?

The lonely drover on a mountain road

Measures out death step by step.


5


I was born, so they tell me, I don’t remember. It must have been a day like any other.

I recall the odd thing, of course: learning to tie my shoelaces, to balance on a bicycle…atmospheres…

So many knots in time!

This moment I anticipate sensation, ideas, acts.

The pendulum oscillates,

The child on the swing

Cries out, thrilled, into the wind.

I exist

With my tenth-of-a-second brainwave,

My one-second cardiac rhythm,

My six-second respiratory cycle,

My twenty-four hours of dead-and-alive.

Megaliths’ and sundials’ shadows,

The monastic candle’s cascading wax,

Hourglass and clepsydra,

Are all in the caveman’s notched bone-clock,

Lines, circles and lines…


6

I examine the knobbles on treebark ,the patterns of waterblobs on the bathroom floor, the crenellations of a seashell…


Moments of my life

That tenderly break me,

To show the inside,

Red and wild.

Dear Diary

Dear diary,

Do you think it might possibly

Be time, at last,

To stop thinking

And start living?


What became of our friends,

Whom we loved and laughed with?

Some died of drink, some of broken hearts,

Some drowned in puddles, some in seas,

Some went in search of glory

And never returned,

Some stayed at home

And only dreamed,

Some found religion,

Some found God,

Some found nothing

But themselves.


Europe is mythology and killing:

See it in the face

Of every stranger in the street.

The weasel on the inside of my skull

Is digging his claws in.

A sick animal

Without philosophy or direction,

I sweat weird fevers,

Climbing the walls of my mind.

Requiems of snow are falling

On this city,

On this world.