Poems – Occasional

Abode

A response to Philip Larkin

I try not to work too much, and don’t drink.
Stretching, I wake to the rustling dark –
to dawn seeping in through the brink
of the window, and the dog’s bark –
It’s then I see what’s really always there;
light streaming in through the misting air
absolving me of days that never quite start;
fallen empires grown thick with weeds,
a knowing smile at capricious needs
and under it all, my whispering heart.

The mind ceases to glare. Not through fear –
some good done, some love given, time
lined up like a jigsaw – here
missing a piece or two, but it’s fine;
there are more puzzles to do, that’s for sure,
while the stars play out their grand impure
drama, which can be a mess –
all scattered across the endless black
that brought us here, and can take us back;
Chaos can stand such a diffident dress.

There is a peculiar way of letting go –
The smile as a cure – like Gautama’s –
who tells of all deaths we ever could know
and did so to teach us: be calmer.
‘They have seen the Way, like a flash of lightning
in the night’ – now that’s enlightening.
Just relax – no sound, no sight
No touch or taste or smell, no mind
everything collapsing into the void
which we are, and are again, every night.

So. You can only learn so much from death.
You can dream about it, sure, but let it go.
It gets easier all the time. And as for the rest –
The sun will rise. This we can know.
Doesn’t it betray the poet and child
in the morning to sit in stunned and wild
silence, hands clasped in black prayer,
and think this shows some clean truth?
Give me a break. Death is no forbidden fruit
and your whining might just hasten you there.

(Interesting to see that you have no thought
For the deaths of your friends and those you love
as well you ought to
in those dark mornings. Let’s forgive
this self-regard. We know there is space
for all kinds of death; the shadow face
you held up as a simple, clarified skull
is a Janus. And on the other side
is a face of a mother, perhaps, with a soft smile
who takes leave from the world and leaves it full.)

David Oluwale

Q. Two things were offered to the river: a statue – and a man. For which do you think England grieved the most?

A. St Geórgios will rise from the Aire with David, cos a martyr knows a martyr

Q. Take five smooth stones from the river bed, which formed a pillow for his head. Take five stones, and then?

A. Somewhere goliath is waiting

Q. And on the Headrow the trees of Sherwood forest sway with their shadows. Who is the avenger stalking among them?

A. A bow and arrow are rising

A Silent Coaching

To be better feels like being a rose, opening

under the moon, a cut rose in a vase.

I want to feel like that rose, in our house –

It is an issue for me, it is unclear why –

this flower. I am involved, we are involved,

in each day, plumping ourselves like a bouquet.

The key feature is this – the satin petal,

curving, and of course the thorns. 

I assume so much each hour, I cannot move

but for assuming – If anything, I have sat

in quiet rooms, making plans for transformations

that would impact me later, my feet in the water, 

my head opening, giving me more options

for living – like absorbing the air through my skin,

and making a painting. 

I might just sit here for an eternity,

playing videogames with my friends – 

or I might eat a peach ice cream. 

I would build a world more just, and expand

into intergalactic space, a rose, orbiting these suns. 

My friend would do this better – don’t I know it.

On a scale, these options are as practical,

as ever anything was practical – a bee

climbs into a flower, brushing pollen on its legs –

that is practical.  No, I will sit in my vase,

dropping petals. Specifically, I will wilt.

Support me in this, support me

by allowing me to be away from you. Know

that I love you even as I go into the other room. 

There is no deadline for this – there is only

the living root line which knots around us, finally.

I will take a step out of the door, know I will return,

later, with flowers which you may cut and vase,

before we arrange and eat our lunch.

V.137

Ends are lamps, like things in the fog
like dust clouds birthing new stars – no –
like lamps in the fog, with cut-glass;
spiderwebs in the lead-lined vents…

O friends, there is no end. Missiles
rain on my friends, there will be no
end. Just think of the desert life
vanished in the trinity test:

There is no end. Things just transform.
A paper plane flown over fields
into the lithium furnace.
Batteries to recharge and change.

Decay. Cycle again, but end?
Pages turn, like brown leaves, become
paths – monotype of the footstep –
lamps receding into the fog.

Everything’s but a pile, my friends.
A pile of such delicate mould.
Such delicate, beautiful mould.
I grow old, and softer, and old.

An end is time’s crisping edge, no –
it’s every line, every letter
An end repeats what’s never past –
An end is something just like this:

V.132 Saggittarius A*

The horror is at the centre –
of the galaxy, in this case –
effigy of darkness, grey fire
that once outlined the small gods’ heads.

A colossus of roads inwards
each with a donkey and lantern –
a one way street – an archer fires
their bow and infinite arrow.

The great Buddha sits there, spinning –
you’d better believe you’ll feel peace
as you breathe deep and cross the line
where Ying and Yang get singular.

In this old place, the logos fails
for now, but then, what is now? No
word can explain the difference
between the future and the past.

Sanctis tuis in aeternam
on a galactic pin-head
which defies perspective with law –
to tint it with a golden skin.

In soft radiance, that black lack
accepts us in, and absolves us
the sin of being data – then
shakes space itself with its laughter.

Mudflat Archive

The barn owl is an ancient vector
on the post in the blue silence
It slips a million years between
thin bones and structures of feather –
A predator engineered by galaxy –
Mudflats in the estuary pop and click
with the worms’ horrific cryptography –
Oystercatchers crack it as they pick
scraps from the crab corpse in the pool
then are torn from the sand by desire.
Tunnelling into the cliff, the sea pops
and clicks rocks against recorded time
and daylight in the tunnel sketches webs
on the vault-line of the limestone –
Striations of land are sunk into the coast
the marsh holds a sheep skeleton –
The lady joins the doomed Gawain,
topless and expecting courtesy

We are ancient predators –
our eyes scan the front and the field
shifts and pulls towards us –
folds in the land are held straight
by our mind whose horizon is fixed
even while the body scrambles –
The lord of the castle leaves Gawain
to trek a last trek to the the rock chapel
in the green-black velvet valley –
cold in the morning – the horse
shifts and breathes under them –
the image of a single carrot impressed
into the horse-mind network
Mist lifts off the sweating body of the hills –
Sleep is slight like ice on a puddle –
We could not climb the stair quietly
the wood would crack and souls stir
stilling erratic movement of the eyeball

We remember dreams – of snakes
coiled around us, writhing on the bed –
of a silent goblin, watching, still,
until he fades – and tales of animals –
bouldering to find an adder nest
suddenly, and the shock was great –
a spider hides in the folds of a bag.
The engine pops and clicks as it cools
as the road humps over the land
holding us fixed, as the earth moves.
Swallows pop and click on the wires –
Geiger counters of each other’s name.
We are naked under these clothes –
she said it herself and I can feel it –
Scars on the land of the robes –
A bird warbles and beeps frantically –
then the fell runner whose hooves
scar the peat in flight from the lord’s hunt

Swallows struck from silver hang
in the sky like the bright moon
beyond three embracing drops in glass
and the black slate of the belfry –
the university where someone sits
in the library, feet up, on the phone –
and thrift clings to the rock pool –
small purple flowers held
for convolutional identification –
I hold the hand of an ancient woman
to help her through a gate and see
the old post office by the field.
I hold a red layered geode
someone had cracked on the beach
I hold a stone like a bearded capuchin
and bring it down to pop and click
rocks on the hard-edged beach

My friends, there is no end
though the sun will soon expand
and the earth be smoothed
by the weight of the turbulent sea
There is no end – the habitable zone
will slip beyond us as we cling
by thrift, like thrift to the rock –
We might build a planet engine
to shift whole seas to tack our orbit
or we might not – it changes nothing
You want to preserve us forever
but we are preserved – I declare it
We are archived of ourselves
of this moment – I archive us.
Now tie these greens around your waist
and watch the grass move under cows
who carefully avoid (though they kiss)
the bluebells

Grange-over-sands

The quicksand and sea of mud
and the sea itself, running
with cold skies as long and deep.
Oaks step out from cobbled banks
with the train’s rumble stirring
the café in the pale house –
I cannot escape from this

barbaric lyric’s enclave –
with the way that the world goes on
how can I still find this peace?
Maybe I should have chosen
to be the gull, the shaggy
dog in the rail underpass
whose soft songs betray no-one

V.128

<< In-between two redbrick houses
there is an alcove and a shed
topped with a mossy corrugate.
On the campus. A leaf dances

shivers, hovers, behind the moss –
blown as if a storm plucked at it
on a taught invisible string.
I’m still in front of the horror >>

<< There is a leaf on the road home
I see in the peripheral
behind me when I look back down
the hill – on the grey concrete steps

It jumps and slaps the ground so fast
and in paroxysms of dance
confined to its small space – I blank
on everything and watch the glitch >>

<< Roland Barthes was crossing the road
when he suddenly stopped – in front
on the path ahead a brown leaf
shivered as if it was burning

but there was no smoke. Enraptured
he didn’t notice the milk truck.
As the blood pooled the leaf flew up
to hover over him, spinning >>

Metaphysick for the Tyrant

The picture shows the bottom of an ocean rift. Small lumps of mud or sand rest in focus in the centre and the rest is darkness.

This you?

*

Nihil of the world, ash and vibration in puddles of ash – your obelisks crushed
and sprinkled onto the beach for the sand to grasp and wipe.
Dog tags from the dead laid at your door will outlast you, scab of the world,
that architectonic of your emptiness, that emptiness of your nothingness, only delays
the time when the void will have its way with you in the way it will have all things –
your propaganda fails as it attempts to invent a face for a man who has no face.
And had you never existed, joy may still have lacked
but at least we wouldn’t have been forced to cope with your voice.
You are the white noise of the state, and entirely unnovel. Here is an overused phrase:
Forces you commanded lie sprawled by waves that liquefied their brains, and you
call meetings in vast halls and have others take the photos. Can you feel the plot?
All it would take for the world to forget you would be one shot from behind you
which would pass through the front of the skull and cause such blooms of flowers
to sprout immediately on the mahogany table perhaps inherited from a ship –
and from that same blood beautiful crystals would rise to melt the empire.
Those history enshrines, their people loved and white crabs tend to a vent in the blackness

*

The war stops. There is nothing else it can do when the soldiers have melted
Panting, you swim back and forth in a reactor pool, treading water –
glowing blue, you rest your collapsing ruins in the ruined body of the plant –
the sound of swan lake echoing through the corridors, over old tannoys –
over the sound of dripping water you breathe your last, while fireworks rear outside
as insects and raised dust whirl like a cloud of starlings above the forest clearing
Let us hold ourselves carefully and cause no vessels to rupture in innocent heads –
the void crackling across the years like glass on a car park floor, and more –
the sound of laughter like a morning chorus of birds being let out of a basement
There is much to think of in the slow walk in the dark back to the old bus
Even the smallest of our days like popcorn kernels that turn in the microwave
and conjure gunfire, or rubble falling from the roof until inside the pack a bomb
goes off and takes out the whole kitchen, leaving a cat yeowling in the rubble
What you destroy in emotion in the concrete city, all of it outweighs you
If even a small blackbird were caught in the crossfire, that would condemn you

*

May peace envelop you and absolve you and wipe you from the world, as quick
as bumping your head on the mantle as you stand up from the fireplace
causing a statue to fall in the desert and the wind to call – ozymandias –
Abel’s missile launcher smoking as Cain’s tank plinks cool in the dirt on the roadside
The charred turret of a tank becomes something ineffable in the dirt on a roadside
Given the unrestrained power of the state, all you could think of was pathetic
of metal whizzing around in the sky to strike upon towers of metal
Your name will go to rest having scraped itself from the slate of existence
as you scream. A tyrant opens its mouth and the wind of the universe blows,
raking the skin from animals and the bark from trees. A tyrant knows one word
and that word is dissolution but in a dialect of indelible slowness, one word
that is itself crushed by the vocabulary of a snail, or a thrush, or a thyme leaf
A tyrant knows one word which causes buildings to expel their insides onto the pavement
A tyrant knows one violently boring word, of unconfronted performance anxiety
A tyrant speaks of many things but always shows the turned face of his dying mother
A tyrant says one word and God places a hand over their mouth, offering silence –
the one word a tyrant says, is the final word, the word undignified, the word;

*

She should have died another time, you will shout – for this word deserves
a place for it to resonate – “Death!” But no, a cold concrete bunker will do for you both
Oh no, tomorrow, and tomorrow and the next day, and the following
sneak past like mice, each day along the cracks until the last echoes of your memories,
being dashed across the wall by a bullet, fade. And all your yesterdays will serve
only as entertainment for fools on their path to the final dust. Please turn off the light.
Your life is just a shadow that will pass. A clown that graced our screens for a moment
walking back and forth, wobbling – we will never see you again. You are a story
made solely of gunshots and screams, maintained by idiots. Signifying nothing