rain

Two Poems

Crowd

The vast pack turns now – howls
it echoes in the dark
locks of the valley cliffs
The whole hive mind stiffens –
an enemy appears
and soon becomes shadow.

The light of the howlers
is a dim-burning light
not hot like communion –
cold; cold as hill mist tears
that graze clean the day’s grime
From forgotten arches

Running silently through
damp places on the hill
Babbling under black clouds
And devouring, slowly
At first, skin from your flesh
And then, thoughts from your brain

Sun Worship

And as poetry dies a death
or is reborn – which is
the same, until it isn’t
And the sunlight takes on a sharpness
And the world begins again to end
quite unlike a mint falling to the floor
and breaking
cleanly in two upon the tiles
and the sheerness of thought stacks
so steeply –
Did not a roman slave walk
the dry paths of this split-cream coast
Does not this man hang such
washing as has never been bettered
in the warm air
Does not the mother walk a beach
as her dog exacts nothing from
the sea
as slow the waves pull down the coast
and the sun’s fog blurs horizons
and a thousand small discomforts –
there is still much to do
even on last days, which may fade
walking through a sliding glass door
as if to return shortly
but never returning (all this
in the sun)

Here, look up through the parasol
at the sun encased in black fabric
does this seem gaudy to you?
The prehistoric stands on a cliff
watching those same horizons
as the birdcalls change.
Ask for help from the sky-trails
as they spread into the blue.
Note the ferocious beautiful
of pre-bomb flares falling on a city
But note you may be thrown off the bus
by those who don’t understand
that a flower can exist in a wasteland.
Place your hands often on
warm heads of hair –
Cope like this – in sunlit ripples
on some body of water

some body of air

Aphorisms I

Often, the cry of the cynic is betrays a jealousy of hope. I know this from personal experience.

*

When someone gives up on a joint project, it takes on the features of glass – cold and transparent. And behind it you see the back of the one who left.

*

There is something beautiful in taking something meant as an insult, and wearing it as a badge of honour. It throws light back up the arse of the insulter.

*

A translation is an excuse to write something new under another authority.

*

“Whatever such a mind sees is the flower, and whatever such a mind dreams of is the moon.” This is state we could strive for, so long as we remember that, not only beautiful, still, and peaceful, the flower has the nesting insect, eating it from the inside out. And the moon is bright, and hangs outside of our world, but lunar craters are cold, dead and sterile.

*

In poetry it is sometimes easy to look for crunchy language, rather than a true picture, or letting one build its surface over the other. But then, capturing things is not the kind of thing language does, like a graph, or a sum, or a photograph, despite these all having their subjective aspects, or hardly capturing anything at all. Language evokes, but must evoke on the terms of the reader. But do I do any of this? Do I even think it when I’m writing?

*

The writing feels right, it isn’t like what has already been said. Some of the language that comes is new, in new ways, some of it is couched in dull or dead forms, which have to be revised. But what does this feeling of ‘needing revision’ consist of? Of resentment, of defining the successful in terms of what I am not? Not old, not hackneyed, not used up? Writing a poem is equal parts what I like, or think is successful, and what I don’t like about what I have written, what is unsuccessful. It can’t just be one or the other. And it can be more. Sometimes I feel nothing about a sentence. Does that matter?

*

Resentment as a concept, a superiority of approach, defining yourself against Them, ‘what they do is bad and I don’t like it’, this concept has a lot to do with how taste develops. And this is okay, so long as we realise it, and can get past it from a negativity to a creative, positive, self-related progression.

V.66

Short breaks in the lambent parade
of life arrive at the greasy
spoon in the market. The hot oil
soon replaces everything else

with crackling. Money slips and slides
from hand to hand around here, but
in a way somehow comforting,
like a hospital, compared to

a hospice. Rain comes in again,
an intermittent then constant
grey wash to tamp down all the days
into a lead sheet over me.

Words can be used by anyone
at any time, and this fact is
a casket leant in the corner
in a dark Dickensian house.

The small bright machine in my hand
clicks and whirs and sells me products.
My low social achievement score
is indicative of distaste

towards crucifixion. I speak
and instantly eyes are on me,
disapprovingly rolling round
and round and round and round and round

V.56

It’s been raining for weeks. The fish
have left the ocean and are fled
to swim among the raindrops in
the air. Airships begin to hunt.

I was walking today downhill
from town when one of those trawlers
passed overhead. It had the sight
of a great shoal over Sheepscar.

I heard the sailors calling, then
the terrible noise of ratchets
releasing. The net jettisoned
had destroyed the park. I ran down

and watched as apartments and trees
were ground to pieces, as people
were screaming and pulled skywards, fast
as the fish were caught and the old

neighbourhood destroyed. I asked her,
this fisher, what’s the strangest thing
you’ve drawn up from the foggy murk
of the city? Unfeeling eyes.

“I once caught a whole damn marriage.
The bride was hanging by her train,
Her mouth opening and closing
in a strange way. We threw them back

V.52

The world that reflections fall to
beneath the petrol station in
the rain – that world where things are good
how can we reach it? The world where

the chemical imbalances
are mostly corrected. In there
where people don’t get stuck. I love
all of my friends, I love you all.

But you need to go to buildings
everyday, in other cities.
Things are made difficult by this.
You need to tap at keys and make

small adjustments, and be harrassed
by parents as their children cry
and try to cope with complex stress.
There is no line. No prime matter

that would lie down beneath things and
smoothly answer questions. Like why
argent, a cross gules, prevails here?
a symbol of stupidity

flutters in the cold wind. As I
attempt to make myself think well,
reach that world dropping away now
beneath the rivers, beneath seas

V.50

Rain! Rain! On the river! Falling!
Oh my world! Heavying my hair!
‘Til it drips down my face! Oh rain!
Cupping my jawline exactly!

Rain! Dampening my clothes! Cooling
my shoulders and neck! hanging out
on the windscreen! Little deltas!
Dancing on the mud! just dancing!

Always a pleasure! Falling out
of the sky! or so they tell me!
I believe rain is liquid air!
That gets so bored sometimes it melts!

I believe rain is a sea spore!
Ready to grow a little sea!
Wherever it drops! It could be
anywhere! Like in your ear-hole!

The audiologist would gawp!
At the little ships, their foghorns!
And the sea mist forming cloudlines
which pour down your neck and caress!

I would spend days alone with it!
Which roars on the roof at night! So
passionate and so sensuous!
Each drop its own exclamation!

Path

Occasionally walk down a path such that you wouldn’t mind to die at the end of it. Having seen the beech seed pods’ dark red and the leaves’ brown, damp on the verges, having felt the cold breeze chill your hand on the umbrella, having said ‘cold I welcome you for a moment’ ’til it echoes in your fingers and having heard the pop of the rain on plastic like rice crispies in a bowl on a quiet morning. And the greens oh the greens of the trees in towering walls and your lone figure at the base. And the end comes with a sigh of a ‘we have to die sometime. And now is a moment for that, having walked down that path.’ Across the way, the hill of trees sits in the misty rain, magentas and grey greens. Colours shore us.

But there remains this; that an act of self abnegation is a kind of assertion of authority over the world. For the following reasons. Either you believe you should stop, in which case you believe you are powerful and too powerful to change yourself, a contradiction. Or you believe your assessment of things is the most true, which is arrogant, considering the world. Or your abnegation is in itself a challenge to the world, since you believe you can still win by not wanting anything. Or something else. If you would just submit to things, you would have a better time, but that’s what I was saying, wasn’t it? No, I was saying something else. I forget.

Outside it has rained on and off all night. The sodden tea bag is cold in the bottom of the cup. I pop a small fruit gum in my mouth and chew it.

2 Storms

8, 3×8, Storm 6

I heard the thunder would come
but mouths murmured, the top end cut
so I never really got it

Their predictions had none or less
crunch or grind to my mouth, my eyes
now the thunder here, behind woods

does the scrape that only skies do
dumps all the folds in the stratos
rattling the bin of history.

I love it so much I could end
arms outstretched with one last static
shock to end all shocks, to end storms.

But you still tend orchids outside
as the rain tends all other plants
then sit close and we wait breath tensed

baited with small sounds to draw out
deeper ones. Each new paradigm
storm sound to teach all others how

*

2, 3×6, Storm 5

Thunder comes once when I
am stood among poetry
among the old books, new –

Only once, but enough
to set a featureless
day in stone memory.

Audio

4, 7×7, Drive Home in the Rain

Outside this plastic-smell car
the rain whirls like a muscle
set off wonderfully, fine
brighted by the too-sharp lamps
in windy spasms of curve
and softens my face, cooling

I feel life has been jammed
like a filament burning
too hot to shed much lighter
than a dark emphasising
fizz and sticky resistance –
the rain and cold air soften

The car steams up, it’s human
my friends are drunk, I listen
to their lubricate jaw joints
It is strange and wonderful
music to hear them talk, now
In the dark roadway, I hang

I hang as the world unfurls
its scoreboard display signposts
a smashed out car, black wreckage
My throat twitches with a cold
surge, we fly home fast as time
I exit and crush a snail
sigh, the paths are full of them

Music credit to Ben Salisbury & Geoff Barrow for ‘Ava’