Me again

Another self-promoting post, I'm afraid. Here's a two-page glimpse of the first number of the new Cambridge Literary Review, which not only contains this poem, written in 1973, but also a memoir of my meeting with the concrete poet Dom Sylvester Houédard, or dsh, as he preferred to be known. It's shockingly candid, as people used to say when reticence was a virtue. (Click to embiggen.)

If you'd like to know more about this excellent review, the first issue of which is dedicated to Cambridge writing, click here.

What Lawrence might have called a pansy

You can find the first poem of mine to be published  in the last few years - by anyone other than me, that is - on Fiona Robyn's endlessly delightful site, a handful of stones. Thank you, Fiona, for rescuing me from such solipsism.

THE GOLDEN FLEECE

The final three sections of my poem sequence The Golden Fleece. The earlier parts can be found here: Jason 1, Medea, Chiron. I suggest you start with those (in that order).

HERCULES

 

1

Apples. Bread. Wine. And the camps

are the least accidental features

of a foreign landscape. No sweat

or, at least, the temple is what’s

sliding like greased lightning on

the waves, who are silent as if they

could not even be arsed. But I want

to know. The white flare of his

buttocks disappearing in the water.

He might as well come back gold

as be dead or living in No Place I

can muscle into, as fast as a rat

shoots off into its own space,

letting the bulky air thrust out,

taking its illness out to the stars.

O lyric density! O blindness!

Impossible fruit in the dank soil.

We just drop it in and pull it up,

surprised at the effervescence of

spring water, and the clean bright

buckets that surround us, pitched

in the well, pulled up and drained.

 

2

The density of a muscled travelogue

or a worksheet. I want to know

what gives when we are all

descended from gods. As for that,

the creation of a nervous system

should cast a new, more viable

taxonomy into their mountain

home. Crab apples upset the baskets

and the entire market’s in a holy

uproar as though it hadn’t bargained

with theft already, as though my

strength were not the dirtiest

sympathy it would ever know. I’m

no more clever than the man I

left with the whole fucking world

on his shoulders. Its bright

striped canopies where gods sleep,

a pouchful of their still profiles.

 

3

Raiding parties. The mystery is

that I happen so often among them

and do nothing but act the fool

as though I were being paid

by someone else, my ghostly

brother, the merchant. Raids on

the blanketing and divine air

that starts at the groin, flows

up, and out. I want to know if

your prick can lift a man as high

as that wave can deceive the

temple’s grip on our sopping wet

earth. By the breakers, an army

is wondering if to set up camp

is like cracking a fertilised

egg into a jug. I say it is,

and start as fine blades start

from my follicles and (the moon

is high) break wind into a fist

and breathe (the sea is high)

and take off. I’m talking about

the real world. Labour. Raiding

parties on the chick’s sticky yolk.

 

4

As love shoves its fingers up

the cute boy’s nostrils I work

the dank groundsheet from under

his sweating rump, the silky

bundles of sequestered jewels,

and a tube of surgical jelly

squelches between my fingers,

a cross between light itself

and its passionate entry. All

credit for that. Strictly,

nothing can be had for nothing

is how I’d explain it to Mr

Atlas and his million disciples.

But it’s ecstasy, and how it

bubbles into muscle becoming

spirit! The effort of spirit

to work it loose enough to

enter’s a neat question about

theft, darkness, the market,

the loved one dragged under

by compliant hands, the rush

of blood, the chartered world

on those aching shoulders. I

bite, weave, break on the ride.

 

5

Legless, the bloodied, rescinded

quest held up against a small

and glittering unit that reels

around the campsite, talking of

the work it has to do. It traces

its life from the hand and into

the vein as a picaresque reverse.

By the splash and drip of blood

I shall be known. The red curl

of the foetus, comma, a grammar

easing its shoulders between the

hard polished surfaces where a

god resides, smiling at nothing

as, easily, I drag the temple

into the shell, stunned by that

slipstream of gold that shimmies

out. Buckets. A count of 100 and

I surface, gritty eyes and empty

arms, unweighted and blind.

ORPHEUS

 

1

A creamy mallow light and me, crouching, calves and thighs together like the two halves of a clam. How things occupy themselves! in spite of our wearily fixated loves.

 

2

The first half of coincidence is a turned-up ace. Three more aces in the pack and everything down to luck.

The elegiac number, one.

3

Down here, at Mission Control, I’m expecting a call from my wife.

4

Embarrassed by loneliness I ransack a city for images of the single life. The wailing of all those cows with distended udders in the meadows of the known world. I shall circle the city with their stripped hide? That one’s been used.

 

5

Inside the clam is edible. I begin to yield. Somewhere another hungry clam will eat me, then I’ll eat him. I’m not as popular in my peer group as I used to be. I’ll have to find another gang of do-nothing creeps. The single life

Brr-brr Biberkopf.

 

6

One way of not doing things. The light so opaque you can’t see out. Inside a small room a smaller room. Hello. At last - I seem to have found someone to listen to me.

 

CHRYSOMALLUS

1

The foreground’s filth is bleeding.

I think my mother is a loaf of bread.

The magic is in the dispersal.

 

It destroys the distance between places.

All of the pieces were buried together.

I think hysteria makes bones and meat.

 

I think my mother is a loaf of bread.

The leaves are beckoning the wind.

The magic is in the dispersal.

 

The foreground’s filth is bleeding.

I think my mother is a loaf of bread.

I think hysteria makes bones and meat.

 

2

They put down the box in the meadow

and taproots around it cried

Mirror, tell me your name.

From the dark heart of the cream

the handmaiden beats a necklace

and I am priceless.

 

Each object must tell its own

story and be damned

Mirror, tell me your name.

 

Break out in the chatter of glades

and heave me across your back

and I am priceless.

 

3

I think hysteria makes bones and meat

imitate a god.

 

JASON 2

1

With my address tattooed on my collarbone I’m a stranger to my body. Indian ink is blue. It settles in waves through which my own blood weaves. Its own red fades and when I want to go home I shall be blocked. Not by a dam, but by a channel through which the flow is graduated and the wheels made to turn. I could watch them all day.

 

2

When I came back with trophies I let them speak for themselves, recording devices built into their filaments. The king’s initial awe was rapidly tempered by scientific curiosity. The domes of the city were razed before they could fall.

 

3

Each sensation is exploratory now that confidence in touch is divorced from the fingers. The cry as the golden fleece is born away, involuntary and inarticulate, makes sense in spite of itself and its wary hoofed grandfather. It turns into a syllable and then a word. A new tongue is born out of petulance tented on pain, drawn fabric through which the whine of gnats can be heard.

 

4

And if I am thirsty shall I not steal from the steps of the Town Hall, the Observatory (my starry-eyed darling), the Ordnance Survey buildings? Now I’m reduced to knowledge those iguanas recognise my tread. Acres of flesh respond to its office as though our concern had been simple annotation. An object already there whose origin was mysterious. Il Mappamondo, large as the world.

A Letter Home

What’s said remains in the idea of

a certain generosity of saying it,

of speech. The sink’s been blocked

for a week and not until yesterday

 

did we get some acid. I’m glad

you’re in love. Will it last and,

even if it doesn’t, will you care?

Is that what you intended, for

 

it to last? For example, I also

love you. A photograph of an almost

empty place, because the  people

were walking too fast to be seen,

 

is another surrender to method that

garners and protects the eventful

silence, and so we’re appalled by

the chemical odours and I, angry,

 

expect that what’s seen in your

‘blindness’ is merely the figure of a

woman, rushing to scream at the

photographer, who won’t be there.

Keeping in Touch

There is also the utterance

of the fool’s music to be listened to

with as great attention as you

give your own

 

flat or mysterious dreams.

Invention on the edge of the void.

Stars on the line speak tersely of

‘creative accounting’

 

and it touches us for this evening

I too should like to be loved.

That fricative dark I

swallow, dropping

 

the net where it may.

Its curious bifocal effect, like

observing the casual panorama of language,

is literally an effect

 

in passing, its

every phenomenon is regional, reading

off foolish grids into truth

and the metaphors

 

we love as our own, revealed.

A humane, political loneliness,

the clouded mirror over the entrance,

your eyes looking up

 

and rounding on the asymptotic line,

which is also without end

as placid space mimics itself.

And I don’t have to

 

apologise or make myself scarce

because I am not the subject

of their concern,

but also a spectator.

Under the Day

In the early light of the morning,

for instance, it remained as a wish to be

companionable and was straightaway

erased and there was the pentimento

 

which was only a come stain on the sheet

fondly ‘remade’ as a model for future

delight-filled emotional hours in the

company, in the company of admiring

 

stares where you are smaller than,

hiding behind, what is looked at, more

concealed than what is concealed in your

arms, which is merely restless and

 

anxious to be gone into the dark,

that silvery mind that reflects your

slightest wish and pushes the tentative

on. Into action and the great claims

 

made for it and pearly days lit from

an almost notional above and, hanging

over that, the pestering and abuse

and the layers of differently coloured

 

sand in the bottom become oddly

confused as the lowest levels percolate

up, like wanting it hard and often.

And the vigilantes also prefer this hour.

Erotic verse

A little bit late, but I wonder if anyone else reading the Guardian's guide to writing poetry last week noticed the wonderful misprint on page 19. It comes in the trickle of text to the left of the main body of text and says (and I'll maintain the line breaks):

"The

sonnet's

moist

obvious

feature is

that it has

14 lines"

"a sense today"

An illuminating post from Lally's Alley, with extracts from work by Nathan Kernan and Bill Corbett that do exactly what extracts should do: make you want to read the rest. The title to this post comes from one of them.

His Life as the Beast

This is probably the only form in which my collected poems will ever see publication, so enjoy them while you can.

Two days in London

...actually, one and a half days in London, but they followed the same rough pattern as the two days I spent there last autumn and I'm just so self-referential I couldn't pass this one up. You can find out what I did last year by clicking here.

This time I went back to London for the launch of the very wonderful Katy Evans-Bush's collection of poetry, Me and the Dead. It was a spur of the moment decision, egged on by Ryanair's extremely cavalier attitude to global warming and my own desire to be surrounded by poets for an hour or so. Believe me, dear reader, I didn't regret it. (Well, perhaps momentarily, when Ryanair provided synthetic UHT cream for my cardboard bucket of already undrinkable tea and an eye-rolling Polish steward had no idea what sandwiches were available and seemed to regard this as my problem. But hey! 80 Euros...)

Before the launch and after a late lunch with my sister in the Mess - an excellent café in Amhurst Road; I recommend it - I met up with Isobel Dixon (friend, agent, poet) in a smart and colourful place at the back of the BFI called Benugo's, where we were joined by Henrietta Rose-Innes, who'd won the £10,000 Caine prize for the best short story in English by an African writer the evening before. (You can read the prize-winning story here.) We celebrated with reviving glasses of champagne before heading off to the Royal Festival Hall for a look-in at the London Literary Festival barbecue, where I almost met Rachel Holmes, head of literature at the South Bank Centre, and had some extremely drinkable white wine. This had the advantage over Pimm's of being immediately available rather than a reward for reaching the head of a shortish queue. After which, we moved on, without Henrietta but with Julia Bird, to Katy's launch in Covent Garden.

I had a great time. Katy read two poems, with great elegance and authority, from a chair in the corner of the over-crowded downstairs room of Treadwell's, leaving us wanting more - the only way to be left, in poetry as in much else. I finally met a whole bunch of people I'd previously known only as fellow-bloggers or web acquaintances of one kind or another - Elizabeth Baines, Simon Barraclough, Anne Berkeley, and wasn't disappointed. I also had the very great pleasure of seeing John Wilkinson again after more than twenty years. And the wine didn't run out. I'd planned to start reading the book on the 38 as it wound its towards Hackney, but found myself listening to a conversation between a disorderly drunk and a young artist from Liverpool, possibly about god, in which each vied with the other to see how many times they could address the other as man and still maintain something recognisable as argument. Sadly, the number was lower than either of them fully realised.

Wednesday, as those of you who were in London will know, was cold and wet. I had medical reasons, despite this, for wearing shorts (you don't want to know), although desert boots were, on the whole, an unwise choice, as was my using an umbrella that protected more or less the same amount of me as a wide-brimmed hat. Still, a grand day out it was, as my sister and I moved off once more to the South Bank to see the Cy Twombly show at Tate Modern.

I wouldn't have missed it for anything, though Twombly's final 'status' remains for me as much a mystery as ever. By which I mean that I've never been more impressed by an artist with fewer painterly virtues, and then less impressed by an artist whose painterly ambitions are clearly enormous. The first Dubuffet-influenced stuff struck me as great, perhaps because I worship the ground Dubuffet walked on, while the earlier graffiti works seemed aimless and the sequence produced at Sperlonga - ten miles from where I live - looked vacuous and muddy: I didn't get the 'symbolic whiteness' business mentioned in the pamphlet at all. The darker crusty stuff in the next two rooms was arresting, with its throbbing dicks and scatological references - I found myself wondering if he'd known Pasolini -, but the Bolsena series, ostensibly influenced by Apollo 11, didn't work at all. I felt that Twombly liked the idea of science, but not the effort involved in doing it. There was the sense of a pastiche of genuine cultural activity, when what he was doing was, basically, winging it by faffing around with formulae that were merely artistic. This carried on into, and informed, the Muybridge stuuff in the next room. My sense is that other artists have done fake science much better than Twombly, although my sister liked these two sequential works very much. She didn't much like the tributes to Nini Pirandello, on the other hand, which I thought wonderful: restrained, elegiac, hard-won. We agreed though on most of the final work. I remember one critic talking about the falling-off in Twombly's ouput, but what impressed us most was the sheer energy of the later work. There was a footling quality about the Roman stuff done in the 60s, despite the down-and-dirty aspirations it clearly had. But Hero and Leandro and The Wilder Shores of Love, particularly the former, were grandly ambitious and achieved works by someone who has suddenly become a great colourist, something that's evident in the Venice series and even more so in the two Four Seasons sequences. The large, brash Bacchus paintings in the final room, where the difference between blood and wine, revelry and madness, is obliterated by the swooping, harrowing scrawl of red, are a great way to end the show.

On the way back, a Ryanair cabin crew member was heard to scream at a passenger. "Stop shouting at me, all right? Stop shouting at me." It's the little things that count.

More on Helms

Jonathan William wrote a poem for Jesse Helms. Here it is:

POEM BEGINNING WITH FIVE WORDS BY
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

glory be to god
for jesse helms jesse
hates fags jesse hates
niggers jesse hates modern
art now that one
thinks about it jesse's
just like most people
in north carolina and
everywhere else what jesse
likes is beauty and
beauty's what bites you
on the butt and
don't leave a hickey
on monday morning we
must be kind to
jesse helms you must
brake for senior republican
senators from north carolina
he has the law
on his sidewinder snake
in the grass that
he is whether he
will brake for us
poets and artsnakes is
another matter thank you
jesus thanks a bunch

and remember to die

Andrew Crozier 1943-2008

Of all the 'Cambridge' poets, Andrew Crozier was the one who touched me most often, and most consistently. Ferry Press was central to the whole enterprise. I loved his intelligence and his eye, and I'm sorry to see him go.

February Evenings
by Andrew Crozier

I begin with a name. It isn't you
profiled against an orange skyline.
Nor the light that dazzled me when I opened a door
and realised after, I don't know how long
I stood there holding on to the doorknob, I faced
due west. It is early morning in March
which is the name of nothing I might hold to
since I can speak only from my temporary place
in the solar system. It is a February evening
the nights are drawing out and I love you
driving your car so attentive to the hazards of traffic
while I observe the passing skyline which so exactly
defines the way your hair falls onto your shoulders
alert to whatever should show up next.
Where were we going? I don't remember arriving
till I enter a room to see the sun setting
framed in the window and know that I still love
while you are elsewhere in its presence there is only
the light it sheds about us as I step into the area
where I can speak your name into a silence
which answers me.

Under the Day

This poem comes from a collection, entitled Creative Accounting, written when the term still had the capacity to amuse or shock. After Enron etc., that's clearly no longer the case, but it still goes some way towards indicating what the poems are up to.

UNDER THE DAY

In the early light of the morning,

for instance, it remained as a wish to be

companionable and was straightaway

erased and there was the pentimento

which was only a come stain on the sheet

fondly ‘remade’ as a model for future

delight-filled emotional hours in the

company, in the company of admiring

stares where you are smaller than,

hiding behind, what is looked at, more

concealed than what is concealed in your

arms, which is merely restless and

anxious to be gone into the dark,

that silvery mind that reflects your

slightest wish and pushes the tentative

on. Into action and the great claims

made for it and pearly days lit from

an almost notional above and, hanging

over that, the pestering and abuse

and the layers of differently coloured

sand in the bottom become oddly

confused as the lowest levels percolate

up, like wanting it hard and often.

And the vigilantes also prefer this hour.

Memory

This is the second poem I'm planning to commit to memory as a whole, instead of in half-recalled scraps. It also, maybe incidentally, acts as a corrective to the over-devout tones of the final verse of my first choice, by John Clare. In fact, reading it again, it acts as a corrective to the entire poem. As Joni Mitchell once, memorably, said: A little yin yang there for you, folks.' It's by Frank O'Hara.

After the first glass of vodka
you can accept just about anything
of life even your own mysteriousness
you think it is nice that a box
of matches is purple and brown and is called
La Petite and comes from Sweden
for they are words that you know and that
is all you know words not their feelings
or what they mean and you write because
you know them not because you understand them
because you don't you are stupid and lazy
and will never be great but you do
what you know because what else is there?

Memory

I don't do New Year's resolutions as a rule. Why set yourself up to be disappointed? Isn't that the world's job? But, watching The History Boys a few days ago (see earlier post) made me realise how few poems I knew all the way through. It also reminded me of how very impressed I was when Renata recited an entire canto of Dante from memory recently. (Canto 15.) So what I'd like to do this year, and this isn't so much a resolution as a fond hope, is memorise the rest of the many poems I can start but not end. The first one is going to be John Clare's I Am, because, like everyone else, I know and love the first three lines and then have very little memory of what happens next. To help me, I'll post it here:

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am, and live - like vapors tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
Even the dearest, that I loved the best,
Are strange - nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smiled or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling, and untroubled where I lie,
The grass below - above the vaulted sky.

For I will consider my cat.... (Tilly)

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself.
For this he performs in ten degrees.
For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.
For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.
For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended.
For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.
For fifthly he washes himself.
For sixthly he rolls upon wash.
For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.
For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.
For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.
For tenthly he goes in quest of food.
For having consider'd God and himself he will consider his neighbour.
For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.
For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance.
For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.
For when his day's work is done his business more properly begins.
For he keeps the Lord's watch in the night against the adversary.
For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.
For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.
For he is of the tribe of Tiger.
For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.
For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses.
For he will not do destruction, if he is well-fed, neither will he spit without provocation.
For he purrs in thankfulness, when God tells him he's a good Cat.
For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon.
For every house is incomplete without him and a blessing is lacking in the spirit.
For the Lord commanded Moses concerning the cats at the departure of the Children of Israel from Egypt.
For every family had one cat at least in the bag.
For the English Cats are the best in Europe.
For he is the cleanest in the use of his forepaws of any quadruped.
For the dexterity of his defence is an instance of the love of God to him exceedingly.
For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature.
For he is tenacious of his point.
For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.
For he knows that God is his Saviour.
For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.
For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.
For he is of the Lord's poor and so indeed is he called by benevolence perpetually--Poor Jeoffry! poor Jeoffry! the rat has bit thy throat.
For I bless the name of the Lord Jesus that Jeoffry is better.
For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in complete cat.
For his tongue is exceeding pure so that it has in purity what it wants in music.
For he is docile and can learn certain things.
For he can set up with gravity which is patience upon approbation.
For he can fetch and carry, which is patience in employment.
For he can jump over a stick which is patience upon proof positive.
For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command.
For he can jump from an eminence into his master's bosom.
For he can catch the cork and toss it again.
For he is hated by the hypocrite and miser.
For the former is afraid of detection.
For the latter refuses the charge.
For he camels his back to bear the first notion of business.
For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly.
For he made a great figure in Egypt for his signal services.
For he killed the Ichneumon-rat very pernicious by land.
For his ears are so acute that they sting again.
For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention.
For by stroking of him I have found out electricity.
For I perceived God's light about him both wax and fire.
For the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast.
For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.
For, tho he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.
For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped.
For he can tread to all the measures upon the music.
For he can swim for life.
For he can creep.

Christopher Smart

Squabbling over kippers

Finally, a story that combines great literature, down-and-dirty sex with minors, gratuitous violence and, er, cultural heritage issues. The house in London in which Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud loved, wrote and fought over smoked fish has been saved from property developers thanks to the pioneering work of the charity Poets in the City. They plan to turn the house into a rendezvous for the poets' admirers and creative offspring.

"It is probably going to be more tea and cake than absinthe," said Graham Henderson chief executive of Poets in the City. "A lot of people have been working hard over a long period of time to get the house saved.

"It is all on the drawing board at the minute, but we envisage a place that is a celebration of Verlaine and Rimbaud, where poets and enthusiasts can meet, do research and hold events."

The house is in Royal College Street, so if you're feeling vaguely maudit, you know where to go.

PS. By pure chance I spent two weeks last year in one of the buildings Verlaine lived in during his years in Paris, in rue Nollet, just round the corner from Place du Clichy. I don't have a photograph to prove this (and I'm sure you believe me in any case). But I do have one I took during my stay which captures something of the rather dark and perverse nature of the two poets' relationship.

Here it is.

THE GOLDEN FLEECE

This is the third section in the sequence of poems dedicated to the Golden Fleece. If you want to know what happened earlier, click on one and two.

CHIRON

1

They’re pushing and shoving to get through

the gate, where darkness appears to be

calling the numbers out. He rides

in a Ferris wheel, wearing the hats of his

numerous god-like fathers. Erotic blockades

slow them all down for a second’s

check on the purchase of their sexuality

and they’re off! harried by waves

into lines of hysterical

bunting above the judges.

A scent of madness

is one thing they share with

the mythic world, which is perhaps

eager to see them gone. It walks

towards an open window without flinching

at the word ‘outside’.

Those waters run deep.

They have, it would seem, been somewhere else

and to drink

is to be alone with them.

To be alone

is one way of living with darkness.

To live with darkness

is one way of counting the flags in the breeze.

And then the breeze drops and the flags are still.

2

It does not always want to be heard.

We extend the untended colonies

just as the travellers

hung in suspension

like an uncut coil of piston rings

will spiral down a staircase

to possess the earth.

And isn’t that

the kind of spiritual miscarriage

only a man with imagination could father,

his long-range devices scattered

across a favourite landscape

whose colour is local to itself. Nostalgic barque.

The fruit of the pine.

This is where nothing need be named.

3

The least confusing thing

opens the voice to boredom and so the voice

becomes desperate, at times confused,

seeming to shut itself out of whatever is

likely to happen. As though I were on the point of

telling you a story about yourself

that has barely begun or describing the room

in which you read

or inventing a language whose logic

would be glass-like and open

onto a brighter garden than the one you know.

All that could be done. Like plaiting strands of

maidenhair

or waiting for the wind to lift or crawling

through the mouth of a cave towards the sound of

falling water and an unexpected, unwanted light.

Anything that doesn’t hurt is transparent

as finding an old

unanswered letter from someone who

signs himself ‘J’. A story

that does not ask to be told. All of its

trickily-guarded secrets are realised before the end.

It makes up a bed in the guest-room for the voice,

flirting before it dies.

4

Love becomes local and woven

into the webbing as dark wings

cover the cathedral square.

I think I am shelling peanuts

or leaving the floor to be cleaned

by someone else as a part of me

scrapes the earth and a part

of me dreams one plausible

end after another. Hopeless

languages are house guests here,

waiting to be entertained with

wine that loosens the tongue as a

prelude to the bird’s vain

silvery gift on your shoulder.

5

Nothing to be done to protect oneself from that

danger, I told him. He listened

as one listens to wind make small talk out of empty

withdrawing hours. The weight of a slow and reluctant

withdrawal into space,

out of the body, into the space of my own. Nothing

can be done. Do everything, emulate

everything. The weight of the city is only partly

disguised by its crimson balloon-like walls

and the voices you hear are truly the voices of

wanting to be possessed. The sadness and evasions

vanish or become

a crueller, more substantial element

than you are used to,

and what is left you can be had.

What wants to be possessed is soft and heavy

as soaking cloth or the terrible lack of

colour inside the body

and the bands that herald darkness are coming soon.

6

One day I shall be taken

into that darkness, and left with the drum.

I shall hold out my arms to be written on,

waking to silence.

This will happen

and no way of talking about it now

can stop me taking the slips,

unfolding them, calling the numbers out,

assigning them each to each.

But the events call out their own,

are pushy like people who make it

in small boats off the cold, unpopulated

coast, or lean on the rails of liners

staring down. The several skins

hold everything, howling, at bay as

small waves eat the moon.