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.

Credit crunch

Near the bottom of this blog on the right, you'll find a widget that tells you how much the blog is 'worth'. Now, I don't want to get into just what's meant by 'worth', in this context or any other, but it's interesting to see that the financial crisis of the last couple of weeks has had its effect. My blog used to be worth $10,161.72. Now it's plummeted to a mere $9,597.18. What have I been doing wrong? And how do I get my hands on what's left?

if you want to see how much your blog - or indeed, anybody's blog - is worth, click here.

Moi Soleil

I haven't got a lot of time for Jeff Koons. After all, he ruined the reputation of Cicciolina, a perfectly respectable hard-working pornostar-cum-politician in the pre-Berlusconi days when politics in Italy was a serious matter. But I can't see what's so shocking about the idea that Versailles should hold a show of his work. It's exactly the sort of high-level overpriced trash that places like Versailles, and indeed the whole concept of 'royalty', feed on. At least it's honest OTT vulgarity with no artistic worth or intrinsic value. Not like the dreadful would-be classical pseudo-rusticated tosh our own royal family seems to prefer when it's forced to think about art rather than horses. The Sun King wouldn't have minded, if he'd had an ounce of sense. I like to think he'd have recognised a kindred spirit. So why should anyone else? 

You can find out more about it here. I'm planning to visit Versailles myself in a few weeks' time, so I'll be able to let you know what it's actually like to see Michael Jackson and Bubbles in the great one's bedroom.

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.

THE GOLDEN FLEECE

Why wait? This is the second sequence of the group:

MEDEA

1
A wild west so fictitious
only cowboys could live there.
I leave my cave and take some clothes to the water.
A fine dust in the water
stains them yellow. Someone arrives
and talks of a mythical beast,
recently slaughtered, gargantuan, bearded head
on the prairies of a land that
is also mythical. Myth hurts.

Myth hurts. I am being used
to describe an attitude towards value.


2
The power of magic is denied
when it works. I too. I too
am afraid of power. As though
the boats would not have slowed down
to retrieve him whole. Only a little
time for that magic to work. A fine dust
in the folds of cloth,
in the knots and tangles of the wool.


3
The natives work themselves
into the imagination, like dust
that rubs off the nap
of a cloth, that penetrates
the fibres. Just as the cloth
falls apart the dust
stiffens into the rigid
form of the robe. The native
walks out of the cave and
towards the river
and everyone is scared.

THE GOLDEN FLEECE

Time for a little verse, I think. This is the first part of a group of poems inspired specifically by the myth of the golden fleece and, obliquely, by Pasolini's Medea (or maybe that should be the other way round). The group - complicatedly - forms the second half of the collection entitled VALUE, sections of which have appeared below (click on poem, or value, to find them). The Golden Fleece has two rather lovely epigraphs:

In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend. The Communist Manifesto

Of course the stars were nearer before we could fly - why else should the universe expand? Tom Raworth

JASON 1

1
I seem impervious to pain.
Spectators applaud, I continue
to cross the archipelago, the tiny birds
collapsing like Asian kites

and the lights must be laid
on as the decoration of a blade’s
journey toward the clarity it
cannot stand. All of the stations are static.
Videos in the cancer ward in a ‘far off’
place, where he lovingly reinstates
the small neglected things,
gilds them with leaf of his heart.

Impassive housewives break wind
among shelves in a market under the buzzing
rails. They’re struggling as always,
they’re talking about the waves
of detached and sacred soap.

2
A bareback rider composed of
winking bulbs, stationary and
electric and blue as
benign flesh. Only the instruments escape
the taint of drunkenness in the maker.
Light moves across daring scalpels
in the surgeon’s hands, kindly
displayed to the objects, the gaudy
entrance of daylight into the
National Grid. His escape

is so often imitated it becomes
inimitable and novel
to walk back into the bar’s
description of itself, its
clients, its
emblems, moving
from wall to wall.

3
The cables are dangling from the roof.
The roof is a temporary structure.
Under the structure is a space, enclosed.
The space is organised.
O twinkling stars.
If only to cover the event
all objects that reflect the light
shall assemble here.

Demand that cannot frame
its words, a cloud
that enters the room
to fill it.

I think I was waiting for that light
to coax me in, to inherit the burden
of the torch-bearer, blinded
by so much improbable splendour.

4
I am walking a little apart from that.
I am leaning into the lit
mirror of a well. What’s opportune
throws smoking scarves round the sun.
It is always too late to get up
and even for the tulip
dawn remains simply decorative.

The mountains leave
the household, the household is anxious
to be left to its own devices
as it works its way into the heart.
I am staring down on the lit
riot of cells and the city is casting
about my hands a frayed ring
from a wistful and delicately drawn
exchange. The generator down
the line and a sudden
infusion of neon
attack my boxed ears.
I am walking toward the source
of the attack which becomes a bulb which
becomes a button which becomes a

bear which becomes a back
which becomes a rider
which becomes
what you said I was all the time.

5
This too shall be taken apart
or be extended, infinitely,
through the city and all that we know
of the city’s madness shall be written
on the palm of one hand
that cannot even touch another
without leaving filth.
As I hold up chaos to the glass
I see my own hands hold it there,
a cowering frame that wards off
knowledge of itself. A bareness
like thrusting
an arm into fire and feeling

nothing, neither pain nor heat, only
the chain of the body’s affections,
appalling glimpses, barely
enough to see daylight by.

Your bodies, their bigotry

Amnesty International's recent advocacy of abortion in the case of rape, incest or risk to the woman's health has inevitably got up some clerical noses. One of the largest belongs to cardinal Martino, president of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, who is quoted as follows:

"The inevitable consequence of this decision, according to the cardinal, will be the suspension of any financing to Amnesty on the part of Catholic organisations and also individual Catholics,"

Well, he can say all he likes about what the hierarchy is supposed to do with its fabulous, unaccounted for, wealth, but individual catholics may continue to feel that the work done by AI continues to deserve their support. Let's hope so. It's certainly persuaded me to join up, for the first time in years.

In the meantime, Eggs Benedict has returned to the dangers represented by television and the Internet. Right, like BBC documentaries, Eggs? Readily available on Google? Or maybe it isn't that personal.

If he's so against the commercialisation of human dignity why is he doing everything in his (considerable) power to ensure that Berlusconi takes over the reins of the Italian government again?

Sunday lunch

Last Sunday, we went to have lunch in a trattoria in Borgo Grappa, one of a handful of satellite villages built under pre-war fascism between the sea and Latina, the whole area created ad hoc from the malarial Pontine marshes by workers imported from the north-east.

The roads are straight, laid out in a grid and lined with maritime pines or palms, my favourite combination of trees and typical of this part of Italy, strung as it is between north and south; though clumps of eucalyptus, believed to provide protection against malaria, are also present. We pass stables, newly-built villas, squat prefabricated houses, fields of buffalo, the kind that produce mozzarella, as we drive from the Via Pontina towards the sea.

The trattoria's called Da Giggetto and it's been recommended to us by Joanna, who meets us there. It's on a corner, set back a little from the road and the forecourt is occupied by a collection of ill-assorted tables, except that their ill assortment is the source of their charm. As in every trattoria worthy of its calling, the tablecloths are white and starched, the space between tables generous, the bread in its basket already on the table. Above our heads is a sort of dense green tarpaulin, slightly sagging, with direct light filtering through the cracks. A breeze blows through the oleanders planted in tubs between the tables and the road.

We've booked, but there's no need. Apart from us, there's a table of six to my right, ten yards away, and behind us, in a patch of sun, an oldish man with tattoos and a cap. The waiter is the owner's son, the owner takes our order, his wife, or a woman who might be his wife, pops over to see how we're getting on, the puddings are made by their daughter. The menu's typed and there are odd, amusing comments, also typed, and quotations from Pavese and writers I don't remember. When he isn't serving the owner joins the tattooed man with the cap. The wine is local, and cold, and good. The food is excellent: seafood, fish, porcini mushrooms, served in abundance and without frills.

In the middle of the forecourt is a narrow wooden boat, the kind of craft you'd expect to see native Americans in; we almost, but finally don't, ask how it got there. Inside, in a long high-ceilinged room, there are photographs of the great and good, and merely famous. The whole place has a dolce vita air about it, of an Italy that was still provincial and unstandardised, generous with itself and others. A backwater, really, in the best sense of the word. Much of its charm comes from the fact that there is nothing here of the self-important cultural Italy of the great cities, nothing that dates back more than sixty or seventy years. It can still afford to be relaxed, and unselfconscious.

Afterwards we go to a kiosk on the beach and the mood's the same. I half expect Alberto Sordi to wander in and order a glass of chinotto. An elderly gay couple, the fatter one with a jet black fringe, the other with blond hair twisted up and held in place by what looks like an ornament of bone, are enjoying this early, unexpected sun.

Grace... to be born and live...

Jane just sent me this photograph of a protest in Dalston Lane, in London, about houses and shops being demolished for some brand new city type development and it made me think of Grace Paley, who would no doubt be angry about such a thing.

So I looked out an interview with her, by A.M. Homes, that's a pleasure and an education to read.

The title to this post, by the way, comes from a Frank O'Hara poem, and continues... 'as variously as possible.' There can't be two writers whose lives are less similar than those of Paley and O'Hara. But I like to think that O'Hara would have endorsed wholeheartedly Paley's claim: All my habits are bad.

Reasons to be cheerful, if you're Peter Kay

This article will probably have been blogged by just about every struggling writer in the English-speaking world. So why should I be left out? Sob.

Any ideas who 'Jane' might be?

No success like failure

I was surprised recently when the name of a friend of mine came up in a conversation I was having with someone who works in the media, younger than me, finger on the zeitgeist: let's call him J. I met the friend who was mentioned at university and last year, after more than 25 years, we made contact and found that our friendship was, against all odds, intact. In those 25 years, I've done what I've done, working abroad, writing and so on, and my friend has become a household name in Britain, much loved and suitably rewarded (You know who you are!) for his work in television and theatre.

And what did J. say? That it was odd to see how two people could start off equal and yet one of them should become so successful and the other should end up a... At this point his voice trailed away but it was fairly clear that the word he wasn't prepared to utter in my presence was 'failure'.

And I started to look at my life and my friend's, and weigh them against each other. We've both done pretty much what we've wanted to do in our lives. We both have relationships that are strong and have lasted for over 20 years. He has children and I don't, but J. didn't know that. We've both achieved recognition for our work (though mine has come much more recently, and to a far more modest degree). We're both surrounded by friends. We both have houses we love and are proud of. We both have dogs... I could go on.

In fact, the only significant differences are two. Money and fame.

So why was I so surprised?

BEATING TIME

Another poem from the collection entitled VALUE. Once again, it seems like the work of a slightly deranged person I'm not sure I'd want to know, though some of the cultural references still mean something to me. Translate 'the new thingliness' into German and you should be able to track down the identity of Rasha, the black dove. Oh yes. The River Manifold, for much of its length, flows underwater.

BEATING TIME
‘The conscience is to you as what is known,
The unknowable gets to be known.
Familiar things seem a long way off.’
John Ashbery

1
Fool music from a country station
and the murdering king is accomplished out of clay
as the granite slopes wear woven caps.

He borrows a voice from the clack of iguanas,
he swallows a compass, he paces the carpet,
recoils from his maker into the head

of a Chinese dragon. It is there he can breathe.
Don’t scald his porcelain lungs with blue.

Crossfire. Blockades. The skeleton of his aunt.
Let’s play that tune again.
His lampshade chest is the new thingliness.

Requests from an imagined hospital
palaver with the painted feathers of song-birds,
the ochre-stained river. He whispers
his blood group into the mouth
of Rasha, the black dove.

Now there’s an address that could be yours.

2
I wanted to be what
you said I was
all the time I
was listening to the radio.

A specific number of dead
on the shelf
a portrait in wood
of a detumescent nude.

As the people walked towards the clinic
I harboured my boat and waited too.

Everywhere it was raining
alarm clocks
and opening hands
and disconcerted

musical gems were tumbling
from a silk-lined bag.
That was the season for speaking in tongues.

All the time I was listening to the radio.
Now it is the motion from one thing to another

or it is the place where bad stories are made
to convince us of the world’s bad use of us

or a kind of art denied the human figure,
vague cushion stifling our fictions of
life, love, death, avocados. To imitate
so many people becomes a kind of coin,
the impecunities of an even pettier trade
Poor naked city.
Was that where I was?

I seem to walking into an even more curious
war than the one I left so many years ago.

3
Capable of its most intimate reach,
a thong on the backs of giggling children,

that nervous flush in the veins of exchange
in a country whose crops are nylon and beads,
mirrors that reflect in the many images of the king
his fatuous dance around fire

like the magnetised needle in his stomach.
He shall become despised, he hopes,

as bitter water is despised,
a certain kind of popular air whistled between the teeth
while window blinds beat around a wooden bar.

His language is not held in common, his sex

is a question asked three times.
His arms are open at the wrist

as he reaches toward the pear tree.
He sucks out the fruit
from under the dappled skin.

4
The river goes under the earth
a second and final time. Timeliness as the dragon
swings on the calendar, as the music
arranges itself on the black caked
scimitar chest of the king.

He looks at the chart.
He folds his raw gums up.
He is waiting to be unsexed.
He confuses ‘war’ with ‘ward’ or the fanciful tangling
of a river’s art, frivolous and intense
along the boundaries of a fine
state to be in. He offers the doctor
his medicine. The River Manifold.

Articulate the soft bones of his anger,
supple as a glove or translucent fish, bury him
up to the neck in rats, words, death.
Bite on the bullet, death.
As to the leavings
something will come of all this.
Lick treacle off a pierced spoon in the nursery.
In that mirror all mirrors are touching.

5
Listen to all that water,
so near it hurts.

He pushes the leveller down to his knees,
his language the delicate pink

of entirely separate notes
in a bloodied stream, a good

number to follow. He wakes

in the cabinet of feathers, his earlobes
bleed like the entrails of a glass

and wounded gazelle.
His mouth is the deranged wardrobe

in which a seamstress, weeping,
points out magnetic north.

6
In the riveting lack of its
dark mineral growth the compasses
are what happen. He pushes a spade
through that crystalline powder
that is water’s revenge
on the garden. He asks his
penis for a little light relief,
he opens to the gurgling
passage of water, of red and
white cells, still wondering if the dragon
is out to get him. Too much earth
beneath his feet and drinking
deep is what the earth,
requiring him, will ask of its
own blood. He takes no more chances,
wrestling down the window. Myopic
children tango from the spar right
into the sea. Each new direction
splints the disarmed politics
of their wordy, glistening lasso
as it flashes back over the meadow
grass, the nightingale loop,
the vicious exactness
greasing their palms with a
tacky silver, residual light
that might as well nestle under the ribs
as become a sick bird fluttering
for its exit, tendentious
signature signing off the main
man. Listen as he takes off
his sewn white plimsolls, his
hairy blue sweater and rolls them up
and stuffs them into the mouth
of his household god. Hard butter
would melt into the shards of
prophecy there and then be dumb.

Pots

I've got three small ceramic pots by Christiane Perrochon that are among the loveliest things I've ever owned. They're no more than four or five inches high. In the photograph, they're standing on my study floor and I've only just noticed how the colours match. I've had them for years, don't know how much they're worth, don't care. All I know is that I'd like some more.

Love tiff at Arcore

I'm not quite convinced by this story. Berlusconi's wife has suffered in silence all these years, even putting up with her husband's insinuations that she's having an affair with Massimo Cacciari, philosopher and Mayor of Venice. Now she loses her marital rag because he's been caught flirting with a starlet (employed, not surprisingly, by Mediaset, B.'s TV empire) on a programme broadcast by, you guessed it, Mediaset.

Given that all publicity is good, this won't do Berlusconi any harm at all. It's given him a chance to talk about the value of marriage, respect for the family, etc. at a time when these issues are front page. Some of his best wife jokes are already being recycled. He's a comic, a little bit naughty, a devoted husband, a flirt. What's not to vote?

What's civil about this?

The government is still arguing about exactly what to do with all these people who just don't want to get married and breed. And not only the government. The Italian president, ex-communist Giorgio Napolitano, threw in his tuppenny-hapenny worth a couple of days ago, announcing that the Vatican's views on PACS, or civil unions, should be taken into account. If this was a conciliatory gesture, it backfired. The episcopal council yesterday said that no compromise was possible, the traditional role of the family was sacred, marriage was an absolute value, etc. The usual position, in other words, and why not? Isn't grunting what pigs do best, even exclusively?

With 56% of Italians now in favour of civil unions, the opinion of God's ferret and his merry gang of sex-obsessed septuagenarians is daily less significant. The problem's within the government itself. Mastella, Minister of Justice, refuses to endorse the bill as a matter, apparently, of conscience after a career based on the most shameless political expediency. An anti-abortionist called Paola Binetti whines on about family, family, family, as though marriages will crumble at the merest whiff of visiting rights in hospital. (Hey! Why go to all the fuss of getting married? I can watch you die without it!)

Meanwhile, the two women responsible for drawing up the bill, because of course it's women's work, are arguing about how long a civil union should last before one can inherit the pension of the other. They're doing a Sugar and Spice routine, like police interrogators. Sugar says five years is long enough. Spice says fifteen, but may come down to ten. Will this be applied retroactively? I don't think so. Great news to couples in their fifties or sixties, who may have been together for decades, like my friend Dan and his partner.

And how long do widows/widowers (I'm talking the real thing here, obviously, the genuinely ex-married) have to be together to qualify? Not one fucking day.

Thinking about Cologne

... made me think about an exhibition at the Ludwig Museum, entitled DC: Naked Drawings, a large white room full of drawings done directly on the walls by a Romanian artist called Dan Perjovschi. It was a great show, graffiti that didn't congratulate or preen itself, that didn't pretend to be both radical and desperate for gallery space; angry and amused and wry. The photograph (mine) isn't great but it's the idea that counts, and the sly simplicity of the execution. The catalogue talks about democratisation, but surely that misses the point. This kind of stuff, if it works, is as hard as drawing a perfect circle.

It was amusing to see how people reacted differently to the show. Some people walked in and glanced round for a moment, then left. Some stayed, and laughed, and thought. Others were entertained initially and then offended, and these seemed to fall into two categories; Americans, for whose government little respect was shown, and young Catholics in Cologne for World Youth Day. Jan wasn't thrilled about them at all.

Because thinking about Cologne makes me think about Jan...

Slow food

I had lunch today with an old friend and colleague, between exam shifts in the engineering faculty, processing students for language credits. We were actually in a hurry, so what we were looking for was slow food served fast, rather than fast food served slow, which is often the case in Rome, where even a MacDonald's queue can seem to take for ever.

We found a trattoria on Viale Marconi that I must have walked past a hundred times in the past, when I lived in the area, but never entered. Maybe because the window is full of forbidding notices saying NO CARTA DI CREDITO NO BANCOMAT NO TICKET, which means that all they accept is money in the traditional sense, something I was short of at the time. Today, though, it was raining, Lynne felt flu-ey, the bar next door was full. We went in.

Red and white checked tablecloths, walls half-panelled with wood (travertine would have been better, but hey! as Charlie might say), the tables large enough for everything that had to be put on them. No music, no fuss, the smell of well-cooked food. Nothing costing more than €7/8 on the menu. I'm off carbs so I ordered scamorza with prosciutto and some green stuff (cicoria) tossed with chili pepper and garlic. Lynne went for bucatini alla matriciana and an artichoke. Water (we were doing exams) and a basket of delicious bread (said Lynne, I couldn't touch it). Her plate of pasta would have served two. €25 (including my coffee). In just over half an hour.

Who else was there? University people, even a barone or two with their relative lackeys, a couple of pensioners eating tripe and sipping dark red wine, a trio of girls at the top of the stairs that leads down to the lavatory. There's a big hand-written sign by their table saying LUCE SCALA and an arrow pointing to a light switch. You turn it on going down and off coming up, or else. It's thanks to this kind of little saving, I suppose, that the place still exists.

Because one of the saddest things that's happened to Rome in the 25 years I've known it is the disappearance of places like this. They were two a penny. Now they're almost as rare as eel and pie shops.

HEROES

This was first published in Angel Exhaust Ten, edited by Andrew Duncan, its publication solicited, I believe, by John Wilkinson, for which much thanks. It's an interesting (I hope) hybrid of the Cambridge School and large doses of Lorca. I don't know if the magazine is still available, but, just in case, here it is. It's part of a large group of poems that have never been published, entitled VALUE.

HEROES

‘A walled dream in which I am stupid
or a bullfighter’
R.F. Walker

1
He wants to make it more perfect.
The beaker belongs in his hand and a golden
armpit over his mouth can’t stop their
vicious whispers for more than a beat.
He is living in the surf.
The music belongs to them that
his feet will dance from, scared
to find himself
the dancer in their despite.
No one has told him off for a thousand years.
How does he know what to do?
He began by counting the waves
that rising now will engulf him
and he knows their numbers as beads of white
or as the scattering of white birds,
numbers revealing his pitiful age.
That pleasure is his for a moment
and the bending of a suddenly prolonged
lightning toward his feet, which burn.
When one day he will count ten fingers
on both his hands, and know himself whole.

2
And then he will be noticed,
everyone moving harmoniously
round the green walls of his harbour
which is all commotion.
Breaking days,
to celebrate the departure of calm
as a breach in the climate, are pinkly
vacant. And he is happy
to be lost among friends, whose concern
is the delicate frill of his suit.
He gathers them up as fruit in his gloves.

3
He is the work of his own dismayed genius.
An amphora found in the city after
excavation crumbles into dust, his mother’s
arm. To the applause of crowds
he runs through the dance that will
fire their alien tribunes, who scrape and bow.
His charm is to be foolish as they are
foolish, with his wrists in a bowl of acid.
They have come so far for nothing but his smile
they can barely see in the earthbound light
what children they are. Those he has banished
gather in their nets
while a red tongue licks from a cloud.
These have been spared, in the great
waves they are crushed to infinite sand.
He raises a finger and a new music is born.
An acrobat turns on the stars to scream.

4
Let blood. Peel off his nipples,
starfish. The philosophic jaw
swings over his tranquil harbour,
midges on its slowly-dissolving
yellow screen. Not soft enough
to be wrought as the landing-stage
sets up a film he saw years ago
in the bright arena, and bled.
He cannot bear that flatulent music.

5
His love has become grenades in the arms of girls.
They take him by the nose through mirrors
that mistake the word ‘ghetto’ for ‘grotto’.
Under the rain he makes sisters out of flowers and owls.
The house is sliding. Where is the house?
He is walking uphill between sofas and trays of cachous.
He is a black man making good.
He is searching for strangers of his own kind.
Glass-like, they wait by his raised eye
for kisses and a basket of
wounded hair. The girls explode.

6
Alone now, he presses his thumb
against the neck of the vase.
He rests an ear on the stalk of its green throat.
Casually spread with gold
the evening dips in his throat
a violent rod, the engine of desire just
turning over as it probes, its stations
revolving as echoes in the machine.

Goldenrod. Love. The break of the lights
on the turrets, swinging his way.
He pauses for the applause of guns
to fathom his silence. He looks like
winning when a breach appears in the smoke,
his seventh labour
barely begun. A little wound.

7
He is wearing that horrible light
that is love for others. Windily showing
his disregard he sloughs it off as
symptom of a gilt and whore-like age.
Glistening in what darkness becomes him
now and as though at rest
in the colonnade of his bones a dog barks
to be put to sleep. They dance in each other’s eyes,
ten boys with the gestures of one, a curtain
straining to be closed.
If anyone answers he is lost,
beginning to die for the others.
In a palmful of water his velvet cries
are expanding always
expanding into muscle.

8
The weight of his sinews is covered in fur,
hysterical and white as a fountain.
A snowman. Kissing its scandalous mouth
he is gifted with the gift of words
to cord his thighs, to make lifting a bird
in the lightning, to silence the clouds,
to tell him what he wants to hear,
the numeracy of the bone structure,
the bees in the throat chamber making music,
dresses that heal the sadly distended armies,
the dream that occurs as a junction box
to re-route the seasons into his mouth.

9
Blue smoke that bears no repetition,
that stutters its cloud-like past
within the bell, the clamour of its wanting
waking the man. He is a statue
under the watery feet of Goths,
he is a heart of legendary blackness,
he is a vein
that runs from that heart
towards a singing and vacant history
of the self among roses and storks
tattooed on a chest, he is a dragon
mounting a girl, he is a girl, he is a clock
dismembered by horses in Paris in the rain,
he is a table made of flesh
in an empty house by a lake,
his filth and compromise
the breaking of love against a coast
suddenly there, its whiteness
and the fluted numbers.
Thus he’s divided
into cards and their numerous arrangements for death
around a central point, where he is perfect
as the decorative art of his veins shall become.