of this evening’s address: the reading.
It was not a good poem, if I say so myself.
As good as the fee, though, and better
than him who that day bought my praises: a man
of so little virtue to sing of
I ended up fleshing it out, as you do,
with something I’d found in the drawer –
a hymn that I’d made a while back, for the twin sons
of Leda, the Dioscuri.
At the feast he had held in his own dubious honour
the little king signed me to start;
but though they were quiet for my halfbaked encomium –
applauding like seals when I’d finished –
his guests, when I started to read from my own stuff,
returned to their wolfing and hollering.
The king, though, was silent. My lyric economies
had not, so it seemed, gone unnoticed.
When he offered me only one-half the struck price,
I made too much show of my anger
knowing, I dare say, his wrath the more just –
but right then I seemed to go deaf;
every eye turned on me, narrowed – at which point
I thought it a smart move to drop it.
However, I fixed each man’s face in my mind,
each man at his rank at the table
(that trick of mine; your coupons, O my rapt listeners,
I’ll have nailed by the end of this poem).
Then this. A young slave-girl ran into the hall
then right up to me, with this message:
two golden-haired boys had arrived at the gate,
and wanted to talk with me. Urgently.
I asked that I might be excused, a small boon
they were more than delighted to grant,
and took a slow stroll to the gate. I found no one.
Bloody kids. I turned back to the hall
and cursed them to heaven. Heaven replied
without hesitation or stint: a great thunderbolt
aimed not at me, but the ridgepole.
The roof groaned and splintered, sagged for a moment
then cracked, and came down on the lot of them.
After the dust and the sirens had died
the wives all came wailing and weeping
to claim what they could of their tenderised menfolk.
Alas, they were all so disfigured
no one could work out whose husband was whose.
Of course I could. The redbeard? Just there,
by the fire. And the scarface? The door. And the hawknose?
Poor woman: look under your feet.
I picked my way down to head of the table
and held the fixed gaze of my patron
as I knelt in the rafters and carefully counted
the rest of my fee from his purse.
The Rat
A young man wrote a poem about a rat.
It was the best poem ever written about a rat.
To read it was to ask the rat to perch
on the arm of your chair until you turned the page.
So we wrote to him, but heard nothing; we called,
and called again; then finally we sailed
to the island where he kept the only shop
and rapped his door until he opened up.
We took away his poems. Our hands shook
with excitement. We read them on lightboxes,
under great lamps. They were not much good.
So then we offered what advice we could
on his tropes and turns, his metrical comportment,
on the wedding of the word to the event,
and suggested that he might read this or that.
We said Now: write us more poems like The Rat.
All we got was cheek from him. Then silence.
We gave up on him. Him with his green arrogance
and ingratitude and his one lucky strike.
But today I read The Rat again. Its reek
announced it; then I saw its pisshole stare;
line by line it strained into the air.
Then it hissed. For all the craft and clever-clever
you did not write me, fool. Nor will you ever.
The Box
If it can stay
at its post,
cross-braced
between
the world
and the
weather
this one
will see
me out:
behold
its dark
scoured
innards,
fragrant
with tea
and rust,
its drum-tight
blown-egg feel, the cone
of air before it, wired and tense
as a lover by a telephone. Bert
Kwakkel, my Dutch
luthier, emptied
so much wood out of the wood
it takes no more than a dropped shoe
or a cleared throat on the hall landing
to set its little blue moan off again.
I port it to its stand. I let it
still. I contemplate it
like a skull.
A Gift
That night she called his name, not mine
and could not call it back
I shamed myself, and thought of that blind
girl in Kodiak
who sat out on the stoop each night
to watch the daylight fade
and lift her child down to the gate cut
in the palisade
and what old caution love resigned
when through that misty stare
she passed the boy to not her bearskinned
husband but the bear
The Wreck
But what lovers we were, what lovers,
even when it was all over –
the deadweight, bull-black wines we swung
towards each other rang and rang
like bells of blood, our own great hearts.
We slung the drunk boat out of port
and watched our unreal sober life
unmoor, a continent of grief;
the candlelight strange on our faces
like the tiny silent blazes
and coruscations of its wars.
We blew them out and took the stairs
into the night for the night’s work,
stripped off in the timbered dark,
gently hooked each other on
like aqualungs, and thundered down
to mine our lovely secret wreck.
We surfaced later, breathless, back
to back, then made our way alone
up the mined beach of the dawn.
Twinflooer
Linnaea Borealis
Tho’ it grows
in oor baald east
alane, it’s still
sic an antrin baste
I anely find it
in dwam or dream,
an catch them
in thir lemanrie
hunkered alow
a wheesh’t circle
cut clean fae
the blackie-sang
or lintie-sang
as ower a cairn,
or wirrikow
in a field o corn.
I pert the girss
an’ there they are,
the shilpit pair
cried for him
wha rived a kingdom
in twa estates –
an’ gently lift
the pallie, lither
bells thegither:
twa fingertips
tak’in up
the exact wecht
o nothin, licht
as the twa-fauld name
on yer ane jimp stem.
Win’-balance,
elf-cleek,
breist o silence –
a word hauf-swicked
fa
e the fa’ o Babel,
whitever it spelt
sae slicht and nesh
it jinked the trouble,
and rode the jaw
as the broch tummel’t
t’ somehow waash
up here, a trick
or holy geg
like the twa-in-yin
breathed in the lug
o the blin’fauld halflin.
Lass, they say
oor nation’s nae
words for love
the wiy we have
for daith, or deil.
Times ye feel
the mair wi gang
intil thon tongue –
hidden, fey
an’ ayebydan –
the less wi hae
the need o ane.
And jist the same,
there’s nae flooer here
aside the yin
I’ve here descreivit;
yet merk this pair,
strecht fae Ovid,
nailed thegither
wame to wame –
tynt in the ither,
ayont a’ thocht,
a’ deed, a’ talk,
hauf-jyned, hauf-rift:
thir heids doverin
unner the licht
yock
o the lift
baald – bald; antrin – rare, singular; baste – beast; dwam – daydream; lemanrie – sexual or illicit love; wheesh’t – stilled; blackie – blackbird; lintie – linnet; cairn – burial mound; wirrikow – scarecrow, demon; girss – grass; shilpit – thin, weak; cried – called; rived – split; pallie – pale; lither – lazy; wecht – weight; licht – light; twa-fauld – two-fold; jimp – slender; win’ – wind; cleek – hook; swicked – cheated; slicht – slight; nesh – soft; jinked – dodged; jaw – wave, breaker; broch – tower; geg – gag, joke; twa-in-yin – supposedly ‘the horseman’s word’; blin’fauld – blindfolded; halflin – adolescent; daith – death; deil – devil; gang – go; fey – doomed; ayebydan – eternal; descreivit – described; strecht – straight; wame – belly; tynt – lost; ayont – beyond; thocht – thought; doverin – nodding in sleep; yock – yoke; lift – sky, heavens
’96
her sleek
thigh
on my
cheek
a flayed
tongue
in the wrong
head
no poem
all year
but its dumb
inverse
sow’s ear
silk purse
The Light
When I reached his bed he was already blind.
Thirteen years had gone, and yet my mind
was as dark as on my ordination day.
Now I was shameless. I begged him for the light.
‘Is it not taught all is illusory?
And still you did not guess the truth of it?
There is no light, fool. Now have you awoken?’
And he laughed, and then he left us. I was broken.
I went back to my room to pack my things,
my begging-bowl, my robe and cup; the prayer-mat
I would leave. It lay there, frayed and framed
in a square of late sun. And out of pure habit –
no, less, out of nothing, for I was nothing –
I watched myself sit down for one last time.
The Landing
Long months on the rising path
I found where I’d come in
and knew the word of heat, the breath
of air move on my skin
and saw the complex upper light
divide the middle tread
then to my left, the darker flight
that fell back to the dead
So like the ass between two bales
I stopped in the half-shade
too torn to say in which exile
the shame was better paid
And while I stood to dwell upon
my empty-handed quest
I watched the early morning sun
send down its golden ghost
It paused just on the lowest step
as if upon a hinge
then slowly drew the dark back up
like blood in a syringe
and suddenly I did not care
if I had lived or died
But then my hand fell on the lyre
that hung dead at my side
and with as plain a stroke I knew
I let each gutstring sound
and listened to the notes I drew
go echoing underground
then somewhere in the afternoon
the thrush’s quick reply –
and in that instant knew I’d found
my perfect alibi
No singer of the day or night
is lucky as I am
the dark my sounding-board, the light
Zen Sang at Dayligaun
As aw we ken o the sternless derk
is the warld it fa’s amang
aw we hae o the burn and birk
is thir broon or siller sang
Each pair o een in lift or yird
micht hae them by anither
tho’ the birk chants t’ nae baist or bird
nor burn tae human brither
For the lyart sang’s no’ staneyraw,
thon gowden sang’s no’ stane
an’ there’s nae burn or birk at aw
but jist the sang alane
dayligaun – twilight; sternless – starless; derk – dark; birk – birch; siller – silver; een – eyes; lift – sky; yird – earth; chants – sings; baist – beast; lyart – grizzled, silvered; staneyraw – lichen; gowden – golden
The White Lie
I have never opened a book in my life,
made love to a woman, picked up a knife,
taken a drink, caught the first train
or walked beyond the last house in the lane.
Nor could I put a name to my own face.
Everything we know to be the case
draws its signal colour off the sight
till what falls into that intellectual night
we tunnel into this view or another
falls as we have fallen. Blessed Mother,
when I stand between the sunlit and the sun
make me glass: and one night I looked down
to find the girl look up at me and through
me with such a radiant wonder, you
could not read it as a compliment
and so seek to return it. In the event
I let us both down, failing to display
more than a halfhearted opacity.
She turned her face from me, and the light stalled
between us like a sheet, a door, a wall.
But consider this: that when we leave the room,
the chair, the bookend or the picture-frame
we had frozen by desire or spent desire
is reconsumed in its estranging fire
such that, if we slipped back by a road
too long asleep to feel our human tread
we would not recognise a thing by name,
but think ourselves in Akhenaten’s tomb;
then, as things ourselves, we would have learnt
we are the source, not the conducting element.
Imagine your shadow burning off the page
as the dear world and the dead word disengage –
in our detachment, we would surely offer
such offence to that Love that will suffer
no wholly isolated soul within
its sphere, it would blast straight through our skin
just as the day would flush out the rogue spark
it found still holding to its private dark.
But like our ever-present, all-wise god
incapable of movement or of thought,
no one at one with all the universe
can touch one t
hing; in such supreme divorce,
what earthly use are we to our lost brother
when we must stay partly lost to find each other?
Only by this – this shrewd obliquity
of speech, the broken word and the white lie,
do we check ourselves, as we might halt the sun
one degree from the meridian
then wedge it by the thickness of the book
that everything might keep the blackedged look
of things, and that there might be time enough
to die in, dark to read by, distance to love.
from
ORPHEUS
A version of Rilke’s
Die Sonette an Orpheus
Leaving
Raise no stone to his memory. Just let
the rose put forth each year, for his name’s sake.
Orpheus. In time, perhaps he’ll take
the shape of this, and then of that – and yet
we need no other name: Orpheus, we say
wherever the true song is manifest.
He comes and goes. Therefore are we not blessed
if he outlasts the flowers for a few days?
But though his constant leaving is a torment,
leave he must, if we’re to understand.
So even as his voice alters the moment,
he’s already gone where no one can pursue;
even the lyre cannot ensnare his hands.
And yet in this defiance, he stays true …
Tone
Only one who’s also raised
his lyre among the shades
may live to render up the praise
that cannot fail or fade.
Only one who tasted death’s