the stones stood.
I can’t remember how long
we stayed.
We danced around the stones
and took photos.
I still remember
the thin tune playing
in my charmed head.
On the ferry back to Holyhead
my bare wrist pinged
where my silver bracelet used to be.
Was it just something superstitious
young Yeats said
that made me believe
the fairies had taken
the silver bracelet
instead of me?
THE HOUSE
Is this what middle age
does to the imagination,
setting up haunted
house
in every idling cranny?
It’s time I sent
my own premature ghost
scarpering
to a cobwebbed nunnery.
AFTER BRUEGEL
Let me join the frilled and flying
damned
and live vivid
as a wet dog.
THREE SONNETS
I . IS IT NOT THE THING?
After Byron
Trying to get a gutless friend
to get it
Byron wrote
Is it not life, is it not the thing?
He was praising the bawdy
spurt
of his own poem, his own
ballsy Don Juan.
Every poet wants to write the poem
that penetrates
with the ice-cold shock
of the Devil’s prick.
The poem that will fuck you awake
or kill you.
II. WHAT A PLUNGE!
After Woolf
This morning the street
stings
like salt in a happily healing
wound.
A memory breaks under
your ribs
and plunges you
in turbulent sweet water.
Life is so dangerous,
but this morning you can take
the wave
right to the sparkling shore.
You can bear knowing
the street will one day dump you.
III. BEAUTIFULLY BONKERS
After Blake
Blake’s burning Bow
turns and turns
in your inadequate trembling
hands.
What holy war
are you trembling for?
What purging dazzling madness
are you raising?
You squirm in paradox.
Hell today.
Paradise tomorrow.
It’s all bliss and grist.
Or is it just those Arrows of Desire
spiking your drink again?
BLUEBOTTLES
In living there is always
the terror
of being stung
of something
coming for you
on the unavoidable wave.
In living there is always
the terror
of the alien boneless
thing
of something
blue
coming for you
from the blue and salty sea
spat
on your bare and shrinking
skin.
In living there is always
the terror
of the poison finding
your heart
of something
whose stingers
will stretch over you
like stars
with an ancient burning
patience.
THINGS
I.M. Ruth Tedeschi
Wafting
half hallucinating with brain fatigue
through Berlin’s massive
Pergamon Museum
I think
how strange. how sobering.
that our things outlive us.
Whether it’s the gleaming
loot
of gold jewellery
and silver plate
of vivid, intimate
usefulness
in the broken
ceramic jug.
Things
outlive our sweetest
most durable friends
things
stolidly, persistently
outlive our wildest
loves
where we fling ourselves
into the heart
of the black spitting fire
and declare
we’ll live here
forever.
We bury our friends
we sink in their clay and weep.
We walk –
in time –
dripping wet
with remorseless
common sense
out of love’s fabulising flame.
It’s just our things
that survive
dissolving in the end
even the most sticky
of our clutching
smudges.
POEMS: JANUARY–AUGUST 2004
For Andy with love
THE NINTH HOUR
The ninth hour
is here
The ninth hour
makes no sense
The ninth hour
rises up wearily
in a freezing mist.
I have come to a river
of blood and vinegar
I have come to a river
where only pain
keeps its feet
I have come to a bridge
of dissolving bone
I have come to a place
of burning cold
I am trapped in a space
deformed
by my own
leprous fear
have I the strength
to pay suffering its due?
* * *
There is a calm
that is no cousin
to courage
There is a calm
that sits
like a quivering ape
under the python’s
hypnotising eye.
Everything makes you
shiver
The hot wind. The rank river.
The poisonous euphoria.
But it’s your shrivelling
flesh
that has the whip hand
Your flesh
has its own tumorous
will
You may think
you have been here
before
You may think
your quicksilver spirit
has your furtive flesh
licked
But darkness
is stronger
than light
The flesh knows best
who’ll win line honours
in this fight
* * *
The ninth hour
is here
The ninth hour
makes no sense
Don’t pray
for a flash flood
delivering miracle
or clarity
During the ninth hour
reason dies of thirst
Your blood stagnates
stale
as a base metal
in your mouth
You dangle
in a cacophony
of retching noise
with no grandiose riffs
of heroism
You will never forget
the foul sound
of the ninth hour.
* * *
I have come to a river
of blood and vinegar
I am here,
ninth hour,
I am here
stripped and shivering.
But listen, ninth hour,
listen
and pay heed
to a new sound
in me
I am not here
silent and alone
Do you hear
the fighting hiss
of this geyser
in me?
I stand my ground
in the undaunted spray
and company
of my own words.
NUMBERS
I get magic
(sometimes I get more
than I bargain for)
but I don’t get
numbers.
Numbers do worse
than humiliate
or elude me
they don’t add up.
I am no algebra tart
ravished
by the meretricious music
of the spheres.
My eyes and nose
never streamed
with incontinent ecstasy
through geometry classes
as my disastrous triangles
collapsed in a cacophony
around me.
Perhaps it’s a failing
to grasp
or even want
the utterly perfect number
burning through my retina
like the utterly perfect morning.
Instead I peer
with nauseating vertigo
into the deep dark pitch
of numbers
like an exhausted mammoth
dangerously tottering
on the edge
of a bottomless mystery.
THE HAMPSTEAD HEATH TOAD
For Roger Deakin
It was one of those
beautiful
English summer nights.
The lilac shimmer of silent
lakes.
The whisper of ghost fox
through your heartbeat.
But the toad in the hand
stank real.
Stank through his palpitating
skin.
Stank of fear.
Is the fabled hallucinogenic
touch of toads
just as Macbeth
witnessed
a hypnotising snare
of toxic apparition?
What thrilling doors of perception
open
to the musky ooze
of panting paralysed
terror?
Of course
intoxicated on moonshine
you wanted
and will always want
the toad
to calm down
smell sweet
and give up his phantasmagorical
secrets
generously.
But the toad in the hand
protected himself.
The toad in the hand
stank real.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE’S GRAVE
How do you bury a poet?
Surely not
how they buried Baudelaire
thrown in with his parents
like an infant death.
It stretches
to a ghastly irony
Pasternak’s remark
that poets should remain
children.
Do poets really want to trade
the lingering savour
of experience
for guileless eyes?
There’s something
repulsive
about an empty fresh
adult face.
Such baby faces
can be seen in uniform
or with a foot
on a slaughtered tiger.
They can be capable
of anything
or a long lullaby
of nothing.
I want to exhume Baudelaire
and give him his own
magnificent mercurial vault.
From one angle
an arching ebony cat.
From another
sneering black marble
spleen.
No poet
dead or alive
should rot
with their parents.
EARLY MORNING AT THE MERCY
This six a.m. moment
in the cool-blue cool
of early morning
is not eternal.
It will pass
like the faint bat squeak
of an early bird call.
It is silent again
even as the dark
fades
and the white eyes of buildings
emerge
slowly gleaming
as they drop their grey veils.
But now the birds
are getting serious.
More and brassier
calls
as my first cup of tea
chills.
And I turn back
to Gwen’s poetry
wondering
how on earth she could write
so eloquently in hospital.
Her spirit
must have been
as raucously persistent
as the dawn crowing chorus
of her vicious adored
golden roosters.
Or she was cheating –
and the Bone Scan poems
were written
when she was well
and safely remembering
her Plague Year
as she put on the kettle
and set out her shining
pens.
MULTIPLEX
Every night
MULTIPLEX
shines through my hospital
window
big blue neoned letters
aimed vertically
at the thick dark sky
like a rocket
steadying its nerve
on a launching pad.
Hiya, MULTIPLEX.
Whoever you are
you look like
you’re going places.
Take me with you.
ODE TO AGATHA CHRISTIE
Is this the crucial clue?
The bug-like trilobite
I bought from a slippery gypsy
in Prague,
still staring through its crystalline eyes
from the floor of an extinct sea.
I am spooked
by the abysmal depths
of my own life’s mystery.
Like a belly-up Christie village
I’m nipped by the red herrings
of every pyrrhic victory.
Can I pocket and know this sunset
flaring over the rollers
of the cold Bass Sea?
No photograph, no poem
will make it anything
but a still-born cliché.
Is murdering time
the most true and convincing
perfect crime?
I tangle in the plot
chasing the hit-and-run driver
of my careless past tense.
Why does my childhood swimming pool
now stagnate darkly
behind a high wire fence?
I rub my clever egg head
and show off my waxed
moustache.
O Agatha, what fun playing
Poirot
to douse my fear in farce!
But how can I make
my solution ship arrive?
To what shimmering port
will it take me?
Or is it just an easy exile
from blind faith and wishful talk?
Death Comes as the End –
Agatha, you threw out cosy
when you served up dread.
As surely as my trilobite
with the right time, place
and gritty clout,
may I be preserved
as insoluble enigma
when a killer comet snuffs me out.
THE BEE HUT
For Robert Colvin
There is a dark place
on my friend Robert’s farm
that thrums
with the nectar smell
of danger.
A swarm of bees
has taken over
a dozing old shed