There are several ways of dissolving:
to soak yourself in the baths is one;
to let the muds meet above your head is another.
3.
That owl gone hunting is the ghost
of Desdemona, or at least her after-image:
corneas domed, a dropped-hanky
breast in the dark. Sulis would love her
credulous glare, the warm
mouse making its way down her gullet,
surrendering fur and ears and claws
the better to join her entourage,
and the story of how she started flying
her own feather bolster and long white ribbon,
displaced from the palace
not by a mistress, but by an avatar.
4.
Pellets indistinguishable from seed-husks
tighten round an emptiness.
Hands without another hand to hold make fists.
Under the willows
discarded vessels, void of fluid,
ache for Sulis to love them again, not leave them
there in the succulent grass.
Already she is forgetting their faces;
she leans to spit in her lover’s mouth
and makes a bridge, a casual suspension
involving them both,
like spider-silk draped from cactus to cactus.
5.
Here they are, Pallas, Minerva,
with hair so heavy it bows their heads
and grey thick ankles they cool where the river
slows its rush in a kind of pond.
Nothing beyond their bodies concerns them,
nothing beyond the pools of light
their own lamps throw.
They did what they could in their time, and now
the boys who briefly rest in their shadows
cannot matter much to them,
as much as the veiled
flies on cows’ faces bother the cows.
6.
Water’s not particular, but where it passes is;
water like wisdom resists capture,
never complacent, revising itself
according to each new container it closes.
The heart thrives on syncresis. Sulis
hearts each man she kisses,
each costume she wears, each nakedness.
Like formal dresses,
she carries them with her into the cloud,
its floating parade
of people who laundered her difficult feelings
until she put them aside.
Woodland Burial
Thrown water touched him and where it touched it said
his body was the same brownness leaves turn
when autumn is upon us, a swept-up heap
trembling where it stood,
that when the huntress concentrated
trees, tree-shadows, underbrush and bushes made a wood
and it was ever thus, that nothing can be other than as known
by a god, no truth a lie, no death long sleep.
Poised with springy longbow drawn
and back to the sun, the one who had revealed her form
from landscape or eyes
independent as a streak of white paint on a mirror
held him on her gaze
and held the torn canopy of clouds on the water
as she might have kept a spoonful of honey in the warm
fold of her tongue before it dissipated.
Not the greatest possible harm,
which needs to be known and named as such
to achieve its end, not what he fled, but the unofficial crime,
the moment she let her attention crop
those deep recursive avenues of beech to a backdrop
he broke against, confused,
so nothing in the landscape escaped his touch
and nothing left of him was in the picture she composed.
Hill Top Fort
Up here, the highest
vantage point for miles, the walls’ red
stones find a counterpart for their silence
in the clouds, the closest of which reveal themselves
by seeming to pass much faster
than the rest from this
comparatively
low perspective. Their long shadows
outrace us underfoot like thoughts. Sea-salt
castigates the wind and whitens the vertical
acre of scrub down to the shore,
or sharpens up the
disembodied cries
of cold birds. Almost unnoticed,
all around, the carnelian ants work,
oblivious to their pleasant seat, whose boot they
circumnavigate or vanish
underneath. For an
hour, what some men take
upon themselves can seem, if not
forgivable, familiar at least:
how distance makes immensities manoeuvrable,
toy blocks of shipping containers
tumbled on the docks.
Emblem
A honeybee pinned to my thumb!
Its legs close, instantly done,
the claws of a setting shutting round a stone,
a rampant lion
brandishing its motto in manly arms.
O memory of form,
spending your sting in defence of the realm,
what medals you’ve become!
Propylaea
It is properly
the gate before the gate,
the entrance before the entrance,
a huge tautology
made of marble
and the old ambition
to be understood in a certain way.
The long approach
up hairpin
rubble resembling steps
towards the massive entablature
and baking summit
frames blue sky
and the heads of those
who comprehend in the foreground;
it glorifies
more than ever
the sanctuaries waiting
beyond, behind these colonnades’
unprotected sides.
When there is
an opening but no dividing
wall, the emphasis falls on process
instead of destination –
that is to say,
you come with your hands
shielding your eyes, in deference,
or not at all;
and those of us
who make the passage
correctly cannot return by the same
route that shut
its eye invisibly
after we entered and hope
for the change to happen in reverse:
we are stuck
in the kingdom
of knowledge we came
here for, too perfectly primed
inductees of a cult
finding what
they thought was true
more true when it finally occurs,
forms emerging
as the dust clears,
enormous structures
maintaining their perspectives
from the deep past
to here. It has
all been done before:
original figures, the seven plots.
We can relax
beside the stone-
sandaled caryatids,
their unmoved skirts giving shade
from the sun
as it’s shone
for millions of years,
lighting all this toil and splendour;
can feel our own
ambitions recede
then colossally resurge,
partial and imposing like the gate
before the gate,
hinged on nothing,
promising this: if there is
an opening but no dividing wall,
t
he emphasis falls . . .
Reconstruction
after ‘The Ruin’
The future creates these fabulous blueprints
from cities it pulls to the ground. What seems the work of giants
lies diminished: domes cave, towers like telescopes
collapse upon themselves, the icy gate
like a berg breaks up, and hoar-frost serves as poor man’s grout.
All promises of sanctuary disband into dust
as the centuries pass. The earth’s fist
closes on the architects, cold and catacombed,
while a hundred generations live above their heads.
Here, for example: here stood a wall,
bearded with lichen and swabbed with blood, not swayed by storms
or the rise and fall of kingdom after kingdom.
Tall or deep, it tumbled at last;
only thrown stones remain, moulded by the wind,
going on milling against themselves
down in the grass. Where once the light of knowledge lay
across these fiddly crafts, mud-crusts offer up
proof of a mind that quickly wove
its ringed design, and that someone sharp
bound the wall-braces together with wire.
Think how intricate the city must have been: archipelagos
of bathing-pools, bristling gables, the bored glint of swords on patrol,
and open casks at every corner
round which camaraderie spiralled like confetti
orbiting a plug-hole –
until the future finished all that.
Bodies piled three men deep for miles. A city of bones
it must have been, and what disease bred
in that grand decomposition claimed the remaining artisans.
Time turned their temples into desecrated tombs.
The whole endeavour came undone. Idols of clay and the talented hands
that shaped them lay in bare scratched graves. Fences flattened.
This red curved ceremonial roof
drops its tiles from the ceiling-vault: civilization
falls to the floor in dribbling heaps
like everything else, here, where many a man of the past,
blazing with wine, blinding in the spoils of war,
bounced his gaze from treasure to treasure, gold to silver, coins to trinkets,
rings to cups, pinballing angles round the faceted rock
of the mirrored enclosure’s endless reign,
here, where stone buildings stood, flowing water threw out heat
in massive clouds, and the mortar circled
the known world within its embrace, where the baths lay, hot as hearts
that prize their own convenience.
Attica
We have noticed the house at the end’s
original golden shell of smoke-discoloured stones
being elaborated upon –
then the funds, the pretence of funds, ran dry.
New cement buttercreams the breeze-blocks together.
The tough blue tub it was mixed inside
matures to found sculpture, a reverse mould for rainfall
on permanent display in the yard;
those grey runny hollows, like pinnacles of guano
at a cliff’s foot, if cast would turn out an architect’s model
so spectacular, so irregular,
no one could think it possible to execute.
Seven flexible silvery extractor tubes flop
from the chimney stack,
the arms of a villain in Doctor Who, never as new
as you wish it would be, a riff on a form;
and finial tiles, faintly martial,
decorate the ridge with a crest of spikes, four-pointed stars
touching tip to tip, a string of paper dolls
holding hands forever, all cut from the same sheet
by someone who also peels oranges in one go.
Terracotta warriors, Tanagra figurines,
their fin de siècle welcoming party interrupts the sky
with its colour-wheel opponent, orange on blue,
and a gallon jug of paint stripper, colourless and violent,
stands forgotten on the tar paper roof.
It must be a reminder someone left for themselves
of something they meant to do.
Midsummer Loop
now in the stillness, the two still hours
between this meeting and that,
hours of silence in which the angel of conversation deserts us
to beat her wings above another gathering,
another long room, magnificent table and solemn pronouncement
made to the detriment of everybody else
and the glorification of the subject,
now we are abandoned to our own resources
on this one original summer’s day
and two hours fill like stones with the heat of the afternoon,
two flat stones placed on the stomach to steady
the heartbeat and the breathing,
a number of rabbits
emerge from their secret holes hidden about campus,
hidden but not undiscoverable holes
down in the beginnings of dry holly-bushes out of season
and the naked wooden roots of rhododendrons
from which the rabbits hop forward one hop at a time, one a minute,
a hundred little clepsydras
all set to different schedules, forward
on to the grass, where they balance, weightless as empty pelts
on the points of the blades, like martial artists
who lie unharmed on beds of nails
conducting their spiritual business, with two hot stones
weighing down their bodies, lightly, painlessly,
rabbits fanning out
across the sweeps of grass that sustain them,
across the blades that do not bend beneath them,
where they eat with endless hunger and fanatical devotion,
clipping flat the sharp tips
again and again, masticating the strands
as they cross and re-cross the blocks of dark gold sun
laid across the lawns like golden doors
through which we cannot pass, through which they pass unharmed,
both ears laid flat like banked canoes
and their great hind legs gentle and relaxed,
white scuts bobbing
quietly across the campus, which is also their campus,
attached as rabbits are attached to their shadows
to a vast university invisible underground, the one ours mirrors,
intricate halls of residence and studios
round which the rabbits conduct themselves
in absolute darkness, by touch and smell alone, the wordless
sensitivities of their whiskers
brushing the walls and other warm bodies
or thrilling to an offensive discharge of fear in the air
undetectable to the human
who feels so pleased to have spotted
two rabbit-holes, there, at the foot of that blossoming tree,
now in the stillness, the two still hours
between this meeting and that
Athenaeum
1.
Your bond has matured! Time to collect:
time to biopsy the ingrown boil
you’ve brought to term on your forehead.
So Zeus bore the staggering
migraine of Athena
like an antler incipient on his parting
until the burden proved
too much, the brain-child challenged
too closely the brain, and blunt Hephaestus
chopped her out.
Let’s see what, if anything, you’ve managed
in the way of inner resources.
2.
Club of one, memory palace,
where membership per annum costs
the time it takes to visit,
climb there now in the culminating light
of a brimstone sunset
against which the intimated mountains
firm their peaks; climb there now
and claim what’s yours,
your abrogate inheritance.
Bring your own wire
if you want the place fencing:
bring your own game if you want it stocked.
3.
This is the home of compulsive hoarders,
as packed to the roof with fire-risks
as lungs with alveola.
It wheezes and expands, a concertina,
no pipes just valves, all wallpaper and no walls,
inscribable surfaces laid face to face,
economies of area
fusing and fanning like blinds in a storm
that blatter the light
and vivisect long views with kaleidoscopic
panic — one turn too many
or one too few.
4.
Heroic moths labour
round the lighting-rig at the open-air
amphitheatre;
heathenish and stately, semicircular
marble benches give off a moony glow,
as if the imaginable might
still happen: dead leaves and dumb signage
clear the sunken stage
for threnodies and lectures;
or a tourist decide
not to steal rocks from the unprotected
structure, though he could.
5.
If you fall asleep in a temple, be prepared
to wake with your ear licked clean as a conch
and the statements of the gods
suddenly cold and clear to you, suddenly a cinch,
even as the speech of those you loved
loses all succulence
and withers on the branch. To drift so exposed
in an icon’s presence
among the burnt offerings, the wine left to breathe,
is to give your compliance.
The dead lie still in dictatorships of silence:
nothing says nothing in their sinuses and mouths.
6.
Minerva born of Jupiter,
out of the undamageable godhead drawn,
guard our sororities that know
no better; shed blessings as we pass
gossiping through the metal-detector doors
on campus, pillars of books