still glowing, off their courses, and a state
where there’s no gravity to hold the world.
I have to hold on when I think such things
and weather out these feelings so that when
the wind drops and the light no longer swings
I can focus on an Earth that still has men,
in this flooded orchestra where elbow grease,
deep thought, long practice and much sweat
gave me some inkling of an inner peace
I’d never found with women till I met
the one I wrote all those air letters for
and she’s the one I’m needing as I see
the North Wind once more strip my sycamore
and whip the last leaves off my elder tree.
Now when the wind flays my wild garden of its green
and blows, whistling through the flues, its old reminder
of the two cold poles all places are between,
though where she lives the climate’s a lot kinder,
and starts the lightbulb swinging to and fro,
and keeps it swinging, switched off, back and forth,
I feel the writing room I’m leaving grow
dark, and then darker with the whole view North.
A Kumquat for John Keats
Today I found the right fruit for my prime,
not orange, not tangelo, and not lime,
nor moon-like globes of grapefruit that now hang
outside our bedroom, nor tart lemon’s tang
(though last year full of bile and self-defeat
I wanted to believe no life was sweet)
nor the tangible sunshine of the tangerine,
and no incongruous citrus ever seen
at greengrocers’ in Newcastle or Leeds
mis-spelt by the spuds and mud-caked swedes,
a fruit an older poet might substitute
for the grape John Keats thought fit to be Joy’s fruit,
when, two years before he died, he tried to write
how Melancholy dwelled inside Delight,
and if he’d known the citrus that I mean
that’s not orange, lemon, lime or tangerine,
I’m pretty sure that Keats, though he had heard
‘of candied apple, quince and plum and gourd’
instead of ‘grape against the palate fine’
would have, if he’d known it, plumped for mine,
this Eastern citrus scarcely cherry size
he’d bite just once and then apostrophize
and pen one stanza how the fruit had all
the qualities of fruit before the Fall,
but in the next few lines be forced to write
how Eve’s apple tasted at the second bite,
and if John Keats had only lived to be,
because of extra years, in need like me,
at 42 he’d help me celebrate
that Micanopy kumquat that I ate
whole, straight off the tree, sweet pulp and sour skin –
or was it sweet outside, and sour within?
For however many kumquats that I eat
I’m not sure if it’s flesh or rind that’s sweet,
and being a man of doubt at life’s mid-way
I’d offer Keats some kumquats and I’d say:
You’ll find that one part’s sweet and one part’s tart:
say where the sweetness or the sourness start.
I find I can’t, as if one couldn’t say
exactly where the night became the day,
which makes for me the kumquat taken whole
best fruit, and metaphor, to fit the soul
of one in Florida at 42 with Keats
crunching kumquats, thinking, as he eats
the flesh, the juice, the pith, the pips, the peel,
that this is how a full life ought to feel,
its perishable relish prick the tongue,
when the man who savours life ’s no longer young,
the fruits that were his futures far behind.
Then it’s the kumquat fruit expresses best
how days have darkness round them like a rind,
life has a skin of death that keeps its zest.
History, a life, the heart, the brain
flow to the taste buds and flow back again.
That decade or more past Keats’s span
makes me an older not a wiser man,
who knows that it’s too late for dying young,
but since youth leaves some sweetnesses unsung,
he’s granted days and kumquats to express
Man’s Being ripened by his Nothingness.
And it isn’t just the gap of sixteen years,
a bigger crop of terrors, hopes and fears,
but a century of history on this earth
between John Keats’s death and my own birth –
with bloody bubbles leering at the rim;
a thing no bigger than an urn explodes
and ravishes all silence, and all odes,
Flora asphyxiated by foul air
unknown to either Keats or Lemprière,
dehydrated Naiads, Dryad amputees
dragging themselves through slagscapes with no trees,
a shirt of Nessus fire that gnaws and eats
children half the age of dying Keats …
Now were you twenty five or six years old
when that fevered brow at last grew cold?
I’ve got no books to hand to check the dates.
My grudging but glad spirit celebrates
that all I’ve got to hand ’s the kumquats, John,
the fruit I’d love to have your verdict on,
but dead men don’t eat kumquats, or drink wine,
they shiver in the arms of Proserpine,
not warm in bed beside their Fanny Brawne,
nor watch her pick ripe grapefruit in the dawn
as I did, waking, when I saw her twist,
with one deft movement of a sunburnt wrist,
the moon, that feebly lit our last night’s walk
past alligator swampland, off its stalk.
I thought of moon-juice juleps when I saw,
as if I’d never seen the moon before,
the planet glow among the fruit, and its pale light
make each citrus on the tree its satellite.
Each evening when I reach to draw the blind
stars seem the light zest squeezed through night’s black rind;
the night’s peeled fruit the sun, juiced of its rays,
first stains, then streaks, then floods the world with days,
days, when the very sunlight made me weep,
days, spent like the nights in deep, drugged sleep,
days in Newcastle by my daughter’s bed,
wondering if she, or I, weren’t better dead,
days in Leeds, grey days, my first dark suit,
my mother’s wreaths stacked next to Christmas fruit,
and days, like this in Micanopy. Days!
As strong sun burns away the dawn’s grey haze
I pick a kumquat and the branches spray
cold dew in my face to start the day.
The dawn’s molasses make the citrus gleam
still in the orchards of the groves of dream.
The limes, like Galway after weeks of rain,
glow with a greenness that is close to pain,
the dew-cooled surfaces of fruit that spent
all last night flaming in the firmament.
The new day dawns. O days! My spirit greets
the kumquat with the spirit of John Keats.
O kumquat, comfort for not dying young,
both sweet and bitter, bless the poet’s tongue!
I burst the whole fruit chilled by morning dew
against my palate. Fine, for 42!
I search for buzzards as the air grows cl
ear
and see them ride fresh thermals overhead.
Their bleak cries were the first sound I could hear
when I stepped at the start of sunrise out of doors,
and a noise like last night’s bedsprings on our bed
from Mr Fowler sharpening farmers’ saws.
Skywriting
for David Hockney
The Californians read the sky aloud.
The Pasadena HAPPY turns to cloud!
My desk top’s like a Californian pool.
Practice mirrors from the ballet school,
meditation group, karate class
dodge or lay doggo in my desk-top glass,
but the opposite gymnasia both let through
enough clear sky to flood the desk with blue
which, like purposeful deletions, smoketrails cross.
Such smoketrails would have been of sphagnum moss
if these aeroplanes were floats displayed
at Pasadena’s New Year Rose Parade,
and in the air, plus HAPPY, there’d appear
as HAPPY starts dissolving, the NEW YEAR.
The seven puffs of white that made the Y
are disconnected cottonballs and sky.
As many floats as minutes are in hours
and nothing’s used to make them but fresh flowers,
raw cotton (wool not being flora) sheep
go bleating round a hyacinth Bo-Peep.
A woodwardia howdah delicately sways
with jonquil rajahs turbaned with bouquets,
the Cross in crocus and in baby’s breath
but no carnation Christ clamped to his death,
no battered nailheads of black onion seeds,
no spearthrust of poinsettia that bleeds.
A larkspur ‘Swoonatra’ in lunaria marquee
croons blue dendrobiums as do-re-mi,
a eucalyptus Calliope plays
furze and broom ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ays.
Next day in Pasadena the parade
succumbs to seconds and to Centigrade.
Mange-stricken mane and stripes moult in the heat,
the tiger’s marigolds, the lion’s wheat.
Poinsettia and poppy start to wilt
and deMcPhersonize the floral kilt.
Stoned teenagers in New Year t-shirts steal
the gladioli from the glockenspiel.
What struts in a sticky palm an hour or so ’s
no longer the snake’s pupil but a rose.
Real gardens make imaginary toads
as purple biro marks make funeral odes,
roses one huge daffodil, the clover moons,
and ferns make bars with cedar bark spitoons.
Life made out of minutes rings as true
as floragraphs of Cherokee and Sioux,
and like igloos quilted out of eglantine
1980’s made from ’79!
The new depth of my desk top’s like a pit’s!
The first stars spike its black with silver spritz.
The twilight shandygaff’s a little swish
of seltzer in a lake of liquorice.
Under plexiglass the crushed polestar
’s a boot-buffed Coke top stuck in Broadway tar.
Half conquered, half unconquerable space
in total darkness now reflects my face.
The space where Apollo slid into Soyuz
cries out for some strong, some tireless muse.
Like Arabella spider, I too try,
trailing these blown lines across the sky,
the creator with small letter c,
to learn to spin new webs in zero G.
And these figures lowered through my eyes
out of and into ever darkening skies,
they’re not the engrossed classes opposite
floating in free fall above my pit,
feeling each other’s faces like the blind,
or trying to rein still a racing mind,
nor those who’ve spent the new decade’s first weeks
mastering self-help anti-rape techniques –
Mummers from Allendale, that’s who they are!
Glum guisers with halved hogsheads of lit tar,
in costumes culled from soccer and crusade
cast crackling casks to start the new decade.
The firebarrels make a New Year blaze
that sparks a chain of beacons that are days.
The tossed in barrels send a noisy hiss
up from the surface of my desk’s abyss.
It’s up to someone else, not me to write
HAPPY in this smoke across the night.
Exeunt the other mummers. ‘In comes I’
sounding with short plumb my blackened sky,
blackface Narcissus whose spirit has to pass
over the desk with dark depths in its glass.
In the glass desk now no lightening spark
pricks through the shiny carbon of its dark.
Night’s caulked over the light’s last penpoint chink.
The tarred creator stares at seas of ink,
and at the solstice of his silence cries aloud:
The Pasadena HAPPY turns to cloud!
And goes on repeating and repeating the same cry
until the seas of ink have all run dry.
The Call of Nature
Taos, New Mexico, 1980
for the 50th anniversary of the death of D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930)
Juniper, aspen, blue spruce, just thawing snow
on the Sangre de Cristo mountains of New Mexico.
The trick’s to get that splendid view with all
those open spaces, without the hot-dog stall,
and those who shoot their photos as they pass
might well end up with billboards saying GAS!
The pueblo people live without TV
but will let you snap their houses, for a fee.
Their men get work as extras and are bussed
to ancestral battlefields to bite the dust.
And bussed, but to snap adobes, rubber necks
get excursion visits to ‘the priest of sex’.
They stay put in the bus. They smell the pine
not spritzed from aerosols but genuine,
dense in the thin air of that altitude.
They’ve heard about his work, and that it’s rude.
Back on the valley freeway at the first motel
they forget both noble Navajo and D.H.L.
Their call of nature ends through separate doors
branded in ranch pokerwork: BRAVES! SQUAWS!
Giving Thanks
Late last night on 77th I waited
to watch the Macy mammoths get inflated
and listen to the blear-eyed children cheer
as Kermit’s leg or Snoopy’s limp left ear
came out of their collapse, as gas was blown
through each sagged limb, now magically regrown.
Each mammoth stirs beneath its weighted net
straining for the sky it can’t have yet,
impatient to be loosed out of the dark
over the browning trees of Central Park.
From yesterday I still can feel you blow
your love all through me like some helium
that restores my true proportions, head to toe,
and lifts my body skywards. When I come
I’m out of the sandbagged nets and soar away
into release and my Thanksgiving Day.
Thanksgiving Day, 22 November 1979
Oh, Moon of Mahagonny!
for John Dexter
Oh, moon of Mahagonny
we now must say goodbye!
I never thought I’d live to see the day,
or smile my un-Smile Center sort of smile
that the Rockefellers threw a big soirée
for the cast of Mahagonny by Brecht/Weill.
Oh, moon of Mahagonny
w
e now must say goodbye!
Between mouthfuls on the ACT II EATING set
where Jacob Schmidt ate two whole calves, then burst,
the argument’s: Iranian v. Soviet –
that is which caviar to boycott first!
Oh, moon of Mahagonny
we now must say goodbye!
These are the tight-belt ways they’re fighting back:
each patriotic family should drive,
say, only one per person Cadillac
at the less gas-guzzling speed of 55.
All loyal alcoholics should desire
their vodka stingers without Stolichnaya.
Oh, moon of Mahagonny
we now must say goodbye!
To say the New York rich can’t enter Heaven
(that old precinct of the poor) ’s as much to say
we don’t believe the PanAm 747
takes off time after time at JFK.
Oh, moon of Mahagonny
we now must say goodbye!
Oh, Marc Chagall should come back as a ghost
once he’s checked who’s got God’s gilt entrée
and redecorate the Opera for our host
with fitter friezes for the MET foyer:
blue bread and circuses, lame Pegasi
and camels that hoopla through the needle’s eye!
Oh, moon of Mahagonny
we now must say goodbye!
The Red Lights of Plenty
for the centenary of the death of Karl Marx, died London, 14 March 1883
‘… et asperi
Martis sanguineas quae cohibet manus,
quae dat belligeris foedera gentibus
et cornu retinet divite copiam.’
(Seneca, Medea 62–65)
Though aging and abused still half benign
this petrified PLENTY spilling from her horn
the Old World’s edibles, the redskins’ corn,
next to the Law Court’s Fallout Shelter sign
the blacks and oranges of Hallowe’en.
All that motherly bounty turned to stone!
She chokes back tears of dribbling gasoline
for the future fates of countries like my own.
I stroll round Washington. November strews
red welcomes on the pavements from the trees
on Constitution and Independence Avenues
as if the least pedestrians were VIPs
or returning warlords lured inside to hack,
their lifeblood gushing out this hue of Fall
bulldozed by Buick and by Cadillac
to side drains too choked up to take it all.
Through two museums, Science and Indian Arts
something from deep below the car-choked street,
like thousands of Poe’s buried tell-tale hearts