THE TRIAL OF KELLY CONNOR

And other poems

by Peter Oswald

CONTENTS

Deucalion and Pyrrha

Actaeon

Daedalus and Icarus

Weyland

Hephaestus

Plato

Parsifal

Clever Elsie

The Golden Ass

Gilgamesh

Boudicca

Perpetua

Oedipus

Psyche

Ceyx and Alcyone

Shakuntala

Sita and Rama

Struensee and Caroline

The Ocean of Melodious Songs

Don Juan

Hippolytus

Narcissus

Frick and Carnegie

Livia and Claudius

Crazy Horse

Milarepa

WS

Kaspar Hauser

Goethe and Schiller

Odysseus

Isis

The Sybil

Steiner

Solomon, Hiram, Balkis

Ambedkar

Augustine

Alfred

Gododdin

Merlin

THE TRIAL OF KELLY CONNOR

The Admiral

Otto

Palaestra

Croick

Pamplona

Grandpa

DEUCALION AND PYRRHA

The last two people in the world sat down,

after the flood, a woman and a man,

and they were old. Strange of the gods to drown

the future too. They stared. Brown rivers ran

in all directions, and the world appeared

little by little. Now she saw a stone

smile in a runnel as the water cleared.

She ran, and pressed it to her sharp chest-bone,

and when she looked, there was another one.

Her husband helped her pick them up, the blue,

the white, the streaky, blinking in the sun.

Oh you dear stones! She knew just what to do - 

fling them behind her on the hardening ground.

They would be people when she turned around. 

ACTAEON

Actaeon saw the goddess of the wild.

What she is like is not known. But infer

from what became of him, enquiring child,

what it is like to catch a glimpse of her.

He turned into a stag, and his own hounds

grallocked him as he raced away from them.

But if he had escaped, with rainbow bounds,

over the hills, what a perplexing gem

his man-mind would have been. He might have tried

to join the men who dance in horns, whose aim

is to see her like he did, to hear cried

out their own hounds, be torn apart, be game.

Or seen a god and turned into a star.

What have you seen to make you what you are?

DAEDALUS AND ICARUS

Daedalus was an architect, who built

underground chambers for the King of Crete,

for a dark purpose. But he felt no guilt,

the job was done, the contract was complete.

But the King would not let him go. The work

was far too good, the man a genius,

and further schemes were stirring in the murk

of the King's mind, and it was dangerous

to share the engineer with foreign powers -

so he was kept from leaving. But his mind

found a way out - observing summer flowers

release their seeds into the heat. Refined,

this gave him flight. He was the right stuff!

(His son was just a floating piece of fluff.)

WEYLAND

Weyland did well. He flew away alone,

having been hamstrung, crippled by a King

to keep him. Off he went, a floating stone,

over towns, mountains, every little thing.

Through the odd flops and flip-sides of the air,

all that vast shuffling seamstress concentration.

A bronze-eyed kestrel whipped up close to stare,

then off again. High up, the stateless nation

of geese performed their sky-sign. Now the ocean.

In the King's daughter's womb he'd left behind

a son. The King's two sons, without commotion,

he had dispatched. A master-work, unsigned

except by his escape. Why not be proud?

Why not break slowly southwards like a cloud?

HEPHAESTUS

Flung out of heaven for the second time,

the smith-god sprawled, legs broken. Mountain folk

crept up, strict souls aghast to think what crime

this could be justice for. Immortal yolk

oozed from his wounds. Split rocks and snapped-off pines

breathed shock, and fragrant dust, while echo-roars

softened into the stark and zigzag lines

of the ravines. The ornamental shores

far down below, continued blissfully

with their shellwork, foam-fingers with sea-care

shaping the sand, green fish-lips kissfully

nudging the tideline straight. No time to spare,

the mountain spiders, like poor men with debts,

rushed back into the light to mend their nets.

PLATO

Plato! The tyrant you sailed west to save,

to make his state a model for the world,

has locked you in a garden, fragrant grave

of your high hopes, and with a dog-bark hurled

your friends to Hades. Every word you said,

dense and precise translation of your thought,

locked in the torture chamber of his head,

bled shadows, multiplied its meanings, caught

leprosy! Now fold up your logic, split

dialogue, walk back through your talks and books

to your first glimpse. Do you remember it?

When what could not be thought, with Gorgon looks

solidified the void. Call up that force

now, to extract you on its flying horse!

PARSIFAL

Parsifal, fool, the castle disappeared,

and all the lace-veiled ladies and the lords,

and there was just a hiding jay that jeered,

go ply your soul with all the other frauds.

Round and about the beech-trees blindly stood,

and beech-mast spiked your back that felt before

a deep four-poster. It was just a wood

for birds to do their work in, nothing more.

Remember now the lies your mother said,

how in the night she drowned the songs of truth,

dressed you up like a jerk. All that has led

unswervingly to this, your slingshot youth

the absent father of this joker glory.

(But this was just the first half of the story.)

CLEVER ELSIE.

Elsie was on the cellar steps, the beer

she was supposed to fetch, undrawn. She cried,

and an entire world crashed in every tear

that was pushed out by the wild storm inside.

Thirsty, they came and found her, and she said,

What if I marry Hans and then the axe

up there, falls down and splits his pretty head?

That is a world to carry on our backs -

whose light lifts laughter from no child of mine,

children of that or any child of theirs,

our love lost in an everlasting line

of nothings, no ones, nevers and nowheres.

My eyes have seen the sower of the stones,

who reaps no crop at all, not even bones.

THE GOLDEN ASS

Lucius! Crazy! In a frontier town,

edge of a fir-clad crowd of steaming peaks

from which mad snow-melt notions sashay down

into the bars, bazaars and pavement freaks –

young man set loose, to shake your education,

civilisation, all that care-home fun:

if there could be one dark-age distillation

to wipe all that, sweet Jesus pour me one!

And here it is – soft-winking in the night:

syrup of stars – just lift it to your lips

and you will be a swooping owl, flap right

out of your flightless face! One sip, two sips –

and you have changed into an ass – hard work,

humiliation, pain - death of a jerk.

GILGAMESH

Gilgamesh came back home. The city, bright,

stood in the desert like a patient wife,

in her two-coloured robe of day and night.

He found the flower of immortal life

and a snake stole it. His best friend was dead

because he, Gilgamesh, would not requite

the goddess Ishtar. Now the nets are spread

for him as well. There will be no big fight

this time, no journey over waves of death

to the world’s end. To reach a garden seat

a gravel path will slow him, breath by breath,

till his heart sinks into his marble feet.

And it will be a garden full of gods!

Each pink that shivers and each rose that nods!

BOUDICA

Boudica thanked the Romans for the arch

they built for her, a spear-hole wide enough

for her whole people to escape through. March,

death’s birthday month, with leaf and lacy stuff

carnivals the occasion. Here they come,

trumpets and drums, into her trap which, sprung,

will set her people free, so the bees hum,

to crowd into the country of the young.

Wagons, behind the lines of fighting men,

stand heaped with children, women, cooking things,

ready to roll into the brightness when

legs fold and hacked-off arms turn into wings.

Look at the meadow thick with butterflies,

closing and opening their unearthly skies!

PERPETUA

All your appeals, Perpetua, have failed,

exactly as you wished: your frantic dad

raging against his rebel daughter, jailed

for such a nonsense crime, old man half mad

with disbelief and impotence; your glands

hot-swollen in their never-satisfied

benevolence, the cradle of your hands

empty – these claims that you are not Christ’s bride

fall silent. Look, you have your baby back,

prior to the final parting. Nothing now

imprisons you, there is no lock to crack

except yourself. As calf must part from cow,

so must you from the clothing of your birth –

your bones, your veins, the stars, the sea, the earth.

OEDIPUS

Oedipus – too much light. You saw so much

your eyes exploded. Out you staggered, blind,

into the black. Your speaking female crutch,

sighted, could not describe the unconfined

vast plains of blackness that stretched out and in,

you a frail barrier of air between,

so that she led you through your own ripped skin

into such darkness as no man had seen,

not even Orpheus. You, without a song,

or any wife to rescue from the deep,

simply kept shuffling hollowly along

through your wide open head, till it grew steep,

and you let go her hand and, at the height,

shrank to a dot and vanished into sight.

PSYCHE

Psyche could not get down into the ground.

Jumped off a cliff, but the love-thickened air

lowered her gently, with a beehive sound,

to the soft earth, and left her standing there. 

She dreamed the trees drew up their roots and rose,

like slow green swans, into the withering sky,

to find out where their friend the west wind goes

after he passes through them with a sigh.

Her lover was the same - he blew away.

Love was against her but she could not die,

because life loved her. Justice won the day

however, and she was swept up on high,

mother of Joy, divine, happy and brave,

who never got her feet into a grave. 

CEYX AND ALCYONE

King Ceyx drowned far out at sea. His Queen,

fearing the worst when he did not return,

thinking correctly that the boiling green

had ripped the royal boat from prow to stern,

sat crying in her tower on the pier,

till the whole view of drifting blue and grey

was one down-streaming window-pane, unclear.

But then she spied, out in the airy bay,

a bobbing thing – she watched it floating near,

till it was on the rocks, and then she ran,

and knelt beside it, nothing left to fear,

because it was the body of her man.

Kingfishers they became, which for some reason

nest on the broad sea – tranquil for that season.

SHAKUNTALA

Shakuntala is sitting in a field

not in the world. Her husband, like a star

from the dawn light collected in his shield,

slowly increases through the air, too far

still, for his wife to know him. Their small son,

whom he has never seen, is playing war.

Three goddesses are present. One by one

they lift their heads, like watchers on the shore.

A man is coming who completely cleared

his wife – her face, her name, all their desire,

out of his mind. Then, when she disappeared,

remembered, and his head filled up with fire.

Who, having searched through empty hells of his,

has found the one strange heaven where she is. 

SITA AND RAMA

There is no danger. If the god had not

descended, as a woman and a man

and his four brothers – then a little blot

would have spread out, unhampered in its plan

to make the world itself. But as things are,

Sita and Rama banished, with just one

brother to help them, there is still a star

that looks as weak as weeds but is a sun.

That is to say, the woman lying here,

who looks no stronger than the orange flower

which, as she left, she tucked behind her ear,

will be the crisis of a mighty power,

which has no choice but to devour the spark

that starts a wildfire deep down in the dark.

STRUENSEE AND CAROLINE

There was a King of Denmark who was mad.

His doctor ruled the country, and his Queen

slept with the doctor. This was not so bad,

really, and could have been a known unseen,

but they kept drafting, for the King to sign,

laws against torture and in favour of

press and religious freedom, so the line

they had already crossed with traitor love

was far behind them. France was royal still,

they were too early - no United States.

Time enough for the dying age to kill

kisses whose heat was melting heaven’s gates,

sweet inspirations in a sinful bed

likely to make the whole world lose its head.

THE OCEAN OF MELODIOUS SONGS

When the Sixth Dalai Lama was a boy,

The Fifth was still alive. How could this be?

It was a panicky political ploy –

a double, for the Mongol powers to see

and bow to. So the Sixth, among wild birds,

not in the cage of office, grew up wrong,

his meditation women and the words

that turned each love into a popular song.

Which was a defect in his destiny,

corrected by Correctness. In good time

he was removed, so his re-birth could be

a tranquil ocean, not a greasy rhyme

or secret kiss, or drunken flood of sorrow

about today’s betrayal by tomorrow. 

DON JUAN

Molly was lithe and lightsome as a tree,

but kisses cut her, soon her bark was bare.

Sex was an axe that felled her. Finally

she crackled up in smoke and wasn’t there.

Whole forests crashed and vanished in this way.

Sandra was like a sculpture made of sand,

all hot and spray-blown on a heatwave day,

which the sea wiped entirely off the land

with its deep love. Whole coasts were blanked like this.

Even a woman won with blood was not

any more lasting for that price. A kiss

or sixty smashed her like a flower pot.

But this old dead man, sword in hand to sever

the bastard’s jugular – this one is forever.

HIPPOLYTUS

Hippolytus was ripped apart. The roar

of a sea-monster freaked his horses and

they dragged him by the heel along the shore,

a two-mile bloodstain smeared into the sand,

fragments of skull with hair-tufts, teeth, his eyes

stuck to odd rocks. It was his father’s curse

that raised the snake-bull – prompted by the lies

of his stepmother. Shrinking universe

for the young man, who had no other wish

than for the mountains, and to shadow deer

on stony summits, raise miraculous fish

out of unhopeful pools, not live for mere

lust of another. But the love-sick rocks

wanted his first-light eyes, his noon-bright locks.

NARCISSUS

Narcissus was the echo of his face.

Staring at his reflection in the pond,

fixed as the stones and flowers of that place,

he strained to reach his yearning eyes beyond,

behind, beneath, inside that painful sight.

What are you thinking? Tell me all you are,

let your sunk self drift up into the light,

so I can see mine too, this dark bizarre

flower inside! The shadows of the trees,

circling him slowly, could not catch his eye,

nor the great star-beasts creeping by degrees

over the fallen water through the sky.

And when his face began to fade and sink,

he kept on staring, not a thing to think.

FRICK AND CARNEGIE

Frick and Carnegie, on a summer’s day

by the swift river’s glass-green urgency,

where it ran red, the old newspapers say,

when the steel-workers and the agency

detectives fought. Carnegie owned the mill,

and from his pile in Scotland he implied

Manager Frick should maybe foot the bill

in terms of blame, and their old friendship died.

Because they planned the whole damn thing together!

Look at them now though – almost hand in hand,

where the strong river smoothly spools forever

its green and silent film, through the dead land.

Frick grunts: well Andy, I was right to say

we two would meet again in hell one day.

LIVIA AND CLAUDIUS

Livia at the dinner-table. Dead

all of the guests except for Claudius.

She is old, he is young, but in her head

she is an endless light. Not tedious

her revelations and her iron advice,

wife of Augustus Caesar, to the slight,

undangerous one, whose wine has turned to ice

in the expanding catacomb of this night.

And she goes on, his guide, into the deep

museum of her murders, where, earth-still,

his loved-ones moan and mutter in their sleep.

The empress leans in close and whispers: Kill,

kill other humans. In their eyes of glass

look, and see all things but your own life pass.

CRAZY HORSE

Crazy Horse. The still sky was trooper-blue.

Alone, he charged straight forwards at the files

of level rifles, all the host of Sioux

watching. In range (thumbs spinning gunsight-dials,)

he stopped his horse, and made it rear and turn,

dancing, right round – and then he raced, high-wire,

right down the line, that fizzed, a fuse, quick-burn,

instant a ripple of exploring fire –

then turned again, and raced that way once more,

like zipping and unzipping in the rain

a coat too hot, or, on a storm-smashed shore,

running along the foam and back again.

Death was amazed and stood there, stupefied,

glittering, in the eyes of either side.

MILAREPA

Milarepa, you built yourself a shack

of voodoo murders, and you lived in it,

skulls on the gate-posts and yourself out back

deep down and digging your vendetta-pit,

self-buried black magician. But you broke,

near the red core, and begged a holy man

for help, who made you, for a holy joke,

build three rock towers, each one taller than

the sky-scraper before, and each pulled down

by you as soon as built. The fourth he spared,

but you crept off into a cave, sprained clown,

and sat there empty as the place, and stared,

and wrote one hundred thousand holy songs,

black writing whiting out your book of wrongs.

WS

He rode to Stratford through the April rain,

but when he reached the town it wasn’t there.

He whirled around him like a weather-vane,

and saw at once that he was everywhere.

The chaffish rooks were brawling in a rout

under the childish laughter of the sun.

He cried for help, but as the sound came out,

he understood that he was everyone.

Suddenly stars exploded all around,

screaming and swerving like stampeding horses.

He saw he had to find the tuneful sound

that would enchant them back into their courses.

And, since the world had turned to swirling foam,

fix it, so he could find his way back home.

KASPAR HAUSER

Great Kaspar Hauser! Spirit of the age!

Things were so bright at first they hurt your eyes!

After your sky-less childhood in a cage,

every slight thing contained its own sunrise.

Your name spelt out in blue unfolding flowers

where there was nothing but sown soil before,

chaotic shapes resolving into towers

and fields – it was your mind’s new grasp you saw!

You thought the world was all man-made, each lace

lily and clockwork dove an artefact.

And when you watched them clothe themselves in grace,

for you the prison of confusion cracked

open. And then with daggered hand the black

idiot-pit you came from took you back. 

GOETHE AND SCHILLER

Goethe and Schiller. Goethe says he saw,

through a clear glass of blue Sicilian air,

one day – the sum of all that came before –

the flower of flowers. It was simply there,

in Palermo, in the botanic gardens,

the one from which the rest all take their forms,

lifting their infinite interpretations

from her, bright Queen of all their varying swarms.

And Schiller said – The thing that lit your mind

did not come through your eyes, it is not here,

it was not there, dear friend. If you were blind

you could have seen it. It was an idea.

And Goethe said – Then with my eyes awake

I can see thoughts, and pick the forms they take.

ODYSSEUS

Odysseus in the middle of the sea,

this earthless country is the only place,

ship sunk, loves lost, home hope a memory

dissolving in the salt bath without trace -

this is the only way to see that one

whom you have seen before, but not so near

as you will now. The faces of your son

and wife receding, make Athene’s clear.

And here she comes, across the waves at speed,

eyes brighter than the city as it burned.

She does not come to those who have no need,

and yours is vast, such is the way she turned

and turned the world, till it was just this rushing

and the dead filling up your head with nothing

ISIS

The goddess Isis, searching down the Nile

for her lost husband (he is in a box

inside a tree-trunk) wears the thinking smile

of an old lady, and her old-time frocks,

and goes disguised like that. She lodges, nights,

in mortal households, and she helps her hosts

by caring for the baby. Now the lights

are snuffed, and just the goddess and the ghosts

awake. She lays the infant in the cot

of the fast-flowing fire, to burn its death

out of it – and the mother wakes up hot,

and runs downstairs, and sees, and gasps for breath,

and grabs the child, to keep it, if she may,

for its own child to weep for, one fine day.

THE SYBIL

A Sybil came to Rome with books to sell –

the entire future coded in a sigh

to her starved dancing at the edge of hell

by an old thorn. She set her price too high

and was refused, so took three books, of nine,

and burned them in the brazier by the throne,

waited a breathing moment for a sign,

then burned three more. But still the King was stone,

staring into the flames. Far-off, the mountains

said nothing, and the sparrows in the lane

chirped loudly, and the gushing of the fountains

continued, and the sun was strong and plain.

Then the King broke, like an old storm-cracked pine,

and bought three volumes for the price of nine.

STEINER

Steiner, your theatre-temple in the sky,

first wood, then smoke, then nothing, is still there –

more so than ever. Up-stage stands, house-high,

your statue of the human as the heir

of Christ – dragged downwards by the earth’s crouched force,

snatched into nowhere by the claws of light,

but standing strong between them, our resource

awareness of them both, and of the fight

that gives us shape. The pillars, whose black stumps

still glowed when New Year’s day revealed to all

what arson and the failure of the pumps

had done, stand curling in their forms, tree-tall,

of musical progression - at their feet,

visible now, each Spirit on its seat.

SOLOMON, HIRAM, BALKIS

Solomon had the temple in his head.

God put it there, but it could not get out.

He could not build so intricate a shed,

mind full of light but fingers full of doubt.

But then a genius was found, who could –

a craftsman and a manager of men,

Hiram. And soon the shrine of cedar-wood

was there, correct in every part. But then

the King’s bride, Balkis, soul-perceiving Queen

of Sheba, fell in love with Hiram and

Solomon had him killed. Brown blood was seen

trailing into a cave across the sand.

She found him where they left him, in the lurch,

smashed up by vandals like an empty church.

AMBEDKAR

Ambedkar burned the Law, but still it stood.

He burned its pages in a public place,

his roaring people like a naked wood

shouting for spring. The Law’s fierce mountain-face

fixed its vast shadow to the earth with hooks.

Even repealed, its stain refused to shift.

Ambedkar read. His house was built of books.

Where did the Law begin? Was it a gift

from God? He glimpsed at heaven, but the Law

had locked that place against him, so he flew,

scanning the soundless deeps, from shore to shore,

over the seas of knowledge, deepening-blue,

till he reached Buddha’s tree and disappeared.

Which was exactly what the Law had feared.

AUGUSTINE

Certain Welsh bishops get the news from Kent

that the Pope’s man is there – he has converted

the devil’s people and their King and sent

now for these Welsh. This is the world inverted.

Half-human Germans swarming in the bones

of smashed Britannia, graveyard of the good,

now chorus to the Lord with goblin groans,

and the wolves howl hosanna in the wood!

The Christian legions left to claim their pay

two hundred years ago. No word since then

has spun across the gulf its golden ray

from Rome. And now, into disaster’s den,

the shrivelled remnants, shrinking, must advance –

as if God asked a dying child to dance.

ALFRED

Alfred, the gold-leafed gospel truth has lost.

The wolf that murders with a human hand

ripped the Lamb’s throat out. Quick as midnight frost

stiffens the heights and hollows of the land,

they struck at Christmas, as the child was born,

and you forsook your songs and saints and ran.

Now the illuminated page of dawn

wakes you in swamp, numb-fingered son of man.

The truth will mold and blacken in your mind,

you will not tread the road of light again

to Rome, but stumble backwards, Woden-blind,

into old night. You are no Charlemagne.

The words that join your people’s hearts will rot,

and melt and fall apart. Or maybe not.

GODODDIN

Gododdin, all the flowers in the spring

lift their lost faces to the light, and so

return to mind. The book, by opening,

turns your mass-buried dead to names that grow.

Silently in the mind or maybe spoken,

then you are almost blossom everywhere,

the holding power of the earth is broken,

almost your banners flicker in the air.

But these are daydream forms, a breach of faith

with what you were. The names are not the men.

You canter vaguely southwards, weak and wraith,

out of the fog towards disaster. Then

the book is shut, black night without a star –

and that is you exactly as you are.

MERLIN

In the beginning was the word, for sure,

but not the written word. And so it was,

by killing druids, Romans wiped their lore -

no shard or deer-hide scrap extant because

memory was their god. So how did you,

Merlin, reach back into the frozen-hive

silence they left, to conjure such a brew

out of the Christian Scripture as could drive

the Saxons back? A many-layered mead,

mix of lost local epics and the strong,

empire-surviving Palestinian creed,

in a grail cup, that is still brimming long,

long after those your fables rallied fell,

as the descendants of their killers tell.

THE TRIAL OF KELLY CONNOR

How Brenda Connor changed her moniker.

Sunday morning she drove her motor,

just seventeen, the grass is green,

Sunday morning the streets are clean,

the pavements shaven and well-behaven,

the street-lights out, and standing straight,

Swiss Guards outside the Pope’s gate.

Every road leads to Rome,

every little ‘rise’ and ‘way’

that sets out and comes back home,

I mean it’s the Lord’s day,

this is Australia, land of wine,

1971 is going fine,

she shoots uphill, a green cat

up a fence-post, just like that –

Bang! That was Brenda, over the rise,

windscreen filled with the whites of the eyes

of Margaret, going to church,

slow as the leaf grows on the birch,

and as it falls, so falls the old lady,

storm-ripped, leaving the place less shady.

Dead stood the car – out of the chapel

(Eves and Adams full of bad apple,)

come the good people, marked with concern

about the place where people burn,

naked, forever, chained together

in real Victoria wildfire weather.

Out into unstained light, to view –

horrible incredible scene –

a completely innocent ancient machine,

and a freshly guilty girl aged seventeen.

The case is black and white,

she was on a zebra crossing

when she crossed over into the light,

Margaret, the one in the coffin.

But the policeman seems to be deaf –

Brenda, what speed were you doing?

He can’t hear 75, PC Jeff,

What kind of duty is he pursuing?

Miss, do you know, have you seen,

the limit it says on the sign?

You are only just seventeen,

your whole driving life’s on the line.

The limit is 55,

now tell me what speed you were doing,

or do you not want to drive,

but spend a long slow life ruing

at bus stops? 75,

she answers again, like an app

that just gives out information,

not like the child on your lap,

whose fact is imagination.

So the officer gives a sigh,

like a shagged-out trucker’s frustration,

following the little white lie

that swallows his destination.

Miss, I will ask you once more

to state a significant figure –

an old maid is dead on the floor,

let the lass not use too much rigour.

Then Brenda opened her mouth,

like a fish that’s not quite alive,

and soft as a goose-wing whispering south,

she said – 55.

We forgive her! Yes, we forgive!

How else can a person live?

This error proves she is human!

A girl dressed up as a woman,

a woman disguised as a wife,

you lie to change your life.

When the ape came down from the tree

he claimed he was you and me.

The suburbs – don’t say a word.

On shaved lawn, a dead lyrebird.

The echidna under the hedge,

the snail on the window-ledge,

are all that’s allowed of the wild –

maybe a jam-faced child.

The streetlamps, gods of low wattage,

one for each modern cottage,

stand guard, like fingers on lips,

dim lighthouses warning of ships.

Silence – the curse of the mother,

heavy and settled weather,

wrapping the roof like the leather

wings of a worn-out vampire

that’s flapped right over the empire.

She was a refugee

from rationed England, you see,

the mother, and lived in a camp

of huts, that each grew a lamp

and changed, as the roses grow,

into a bungalow.

What else but silence can say

how strange and deep is the way

from there to here? Words stop,

stunned in mid-flight, and drop

into a bottomless well,

the radio-silence of hell.

But that was where she hid

when she was sent as a kid

away from Manchester, safe

from fascist fire-bomb and strafe,

into some country place.

All that she can recall

is the old man on the wall –

a picture of a face.

And she had never seen

a portrait, never had been

where such things are. She bound

herself up tight like a wound.

The family might be a band

glittering on a bandstand,

tuba and cornet and flute,

but the conductor signs mute,

and nothing is played, not one dash

of cymbals, or soloist flash,

child-word of triangle bright!

Because she has wrapped them tight

in the wings, black and terrific,

on which she crossed the Pacific.

Now, the policeman’s knock

is a big market shock.

If a household is a world,

that rap is chaos unfurled,

which runs from room to room,

travelling sonic boom,

just like the crash of capital

leaps from capital to capital,

gigantic ape, electronic,

instant, blunt, un-ironic,

making the house one vast

underground bomb-blast.

When mother opened the door,

she let in all the white roar

of a hull-shuddering gale

right off the screaming scale –

heard in her heart alone,

which yelled like a telephone

in the whole family’s ear,

a siren-blast of first-fear.

(Mighty, I’m tell you,

what a dash of blue can do.)

The dragon in the dust,

pinned by the saint,

is the lizard brain

that isn’t sane,

but all taboo and restraint,

and lust.

And when its jaws

open their doors –

oh what a gust –

of every careful mouse

ever snatched into the air,

crying its life out up there.

It was like that in the house,

but quiet, as the police,

charged with keeping the peace,

delivered, back to her mum,

the newborn killer, stone-dumb.

Limp as a soaked shirt

washed up on the shore,

seventeen years of dirt

in the dark frame of the door.

When the officers have gone,

who brought the crash and the roar,

shame, dread and so on,

tabloid rapture for sure –

when the door closes again,

silence salves the hurt

with smears of dog-dirt,

sutures with barbed wire and then

connects that up to the grid.

Mother says God forbid,

and seals the ill. But that night

the rock of ages split.

A chasm opened, unbright,

and the lass fell into it.

There had been one last chance –

up to the balcony

she heard her brother return

from keeping company

and a bit of a dance,

late, late, the stars cold and stern.

He stopped, took two steps

towards her door, which she heard –

through its bone lips

muttered the night bird.

But then the mother’s word

turned him, loud in his head,

and he sighed, and swallowed hard,

and went to bed. 

We forgive her! Yes, we forgive!

How else can a person live?

The error proves she is human!

A girl dressed as a woman,

a woman disguised as a wife,

you lie to change your life!

When the ape came down from the tree

he claimed he was you and me!

Root-Creatures, twisted, dim-lit,

on one side, speaking sweetly –

on the other side of the pit,

a different question completely –

Sword-People, sharp, straight, bright,

shooting out points of harsh light,

that thrust right through the chest-bone,

shatter your heart-stone –

Why did you end her life?

Why did you push so fast

out of the known past,

flash-happy throwing-knife?

Search through the mineral grains

of your smashed heart to find

which of their glinting panes

is the least blind.

Look, in the dancing space

where they entwine their beams,

in imitation grace,

maypoling light-streams,

something perhaps will form,

firebird or golden hare,

like a new word, birth-warm,

flying there, crying there –

This is the thing to note,

the means by which to infer,

slow as a drifting boat,

why you killed her.

And the Root-Creatures, writhing, howl out

in a chorus kind of sing-shout –

You sour old judges, skull-hard,

in your eternal pub,

quaffing blood by the yard,

soft foetus-bones your grub,

Sin, your servant, your bright

self-perpetuating invention,

has screwed the heart spanner-tight

in dread of its own intention!

Innocence, and the dance,

you cramp and clog with ill-meaning,

so the dear lightness of chance

is a dark mind intervening!

You cruel and crippled old buzzards,

thinning the blood with shame,

thrusting into young gizzards

the old rules of the game!

You think that without your laws

no April flowers would rise,

you dread the lack of a cause,

you hate the taste of surprise!

Let her go, let her go, now and for all time!

Here there is no sin, here there is no crime!

Meaningless innocence, spring-water clear,

that is all there is to see here!

Which your dark glances turn to murk.

She was just on her way to work,

Sunday morning, simple planet,

and the same gamble that began it,

put an old woman in the road.

It could have been a toad!

And the Sword-People, just as strong,

kept on with the same song.

Search through the mineral grains

of your smashed heart to find

which of their glinting panes

is the least blind.

This is the thing to note,

the means by which to infer,

slow as a drifting boat,

why you killed her.

Which made the Root-Things cackle and spasm,

so the cacophony of the chasm

intensified – storm-ripped wood,

contested neighbourhood,

where wind and lightning fight.

It was like this night after night,

while the silence of the mother

branched through sister and brother,

starting to drain dad

of what small talk he had.

(Big love for first daughter

went like lamb to slaughter.)

Louder and louder! Loud

as a close Cup Final crowd,

while Brenda’s face appeared

in the newspapers, as feared,

and vanished quick, by good luck,

but not the horror – that stuck.

And she went to work on the train,

sat down with the sane

as a receptionist,

heart tight as a fist

for the night-fight axe-attack

splitting a sharp crack

in the closing dark,

just like a dog-bark

slashes the sweet face

of a hushed, holy place,

splitting her mineral heart

with a steel wedge, to re-start

the escalating debate,

heat of increasing hate

on the one side, blasted white

by the clear voice of sweet light

on the other – as if cold beams

of cloud-light spearing green streams

of coiling seawater frantic,

maddened the whole Atlantic.

Leave her alone! The rope

you throw her, greased with false hope,

that dangles into the pit,

won’t get her out of it!

-   Shatter and break and then

shatter and break again.

All flesh is glass and must crack.

Truth’s lamp shines black.

Desperate argument

of the hung Parliament

of an island nation

facing invasion,

closer each narrowing night.

This was the battle of Brenda –

For the sake of the nation, fight!

For the sake of the nation, surrender!

And she herself, contention-bone,

overcrowded and alone,

what was this doing to her? She diminished

like a biro’s ink, fast-finished,

to the faint dot

of the last drop.

And on that impossible spot,

she stood up and shouted STOP!

All of you! Pack up and go!

All that you say I know!

Clear the court! From now on

I REPRESENT MYSELF!

                                      They were gone

instantly. And the nights were mended,

the chasm vanished, the trial ended,

apparently. Brenda changed her name

to Kelly – Brenda could take the blame.

She left home, lived, worked, no trouble,

silence in court was just a bubble

growing inside her, till she was filled

completely with the one she had killed.

The only solution

was an institution.

They said, Mental pain

can make you insane

(effect as cause)

but there are laws.

You suffer from guilt,

milk has been split.

Or was it ink?

Well, what do you think?

She confessed, and they said,

Yes, a woman is dead,

but there was no crime,

if you’d seen her in time,

you’d have stopped. It was not your will.

She was out of sight, over the hill.

First, you wish she was still alive.

Second, you were only doing 55.

Third, you were just seventeen.

You are squeaky-clean.

Your tower of guilt

is obviously built

on the buried foundations

of your strained relations.

The King is nowhere to be seen,

on a bone throne sits the stone Queen.

Outside the gate,

green and weak,

the children wait

for her to speak.

This is your family, which made you.

And they have given you one gem

of wisdom, utterly untrue,

which is the myth that you made them.

So you have cut this stone

into a surgeon’s knife

that slips through flesh and bone

but does not end your life.

Only it endlessly operates.

And so hope evaporates.

You are a tree

whose taproots taste

chemical waste

we cannot see.

But what you show

is strange-coloured leaves,

bark that grieves,

apples that glow.

No.

So

say

you

but who

am I?

I

will not lie.

I

am why

she had to die.

I

am why

she had to die.

Speak then, to whom,

with a tongue-tomb?

Slurred by immense

false innocence.

By what strange scene

to be wiped clean

of the shame-spittle

of my acquittal?

From what horn-mask

do I have to ask

for curse, ban, task?

Who in this town

will cast me down?

Who has the nerve

for what I deserve?

Forgive me not

for this plague-spot!

To be set loose

for me is a noose!

To be let free

solitaries me!

To be allowed to drive

buries me alive!

Too slow time kills.

Lacking a knife,

with sleeping pills

she took her life.

Down on the beach

on a cold night,

out of harm’s reach,

she sank out of sight.

To the seabed

to speak to the dead,

so I suppose.

But then she rose

revived, brought back

out of the black.

So Kelly, I say,

how are you today?

With your own daughter,

books, great career,

solidly here,

head above water,

brightly alive,

though you don’t drive.

Once you had shaken

the institution

where you were woken,

once you had broken

the family silence,

that broke you once,

you kept on rising.

But on that sand

at the edge of the land,

when you sank, frozen,

under the horizon,

where did you go?

Tell us, speak slow,

deep, as in sleep,

pronounce

that silence,

make clear and bright

that pit of anti-light,

or else all our words

are little songbirds,

or faint stars that lack

the power to speak black.  

Look at this woman,

coupled with someone,

shadowed by something

brighter than lightning.

Who is it - Margaret?

was she your target,

was it your aim

to tell her your name?

Was silence broken

down in death’s ocean?

Is that the case?

Did its dry face

break into brooks?

Could that be true?

when I see you,

that’s how it looks.

OTTO

Otto, you were a booby-trap, a teddy

wired in a dugout to grenades – and saved

for a headmaster’s study by the steady

sapper who saw what gore your straight face craved.

Now we stand listening in our dressing-gowns,

and the headmaster tells us how, that spring,

when bombing down a trench (increasing frowns

of concentration) from an opening

a boy in uniform jumped out and ran

shaking and clown-mask-white, into his arms.

I almost killed him. Bismarck of a man,

with deep moustache, strange storms and stranger calms,

watching the little men troop back upstairs,

as tried and truthful as their teddy bears.

CROICK

My dad (he said he never had a dad,)

called us outside to see the wandering man

who had leaned out of seaplanes as a lad

and dropped on subs (till boffins changed the plan)

small bombs by hand. He turns away, a breeze

clad in a sail, in Croick, among the hills

where the road ends. These dreamless rowan trees

shade psylocibin, nature’s changeful pills

that the moss deals. Years later, in that place,

browsing on these, while the road lasts, late night,

no alteration in the whole of space

except the Harriers blinking green and white

and red, high up. And black of mountains leaning

into their central point, to keep out meaning.

THE ADMIRAL

The admiral my uncle in a boat

with his two sons and me, the Rosshire air

gentle suspended water. Line and float,

everything tangled like a mermaid’s hair

when she comes up to comb it in the light.

The admiral explodes (a Captain then,)

at his thumb-fingered boys, a sorry sight,

then, like a boulder bouncing down the glen,

singles out me: ‘You are the worst, the worst!’

When he was dying, and the threat was gone,

Russia’s vast bubble of black doom had burst,

I asked him, ‘Did the whole thing rumble on

for need of conflict, was the loud US

exaggerating?’ And he answered, ‘Yes.’

PAMPLONA

Once in Pamplona on a summer’s day,

drink taken, sleeping in the arms of light

on a low wall, I woke up thinking hey

I have to get back. I could hear the slight

hum of my fellow monks the other side

of an old building. I had got to clang

up the drainpipe and over – and I tried,

but when I reached the pitched roof’s overhang,

impossible to reach and not let go

first, of the pipe, and so fall back through vast

suction, and crump into the present - no,

I slid back down into the recent past.

So I have had to drift outside the order,

not drunk enough to crawl across the border.

PALAESTRA

Palaestra, stolen from your father, sold

into the old trade: – crossing Regent street,

heading for Lambeth palace on a bold

blue morning, with my good shoes on my feet:

a pale girl in a parka – are you looking

for business? I have got a breakfast meeting

with the Archbishop, I am not for hooking,

but shall I ask him, since this life is fleeting,

to pray for you? Yes. Yes. And so I did,

after we’d spoken over breakfast things

about Augustine. And the moment slid

to a strange edge, fell over, but grew wings,

and he said Yes I will. (She gets back home,

Palaestra, in the end, in ancient Rome.)

GRANDPA

My grandpa stepped behind the altar, turned,

and faced his congregation, raised the bread,

asked God to bless it, raised the wine that burned

red, invoked God to bless that too - and said

all that he should have spoken to the east

westwards instead, towards the people there,

as if God could be squashed between the priest

and pews, who lives where sunrise golds the air.

It never had been done like this before!

But he had wanted to be on the stage,

and this was Soho and the bombing-war

was bringing down the curtain on the age.

So he turned round, and spoke, and in the pause

earnestly prayed there would be no applause –