EARTHBOUND

LIE BACK AND THINK YOU’RE ENGLAND

Gorse breath and evening storm,

Lie back and think you’re England.

Blackbird on a streetlamp,

Lie back and think you’re England.

Be a real England-woman,

Scrawl on the walls

Ink under skin,

Green under the foreign storm

Biting and biting you with lightning.

Weathercock flashing round and round,

Like back and think you’re England.

As the hurried cloud hands

Mould your mounds

All stuffed with coins,

Lie back and think you’re England.

Every piss-stinking pillbox.

Draw down now, draw down

Into all your Avons,

Tangled into Thames’ arms,

Into your writhing wheat

Receive the alien signs.

Be irresistible England.

Wrap the sky in your legs, drag down

And down now the enemy rain

Into your shivering ditches, England.

AFTER BEDE (from Augustine’s Oak.)

The place once known as Albion,

Now known as Britain, is an island

Not far from Belgium in the ocean,

Not far from France, and quite near Holland.

Which on the other side receives

The sea that has no other side,

And oak and ash and other leaves

Gather and scatter on the tide.

Oh there are vines and there is corn,

And horses walking on the land,

Dry timber ready to be sawn,

And salmon heavy in the hand.

Various types of birds abound

On sea and land, and on the shore;

And there are dolphins to be found

Close in, and I can tell you more:

Shellfish and oysters hard and light

Are sometimes found containing pearls,

Violet, green, but mainly white,

God's promise in the ears of girls.

Whelks are abundant, and a dye

Is got from them that lasts forever,

Deep scarlet like the evening sky

That prophesies angelic weather -

It actually improves with age.

This country is alive with flowers,

Like clematis and saxifrage,

Glorying in the frequent showers.

There are at present in these islands,

Four nations: English, British, Iris

And Picts. The Picts are in the Highlands.

And with God's help we all shall flourish.

EARLY MORNING HALF ASLEEP

Hushed as a mummy my son lies

in dawn’s loud pyramid. The sky’s

full of invisible fish the swallows

scoop from the deeps and from the shallows.

The ewes are wailing like kept women

on the bit ground they hold in common.

And death’s pet lambs are in the meadows,

and death’s pet birds in the green shadows.

A silence – of the swan who sings

not with his voice but with his wings.

POEM TO MY DAUGHTER IO

Sweetheart, while you were asleep I wheeled you

Through the red sea into Jerusalem

Where frogs lamented

The conquest of the insect kingdom,

Past God on his gallows,

Through the bogs of the Somme

Where red-haired angels,

Work-numb, hung out their washing,

Trucks smashing the hopes of puddles,

Gamblers with stars in their hands,

Dogs with their hearts in their mouths,

The sky on a brown hinge, turning;

Famous paintings left out in the rain,

Mona Lisa hopelessly weeping,

And many other things I did not try to explain

To you since you were sleeping

FOR SYLVIE (Chrisening Poem.)

Why did you not decide to be

A blackbird in an apple tree,

Blowing the whistle of your head

As the green summer turns to red?

Or a fish flashing in a stream

Like a piece fallen from the moon

To dazzle in a different dream,

Bright riser in the afternoon?

Or a cat sleeping in the light,

Between the shadows where they fall,

Sweet dreaming till the break of night

Wakes you to walk along a wall?

Or a half-collie in a field,

Flustering through a maze of traces,

Till the hare leaping unconcealed

Suddenly takes you to the races?

Or any of a million creatures

With all their fascinating features?

Because as you, imagining

All of them, you are everything?

SCHOOL.

The children are repeating what the teacher is saying. In the playground the seagull and two jackdaws have found a sandwich in its wrapper and the seagull is tugging it along and the jackdaws dance and sidestep behind. The traffic is lashing its tail, lashing its tail. Again the wind, that had sunk into a dream, stunned, grips the trees and shakes them, then sinks down again, dizzy, like an ape injected with intelligence. Very high up, an aeroplane is feeding its unborn young, like a pig’s womb, with two rows of unborn, held tight in the glow of the womb, in the big pink belly of the air. The seagull takes a great step, with a flap of one wing, with a flash of one yellow foot, and the jackdaws open their coats and sidestep, and the children repeat what the teacher has said. In their boxes the pencils have laid their heads together, and in the trees the small birds are talking in five hundred languages, it is impossible to concentrate, as if thought itself was suddenly loose, light, winged, in the wind’s fury.

SHORTER OXFORD

Square angel,

Strong citadel,

Museum of exploded poems

And unravelled novels

Whose assortment

Into your catacombs,

Reversed,

Will be called writing,

How they howl

In their isolation cells,

The separated elements

Of future psalms

With what unconnected monotones

They sit gloomy as caged kings,

And around their feet in piles

The shackles of their meanings

So many,

Such a slave-ship of them,

Moaning, imitating

The sea’s unresolved rhythms

Or stamping off in all directions,

Imitating animal sounds;

Beast mask

And nonsensical drum;

But bring them near to each other,

Outside your borders,

Drag the lion’s cage

Over by the geographer!

Spells powerful

To raise the dead and keep him hanging

High above the fireplace

And the illiterate flames.

Square angel,

Strong citadel,

Where in your many strata

Are the discomposite songs of heaven?

PAUSE.

People are pausing, lips parted,

Not quite yet saying what they are thinking,

Pausing, looking

At the sky for inspiration,

As if it was a dictionary attentive

To their thoughts, a butler hurrying

To supply the words they need,

As at the particular hour, the punctual cigar.

But the sky, that longer pauser, is looking

Through completely unfocused eyes

Like a baby’s,

All blue air and bright water,

At the world for inspiration,

As if it was a dictionary, disintegrating,

Its letters black ants maddened

By hot water, searching in all directions

For a way to cohere into words

To replace the prespeech of the stars,

Ego-scream of the moon

And the blue babblings of the air

With some kind of contention

So they can mean something.

                                            A MUG OF TEA.

                                          (for Brian Goodwin.)

A whole new disturbance and upsurge over the steady level of the table is signalling to the clouds as the wind teases the trees with her lifted-up skirt revealing no underwear or anything else. But not the curtains, since the windows are closed. In the sealed room, everything plays dead or rather sits dumbstruck watching the performance over and above the mug now, the mug a blank or neutral mask on the face of a magician out of the top of whose head curls and curls of coloured ribbons are pulled, though these are not coloured. A tiny imp or changeling infant piece of the weather stolen here in a different kingdom is acting out what it believes to be a hurricane, it is incredibly excited to find this storm imprinted on its atoms like a remembered maydance, there is nothing else on earth it would rather be doing, a genius and in this place inexplicably alone, with no competition, and the books enraptured, shivers running down their spines. Whirl and again whirl goes the stormer, letting further scarves of herself flow out from the ends of her hands, in a widening imperfect repetition  – though there is an edge, where she ends, and it is not still, it is shrinking very slowly, her curvettes growing shorter, though still reminiscent of the S’s of estuaries and Alaskan rivers, great ice-snakes, and the patterns in the Book of Kells, (that never cools,) and so many other things  – monks moving through a spiral maze, or any other spiral that might be her ambition if it was not that she is completely engrossed here in this room though now time is running out as the cause reason and impetus of her storm vaguens, she concedes to the stillness of the room, the arguments of the carpet seem to hold more weight than her idea of unspinning, the curtains and the chairs, though entranced they also ache for her to end, so that they can sink into a dream of what she has shown them, the workings not just of the world but all the little galaxies briefly swirling and widening

CLOUDS

When shall we be born again

Free fall

Into the bright running,

Mingle in ditches

With all kinds of scum,

And the heavier dead,

White freight of mayflies –

To carry all that

Or be lensed on panes,

Tickle a face,

Slide over tongue

Into the processing place,

Re-arise, salt,

Through ducts by sorrow squeezed,

To again

Be face-rain,

Creak in copper pipes,

Or caged in glass, sit

Out all the enquiries of light -

OFFICE THOUGHTS.

If there had never been any sky, stars, clouds,

Trees, never a single bird,

How sad would we be?

Not missing them obviously

But surely less glad even than these pent people here in the office,

Where the clouds crawl over the vertical glass surfaces at snail speed, leaving no snailtrace

Except on the mind,

A bright glad track across the thoughts of the morning;

And birds drop their songs

Into the gaps between screenache and printerrythm,

As if the mind was a tree whose branches

Creaked complaints, aches in the damp joints, thinking I’ll never be green again,

Never,

But then some overwintering bird stops briefly,

Perched on a pause in your thoughts,

Sings all through the lichen of your depression, lightening

The careful plans you have made

To see the days through, age, die,

Fall forward into the dead question;

But then again -

What do we not know we are missing,

What further skies,

Singers additional to birds,

Lights unrelated to stars

WELL YOU CAN LOOK

Well you can look at crows and rooks

and blink at butterflies,

but they’re a swirling smoke of crooks

stealing the light out of your eyes.

And you can gaze at fading days

as the red sun goes down big,

but it’s a grief, the sun’s a thief,

it’s got your heart in a bag.

Yes you can pine at the green brine,

but when the cloud comes, look,

that isn’t water, there’s been a slaughter,

it’s your black blood in the slack flood,

oh you can let your bee eyes flit

from leaf to leaf and flower to flower,

but listen honey you’re losing money

through the blue holes in your true soul,

your eyes are spouts, the world pours out

of your emptying head and then you drop dead.

THE CARNIVAL OF THE ANIMALS

In the wake of the parade

I lingered among heaps of dung;

Listening to the chaos fade,

I hummed the song the animals had sung.

As the steam that left the piles

Drained itself and lost its heat,

So the song, with growing miles,

Lost volume, soon, to my ears, incomplete.

But I, among its residue,

Echoed my memory's cartoon

Of them and the lament they blew,

A mesmerising, supernatural tune.

Where they had eased themselves and bled,

Cut by the monotonous blade,

Animals singing as they fled,

So that their panic seemed like a parade.

DAIRY FARMER.

Dazed dairy farmer, racing round,

Stepping and bowing, cow to cow,

In your hosed parlour, shit-sluiced now,

Unlocking suckers, two by two,

On without looking to the next one -

Hemmed in by quotas, sleep-starved, working

All weekend long despite believing,

Sweeping your fields above the sea

In arcs of light like scythes laid down,

To keep so many slow mouths moving

To the dull pulse of the machine's

Multiple sucking – in your dreams

Slow hands in Africa pull down

The endless vine with tugs that send

The warm jet into the small bucket

That quickly brims – you walk at dawn -

A cow is lying on the sun,

And won't get up for all your banging

With a light stick on a long spine,

But now your dung-caked cow-dog's barking

Uplifts the obstacle, and streams

Of diamonds dive into your brain -

Sweet daylight! From their parlour beams,

Others, strung up by numbers, hang,

But you move on – and here's my question -

Father of all your calves, begun

By your sheathed arm's inseminations,

Selling for leather and for hounds

All your old brides when they run dry,

What's this bright outcome of a nightmare,

These rocks that breathe where rainbows bend

In the black hands of the east wind?

Seventy nine ships of the line

Drifting in here and there formation

On a sea far from wars and storms?

COWS

The cows are grazing on the hill, they can do nothing

about night coming down, the deflating zeppelin,

and their own forms changing,

growing monstrous, rising

out of the all-day-work of the ground

that blows them up, that swells and swells them

vast monstrous wind-staggered balloon-cows

crowding the sky now

as the night comes down. 

DEER 1

Bending in the same wind

poets and mathematicians

have concocted a theorem

and here it comes, tight-boned,

prints its way out of the wood

of their thoughts, trembling and

susceptible to disproof

DEER 2.

The tree-limbed deer as it flees, leaves

A permanent after-image of trees.

GROUPS

Today we are looking at groups,

at the beauty of relation

and slight difference,

see the fuchsias on their bush,

dangling conclave of cardinal’s hats –

is it their similarity or their difference

that attracts us?

Rooks go over in a group,

something less than a flock or ‘parliament’ –

a gang or troop or detachment.

What has made them split from the main bloc,

was it an accident

as when water runs among rocks?

They call to each other and their calls, no doubt,

answer exactly that question –

perhaps they are saying, ‘We are not a group.’

The countryside is covered with these scattered gatherings.

Now ‘it’ has started to rain,

infinite notes

very nearly identical.

Here go families of thoughts hand in hand,

passing down their characteristics.

Some are not in agreement.

Look one tall young thought is refusing to speak to its father,

an infant thought is laughing

but who can say how grave she will grow up to be?

Now we see their dead relations following,

in fact their distinction

is that they are related to nothing.

Days pass in large and small clusters, 

sometimes one at a time.

So many sevens, the number seven is broken.

Night and day constantly adjust their distinctions,

twilight is drawn towards night which is drawn towards dawn

which is drawn towards noon, and so on,

tribe eats tribe, name name,

everything tends towards water,

mere mass,

then breaks

IN THE HIGH FIELD

In the high field

The cows are waiting for wings.

But they are fattening.

Seagulls walk among them,

Critically despairing.

Cloud-shadows lift the eyes

To the clouds that make it look so easy,

And the white stars on the brows of the cows

Yearn upwards

Even as the green grass

Sweet-talks them down.

DEER.

Cows graze, stomach-baloons,

Tethered by teeth to the green of the ground,

Not glancing up at the deer

Like school dreams that stray

Straight through the geometry of the hedges,

Leaping the grammatical lanes

Of this landscape copied from a map of itself,

Surveyed with the sole intention

Of pinning the deer down;

Here and there, investigators,

Camouflaged, with chainsaws,

Interrogate the stationary villages

Of foliage - out of a line of trees

Rip every tenth, in front of the rest,

But still nothing is said,

Though winter, traitor,

Hides less, lays more bare,

Almost ready to spill

Her all as the year wears.

Look – where the morse of the hedgerow

Almost communicates between two woods,

A branched head

Leaps the gap of sense.

On the bare moors the herds

Scatter and gather,

Their shepherd invisible,

His crook a rifle, but here,

A coven of hollies conspires

Against the not-quite-absolute empire,

Into whose untuned ear

The deer disappear.

ROE DEER.

Buttercups not yet open (small sun);

Tawdry material, crimped and crammed;

Buried among them, cowslips gone green -

Curtains in an abandoned caravan.

Deep in the rusty grasses,

Litter of Latin names,

Some grey moths beyond taxonomy and

Stacked upstairs like old silver

In stiff drawers, the tarnished stars.

Someone is still feasting in Eden

Nose down among the Hebrew flowers

In a haze of Arabian perfumes,

Searching for one particular delicious thing among millions,

And lifts to me a face all triangles.

FOX?

Tell me, Mister obvious magpie,

Have you seen the fox lately?

I have not seen him for many a day.

Has he escaped out of this territory,

Or been exterminated quietly?

It seems so, from the lack of villainy –

Farmers glib and sheep self-confident.

TO MY BELOVED

Please don’t do that

Thing with the dead rat,

And waking me up in the night

With your mind like a searchlight,

And trafficking flea refugees

To my bed – don’t do that please.

But do come back with your stare

Returned by bird, bat and hare,

Your passport stamped, as it were,

By the black inside the hedge-blur,

That’s changed by my eyes to far shores,

But etched sharp onto yours,

For me to glimpse just before

You flop like a cat on the floor.

ROOTED, FOR ALL THEIR WINGS.

Rooted, for all their wings,

Flowers stand in the ground.

The great oak crashed to its knees,

Flinging out wrinkled arms.

Tugging at green strings,

Flowers, in the low sky,

Fly a kite but don’t fly.

The willow shook from the ground,

Stretching out rivets, and strained

Up, but released only seeds

To glide to new ground.

Even the birds are always

Falling, but only so far

As the fingers of the elm.

And clouds, perfected birds,

Put down roots of rain.

CAT AGEING

I have crept in among the carpet flowers

To grow a little older. Showers

Outside the window, their dotted line,

Help me to uncouple my spine

Little by little. Strobe skies

Suck the colour out of my closed eyes.

Hours of course help, heavy labour

To carry away my lightness, while I harbour

On the bright carpet. The labyrinth pattern

Will help me to completely unfatten,

Unravel my whole self. My soft concentration

Leaves it to woven lilac and carnation

To do the eternal work.

All I have to do is shirk.

CHILDREN AT THE ZOO

The children wake early in the morning

the sparrows in the eves are shouting

and the voles rush through tunnels of grass

the rhinoceros pulls at green leaves

to the sound of the radio news

the children of the baboons gaze out at the empty zoo

the children are rushing their breakfast

the flamingoes lift folded toes clear of the dirty water

the children are jumping and shouting in the car

the alligators lie like plastic in their tanks

the children pour through the gates

the adults are counting them over and over again

the pelicans are swimming among ducks and geese

a seagull stands on a post

through the ash trees comes the roar of a tiger

the children are chattering, they are staring at an empty cage

the tiger children roll over and over

you can also see them on a screen

the perfumes of the summer flowers run wild along the zoo paths

and butterflies, prayers done, tear loose from leaves and go floating

CAT

Sit full of singing in my window.

The bird I ate is again

Singing in the hedge outside my window.

I will catch it again and again

Sit full of singing in my window.

DOG

Went out to try and locate

dog of that endless bark,

finally found it

not locked up as I’d feared

but just old and mad.

Go on then, scatter

your barks over the rooftops,

sticks flung by your madness

and fetched by your madness

A CAPTIVE WOOD.

Yesterday's country, that was clear and bright,

Has been all but smudged out, a loss of sight

Beginning near the ground. The fields cling small,

As beads of water sag a spidersweb,

That once rayed proud. The wind, a seabird fresh

From beaches where the dark sea lay smashed white,

That lifted brightness through the trees, now pipes

In a small place. The buzzard, that was just

An iris-speck, now hunches in its mac,

The sheep have changed their language, that goes soaked

With grumbling steps like those whose walk is work.

But it was not bright here. A ten-foot fence

To keep the deer in keeps the clear days out.

FIFTEEN YEARS LATER.

Turquoise damsel fly

still in this moment.

SPRING

Primrose

Slowly

Opens

Its face

Millions

Of years

Old

CROCUS

Where have you been, my friend, asleep so long

dreaming in purple, wrapped in everything

purple, to keep you sleeping, iodine

and shining sea-plants pasted to the pilings

of wharves, and purple of the evening’s brain

thinking a storm, and purple of the dream-

cloak of approaching death, and purple, purple,

stain of exaggerated grapes, off-black,

of hemlock, much too purple for the mind,

that stains the body dead, stained glass that stains

the light out of the light, in purpled shrines

where fading unbelievers kneel, with cancer,

and purple makes them well. You call this spring,

you call this waking up, this purple strain,

you cannot even speak, your purple tongue

is just for drinking light, you suck the sun,

the teat of light, and purple-swoon again

into your purple baby dream of opening.

LOVE LIES ON THE GROUND

Love lies on the ground,

A cloud that could very nearly

Lift but is just coarse enough to get

Looped up in pines and power-lines

Like sheeps-wool barb-wired.

Everything is lost

In the sweet-pea-soup wandering

In circles or serpentine,

Nothing is getting done,

Hedge-flowers robbed blind by the light

Selling their colours for nothing

DAFFODILS.

Daffodils, here you are again.

What have you brought us from the ground?

Make a loud noise, a bright brass sound,

That we can clearly understand.

Among the open mouths I stand,

A deaf man staring at a band

Of trumpets heralding a king,

Making all eardrums ring but mine.

These are the only sounds they bring

Out of the numbness of the ground:

The absent music of the moon

And the bright silence of the sun.

APRIL SWALLOW

You slapstick sparrows in a gang,

You black-cloaked lurking jackdaw villains,

You fairy seagulls trailing tinsel,

You starlings wittily ad-libbing

Have all been suddenly outdone

By this trapezist who has swung

Shining around the globe to end

Your long-extended pantomime.

FAKE

Look out! Last night in the churchyard late

The fake flowers began to pollinate.

Before the false dawn blushed in the east,

A prestidigitating breeze released

Their nylon seeds all over the map.

And then the fight began – dry sap

Against the real stuff, waterproof thread

Against sticky membranes – the undead

Against the serially alive,

Which frankly cannot survive,

Crushed by the durable expressions

Of Hope and Grief, the ever-fresh-ones,

To which in vain the daffodils vanishing

Into the bank, talk about next spring.

CEMETERY

The graves are gloomy in the rain today,

But I have seen them have a holiday,

When they have slowly danced from dawn to night

With their own shadows turning in the light,

When the guide blackbirds, standing on the stones,

Explained the vague emotions of the bones.

And butterflies have brushed them with their wings,

And children's fingers – many passing things

Have hoped a touch might teach their ignorance,

And though unfathomable, the response

Still stirs the touchers, as a lovely face

Unmoved by flowers, still gives the bringer grace.

DRUNK MOONSONG

Over Australia upside-down,

Trying to die, to be a midden

Of daisied graves, to grow one finger

Of waving barley, squeeze one tear

Out of your lightly powdered eyesockets.

Wastebin of paper thoughts that fall

Out of earth’s mouth and up the stairs,

Turning your nose up from your mother,

Her smoking paps and steaming oxters.

Empty speech bubble of no speaker.

Mirror mirror in the black,

What have you got behind your back?

Blotched and bleached-out Mona Lisa,

If looks were letters you’d be littered.

SOHO

The sky tries to ease its breeze

into the tight streets,

the smoke pushes it back

with a little cough,

the streets contract,

they tar, and choke, and pant

and gasp, they are crowded with coughs,

the sky tries to dawn

bright clear ideas, to project

into the little streets the higher

and higher mathematics of the stars,

calls Lazarus rise! to the moon,

rolls it aside like a stone,

stages large-casted cloud-plays,

gestures ironically with contrails

and now, desperate, pours,

sends down its millions of unmet eyes,

fascias skin,

lenses panes,

french-kisses the drains -

then steps back again

waiting, inviting

any kind of reply, anything -

A FLY ON THE CEILING.

The midnight snow bombarding heaven shines

In the tar-blackness of the window panes.

The shouting trees that hang their heads in hell

Clutch their deep roots in good with all their will,

Though leaves tear loose like pleasures into limbo,

To rest above or leap and spin below.

By the straight slender plant whose golden bloom

Burns in the whited centre of the room,

Let me drop dead to heaven when I must,

And let my body be a useful crust

To the first searching creature hunger brings,

Thankful for husks of eyes and sticks of wings.

O LET ME LIVE BESIDE THE SEA

O let me live beside the sea,

A landscape that is temporary,

Whose hills are pliant to the heel,

Whose tractors cleave transparency

And sink, immense, imaginary,

As their wide sprayers cut the spray;

Whose fragile cattle range white-winged

And grazing on the vertical.

O let me live beside the sea,

A subject of uncertainty

As to its own extent, that blindly

Puts out weak feelers every day

To the braille Bible of the pebbles,

And shudders at the prophecies

And swoons, white-eyed, into a stupor,

And rocks and rages in its wheelchair.

O let me live beside the sea,

And search for treasure on the shore,

And be frustrated utterly,

And try to count the grains of sand,

To classify the rockpools and

To psychoanalyse the foam,

And then creep back defeated home,

As wide and wasted as the ocean.

ROLL ON SUMMER

Roll on summer with your wagon heaped high with fields

And these hazy impossible horses

That heave your cart down the hill

While out the back spill primroses and pigeons

Now tumbling down the slope in front of the horses

Towards the estuary that is leading the sea

To its mud pastures.

A lurch and

Over the side pours a whole new wave of flowers,

And eggs that smash but still flutter away happily.

No amount of shattering diminishes any of this,

It grows by being broken.

Summer is not hard to find, it dwarfs motorways

And turns tower blocks into little girls

Kneeling in the daisies,

It wears the sky as a badge.

The night cart picks up winter’s bins

And piles them onto a blaze that each day

Grows brighter and earlier.

And these day-horses, what can you say about them,

A kind of invisibility that hurts the eyes,

And there’s no driver,

Someone has got to get control of them,

They are dragging the Milky Way

Like tangled garden netting

All over London and Leeds and Birmingham

CANAL.

At a digestive pace her grace

Sets forth her not setting forth,

A lesson in non-progression

To the cows her cardinals

Bent in adoration.

Moorhens fuss at her buttons

And she calms them,

Narrow boats iron her train

And she cools their bottoms,

Swans massage her back in white silence

And she hypnotises them

With their own reflections.

In her the sky turns backwards

And there through a gap in its folds a seagull

Plummets to the very heights

Of her silt and a trace of your face.

She acknowledges with regal ripples

The flagflapping bramble crowds,

Slow Queen of Cows.

The filth of the ditches

Adds to her riches.

At all times attended by finches.

Wheels in her deeps

Have come to rest and to rust

In the stopped clock of her mud.

Fleets of rooks go over in the dawn

And back in the dusk, for no other reason

Than to see for themselves the fine cut of their costumes,

And the magpie glancing sideways,

And the kingfisher,

Eager for a flash of itself.

Now as in the day she lay with the sky,

So in the night she plays with your days,

Bends your straight hours into spheres

And blows them,

Stretches your moments to riverlength.

And with an underwater ear you can hear

Even the far sea bang on its anvil

And the steel silence.

And now you are she and her moored herds

Graze in the clouds of your shallows.

A WOMAN DREAMS SHE IS A WHALE.

You shatter through the rooftop into moonlight,

Shoulder through water rafters into midnight -

Out of the darkness where the hours don't pass,

Into the light-years trapped in shattering glass,

The self-consuming moments of the ocean.

You are a destination set in motion.

And though you're heavier than a thousand cows,

In this vast wood that never rests its boughs,

You are a bird. And in the streaming ages

Drained from the land as if from rain-blurred pages,

You are a moment. So you sing and fly,

Weightless in the reflection of the sky.

THE NATURAL DESPAIR

The natural despair

That falls out of the air

Runs on rocks and down

The tile hills of the town

Looking for – looking for –

Without eyes or hands

Or lips or anything –

A wife

But is everything,

And meets, in every lens

Only itself, and vastens.

TUESDAY

The moon of these last few days is going,

The moon of last Tuesday afternoon,

With its various small coincidences,

Like two flies hatched in the same turd

Alighting on the same spider’s web,

Unlikely as the first moon landing,

And all that new blue world. The moon,

The moon of these last few days is going.

The ash trees are all hanging hands,

Brown and yellow flapping banana skins –

Impossible to slow her going,

Carrying off last Tuesday afternoon,

Stowed in her leprous cheek,

With all its co-ordinates, its trines and ascendants,

The cross-wired moments killed and killed and killed,

Scattered husks swept now and tidied into the dark.

Wednesday and Thursday and Friday will be dark,

The stars will hold the floor, with small talk

And domestic debates.

Sometime on Monday on the evening horizon,

Much newer than the restored Church tower,

Among the haggard watchers, the ash trees, there

She will be –

A new bright eye, wiped clean.

WRONG PLACE, WRONG TIME

Love, the boats were lifting

While I waited

In the wrong place for the meeting.

Earlier I had asked for luck

From the sea by the marina, but no warning

Came from the great amnesia heaving

Soft sighs of love, ah Plymouth my darling,

As its deep sleep shallowed to the land

Where I stood mistaken.

PLYMOUTH

Plymouth is a city beside the sea,

And the ships they add and they take away,

The ocean is a mathematician.

Only the rich can put down roots,

The poor man always will be straying

And the poor woman with her poor children.

Only the strong can keep their station,

The weak they always are escaping

With all their might, so by my calculation

Plymouth is not a thing of precision.

She is a mouth, wide open, saying

For what we are about to receive,

May the Lord make us

Infinite!

FROM INDIA.

Who else will tell about this mother

Running like mad along the Ganga,

Because her child has disappeared

Into that sliding land, the river?

And how she came to question dolphins

Till she could clearly see him drifting

Upstream, above the point of drowning,

Turning the way that things will turn,

Back through the valleys of abstraction,

Against the stream of loss, through madness,

Into the spring of the beginning?

WEARINESS

How many freight-trucks of weariness

have passed slowly through,

full of waste heading west,

trundling clones?

Here comes another one,

off to the slag place,

where it will turn round

and head back east empty

IN NIGHTS AS LONELY AS THE SUN'S.

In nights as lonely as the sun's,

I live my second innocence,

Dreaming about the moon’s white thighs

In dark asphyxiated skies.

The pricelessness of dawn demands

The heart and soul and resonance

Of little birds with worlds to sell,

But I possess the still hour's owl.

When butterflies, like pairs of hands,

Flit by me in a strobelit dance,

Gesturing in their extasy

That heaven is a shrubbery,

And breezes stagger drunkenly

Into the slowdance of the sea,

I cannot feel the kiss of the wind,

Because the moon is in my mind.

LOVER (from the Russian)

Weave a wreath from the birch tree

With a blue cornflower too,

Cast it in the stream to see

What your love will do to you.

Oh my wreath is drowning, drowning,

My true love is frowning, frowning,

He will fly away from me

To the far side of the sea.

BRIDE (from the Russian.)

Far away, far away

From your mother country,

When your heart is cold and grey,

And your cup is empty

Find a bare and virgin place

That was never ploughed,

Let the tears run down your face

Where it is allowed.

Mother earth will not tell

What your soul said,

The hot stones will not sell

Spots of tears you shed.

DEAR GLORIA

Dear Gloria the days go by,

The pale nurse's rosy fingers

Change the bandages on my eyes;

No change, the light still wounds,

Wintery stormclouds rush the hills,

Causing landslides of shadows.

But today I discharged myself,

And seeing darkness one day away

From the trees around the bend in the river,

That wore your air,

I went in there -

How eagerly the water goes over!

BAYLEAF BOAT

Love, to creatures bright and small,

Like us, offers no trials at all.

We flitted to it like two fleas

On a match and wire trapeze.

A castle in a goldfish bowl

Tested the mettle of my soul

And your hair could pull me up the tower

When trimmed to just below the ear.

But sighs in empty concert halls,

And passion whispered in cathedrals,

Where echoes seem to grow forever

Through chambers of unchanging weather,

Made me vainer than the thrush,

Who knows that when his lovesongs hush,

The sun he raised will sink again.

Morning came and you were gone,

Fleeing in a bayleaf boat,

As dawn broke mighty from my throat.

TO AN ACTRESS

Your eyes began this dialogue

By reminding me of it.

It ends by proving me a rogue,

You dodge the consequences with your feet.

You speak as though you dreamed these sad affairs,

And yet your steps slow to a stop

And you succumb to change with tears,

Fall silent and, in darkness, drop.

Each night I feel the waters rise

Over my face, wondering how

I drown and live in such quick seas,

Which is surprising when so often now

I’ve looked at you defending your designs

And your desires for two hours under lights,

Then gone to laugh with you behind the screens,

And out to watch the people on the streets.

PRE-NATAL.

Smile at the tired smile putting down a phone as another

Wakes up and cries.

Swish-swish the monitor, telling of pressure

In a tight place, the last crew-member

Banging on the inside of the sub's hull with a spanner.

Up here someone is crying, she is peering

From the edge of herself, bad news has surfaced

From down where her love circles

In shoals, in blind glittering schools.

But you my little one, there you are, there you are,

In black and white, bird-boned.

Still breathing at ease in the deep through your stomach and

Planning on being some kind of woman

AN ISLAND

You are the kind of place I like.

An island. Silver birch stand round

Nonchalant rocks that might have been

A burial chamber. Here I have lain down

After shipwreck, the sea my headache

Limitlessly glittering.

And then the ground blurs, fire blankets it,

The earth's black, but still I,

(Who dropped the careless fagend,)

Cling on like Ben Gunn.

Then branchy creatures,

Spidering out of the foam,

Take root where the trees burned,

And everything's changed, but still

I won’t cut them down for a raft.

I lived awhile on the moon, and died,

And Mercury's ironic air could not sustain me,

And I have tried the life of plants

And of sharks, but none suited me

As much as this island.

GRANDFATHER

Liked me for your grandfather’s smile.

Whose he had is not recorded.

Smiles floating down like blossom from Eden,

Catching the eyes of grandchildren’s grandchildren -

THORN

Although our sign has sometimes been

One thorn tree with two shadows, woven

Into a fierce embrace of scratches –

A witch interpreting the wind

And the wide north in creaks and groans –

And though these days get packed together

Like flakes of mackerel or the strata

Of Hartland cliffs, vast aeons diminished

To streaks of green and brown and green,

Love is the opposite of time,

A river falling from the land

Into the wind, and turning round,

Blowing through rainbows back upstream.

SMELLING-MISTAKE POEM.

The wives are sudding on the shore.

Far out to sea the wives, colliding,

Become each other. Soapy tears float clear

From the grey eyes of the green wives out there.

Running in lines across the enamelled plain,

Like waving washing shuffling in a line

Back to the house from whose machine it came,

They walk towards the shore. The shore is them,

Their marriage to the land, a sudden May

And froth of celebration, of champagne.

The wives progress towards the shore. Clouds darken

And they are khaki marching in a line

Towards the wire one putrefying June.

The wives are anything and everything.

SKY POEM

She can do anything she likes,

Without reason.

Yesterday she hammered so hard

We were stuck in the car.

We got to a gate and she threw up a black wall

Of thunder.

Today she is clear

And it’s clear who she’s clear for

Is not us

But that bright lad up there.

For him her dawn-gowns,

Her seven thousand veils of air.

We just get her hysteria.

LOVE POEM

It was the January black

That pushed me like a shivering stone

Into your heat. But not to stay.

And so I say,

As the train iambs me away,

Darkness and frost with crippled hands

Wind us into a ball of wool,

The light unravels us.

LINES FROM A LOST PLAY.

How similar the state of sleep, soft dove,

Head under wing, is to the state of love!

Both pliant, knocked out, unresisting, good,

Exiled from qualities of must and should:

Sleep is no duty, love is not a duty,

Sleep drops the watching dog into a beauty

Of helplessness. And sleep is full of dreams,

And so is love, into whose heart light streams

Unreasonably. But similarity

Begins to founder and lose parity

When I consider that love hurts, sleep not;

Sleep not the slightest bit, and love a lot,

Unless we count bad dreams. If she loved me

Again, what a siesta that would be.

BLUES

Feel like a mouse in the superbowl,

So many changes sweepin thru my soul

If I was a horse I’d be in foal,

So many changes sweepin thru my soul

Feel like a half that’s eaten a whole,

So many changes sweepin thru my soul

Did I lose my heart or was it stole?

So many changes sweepin thru my soul.

EARTHBOUND.

What rathole does not drag

Into its bed me, of grey skin-dust,

What dogbark not un-retch

Into black offal sack?

What web soever does not snag

And me yank by the mind’s hair, stopped

Under the holly long

As the leaves are green, almost?

What sky not broad-wash

Orange on the high ice?

What wasp hole not heart-stop

Me black as a bullet would?

What stars not shrink bright to the spot,

What pond not reflect till I rot?

FINDING POEMS AROUND SNEEZLE’S PRAIRIE AND SO ON

Heard crying in the night walked out,

Found it lying either half made or half smashed,

Took it in hand, it gasped

Walk with me, walk, walk -

Where? Everywhere. Into the green interiors

And deeper

Also out,

Wider and still wider than the eyes of the stars.

And what would you like to eat?

The sea, the stars, all the prime numbers.

But it was just exaggerating,

All it really wanted could fit in a matchbox

So I gave it that,

By means of tweezers

into its tiny mouth

And gradually it lost its crook look

And became a kind of monkey, dressed smart,

Leaf-light, dancing about conversing with experts,

A likely lad,

And so I left it, relieved, and just then

Heard a tiny crying

In the far corner of the kite-shaped field,

Went to investigate that

CHARM AGAINST DARTINGTON GARDENS.

Now the amateur actors

Have boomed their goodbyes in the courtyard

And the traffic’s relapsed and the jackdaws

Shuffled into the holes in the church-tower

And the statue reclines, not alive,

And the graves play peekaboo, just about to break open

And the two thousand year old yew tree still bides its time

And the streetlights fake tan the sky’s unbikini’d body.

And through the whole deepening scene walks a young man

Whispering incantations

against anything speaking

WINTER

The grass is dragging down the rain

And I am dragging winter down

Into my bones and veins again.

It was a model of a day,

Not the real sun, not the real sky,

All summer long – a fist of clay

I spun into a jug and glazed

Horizon blue – and there it stands

While winter smashes me to pieces.

LAUGHTER.

(To Charlie G-F.)

Wagons of laughter are heading out west,

The canvas is quivering,

The oxen shaking,

The lad with the rod to tap their rumps

Weeps buckets

Of glee as they plod; the guitars laugh softly,

The banjos,

Even the winchesters are giggling,

The greased wheels chuckle,

The dust lifts

Into a haze of jest stretching

For a long way behind the laughing pioneers.

And this is lucky because (they are us) they will have to face

The serious hilarity of whiskey and powders,

And their own arrogance camped in the promised land,

Having raced ahead in jet planes.

All this and worse things no match

For you sitting

In a stream of laughter,

Pointing at some big-small piece of self-importance,

The springhead

Of such a child of a rainburst

As could erode the most granite

Effigies of yourself.

WHITE FLOWERS UNDERFOOT

White flowers underfoot,

Switched off at night and shut, stars take their place

In gardens overhead – or cloud wipes out

All of those walks – or morning shuts them off,

But switches on the daisies. Balance up

The compensations in your head, or else

Walk down beside the waves, between the waves

Of water and the waves of sand,

With, on the one hand, yes, the land,

But with the sea, the sea, on the other hand

FIRE AND AIR

I have been given words beyond invention.

Promise of nature they are now my treasure.

Elements bow their heads to my intention:

Water, and air whose weight no scale can measure,

And earth and fire - each word of mine contains

A universe. But it goes riding by

Like a horse racing free of broken reins,

Like the horse galloping demonically,

Dragging Hippolytus, that kicks away

From the green beast that glittered in the sea,

Intolerable memory. Its neigh

Comes out a scream, and it is dragging me,

I am Hippolytus. Through eyes blood-blind

I see the forehead of the earth is lined

With death. I see the word flee endlessly

Across it like a horse along the sea.

From the Russian of Lev Gumiliev.

HEART

How long heart will you keep on tapping your baton,

You have got my attention,

Headless juggler of the sun and the moon,

Two blind fools on a bench entwined

How long, heart, will you keep up your beseeching

To me for directions,

While I look to you for the same,

Since yours are the vaster demands

Drain where the world drowns,

Falling in through the eyes like returning tears,

Tapping your foot with such authority, idiot Emperor,

What could possibly break you, you are the breaker,

What could satisfy you, flooding and flushing,

Windscreen wipers

Rearranging creation,

Leaping from each spent thought to the next, like flames,

Eternity's tin bucket,

Slipping and slopping

To the hips' rhythm,

Spilled in kisses and glances, famously wasted,

Famously bound

For generations,

Then wandering again, wondering

BEING EVERYONE ELSE

Just about now I must be sitting

In a glass room above glass rooms

On a firm cushion of opinions,

Gulping strong coffee I can't stand,

Hitlering into a device

Trapped in the hollow of my hand,

I must be standing by the lanes

With my thumb out, I must be snoozing

Over the moaning blur of pistons,

I must be walking on the moon,

Collecting dust, I must be humming

Into my goldfish bowl, theme tunes

From earth Friday afternoons,

I must be setting out, bow crushing

The paparazzi of the ocean,

I must be falling fast, head down

For the last time, the postcards on

The mantelpiece no longer holding,

I must be tense like a bird listening

To its own listening, in my coffin,

I must be gradually collapsing

Like Bouncy Castles at the day's end,

I must be mad, I must be shouting

Into a statue's ear, unhinged

Suddenly in the Luxembourg gardens,

I must be dreaming in a train,

Travelling home in both directions.

SLEEP

Each night sleep comes to all my friends

(and my enemy)

And those I have never met

In Wales and Romania.

To a little red hut in the forest

Sleep comes. Constructed

Out of heaps of smashed minutes,

Glimpsed distances,

Snapped shoelaces,

Pictures of clouds

That drop from the wall

Onto your foot,

The obese turning of the earth

That hurts your shoulder,

Willing of car parts to hold together,

And bones and philosophies and families

and history.

The influence of invisible stars

And stepping on thin ice pavements,

Under a curse,

Breathing poisons wafted from cauldrons.

A sudden hushe of woods

Oh and death.

Sleep made of burnt match-sticks

Creeps in through the cracks in your eyes,

Turns them to glass,

Kills the clock with a kiss

And dips us each

Into the same pot

Of difference

TO LIFT, TO DRIFT

Clothed by sleep,

By day stripped naked,

From rags to bones

By action of the light

Again and again.

Sculptor polishing and polishing

And polishing -

A slow airship smile on the stone

I begin

To lift, to drift –

DIGGING

Dig a grave for winter,

all the starved branches,

dawns that didn’t happen -

let down, slowly let down,

the great grey coffin full of coughing.

Shovel it back – cold fingers in your collar,

print of the air’s invisible feathers,

all that corpse-black, shovel it back,

shake the blades out of your hands and sow

the sun’s yellow

DAWN

Hard work to turn the world. At the first whistle

they are up, the encouragers, all bustle and throstle,

the stars, fully charged, sink back into their blue casings,

dogs sniff up stimulation,

the undead cars cough,

drift and keep drifting

till all the veins of the land are lava.

Orange turns over the horizon’s engine,

pavements are stilleto’d awake, morse to Hades,

fags flare off the gas of the lungs,

trains drag taut the great bow’s many steel strings

till everyone is at their stations.

Tight-sprung clock-concentration.

A scurrying under hedges and

one or two squirrels on thin boughs malingering but

slowly now it is turning, it is turning,

the vast grindstone, thick oxcart wheel, steel roller

crackling over the stars’ gravel

LATER

in their glass towers the navigators

have stared all day with new-moon eyes,

with laptop-dancing of fingers,

their calculations

have all but snapped the axle of reason

now it comes, at last, confirmation:

the modelled stars arise in confederation.

Pierced by relief, they collapse,

stare out through steel frames

at the predicted evening

VILLAGE CRICKET

Massively the village

once heaved itself into its grave:

mill, bakery, school, post office, pub,

sinking-extinguished arctic convoy,

till only the vicar has work,

and the gravedigger,

who will just lie down in the ground

when he has buried his master.

All work-songs boxed

except those of worshippers,

that butterfly out of the tower for one Sunday hour;

invisible dead sky-whale of silence then filled

by the strimmer

forever and ever and ever.

But look – down there

in the punk architecture

of the grass –

a creature made of green straw.

Bull-masked miniature Cretan bull-leaper,

tense with our entire attention.

And later,

in the flailed lane,

his arrhythmic string looped commentary

on the slow grand prix of the stars

OUT OF POLITENESS

Out of politeness

the rooves sit still on the houses,

and the chimneys stick up two fingers

because that is expected.

Because they were brought up like that

the gulls float right over,

dropping at most one wingbeat.

Compliant to disaster,

the rain will drive us all indoors,

where we will sit shivering

and dying out of politeness.

MOTHER RIVER

Light work in winter,

Few roots, grass low and self-absorbed,

Flowers few and small, little starved stars,

Just about everybody elsewhere,

Stuck at their studies in stable and byre,

Neighbours indoors, their grumbles a chimney-trickle,

Tree orchestras away in Jamaica.

Only rooks to argue with

Only grey to reflect

Even sometimes it all stops

And she can step clean out of herself,

Leaving herself gobsmacked,

And swerve upstream over her own stiff back

But now! She's up to her eyes in calves

Knee-deep in her,

And the grass like crowds in India

And the absurd self-love of the mallows

And a thousand genius children

Shrilling their brilliance on different instruments,

And in the evening

The tut tutting of the neighbours

To be played over on her stones

With her tin fingers.

ON KRISTIANSAND TOWN BEACH.

Desire falls, an invisible rain

of flames that has conjured the sand

into spheres and symmetrical tubes

that catch and throw

on this day made round

by the distant wish of the sun

and of eternity

that slops, salt, onto the flat heat,

not with a classical fall.

Each of these beauties

holds nine months of ice carried

as happily as if stretching the belly

and even the statue fallen

flat on its face, lies here

perfectly placed.

FREEZE

Our maid got sick, collapsed,

eyes milky, skin flaky,

lost her invisibility,

got thick, got stuck in her burrows.

We stretchered her in buckets,

precious and more precious

sleeping princess, and after a bit of that

thawed out her pipes with a hairdryer

and then she came back

whistling and eager and cheap

AUGUST

Summer leaks out of leaves

With balloon-air hissing.

Still enough left though to float

One more moon.

IDLE

Idle you are an aviary

whose wire has been removed – an undefined

small area of trees. The rare birds fly

into the night, the common birds invade,

chattering local endless intimacies.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

Seen your old man’s face coming through,

a cocoon splitting

to unfold a Grey Admiral

TREES

Suddenly here one morning from outer space,

Swivelling green panels signalling

To their mothership Summer.

WORDS

After a week of rain – at last the stars

That were behind it.

TOO MUCH

After reading all night

About war, debt and drought, step out

Into the blurred world

STREATHAM

Like fingers three pale towers rise

Towards the morning moon.

But steps that sputter like a fuse

Down paths however white,

Return, and come to no explosion.

ESTUARY

Winds in up the spine

like pain slowed by morphine –

feathery telegrams

from the blunt limb's front line.

And the stars – old photographs

of rocks hitting plate glass

COUNTRY STROLL

Rabbit dips under low boards

Well aware of my fury

STAR

Never could find that star again

Of all the billions we visited –

The one with the eight dead friends

And one living one.

SUNDAY

Sunday is amber,

Sun through the curtains amber,

Insect in amber I am

In the pine forest trapped

For millions of Sundays

Round the neck of a puella.

Kindest of traffic-light colours,

Sunday is amber.

FOR DAVID AND JULIET

I saw your love this afternoon –

ignorant crowflight out of evergreens,

(firs huddled in a thick of memory)

and then the river

hurrying the wrong way,

bending, forgetting

its message completely,

lost among the listening reeds.

And then

a yellow-lichened churchtower asking,

confused by sermons,

Am I a daffodil?

And then

the sky slow-licking the world:

are you my calf?

And you were

stopping my speeches with anemones.

THE OLD FOOL

An old fool stands in a field

In the shape of a young horse.

Where is the wit in that?

Hooves, mobile ears, big teeth!

This rolling around on the ground

Isn’t amusing anyone.

Sheep chew over the joke,

But already the jackdaws

Are turning back to their work.

An old fool stands on the table

In the shape of a mug of tea.

Where is the wit in that?

Steaming – standing there –

At the hip holding out a handle,

Deepening an O to the ceiling

As the tea sinks sip by sip and then

Gulp by gulp and then

The empty-mug punch-line!

You old fool, what are you doing

Hanging around in the shapes of things?

WEDNESDAY.

Wednesday was a plain girl,

None of the dead did rise.

(Ladies and gentlemen, please keep your seats,

She is no Queen, or glittering singer,

just look at the plain way she dawns.

That is no trump that rattles the twigs,

Just the poor scholars in the trees

In their Sunday worst

Fiddling their best,

So keep your seats please.)

So they stayed in their graves,

In their graves they stayed,

Mother and father and dearly beloved

And missed and matched and relict and remembered

In the arms of angels

And sleeping with Jesus

And given and taken away –

Wednesday was a plain girl,

None of the dead did rise.

Some people even died,

Quite a few people actually died,

Another enormous reverse resurrection,

And worldwide flashing of spades.

Wednesday was a plain girl,

None of the dead did rise.

Perhaps next Wednesday?

B’BYE

Went to Berlin with my friend

In 1989,

Danced with Swedish girls

Till Six in the morning.

Made friends with an American guy

And a G.I. lady.

No addresses exchanged.

Goodbye Berlin,

Goodbye! B’bye!

Went outside with my love

Arm in arm lots of times

To see the comet Haill-Bop

High-tailing it over the sky.

Took six weeks to leave,

Two hundred years to arrive.

Hail to thee, Haill-Bop,

Hail and goobye!

Goodbye! B’bye!

Left home aged seven.

Left school lots of times.

Keep going back in my dreams,

Over and over again,

Tumbling around like washing,

Like the sun’s son flashing by

In his dad’s chariot yelling

Hello! Goodbye!

Hi! B’bye!

Here comes the fish roving

Round in a glass eye,

Tasting the fading trail

Of his seven-second memory.

Sees God, sees heaven,

Sees all his past lives.

Can’t hold onto them!

Goodbye! Goodbye!

Bye! B’bye!

Stood on a mountain

With my brother in the wind,

Ancient faces of stone

Gathered like friends all around.

Here come the clouds now,

Stop here and we die!

Better be getting down.

Goodbye! Goodbye!

Bye! B’bye!

HAPPINESS

When polar bears in worlds of snow

See the horizon start to glow,

Ending the night so long and slow,

They always let their feelings show.

When tall and weighty icebergs rise

Like frozen clouds in walrus skies,

The whales, despite their own great size,

Always express complete surprise.

For when the crowded ark was rocked,

And rose from where it had been docked,

When heaven's floodgates were unlocked,

Even Noah, who knew, was deeply shocked.

And when the seas began to sink,

And when the keel stopped with a clink

Upon a steaming mountain brink,

He celebrated with a drink.

ANGEL OF SEX

Angel of Sex please keep your head,

Not every road leads to a bed,

Not every look requires a blush,

Not every silence is a hush.

To keep the peace, I know you must

Not be denied, but – leave the dust

A glaze of dignity, a skin,

Do not be always thrusting in,

Ripping hearts open like a surgeon.

Leave just one undeciphered virgin

In her cool grove, whose trunks are stone,

Where she sits happily alone,

Wrapped in a thousand leaves, green tears

That fall, one every hundred thousand years.

TWO CORPSES

Two corpses in a room sat talking,

Since they were not yet dead,

But stank too rank for kissing,

With mollusc lips and cuttlefish tongues

And teeth like mouldy bathrooms,

Hair thin, breath sparse –

Or so the microscope declared,

But love’s myopia descried

As if through mist the gold sun rise

Of youth, and secretly perfumed

As pavement cracks with dandelions,

And in that room and in that room

That rosy child the god of love

Was born again, is born again

And risen from the living tomb.

GNOMES.

Note: hard for most English-speaking people to take seriously the idea of gnomes. These gnomes are the elemental beings who, according to Rudolf Steiner, have responsibility for cohering the matter of the earth in such a way that it carries a memory of all that has passed through it, and so gives a certain continuity to those living and dying and being reborn.

GNOMES:

Clump and clod, stamp and stamp!

This is how we tramp tramp!

All the world was dust, lost,

dry crust, blown frost,

seized by wind out of the east,

building tower clouds of dust,

bent double in the blast,

shapeless almost-air, all the earth,

dunes that straddle and give birth

to dunes, to the ever-wandering sand

of nowhere no man’s land!

In the whirling of the west,

never any rest for rust

that flakes and falls – when the Lord of the North

breaks forth

to kiss the hot mouth

of the South,

and all is rush, and stream and strewing

of shreds and rags and twigs and general undoing!

Oh who will press and pound ground

east and west stones grind powder-fine,

so that a sneeze

strips all the trees

not just of leaves but of their whole selves!

Are there not some kind of elves –

gnomes shall we call us, to be precise,

who have got the power of ice,

of form, of weight, of strong compacting,

like baking bricks in the kiln,

like firing glaze in the oven?

What is the gift heat has, at that height?

Oh we have it, we are it, we have got that much right!

You may think things gather by themselves,

you may think dust thinks itself together,

outwits the will of the weather –

oh no, that wrecking spirit,

we pit ourselves against it,

with all our heart, with all our wit!

Because we love – because we love

the rock that nests the Rock-dove!

There must, there must,

be more than blasted dust!

There must, there must

be more than blasted dust!

So that the earth will keep

your deeds, as dreams in sleep,

for the time your spirit returns

out of the sun, where it learns,

between death and your next birth,

what you were doing on earth.

Our huge heads store, like flags furled,

all of the thoughts of the world,

so each time you are born,

here among rose and thorn,

the ground on which you walk,

strong flint and firm chalk,

is the clod-book, the stone store

of all that you did before!

Yes we can grasp in one thought

the entire universe – caught

like a vast fish in the net

of our heads that don’t forget!

Bright waves pass

through the roots of the grass

into us, and through us

into quartz and feldspar, composite or igneus!

So the invisible

dissolves like a pearl

into the dark soil,

and lifts back up through the roots,

and the whole universe shines in the shoots!

Now see the looseness clog, clag, clump,

like milk to butter in the churn!

Turn, Earth, you old slag-heap, turn!

That is the way we tramp tramp!

That is the way we stamp stamp!

OUT IN THE GARDEN

Out in the garden

Stands the Moon Maiden

Elegant and very tall,

All of her invisible

Except for her face

Far away

And her shoes kicked off

In the vegetables

MOONFLIGHT

Countdown.

And in the east, the moon

blasts off, a slow explosion,

rises, on budget, unmanned,

a vizor stuffed with light,

ascends

into position, docking

by Babylonian arithmetic

and star-navigation,

with its dark side, waiting.

Now the descent,

watched by hushed trees in the screens

of every pond and puddle and stream,

re-entry through the blaze of dawn

and splashdown in daylight’s

pacific ocean

THE MAN WHO RUSHED WITH NOTHING IN HIS HEAD.

The man who rushed with nothing in his head,

Out of his house, into the woods and in,

Over and over the mountains, up and up,

Left every valley like a golden cup,

And every wood a crowd of seraphim,

And every mountain top a marriage bed.

The emptiness of the future made him run,

He floods its channel as the present thaws,

And over his horizon farmlands rise.

The people see him with the same surprise

With which they see the autumn when it pours,

And with the awe in which they hold the sun.

He and this land, being each others' womb,

Love one another truly from afar,

Trees of one size across an equal stream,

Whose leaves are eyes but closed and in a dream,

In which they stroll and talk on a cold star,

Whilst the world smoulders in an orange gloom.

Following gravity through the tilted plough,

Stained by the faces of the self-seeing souls

Only as long as they can meet his stare,

He hurries on and leaves them standing there,

As water leaves a bucket full of holes,

As rapidly as time is passing now

Faster than darkness when the eyelids close,

Pressed by the thought of that which drives him on -

Nothing - until he runs against the mound

That makes the circle that he must run round,

In blinded rage, defending something gone,

Perhaps in penance but till when who knows.

NIGHT

Outrage in the village

And in the dark farms.

Is it a fox

Or the trees shuffling closer

Putting on layer by layer

Of darkness,

Bodying the wind

Until it almost believes it’s alive

That makes the dogs bark?

HIGH WIND

Now the sky quivers

Like a kite tied to your fingers,

The classroom rhomboids,

Thoughts bump and squeak like balloons

The wind imitates explosions

Making the ceiling

stagger like a man in front of a firing squad.

The next second, surely, uprising!

Surely the wind is a friend rougher than anyone,

Surely if a chair feels life in its legs then a person

Can borrow the sky for wings, riot star-looting!

There's a whisper that out on the drill-squares

Regiments are leaning to attention at the angle of howitzers.

Buckingham Palace has blown right over, an engineer

Blinks as his cables whipcrack, tears pour

As his bridge bucks like a sky tied to his fingers