Category: Uncategorized
A Veterinary Suicide
You died like a sick animal for reasons which the average heart will barely understand How often before had you hooked up a drip feed similar to this, or pushed a hypodermic through a thicker skin than yours to give unknown relief to feral pain? Did you think yourself unsuited, and with human contact down, have only lethal hope to hand, to take the conscious step that marks us out as otherwise? As much as I know, I know of this through the grief of mutual friends, and can but wonder, and regret, where some distinction touches me, your death in a chosen captivity A coursed hare heart that ran too rare and fast for what you thought could cure, to break itself in fall and twist and leave you with no way between the stretch of yearning for the wild, the ruthless logic of despair, the calculated choice So death, which in us makes the animal apparent, defines in you the human and intervenes as paradox: the magical and obvious, the instinctive and the planned; and the aching disappointment of the shadows in between In this dazzle of vicarious bereavement I lose myself, not knowing what to say, but shedding skins of difference hope that in oblivion or bliss your animal heart and human mind rest in equilibrium, lie undisturbed, and free
The Memory of Clay
Pliably unravelling,
she shaped me underneath her hands
Repairing every bend and tear
belonging I became complete
So send me to the fire
before she thinks again
Let me assume my given form
in this furnace womb
Let me remember how I was
given my intended shape
Under and within her hands
never able to forget
When I was all she kneaded
when I was all there was
While in this refining fire
I dry, forget my lines, and crack
I dry, am brittle,
liable to snap
Examination
No one can take this test for you
and what would be the point?
It’s essential to be honest,
these hours could define
your life from here on in
And life’s not a rehearsal,
so what could you revise?
Too late to take a different course
All this and more come floating in
as you wake at 3 a.m.
Nervous, feeling foolish
in your backless gown,
and all the while thinking
of the answers that
your stupid blood
proved too thick to give
The Maker in her Workshop
A room beyond darkness,
where generous energy conceives
a life after clay
the kiln stands for a womb
where twisted shapes are
fired into life
I stand beside the door and watch
the elemental shaping,
the strictures of your being,
and in the northlight progress
as the spirals of your works ascend,
count down the aching hours
dwelling on the threshold,
I hang between the fiery air
and the auguries of spring
the door to summer opens,
your son and daughter
come running in.
Two smacks at Auden
i
The fever took the city in its grip.
Enemy agents safe through vaccination,
met the planes that landed at the strip
and spread abroad the news of the infection
The unseen hand that quarantines hotels
sent ambulances each day for the dead.
Softly, someone tolled the abbey bells,
but no trams ran, and all the workers fled.
His departure started from a foreign bed
when the panic of invasion made it easy;
engrossed with what the poster hoardings said,
then in the station bar with vin du pays
while through the endless landscape of the city,
a van goes packed with meaning, like a phrase
ii
No one, not even Oxford was to blame,
(blame if you like the anal penetration)
buggered in the States, his work became
a literary firm of masturbation.
Deliberately he chose the dry as dust,
kept poetry like postcards from a whore;
Chester was his public love; his private lust:
Stephen, Christopher, sundry others more.
In legal acts on ribald speculation,
he timidly reversed the life he’d led,
when poems had come from queer goings on
in the loose expanses of his double bed;
And only forty years of poor revisions
part well-hung student from crotchety don
Consultation
Please turn your head and look towards the light
and tell me what you see beyond my hand.
When you took that knock, how long were you down?
How far did you fall and how did you land?
You’re not the first I’ve seen like this for sure
fretting in the consultation chair;
others have been worse, almost beyond a cure,
but a normal life is possible with care
I’m telling you this to put you at your ease,
you are at once both delicate and tough,
and this is the same as all other disease:
curable if treated soon enough
So trust me to perform for your sake, and ours,
that delicate dance of scalpel and glove,
to cauterise the heart and kill the cause
of life’s most life-changing injury, love.
The Cure for Wounds by Sympathy
I longed to touch and heal as if I could
With one light-hearted blessing close a wound
Equivocation present in the blood
Made my clumsy tongue and touch express
In ways I never wanted to or should
And only served to cause you more distress
My presence is too much for you to bear
Whatever gift I have I cannot give
Your symptoms manifest when I appear
So making my approach to you unsure
The benefit of what I bring unclear
And love as likely curse as likely cure
Philosophie
I want your ear your tongue your touch your cunt I want you close against me here and now I want I want I want I want I want And what I do not want you need not know For knowledge is a shifting weighty thing It cannot lie between your thighs and swear As I and others did that there’s no song Or prose to drape you sans pareil mon souer I cannot give a tender to the fear I cannot kick against the pricks who doubt I cannot be myself without you near Philosophy or sophistry or cant Will spin away like gossamer to air And leave as much as sonnetry will dare
Snowblind at Midsummer
The bleak, unhallowed call of God comes in the nonsense calm, comes where the quiet pitch of wind might barely stir an inch of grass or rouse a head of corn from stoop black ice on the path of words makes language inexplicable and there the stunning blow of God makes landfall in a silence But call and blow are not enough and so the freezing mist and sleet fall out of season everywhere On every orchard sunset bronze and every fleet of growing corn The weather touching in my head defies the sense of what is there
Renoir’s Field
Your father is buried in Renoir's field but you will be following soon; Shakespeare's hat lies turned in a ditch, full of the silvery moon The masque performed by the mummers was drab while you sat with your tarot and loom, weighing the sea and the sky in your hand; and the priest in the secret room. The soldiers are going to Marston Moor and leave to a marching tune, the frozen mosaic is down in the mud and you will be following soon