descent into the dark
to bring back
tomorrow.
Sky News
A listening post
in an open field,
a green message tower,
each filament and pad precision
— designed to pick up
what the four
winds and their attendant
weathers pour in,
on the senses, on the skin.
We catch
at a remove what passes
between packed leaves and Heaven’s
breath as the big sky
story blows through
the gaps in conversations,
caught without
shelter like Poor Tom
under the wet lick and whiplash
of the metaphysical dark.
Hunkered down
in the raw, a-shiver between
on the one side a mad
king who weeps and blusters,
on the other his Fool
who wisecracks and mocks,
he grits his teeth,
hugs himself
to keep warm, and privy to all,
illustrious nosebleeds, the heigh-ho
Dobbin and full cry
of the great world’s
hiccups and fuck-ups, says
nowt, sits out the storm.
Trees
Trees have their own lives, simple
if seasonally haunted;
in their branches the sky
— adventures of passing gods.
They make up the wood
we cannot see, and one
looks so much like the next that we
wonder what sense they have
of being what we would be
when nomad thoughts possess us, standing
in one place only with nowhere to go
but upwards or deeper.
They wear our rough hearts linked;
mute journals of what we felt,
avowals made
before rock and cloud as witness, X loves Y
forever. A promise kept
here and here only,
in their lives not ours, though the wound
still aches, in all weathers.
Rondeau
As long as
the stock keeps turning
over
as long
as spring keeps knocking
on wood and willows bud
as long as
Jane and Jed and Lou are still rocking
on and have got
my number
as long as
a wet weekend in bed
with you in chill November
just the two
of us and maybe Sting
as long
as long as a piece of string
Two Odes of Horace
Odes I, xxvii
I’m over it, the floral
tributes, fancy speeches.
Thank you but
the roses in that bouquet, so pretty
pink, will be ash-grey
by nightfall.
From now on
I’ll take life straight, no fuss,
no faddle. So fill
the wine-cup, boy, and stand
close by in the vine-leaves’ fretwork
sunset while I drink.
Odes II, ii
It’s the coin in use, the blade
in action that means business.
Stacked in a vault, locked up
in rifts in the Sierra,
all minerals are dross.
It’s the world’s big-time big spenders
who hog the news. Big bucks
stop nowhere. Endow a college, cast
a pearl, say La Peregrina,
to a call-girl or an ex.
Fortunes are hard to manage.
Far easier to rule
the Russias, take a bowl
of tea with a fat-cat Chairman,
bring Cuba to heel.
Greed is like dropsy;
the body bloats
then parches, feeds on itself,
hoards its toxic
water in hundredweights.
Is Nixon back? Do millions
flatter him and chatter
of History’s favourite son?
Well we dissent, and wish
that wise men would use better
terms. True honours rest,
the laurel, the diadem,
on the head that is not turned
by the flash-bulbs’ pop when Jackie
O descends on the room.
Spleen
I’m like the king of a rain-soaked Low Country, young,
rich, effete, grown old before his time,
and bored, bored to extinction by his kennel
of fawning grey preceptors, his dogs, his roe-deer,
his falcon, all his beasts, and the people howling
for bread at his forecourt gate. Even Sir Fool,
his shadow once and bawdy dwarf familiar,
now stales, a peevish sad-sack. The great bed
where he’s laid, with its fleur-de-lys, has become his tomb,
and the ladies who surround it, for whom a prince
is Bold always, or Fair, as they toy with a tie-string
here, an eyelet there, raise in this death’s head
no spark of the old quick leap to concupiscence,
nor can alchemists, as they fossick and assay
his stools, sniff out the prime cause of corruption
in him, or bloodbaths, in the high Roman style
passed down by senile tyrants, revive in organ
and nerve dulled to stupor a warmth past all
rekindling, manly vigours now long spent.
Not blood swells these writhen veins but the green putrescent
slime that clogs the slow tide of Lethe.
After Charles Baudelaire, ‘Spleen’
A Parting Word
All’s dashed in me, all’s dished and done,
bold schemes, fond hopes, my long dispute
with a sick world, one man’s concern
for his own and others’ troubles. Death
is the next big thing. It’s all I’ve got
to live for now. To live with.
E finita la commedia, last lines,
then curtains! The public, my loyal fans,
with a yawn troop home to supper. A chorus
or two, a pint or two — ‘The ladies,
bless ’em!’ — a few good laughs. It’s not
so dumb to love life. He got it pat,
that hero that Homer praised. ‘The puniest
live petit-bourgeois dormouse
in Dudsville SA is in better shape
than I am, Great Achilles. First
in rank of the resident zombies. Top
dog in this dog-house, Hades.’
After Heinrich Heine, ‘Der Scheidende’
The Brothers: Morphine & Death
The likeness so close between them: both
youthful, both manly fair; only one
is paler — more strict I’d say, more aloof,
more lordly. When the first drew near, how sweet
his smile, his gaze how gentle. The wreath
he wore when his brow touched mine gave off
a musky odour — poppies, but not
for long, alas, drove out the pain
I’m racked with. To be well again, quite well,
the other more stern unsmiling twin
must come and with lowered torch light up
the path that leads underground. To sleep
is good. Death’s better. Best of all
were never to have been born.
After Heinrich Heine, ‘Morphine’
Long Story Short
The Book of Grievances has its roots
in singular griefs. A man keeps his list,
his hit list. Writes down times
and places where the knife went in, was twisted. Writes
it down in the ample folder of
his heart as we call it, to be underlined
in red and revisited. The gun he keeps
oiled is also there in the heart’s darkness.
He takes it up and aims. Somebody falls, only he knows who