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Leaving the town I see.
absurd, a singing tree
in Rorshach symmetry –
brow, bray, and tray,
and a bird on every spur
coos and clucks in a shower of sound
like leaves that fall on the ground
Fifty birds as I near
fly to the paddock beyond,
and back before I’m gone,
and their chuckling, soothing song,
slides all the way to the bridge,
where the melody’s finally drowned.
So I climb Dicky Hill again
as I’ve so often done before
past each Violet Plantation fir
that strains to catch the sky
and solitary satisfied oaks
stretch into the space they occupy
and I wonder how long it will be
before all my friends have died
or how they will feel to remain
if I’m first to leave them behind
but there isn’t any tree
that will remember me.
I walk home with that in my mind,
Like a flint caught in my shoe
back to our gnarl-branched sloe
where the finches and tits that speed to and fro
cross-hatch incessantly
as long as the seeds and the nuts remain
their flight-paths fade in the blink of an eye –
constant, immediate, gone.
It’s quiet now I’m home
and the window’s inbetween
I leave them there to thrive
out in the freezing air
like the ending of a prayer:
world without end,
amen.
I should have asked him: he’d have known
she says, years after I am dead
he’d so much stuff there, crammed inside his head
but all that’s left of memory is bone
When I was young
I’d go into a field and draw
small boys would come to twitch and say ‘Are you a real
artist Mister?’ – if I knew I’d tell
I’d pull my bike
out of the hedge, re-pack my box,
& dawdle to the edge of town
past oak and dancing counterpoint of elm
the natural language of that place and time.
My student and my wander years behind
back in the city, on my bike again
I ride to Greengate House from Hanley Road
through Stratford’s acrid air, return
over the railway bump,
past the Precision Screw
Co Ltd and then
the Balls Pond Road to swing into Green Lanes
riding the traffic with a boatman’s skill
and wondering if ugliness can kill.
There’s pride in action; I am not aware
that trees are dying as I ride
the city gapes, a concrete trap
with me inside
while in some country lanes I once knew well
trees wither, get cut down, or fall
the country dwellers pick their sockets clean
there is no way to tell where they have been
– nobody sets a tombstone for a tree.
And was it you who forced me to discover
a tree-shaped absence in my mind?
to tell the truth, I really don’t recall
how the elms looked at all.
Why did it take me so long to remember
what I had so efficiently forgot?
It took me till I hit my head to know
the elms had gone.
I did not see them go
He Sees Her Break Her Arm
Again I see you trip, again your fall
freezes into a still –
there must have been a sound –
I can’t recall.
Spun from the wall,
there you are lying on the ground
“My arm is broken”
that is what you cry,
I know the words, but I
can’t bring your voice alive
Somebody holds your hand
the pavement’s hard
the ambulance has thirty miles to ride
your face is white with pain.
And now, though I retain
these fragments, which would make a moving picture
I could assemble, if I wanted to,
yet all these memories are stills –
it’s only later that I’m moved by you.
Together in the Shower
The shower turns me on, and yes
I never felt a hand cupping my breast
or felt a nipple tugged by what I held.
What do I know then? only this
that growing-up gives way to growing-down.
An intimacy we had not expected
binds us together in the cubicle.
What I’d have given, thirty years ago,
to slide myself against you, flesh to flesh!
now it’s because you need to wash you hair
and I must be your naked canephore
Dressing again, you say “I can’t quite reach,”
a wounded arm folded like card behind
“Can you do up my bra?” Hold hard,
The trick was meant to be
(when I was young) a sly
flick of the fingers on a silken back
no fuss, and cornucopia unleashed
But on this day I hold your bra-straps taut,
and slip the hook firmly into its eye
in memory of what I could not reach
and never may.
Little Priapic Ode
Stop these nocturnal visits, please
at inconvenient hours. It’s some dark corner of the night
when through the gate of horn,
your lewd mosquito trumpets in my ear,
calls action stations,
and soon as I’m awakening you play
your boring mime ‘Haephastos and His Limp’
and fade to grey.
Not funny, and no way
to earn libations.
This isn’t how you were when I was young:
nose stuck in my affairs,
you’d stick around all afternoon:
my flesh would crawl with honey and with bees,
my brain would freeze,
when I was young you had me on my knees.
It’s such a fall,
a mighty tyrant dwindling to a tease.
So summon up your ichor, little god,
and if you please,
either come hot and strong
or not at all
Drill-Hall Threnody
January 17, 2020 in Poems, Poetry, Topical Commentary, Uncategorized | Leave a comment
Like spiders that you had not seen
The kids come out from in-between
Splashing the road with khaki green –
And how their pallid faces gleam
like blossoms on a Chinese stream
The drill hall hunches on the hill.
the little soldiers gather still:
The school, where they all learned to play
is only fifty yards away
And still they come, and still they come –
we do not fight our wars at home,
Gloucestershire versus Worcestershire,
armies cascading down the hills
to valleys full of boney loam.
The wicked men of Worcestershire
pursue their wickedness, and thrive:
we don’t mind leaving them alive.
We don’t do War here any more;
we send our children far and wide
and visit all that shock and awe
on lesser breeds without the Law.
And still they come, and still they come
to take a shilling from the Queen-
They don’t read Hardy or Li Po:
they need to feel before they know
We live on history and fear,
but they live in the now and here.
They don’t use tabors when they drill
or scarlet when they dress to kill
but war’s a fashion driven thing:
so dappled coveralls provide
a uniform to wear with pride.
A skewbald rag will do as well
to blow about that foreign field
where some poor squaddy leaves behind
a life, a limb, or just his mind.
The corner seat is always there
reserved for mutilés de guerre
The ones who bled, who we ignore.
As Byron wrote to Wellington:
who cares, then, when the war is done?
And will they come, and will they come
’till the extinction of mankind?
Will the last human toddler found
pick up a stick from off the ground
to point and say “Bang Bang, you’re dead?
is it encripted in each mind?
is it engendered in our blood
by genes that cannot be denied?
And if they come, and if they come
The shining ones of space and time,
will they accept us or decline?
Will our indomitable mind
condemn us to be left behind
while sunlight falters and grows red
and every living creature’s dead
and all the oceans have run dry
and no-one’s left to see or cry
and all the stars have fled?