Refusal
These fierce red roses, blazing at summer’s end would be amazed to know they are expected to stand for something else. Their refusal speaks for itself.
Poems
Tuesday
Wednesday
Sash
We pause while he takes out the window from his shop. The fancy way he handles your likeness makes us stop; the way his violet glass reflects your better side, sharpening with sunlight the tongue in cheek you hide, until two yellow gloves release you from the glare, tip you out, conceal you up sleeves of dusty air, where either I must follow or, back before you’ve gone, be thankful that he’s left me this frame to rattle on.
March
for Arbel Oh God, yes, our birthdays – spinning to wave at us again like two children riding a too fast merry-go-round. There’s you… there’s me… blue dress… red shirt… And now we feel dizzy, standing here so long, spinning there so briefly. Our horses don’t look back. Their eyes are cold and pitiless but the fair’s organ plays on, forging its joy, mechanically. And though our arms grow heavy from waving, though our feet turn numb as the ground there’s still me… still you… red shirt… blue dress… to hold on to.
Wednesday
New Hat
We shall both have hats showing we are wonderful,And mine will be big and blue as the sky,And yours will be the same colour as the daybreak,And on the moment that we die,We shall hang them on the peg whose name is HeartacheAnd never for one moment stop to wonder whyWe both had hats showing we were wonderful. So I shall to the hatter and you’ll go to the milliner,And mine will be a hat of sturdy felt,And yours will deploy all manner of fine fabric.And while we’re waiting for them, we shall meltInto each other’s head without a panicAnd learn all of the places each has dwelt.Yes, I’ll go to the hatter and you will to the millinerAnd we shall both have hats showing we are wonderful. Wherever we shall walk, the people will say ‘Ah,There go the fancy couple in their hats!
Wednesday
Ode to a Housing Estate Blackbird
For D.M. Your morning caller on your corkscrew willow, herald-on-high, swaying on the tip-top branch, purveyor and articulator of the drear backyards and garages of the new-build housing estate, a mad planner’s rash, built spilling-out, in bricky flood over the salt marsh. Trilling exultant blackbird, who, when you buckle under baleful neighbourly pressure to prune the tree, that looks endlessly a free-flowing fountain; (the only tree anywhere to be seen) is gone. And the morning is bare, silent, empty. And what is a morning without song.
My Lego Life
White walls and ceiling, white tiled floor, scarlet bookshelves filled with authors I can never reach, Yeats, Homer, Hardy and the rest. Yellow velvet sofa, bought online from Wayfair. Blue jar, red peonies. Broad window green with easy houseplants: monstera, ficus and anthurium. On my walls Matisse, Dufy, Pissarro. Luxe, calme, volupte… Nothing in my flat is difficult, nuanced or allusive. All you see is all you mainly get. Out there, sunlight on the Common, pampered dogs, kids’ football, padel courts. Pretty people pose in groups by leafy trees like innocent Edwardians unaware how quickly it can all be smashed to pieces. At my eye’s edge, the future.
Wednesday
Winter’s First-born Snow
We take photographs of snow falling, but all we capture is the aura of feelings, abstract and ill-defined, the sensations of snow, of falling, of tumbling and dreaming, obscurely. We glimpse childhood in fragments, gleaming, a memory of you standing in the doorway, glances, leaving, coat on, bags packed and ready for denial. The falling snow can’t hide that look on your face, joy of departure, pleasure of dancing snow angels, a sense of delight, betrayal in the smear of ash. A blanket of perfect white before the stains came, a perfect life, marked, patented and forgotten, just photographs of snow falling, trying to capture obscure beauty, ephemeral and all too fleeting.
Little Song
To be original would be to take The path that brought us back past the first song, The greenness of the buds out there along Near branches in the Springtime as they wake Up Springtime in ourselves and the ache Of seasons since so that we long To know the freshness in ourselves as strong In leafing as when it seemed a song would break Into its green forever, though now we hear Its cadences as leaf-fall. But that song, How did it go? It goes like this, and going Modulates to Summer, to reappear As Winter silences. No, we were wrong To think it gone, and everything is growing.
Wednesday
My Cavafy Poem
We are all, you might say, waiting for those barbarians even though we lack particulars, even an approximate profile, mug-shot, card-index summation, press cutting.
A Poetic Connection
There should have been thunder, jagged brilliance of lightning across the city the night the Fulbright Scholar claimed the piece that briefly made the puzzle whole: a hulking Yorkshireman with a gift for words the equal of her own. But the only storm in Cambridge that night was psychic — life not always resembling myth with Ted and Sylvia. Why do they draw me so? Is it purely the bladed language the recognition in Pike of my father’s hoodless countryman’s eye, in Tulips a kinship with obsession? Their opening scene was worthy of Broadway: he tearing off her red head band, she biting his cheek so hard it bled. The same evening mother felt the first stabs of labour.
Don’t Take It For Granted
The sun and the moon and other wonderful objectsmy mind, rushing about, connectsare just there, they’re there, whatever I may think.Why am I here, red-faced, shouting at the sink? Perhaps the world is given only once. It’s certainly odd.How hard I pray for the absence of God!The child’s idea: when dead or asleep we floataround in a sort of invisible boat and because we’re no longer bodies needing airwe can pass through the atmosphere.What if our after- and before-lives were completely lawless?Then there would be no sun and moon to say: ignore us.
Wednesday
Sunrise Symphonies
What magic is this, to elucidate the stars? Dawn chorus erupts with a thousand yarns, a thousand memories, wishes and desires, an avian Arabian Nights furnished before us, loves, losses and the lyrical space between, adventures told with a spectacular orchestral score, imagine if we’d never heard any of this before, we’d be in awe, dumbstruck at the beauty, seeing the impossible elegance of this world a million times or more, instead we yawn and fall asleep again, enemies to the beauty, outsiders to a world so stunning and profound, we miss all that should make us so spellbound, forget the wonder, but wonder never forgets us.
Deptford Strand
The cherry trees all sang On the road to Deptford Strand – A million blossoms wild with hope for a day. And Marlowe blew a kiss, Then he gazed into his hand On the road to Deptford Strand. The lilacs sighed of love On the road to Deptford Strand – Of hours like worlds and kisses long as nights. And Marlowe plucked a bloom, Then he crushed it in his hand On the road to Deptford Strand. The hawthorn whispered death On the road to Deptford Strand – Its sweet scent wrapped around a crown of thorns. And Marlowe slowed his pace As the blood froze in his hand On the road to Deptford Strand. The willow bent in grief On the road to Deptford Strand – Its branches hanging like a mother’s hair.
Wednesday
Landscapes, Ukraine
Winter, 2022 I Apartment blocks stand stiffly like Swiss cheese, Pale walls sliced through with holes that let them breathe. Elsewhere a single wall looks wafer thin. The water is unsafe, it breeds disease. The crunch of popping shells unnerves the skin. Faced with this daily diet , people seethe Remembering those laid in shallow soil While cooking pots in basements stew and boil. II These images are peppered with the sound Heard by the hungry huddled underground. And, sadly, we have seen this long before In Stalingrad, the ghetto in Warsaw. What does it take to move our numbing feet, Dogs gnawing bodies lying in the street? If this is food for thought, then have we lost The taste for action, counting only cost?
The Cherry Orchard
She lies beneath magnificent cherry blossoms, watches the whispering winds of spring, sing, spin, she becomes a child again, full of wonder and awe, dreaming of magic, love and flowers blooming, soon a teenager laughing, lying with her first love, face flushed red with cherry blossom dreams, emerging into her twenties, just married and hopeful, full of confetti streams scattering in perfect light, age whirls and whirrs to her forties, her second husband, second flush of cherry youth, another forever blossoms, swiftly into her sixties, quiet reflection at another passing, a quiet dignity to throw her life up in the air again, back to her eighties, a life cycle comes full circle, caught in a flurry of cher.
Wednesday
The Private of the Bluffs
Last night among his fellow roughs, He plotted, schemed, and swore; An anxious statesman of the Bluffs, Who never looked before. To-day, beneath the foeman’s frown, He stands in Charles’s place, Ambassador from Britain’s crown, And type of all her race. Rich, reckless, posh, well-born, well-taught, Bewildered and alone, A heart with leftish instinct fraught, He yet can call his own. Ay, tear his body limb from limb, Bring cord or axe or flame, He only knows that straight through him Shall England come to shame.
Wednesday
What’s your hurry?
When I was young, nobody ran, unless, behind them on a dark and lonely road, they felt the breath of some misshapen thing, the aspens quivered and the willows wept; or if they’d spent their bus fare on warm beer, and they were overdue where duty called. Accoutred armies hurtle through our parks and boulevards, no good to ask them where’s the fire. Health oozes from their every pore. The race is to the swift, though only three ascend the podium. The rest are also-rans, way down the field, not troubling the judge. But now my ears are pricked, I pick up speed. There is the flag, and there the finish line.
Counter Culture
Leaving a bedsit’s fickle gasfire flame, You make it to the corner shop that’s seen Far better days than his fluorescent name, But then his moon-white face appears between The shelves and high glass counters, lush with rows Of Swiss liqueurs, dragées and cigarettes And hangs there patiently as if he knows The types that Sunday evening brings and lets Him fantasise on whom they left behind In flats still warm with clinging sheets, while you Feel naked in deliberation, mind Lit up by fancy import packs on view. Then, ‘What will be your pleasure, sir?’ he says, Straight-faced, but knowing wink of meaning in The joke réchauffé from his Navy days And, like his seedy silk cravat, worn thin.
Wednesday
Blue Moon Valley
There’s a magical muddle that clings to the pagelike mist to a meadow. No help in the hurting, no truth in the light,just haze on the harvest. I’ve cancelled my comeback and chosen insteadto be cloistered in clover. In the blare of the body the spirit lies mutelike a book in a bottle. I’ll hunker in hollows where wisdom is vagueand history can’t happen. There’s a heaven of honey in hives of friends’ hearts.They’ll humour my headstone.
The Death of the Autocrats
The world, the young woman said, is ruled by old men with hard, brutal faces and an ugly lust for power. Nothing that gym bars or strictures of the personal physician can offer will help them in the end when the dark fog drops to cover the formerly sentient mind, its edicts like arrows that once made the sky dark, repulsed its multiple enemies.