(after Mallarmé) The smoke rings I cannot blow seem summations of my soul one by one by one they roll scattered with another O their trembling grey bears witness to incendiary art keep your ashen mind apart from the buried fire’s red kiss thus whole choirs of romance fly up to lips unclean with sin just exclude when you begin so-called realism’s lie for with too defined meaning poetry will never sing.
He’s got an old truck in the driveway, Hot cup of coffee in his hands, A way of life he’s known since his childhood, First rays of the morning sun Breaking through the clouds He plans his day in the farm He knows he’s gotta give his best ’Cos all he’s got is in the farm Three kids and a wife A mansion built by his own hands Paradise in the prairies Sings praises to the lord above For the love of family.
Just grant me one summer, powerful fates, and a final autumn of lucid song, so that, sated with music’s sweetness, this soul may wholeheartedly die. A poet not wielding his sacred might in life shall find no quiet in Orcus, yet once I have said the holy words I came to say, spoken my art, I’ll welcome then the still realm of the shades… I will be at peace, although I must leave all singing and travel alone; having known the gods, I’ll ask no more.
The cab suddenly turning up twenty-seven minutes later after my ten frantic calls from the pavement outside your block, your dressing-gowned silhouette hovering on the balcony, a halo of your wispy hair blonde once more against the dawn. My suitcases thrown in the boot, doors slammed, engine revved, clutch released, I forgot our goodbye wave, checking messages and chanting my flight number like a hex. If only that cab had left me waiting in vain. No way to know I’d never see you again.
Remember those lanes he walked after work, past the weed-wormed car park at the rusting colliery to the two-street village, to catch the bookies or straight into the Oak. His days governed by dim light: in boiler houses or the single bulb rooms of boarded-up terraces – jobs no one wanted never fazed him. The same fanged grin at a rumour his horse had come in, tipping me for putting his bets on; the whiff of piss even turps couldn’t disguise. No family, nor home, some nights sneaking back to the job to doss. He was found on the edge of a field, crushing those tiny blue flowers I still don’t know the name of.
for Ian Sansom Where was it written that I should measure my middle years by the great blank flowering of these pom-poms – uncanny as domes in a village landscape – whose advance has no warning (one day a sprinkling of warts, the next WE’RE HERE!!!), that love water and pacify the night? They’ve no smell; the bees and other pollinators shun them; even the cats, hardly particular, pass by Snowglobia and take their rank business elsewhere. Don’t get the wrong idea. This isn’t a plangent lyric about possession of the instant, bright fields and flying clouds. It’s pointless. Something, something, middle years: they’re pointless.
I send you this bouquet, which my ownhands just culled from the marvellous bed;if spring’s not gathered tonight, I said,tomorrow her beauty will have flown. Let its light serve as a sermon then,how your charms flourishing their fair Mayshall soon be invested with frost-greyand, bit by bit, become forgotten. Time paces restlessly on, my sweet,and yet it is not time’s but our feetthat point to a house beneath the hill, and the joy we are now free to chooseis something of which skulls have no news:O love, love me while you’re lovely still.
Firm pillows stacked highfor hope to rest on, each calling outagainst nightmare and fear. Courage has determinedthis towering resistance so may it hold firmand remain until dawn for the light to discovera mended nation whose cities awakefrom their troubled sleep.
Let me be baroque in death as I’ve been practical in life.Let six black-plumed stallions draw the black-gloss carriagewherein my black-gloss casket rests upon a maple plinthfestooned with lilies – outrageously frilled and huge whitelilies exploding from every crevice, their syrupymusk clagging the air for miles around. Let us halt alldeliveries. Let the golden trim of the vast black wheelsflash and wink as we roll by, let the mourners’ wails flyabove the roofs of inappropriately mundane semiswhere only grandpa doesn’t doubt his seeing eyes.
The end of a perfect summer’s day –we ramble down the canal path, past Pirate Castle and the shopping arcade where confetti sale signscamouflage lives mired in quiet desperation. Harassed shoppers go about their business,wearing their mask of disappointments discreetly. Everybody is dreaming of being somebody, preparing to be chosen, immortalized for eternity. Admiring the moored boats, we move along the track.Suddenly, we are in the presence of five stunning villas – Ionic, Veneto, Gothic, Corinthian, Tuscan –already celebrated, recorded for posterity. The water in the canal does not stop to considerthe inequities of our world.
Caught out in the wrong shoes, I choose to join the spiders in a crevice in the old park wall. To them, all weather is the same; all time is time to do some work. I watch them working, watch their old webs breathing as I breathe, now tilting brickwards, now tilting back, laced with shreds of sycamore and pigeon down. I wonder if I stay here long enough might they take me in – reduce me to a crescent of fingernail, a snatch of hair – induct me to their way of being there, stoically sticking to one thing. Then a robin cocks his little head as if to query why I’m crouched here like a toad when the rain has stopped and all these worms are ours for the taking.
and stare perplexedly into the middle distancewith one crease, one particularly characterfulfurrow knitting my brow, not an old lady furrowoh no something about the way I hold this furrow in this ongoingly perplexed stare will imply a whole panoply of barely suppressed emotions, a gamuteven, simmering away under the surface of thissingular furrow topped off with an immenselyenigmatic rage that also, paradoxically, resemblesserenity and I will do banter in my cop car with my sidekick oh definitely I want a sidekick with whomI will stop. Unwontedly. Here. And also sometimes —there. And I will chew my lip. And he will hold hisbreath. Bamboozled by my odd. Choice. Of hiatus.And no one will move until I speak again.
In summer, when light’s fled, narcotic scentsare poured out from ten thousand blooms; we dozewith shut eyes but ears which only half-close,immured by sleep of a strange transparence. Soft shadows and the stars subtler, less bright;vague radiance tints that eternal hall,and the sweet pale dawn, awaiting her call,seems wandering low in the sky all night.
for Gail McConnell IHow much of what we scribble down survives –Sappho’s miraculous bits and pieces,Dialect words for kitchen utensils,See-through dresses, moonbeams – somebodyAt a busy street corner advisingWhere to shop for chickpeas and mascara. IILet blank spaces between parenthesesBe annotated thus by me and youWho loiter in the margin, Sapphic souls –Silence that has lasted a thousand yearsIs poetry of a kind, Gail, poetryLike a brain-child impatient to be born. III O suburban parthenogenesis,I eavesdrop on a holy family –Sappho would have fallen for Beth and you –Two mothers, two wives, a baby boy’sThumb-sucking bliss, glistening eyelids,Hazel-nuts safe beneath a Lesbos sky.
In the days when I loaded goods trains for a living Out of love for you, and no small concern I felt cold and tired and clean My throat pulsed slowly with the cold air’s burn Down on the silvering frost-lit rail Balanced with risk on the oiled sleeper Pushing upwards against the weight Of an electric four-ring cooker or a fridge The tracks going on till they fell off the world’s edge.
Life together began when you hooked your shirtson the rim of my bedroom mirror — I likedhaving someone mess with my neatness. We’d skirtthe notion of settling down and fly a kiteon Parliament Hill. If the walls crowded round,the smoke too thick from each cigarette we lit,we could take the bus and be Soho boundthen come together in calling it quits.I don’t know where the time went, we weretoo good at drifting off together, and waking upsomewhere new, on the way to getting there,until — it seemed so abrupt —you arrived at what you hadn’t known you wantedwhile I was still in love with being disenchanted.
Kew Gardens, March 2022 Late-winter dawns the larches start to sing their conjuring of bright green coronetslike miniature elvish party hats strung along hanging shoots in sheets of song –notating, emoji-like, clean morning notes. And then you see scarlet-and-green mitres,miracles of meticulous enamelartistry, as your mist of breathing clears –cabinet of a devout midwife’s tearsfor the exiled female pope, turned crystal- line. But your tears flow, since winter scarcely hurt for once: already spring has broughtits tragic joy, the lengthening days that slow the fierce arithmetic of life below stairs or stars, in kitchen or papal court. All beauty needs its nearby monument.
I suppose you’re right and breaking upwould be quite a good thing,but staying togetherwould be an equally good thing,so whatever we decide to doit will be all right. On balance,I lean towards doing nothing,but whatever happens we’ll go onseeing each other, won’t we? I suppose it wouldn’t be so bad,seeing other people for a change,we might even find someonewe could bear to be withfor more than half an hour,although I doubt it somehow.Experience suggests we go onfeeling the same about everythingno matter what happens. I do anyway.
Agnes B. Marshall, née Smith, of Walthamstow, practised at Parisunder Viennese chefs, had visions of snow-capped mountains,stiffly beaten peaks, set in glassy dishes. Not for her the Penny Lick.She knew life wasn’t a rehearsal and set about chipping away at Gatti’s glaciers: Norwegian ice kept frozen under London clay. (Liquid nitrogen later emerged from the mists of her imagination.)A finger in so many pies! She licked off the cream and ate the cone. At her height, she fell, the Queen of Ices thrown by a horse,never to recover. Without her, the business tripped, too: bought up by Mrs Beeton’s publisher (if you can’t, then join ’em). But why be sorry?
when an unexpected whirl of wind tosses grey veils of rainacross the Common; gobbets of roof-tile moss and mudplop on my doorstep. The parakeets, no doubt bewildered, flung among new-leafed trees, are blown to destinations never planned for. Flowers I planted yesterday fight fortheir lives in sodden borders. The sky turns dark. I switchon every light, write this... Abruptly it is over. Blue sky,calm cirrus clouds, warm spring sun and I, sitting foolishin the spotlight by my tall wide windows on a shining day, war still roaring from the TV screen.