Immediately driven into a wilderness, the speaker finds the land and its cultures equally harsh yet at least enough to inspire a market that excludes no-one as it wants to sell anything imaginable to survive devastation by the laws of God, governments and taxonomy.
Imagine nothing, wait, thirst,
Don't move, wait for the water.
Glue your lips to the hairy skin.
Its cat storm and stream of goat
Make mud at the bottom of your throat,
Helping you wait with less need
Than before when the stream overflowed
Down your arms upraised to the sun
That allows the little more of mint,
Charcoal fire, and dented tin to hold
Tea long enough for death, escape
From death, truth and lies or fiction.
It knows where the wind comes first,
Free of desert, rain, heat and sea;
Digs a well of light and pictures a sheep
Before the grassland and gulf disappear
And a coast of fish skeletons
Must feed the palm tree of fear.
Caught between desert and phosphate,
The least of a tree, its shade,
Sustains enough flesh for a soul,
Daughter of night or son of shadow,
To press and share its oil for food
And light, for washing the body upright,
For easing the bent-double back
And feet bandaged in mosquito nets
As they lug brushwood down hill tracks
Timeless as the generations
Yet also worn as flat—no numbered
Day of birth or death and no recall
Or care of genealogies
And graves beyond a wet and cold
Palm plank lining a well
Seventy meters yet still not deep
Enough to save half our children;
And all their innocence imagines
Nothing of the guilt and hate
In the elder brother's bitter,
Lonely and thick oleander,
In the open-mouthed vulture's hood
Full of flies, and in the bleached skulls
Of themselves become desert
Tombs and cooking ovens where a saint
Of sunburned eyelids, cults of dates
And rags of the most intimate
Can multiply the cube and dome
With an interior of dark green paint
So that each barren place provides a home
For a helplessly glistening sky
To be buried without human hurt.
Without its code simply discontinued,
The surrounding land would have succumbed
Long ago because it lives upon
Its own unknowns and needs no rape
By gods that dreams of death have made
Into mountains of defense and penance.
Rock like Saturn's rings, black glaze,
Yellow, red and milky sands and clays
Open gashes for the hot breath
Of the horizon's abyss
To thrust in its tongue with a kiss
Of cactus, laurel, palm and fig
So hot that every secret must
Evaporate unless it's sealed
With wax of desert rose and lust
Blue as a fissure of moonlit rain.
These mountains of Atlas nude,
Slabs of river feet, eyes filled with cranes,
Scorpion nerves, muscles like snakes,
And beetle wheezing pores will yield
Whatever the sky wants to make
From hopes of carcasses after death
For more than larvae ropes and clouds of flies
Because it's never too steep or too high
In the noon or snowy nebulae
For voices to break solitude.
They come over vague, near-parallel trails,
Gullies with the pebbles kicked away
By years of claws, bones, and feet.
Passing donkeys dreaming in ditches,
They come over walls half decayed
And half built, broken and fused
Yet equally needed and used
By flesh and clay, cactus and snail,
Red lichen and stone, mud and light.
Lazy and discipline rich,
They come with lizards from the gardens
Of circle and line but no face,
Not even your own in the cypress and ilex-
Channeled rills, the feather canes,
Camomile, mimosa, jasmine,
Hollyhock, papyrus,
Citrus, olives and golden green,
Violet grapes transparent yet opaque,
Hard, sticky and explosive
To overcome the dry leaf's fall
Into a plan of rose petals.
Fortified with drinking oleander ash,
Dead fathers' bones and burnt fish scales,
You eat grilled corn to the right
Of a room of salt behind
A door of flattened sardine cans.
Ripe almonds crack like your walls
Of earth, straw, rain and windows slit small,
But the impermanence is no more
And no less than your dirt floor
Fire among three stones and a fountain
Enclosed and constant in the core
Of your home's simple lines and open space
Within earth's curves—still a façade
But plain as trusting the sand and rain
With your cemeteries, one desert man
With your goats going out to graze
In the desert from dawn to midnight,
And trusting that God is God.
At least such a trust lets you live
For something more than the market's
Chance lurching to the jug drum
Of donkey skin but paying your ransom
To cinema based on a diet
Of urine, stone, bronze and dry sweat.
Half-asleep on top of a van,
You ride into the mouth smeared red,
The face laid waste by sexless sex,
The knee long breasts, steel spike teats,
Vagina stuffed with date pits,
Voyeurs and yanked out tongues,
Penis of diesel exhaust dung
Sucked by gold toothed goat heads
Artificially made sweet.
You'll worry about devils tomorrow.
For now the child with a sheep fleece wig,
Magnesium deformed, wanting a kiss
And selling hard amber curd
Must also appear to you unseen
Before the lizard in the incense finds
Prayers to protect your life of bread
From long knives of the evil and dead,
Though they'll weigh you with feathers on
And full of blood before they pack your eggs
In straw and let you see the blade
While quieter types sell cocks
To storytellers prohibited
To wear shoes or ride a horse
Yet who dress in inky velvet
As they please their hero's gaze
Like a blank video screen
And confect their maker's name
Through alms giving with no intention,
No secret want except to beg
Themselves, lost as the blind
Saints of repetition
Catching their flesh on the thorn
Bracelets slipping the closed fist.
The private sold in open air,
Value like nothing in the world,
Necessities for the unborn,
Conscience telling you what to wish
Buying a box of broken locks
From mountains of the moon and spice
Colored from the black and white,
And all that remains to trade
After cracking open the dice
Of sympathy and blame
Continue an old game of fetish
Powered by a new resource:
Gods still jealous of what you desire
Flowing freely out of the east
Let you eat, drink and admire
The fish and wine in the fountain
Behind a low door of no trust
In fast and purification
Or their rationalized behaviors
Bleeding buyers and sellers blue
Until they no longer exist.
But these gods will sell you too
Or barter for something else at least,
Unless you can provide better
And more than foreign letters
Written on a chemicals box,
Useless cloth and videotapes
Of your orphaned, sucking mouth
Full of blood and milk from the south,
Henna in your nails and beard
For no other love than uncooked, smeared
Sheep fat, tea, sugar chunks and mint booze
Puffing your eyes, dripping down your chin
And loosening the rope of goat hair,
All that holds back the guts of your brain
From bursting the basket of some whim
Claimed as your identity.
Let it like all incantations
Hemorrhage, and people
Will use dripping clay, tar,
Whitewash, sharp tin, Renault parts,
Spent cartridge coppers and old tires
To make utensils and dishes
For whatever comes into the dim
Space beneath canvas, planks, reeds
And rusty metal forming a town
Under one roof with openings unplanned
But effectively letting in
The sun, rain, moon, stars
And anyone else who will wait
For tea and heaps of dates,
Yellow, black, red and brown.
Address
442
Between this address and where
I think it is, the ivy
Replenishes itself with roots in the air,
I live my dead father
And try to write my family on mud
Without betrayals into mere history
Or music instead of the spontaneous
Rituals of light in knots of pulsing jewels
Through the network of earth black nerve
To carry the history and music to come,
The divination bowl, a woman
At a loom, weaving at the root,
Yet also at a stem like this address,
Her butterfly coloured cloth to wrap
Wounds in the world, her children, and her man,
Healing herself and them with her body
And abstract designs she names.
An Immigrant's Grandson
Blind man enjoying a movie,
I see her names, too, in this ivy
Meaning wine and god enough to rub
Her story like my teeth, find four legs
For my head at the altar of her hand
And jump the powerful engine drenched in chartreuse pollen
And smoking through the forest halves of raw
And civilised, cultured and primal, on curves
Blocking the vision of it left in flames
But not the lust in ashes to make icons
Out of nowhere: invention and
Accumulation gifting them with tools
Alchemically one with their users and any scraps
They throw in to find happiness,
As I have, living at this address
And where I think it is, sucking fruit
Once forbidden and now without effect
Because I was forbidden, too,
And now live here with no need to beg
For anything but the truth from both sides
Of the lie that represents this place,
Unless it includes the familiar stranger's face
Of innocent people's dignity.
Gustav Grunewald
(Moravian-American painter, 1805-78)
This broken stump in the shade dominates
The foreground to measure any view
Of the ideal origin, innocence and law
And reduce it to an impossibly round
Calypso seducing with pencil lines too blue,
Grass like a brush, nothing but solos,
Lonely rivers, mountains too steep for their slopes,
Exotic laurels and pines peaceful with crows,
The whitest of creeks and most inviting gaps,
Glossy mists and twenty-story waterfalls
Powering into my viscera the hope
They really exist, that I might want these things
With a straight seminary of dark windows,
Where women need companions and men to be alone;
A steeple transmitting dreams of room at the inn
And a god but not violets, local slate
And children's bones owning the burial ground;
The town when it also named the road
In the fields with no fence (though it's in a photo),
In winter from the north and summer from
The south, no other way; and conscience
Calm as a locked canal, two men fishing,
And a third about to capsize in a boat
Added like an afterthought yet equally remote
From the real experience I want to grub
Among these scenes: the sprouting kernel
Of this address when it looked like them;
My home on their "High Street", still highest
And now my street, even my baby says so.
Mud
My immigration ends with colonials
Shrinking to mere evidence
And what it doesn't show: their graveyard down the hill;
An invitation to decompose and contemplate
The fierce discovery and reconstruct
Its image through alternating appearances
And their inversions to sustain the present
Faithful as the past in its devotion
To the home and scrubbing its floors with basil,
The bridge with a tree growing through its middle,
The waterfalls' level and a kinship code
With a fingery fist from the sky
Flattening the earth so it can flood
Into my eyes, deconstructing even
Themselves to re-use the piled-up boards
And survive the poisoning of oceans
By the solitary gardener uprooting ivy
And ferns, salting the land, planting broken frames
Of the sublime—cartilage, ribs and backbones—
And forgetting they retain power to condemn
Any address down to its mud:
Its children's play, the most important
Source and resource, tinted nutmeg,
The first step and a bench to rest;
Mud house, oven, animal, adored,
Jars for water, a window on dawn,
No straight lines, round corners, fawn
Colored incline of a wall inscribed with star,
Vine, crescent, stork smile and embedding
Of broken dishes, herbs, fronds and a car
Headlight to deflect the evil eye.
This mud on my address won't let it die.
Two Recordings
I listen in the ivy to a music—
A gift never lost when it plays
Back first in the spirit that it's given,
Talking almost to no-one of nothing nowhere
And never heard before, an evolving arrangement
Of lush, honest, immediate ore—
An address for a domestic
God to dance its ceremony of mere everyday
With willing bodies awake with birdsong before
Sunrise: the same god's monkeys hanging on the first suspension
Bridge of chain links, happy between wine and diesel exhaust;
Between white devils in a row of warm brick
Houses set in snowy fields and black concrete
Progress of glass and steel, debt and the dead
And buried, skins and gourds, shit and a love dream;
Between sleeping lines and a crocodile chest,
Hair glue and wind, sex and sulfur, hammer and clay,
Wattle and daub, easel and albumen,
Negative and canvas, salt and synthetic colours,
Oil blanket and nothing local, cotton and rayon,
Silver and no pose, peace and cloth cash,
The bleaching sun and whitewash
For every spring to decorate
With a letter and appliqued story
Formed in a human profile yet serrated
To prevent disease and printed with children's
Hands for protection, a corncob, the navel
Scarred from giving birth, and a scattering of seeds
In indigo so deep, rich and sweet
It seeps past the hourglass border to make a stream
Taking the wealthy sea to undeserved poverty.
I play back sounds of shells as the healer moves
In waves of circles, diamonds, triangles
And squares strongest in their sense of surface—
White nuts on the black soil, pans and pots
In a string bag, funeral red, safety pins
To count for power, neck of the suicide hero,
Thick wire to hobble a truck, mistakes crossed
Intentionally for beauty, mother snake fierce for her eggs—
Uneven texture, zig zag, bump, dent, dot:
The difference to continue
Beyond the untriumphant and innocent origin,
The despair of imitating only less,
The deserter's death sentence,
And neither woman nor man secure without a chain
And an end to hold fast to the spiral
In and out, the roads and branches of need
And fullness within the ivy
Of this address and its domain.
Richard Caddel
from For the Fallen
56
o winter and mead thirst in aether gaining
clue rig Orion, news going late letting
come clueless O least in view
rag Catterick holds faith and clue
on gorse muddy fog flower dew
o drew chant naming in anger the few
57
O wine faith and moth faith is grace-sent
wire in rest molest a nest thick went
glow dull and droll and befeathered
going amidst a maul or muck scent
on gorse my dog-hard life and falling
or rue it at college in wired garage
o dry chant reality's grey sound at Catterick
true naming one wire and not cursing
58
who bid the young highwire in parent
made peel awry he
who'd bid thy own ivy a tree
who'd among old or thin
win a maiden hiding
in highstrung history
and Tom Caddel in catcher flights
marching on trust in moors
59
anger dour dane
sharp stuff we grin
send a worm again
in lean budding
Arthur in all
drew sad dresser
sent away war
in this cadaver
inlaws wear none
isle in thick gnaw
newsdesk true and far
led in the dark
O drydock drink
see where youth wears fire withered
60
anger doing down
any scoffing
in mean bidding
lead roof lowerer
in marsh of wire
rag of cotton
wrecking of Arthur
of worrying bath
Cymric tarred hearth
a rage of Merlin
61
anger dire dawn
serves saffron green
engage in vain
inlaid budding
arial railway
trace track chimeways
in rue coppery
cordway laying
choir youth elsewhere the gyres withered
rector stair-hater more gobsmacked
tutor tracing air care of the lathe
62
clan for lead roof
claw gift aloof
wrong wreath in morning
crawler clothier
lawn feathered
tidal flight at blest seaman
loose art too close the
law in a lather
since no ideal's a bargain
see there youth always on highwire raised
rector tillerman moor pub flyer
tutor treading air care of the lyre
63
earthly deft songs coming caffeine
in sad ear at Catterick rapidly breaking
brother a year wiser sung
sung it with a wind
Dial M for Murder
O gallant befringed
this drawl kid nowhere a cuff wrecked
coffee coming here to a craft so dared
64
ah the dog gone no common offering
torn tan and thunder a rivering
gored Arthur might marching musty
rough fettle ruffle on either knee
gore going the different dining car
or main lad in the sky
I whisked awry wrist with a hard folly way
made wine glow and wide lustre
a wheel I am fed O daily
winefed of wide North son so dearly
65
earthly songs clear or certain
a chime defiant delays Orion
rife scent I lifted pen or ink clued
in anger glory birds a-living
an arles for many dogs marching mean
of deeds we do our way by the gallon
at Catterick a fresh new door lacking
way they went clothed in sea fog iron
or else a tremor treads galleon
oath I did amongst the bared Britons
Gododdin O bell welling not chiming
66
earthly songs with common refrains
loud lodger-bird by dizzy want
how many in hill bird idle amount
every great march a mead feathering
forgetting the airing when fainting
67
earthly dog songs clear on common
our negus morning fog mistress mine
a match for her dry wonder
old buffer whistling a land of the broken
68
no portent from mauled noise of
ragtime railway train authored
too big for truth truly kindled
Tuesday whistled in clothes dithered
Wednesday butchery is done
Thursday kindly outmoded
Friday calamity closed
Saturday differing yoked wethers
Sunday clans go red adrenal
Monday hide mine eyes wading waylaid
news draws Gododdin wed to the cluttered
rag pebble mad dog pain gored
naming a man O gallant not delayed
69
mock away wraith in moor
in gunnels at peripheral ragstone
by shores of the Wear
sing hinnies cold
avail of the guard
in degree
but cold hold a minute—but lay
but going a willing journey
70
mock away wraith in morning
pancreas in ruin in mourning
O drawers in houses undiluted
rag song of want guise thing
old gear of goon squad chews wading
malefic booze true—certain
old clue and cladding wears thin
leatherfull dual fighting
O most wretched
delayed escape stair
awful in morning
71
he fell headlong to depth
no delay who with wrenching pen
disgorged brain fuel lads a-going
cunning in rain a stair edger
eastwind kangaroo'd ghastly his going
dilute disdain carefully filling
disgorged pen viburnum bran
fetching march a worn search at each wide dawning
go for it go for gold against disdain
72
air draws a ruddy wiseapple
let gorse away with a fiddle
worth weird words and nervous
search away am I red in faith
singing a search—seeking a song
our fellows cleat daywise and cluttered
penitent enough in neckwear carved
hunt amber but go to penitence
73
faint and hard on the far gale
and his table is withered
darkly the mode melds a mangle
crisis arguing a league in war
sad loose English leaves a door
wry benefit hid in a guitar
ah wine cluer to achieve
go on and on with faith
safely care away the winners
tear away thin face fast strumming
canker west dear can go west wing
by orphans goddamned breed
74
my thin orthodoxy negates
my motley dog clawhammer
but does a choice on chordway
not odd of wrath gift coffered
muddying onions are we held
not odd are lights born or bothersome
angel where our china lived with
in high flown belaid her belied her a dimwit
godly Sir heron Cliff and law inactive
searching in ignorant highlands
water freshly by flame hard rag a scarp
75
the far fuel and growing
the lady and the hero
neither overheard nor strumming
neither earth fed nor drumming
nothing we rely on is held
not owed our keys upon the blue
not chilly waster train led to rue
draws to choose cleverer than you
Ralph Hawkins
from Skinny Protruding Mismatch
a releaser comes at the end
these appeals to lost relations are understandable
my family mingles with root vegetables
until I have influence on whether systems
I am a legume in the rain
nothing will change
perhaps I shall adopt convention
as I am alone now
Yet I have committed no crime
I am free from sin
& a model of virtue,
set amongst a world of stock situations
I am a non-event
consider these combinatory elements in sequence
perceived as discrete units
thanks to this lineage of ready-mades
events co-lapse to release realizations
of the interpretive mind
the interaction of cities with prominent sites
the container & the contained (jism & ruh)
the plateau regions on the apron of majestic mountains
the judicious placement of points of reference
gateways built in the mouths
points of arrival & departure
(haven't we been here before)
bridges & roads deepen the combinative axis
the groin yearns towards the Logos
I have not learned from experience
I have followed neither the line of fortune nor the line of desire
I have studied the imprint left upon the mattress
I have attained the possession of a shadow
I have yearned for the coming synthesis
I am unwilling to compromise with the dialectic
I reject the mechanical softening of contradiction
We could just kiss and kiss and kiss?
You could give up and live your life (!)
I take no pleasure in what the world cares for
I have built a house of osmanthus wood
I have planted an orchard of orange and pumelo
I will cross that gate when I open it
to the bridge-heart where you toyed with me
& toy with me still all these years, Helen
& I have drifted & compromised
But I have been honest & true
I have lacked confidence & I have failed
but I have been honest & true
My bones are those of the chicken
My skin that of the heart attack
My face that of the caged bear
The look of the wolf
The splash of the penguin
I have suffered
The langour of capture
In the context of delusion
I have fallen into interchangeability
Into temporal loss and abandonment
I have fallen into the trap of the dichotomies
I correlate a variety of different referents
I look forward to a better life
He wrote this his heart on rice paper
It was a recipe of disaster
Ear Ice & Ape
Earth Spice Shape
It contained certain geometries
Caper Sauce
Cloud Ears
They must be soaked in warm rain
The noodle
On Sycophants
you have supped with the fish
written of his pin stripes
played with his milk sacs
but have you driven his car?
I have, so NAHR
(Harris)
woke up, back to ordinary consciousness
Harris took the bondage applicator off
Oh he looked unhappy and lachrymal
a bit too much colonic irrigation
words were sweeping through
the city's sewer system
there seemed to be leakage everywhere
I walked the markets
they serve night-shift workers
brewed from a type of millet
small eats booths and windows
first slit of light
organdie, blood sucked orange lips,
silks with dragon prints
cobbled stone walks
back alleys
drains
the civet cat,
hare, hanging duck, snake, wasp nest totems
taken between the lips
sucked and lolloped
happy as a pog in shit
(old city)
there is an old city
of formidable rock
an assemblage of collations
of star ports
of quadrants turning on the outskirts
they say of the inhabitants
they are improvident
they are lazy
yet they have no fear of cold or hunger
there are no rich households
Chu is a land of lakes and rivers
the city blends in
it is all things,
mono & poly
there on the hill or in the valley
fed by great rivers
the rain god sprinkles clear the road
the ocean road
the road to the vast desert
the road which the star port opens
to a language you cannot read
falling from the sky
it is written on the walls of the city
& there is silence all around
silence of the moth
silence of the gnat
silence of the snake
silence of the wolf
silence of the scorpion
almost post coitum tristitia
zoo and eats
that's what Harris called his restaurant
menu full of protected shark and contraband whale
goes out the back with a hook harpoon
sharpens up the appetite
krill for a starter
the water in and around said environs
(the most polluted in the world now)
is a treasure waiting to be spent
there is dog
civet cat
bear's paw
snake & monkey
take home a doggy bag
practice zoomancy
spirits don't eat
that's why they are pale and wan
almost see-through
almost condom to the touch
almost not real
almost clear as a tear
they survive on a diet of dew
they are light enough to fly
can you get reverse suction on this said Harris
don't plug it in for God's sake
the leaking of the poet's room
disembodied, disembedded
the granite blocks of the city
seem to be sliding
a little bit thinned and watered down
in our cities we look like nomads
leaving his girdle for Harris in one of the river's inlets
a jade girdle
a rose for the can
a strainer for his tea
a garlic press
a language leaking
zones marked off by the Pogminister
& the present information invasion
by food & bottle parasites recycled wormery
"beyond the radiant slits
who cry nooses of noon
toward a transformed future
the stabilising force of the immutable present
a three way plug
Harris wants a Take Away
Snacks and Street Food
instructing the cook
on the spot
to cook it
we have red and watery fresh peeled
round eye lychees from Furhou
from shady cool Piguang some sour tart,
from Songyang
sweet sweet luscious
yellow orange green tangerine and
some supple supple soft quite quite white
crystal crushed flat persimmons
notice the way the steps ruin this way and that
ew ork ome and aris
a name dropper of sorts
the rhythmic bazaar sculptured space
and gardens in the city
and parks
are usually pots and pans
or plots and plans
did all things once start in the same place
this leakage
(maladie initiatique)
the city of thieving,
the city of rice grains
the city of rams
teeming you remain my favourite,
empirical & theoretical when you walk
the whelk speaks
the wok talks
in the swim you engage
simmering, stewing, deep sea frying
the city of radical pronouncements is
indeed the wish of a lifetime
my favourites sell condiments
ginger juice, lily buds,
star anise on clouds
flew five immortals
riding rams
he was sick all week
"something you ate?"
maladie initiatique
seafood splashed puddle
you call back Isfahan
stars tumble & collapse
you are ill and the dragon yanks at your gut
you are poor & you hold out your hand
city of delight
historic & productive city
city of parasites
city of disputes
future city
city of teeming rain
city of inestimable numbers
(penguin snorkel)
God said Harris you're quick with your vacuum cleaner
I'd rearranged it to look like a space vehicle
I could strap it to my back
snorkel & nozzle
some deep sea fish
cast over quartz eyes in a dynamic synchrony
against tense & lax vowel movement
today my son told me of shitting
he sort of bent down and the shit squirted out wet
where do they pee from
I wasn't paying attention
I thought he was telling me of the fat baby at the zoo
wearing glasses,
two earrings in one ear,
naked, with boobs
when all along he was describing a penguin
both Trubetzkoy and Sergej were amazed
at the positive reaction of the penguin committee
we had little penguin motifs
tattooed on our arms
we called ourselves the conservationists
or was that the conversationalists
and scrubbed out the word ZOO
Harris had no recollection of being lost
I'd like to have hoovered him up
but he would have left a wet stain
it's either left or right or straight ahead
if you're lost return from whence you came
this is difficult when I was born here
you landed on your feet
with primary waders
and in the centre of the city is a square
it looked like a grid system to Harris
it looked like a good system to Harris
when you're lost there is no system
he pulled out three dactyls to buy a map
they rung like heaven
and looked to the stars
through a maze of dishes
ponder stars and dishes
observe the paradigmatic axis
rather than successivity and simultaneity
(syrup like light)
close up in the poetic
a releaser will spore the mites of dust
y dread
the planet of scrape wind
carries the contents
ride this worm
this shaman ram
into the world of tears
there to listen to the delimitations of
dark labialized vowels
Quick, my vacuum cleaner has a sister
this is the Pogminister talking
a releaser slowly eases the word poison into your bran
I am naïve to ask
being lost in syrup like light
& fan out the map
its a grill system of a zoo
to look after the animals
at time for break
fast
(Ping!)
the light faded in the afternoon
I was born in the city
when I look back
the streets are all the same
I tried this morning, hung over, to remember your face,
what we did together
where we went
there were buses and trains
I remember I had to wash three or four times a day
Mr Yu read Hölderlin to me
all anxieties left & joy spread over me
layer on layer
when I look back
my heart becomes manifest
it functions on that combinative axis
where walking
our paths criss-cross the vowels of a grid system
you were lithe & intelligent
& my experience scant
it wasn't clear then
that I would go on to invent
drainage & irrigation systems
Mr Yu had a way with people
some said he could move mountains
he certainly liked his Hölderlin
employing a cryptanalytic approach
to obscurantism and the tonal qualities
he said lay, he used the term deep cover
& sedimentation, beneath the surface structure,
much like the way a metro is timetabled,
yes, that's where you stood waving,
it was goodbye, outside 33rd St,
a hydrant gushed water
the faucet in my room,
your photo pinned to the wall reminds,
dripped water, sounded like a feng in the basin.
Note: Ancient Chinese is thought to have no labio-dentals, so "Feng" and "Ping'"would have sounded much the same
Susan M. Schultz
Course Requirements
Commodious comodity, alert
this instance to your overlord,
perform inheritance in subways
whose clangor imitates inebriate
cast out sluggards wandering
earthward after hours locked
in proto-spaceships, that shelf
where denial meets the open
alacrity of us. In this, we
resume telepathies that link
futurists (those who live only
in the past) with Farrakhan,
whose violin sings through
broad phrasing articles of
impeachment, genetics the matter
for an embarrassed icon to dis-
play in front of the unfaced men
in bow ties who nod and so diminish
messages left for the intended.
Now parables are screened
for a disorder that breeds not
wisdom but a contempt of stories,
progress a clarity pulled like
taffy towards nests of wise
acres swift as koalas, puffing
eucalyptus in beamed conservatories;
and so innocuous buzzards make
base harmonics to drown the soprano
performing arias in a spa where
sounds are steamed hieroglyphics
we keep meaning to crack. Tame
celebrities wallow in the cement
will of sidewalks, pressed signs
one was there who kissed the camera
lens, invoked beacons or deacons
of the southern church whose base-
ment pool contains a worshipper's
oil beads; conversion's a game
that plays us out for transformative
souls or fools whose histories are
susceptible to change of content,
nay even form. I saw her afterward,
her eyes corridors toward resurrection,
tombs opening up to reveal Antigone's
typology, a tragic woman substituted
for Christ, lacking only the lyric "I",
dripping like a faucet before firearms
are banned and the lost children
of Port Arthur live again on the Isle
of the Dead where cormorants are no less
appalling for being endangered. The ship
rises and falls like an archer whose
myth is soon over; a teller waits, knowing
curency depends on audience, attendance
on a policy spelled out in advance
of this latest incident, the hit and run
vehicle that stunned our favourite tenor.
Major Funding for Despair
Resume nasturtiums, obeisance
toward arcane goodness consumed
as wafers in catacombs, historical
churches breeding grounds
for the exogamous headaches gods
abandoned in a last experiment
at human experience, its nodes
and modules careless as bones
on the scruff or surf where
waves are beached and whales
immunized against the contraflow
that traffics in regional market
strategies, humus before the fall,
evil emblem of national indebtedness
to virulence and the hymns that
semi-automatics make, honorably
discharged from a service that
turns ransom to candy, indigenous
slights handed out like tissues
at Shinjuku station or beside
the faithful dog that has his day
in bronze, girls in pigtails
initiated into the occult cult
of friendship. Finders sweepers;
to the early bird goes the trumpet
or was it a sax that so reworded
us in our hankering for beauty
and truth both, scrap metal sold
at pennies a pound, a '55 Chevy
your urn of choice, time stalled
at intersections where enigmas
fail to start, car talk like god
talk interrupted by a static hum
of excess, metaphors flat as soda
cans beside the parapets or pedo-
philes, students voted least
likely to accede to social graces,
consumers of our demand for shock,
as if the electric surge were
evidence enough our blood burned
inside us, burrowing out corridors
of tissue and bone like beneficent
spiders casting nooses over corners
where murder is an art and honesty
admonition. Less crime leads strangely
to a greater fear of randomness,
time's dishonest caravan whose
linguistic ineptitude indicates
moral decline like verb strapped
in a 19th century German drama
but waiting out onto the plain
speech of Kansas, abrupt likeness
of the middleman who captures
the White House only to release it
from its synecdochic bondage.
Liberation theology it isn't,
this misanthropic tea party
where sentences are set for
realignment like stars or wheels,
celestial mechanics inspecting
the bent axle of our devolution.
AW Kindness
The Split Shadow
(from: Flashback)
meet the walking dildo
good for stand-up turns
in a world of busy objects
bodies of disinformation nourished
on depleted orgones' clockwisdom
introducing the body sock in person
walking one's bike into
the other's hard-pushed luck
middle of the road? halfway along?
speed inconsistent motion uncertain
corner buffer mirrors foreshorten
closure of possibles unmarked one-way systems
who's breathing our air
rendering it unbreathable unless
we cough up oral foam requisitioned
calling discount doctors mobile
blows in the night
visiting sins of the unwitting father
vapours according to volume
shrieks in cups of
gold syringe made to measure outwards
double-decked non-stop patter energy
siphoned sweat as currency
concerned traders set going rates mechanism
this small talk shrinks
smallness of voice excuses
harmonic fundamentalists squeezing vicarious impartiality claims
less than an octave's
pitch ruptured uneven song
hemmed in a brain without ambidexterity
bel canto breaking glass
mineral music's swagger minced
harmonic content set sun's candle power
didgeridoo dream snore yes
Genghiz Khan's manifold larynx
all sounding through the vocative mask
per thru sonare sound
of the drama fixed
expression of what you look thru
facing the voice opaque
medium voicing the face ta tou dramatos prosopa spells cast
voice-faced antibodies of knowledge
undernourished face-voiced star turn
out to be each other's reflection
symbiosis of vacuum tube
inserted into rotten wood
to take out residual rogue bugs
extending nuclear reactions to
death of the family
tuning into interference thriving on it
their shadows overshadow ours
porous exhalations their element
high on clear liquid from blisters
scripted utterance tight-fitting smile
reconditioned reflexes drained affect
heart defence stained to the bone
double talk half price
they saw us coming
another cost-effective source of raw energy
valued for our buying
power reliable as dust
in the folds of multi-national dossiers
John Tranter
Locket
Her laugh had shocked her university friends,
and she would have to find a faith in a bottle,
the dark never really dark, but her life story
more like a riddle at the bottom of the glass
calling the loonies in across the lawns.
Crazy smile—I'm a bit of surgery,
this is not my real career, I'm a jockey—
tracing the tram track it followed—my life,
not myself, and worse, his brain was a dick,
that's how he described it. Cut the economy
of the street, they were just bad, those
cruising boys, the bay now a body locker,
on the nearby slopes a homestead or two,
no traffic on the grass, only on bitumen because
appropriate—driving around in her dad's car and her
usual daze like a robot on Sunday, the slow traffic
photographing how it is reflected as a carnival
by the strips of dusty glass, how the murmur
has a querulous inflection, the tone the T'ang poets
struggled to get down on paper, once they'd invented it—
ages ago. She had taken her name from a ribbon,
a name tag that offered a motto-loser.
Then when she broke open the fortune cookie,
the message gave the answer to Fermat's last theorem,
wasted here among the groggy customers.
They were busy calling blue jokes out
to one another in the toilets, yelling through
green glass, and tawny lemon, and the scent
of that cheap hospital grade disinfectant
and she answered: I'm listening to that,
you jerks! From a neighbouring cubicle
then—a smaller moment than many—
I knew that she'd sob, that her good times
had ended, that she seemed the strangest creature
to herself. It was so lonely there, in the suburbs
fringing the university, the passing crowd
was full of brainy intellectuals who,
once they'd been indoctrinated thoroughly,
had all turned into their own doubles—like that.
She stumbled on her high heels, maybe she would have
developed into a genius, who knows, and her friends
were shocked when the Chinese waiter brought her home,
back early from the old testament, and babbling scribble,
stretched out from each week's work, remember disentangle
her mad laugh at the dark, then looking through the car
for her makeup. Her laugh echoed under the trees,
the lamplit street sleeping, now a dog spoke,
the moon lying along the distant ridge,
her university friends abandoned long ago,
along with her childhood—marriage—the locked locket.
Package Tour
There's a gap electricity leaks across
between the eyeball and the page, between
the demonstrator showing off the dicing knife
and the tired woman going home on the train.
For five million people Paris is a place to work,
not a fucking vacation. So the young flirt
went to Europe, meaning to spend her money.
Cigarette packets, rain showers, Existentialism
blowing through the groups of confused tourists—
whistling something, these prisoners of air,
a sad little tune that spelled out how
lost they were, under the European weather.
She walked in the rain, the acid drench
that was pouring on the new wet paint,
as though through sheets of green gauze.
Her anxiety was quickly dispatched, and the messages
soon sparked down the wire to clang the bell
back home. The hot air was shuddering, they said
it was necessary—voice flattened by the phone—
to make an example of the rapist feller;
and the girl reporter read about it on the Teletype
and came down here looking for trouble.
We gave her trouble, more than she planned on.
Click. I guess it was some family habit.
She was working class, all right. You could tell,
under the cunning accent she put on,
something hollow, stained, fake.
Everything in the kitchen could be overheard.
To paint—that's all she wanted to do,
even if it was just grasping lies. You could take it
that this was only a moral lesson, or
you could imagine more. That's up to you.
She pushed the doors open, looking in
at the confused diners, and only a moment ago
she'd been fascinated by history's obsession with itself,
how we stayed up and talked till dawn
when we were just dumb kids, like philosophers.
She drank ouzo and retsina until even the Greeks
wouldn't have any more of her, drank
till dawn, threw up, then drank some more.
It had been raining in the square,
the cobbles were slick, and coming home
from another binge, she slipped, twisted her
ankle and knocked out a tooth on the kerb.
So the biographer says.
She wore a raincoat everywhere, a matter of
style, to work, to the toilet, God knows, and
when she let it slip to the floor the buckle knocked
on the wood. She saw her future rise up, a sheet
of lightning. Paris or Peoria, it's all the same.
John Kinsella
Epilogue
High forest and understory
converge with the ruin of day,
the collapsing narrative thread—
traffic never far away—
earshot merely a colloquial hum
as songbirds contract with scrub,
the collation of gunblast beyond
the jurisdiction of the Wildlife Trust;
etiquette of castigation in a pastoral voice
barely showing through
as Major Mitchell enters the interior
of Tropical Australia and quotes Ovid:
"Communemque prius ceu lumina solis et auras
Cautus humum longo signavit limite mensor"
and steps up the veracity
and range of the Voice,
confirming enclosure,
the haptic integration of sense organs,
their turbulence across
oiled waters of survey data,
hydraulics of boundary machines
in the "Gothic hypothesis" of Outback—
that sea for depressives
who would die unsatisfied
if they actually found a reef of gold—
"O soule be chang'd into little water drops
And fall into the Ocean, ne're be found."
With the draining, the water Brethren
assembled against the drainers
and Pastor Albrecht was heard to utter
from deep within Centralia:
"When we came here
we thought we had found
the only people in the world
without religion. Now
we have learnt
that they are among
the most religious people
in the world" as yet again
the monks at Ely
refuse to toe
the party line.
"It's what you don't have that counts!"
yells the Capitalist, while you—
wanting soule as the radio "blasts"
and diminishing woods struggle to coppice—
peruse missives from the last settlers,
uncomfortable in their paradox,
while sheep are trucked to market
and seed bins emptied,
the sunset ashen and sentimentality
left stranded on a dirt road
going nowhere. An echidna
is crushed by a stranger
coming to grips with the edges
of what is now his paddock—
"All beasts are happy, for when they die,
Their souls are soone dissolv'd in elements..."—
it being neither here nor there
that the first badger
and hedgehog you see
in this, your New Country,
should lie dead upon the road—
at night you might say "At least
there aren't any kangaroos
to worry about!" the impact
potentially fatal.
Harmonium
Sandspit at low tide
taloned in the lower reaches
of the Swan River
as the atmosphere condenses
to a single spark, a son et lumière
entertaining only itself
as upstream they fill in just a little
more of the river, burgeoning freeways
forcing their pylons deeper into
the settlement's sludge,
knocking on the door
of landbridges that link
the place with Empire:
that up there, beneath the fens,
they find buffalo and lion,
elephant and rhinoceros,
and poets are offered residencies
at museums, oblivious
of the subterfuge: but all of this
is off the map and everything
leaps for th'Antarticke world
into the sky, as from here they
head to Bali or India,
in search of temples and karma,
lomatel taken regularly
and also consistent doses
of anti-malarial concoctions,
in their busy search for pleasant fruites
as if the world is hypertextual;
so too in language of the primal,
linking druids to the Wagyl
and claiming kinship,
like domesticating the dingo
and talking of pedigrees,
while the sand paintings spiral—
not vanishing but rearranging endlessly
at least to the poetic eye.
So this sandspit, or at high tide
"sandbar", that'd grip the hull
of a drunken sailor's yacht,
or catch a corpse drifting
up for the harbour,
might well be the inverted
signature of a sluice
draining excess water
from the shire, as drought
addles the senses, or simply
a memory of this.
If harmonium is a busy sprinkler
casting rainbows to the sun's
determined backdrop,
the greens greener than green
(down here the blue
is bluer than it should
really be); then you might consider
the river the source of prosperity
and rather than filling it in, recast its course
and send it inland, calling it snake
and naming it Protector,
making the desert sprout
and fill the nation's coffers,
fuel calls for succession.
CY O'Connor,
State Engineer, went some of the way,
linking goldfields with Mundaring Weir,
driving water into desert,
quenching the thirst of gold diggers,
washing the finds:
the pipeline a concrete and metal river,
of a precise depth and volume
and almost consistent flow.
In early paintings of the Swan
natives reclined or stood fixed
against their spears
as industry and commerce
terraformed the flows; as the protests
at the old brewery—
built over the Wagyl (river serpent,
guardian of the local dreaming)—
raged on into litigation
the art market kept its head
just above water,
though collapsing prices
in the late eighties
had sellers wary—it was still
a buyer's market.
Paul Holman
eurasian
in various
forms of
mask and
silence the
spiral I'd
looked for
around the
neck of
a dancer
more red
tangled on
a kind
of nomad
not
formed a
fool R
okuro-Kub
i made
shadow an
insect
a halluc
ination a
ll shared
is not
the hut
of fog in
could
imitation
I of
to guard
against
this letter
but
asked for
control
of
archon policeman
archon policeman fox spirit in a
spacesuit but their action had damaged
the future also Sun Ra correct
to hold Pharaoh above
Moses beautiful
an architecture of some being of
found herself a ghost world crimson
silhouette of a bird paper bag
monster head
wand turned back into
hail on the kitchen floor hand
moth no longer settled on styled
himself prince of the dragon tract
through which a girl in the
Ohmu eye of a broken Hotpoint
Heldscalla the negative of the Odradek
Stadium Henry James would
have cared
for the delicate cut the great
still lizard in a dreamed encounter
to haunt the eye trapped behind
honeycomb or
lightning the blood bought
disgust me identified the tattoo as
her mermaid rubber stamp had once
been a knuckle girl in rust
on Hazel's tinsel badge found that
I'd pushed the baby cart into
a gun siege tell Mas Abe
no seam our dog
buried upright
at the orchard gate image head
mover head of the blue star
on broken metal the shepherd burned
his drum
revolution not magical but
biological pleased with the little oracle
at the edge of a leaf
the abacus click at her throat
nettle
but container of
it a Chinese
should | beer
be thread |
the invisible met
infra with the
red sewn young
band green saddle
not in maker
tear next
even the to
the | the
cast thin skeleton
of Didi |
knight turned
knight turned from
the map of
false stone must
sever to connect
fuse lit behind
each eye but
payment is a
cigarette transparent
that I
disconnected from a
system of chance
the outline of
an imagined map
into her pencil
scatter reptile at
the ankle made
an x beside
the canister practiced
magic to retrieve
an invisible
the erased most
terrible fable continued
to haunt too
much paracetamol in
the bathroom just
before she met
three lights in
a bowl her
grey green iris
opaque brought up
in the radiant
house of a
claustrophobiac
tell | Mas
tell
Mas image
head Abe
no
mover
head seam
of our
dog the
blue buried
upright star
on
at
the broken
metal orchard
gate
(but cast revolution)
but cast revolution
into neoplatonism made
stupid. I have
named texts after
two different brands
of fuse
my clothes
singed by Faust's
blowtorch. In 1989
I could think
of nothing but
nature over again
after Lovecraft. I
sleep beside the red sister of Jill Bioskop each
Mark E
Smith took the
spread fingers of
Wyndham Lewis for
his stencil. She
told me of damage to herself
that I'd heard
described as fated.
indefinite
Ian Hunt
En Echelon
[A windswept hill above a port.
Large gun emplacement. First
lights of evening. Harbour master
old, shorter, fixed face. Daughter
young, taller, mobile face.]
Counting the vessels into home,
wind sings in the rifling. "Burning time.
Daughters, teach me to wait.'
Too well before delete she said
"They aren't us" which he knew.
"Now list me in your harbour arms."
The penitent one windburnt to sense
heard words scooped out to sea,
imagined always to the right.
"I'll calibrate the hours of sun
each day you went. What's strange
is not begun in you. When there were fires
we moved and quickly. Don't forget
that owing to us. Braid showing
at our collars marks us for these fights,
is not put off. I took to water after that,
headlands, drainage, towers, redoubts
clothed beyond reason like a dutch,
wanting only the parts given back
as fitting home. As now,
not asking much, you could demur
at something, not give up
at speech grown strange in air.
this medium that drags us to our sense."
"No air would give us that, no speech
deleted pause. We are not sagas, scrolls,
laws are renewed in breaking, found
again inside the wrist but for
the finder true, even to capacity
of print's chambered burning:
for all I know enraged on a harbour wall.
Tyneside toughened glass spins back
the loan's reflex, ask for that much-
the dancing master's warmer in the hall
and self-taught. He doffs his cloak,
snuffs the attendant's false candle, folds
a smile of the voyaging tropic to the cold.
Countless printless footless times.
And now I demur we're nothing,
particles dumped in ranks
an audience free to leave,
we have our chancy vehicles. I'd have
you speak all this in a play, to know
your one side is a dreamed half-fall
into the medium you say sustains you."
David Rushmer
The Oracle Bone
body without form
beneath milk-teeth stars
fist of wind
encircling sound
the cries of birds
leave their imprint
in the bone
in the beginning
a pause
foetal comma
coil of thought
the sleeping messenger
awakens in the bulb
forming fingers
prizing open the mouth
feeding the host with sunlight
hands entwine
the current of the blood
solidifies the spine
tongue poking
the belly of the sky
my teeth shall fall
from my skull like rain
the dreams of the dead
flow into the ocean
20-10-97
Locus Amorphous
1
efflorescent
body
suspended
in the air
held
in a net
of blood
the white of the eye
moon blinks into sight
genesis of liquid bone
flow
&
counterflow
flood
of emptiness
clouds web
ghost of rainfall
2
a hole
right through me
where the wind
passes its hand
welcomes the tide
the names of the dead
on her lips
drowned voices
corpses of foam
thrown up by the sea
the gasp for breath
in an ocean of silents
3
dawn
the skin of night
breaks the thread
the duel lips
of sky and sea
part
the eye alone
is vocal
4
to come
out of nothing
or
to touch myself
in your reflection
30-10-97
(untitled)
unborn tongue
belly-up
in the mouth
musical rain
moon-painted surfaces
rippled hieroglyphs
chatter to the open sky
the wind wraps her hair
around the bone
solidifies the violence
of the flow
and into the silence
sound flowers
cold blooms effluviate
meat
nascent
in the dark shell
10-97
Emma-Jane Arkady
Cut
(1) Pandora
His boat
little blue
pulled six inch of skimming draft
as I lost it
drifted and the arm
as it stunned the brick
crack you little fool
crack you little shit
crack up an alley
long slit cut up the neck
set to a red dry river
called father
holy holy holy
box of anger
floating trap
on a Sunday
(2) Lock eight
up to my neck
in line on line
of holy
how the saint
pray child
to catch the tall place
set against the damp beaded pain
feel it ratchet
kiss the stash
missals are not just a tactical weapon for burning
on the bank
light the long
long darkness
darkness
fall on you
the word suffocates
the fall
the ratchet turned
sucks down
jams you
in its anus
chucking up
the holy
turn it against
spits you
out to the sluice pond
when darkness sets
hard set as the stopped
lock the dead
breath the word
chokes all in the missal
all burning
burning
pyre on the bank
as a light
and she pushed my hand in deep
held it with tongues
(3) Gas works sluice
works rust down
graveline on the cold
and he lurks
pray set the pet face to glass
note the sharp
slicing edge
taste it sweet
very sanctimonious orange in the basket
rot them together
lined on the edge
line of the city chains
the link green fencing hems
the rhythm note it pet
or else or else else-wise
cold we chuck you over
money
give us give us your flesh
note it sweet child
I'm a holy man
I cuts up the gas works
chucks it into skips
redevelops the holy shit
note it or holy else chick
Michael Ayres
Sad Idyll
Angel,
angel of grip, angel of spines,
they're first a sigh and then a kiss,
they're first a murmur and then a cry,
but are first a sigh, and then a rattle-dry-angel:
at last a rattle, but now the cream,
angel, now the glisten and now their prime,
the centaurs galloping on their hooves of sperm
from left to right, through turquoise waters,
across spurting sand, to palms of celluloid across a shallow foam,
angel,
and naiads slowly form orgasmic pearl,
angel,
so gradually blow the bubble of their world
to ride upon slick backs like kissing snails.
Angel,
angel of severance, angel of times,
angel of clocks whirring and of clouds passing,
cast the net of your eyes into the space
which waits and yet withdraws, angel,
which opens ahead and must also slide, and tilt, titanic, slowly
away, angel:
then grab hold and haul slowly in
the meshed catches milling there, angel:
shade your eyes against the light and, squinting, see
fractional holes, pink with afterbirths, like vapour trails,
see cubes, and Blue, God, and trumpets, angel,
heads and tails, and wings,
bodies, and humped backs
bearing stumps of things, at odd angles
Angel—
imagine them (as you will never see them
whole, angel)
dragging their snapped-off fins of time
like kindling, like rumbling barrows, angel:
angel, like you.
The air is thick and liquid with a fever
as of gills, beating, gaping,
or bat-wings whirring in the heavy gloom,
of scraping scales, and motion perpetual, but slow,
with shadows hissing by,
a prowl,
Angel,
around, Angel,
a stultifying circle, worked, ground out,
like Kois,
angel,
patrol, or tombs
are stirred by the unsettled dead
being bruised into their resurrection.
And yet the light is brilliant, and the shadows neat
as alcohol; under closed lids,
creep of no one mind, no single voice, but like a sea
whispering,
the will seeps slowly from the textile brain
like unfast dyes, angel,
to leave behind
only the screaming, half-awake faces, day-dreaming, of those
caught in the geriatric claws and leap
of the senile lion,
Sleep.
Sleep.
Yes, sleep.
Let go, angel,
and go down.
Slip under
the sunlit surface where there is still air, and pull
deeper, through rumouring murk, and cords of bubbles, deeper
past the drifting hands of weed
at last to where, on the oozing bed,
the drowned and rusting limo rests in sand, and God
floats but yet is still
restrained by the tightened belt, but softly
stirs his head where
a fish picks at his torn and opened
cheek to feed: somewhere
on the road to heaven they were
lost, angel,
his seraphic chauffeur still at the wheel,
in spick and span
tan and mocha livery, only
his peaked cap bumps and hangs
askew under the crumpled roof,
and the pages of the paper spread themselves
against the windshield with the stocks and shares.
Sometimes hell is soft gold, limbo nickel.
Sometimes the fiction is supreme, Angel, sometimes
the rubber sheet, angel, or the clock with no hands,
(the sweating clock with the ancient, insect time
of Babylon, carbon, and Beelzebub)
Angel:
sometimes the curious, crowded gaze
of glass eyes from a case,
angel,
preoccupies, angel,
you:
sometimes Love, the moon, the Love, a moon,
love, the Moon, moon moon love moon, angel, Angel:
sometimes heaven is a swastika, hell silver.
Angel of centres, of crystal,
gazing through the misted lens
will you pity them their sticky, honeyed bodies, Angel,
with the runny cells,
their raging palms, their hearts on sugar, their buzz,
angel, their rush and their zip:
will you pity them their comradeship
with the bluebottle, the mosquito, and the flea,
Angel? Angel
of the cool brow,
have mercy on their delirium, their Greek,
on their gaping mouths from which are uttered
hands:
pity their babies piled like rotting strawberries,
their heads which are saws, or violets, or chains;
O, Angel of bachelors, of the sterile womb,
Angel of all origins and termini,
pity them their liquid names, their dreams of final stone,
pity them lost on their voices which are always roads.
On loosened strings of heat, they seem to
hang themselves, angel,
up: and—oh, but so
limply, so
lethargically—
try to take some doll-like
steps before they fall.
This heat is like a plain, angel, so huge
it dwarfs thought,
even, angel, thought of you,
and plays its dull guitar, gone out of tune,
to the endless fields
and the provincial sky
of numbskull azure
which yawns, and yawns, and yawns....
This heat is sweet, and rank, and waiting:
a junkyard of buds, angel, of leanings cropped,
truncated,
an overgrown siding, way off the main line,
heavy still with dreaming freight.
By means of intricate and spiralling ladders,
through thick spaces, through hairy apertures
and rough integuments,
and a sugared darkness, like a fruit's
blackening interior,
a belly over-ripe with spilling seeds, through leaves,
angel,
perplexed by dizzying perspectives
and the dazzling follies of the trompe l'œil,
rising by the sticky pods, the split
heads exuding oils,
in the swelter of late afternoon,
the light almost violet,
angel you find your way,
you push once more
into this sad idyll.
Is this, at last, the place?
A stupor hangs here like a heavy perfume.
Odysseus and his dreamy, washed-up crew
pad round, unshaven, in their canvas shoes,
always licking the snow-white, whipped and softening cones
of lotus gelati.
Superman stands by the edge of the pool
in his cape of muscles,
prescription bifocals, but with his hot, itching and painful piles.
Batman peeps shyly from his black silk cowl,
paunchy, knock-kneed, a little excited;
Robin lounges by the ocean side, false teeth in a beaker
like a strange marine flower.
You are not the One, angel.
You are not the cowboy with the hand-tinted eyes
and matching colts of supreme silver,
the dainty palomino, and the full canteen:
your pistols are jelly,
you've lost your horse
and must eat your own lips
just to stay alive.
Angel,
you are not of them,
no languid sylph or easy faun,
no satyr with the horns of speed, and blond goatee:
you are not there, angel,
in the bullworked foam
where the men and women come like trains,
or lay back on the burnished sand
and play their empty bodies
like drowsy flutes.
Eyes.
Eyes,
angel.
They slip and sidle. Drift.
Idle.
Like hungry engines, angel. Slitted and lowered
against the sun, langorously inspecting
bellies, fingernails, and
eyes,
angel. Wandering
across a desert of young skin, stretched
tight before them, angel, like a dry
tongue which will never
crush into speech or drink again—
a drum of want, angel,
sounding its pink, tan, cream beats,
sounding its white, bronze, brown beats, angel,
a heart like a hive
with all its honey dripped outside,
among the flickering hands,
and the pitched screams
of little angels on waterwings,
among dropped and lost dolls,
with their heads of glistening hair.
Angel,
angel of reaching,
angel of bad odour,
here in the lung of things,
on the moist floor which breathes,
livid fungi push up their rotten, orange minarets,
their soft, dun domes:
here on the underside of light, the sea,
here are speculative feelers, angel, hairs which wave and sway:
this grove is an oven where flesh
erects itself and softens,
angel,
where vaginal bread is slowly broken,
where stands are made:
Angel,
it is a tree hanging with sighs.
But, angel, what is that noise?
A hurricane of hands and mouths,
a loitering wind of fingers and teeth
picking at the pavements and the doors, passing
by, angel,
gossiping at café tables, grabbing and chattering,
bolting litter along the roads,
scraping the bones
clean, angel, oh,
angel:
and what is that silence?
It is the night, stars now unseen,
and under the great eyelids, the turd of sleep
withers to brown nothing.
If the horn would blow, the foam would rise,
the wave would fall,
loss would begin;
if the shell could sound, the air would move,
Love would step from the sea:
but the horn will not blow, and the foam will not rise,
angel,
angel, not in this
sad idyll,
not on this desolate shore
on which you have never arrived,
and which now you will never leave.
John Welch
Not Half: the Sixties
Paris France
Passy Passy places
The tinting on a map. Down by
Contagion immemorial centuries
Corner dust and sun
And a virgin made of gold great counter
And the song of her white tint.
Trees step on forbidden lawns, their
Leaves on the hot sand.
Under the paving stones two faces
Drink choky chocolate and tea.
General society is
The world at the carry of all.
Café Life
The fat man with a rose in his mouth
Hasn't said No yet, she has
Moved from wonder to terror
Still seated on his knees.
Her protector
Arriving later with the windows
Breaking a crust at every hour
Goes out to the smoking dog
Past a hospital, that
Monument to fever.
She is an idol
That fits the hand easily.
Lyons Lyon
A girl selling Workers Struggle
Totters under the sun.
The city roars revolving around her.
Light moves across the façades
And a chicken half-in-mourning for lunch
It was cold-hot. Coming apart
In the tobacconist's shop
His lenses reflected cigarettes.
Water was coming endlessly from the mouth
Deuil deuil.
At Pascal's each noon
Swathes of white curtain hide us eating
Lunch
O Alpha
The words, chopped ends of things. Barley.
The president began
He warned the members of his speckled cabinet.
Breath came to rest in the scenery,
Plantations adored by the cock and a damaged
Voice spoke up through the grass.
Outward to sunrise pink portals
Where startled doves yelled and trembled alight
Beyond the lattice of shades it is all ablaze.
Her body worked was rolled upon by wind.
It adored a clean sky the puddles marbled with clouds,
The sober dust smudged initial of sunlight.
Walking home puddles are flooded with light
Yet suffer the perfect defeat
Each paving stone utters in throat and genital.
Diurnal
1
Reflections, like marquetry inlaid in a table,
Staying round all afternoon —
The drier's spindle mourns.
Under the sky goes a desk.
Like a pair of carved wings it travels alone
And its wake fills with a buzz
Of our conversations. The wings
Dive underground now. Upright and full
I can topple back into myself.
Wings carefully folded, I'll sleep.
Next day their wash ruffles the tops
Of the summer trees, again, I'm so thankful
To all those people out there
Who are striving so hard to entertain me.
2
If only I could, forgetting myself, be simply
This body cutting up meat,
The knife easing its way, searching out
The invisible junction between here and not
But the sky outside replaces my writing
And I am alone with the mark of myself.
It is something between a fingerprint and a sign
As I climb these unresisting stairs
To look from an upstairs window,
My ageing a process of sunlight, while over
These cluttered gardens a hammerhead of cloud
Gathers itself, day's wave
Looming up at me, and a dog
Rubs its voice on the powerful surface of air.
3
Deep sleep and one brief chapter of dream
I remembered. A household to wake to.
In the afternoon dreaming again.
Being roused with a start at the existential moment
To meditate on panic briefly
I shrink like a wave drawing back, I was
Learning the great routine. You want more
Than you can, which leaves the residue—you—
A diminishing circuit. On the periphery
Subtle bits of it start to fade.
Already I'm borrowed by children.
The blood moves round in its channels.
I wait inside encircled
By redoubts of dumb air and signalling dreams.
Valerio Fissore
I have erected a peripheric monument of air
a medieval soul of healing celestial anger,
the light crushing the oil out of the life
below. Wait for me, we'll walk, the three of us,
to where the ramparts chain the ecstasy
down to earth. I'll meet you at the appointed
plain, along the road of many lorries, of much
traffic of unholy pilgrims. The greyness
of the stone deepened the chasm, oozed the soul
of millions out of bones dancing madly across
the summer tide. In this darkness, in this
lightlessness I rest, I pause surprised, I trust
I see your motherly traits, and know the fracture
is the crack in a wall that can withstand
any amount of pressure. You have made a line
stand between this union. I have met you across
the days, just in time each time, the line
made the union fierce, the chance made the choice
not only further removed but more inevitable,
more willed. More walled, more welled up against,
I find we owe them this sense of equilibrium,
they are our fourth dimension, the non-tottering
leg of our elan, they have mutinied against
the would-be mutineers that kept falling back
to evade commitment. We are prayed for. We have
been made line up with them to see the light
of autumn flect the day, and
we argue against numbness and dumbness.
Wind, warm and blustering,
tore along the overcast sky,
river, grey and mortified,
soured the embankment, rain
iridescent and slow, spluttered
on the slate flags. This is
the geographical target of a long gone
temporariness, bracketed intensity
of circumstantial density. How
did it happen why did it happen
did it have to happen.
To the north of the southern continent
pocketed in the winding four times per year windy regions
of high peaks, snowy serrated chasmatic,
sometimes cornered sometimes blowing up
the powders and the dusts of Europe, never
self-content (open to one-sided invasion) never
self-displeased (loth to look over interlocutors' shoulders),
a pouch of physiognomic distinctive traits and distinctions,
from the Mediterranean, from Africa, from the very far east,
via a meandering line, from Spain perhaps,
forehead spared straight, nose short
and squat (slightly), lips fairly full
smile linear, face steep and unattainable
chin unprotruding firm rather well
designed, hair dark crispily straightened,
figure sturdy, gait (unscientifically) funny
lovable slightly slouchy to fascinate those
the other side of borders, na‹ve all
considered and unexpectedly innocent
and defenceless eyes;
and, from over the sea, moors of all religions
face paints, unreflexed gestures and reflexed
implements and clothes, voice peaks
that cut across biological millennia of
civic frames. Now come together, with mystery
and distance. Now interlocked, now unbolted.
You went through a maze of human shapes
and cultivations, east come to west
south to north and gone to further north.
Anthony Mellors
Crowland Gap
Clapped out of Wisbech at 2 this morning
rank and file braced for the cutting air
left behind a jangle of fairground riot
brassy tot mewling in pushchair haven
clod down to the sea, arc blister pottled
broach fiend running square on the eaves
hootenanny brushfire posture is right
ripe for the taking, hosed down for the night
another drag of fag then over to the warehouse
the derelict mansion poised in dim light
old git next door grumbling, sure of break-in
feud in the making, cur analysis down to the bare
bone, cur off the rails, bark I said bark all you like
thickets of garden embrasure, throstle may sing
there is yet all we can see in this dark, the primus
on the go, an array of little lights.
Alan puts on another coat, winds up the wireless
the better to mask creaking boards, squirt breeze
in sputtering grate effluent spanking grunt smells
crusty books, a piled doss of quilts, muck in enamel
bloat the carcass, bit of old pig crackle in organic bliss
foster bean-bake hankie wipes the grin off your face
and off the plate there is no way authority will not
cotton on sooner or later spread out before the embers
love is in this I cry for the oast belly up sprawled
beyond the clobbered ha ha cost is on the mind too
much to warrant renovated idyll. Close up the garden
spills onto bosky crunch brick walls exclude prefab
glare a mound of old coal festooned with sunflower mash
toggles percept furore like a night of sheer heaven, a gable
about to split open, Ealing kids on the bridge flashed by
Edwin Smith, the neo-romantic icon trashed by legends
too bleak to bare, hanged rentees ghosting brittle offset
fondle into sozzled dust. All still a joy as we fumble
through a Crowland gap, pile into the waiting rustbox.
The True Visionary
Who smelt weird breeding
controls tricked up lacto
should then eschew
New Year's Eve style
in Prague the quality
and integrity of North
American youth served
up in a riot of crispy green
in search of Elysium
a thousand dollars' worth
of authentic mould
and then your radiant
face impressed upon
the reflections of stifled protest
populations bent by eastern
gales, hard yet soft
shadow of a hunger artist
squeaking under the eaves
beat rant in colonized bars
cream of the crop
sheltered here as glistering
stars emerge from the heavens
home to the condominium
head sunk in a lustrous quilt
demanding this of you
but this is not it
the gaze of the children themselves
warmed through precious morsels
Tony Lopez
Always Read the Label
This body does not contain an index, but is
Otherwise spontaneous, unrestrained, natural —
Made from the finest time-dated TV footage:
Ironic, absurd, full of self-mockery. Shot
In one of those rambling clapboard houses
Like a brilliant parody of criticism
Which says nothing at all. Shut the jewel case.
Belief in God may not be sufficient protection
For the under-capitalised, so that
The following year you'll be back where you started
In a blood-spattered cowshed. You can leave early
(Weather permitting) float into a delirium.
"Shut the jewel case like a good boy" she said,
"History just doesn't happen everywhere."
You begin not by picking up the powerbook
But by deciding to begin. Here we are
Established in a freezing pinch of the feet.
The smoke bush is another example.
Inuit are at the top of their food chain
In the ultimate chemical dump. Boil water,
Cook your meat right through, demand a second ballot.
You can't get a solution by proxy
In any aspect but the purely visual.
These are real flaws in the non-profit ethic
To which is subjoined the machinery of this
My eclogue, old and well publicised in the night sky.
The entire braid can be coded as a sequence
And thus receive your troubled delegation.
Patrick was the name of the day as I heard it —
Slide into the seat, put your hands at the wheel
And feel our glorious Teutonic past. No bugs.
A fabulously elliptical house style.
Governments control this data. There will be no
Opportunity for lunch. Small business users
Are welcome on the field trip to St Elizabeth's
With chill-out rooms for true skaters. Our psychodrama
In a strange labyrinthine palace of ice.
It means something like "deep home" but with overtones
Of hatred and loathing. Things and persons always
Already Alien. The worst fears of researchers:
Forests haunted by shapeless apparitions
From the middle-England mail-order catalogue.
Why is it that a man seems so sinister
Wearing gloves indoors? Someone says "mind the gap"
As he moves along measuring table settings.
These are things and persons always already
Innocent in the soft verges. Don't leave the lights on—
They will kill you for a shovelful of small coals.
Martha, the world's last passenger pigeon, long dead.
Soft-feel fibres and drizzle-paint, pink on light brown.
This glass is wrapped for your personal use
It won't last so call Stewart. Gold in your teeth.
A floor-proximity guidance system
Will direct you to the exit. Remain seated.
Call Anne today on a quiet cul-de-sac.
Double car port, cheaper than renting, call Eddy.
Unsteady on his legs in Omega cottage,
He bent down to pick up the lion. This set,
A translated grove with low maintenance
Corals and sponges, comes with deep-yellow flicker.
She wiped the points of her nail-scissors to retard
Clonal reproduction and complete the crossword.
Slipping on wet marble slabs, we look up
At the LCD information panel. No trains.
Asda price, pocket the differance. Replace
The mindset. Up the broad avenue into town
Obviate the need for costly simulations.
The explicit limit of our instructions is
That the icon convey mean time to extinction.
Call it a "family" toothbrush, spin on about
Delicate gum tissue (bleeding round the teeth)
In the later bracketed line. Let's go for
Rapid expansion out of Protestant theory:
Quality, Deep House and Trance. "More relaxed" still means
The perfect "more relaxed" outfit. You'll need gloves
And a tank for surgical waste. Ishi, the last
Wild Indian of California, spent his
Days in the anthropological museum—
He just couldn't cope with San Francisco.
You can phone researchers and tell them your story
In unannotated regions of E. coli
Chromosomes. Transcripts completely updated and
Tastefully landscaped. Buy now, choose your own colours.
From time to time we may pass on your name
To other, carefully selected companies
That ferry impulses above the brain stem.
No live model could stay in place night and day.
Please select another channel. Pull the mask
Towards you and breathe normally to download
A fully-functional demo version. At the epoch
Of last scattering, ordinary matter
Was dumped all over the Hubble sphere.
Now the dim gods of death have in their keeping
Mere protein fragments. You take out bone marrow
Add your viral vector, put the bone marrow back.
Palatino is fine—but I prefer Caslon.
It's a genuine pleasure having you on board.
Dummies sometimes take the place of real people
To see how badly they might have been hurt.
We encourage you to watch the video
Which is for your own welfare. Everything downstream
Of the blood clot was either politically
Unstable or subject to hormonal surges.
It was "extremely unlikely" that the canisters
Could have broken up in the atmosphere.
What if the Continuity Army Council
Neither consented nor refused to complete the trade?
If no Wimbledon train is shown, take the next
Dimmer switch that comes on gradually
In foetal development. Pressure of light
Produces gold-plated stars. When does pain begin?
The so-called nonsemantic features of language
Never had time to be beautiful. Hold fingers
Horizontally touching your forehead
To show the amount. Tongue and groove boarding
In a plausible context, one of the plots
Is newly dug. These are voluntary targets
A little nonplussed by your Stoical charm
Having issued writs, free pens and mouse mats.
A strip of brain tissue that hugs the surface
Causing a massive increase in drag. Implants could
Translate prejudice directly into votes:
A whole panel of buttons that must be pushed.
Pain without cognition. No other network
Covers more of the UK population.
Britain, perfect for filming period drama
And convenient for Eurodisney, appears
To be rising more slowly. The prospect of ermine
Keeps eclipsed former ministers in order;
Reducing the appearance of wrinkles, which are
Broader and deeper than one might expect.
Marching into the second chamber. Hello John.
When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces
There may be no mortgage and no purchase
Despite low entry and exit costs. Most victims
Were homeless men sleeping rough but holding fast
To core principles. Sleet threatened, snow was alleged—
Broadcast on two cable networks. Making the dream
A reality, surrounded by spotty dogs.
Gavin Selerie
Bird in France
Last unissued, Doctor Robert
springs it, a yard of alto
on the rim, spun
by scratchy retrieval —
weight billows, a potato, a stone
with eyes alive
salt in the groove
'la même chose'
sows a beat (story)
out of war
tracks across
Nowhere twice, 52nd Street
Hot House...
chur-cheep, jink-tzit
slides, slurs
sung in the grid
reedy-metallic
a continent latched on
to go over, for-mee-dar-ble
faces reflected in a bucket
(champagne on ice)
respect like the classics
for fingers, plump and tapering, and lips above the suit
skin isn't the issue
even if spades lie up
steeped in the riff
and away, high and hard
night of the working
Five
(From Days of 49)
Elstree Colonial
Any guide or explorer will tell you that. When they realize they're lost, or they've taken the wrong road, they won't take a short cut through the forest, nor do they rely on their instincts to set them back in the right direction. What they do is to carefully go back over the whole road until they've found their starting point, or the point at which they took the wrong turn.
-Alfred Hitchcock on the film he made
at MGM, Elstree in the summer of 1948.
One evening in 1941, the Hichcocks invited the Gables to Saint Cloud... Gable said he owned a shrunken head [which Carole Lombard had buried in a tiny coffin] in what was now Hitchcock's garden!... Hitchcock's eyes widened at the news... and they planned a midnight exhumation party... [But] the only graveyard activity that winter was Carole's burial. At once Hitchcock decided to look for a new home.
-Donald Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius
Under the Capricorn she speaks her confession in one take.
I shot my brother dead—he looked surprised
as he crumpled up. Image by image
the reel is unstoried: from Galway to Gretna Green,
jewels or a lady's name and the blast
of a horse pistol. To my groom in chains
half a world away. I came as he said dear Diamond
do this, there's more to go down.
Touching her throat, never so much the star,
in aching colour.
The flaw's in the man
whose accent doesn't hold. He's truer
than you'd think and it's bad manners
to ask questions. The rope-trick in Sidney
needs grit. Sam Flusky, emancipist.
The eye rooted pushes all aside,
walls, doors, chairs. Cranes along
a year's supply of carpet, past faces that turn
at dinner—the only cut to her bare feet
halting the show. A ghost from upstairs
she binds and is bound, "notorious"
They can't touch you now. It's a big country
but not big enough. I have no mirrors.
I put them away years ago.
Bottles fall out of the cupboard
when the housekeeper calls the tune:
in Minyago Ugilla a bunch of keys
jangles to destroy her smile.
Such trouble with a woman's frills.
Driving through the night to music.
They don't have the same rules as us.
She had half her clothes off as if
she didn't notice. Suspicion takes
what can't be restored
like the ruby collar behind his back.
Now, Lady Henrietta, you mustn't give way.
The mansion glows, weeping indigo.
Every day she drinks the stuff she's given and
sees a shrunken head. There on the bed
it's always grinning—make it go away.
Teeth protruding, the thrill of the outback
a hundred minutes in, service smirks
beneath the linen, victim to victim.
You'd work to the death for me.
A twist to the box in a Hollywood garden.
Flashbulbs for the woman who'll desert
to Italy and another maker.
(From Days of 49)
Pyramid Shots
Mummy it as the Opening of the Mouth. To get back speech, sight and hearing. Two girls bend over a bundle of gold leaf wrappings. De Chirico haunts the square opposite. He's leaning into himself as the old master, when before it was What shall I love unless it's the Enigma? This parcel contains Zoser's butcher. Like his master he thinks he's with the Sun. Wrapped up in a crude arrangement of bandages. Or not so crude it it goes for seventy days. The professor in the fez would say Djoser. Three-stepped to a four stage and finally a six stage pyramid. John Soane's Garden Temple 1778. Emery's working in the sand. The French in parallel and without Napoleon after all... it would be one half of this dream of a dream. A third of the cabinetmaker's Egyptian designs are the library funishings. George Smith: 1808. Just before the Hall in Piccadilly, demolished without the zeppelin or V2. If it wasn't glib I'd say tiredness equals war. Revival calls down enemies. It shan't live a memorial for every beggar's dust. Let all die and mix again. This is the fallout of Personal Landscape. Return to Oasis. On the word EXILE should be added a rather special limitation of meaning. Musing on the suicide—or was it—of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Geoffrey Wagner cites the figures for Seattle, Washington which has the highest mean rate (43.7 per 100,000 of the adult population) in a country where 22,000 people kill themselves each year. 'Britons, bores and Buttered Toast; they all begins with B'. Scrutineering, John Danby sees Mars and Venus as a filmic adjustment: a mixing of shots with so much panning and tracking. Her distress over his departure cuts through the scene like a knife. The vital done for by perverse war and sensate love. Rome (as in room) or Alexandria? Do blocks melt in the river? A critique of judgement, deliquescent, though it's difficult to get dialectic back from Hegel. LOVELIGHTS in your hair tonight. Not a soap or a harsh chemical but a fragrant liquid-creme. Against deep-pile cosmic red, her hair billows sculpturally into curls or scrolls. She faces down, her cheeks chiselled into the perfect mask.
Harold George Shakespeare Hart, eleventh in descent from Shakespeare's sister Joan, is tracked down by P.W. Montague-Smith, assistant editor of Debrett, to High Wycombe, where he runs the family engineering works. 'The Last of the SHAKESPEARES" is photographed eyeing the bust of the playwright in the Gallery restaurant, Stratford. Flame of national identity, a muse of fire. Dreamed through war, this cask or cockpit set against infection. The World's rich garden. Another descendant has Shakespeare's walking-stick which is a plain vinewood stave without ferrule or knob. It tapers from two inches at the top to an inch at the bottom, and is slightly bent. Is this Time's prop from the mouldy tale? CLOTHES RATIONING ENDS. Sigh no more ladies. The mystery of the woman who never grows old. BIOCELLE. She has eight changes of dress in STAGE FRIGHT. In Paris optimism fizzes up out of the lemonade. The cooker every woman wants. The home-help lives in! Mr. Therm burns to serve you. Hero has Leander but he's started to philander—Miranda. Updated Anna Magnani attends the premiere of ANGELINA. She is greeted by the padrone of Gennaro's in Soho. In Rome the part earmarked for her is rewritten for Bergman. British Gas is nationalized. Karin talks to the island. Blinded by volcano gas she wakes and sees. It is lovely. Sam Wanamaker sees only a grimy black plaque marking the site of the Globe. It is set in the wall of Courage Brewery which hides part of Maid or Maiden Lane. Now Park Street. Burnt out of Hollywood he thinks he can set the Bard up again: FOR SALE. REDEVELOPMENT. If I had to do it again I would do it again and I would do it the same. Another advert says CONCRETE GARAGE for £50. 100 miles free delivery BUILD IT YOURSELF. Like those pill-boxes along the coast which my father explained. Against the Nazi menace. The comic frames accentuate the helmet and reduce the language to donner und blitz.
They drive a tunnel from the corner, cutting into separate compartments. Gravel down to rock. The magazines are plundered and replundered. Sacrilege is obscured by fire that rages and smoulders for weeks. Mud-brick walls are burnt red throughout. Baked. Each time the chamber is cut deeper. The more wealth, the more isolation, the more temptation to share. Means take. A false portcullis groove. Roughly dressed limestone. A false floor of clean sand. But the gutting makes things last, oddly, as the superstructure collapses and rubble piles up. What doesn't get out? Charred fragments of a coffin, a skeleton with a jar resting against the skull, a flat blade of copper, ivory bracelets, a pink-veined alabaster pedestal cup. A small hardwood chair almost destroyed by white ants. A tall jar with rope bands around the shoulder. Jars standing up like people in a crowded room, others knocked diagonally in disarray. Matchstick wall decoration. Corn bins. Seal-impressions, some overlapping. Emery explains in his first volume, a massive folio: These are the hard facts revealed by the pick. Any theories come later. She is wearing a long clinging dress with wide shoulder straps which leave the breasts uncovered. A green dress. She is sniffing at a lotus flower. A war discovery being taken in. You pick up the threads after rainstorm. Turbaned workers stand in a pit beyond the bull heads bench. A man dressed in English clothes stands at one end of the east outer corridor. He is consulting or writing notes, is absorbed but solid and casual in his command of the situation. He is wearing a hat and what looks like a tie. The axonometric projection distorts to show the whole: regular niches and slots reaching up to a double roof and mastaba with a palace fa‡ade. An image of up-ended girders perfectly aligned. Modernist grid for cellular frenzy.
A collector has tactical instinct. It is a way of remembering. By a certain passage in Strabo. Came through the desert thus it was. The sand baffles like water. Wind heaps up dunes. An avenue half-glimpsed, twisting away. Sphinx territory. So much is so. You climb the steps to survey a strip five miles long. You gauge the boxes and channels which lie below. You dig and sift, recording each detail. Feel wonder and something like remorse. Can one be anything but a spoiler? Rifling chambers with trust or devotion. The god of this city is Sakr or Sokkar, the hawk. A shaft of light breaking through low cloud at sunset—an inspiration for the triangle in reverse. The body in a safe place to support the ka. Two sets of identical rooms. Eyes wrenched out, the place retains form. Zoser walks his stairway to the stars. A job well done, vizier, magician, healer. The hieroglyph for foreign country is a sign showing mountain peaks. The corridors are lined with blue glazed tiles suggesting reed work. Gilgamesh is, roughly, his contemporary. Thirteen entrances are set into the walls, which are recessed in the Sumerian style, but only one is real, giving access to the complex.
The staples rust and pop out. That's the logic in this arch business. THE KISS OF FATE. SMITH AND THE PHAROAHS. THE TALE OF PHILO. Pictures that thirty years won't wear away. Ayesha: She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. A kiss of welcome and his hood falls back. On which ring was cut the cartouche. He's a boy turning the page. The hawk that has spread its wings. Opening the last continent. An apprentice to marine engineers, Liverpool. Exactness with a pencil. Accounts for that skill at the drawing-board. Overcomes any bite on partnership, he insists—living soft and feeding well through barren days. A roll of drawings is the everlasting house. The walker puffing contentedly at his pipe. Bluff warmth. England figures as a ghostly pylon: extended fuel and making the best of it. Vim on the tiles, feet up by the sofa, the New World silent beam. A pound that has to slip.
The company is sealed: each with food and the tools of a craft. Do they go with joy, lined out in the scheme? A decision to take poison or an order. But hardly a surprise. The vase-maker plays with stone as if it is clay, turning in lips towards the centre: schist (form the layers you split). The design says here it is but whatever you mark shifts into something else. The slippery serpent of the old Nile. Dusk rides on frail papyrus. A dummy boat is cut into the rock and encased with limestone. Journeys beckon where nothing moves. Dummy granaries and storehouses.
Between campaigns he sits in the embassy: at a desk behind battered retaining walls, dressed stone. Intelligence requires parallel skills. Patience, intuition, the joining of fragments. A nose for the way things are. Air photographs. Broken plurals. Allegiances. A fig-hawker in the bazaar may be of the Brotherhood. Buy or sell as the stars peep. They want us out but they need us. Canal investment stirs the haggard's every feather. Kindly counsel over a barrel. Whispers in a labyrinth where the coffee tastes like syrup. with bitter fumes at the bottom. Wailing notes of the call to prayer. Petrol fumes. Stepped house-fronts like a negative pyramid. Still there's the palimpsest—what's beneath the Koran, the Bible and Herodotus.
Idiom of wireless traffic. No ineffectual adjectives. BULLSHIT is an army word. LET HIM KEEP BUMMING ON. THE TANK'S ABOUT TO BREW UP. WELL BLOODY WELL WAKE UP AND ACKNOWLEDGE. It's not so easy to say it's finished. The echo catches in the passage. Half a face blown away. Holbein's signature. The nature of the beast. To balance the factions. How about a Scotch at the Turf Club or the Semiramis, a shared joke. What in this case is 'They'? What is 'We' for that matter? Whose interests to secure. When will things get going again? You can't reach into your pocket for ever. To survive interruption you plot in dreams. The Exploration Society taps out numbers for The Department of Antiquities. The news sits for its portrait back home. THE THIRD MAN. A game played out in the sewer. Shepperton dubs Vienna with the king of dykes-the Fleet coursing through a tunnel fourteen foot high. Fingers grope at the heavy lid. Zither music.
Kelvin Corcoran
And Such Other Cudgelled and Heterodox People
Climbing the liquid stairs of drink
we go are you there Alan?
in the English good night
where Byron glides unwritten.
--
Across empty England tilting under cloud
towards a new order and petrol thirst,
trees lift like visions at the margins of fields;
an innocent history passing with ease
as if the rural poor lined the road, waving.
Blasted through a slot together landscape,
with no essential link between these lives
—easy as speed, didn't feel a thing—
dead winding gear, wooded fields, barracks towns,
figures moving together in a film.
To answer the young lord's questions:
we can commit a whole country to its prisons,
depopulate and lay waste all around us and
restore Sherwood forest as an asylum for outlaws;
in the English good night, where Byron glides unwritten
--
In the cold eye of the lake
light dissolves around the trees,
a boy, free as a fish, dives
dreaming of the sea.
--
Lyres on earth cast like nets
to catch the living god
but to stand beneath these walls
and fall into those hands is terror.
The beginning is music, a strange thing;
in the shade of power we found fun and delight,
crossing Paynim shores, Earth's central line,
through an invisible door.
Over the dark sliding wave
into half the world unknown,
with liquid nerves in charged air
we sought the god of birds.
Saw the blue cape afar
said his heart, tamed to its cage
all summer long;
milord is dreaming an island of light.
--
"I ran to the end of the wooden pier...the dear fellow pulled off his cap and wav'd it... God bless him for a gallant spirit and a kind one."
--
After an interval of years, this composition to one far and firm;
events left me for imaginary objects, an imaginary England.
Do you remember when we were out with the Luddites,
from airy hall about the county, about the forest and villages?
But buzz buzz eager nations, not with human thought,
no new land nor fair republic, no deep sea music sounding.
Events left me in the umbrage of green shade,
my dear Hobhouse, return to that country.
In that completed state words are things,
the electric chain we darkly bind about ourselves.
From this tower of days I see the pathless woods
and the waters washing empires away.
--
excuse the scrawl, fresh morning at daybreak
boat starting for Kalamo...blue upon blue these mountains,
the Turkish fleet gone, the blockade removed
the air fresh but not sharp, we sailed together,
the song we sang was—a nation to be made,
when the waves divided us we made signals
firing pistols and carbines, tomorrow we meet at Missolonghi
if at the head of some one hundred boys
of the belt and of the blade, that I may
(calculate the cost of keeping one man in the field for one month
(the sale of the Rochdale manor?)
we bore up again for the same port
excuse the scrawl..
frosty morning that means to be of promise,
that I may get the Greeks to keep the field
the final port or [word torn out with seal]
who will stick with the Greeks now?
the Lempriere dictionary quotation Gentlemen
or those who do not dissemble faults or virtues?
(when I was in the habit)
I reserved such things for verse
--
Aboard the Florida in an oblong packing case lined with tin,
organs and intestines in earthenware jars
—this heart should be unmoved—
The case stamped with seals of the provisional government,
painted black and submerged in a barrel of spirits
—worm, canker, grief—
Hobhouse went aboard at London Dock Buoy,
the undertakers were draining the barrel
—life blood strike home—
Though assured "it had all the freshness and firmness of life",
he declined this last view of his friend
but later identified him by his foot.
And John Clare, wandering down Oxford Street,
saw the funeral train and a girl sighed—poor LB—.
--
To answer the young lord's questions
Saturday night at the trough
they talk about technology,
new magic make you work harder,
their veins corrupted to mud.
I can hardly make the words out,
I never saw such things in the provinces of Turkey;
men sacrificed for cheap exports,
for Spider-work to bloat others.
The magistrates assembled,
troops ransacked homes around Newstead;
men, guilty of poverty, willing to dig
but another owns the spade.
The mob enabled you to defy the world;
the pitched against the poor
must learn flexible work and slut-time,
must learn global economy.
Capital tips off the edge of the world
to strike the old deal still in place,
a life above ground or boundless waste;
here we go, here we go, here we go.
Breakers of frames, iconoclasts incandescent,
let me be among you about the county;
snap their heads awake
with the politics of paradise.
AND SUCH OTHER CUDGELLED AND HETERODOX PEOPLE
1 The title is from Byron's notes to Child Harold's Pilgrimage.
2 The final stanza in part two refers to the rhetorical questions in Byron's maiden speech on the frame-work bill of 27.2.1812.
3 Part four reworks phrases from CHP cantos 1 and 2.
4 The phrase "music is a strange thing" is from Byron's Ravenna Journal,
Marchand p250.
5 Part six reworks phrases from CHP canto 4 and its introduction. The Luddite reference is from a letter to Kinnaird on 22.9.1820.
6 Part seven quotes and reworks Byron's Journal in Cephalonia and last letters in SELECTED LETTERS AND JOURNALS, Marchand 1982.
7 Part eight draws upon BYRON; THE LAST JOURNEY, Nicholson 1924.
The italicised phrases are from "On this Day I Complete my Thirty-Sixth Year."
8 Part nine relies upon THE POLITICS OF PARADISE, Foot 1988. It alludes to "Song for the Luddites", "An Ode to the Framers of the Frame Bill", a letter to Moore on 24.12.1816 and the maiden speech.