The Artist

The artist at his cafe table sat
Morosely sucking coffee from his thumb;
His head was filled with other artists’ chat
And Mandeville his agent had not come.

Behind the square the day was setting fast

Whilst shadow like a plague spread all around,
A woman with a screaming child pushed past
And rain like bodies tumbled to the ground.

What now might stir his artificial mind?

What rage like Homer’s smoulder in his loins?
These days he never wrote before he’d dined,
Content to be a scavenger for coins.
Far off, the sea flung questions at the land
In language he would never understand.

====================

© October 1981

Hearing Thunder

A purple, fleshy sinew of lightning snarls
In the east. A thunderclap roars, disturbing
Business and dreams of longevity as
   Once more the old gods lunge after power,

Arousing our subservience to the

Hatred in us. Who would not shiver at that
Moment’s knowledge, when flesh is made witness to
   Its sagging grip and every head

Which dares think has to struggle aghast with two

Centuries of freewill? The Chancelleries chatter
With telexed diplomacy, but the gods
   Of iron, the appetitive gods,

Are caressing delighted human flesh,

Urging a passion of sprinkled blood, heads
As trophies and privileges in country
   Dachas. On wintry nights behind

The neon defences of a febrile

City I consider my textbooks of
Human progress; from big-bellied Socrates,
   Snatching the ethical from the hands of

State or tribal cults, to a vendor, loud on

A street corner, dealing more fairly more
Of the time, licensed by the relevant
   City Department. In the Marches

War is endemic but restaurants and bars

Prefer news of exciting marital
Strife. Yet despite the fury, the clash of
   Fast talkers, blithely pocketing

Whatever they can, we discover daily –

Half-buried by peremptory orders,
Scorned by harsh words and flashlights – paradigms
   Of the Good Life – even an apology

On the subway can help. Each morning on

Waking I think, “Innocent men will go
To their deaths, the culpable will live out their lives
   In a trashy splendour.” But the

Brilliant, scouring morning light, which has

Outlived pogroms and showcase trials, will not
Bow down before historical facts: it
   Amazes with its optimism.

====================

© January 1982

In A Summer Garden

When you were gone I sat alone
And hearkened to the summer hour;
The sky was slightly out of true,
And baking in the steady heat
Like fields of over-muscled wheat
   The garden lawn turned blue;
Reminded with a humid power
Of sadness in the insects’ drone,
The distant doves’ decaying coo,
My mind patrolled the walled-in grounds
Like some poor sentry on his rounds,
   And ceased to think of you.

Who can imagine what it meant

To hold an empire in your hand,
To struggle with the northern hordes
While Stoic fingers on the sky
Wrote, “There is no final why,”
   To the clashing of the swords;
To languish on the beaten sand
Where only the condemned were sent,
And hear your fate upon the boards
As hangmen came to disabuse
A mind intent upon its muse
   And roughly cut the cords?

Honour to him who late at night

Dismissed his household to their beds,
And turned the pale moon of his face
To sift those fragments of the sage
Which gave coherence to the page
   And taught what was the case;
Who wept for all the broken heads
Defeated in their final fight
To halt the passing of the race,
And sought to find within the wreck
Salvation of the intellect
   And quested after grace.

The way of mind, the way of flesh

Are opposite and reconciled.
The teacher sitting in his cave
Has found the dew beneath the stones,
The emptiness beneath the thrones,
   The power of the wave;
The artist by his skill beguiled
Paints what is true that’s in the dress
Which all the flowers of summer have,
And both have knowledge of the right
But cannot comprehend the light
   Within a stone-built nave.

My love, the blooms upon this rose

Are lips to welcome your return;
This sunken garden is the bed
Where nakedness discovers in
The blush upon each other’s skin
   A blessing of the dead.
Let all the mealy-mouthed who spurn
Such moments from their cheap repose
Go cluster where the Laws are read;
The frankness of your honest eyes,
The honest frankness of your cries,
   Say more than kissing said.

Our love may be a lonely sigh

Against the twilight in the wood,
And all the story of the past
May only live in that domain
Because we tell the tale again
   In words which will not last;
But Eros with his pricking blood
Is yoked to Agape, and I,
Who know not how the cards are cast,
Must in the circle of my arms
Enfold you from the fierce alarms,
   The night which comes on fast.

====================

© August 1980

Nightfall at Pagham Rife

A poetic vocation is born! Ted Hughes has much to answer for.
   Pagham Rife is a small river flowing into Pagham Harbour - now silted up and a nature reserve - a mile or so to the west of Bognor Regis on the West Sussex coast.

------------

Without sound, without movement,
Dusk put its gravecloth on the brow
Of the hills, the mouth of the sea.
A man stood in that great bowl of darkness
Listening to the river as it ambled off
To the marsh. A fish jumped unseen –
The sound of its ripple as involved and as lasting
As the birth and death of a dynasty.
This urban man, far from the cities
And with only his car keys for company,
Listened appalled to his own incomprehension.
The grandeur of night, the last light on a cloud –
The lintel of another existence –
Mocked his bundle of cells and jaded muscle.
The ticking of mud was a challenge
To make something of it.
He shrank into himself like a crouching tribesman
Waving a sharpened stick at the night.

But his hand on the bar of the sluice gate

Tightened its grip until the knuckles glowed white:

      It was a nebula

      Knotted and brilliant in the depths of space
      It was landscape
      Cooling to crags out of a nest of steam
      It was joy of the victor
      Fires of his army –
      History flowed through the household of his hand
      It was parchment
      Riotously covered with leaf of gold
      It was impulse, decision –
      Coriolanus shook the sluice
      And beat it into meaning.

Under the blackness, under the night,

He took off, like a king, the robe of disguise:
His arm was a sceptre of command.

He looked down and saw the swans on the Rife

      Silent as lions

      Epic as eagles
      O darkening eye of the sun –

Their plumage blazed magnificence.

They moved upstream
Turning the globe
With a foot on the riverbed:
Behind them were gasps of mud.
Assured as hierophants
They vanished through the curtain
Held by their courteous chamberlain, the night.
The man almost cried, “Take me with you!”
But realised that the domain into which he had come
Lay elsewhere. He turned aside, claimed his inheritance,

      And wrote this poem.

====================

© September 1978/Revised May 2012

Albion

Who would not have sailed with Brutus,
Searching for these islands
In the steely mists of the northern sea?
Or bootlegged for Elizabeth
With Drake and Ralegh,
Plunging through combers like a saw through wood?
That is what I think
When I stand in the Marches
Watching the west wind blot the grass,
The dog rose shiver red and white in the sun.
But at home
On sunny, windswept afternoons
I put aside grandeur,
Alone in my room.
I sit at the window
And watch just a simmering
Corner of garden –
The creosoted fence like black canvas,
Grainy and pulled very taut;
A passion flower climbing
With semaphore arms,
Pouring itself on a trellis;
And the ceaseless, piled activity
Of turbulent sky above.
Dove-bruises of cloud
Rush across the earth –
It is English weather –
Blue and gold enamelling
Giving way to blustering cloud,
As quickly dispelled
By a sudden shaft of sun.
The wind sings at my door,
And a shred of spider-web
Shakes on the pane like a trampoline.
It is an agitated honey-jar
This corner,
Become as a little Eden.
The fence has a sheen like a fly’s back;
At its foot are the gathered
Remnants of gardening –
Dusty old canes,
Flowerpots,
Remains of cacti crawled on by ants,
And an old mat
Gone anaemic in weather.
The garden swells with good things
Like a smile;
Vegetables fall over themselves,
All fingers and thumbs of growth;
And the passion flower flushes
Along its stem,
Its darkly-smiling leaves
Pursed like empty pea-pods.
It will be the highlight of summer
When it lusciously flowers:
Already its feelers
Are dizzily hugging themselves
With narcissistic glee.
And again the wind is in the corner,
Stirring things up like a stick in paint.
I am wholly at peace with myself,
Reconciled with the hung flesh
On my bones.
Warmth clambers through the window
Dressed in the primary colours of summer.
Brutus! Brutus!
Your land is fruitful as a bursting fig;
Call down protection on this demi-paradise!

====================

© July 1979/Revised April 2012

Works and Days

From my window on the world,
My back office sunk among
Part-roofs and fire escapes,
I can see into a courtyard
Where a sycamore tree
Is surrounded by a biscuit-blank wall.
The tree, thinly leaved
And wan from its lonely existence,
Raises its crown
In a howl of anguish;
Its trunk is weeping bark.
I try to spare some moments
Each day for the tree –
To study all its small changes –
Just as in the train at morning I stare
At the wedgwood bowl of the sky,
And the young embankment grass
Waxed by the sun,
Remembering a moment
By a forest pool
When waylaid to listen
I heard the damp earth
Buzzing and crackling in the morning heat –
Small sounds, too small to hear
Above engines and radios,
But unique as life
In the clear forest stillness.
I want these sounds
To tell me about myself,
But the blundering boy of speed,
In his clumsy boots of noise and routine,
Tears me from my thoughts
And lands me in the sump
Of another City day.

The tree is so cramped

It scrapes at the wall with its branches.
But the wall is Polyphemus,
Irremediably stupid;
It would crunch a body
Like a bunch of radishes if it could.
I think the tree
In this solipsism of wall
Must sometimes doubt
The reality of its own existence.
But somehow it holds on to dignity,
Like elders in their robes,
Their hands clasped on wisdom,
Their heads serious in servitude –
O Israel, Israel,
City mud and wasted straw
Are our labour these generations.
I have sometimes thought of a gesture,
Some striking affirmation of self-hood,
But the spaces of morning frighten me.

Two things cheer my day:

The occasional whirlwind of sparrows,
Plump as corn on the cob,
Turning furious cartwheels
On the cobweb-grey hub of their heads –
The Lord God spoke out of whirlwinds;
And a certain self-hating satisfaction
When I see that the paving round the tree
Has split into grins,
Kneaded by the tree’s roots
Like fingers in dough
(Already old Cyclops
Has cracks in his boots).

I am surrounded

By the silly sheep
Of computer terminals,
Lulled to believe
That we have placed permanence
On the face of the earth
(It enables us to knuckle under,
To knock along with entertainment,
To ignore the questions under our ribs);
We have turned from the glory of life,
The super-charged moment
Caught in the hot flash
Of sunlight on water,
And dare not look over our shoulders.
But the marble columns have fallen,
The edifice is always cracking:
One day I think we shall be terrified
By a sudden access of sky.
And then –
Flashes the kingfisher water drop,
Replete with perfection,
Though we shall see it with a sticky eye.

My head has begun its descent

Into the dregs of afternoon;
The tree drapes its first shadow
Like gauze on a wound –
I am a row of ciphers.
The years lounge in my in-tray:
Its wire mesh fingers my face,               
Its long fingers finger my face.              

====================

© May 1979/ Revised April 2012

Country Music and the Sky

Ashford, Shoulder of Mutton and Stoner are all hills in Edward Thomas country in Hampshire.

------------

I wake to my neighbour’s country music
And the urgency of radio news.
They are treacherous things
For before you can look out of the window,
Or begin to think who you are,
They have stuffed you into pockets
Of unnecessary pleasures,
Bogus and irrelevant worries,
And put a grey hand on your brow.
I make an effort
And go out into the garden –
My blood sits up in its veins.
Dew tumbles across leaves like skiers on slopes,
Spider-web sparkles like lemonade;
The marigolds and alyssum
Crouch in their nightclothes.
Already the late rose is cuffing the wind,
Grass leans over to hear its own gossip,
And runner beans struggle out
From under the overcoats
They have piled against the night.
The sky blushes with gold, pales with white,     
It whispers of distances,
Almost echoing to the single bell
Which tolls the new day
In Alpine passes; its blue
Is that of a canticle.
A first hand of warmth
Dabs lotion on my gooseflesh,
And I am thrilled into life –
Not a feather’s flick
On the shillings and pence plumage
Of a tottering starling,
Nor the wine-gum stumble
Of a beetle on the path,
Can escape my wide attention –
The world grows through me like a root.

But toast and coffee crackle in the kitchen,

And my tie waits for the working day.
The country music pounds through the wall
Like a long-distance runner under punishment;
It mumbles again and again to itself –
“Inanition, inanition of inanities”.

I thought of a morning below Ashford Hill,

Tip-toeing through fern and nettle
To reach the edge of Ashford Stream.
The water was low,
Scarcely enough to shiver the cress,
And the flat mud of the bank
Revealed the delicate paw marks of fox,
Glistening beneath a film of water.
Freshly, they re-enacted
Its wary approach,
The hesitant sipping,
The chestnut glare over shoulders,
And the triumphant trot
Beneath the banner of its brush
Away into the undergrowth –
The water wandered on
Like a girl in a trance
Absent-mindedly waving its hands at me...
And later, on Shoulder of Mutton Hill,
Looking across towards Stoner,
A fox rushed out into the cornfields,
Pausing only to light the bonfire of himself
And turn his nose to the wind.
I watched him through field-glasses –
A stone in gold,
A brick-red sunspot
Exploding across the fiery face of the field.
He snickered along the hedgerows
And sat a long time,
Sniffing the corn.
From where I stood
Perspective and distance disappeared;
I looked over the blue of scabious
Into the blue bowl of distance beyond
And seemed to be safely upon a sea,
Lulled by the green-and-gold-reflecting water...
That morning was a pearl of great price:
I hold it to my skin like a charm.

In the city the sky is thinking

Of the day ahead;
It points upwards into zero
And sideways into doing –
I am ready to rush for my train.
Country music punches holes in my walls;
It snivels like a child over his knuckles.
Another day, O Lord, another day.
The sky smiles and says nothing.

====================

© September 1979/ Revised April 2012