A Tardy Epithalamium

For X and XX

All vows given and received, all papers signed,

The wedding breakfast eaten and guests roundly
   Thanked, the car with tin cans and streamers
   Is despatched with deep elemental

Leers. Later, after the disco, as tipsy

Voices disappear down darkened streets, a last
   Light is flicked on and off, a door tried
   And a key turned as everything drains

Into the vast breathing silence of the night.

And so another occasion by which we
   Measure the old, slow wandering of
   Time is placed in an album or ranged

On a mantelpiece and we can turn back to

The curious business of living in which
   Days, weeks, months are lost without a trace –
   Can it really be six years ago?
 
On chilly autumn Saturday mornings you
Drag yourself from your musty cave of breathing
   And stand before the shaving mirror
   All bleary eyes and dreary soap suds –

How did this tyranny of weekly shopping

So easily assume undisputed sway?
   After a long week of bought ledgers,
   Angry telephone calls and delays

On the trains (how often do you get home at

Past eight o’clock?) a Saturday lie-in would
   Have been a more than necessary
   Treat, but here you are listening to

The ‘Early Show’ and wondering as you shave

If that creaking plank can really be your neck.
   Through the window in the October
   Gloom you can all too visibly see

The frankly mutinous realm of your married

Estate: the lawn with its weeds, the roses which
   Were never dead-headed and, under
   Your nose, the side-wall spitting out its

Pointing like a baby’s first teeth. Come Monday

And you will stand on the station with hundreds
   Of others, all ruefully counting
   The lost years and wincing at thinning

Crowns, dubious after all about the joys

Of ‘Begonia Close’ and a one hour rail
   Link with London. And it’s then that you’ll
   Cling to this Saturday shopping as

A chore which silences awkward thoughts, which puts

The workaday stumble into perspective
   And lets you believe that should life turn
   Lucky, you with your choices would stroll

The High Street, day in day out, watching the herd

Rush to be shouted at or glumly ignored,
   Thinking, “The sun shines on the truly
   Free. If only there were no winters...”

The Self-Condemned

Last night as an August warmth
Chilled into September
I completed my education.

Autodidact of sorrows,

Arranging my systems
In exquisite precision

I subjected them

To the test of tears.
They crumbled. In the ruins,

Half-sought, half-forgotten,

Was a word shattered like a
China cup. The word was Love.

For years, shunning

The basking crowd,
I sought for the Good,

Read books and made notes.

A woman – my wife –
Brought me food and listened:

My chin chafing my collar

I informed her of the nature
Of things. As she closed the door

Her eyes were awash.

I considered the facts briefly
But could find no explanation.

One night I started:

I was reading Spinoza
When a thought like a knife

Turned in my brain,

“How hateful
Is an abstract love.”

Longing for her hand,

The shy hiss of her breath,
I ran downstairs

But she had gone.

She had left a note –
“I, too, am human” –

Her suitcase had scuffed the hallway.

Collapsed on the stairs,
Shaking the banisters like a child,

My tears melted her words.

Overhead, swollen like tumours,
My books were suave, replete.

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

© August 1983

 

Mr Longley's Dream

This is something of a rarity for me. I think I was aiming at the 'younger market'. I subsequently went through a period as a vegan - it was hard work. Nevertheless, man's mass, indeed industrialised, cruelty to animals is a mighty problem.

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James Longley was in business,
   He did it very well,
Battery farming was his line,
   He gave those creatures hell.

His farm was many acres

   Stripped of tree and hedge,
Long grey factory units
   Stood on a concrete ledge.

His birds in semi-darkness

   Lived four or five to a cage,
They were not allowed to turn round
   Or else he got in a rage.

Mr Longley went home to dinner,

   Slapped his paper with a hiss,
“I gave an interview to that man –
   The result is this.

Says I mistreat my chickens,

   Says I’ve done it for years,
But I’ve never had a single one
   Come to me in tears.

Of course some die in their cages

   Gone mad or pecked to death,
But the rest are blithely happy
   And as buoyant as a breath.

My technicians tell me often,

   Pointing to a chart,
That the optimum production curve
   Puts them in good heart.”

Mr Longley filled his wine glass,

   Picked his teeth with a pin,
Thought of all the hungry people,
   “Doesn’t he know the world’s starving?”

Later in bed he snored so hard

   The moon could hardly hear
The chickens in their batteries
   Muttering in their fear.

A Transatlantic Call

Our condition is contentious. Ill-at-ease,
Clinging with cities to a crust of rock,
We manage history, that sprawling torque
Of nations, contracts and economies.
And love, your dear voice rising through a surf
Of sound, made neutral by the nasal sting
Of distance, tells me that though still breathing
We have yet to sign a treaty with this earth.

Now, like a conscience, dusk disturbs the sky

Troubling a well-fed moon become insane.
Elsewhere, as the turbid day is burning south,
Caring for disease and rags on the plain,
Someone is allotted language – a cry,
Which bubbles in blood upon a fly-black mouth.

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

© 1976-77

Four Last Things

Death, judgment, heaven, hell.

Karl Rahner writes somewhere to the effect that most men do not reach a spiritual level in this life worthy of being judged.

I.

He was enjoying another good argument,
His brain as active as the froth on his beer.
His hand was busy declaiming,
Cranking his face into pictures of moral commitment.

He was cold and sweating, shrunk inside the skin of himself.

His final argument lay in his mouth like saliva.
Death with a small black pin was striding through the air:
He had left it too late to discover what he really thought.

II.

He had left it too late to discover what he really thought.
The human heart descending slowly in a pair of scales –
The musty creature sprouting feathers and nestling in the dust –
Was this what judgment was?

He had read many newspaper articles,

And had taken the Book of the Month regularly;
But none of this had seemed to prepare him
For the questions now being asked.

III.

For the questions now being asked
Good God I thank you.
I know what I think about other people’s motives
And it is a joy to be able to hold forth.

Who would have thought that heaven was so simple,

That I could encompass it all in a witty phrase?
What with the beer and the women and the one howling bore
I am having the time of my life.

IV.

I am having the time of my life,
Though I am troubled by a vision like a face behind cloth.
Somehow I have lost my cheerfulness
But I win all my arguments and drink much wine.

To be as convivial now as I was in the past

Is something that puts hairs on my chest.
I am not sure if this is heaven and I do not much care,
I have reached my “summum bonum”. Do I dream?

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

© December 1979

Love's Imprecation

Speak the word and come to me,
Sit you down and make me free;
Conjure with your churlish spells,
Slaughter cattle, poison wells,
Do whatever must be done
That the devil’s cause be won;
Save the fury of my face
From his laughter, my disgrace;
Only, hag, good wicked witch,
When you have killed him with the stitch,
Ripped him rib by rib apart,
Have pity on his beating heart;
Teach him well but teach him short,
Make me happy in his thought,
And when he wakes all sweaty-limbed
Bathe his eyelids, mandrake-dimmed.
Dearly I love, O take your spells,
Practise them on someone else:
My mind is like a lightning-bolt,
And he an untrained, furious colt.

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

© December 1979

To His Wife

These sonnets make reference to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian revolution - both "developing stories" at the time. The Russian invasion was taken so seriously that indeed it was feared that "a new Assyria" was on the march. How sobering to look back over these few decades - already the Russian invasion is memorialized by little more than rusting hulks abandoned in the landscape. Shelley's 'Ozymandias' comes to mind.

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

The first of marriage is a giggling breakfast,
The day as bright as water, and the bed
Which served as table for the night’s repast
Forgotten till old Adam nods his head.

Coffee and toast and glossy orange juice

Are all the contact offered with “out there”;
For lovers have a temporary excuse
To hide behind a cordon sanitaire.

Consider then, no matter where you look

A man beats up another, someone dies.
The Russians polish guns, Iran goes mad,
And tears of refugees make fighters glad.
Compassion scribbles in an empty book,
“Love is irrelevant as butterflies.”

---------

The second is the wilting flower forgotten

As life becomes a hurried kiss and run;
Your hand appals you and seems ill-begotten,
And no one knows quite what is to be done.

Our days decay into a past become

As turbulent as water in a strait;
And our request for all is answered “some,”
And our request for some is answered “wait.”

I offer you a kiss my sweetest love

For soon the times will make us all behave.
At night I question devils in my sleep
As nations clash like monsters in the deep,
And dream of someone pulling on his glove
Who in an instant tumbles in his grave.

----------

The third is in the classic lines of Chaucer

Which tell us of the squire who carved before
His father. But the men of Odoacer
Are busy with their thoughts and call for war.

The Russians play their cards; Afghanistan

Is made a province and the Khyber Pass
Dreams of its future as an autobahn:
The eyes of the dead are silent as glass.

Think tonight of the lusty squire, the one

Who has to love and suffer history.
A new Assyria is on the plain
And stirs up man’s old wilfulness again.
Two people are but fodder for a gun,
And armies marching give no surety.

----------

The fourth is taken from a tapestry

Gone smoky on the wall above the fire;
It shows us in the human husbandry
And dates us by our out-of-date attire.

Come, sit by me and let me hold your hand,

My brain become a blackboard without chalk:
The sun is dancing on your wedding band
But Charon is commanding us to walk.

When time begins to sunder what has grown

As closely as the fingers of a hand,
The furious concerns of man fall by
Become as distant as a fading cry:
And all that you and I have ever known
Is given to the tide and shifting sand.

1^st January 1980

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© January 1980