Sighting Venus

This is in syllabics with a syllable count of 11, 11, 7, 14, 14, 7, with no elisions. Five lines are irregular by a syllable plus or minus. There is rhyme in lines three and six of each stanza. The form is borrowed from W. H. Auden's "At the Grave of Henry James."

   Ishtar Terra is the high mountainous area in the north of Venus (Ishtar is a Babylonian goddess with some not very nice tendencies); Aphrodite Terra is the flatter area south of Venus's equator.

   The true Roman Missal - not the milksop post-Vatican II apology - says of St Tarcisius that he was an acolyte who was, in the ages of persecution, "entrusted with the bearing of the Blessed Sacrament to those of the faithful who were imprisoned for the Faith. Set upon by a pagan mob, he gave his life rather than suffer the Sacred Host to be profaned." He was martyred in AD 255 possibly as young as 12.

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Rising at three in Cumaean darkness for
The old fox’s toe-knocked shamble to the klo:
Ah, such tiresome pensioned grief! –
Did Achilles blooding heads on the death-fumed plain of Troy,
Bare-toothed epitome of the self-willing skirmisher
Shredding his foeman to leaf;

Or Aeneas, jilling off the low-hilled coast,
Sizing up Latium as compost and seed
Of an itinerant’s home,
At last to be matrona of a clamoured sun-stained res,
Wringing group to state and scorning the volupt’s yawn that acts
Become greatness: plangent Rome! –

Did either play host to the body’s vexed ways?
Glancing from my window whilst tribute was made
I saw Venus resplendent,
Its peephole of white light outglowing all things bar the moon,
Able, incroyable, to cast shadow on a sheet on earth
From a hand proffered pendent.

Double-known planet: Lucifer first, in chill
Morning mist, bright polisher of fake promise,
Tempting men with cheerful dawns
Which crash to betrayal in trade or love with brusque handshakes,
A beelzebub self’s-autonomy, delighting and cruel,
Leaving love notes torn up on lawns.

Then Hesperus, white-golden at sun’s demise,
Doyenne of Hera’s orchard where the maidens
Prune with companionate song,
Bonded in collegial tasks which fruit as choice and duty,
Apples, rightly used, which grant what length a domus can hope,
Making pattern of a throng.

Venus is metaphor: should man plant a foot
He’d find breathing was daggers, heat like hell-flames,
Pressure in pitiless tons,
But work would be done in his brow’s melt, ingathering truth,
Pricked by urgings of right, of lust, for through him natural law
Inhabits planets and suns.

Right action cannot be fudged: tall in the north
Ishtar Terra lauds blatancies which buttress
The king with gods’ condign power,
Whilst crouched in the south, Aphrodite Terra hymns the gods’
Amour propre, trouncing good sense; to man, though, it falls
Not to build tombs, but a tower.

In transit, Venus on the sun’s rougey cheek
Portends beauty spot artifice, hale but rotten,
Ungiving like Narcissus;
Think rather of a scooting boy, proud-tasked in the backstreets,
Hugging the Gifts which will do good and require his dropt blood –
Faith-purposed Tarcisius.

But how pointless to brandish the Pentagram
Of Venus, that New Age bromide which swizzles
Egos on beds of laurel;
Sans denial and penance none knows himself, and muddled nous
Of peevish mantras is teeth-edging, like righteous children
At play, itching to quarrel.

No, best to spill wine to Venus Obsequens,
Goddess of gardens, the formal, the market;
Might man’s wit one day embrace
Planet Venus with gardens, unstrifed as first-bloomed Eden?
Truth, he’d amaze if that were curated on earth, without fuss
Of thundering into space.

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© June/July 2017

Cautionary

This records the unfortunate fate of an ex-acquaintance who never got over his wife's desertion.

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“I’ll never love,” I said,
“Women grow old and lose their looks,
And who can love them then?”
Just four months wed, he said,
“When looks have shred like torn-up books
You simply vow to love again
And kiss her age-sagged head.”

But twelve months passed, his wife
Refused him for another man
And snatched her love from him;
His flesh like ice, his life
Collapsed; years gone and dry as bran,
Still smit, he knows not if her beauty’s trim
Has rot beneath time’s knife.

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© July 2017

"But the Greatest of These is Charity..."

The first two lines are adapted from a previous poem, "Song" posted on 21 July 2021 and linked here.

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It’s long-lost loves that ache the hardest,

It’s long-time hates that fester most,
The one can rust the gold-eared harvest,
The other sear like black-ice frost.

So states might fanfare motives purest
When blows erupt for friendship glossed,
Or long-hugged rancour grown the rudest
Might leap to war and damn the cost.

For moral suasion quite the vilest
Besmirching acts will wink and boast,
And intellect’s much dog-eared digest
Will green-light death from hill to coast.

Ah weep your tears and clutch your dearest,
Men run to lash you to a post,
You’ll writhe with prayers and pleas the loudest
As dogs are primed with red meat tossed.

(1 Corinthians 13:13)

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© June 2017

Sage and Onion

To clarify, this poem refers to a long-lost daughter, not wife, lover or whatever.

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What memories, regrets, cohere upon
This battered packet, dusty now, of sage
And onion stuffing which these twenty years
With other household goods has joined me on
My long-haul journeyings to earn a wage
Between London and Penzance. Old eyes and ears
Now force a halt, a change from verb to noun,
And I and this packet slump in Penzance town.

Long past its freshness date, it stands for she
Whose loss is like an ill-set bone which aches,
Making the body hobble, and those times
Bright and enthusing as the Penwith sea
When all was fair, and love like fresh-baked cakes:
And once, I cooked the Christmas lunch but – crimes! –
Forgot the stuffing, which in this drab box
Has trailed me since, and comforts though it mocks.

Heart’s closeness did not last, love twisted loose,
And like a ziggurat which seemed immense
Was crushed to stones and dust; it thereby taught
Life’s hardest lesson: all’s a torn-knot truce;
Nor love, achievement, health, can prop their fence
When fate’s ill-voiced contemptuous winds make snort
And like a big-sticked boy with a crotchet wish
Stir up the fishpond and send mad the fish.

Such wrenchings of wellbeing, deserved or not,
Nurture thorned thickets of heartache and of loss
Through which men struggle with a blinded hope
Seeking some clearing like a sun-warmed spot
Made sweet by morning and the downy moss
Where, bloodied, they might nurse their runtling hope,
That piecemeal happiness grubbed up like roots
Which this life offers as the sole of fruits.

At rest, there sometimes knocks like wind in leaves
The knowledge that a half-cock world is known
In journeying, though journey’s end is death,
And that dark portal like a tunnel’s eaves
Is arbiter of what was gift or loan,
Fixing the import of your passing breath.
At death, a chastened man though gashed with scars
Knows all – time, consequence, the stones, the stars.

That vision, from the basalt roots of ranges
To spheres where inter-stellar gas clouds weave,
Finds all is poise, proportion, hence is good;
Then soul melds with the source of being’s changes,
That sui generis which must retrieve
Its own, this universe of would and should,
Even the atoms of this travelled box,
That all be all, the shepherd and his flocks.

Come closure, prayer for her who these long years
Has bent to life’s persuasions, being now
A stranger of an unlike tribe and clime,
Must wish her joy, however damped with tears,
And one-flesh fruiting which glows a woman’s brow,
Fulfilled at death, replacing fact for mime –
That ever present present which was limned
In wounded love on Penzance beach, and hymned.

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© May/June 2017

Cleanliness

Michelangelo sometimes neither undressed nor even took of his boots to sleep so caught up was he in his work. Auden famously disconcerted his college's senior common room by proclaiming his use of the humble sink. Many penitents recorded that the saintly Seraphim's face would glow like the sun.

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Michelangelo in
Boots and paint-dabbed smocking
Lay himself to slumber,
Nightwear all forsworn;
Neither soap nor toothscrub
Struck him as important
When creation’s moment
Seized him like the dawn.

Cleanliness, the preachers
Chant, is kissing-close to
Godliness; hence, maiden
Aunts in underwear
Fresh each day, make volta
Knowing that if car-struck
Death will find their undies
Pure as mountain air.

Medieval kings were
Sewn into their garments,
Winter’s frozen months to
Bear in smelly gloom;
Ladies likewise: he who
Held the patent reaped as
Kings gave audience and
Nosegays packed the room.

Still, though, baths and showers
Freak both lord and tenant,
Water quite upsets our
Dirt-grained status quo;
Gels and steam and soap suds,
Body scrubs and pumice,
Froth and fluffy towels,
Dry the skin out so!

Writers in especial,
Drunk, suspicious, debt-struck,
Grubby linen whiffing,
Know that pen and ink
Pardon many foibles:
Auden made a poet’s
Polis from mere words though
Pissing in the sink.

Desert fathers also
Scorned all cleansing potions,
Fed on cabbage water,
Fasting unto grace;
Seraphim of Sarov’s
Flea-infested blanket
Made a royal threshold
For his God-glow face.

Strangely, man – God’s image –
Sweaty, mouthy, fat-hung,
Fizzing brain half-sunk in
Exculpating sin,
Vision of the One is
Vouchsafed gratis though he’s
Crowned by hair bedraggled,
Stained by ringwormed skin.

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© May 2017

Time's Arrow

Time’s arrow deathward delves,
None are left behind on shelves,
Beetles, curlew, bare-faced man,
Cannot stop what birth began –

Pairing, getting, toil at nest,
Shrugging spawn to east and west,
Loss of poise, then dulling eyes:
Something strikes and snaps your cries.

First, though, man with “ought” and “is”
Limps the world whose faults are his,
Beauty goads him, stings the good,
Raged, he slaughters for his food.

But at last the cosmos ends,
Black holes leach and nothing mends,
Heat death starves in deepest dark,
Silence touch-walks through the ark.

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© March 2017

Thwarted Love

I said to my soul be still, be still,
If God doesn’t want you, the devil will;
In love there’s always a kiss or a dart,
And both are frenzied as a broken heart.

And if love decays and scorn obtrudes,
Furious as whirlwinds or vipers’ broods,
There’s few who can bluster a stiff-lipped shrug,
Far less a kind word and a parting hug.

For passions broke loose will shred up the clouds
And rip apart mountains like nail-torn shrouds,
And stamped on, disgraced, in the stone-filled mud
The lover’s pale likeness will blacken like blood.

I said to my soul be still, be still,
If God doesn’t want you, the devil will;
Dragged to the judgement, to curse or to bless,
Your tight-ribbed “no” is the devil’s “yes.”

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© February 2017