RENDITIONS
Night Walker
I find a black egg in the gutter.
It weighs as heavy as iron.
Vague fears have the heart in a flutter.
I pick it up. Someone is crying.
The black egg could be a bad omen.
It would take an elephant to hatch.
Through an open window a phone rings.
There’s warmth in the air, and I catch
the thrill of the first nightingale,
so clearly, I am transparent.
It brings back the self without fail.
I hear what’s more real than apparent.
When the birds fall silent it gives pause.
I’m seen through by invisible eyes.
I put the black egg back where it was.
The song starts again. The spirits rise.
Found Objects
Inside one -
something ugly,
knotted.
Inside two -
something transparent.
Handle with care.
Throw the robust away,
and let it explode
elsewhere.
Keep the fragile
in a bubble,
and don’t breathe.
Ordinary
I’m an ordinary citizen
who’s marked to be wiped out, amen.
Being like everybody else,
I am game for random violence
from a cluster bomb, or some such
device I accidentally touch.
Maybe we should take to the streets
to demo against ourselves. At least,
it might prevent the careless fates
from targeting inane innates
as nondescript as the moon in
broad daylight. And scarcely human.
Sometimes I dream I could become
the lonely sniper with a gun.
But who would be the hit? You’ve guessed:
a sad bystander like me, the pest.
I wonder what I’m guilty of?
Merely existing is not enough.
Nobodies of the world unite.
You haven’t much to lose. Recite
‘I’m hardly worth the time of day.
Ignore me and I’ll go away’.
That will attract whatever
now passes for human error.
See me clutching an intestine,
rupturing blood and guts. All mine.
I have been made famous by chance,
rolled screaming into an ambulance.
Observe the usual family
not looking good, mourning for me.
Pipe Song in Death Valley
Down in the gorge it’s heavy on the blood.
One plods breathless. Where are the Indians?
But the air is lightly feathered by the bell
of a running stream, ringing silver change.
I’m suspicious of a man who doesn’t sweat.
The pines withhold their freshness. Airlessness
makes them selfish, shedding what they don’t want.
Fires being forbidden, hobos lighting up
are shot dead by self-appointed vigilantes.
A steam train crossed the valley in the old days.
I’ve a countering wish for the comfort
of smoke signals in the distance. My tribe.
What’s needed is a dry stick. I strike myself.
My head is phosphorescent. I climb down
the rock face to put my feet in water,
restoring the peace with the quietest of pipes.
The Living Past
Who cares about my great-grand-uncle in Limoges,
the parish priest there during penal days? I suppose
it must have been a strange life so far from the land,
hearing confessions that he didn't quite understand,
baptising and marrying his adopted flock,
and seeing them into the ground, faith like a rock.
His displacement won't figure in the archives.
All that is certain is that he had many lives
protected from distortion by the copperplate
script of the copy clerk marking the name and date.
History repeats itself till it's lost in the mists
of time, a Balzac novel that does not exist
except in the imagination of Flaubert. The
truth is, in a small way my ancestors are me.
Blindman’s Tapestry
The theology of the fallen gods
is poetry, but the tablets of stone
get broken on the way down. Yet the shards
may be stuck together in haphazard
pots, so the magic lantern show can go on.
There is no light at the end of the poem.
It is all shadow play on a blank wall.
The silver lining is in the dying fall
of small change in the pocket, jingling lines.
You hit the jackpot when by luck it rhymes.
The Maker Gets Out More
On the vice between the ugly and beautiful
that is life, I hammer out sparks. Who is to tell
if they burn down the workshop or light a candle,
or just flicker out? But I’m bored with it all.
I’m into the swing of beating out the sound.
And if I hit the right note it has a ring
of the inevitable. The echoing
diminishes into silence, always ‘profound’,
so, I can sleep in the backroom, dreaming of hooves
thundering across the desert of body and mind.
When I shake myself awake, I pretend to be blind,
and walk out in the street, waving white-thorn reproofs
at passers-by till a kindly soul lends me an arm,
and I see the town without doing myself a harm.
Components of the Pyrenees Caprice
Fire
Hercules rapes Pyrene who gives birth to a snake,
and recoils from her issue and makes an escape
to the forests where she is eaten by a bear,
which Hercules hunts down, and heaps stones on its lair
to make her burial mound (now called the Pyrenees).
Zeus, his father in heaven, isn’t best pleased.
‘It’s time you settled down to your half human side.’
And sends down Deianeira to be his bride.
Nessus, the centaur, gave blood as a wedding gift,
‘If you want the knot to hold, you’re going to need this.
a drop will stop Hercules chasing after skirt.’
And so, for the big day she put it on his shirt.
But the viper’s venom turned him inside out,
and tasting his rear end coming out of his mouth
he leapt into the sea. But the salt made the pain flare.
Deianeira, hearing his yells, hung herself in despair.
Uprooting a pine grove, Hercules built a pyre,
and as he braced himself to meet fire with fire,
Zeus boomed ‘Zut’, and thundered down a horse-drawn cloud
to winch his prodigal to where Everything’s Allowed...
Ice
The horseman abandons his bridle and stirrups,
and rides bare backed into the great apocalypse.
The cloud is his saddle in the upper reaches,
a cumulus that mushrooms over the beaches,
darkening the valley to break into an ice storm
that batters down on the orchards of Roussillon,
wreaking vengeance on Nessus. And the summer fruit,
apricots, figs, plums, peaches, and pomegranates,
ripe for picking, are torn apart, tout à coup,
by hailstones, an avalanche of liquid granite.
Only the vines twisted close as snakes to the earth
withstand it. The grapes of wrath are Pyrene’s rebirth.
False Spring
The birds are singing in Pujol’s garden.
Muted excitement on a taut string.
They know the breach of promise that is spring.
Yellow mimosa brings out marauding
flies, but there’s snow still on the foothills.
Blossom surfs in the wind. Cherry. Almond.
Still trees won’t leaf till seagulls leave the land,
and the storks start to nest in church steeples.
Camellias that flourish like blushing brides,
are the foolish virgins of the Pyrenees.
Their bloom blighted by the last blast of hail.
Vines won’t unknot with sap till March Ides.
Then blackbirds will sing with full throated ease,
and you can listen for the nightingale.
Nature Vivante
After the rains the fragrance of laurel rose reigns,
incense to bless the overflowing drains,
so they grow watercress.
O cuckoo flowers, so white, so light
You’re hour’s twilight: lightning the air
as waters clear.
Milkmaid-blossoms, shyly in the shade,
the slightest breath of wind
and they’re off.
Verlaine and Van Gogh in cahoots
not to draw them from life, wield their pen and knife
after removing wet boots.
Stellar Connection
The stars make their point
in the sky, anoint
space with light and time,
so, they become mine
as almost nothing.
And thus, worlds within
include me. I bring
them down to earth with
a blink to inhabit
the unthinkable.
Common Ground
I don’t want to be alone.
But there is no one to be with.
I’m a statue turned to stone
that has sunk into its plinth.
With you I could be alive,
and didn’t have to behave
like somebody else. Now I’ve
found myself a mass grave.
I could do with the company.
So entombed in the dead-air
of a granite cemetery,
I’m no one in particular.
Somnambule
You’re in the room, my room of lateral vision,
taken for granted, part of the décor, long shared.
But now you’re part of my life I don’t know about.
I wake from a bad dream, burdened by the shadow
that intimates your absence and sleepwalk downstairs.
Overnight the familiar has been made strange.
I only noticed you when I turned on the light.
As clear as day I see that nothing has changed.
You are holding your own where no one else would.
My eyes focus on the floor, and it steadies me.
The carpet is a tapestry of our past life.