All Poets’ Day
I had broke my ribs in Ostenbach
And woke to find you sleeping in a chair,
Your naphthalene eyes jotting down kind dreams
Behind their shutters. You had entwined your hair
With all the care of no road home. Your skin,
Wearing olive like a flag, still sweet
And perfect now as when you stood exquisite
In your oyster. I had been through whispers
Of cold ruins, diced landscapes and dreams,
Neurons thundering out uneasy scenes
As I lay uptight, a drugged pimple
On the bitchy whiteness of the ward.
I had broke my ribs in Ostenbach,
Or was I stepping glass in hand to you?
The light low flute of the wood pigeon thrum
Reminded me you had only to hear my voice
To leave the room and tuck your arms inside
Your blouse, bow your head and immerse yourself
In chores. My memories are yours, bounding
Down the old oak staircase like a child
On a silver tray. I could barely
Charm the troubled leaves out of the trees –
You used to smile up at me, roughly tuck
Yourself within my lapels and tell me
My charm was my Trafalgar, my Indus,
My Marathon, and would be your Waterloo.
I had broke my ribs in Ostenbach
And woke to find you sentry at my pyre,
Your sweet and petalled breaths sail crewless
To my bandaged feet and stroke at scars
That I must have picked up on the decking
Where we bellowed lies cocktailed with childish
Indecision and sloping fettered infatuation,
As the proud dappled moondisc peaked his
Eavesdrop from behind the scraggy autumn
Branches. And how bright you were when injured,
Vicious and wild – long before the sharp cold
Afternoons when all you were was brown
And creeping between rooms. It seemed all there
Was to do on that veranda was spit and cry.
I remember sitting down amongst
The tearful reach of Old Uncle Sycamore
In the garden that your father left
Us just in sight of our house bequeathed
By mine. You loved to press against the damp
Of the early autumn grass, the webs
Imbibed with globes of dew, your lips apart
In schoolgirl drifting dream – there was some tale
In every corner. You read to me from ‘tween
The anchored filaments of your twisting crown
Those dark emulsified speeches of Prometheus Unbound.
And I would rest my chin upon my knee,
Grind my teeth and live a blinkless hour,
Take you in and whirl you in my magic
Like gold bathed ice in fine crystal. Petals
Quivered on their banks, moist and velvet,
At the sound of your poetry, crisp
And tender. Your voice was as a child,
Lost in a game that ventured a tattoo
From every graze, war-paint from every stain,
And all of nature’s nooks were gateways.
I could not see these planets, these gullible
Wild realms that welcomed you with trust
To re-paint them, re-sculpt them, re-build
The very blocks of Eden from mere words.
“Mere words!” I can hear you gasp
It now, your sleeping lips do trip upon a murmur.
Your naps were always restless fairs,
Fighting, leaping, giggling with every breath;
For one to waste was one to offer death.
II
And it is at the drooping sycamore,
In comfort of the questions in the soil,
That through the mist like Arthur at Camlan,
I see a figure glide, in pale and wan
Encroachment ‘cross the turf, each step
Soft and cautious in high buckled boots,
A figure waxed and wiry like a wren,
Wading through the marshland of a dawn.
My heart holds tight, my eyes strain for his long
Sharp nose and eyes of urchin care and pride
Mixed in the pupils like two wild dogs
Biting and clawing at each other, numb
Recognition within them both. He marks
With calm a place to rest, his speckled shirt
Indenting in the breeze, and sits awkward
In the roots of Old Uncle Sycamore.
He offers me a dram of something coarse,
“To crack one’s bones and melt one’s wilting spine!”
His laugh is high and seldom aired, I’d guess,
A laugh that made the alastor his pest.
It seems a natural pose for us to gaze
In solid silence like an echo and a clarion
Wound infused in an old abandoned mill.
But it can’t, there is too much to be said.
He rests amongst an aura, spectre-grey,
As cruelly cut as generations have described.
But I find his earth-stone in the cinders,
A trembling harmony of all the cold lands’
Colours viewed from the violent cliffs, storms’
Beloved wave crests in a theatre,
Growl-tipped and breaking on the bridges
Of his teeth.
“I have tried my own soul
In a court that deals in more than justice
And have been found, by roster, to care
For man in ways I cannot sketch.”
There was a day in Italy;
Your breath was toned in heavy coffee
And somehow you had turned your frailty
Into the charm of a child with broken French
And your lunatic Latin. You wore a canvas hat
With a red crocus broached as if an emblem,
An ensign to the days when we would know
The other’s thoughts and be the envy of all those
We refused to care for. Your eyes were sallow
And afraid – a look as good to you as trophies
In our early times. You wore white lace,
Perhaps to act as some neurotic gesture,
And red shoes, no doubt to catch my tears.
I was, I knew even then, your proselyte,
The stranger wandering within thy gates.
And freedom was his reign, cold and chanting
‘neath the branches, never having sat opposite you
In the blind bubonic heat you unravel
At the wing. But there now, soft freckles
On your tired and languorous face, I must
Find your bitterness, drag out deceit,
For I am nothing without them.
III
A Party! One of many in those days,
Full of people half my age, soundly dressed
(And doused) in things I thought were petty crimes.
You looked like pure endeavour and would smile
And tilt your glass at me from across the room
Reminding my poor misguided soul, indeed,
That it was I that would be holding you
Tonight, I that owned your attention, proved
Your existence with mine. All else was little
More than vol-au-vents and wine. And I would
Smugly sway my way through some bawdy
Indiscretions, pretty college extras and histrionic
Gamekeepers. I recall long dark hair,
Eyes like two halves of one broken heart,
Round cheeks and lips that parted in the centre.
She had read my only novel, sunk
It in those eyes that would not leave me.
I recall we stole a bottle and we sat
On Wintry deckchairs, creaking in bemusement,
As the competitive cackles and
Odd shy strays, hiding their own cobwebs,
Concocted melees in the warmth. And what
Warmth! It pricks my solitude, will not
Forgive the loneliness of decadence.
And in this bed I cannot muster ire.
And I cannot call on shame to tuck me
In, the brittle pond on which I trot
Is cracking under my peace. Your chest
Rises and fades, your breath emerges tickling,
Humble, waiting for some new renaissance,
All knowing, all seeing throughout time.
It was barefoot on the decking, your
Corduroys marked with the faint cobwebs
Of the mornings’ nursery paint, my shirt,
On you, heavy and twisted, all leaning
Forward at me, angry and bemused. Your eyes,
Bewitched and buried beneath all those marching
Lies, stepping, stop-motion, from under turf
- that golden ice-crisped turf –
Your trembling lips (as now in your innocent
Huddled doze) unsure and, yet, beyond
All hours and days and societal gestures.
Your trembling lips filled with filling words
And bulbous hate; caliginous, aphotic hate
That ashens all the evergreens from the decking
To the jetty, along the limpid lapping of the lake
Up to the heavy iron gates that keep
Our business from all those we refuse to
Care for. Always. At the fore. It was
Not the place to say how frightened I was
Of your hurt. But I should have said it anyway.
IV
Some time ago in Italy?
One red candle lit the cheek of one
Side of his face as he sat, midst smoke,
Midst that delicate orchestral hum
Of the dusk shade musicians of the country.
I had seen him once in Italy – or was it Hungary
Or Greece? More pale and tied to bones.
His skin like royal wax stretched with wit
Over priceless African ivory. The tedious
Joyful murmur of the party behind
Us sank back in the air like broken
Oriental beads, and he turned to me,
From out of the dimness, a clear face
Of titanic cosmic self-assertion.
“I had a dream, which was not at all a dream,
The bright sun was extinguished,”
As, indeed, it was – a dream as I have had –
“and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space”
He spoke as if a war was in his throat,
As if limb-shorn men cried out from his
Adam’s apple, from that strong and vein-mapped
Neck. His words, familiar to me, as familiar
As Italy – or was it Hungary or Greece? –
As familiar as the lilting arias of the soft
Reclusive lakeside night.
That girl was not a lover. She was the
Carrion of my ego, the stumbling
Zombie of my misfired voodoo prank,
Staring, eyeless, gaudy, from the corridor
Of my blank humiliation. I cannot
Leave you on the decking, I recall,
Hair tied up above your scalp, flecked
With lemon, as you did not want to know
The sex. You curled up on the deckchair
And looked out to the lake as if some
Bright and wooden vessel was battling
To your rescue. You seemed to run away
From that night on – the vessel took you,
But I did not see it – the world’s you charmed
At last were border-free. Your soil dark
Hair was away, your full, versed lips locked,
Your eyes as cold as risen from the lake.
This party must have lasted like the
Roman nights must have lasted, for
The stranger on the veranda spoke
As if he was charged by the neighbourhood
Moon. He had read a paper I had written
On Shelley and told me I was wrong,
That I should have met him. I would
Have liked him.
V
The brightness of this ward, it has me floating
In a bubble softly shimmied from wall
To wall by your canorous breathing. I see
You move, and shift again, perhaps you dream
Of all the times you forgave me, all the
Times we made love deeply as the dusk
Unfolded across our hushful world.
But I know that dreams are playgrounds
Without this life of onerous impounds.
I woke to find you sleeping in a chair.
Lord knows how long you have rested there.