I: Batman
The hero is sensitive and distraught.
Driven to revenge his murdered
parents, he confronts the classic
bully, all vulgar flash and
dazzle, grotesque, intriguing.
The hero wins, but in a cloud
of darkness. It is never quite
daylight in this movie.
To avenge my murdered parents
I could live like this, with
cartoonish handsomeness and
a fashionable princess
indulging me with sex and admiration.
I would be born to wealth
and have no need to work
except on my own preoccupations.
I'd have enough discretionary income
that discretion would be merely an option.
Who murdered my parents? They
say the bully, but money has
its own reality, and commerce
always censors dreams. A
cloud of darkness shapes this fantasy
but it is clear why in this
movie, there can be no blood.
The vampire is much too close
for concrete gore: a heart
might burst and gush.
No bully killed my parents
unless you believe that time
and the sun can sneer and
crush. They died within like the
flower that sheds its petals
and swells to a lumpy green
then withers, blackens, snaps,
and sheds its seed, or like
the tree that's forced to breed
excessive fruit: its branches
twist and dwarf under the
burden of abundance, while the
extravagance of sun and
rain and insects make
sawdust of its core.
II: Sacrifice
Loved murderer I love you still,
though everyday you carelessly kill.
Ignoring everything I need
you feed on what I give.
And so we live.
Like the two sides of the helixes grown
so well together
they can't be finally parted,
we each day make our own events,
but we of two minds
are one-hearted.
My youth was slaughtered
burned by the fire that wasted her flesh.
The acid of her family
is my test.
Our past burns a tunnel through the air,
scattering perceptions,
and sends us shuddering to the poles.
Amidst such ringing, magnetic fires
we hear only what God desires
and what the pulses in our bodies know.
III: Heads
It's been so long since I loved a boy
I probably can't remember how,
but if you're patient, I'll recall my lust
and likely manage to love you now.
My flesh in spite of age is quickly willing
but the images with which my mind is filling
are from the limits of what I've known:
an ancient valley pristine in the morning sun
with light like water and innocence,
a dawn when the world awakens
and repents foregoing any love or pleasure.
O perfect boy, my slender treasure,
when I dip in the clear pool of your love
I ask, was Eve a woman?
I could have grown
from a single bone,
and why is it always a Robert that I love?
IV: Tails
It's been so long since we last made love
I'm afraid I'll have forgotten how,
if you're patient, I can recall my lust
and likely manage to love you now.
My flesh in spite of age is quickly willing
and my mind, that was lately filled with longing,
is free.
In you, I'm me, and I am home.
You are a fertile valley
that cradles the rising sun.
You flow with light like water,
and when our love is done,
the world awakes with pleasure.
O perfect lover, my rounded treasure,
when I dip in the clear pool of your love
I ask, was Adam taken then as I am now?
I never could have grown
so well alone.
Each love-making,
each bedding,
is another vow.
V: Caught
It's the differences that make
a marriage. She balances the family
accounts by rounding off to the nearest
thousand whereas he has attacks of
socialized anxiety at anything
over the number 99. He has learned
to hold his tongue about the cozy
detritus of the bourgeois household
although he still twitches when it
gets above his ankles. She straightens
up only for guests. After more than
twenty years he has learned to
assert himself with humour and
then segue into affection and
interesting sex. She can dissolve
into receptive laughter and lose
none of her strength. They are
like dogs so used to the yank
of the leash that when the collar
snaps instead of dashing off they
bounce anxiously, eager to feel
the bond again. Love is indeed
a prison, an asylum where
mad men and women sing and
dance in chains.
I: My Poet's Face
I don't want to see my poet's face.
If you must show a photograph
douse the light, let sunshine
filter shadows through the place
so his skin can shimmer like secrets.
Poems are bones of breath fleshed out with memory.
They stalk the half-lit halls of a dusky nowhere,
long-limbed children exhilarated by laughter
even as their poet moans.
If you must show pictures, show his children,
bright skittering creatures
sucking the milk of life with no hereafter.
Don't show my poet's face.
It has no place in my imaginings.
Tell me his birth, his pains,
and his achievements.
Give him historical muscles like a tale.
Let him whisper ghostly his bereavements.
No matter what monsters his heart
gnaw against his
he shall not fail.
He shall not fail,
but only if you listen.
Wife, you are the shade and light,
the shimmer of sun at dawn,
of moon at night upon his skin.
Love him,
and in your ear
his dark words glisten.
Listen.
II: Time Flight
I spoke with William Blake
the other night. He said
forget symbolic nets.
Let words and images fly.
Sketch them in their flight
before the symbols set.
A poet's not a poet
that keeps a poet's head.
Or so he said.
III: Homage to a Wry Senescence
I once met William Empson live,
a silent, quirky old coot
who later gave a lecture I forgot.
I also met a man doing
a doctorate on seven forms
of ambiguity who knew him
in Hampstead and as much as
said that he was senile, an
artifact of exquisite cleverness
gone to rot, listening to the
Northern Line rumble beneath
his garden. One thing that
I will always have from
Empson, though, was in an
article that same year that
rambled on about WW II,
intelligence, and Singapore,
asserting that we cheat the
censor by using irony. Perhaps
that's what my academic
colleague (and I)
failed to see.
IV: A Slapped Awakening
When I was young I read
W.B. Yeats. Wow, did that
man have myths! Powerful,
obscure and confident myths
to warm my troubled heart by,
lies to cheat history, to diddle
his personal form of original sin
(and mine) into a triumph. That sly
old strumpet, it now turns out,
was the mentor I never thought
I had, lurking in my head
until my own awakening.
I remember reading his poems
much later in a nineties
anthology and deciding that
he was the only one likely to
break out of the field. The
rest, though eloquent, were
prey to their emotions, like dogs.
I am far along enough to
see his tricks and love them.
Like a dog bouncing on her
leash as her master takes
her out, I am tethered and
running. I will have my myths, my
mazy constructs, but I've
come to think the best metaphor
is a joke.
II
I got up this morning in old
and worn out dreams. My feet
are cold and the morning light is
painful and ludicrous. If I could
personify the night without embarrassment,
I would no doubt call on it. I could then
exorcise this dawn with a few
strokes of a ball-point pen.
I go to the window and watch
the empty street. The autumn
light is cool and grey, the
leaves have turned from green to
gold and brown, and a delicate mist
hangs from the black wet branches.
I turn from the window and go
back to bed, light a cigarette and
stare into space while the radio
marks time. Somewhere in the mist
and trees, somewhere in the cool grey
light and the autumn air, there is something
precious I have lost and I shall
grow old trying to remember it.
III: Anima
The wisteria which we
neglected to trim spans
the garden. Its shoots
are wilting as it draws
its strength into its roots.
Patches of grey sky show
through. The oblate leaves
are tawny, chilled and
glistening from the recent
rain. A breeze embellishes
it with faint movement.
It rests upon the arbor
and climbs the wall, the
dragon of the waning year.
VI: On the Road to Seattle: February
Before late morning
had entered the forest with its wakening sound,
while the valleys were still filled
with a thick and sinuous mist
that wrapped itself in air-light coils around
the birch trees, damp and glistening, transfixed
in the low bright light of the rising sun,
he saw between the slow up-rolling mists
and the low white clouds
that hid the water and almost all the sky
a promontory of the land
stretch out on to the surface of the lake,
floating, asleep, submerged,
drifting in shrouds of untouched white
where imperceptible slow movement never ceased,
as though he, live and still awake,
were softly plunged, as birds would be in water,
involved in the deep, unloaded mind
of a slumbering beast.
VII
Someday I will open my heart to the
angels of the winds, the way when I
approach a subway station the warm
wind's pressure opens up the door.
I will enter, and they will pour
their sly secrets into my soul
until the brim is moist, lush
silent voices like the sound of
pearls on velvet, small sounds like
fur alive with static. So soft, so
cunning will be their clear, inhuman
whispering that I won't hear, listening
and listening to my silent body sing.