from Blackwater Quartet, selection 57

Flamingo Road

The verses open where a vivid wash
wades by in stately circumstance, intense
against exotic foliage, the sun’s lash
adjusted now to heatstrokes stripping sense
from sense, those gaudy pinks a reference
to weather anchored in the primitive.
Horizons redefine the fugitive.

The limewashed house is twisted timbers, split
from years of windrock, summer’s driven dust.
A spider’s webdrift widens in a knit
of failed intentions, hazing to august
insouciance the spinning spans to rust-
remaindered railings’ bent ironmongery.
A feint of scarlet lures the refugee.

There is no winter here, no wind-tooled frieze
of frosted glass where shunted seasons slide
to zero. Ceremonial degrees
are bathed in tropic mercury: a tide,
a cinnabar transparency I ride
returning to this place, returned to mind
misplaced. The future is the past refined.

The porch’s baked penumbra breaks the heat.
I shelter here, a creature of oblique
persuasions, practised now in cool defeat.
The years outrun run down this swelter creek
into the bay. An undulating sleek-
ness dominates the distance, a refrain
of purpose our imperfect lives sustain.

Just Breathe

Some forces are difficult to define, and give up their secrets grudgingly.

The power of love, of redemption, the focus of energy that allows distant, giant planets to circle their local star in a matter of hours, the aspiration, the ideal that sets apart a mind from other minds, the slow burn of personal revelation, or revelation of an instant in the glance from a stranger confirming others, too, seek love, redemption, shared starlight.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 56

Fortunate Aspects

We walked in chill October.

The girls were little still, peering down

through pier decking,

watching waves sling dirty spray.

Teeth chattering,

they called for Double Fudge, made

straight for shelter, garish in the cloudy light, a fey,

Edwardian folly signed, Minerva— Ancient Seer.

Boarded over for the winter,

the Yarmouth prophetess

had packed our future in a shopping bag,

headed south.

The wind never dropped except to rain,

the floribunda patterns of your dress

soaked through: water-colour laughter,

your perfect mouth.

In the café, leaves of Earl Grey shadowed higher planes.

The charted signs are yesterday’s news,

the zealous accident of every breath

discarded outright

for a précis glimpse of heaven.

We walked along the foreshore,

towards spring with wild garlic

and the pinprick purple of orchids, sparking through briar

and bedstraw-yellow tracts.

Only love persists,

the autumn air stick-brittle, electric,

to witness, to remember and forgive, ourselves

at least, a little more the more we live.

Walking, Late Afternoon

England lost in mist
Muddy lanes, a century
Of rain, the sun cold
No sound but my footsteps, clay
Chiding where soles lift and fall

From Blackwater Quartet, selection 55

after Arthur Rimbaud

The Drunken Boat

(Le Bateau Ivre, 1871)

… alone, I reach the rapids, guided through

beyond a sense of distance— double-crossed

to screaming savages, my crew

nailed naked to the bull’s-eye totems, lost.

No second thoughts for deck hands: the cargo

scow of Flanders grain, of English cotton,

cast clear of the imbroglio

upstream to catch the careless current down.

The winter runs to tantrum tides, empty

childish fury fuelling my direction,

the breakaway peninsulae,

each tinny coup, slaves for my selection.

I wake to tempests. The oceans sanction

my weightless two-step on the flood, the waves

beneath, breaking towards extinction,

the harbour lighthouse blind to salty graves.

This seepage hull, this apple flesh, this crab-

green infancy of sweetness shoals the seams,

snap-anchor swells that clear the scab

of vomit, wine, this listing bridge of dreams.

And now awash in milky starlight, sea

rhymes sunk to these devouring azures,

nudged by the drowned, pale subsidy

of pain the brooding look of corpses cures;

where, though a sudden cobalt saturates,

measures languid time, beating to the noon,

a manic, boozy chord dictates

a bully red, love’s dregs, its bitter tune.

I know the sky, scissor-cut with lightning,

the waterspouts, the boiling reef, the coves;

I know the night, and dawn rising

dreamily, mounting with the census doves.

I saw a late star stained with hieroglyphs,

a shock of bruised illumination,

a Mystery Play, where sainted stiffs

reveal, fin, the wellspring of salvation;

snow-blind with visions, the night’s green kiss

tracing the sea’s eye, this alien pus

trafficking metamorphosis,

blue alarms, yellows, ballad phosphorous;

these many months, the mustang oceans bolt

along the beaches— following, I know

I cannot break the briny colt,

or save the Virgin from the undertow;

I know these flowers, bizarre sub-tropics

melting into human shapes, the wildcat

eyes, the tattoo’s green italics;

the rainbows rein the deep’s Magnificat;

the stinking marshes mire the world with sinks

of rotting reeds and spent leviathans;

above the falls, the river brinks

on chasm sky to echoing cyans;

glaciers, silver in the sun, a pearly

fire of waves and sky, the seabed’s shipwreck

murk, and then the serpent’s burly

riptide bite— squid-ink, coiling on the deck.

The child in me demands the golden dream,

the leaping schools of blue-finned, goldmine seas.

The tide, flowering on the seam

of journeys, swears to sweeter pedigrees.

Weary of poles and zones, of sacrifice,

of sea swell gentle as a sob, sometimes

I rest, resigned to the device

of days, deep yellow bell flowers, love’s mimes…

This loner’s life confronts the routes, edges

with the albatross between the guano

and the far horizon, pledges

deeper dreams, frail nets and the dead below…

No map marks this tangled voyage, riding squalls,

sky ether without birdsong, this fatigue

of tar and timber, my gunwales

iron salvage for the Hanseatic League;

against heaven, its bulwark rouge, its mists

and clinging indigos, its illusion,

the poem’s trajectory persists

to this preserve, this spit-shine arc, this sun;

eel-volt lights the dark, attendant creatures

scattershot before the twisted hull, heat

hammering the weather’s features

in vortices of burning blue conceit;

deep distance down, a storm-massed entity

consumes these rolling worlds, these epaulets

of sea-stained, stilled eternity;

homesick, I long for Europe’s parapets!

The starry archipelago invites

the drifter with its restless nebulae:

is this the exile shared with flights

of golden birds from depths of prophecy?

This weeping admits the heartbreak dawn, how

the cruelty of moon-phase spawns bitter suns.

Love’s bile swells through this torpor: now

the breached keel rolls, drunk with destinations!

Europe’s element, a twilight stillness,

scents the shade. Regret, the secret spring,

is part of this desire— finesse

of Mayfly wings, fragile, a child’s plaything.

I sleepwalk through the freighters’ wakes, the trades,

the high masts bright with flags. The signals mark

a drowned world and its renegades,

where prison barges’ searchlights cut the dark.

Rimbaud

I always felt an affinity with Rimbaud - his disrupted, and disruptive, personality, his commitment to abandon the writing of poems for more practical considerations, his final collapse into the Personal.

A Season in Hell, perhaps, or perhaps emotional posturing,either way a confluence into the poetic mind.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 54

Record of My Delights

The doll, a coarse cloth juju

for a species made to measure,

overstuffed belly stitching

burst, and there the Deutschmark stash,

chunky Weimar wadding

when bread cost a million—

one black button eye stared back.

I made room for the beating heart,

the loose cloth stretching over bony feet,

a comfort unexpected.

I am often asked if the money was a problem.

For my part, it was not a problem:

everywhere I go there is bread.

The lost jet of eye space is never mentioned,

only my stylish walk.

Ticket to Ride

As we approach the Winter Solstice, I'm reminded of the pre-Christian rituals undertaken to coax the sun back into a sky that was dark and cold, and for which intervention a brighter world would return.

Recently, reading Walt Whitman's poem,"I Chant the Square Deific", I was reminded too of the meditative journey towards spiritual equanimity, and the sacrifices specific to the journey. The Self is set aside yet paradoxically it is the Self that is the key to the unfolding centre.

Beyond the myth of heaven, we alone.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 53

An Introduction to the Skill of the Viol

How high is the sun?

Equations turn it— yet, no higher

than the hill above the burning town, shadows

buried long ago still shining, and the pines eased of resin

where heat sucks green needles black.

Each day is a fiction; why do you persist?

There was a summer ballroom. We gathered

camellias from the garden to brighten cold stone.

I was happy then.

I sat against a wall south-facing. At noon

a ruby light leapt and pranced. After the applause

my shadow was released unharmed.

How high is the sun?

There is no sun, no hill, no sarabande. Everything taught

is forgotten. There is a hidden thing that cannot be known.

This is how it begins.

First Person Singular

Where do poems go, their shadows fading along the wall, tides breaking across tides, the spent leaf and the bud dovetailed on the branch?

The clouds over China gather, relentless pressures released across the roof tiles in the poorest mountain village, and in Ghana, and in Arkansas, one system, always moving as the planet moves, Earth's elliptic, benchmark floods, record droughts.

Patterns range, repeat, the shadows multiply and the darkness extends through TVs and broadband's puny pulse.

Show me the sun, show me the high range and perpetual velocity, the levers of stars.

The poems without form, yet singular, without appetite, and still we are advantaged.