"Sunt Lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt"
(Virgil, Aeneid, Book I)
Tears of things are gleaming
in the darkness of memories.
Camellia, cherry blossoms
fill the ground of my mind.
Tears of things like dew drops
on the bones of springtime
picked clean by the moon.
(the memory
that the moon lost
is mine)
Tears of things
sparkling like stars,
the stars are tears
of the unknown
forever
When I was a child a dense swarm of bees
Poured into my mouth pure forest honey.
So it happened with Isidore of Seville
when he was just a nipper, legend says.
Everyone expected of me the eloquence
Of a saint in Damask, a rethorician in Athens.
But nobody, not even my mother knew
About those bees having already sipped
into the white asphodels down in Hades ,
into the delusive oleanders in Arcadia.
Nobody expected of me to be a poet,
a secret polisher of words, the amanuensis
of the invisible...
I still can listen their humming on my lips.
(2006)
I cried the louder at birth
but I was not orphan like Oliver Twist
in Pentonville, London.
Though twisted I was
brought into this world,
sired by the sullen glare
of tropical sunsets.
I cry now -even louder-
at my mother's ascent
into the unknown as a skylark
from a garden of blue roses
by the sea.
I saw her soaring embracing the sun.
Pindar said
a man is just a dream
of his shadow
I am the nightmare
of my walking shadow
not even sure
it's mine.
*
Plotino refused to be
portraited because his self
was only the shadow
of his platonic prototype.
The shadow of a shadow
of a shadow of a shadow...
And the last shadow just
a seagreen twinkle
in my cat's gaze.
*
Sat upon a rock in Montségur
stronghold of the hapless
Cathars and songful birds
the poet aligned his heart
to the sun in summer solstice
The poet became one of the Perfecti:
his shadow went back to his loft
in the old Paris in Montmartre.
Wild geese
where are you going now?
Sweet day not to alight
where the clan of hyenas
drink at sunset.
*
the past is not a foreign country
the past is already my country
for good. A country with no flag
other than laughter and the erect
phallus of an African god.
*
(The birth of Venus)
She sprung like a goddess
from the whirling froth
of dream-seascapes
He stepped into her glance
with the randomness
of a fallen card
following the saline fragance
of her vellus hair
She embraced him with a touch
of a dolphin playing around
dissolving him
in the sunblind waves.
*
Etiolated like a daffodil
trodden upon by footfall and rain
I was in a cafe
of the station concourse
but the last glance
she gave me at leaving
became a robin redbreast
in the garden
staring at me with hope.
*
I am a mortal who made love
with a goddess
and must die
and will never know
the goddess'name.
*
Don't bite again
the wrong side of the apple
-said the Sphinx squatted
in the middle of a vast desert
among the italianate ruins
of my mind
A sandstorm coating
her lion-wise head
*
The dogs scenting me.
I am already a wolf.
Maybe the moon.
*
like Anaxagoras I point to the stars
as my native home
even beyond the dark matter
*
All day long
I've been smelling deep
the moonshiny aroma
of jasmine trellises.
All night long
I've been smelling deep
the jasmined aroma
of the moonlight.
*
Odd times
I write to God
and she replies to me
in form of dancing cranes.
'He triumps now, the dead,
Beholding London's gloom'
(Lionel Johnson)
Beholding the London gloom
from the overground
bound to Gospel Oak.
There is a beam of fickle sunlight
that glares onto the buildings plateglass
a succession of drystone walls
with all the verdigris
of centuries and drizzles.
*
Komorebi
-so call the Japanese
the sunbeams filtered through the trees.
I want to be called Komorebi, Komorebi,
even the tender sound of the word
subdues the clicketyclack of the train
alighting on West Hampstead.
Call me Komorebi, Anne, when I am already home
with your favourite Jaffa cake and white carnations.
Conatus
-so called Spinoza the strength
driving each human being to carry on...
Carry on in this gloominess, Jo,
keep at watching those strands of light
along the bridges and fences.
But how could I avoid watching all that knackered
people in tracksuits and elegant suits?
How can I get rid of that voices chewing
like cows trite and rain-streaked words?
How can I turn all that mud into memorable light?
I can listen outside the leaves
of the ash trees hissing in the wind.
I can see a posse of thugs that pull
a mooney to the train passing by.
I can see a pigeon pecking at a dog-end.
Carry on, mental Jo, sing along with the rain
pitter-patter on the cobblestones.
"Something will turn up"
-says Wilkins Micawber
with his eye-glass and walking stick
waving at me a silk hankie from a park bench.
I smirked him back.
Disabused of reality, down-trodden by hope...
Carry on, mental Jo, ya scum of the earth
enlisted to drink, ya closet poet, dotty low-lifer,
man up and stop nursing the same flummery moans...
*
A smell of deep-fry
cast my reveries away.
Still don't know
if I got off at Gospel Oak
or rather at a purple desolate
seaside in Devon at dusk.
The barefoot poet walks carelessly
over the last shards of his wisdom:
crimson, green, blue, yellow shards
glinting by the autum gloam.
Far from bleeding his feet sing out
all the paths he never wandered
all the paths he is just traversing
all along the next life.
