TITANIC'S COAL STOKERS

 

What were they singing 

the Titanic's coal stokers?

What did they choir along

in the steam engine while shoveling 

coal on end amid screams, 

expletives and sailor jokes?

What were they humming

larksome soaked in rills of sweat, 

ale and eating beef stew, plum

pudding like ravenous gannets?

Were they guided finally 

by Virgil as a lodestar

while walking through 

the last and eternal

flames of their lives?

What did they ever sing 

somewhere in the waiting room 

to the Other Side? 

I hear their hobnail boots tapping

a rag-time on the flooded floor.

REPARTO SUEÑO, 1975

 

A child is

(still not an exile

not a failed bard not 

a kind of eternal castaway)

 skipping ropes at sunset

in his native home patch

 called Sueño 

 

Reparto Sueño 

a child 

collecting silver caps 

of milk bottles earthworms

 blue marbles pick-up sticks 

like coins to pay for daydreaming..

another kid in the shade

of a flowering mango tree

still expects his father

from a far-off war

like a dog mourning

its master by his grave

A red sun hangs

on the sea-scented horizon

glittering like a goldfish

in a plastic bag.

                   ©,Celia Washington, 1983

HEMLOCK

 

Here I am in this garret

where no insulting light

could glimmer on

my endless guffaw

like taking a curtain call

and bowing down

to be acknowledged

by an audience of ghost-

like beauties

in broad morbidezza

as if I had drunk a swig of hemlock

along with Keats and suddenly

the blue-green waves of poetry

 had broken at last into words

don't tarry long beside my gloom

LACRIMAE RERUM

 

"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 up the ground of my mind.

Tears of things like dew drops

on the bones of springtime

picked clean by the moon.

(the memory 

lost by the moon

is mine)

Tears of things 

sparkling like stars,

the stars are tears

of the unknown

forever.

BESOS DE HIERBABUENA

“El mundo
-hoy levemente bélico-
Sin embargo huele
A besos de hierbabuena.
No conozco a esos labios
Que prodigan esos besos
Brujos(como diría un tango)
Sólo sé que rompen
En todos los vencidos
En todos los melancólicos
Como un oleaje lento y musical
Como un masaje que cura
Todo el dolor de vivir
O mentir.
Sólo sé que esos labios existen
Como uno tiene la certeza
De que hay agua en Marte
O nenúfares en la luna.
Dicen que Helena
Sólo era una sombra,
Que la verdadera Helena
Estaba en Egipto riéndose
de los verdaderos aqueos…
De ahí que mintiera el Bardo.
Yo no mentiré.
Yo no diré que besé a esos labios
Ni siquiera que existen.
Sólo sé que el mundo
-hoy levemente bélico-
Huele a sus besos de hierbabuena.
Y no a humareda de batallas o ambiciones.
Besos que curan cual esponja de vinagre
Todas las heridas visibles o invisibles.
Besos cuyo aroma adormece a las hienas
O enternece a los usureros.
Besos que uno puede contemplar
Como a un vuelo de golondrinas
O a un dibujo de Matisse…
Besos de hierbabuena,
Besos de hierba mojada por esa lluvia
Que ahora cae en Herculano
Poco antes de la erupción del Vesubio…
Poco antes de yo despertar…

BEES

 

When I was a child a dense swarm of bees

Poured into my mouth pure forest honey.

So it happened to 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)

SUNDAY, 4/05/2025

 

I cried the louder at birth

so loud that all the hollow deep

of Hell resounded...

but I was not orphan like Oliver Twist

in Pentonville, London. 

Just 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.

II

Dear mum, you already rest

in some melodious plot of beechen green

guarded by rain-soaked crows

and squirrels in Hampstead Heath.

Your ashes glowing as a constellation

of fresh stars or a new moon goddess.

Oftentimes the Constable's white horse

gallops by neighing your name.

Something in the aroma of your name

calls the scent of wild moors in its mind.

I smell the aroma grazing along

with the horse, now cantering in blue.

And the world outside stop mattering.

METAPHYSICS OF THE SHADOW

    

  

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

sat upon a rock in Montségur

but his shadow rushed back

to his lofty mansarde in the old Paris.

FLASHES

 

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.

*

 (Venus Anadyomede)

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.

*

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.

*

A scarecrow wrapped

in a military overcoat

received the splashdown

of prison vans and lorries

passing by. 

                     A symphonic rain

caressing wheatfields

                                        and roadkill.

The sky is like a mauve notepaper

where a solitary swallow

scribbling a ghazal is observed

by caravan of gypsies

and lovers just about to elope.

*

Whatever the wolves

      Think of rain

           So do I.

BEHOLDING THE LONDON GLOOM FROM THE OVERGROUND....(SUNDOWNER)

 

'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

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.

BAREFOOT

 

The uneventful life of a poet

barefoot in soiled dungarees

deadheading carnations

first thing in the morning

trying to balance the scales

of justice and madness.

Satiated his magpie need

for shiny words

he leaned a ladder

against an invisible wall

to climb for his shadow

stolen by the dimming stars.

He hears goat-bells

from a violet distance,

the rustling of some cypress

that godly seems

to hallow the morning

crowned by a sun

forever in childhood

forever in gold.

PASTORAL

 

An old van rusting away

by an elm-lined footpath,

a cat stares at me bemused

like someone seeing a ghost.

A dray horse weary near

an old stone trough

bites a beam of sunshine,

huffs and puffs at hearing

my sighs.

There is an apple tree nearby

a honeycomb of irate bees

there is a beetle corpse dragged

by ants on a straight line

there is a din of merry birds

circling above

and the sudden sight of a naked

maiden riding a deer

there is the hermit's ramshackle hut

where I'll be kipping for a while

over the dead leaves

a brownish skull as a pillow

a firefly as a lover.

*

Like a salesman 

who sells pure mornings 

never stained by polluted cities

venal glories,

I sat over an oak stump

to bargain with the stars above

my next cloak of invisibility:

there hardly I am but I am

at least bedazzled

by the flying squirrel

about to jump

upward to the moon.

(2007)

LETHOLOGICA*

 

Like a moth buzzing around a flower

as she can't alight on a word. 

(Virginia Woolf)

I cannot find the right word

to define my present station of life.

Maybe quietus, maybe oddling.

Oddling crow in the quietus

of a back and forth existence.

The right word is a moth flitting

around the light we'll never see

for good. The right word is

like Democritus in his garden

laughing off for nothing

while tending black roses.

*The inability to remember a particular word or name.

SHADE

 

 

I do well in the shade  near the hydrangeas

and my dreaming cat   without the tyranny of the sun

spotlighting everything I do well.

Only the violet shade can shine

all this black brooding from the spirit,

the wishfulthinkingness of life.

A true poet is a hawker crying out

to sell the goods of his soul knowing

that only the Devil can afford them.

.  

ASHES

 

my own ashes well kept

 in a transparent urn

of heartwood and amber.

Shall I scatter them from a cliff

in Patmos or maybe in Corfu?

perhaps they might turn into a white trireme

 sailing away to the sun. Perhaps

I'll be expecting so long for the arrival

that a war in Troy will break out again; 

this time Priam would be the victorious one

and Ulysses crushed by his own wooden horse.

and Helen up to the creek sick of Paris

would end up jumping on the white trireme

seaworthy for the distant Egypt.

 patiently patiently I'd be expecting: the world

has defeated me but not the freedom

of my wandering ashes.

A LETTER (VIRGINIA WOOLF TO VITA SACKVILLE-WEST)

(MONK'S HOUSE, RODMELL, 1933) 

The downs sizzle across the marsh

with all the dust and ashes of my brain.

I hold a green parasol to deflect the sunrays

scorching like embers of my last sensual dreams.

I could write oodles of volumes about the lives

I lived out in just one second of this silence

to finally celebrate the heat fainting

among the dahlias, near a vagabond

kipping under a gooseberry bush.

I lay flat on the grass at Leonard's feet,

follow the flight of a white owl

crossing the meadow to Brighton.

My white owl soaring above cornfields, blue wagons;

my black spaniel barking the sheep away.

A draught of digitalis is slowing my pulse.

Who brought home this great jar of oleanders?

You? Don't remember...

An Emperor moth hovers over their heady aroma

blended into the smell of rain.

Reading Jane Austen's letters by a log fire

She died at 42, the best to come

Leonard has turned on the wireless: 

Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring...

Asheham Cement is now all noise and smoke by day

and light by night. The Rite of Progress...

...I miss your presence

in the green fields of Kent, dancing high

on cider, hashish and Lady-bits.

Still spinning with the last night shindy:

dressed up as Queen Victoria on her wedding night

I fell into the arms of the Prince Consort

suddenly turned by charm into a black savage

of Mauritania in the nude. Halfcut he whispered:

"I want to film The Waves"

The outcome upon the royal blood

has yet to be discovered.

The thrushes sing. Leonard is pruning the fig tree,

and Violet Trefusis sent me a bunch of lilacs.

I like her drinking brown ale in purple satin.

How can I smooth out all the glooms of late?

Miss you, Donkey, I want pink towers, green follies,

moats and swans, one tireless bull pacing

up and down.  You, in shorts. Me with no garters,

no undergarments, my gingerous muff pearled with dew

blossoming in your mouth.

No more digitalis. No more Spanish wine.

Ah it was the sight of your gaiters

that inspired Orlando

("the gaiters and what lies beyond")

as the sight of the violet socks

 of Fabrizio del Dongo

flared up the passion in Madame Sanseverina.

I write all this twaddle while travelling books

on the way to Sussex

My teacher is called Bianca Weiss. I am learning

the language of love and dolce far niente

Tell me, amore, what are you doing in New York?

Do you like Blacks as Nancy Cunard is fain to do?

Did a handsome one make love to you ever?

London is so quiet, one hears a man

blowing his nose in Kensington High Street.

Almost dreamily I write Flush, a silly book, a joke,

O write me long letters on violet scented paper.

Flush is black in the novel though was red in real life.

You are always mauve in dreams.

Please, darling, ask me to Sissinghurst.

Ask me to be off in my car to Italy.

Ask me to be one of those virgins you deflower

and make them the most awesome flowers in Pink Tower.

Now I must take a bath, all lust and ink stained.

Must dress and take a hamson cab to a dinner in Pall Mall...

Did I tell you I'm going to be painted naked by a woman

who says I am the image of Lilith?*

Did I tell you my notion of Heaven is mushrooms?

Did I tell you I have a marmoset that nibbles on my ear,

lecherously bites my nipple?

Would you ring me up to Lewes 385 soon?

Though your voice in the telephone

is a leaf in the breeze.

Send me a basket full of quinces afresh.

*Ethel Walker (Scottish artist, 1861-1951)

.                   Ethel Walker, Lilith, 1916

POEM

 

I love my empty life 'cause 

also empty are the haunted houses

where the dead saunter around

with breeze-like feet and voices

of drizzle tapping on the windowpanes.

In the lounge of my empty life

I am sitting on a bidet of lapislazuli

reading Joyce surrounded by unicorns 

that mistook my self for the Virgin:

 they approach and sip dewdrops

 in the mossy well of my hands.

I pet their horns of white erectness.

The lounge of my empty life is infinite

like the Universe and Circe's laughter.

It has no walls but the sea and the horizon.

It has no light but glowworms 

and your eyes, Maria. 

Lumière mariale 

It has no windows but words

 overlooking ravines

where cranes, bats and sloshed angels

 alight on.

Love my empty life where gracefully

I riff on the piano without knowing 

how to play at all... And listen to myself

as to the most perfect rendition

of a Beethoven's sonata:

a brief sonata of violet waves 

breaking into 

                       deserts of vast eternity. 

POEM

Alone

At the edge

 of my manifold shadow

I saw the light

That I'll never see

(Lumière mariale)

All boasting truth

Ends up like those

lettuce leaves wilted 

in the shopping trolley 

Consider the lilies

 of my turd 

POEM

The March robin song

 signalling my renaissance

 from the last defeated

 renaissance.

No more words 

that shine

 like a prop sun 

on the horizon. 

Ah the beauty 

of the ubi sunt moment.

The beauty 

of a suited-up minister

playing a tuneful recorder

to a beggar in the street.

Goodbye

to the hectoring tone

Of my voice 

at any old stone

lion in West End. 

The wooden fish 

that Buddhist monks

Beat during the prayers

Is my life.

Once in many a dream

I hear their Sutra 

enlightening

the many ways

 to the blue Void.

Somewhere in the past

lay all the meaning

of our next soul.