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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
.
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.
(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 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)
