Unearthly Toys

by Ned Denny

against the counterpressure of that light

  and slow until a hypersonic stillness

  has him drop, a stone shaped like a heart,

  it’s as though you step into a green rain

  of envy of those whose smile is no disguise,

  wondering that your chest’s flagrance

  isn’t instantly reduced to a spent black wick.

  You thought you got love but your thoughts were

  simulacra, a counterfeit delight,

  for what idea can cage the pace of the kiss

  you pursue in dreams and trace in art;

  she has stolen your blood’s loving refrain,

  nabbed her sweet self, has purloined the very skies

  and in so doing’s left a dunce

  caressing thin air to the soundtrack of a tick.

  You’re no longer the fat controller

  of yourself, squinting from a tourist’s height,

  since you glanced into those eyes where all joy is;

  as mirrors hold death and life apart

  they disclosed your second self, free of pain

  as a meat suit is nipped at by shoals of sighs;

  you’re shut out from your days, as once

  Narcissus was undone by his own biopic.

  You’d wash your hands of her and all her

  kind – whose ways are at ease, whose touch is light –

  vowing that just as you once sang her wholeness

  now your branching tongue shall flick and dart,

  seeing how they close their ranks and disdain

  to aid one who shakes in her dawn air, who dies

  into the vast clairaudience

  in which each opened tree receives an old magic.

  And in such things, alight under fur,

  she shows herself to be a dame alright,

  not resting content with the bland park that is

  permitted by that celestial fart

  but reaching for the fruit that fires the brain;

  I’m afraid that you’re a joke in her bright eyes,

  roped to the cliff of appetence

  with no companion but the music of your pick.

  Grace is gone from the world, you aver,

  yet what have you ever known but this night

  in which the sainted mother of our riches

  has been replaced by a doll, a tart,

  a bulb-eyed changeling whose synthetic reign

  is the false light, a grim tree, which if you’re wise

  enough to unspell appearance –

  now’s the time – you’ll know for the shade that makes us sick.

  Your tame prayer is just a verbal blur

  wholly failing to manifest your ‘right’

  to her who can be the riskiest mistress –

  the cyclone her voice – so why not start

  a trilled silence, burn books, begin again;

  let death be the force that you ventriloquise,

  that end which is the newborn dance

  danced in exile by those who are so slain they’re quick.

  GAZELLE

  And let me die before my death!

  HENRY VAUGHAN, REGENERATION

  There are some who insist on voicing the dusk

  without first silently drinking the dusk.

  A line of bared trees is a line of adepts,

  their delicate fingers playing the dusk.

  To legislate on the progress of souls!

  As preposterous as outlawing the dusk.

  The seer who ministers to his people

  makes an honest living climbing the dusk.

  The loss of their minds was due to the music

  heard by the scientists mapping the dusk.

  ‘This water is no right but should be paid for,’

  said the ceo, packaging the dusk.

  Thought is an ape but the heart’s a gazelle

  God murders to aid in your feeling the dusk.

  When you pack and you ship to your off-world home,

  make sure you don’t forget to bring the dusk.

  The genuine poem as much as a skull

  is a living room containing the dusk.

  To ease that despotism of the eye,

  perhaps it’s a matter of being the dusk.

  A girl with no head is a day-sized bird,

  one blue wing the dawn and one blue wing the dusk.

  All six hundred and sixty-six channels

  simultaneously defaming the dusk.

  A soul from afar in miraculous dress,

  you have to lose your name to sing the dusk.

  ANNUNCIATION

  She is attacked one bookish day

  for no discernible reason

  by a beautifully dressed man.

  She admires the velvet collar

  of his elegant coat

  as he launches himself at her with both hands.

  She observes the stitching of his boots

  as he kicks her

  in the face with all his might.

  O he left me kneeling in a garden,

  my hands filled with blood

  and each dark cell alight.

  MAY

  birds in immaculate trees

  gossiping of God

  his outrageous ways

  ODE (SEMILANCEATA 312)

  in hoc signo vinces

  Each one laughs because it is itself all of her, the

  real substantial presence of her eternal temper,

  ecstatic in an equally serene and raving ease.

  Come to me my lost ones and I will make you antic

  that long-unwatched song warbles from the bony dust,

  not just the whole imagination’s manumission

  in thistle-starred fields but – feel! – the wrists’ virtuosi.

  Praise to the lance-snapping folk of the blood, praise the deep

  pouring its dark weather on our brains, the Phrygian cap

  lifted in snide greeting when the constant moon is full

  (each a child of the feral Word, each the freedom pole

  seen by leaf-bearded Rip beside the strange-eyed houses

  on the dreaming green). Praise to the disordered, those who

  find the broadcast wine repugnant as the sluggish loaf,

  the ones – Nature loves courage – who’ll tune to the forest

  her science builds, she who unlocks the night with the feath-

  er of an owl. Praise her sky-wide incarnation, praise

  goddess almighty in the black guise of a dog

  or the earthbound earth-transcending tree, praise the holy No

  dealt out without regret to the brethren of the dead;

  death rends each breath in the empire that’s not ended,

  except in that unalone apocalyptic peace

  subsequent to the sacrament, Sophia’s glowing kiss

  silencing the virtual serpent’s televised hiss.

  ERA

  I bought it because of the backwards ‘s’ and the teeth of the mouth, the jagged lip: DADDIES FAVOURITE SAUCE. He’d unearthed it in the seventies. It cost me a pound or a fiver. ‘An error. Unusual. “Under the radar”’. His wink made me think of the interloper, of things renewed, of things reversed. The glass was the clearest, palest blue.

  When I handed it over, a bird called from the garden – this is just as it happened, I have it here – and you read it as DAD DIES. That made me cry. That made me wonder.

  FAERIE

  I sing of Times trans-shifting…

  The space between two seconds is our palace,

  the fire where we thumb our noses at the world

  and chatter in tongues with all the lost boys and girls

  (before you were born, you had another face

  that the nothing between words mouths back to you

  or you glimpse in the darkness between two pines,

  the face that can slip in and out of time).

  The colours seem brighter, the sky more blue

 
; and the white milk thick when our city alights

  in the copse on the outskirts of the village,

  when we reappear at the close of an age

  to rattle the panes of your double-glazed minds.

  The kaleidoscopic head of the bee knows us

  and the tree that is dancing yet does not move

  and those retuned to the frequency of love.

  It is time to say goodbye to the circus,

  to come and disport in serious wonder

  in the pixellated precincts of our queen.

  We are here. Our joy is to trouble your sleep.

  The prison falls; the dawn comes up like thunder.

  EXILES

  after the Old English

  The outsiders will be blessed, will move in the ways of the Measurer, though for now they tread with their bare hands the wailing roads of the cities, the just and preordained tarmac of their exile. Or so we tell ourselves, mindful of the unspeakable, the cut-glass tones of the killing machines, the person under the train. Take thought, take thought. How often have we, alone, in the God-charged hour near dawn, lamented with the light lamenters, the callers of His names from tree to shivered tree. But where can we tell of this, who can we show our dreams? Nowhere and no one, for the treasuries of our brains are weapon-hung: grenades in silver filigree, electric batons curiously-wrought, the drone with beaked or dragon’s face. We are wiser than to unleash these, rather feeding on the venom we secrete. When our hearts beat, they scream thug life. Yes, ever since that hour when we buried our angel, when we covered her with flowers and a sick rain fell in that open face and mad as a wood in winter we spread out over the land’s slow waves: the naked, the twisted, the solitaries.

  The wealth we seek is love, kinship, the house lit with joy; sorrow at our sides like a twin, a cowled advisor. We move along exile’s spiralling trail, the thicket track, avoiding the bright avenues of the cold-at-soul, the gold-dazzled, the droolers after praise. We remember she who taught us, the feast of our union, the silenced transmissions from mind to delighted mind. Sometimes, our sorrow turned to sleep, we hold and kiss her radiant face, taking in our own paws those lithe and slender hands. And then to wake to the ruinous shore, the blonde-eyed seagull primping its whiteness, only the snow’s caress! All our longings rise again as the vision redescends, snatched by memory’s currents, sinking through the deeps. We have ridden down that wild sea’s thread, and we are weary; the dead can speak, and we do not understand them.

  The sacred, sentient, all-encompassing earth – this blissful inferno, this blazing paradise, this pure bone-fire, this nether heaven – is the place where every scheme fails and falls. Can a man be thought wise until death itself has shaped his face? The loud mead-hall is in the ground with all its laughing voices. Dwelling on that, the dark mind reels. Hear, then, our warrior code: study patience; stay cool, fool; use a word with the same reluctance that you would a blade; see through the gleaming hoardings; move as though crossing a frozen river, as one who perceives his doom in each dilating cloud and each gesturing tree; identify your real enemy; know happiness and sadness as figments of the mind; hold fast to the ancient ways; be gentle as the animals and a bastard when you must. We know that this swollen world’s trillions will soon return to air, that the ivy’s gleeful melody will play over glass and steel; buddleja on the runways, silence on the airwaves, these sleek and new-minted man-shells rusting in their mounds. And every soul now joined in breath having met its end alone: taken by the raven, asked by the grey wolf to dance, sent up the winding path to where the river springs. So they were destroyed before and will be again and again, the strongholds that we build to shutter out the light.

  The contemplative, the self-taught, those who can cast a third eye over this Gotham globe, we do not forget the slain. O my love, where are they, where are they going, I ask not in sorrow but wonder. Where music once flowered is a wire-topped wall, the pace of black-clad mercenaries with peaked and snake-badged caps. Weapons thirst for blood, not men; once built, they will have their meat. Day falls, night rises, weird storm-clouds bloom. A winter readies its assault, ice prepares its curfew. The fatal sky will unpick the ties of enemies and friends, unbind the body’s ligaments, unweave the banknote’s cunning mesh and the very cloth of love. And we – hermits of the grim estates, exiles in our own domain, aristocrats of the wordless – set our feet in the igneous heavens and our sights on the holy ground.

  TREMOR

  One, reports said, rushed

  from the room in terror,

  was struck on the head

  and instantly killed

  by a lump of falling

  masonry. Another, we heard,

  dropped three floors

  in a porcelain bath

  to rest, regal, amongst

  the smoking ruins,

  amazed at her own

  nakedness. And a third

  was thrown (along with

  his bed) into the open

  arms of a tree, descended

  into a new world.

  3

  The Sun

  CLOUD

  Such translucent seethe and coil

  this architectural flow

  self-weaving unweaving cobweb

  wizard melting intricacy

  wild celestial engine

  revolving inward and outward now

  moth-light beckoner

  to the sun beneath the soil

  imperial feathered gentlest strutting

  over the stricken the rotten

  disturbance in the ringing blue

  desert of the mind

  proceeding at the pace

  of what we have forgotten

  NATURE & ART

  after Goethe

  Though they seem to be different, Nature and Art –

  if clearly seen – are a single growth.

  Me, I no longer make the distinction;

  seeking neither, I embody them both.

  The whole arcanum’s pure-minded intent,

  the hours you give to the extinction

  of all that’s truly unintelligent

  and blackens the tree that glows in the heart.

  Such is the rule of self-cultivation:

  they who imagine themselves to be free

  may eyeball but never tread the white peak,

  the far-shining pole of those who speak

  of constraints that make a space for mastery.

  To align with the Law’s liberation.

  MINING FOR BONE

  A natural resource of my own,

  this wealth of bone

  below the skin,

  this pale mineral

  the blood has hoarded.

  So far I have managed

  only needles, idols,

  have trudged through caves

  where beasts were praised.

  I’ll persevere. I’ll tunnel deep,

  raise whole cities;

  it is a rich seam.

  ARLES

  You arrive in February, the darkness

  of Paris forgotten in the sheer light

  of fresh snowfall, the black outlines of trees

  like Japanese script in whitened gardens.

  It is near, the strange harvest of your life.

  You make a study of an old woman,

  receive a visit from some friendly men

  who also paint, are struck by the darkness

  of the local girls, find somewhere to live.

  By April, the damp orchards are alight –

  they sign to you across broken gardens –

  with the upraised flames of transfigured trees.

  In September, you sit amongst the trees

  and watch as a blank-faced man and woman

  shuffle their way through the public gardens,

  the blue firs bristling with lupine darkness.

  You are able to take a child’s delight

  in everything, seeing it all alive

  (innocent of your
gimcrack afterlife,

  the Vincent erasers and mousemat trees

  arrayed in the giftshop’s shadowless light).

  Your business is the salvation of man,

  to wash from our eagle eyes the darkness

  that stops us knowing ourselves in the Garden,

  that keeps us pacing the madhouse garden.

  You paint the blaring sun, broadcasting live

  from the galaxy’s wild hub of darkness.

  You are drawn to the cypresses, those trees

  whose ominous figures resemble men

  in their spiralling journey up to light.

  You write of the ‘blue depth’ where the starlight

  coils, of the jewels of that high garden;

  you show no sign of the desperate man

  who will voice the desire not to live,

  illuminating this place of trees

  where all’s defined by a sinuous darkness.

  *

  When old men die, you said, they go on foot to light

  from the darkness of these gardens.

  We learn how to live by watching the trees.