Unearthly Toys
Page 3
THE SUN
after Baudelaire
Scattered papers wheel through streets where behind the boards
nailed to concrete hovels are lowlifes getting high,
at the hour when the original redoubles
on slate and wheat alike the rage of his beams;
there’s me, alone again, a mental samurai
who scents in the shadows the echoing of words
or stumbles against them as over loose cobbles
or poems preconceived in childhood’s monstrous dreams.
The enemy of sickliness, He who provides,
makes images and roses open at a touch;
dissolving sorrows like the white ships of the sky,
he sweetens brain and hive with golden roubles
and greens the withered cripple on the trunk of his crutch;
he gives to each thing such unburdened blood it seems
a laughing girl, his decree that all souls bud and fly
in the supreme heart where endless Aprils sing;
and when, poet-like, he bathes in city crowds
it’s all that you’d call filth that he ennobles,
entering in turn as an incognito king
the mansions with their piled silence, the locked ward with its screams.
CUTTING CLASS
We slip by the brick estates
patterned like a lizard’s back,
then suburbs where the conifer’s
black flames stand sentinel;
we pass the clipped, uncanny gardens,
pace through the witchcraft
of the giant leaves of planes,
wade against the smoking tide
of insect-faced and swollen cars.
We skirt the sewage works,
cross over the motorway’s grey
cortege to the dark
matter of the countryside –
Egypt’s pylons scanning the fields,
evil spores in the undergrowth,
antennae needling the clouds –
and we just keep on toiling away
from town, setting our sights
on the grace and madness
of burning trees, as far as where
the truant woods dance
in a light that is breaking all the rules,
to the point at which we start to learn
to stand inside the fire.
AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING
The mark of the human is twofold, and consists in his or her relation to both language and the world. Concerning the latter it could be said that a human is one able to experience things at first hand, to see the black claws and the silvery shin where others only think ‘a twig’. This encounter is more terrible than picturesque, more ignorant than knowing; its absence gives us literature. As regards language, the human’s oddness consists simply in a heightened feeling for rhythm and an instinct for the precise – which is to say primordial – word.
A human is just a creature with an unusual capacity for astonishment, and the ability to utter that astonishment in speech that makes no sound.
DARK GREEN
Write this in whiter words but go forth on…
LIBER XXXI
Roars scrawl the night like white words on black paper,
An insect prays aloud, the rainbow anaconda
Illuminates the river as the trembling agouti
Nuzzles a brazil nut in its root-beamed den.
Far from the forest and the flame in each leaf
Other lives go on or seem to, ambling solo
Round sunlit parks filthy with talk and beer;
Each soul forgetting that the green dark holds us, how we
Stumble over its panthers in our sleep, love’s
Touch as wildly silent as a blue-feathered dart.
RETURN
after Jules Laforgue
Earth places History in her deep coat:
farewell, holy and unholy mornings!
Buildings quiver? She merely clears her throat,
a fat lady getting ready to sing.
When you stagger, squinting, from the last night-
club, heads possessed by the last mad anthem,
the beaches are bleak as a used condom.
Children, return to the city of light.
Enough of this ocean whose dismal laugh
has driven the coastlines to breaking point;
an end to the wind that chews your ear off,
to that lame, interminable complaint.
Beneath the grey coffin lid of the skies
you’ve weathered rain with less wit than Noah,
but the time for misery is over.
Children, return to the city of light.
The strange craft of your flesh can take you there.
Somewhere ahead, the wild metropolis
is fatal, melodious, lucid, foursquare.
You will feel your way to the palaces
that have stood untenanted time out of mind,
throw open the shutters, raise the dust;
you have moped in the country long enough.
Children, return to the city of light.
*
Your sleeping forms are not less than divine.
Awaken, amnesiac magicians:
you are gods, take up your true positions.
Children, return to the city of light.
4
Where We Are the Dead
ANTIMIMON
O frondens virga
O greening branch! You stand in your nobility
like the inconceivable inmate of a star:
rejoice, exult and deign to free the fools we are
from the bright shade of the feigned tree of mystery.
Like the inconceivable inmates of a star,
shining with the rising dawn’s calm velocity
through the bright shade of the feigned tree of mystery
where artificers play and none know who they are,
we rise with the shining dawn’s calm velocity
to nibble on the paper leavings of a star.
The artificial lights, no one guesses what they are
and the drugged soul is the true atrocity,
rising to be eaten by a paper-grimaced star.
The bloomed car flames with the soul’s ferocity
but the captured soul is the one atrocity,
not seeing the bough’s come join the grace that you are.
The bloomed car blazes with its sole ferocity
upon the ailing slaves, the city’s brightest star,
no one seeing its come join the grace that you are
conveyed in a gesture that is all charity;
above the limping slaves, the city’s lightest star –
O greening branch! – you stand in your nobility,
saying with a gesture that all is charity:
rejoicing, exulting, freeing the fools we are.
FAKE NEWS FROM NOWHERE
We cannot begin the prison-break
without first convincing our fellow inmates
that they are in a prison at all;
they are incredulous, saying one eats
well on either sausage or steak,
pointing to the forest painted on the wall.
DRONES
You see the Greys, he said, girding his teeth
for a lime doughnut, they use the owl’s
nervous system the way we use a drone
or hidden camera. Given what I now knew,
it almost seemed possible. When green tea
was announced I slid outside for a smoke,
paced roided grass, watched where stained smokestacks smoked
into the wind’s dead breath, its yellow teeth.
Back in the conference centre, the tea-
fresh crowd were pondering the giant owl
that stilled her car on that night when she knew
she knew nothing, its voice a savage drone
terrible to re
call, a rising drone
which turned her body into pixel-smoke
swarming upwards and assembled anew
(‘like I’d been sucked into a white hole’s teeth’)
on that craft that swept as quiet as an owl.
When she arrived home, hours late for tea,
her forehead was marked with a tau cross: T.
She paused, and the air conditioning’s drone
momentarily quickened the cased owl
on the wall, living eyes long gone to smoke,
and shivered through the symmetrical teeth
of love’s lost children (tell us something new!)
who’d come here to share what little they knew.
I thought of the onset of DMT –
that sense of deliverance into the teeth
of a buzzing gleam or luminous drone,
mere seconds after releasing the smoke –
and then of that line from Twin Peaks, ‘the owls
are not what they seem’. I dozed, dreamt of owls
sane and inviolate in all they knew,
and awoke to the guest lecturer: Smoke
and Mirrors, Carl Jung and the Abductee.
With his grey skin, dark clothes and soothing drone
he might have been a priest. I licked furred teeth
clean of dough, grabbed a smoke with my teeth
and headed to where I knew mowers droned.
Love is an owl and it’s having you for tea.
JUNGLIST
And, at its greatest intensity, it is as if
the insane din were in reality the profoundest of silences.
WALTER F. OTTO, DIONYSUS: MYTH AND CULT
To raze the mind is the drums’ one desire.
They chant, in darkness, that light is a grave.
Their speech is the speech of shadow and fire.
Some flicker softly like moths in a jar
but mostly they sing a mechanical rage.
To raze the mind is the drums’ one desire.
We hear them at night, for now from afar,
but picture the woods, the dance and the blaze
where speech is the speech of shadow and fire.
They drum from within, each tap of the heart
disturbing thought and these orderly days.
To raze the mind is the drums’ one desire.
We hear drums bellow, the earth stands ajar
and all its passionate creatures gape:
their speech is the speech of shadow and fire.
Sometimes a frenzy will summon such quiet;
sometimes a rhythm can sound like a fate.
To raze the mind is the drums’ one desire.
Their speech is the speech of shadow and fire.
MATRIX
i Vista
Our sole legacy,
splintered plastic toys litter
the castle precincts.
ii Vernal
In truth, winter won.
The beauty of this season’s
mere apparition.
iii Untitled
He is nobody,
he is unafraid. At dawn,
deep in the gardens.
MUSED
Chinoiserie of the turbulence –
her guys didn’t call it crystalline
for nothing – and the suspended dance
of the shore’s cedar-spelled depths, the nine
miles of dark light between town and town
where the machine of our thought relents
and you see that you are on your own
with this grace that peoples the silence;
on your own but for something that hunts
and sends through the trees a clear glass sound,
a call that scans, such eerie parlance.
It was unwise not to bring your hound.
The frozen air rings, no earthly bell,
shaping in you a deer’s vigilance;
you want to live, to sing; you flee, all
patterned over with sweet arguments.
REIGN
after Verlaine
I used to dream of metaphysical bling
and Persian or papal sumptuosity,
of Sardanapalus and Elagabalus;
I raised with sheer desire a star-tiled ceiling
sustained on the scent of silent melody:
the spiritual joy of the flesh’s endlessness.
Calmer today though hungrier, while
perceiving that true wisdom is to move panther-style,
I loose my madness by reining it in
without one note of surrender in my pace.
So what if the infinite outstrips me at times?
Consign the pleasant to the bargain bin!
God how I despise the presentable face,
the once-daring friend and all credulous rhymes.
WAKING
for Mark Blanco
At the edge of the woods, where reality bites.
At the edge of the woods, with the listening pines.
At the edge of the woods, where a black bird laughs.
At the edge of the woods, where the moss is alight.
At the edge of the woods, where the grasshopper strolls.
At the edge of the woods, where small leaves roar.
At the edge of the woods, where the wind’s a caress.
At the edge of the woods, where thickets cavort.
At the edge of the woods, where the sun bears down.
At the edge of the woods, where the heart is stronger.
At the edge of the woods, where the land is electric.
At the edge of the woods, where everything talks.
At the edge of the woods, where sobriety plays.
At the edge of the woods, where vision is X-ray.
At the edge of the woods, where tales are recalled.
At the edge of the woods, where light is a searchlight.
At the edge of the woods, where the Stone Age shines.
At the edge of the woods, where the wood’s camouflaged.
At the edge of the woods, where the twigs touch the light.
At the edge of the woods, where geometry grows.
At the edge of the woods, in the Gothic era.
At the edge of the woods, where the children are lost.
At the edge of the woods, with the fire salamander.
At the edge of the woods, in the mind’s Alhambra.
At the edge of the woods, where the path is no path.
At the edge of the woods, where the wire is barbed.
At the edge of the woods, where an oak weighs the sun.
At the edge of the woods, where the wood is a dance.
At the edge of the woods, where the mind will roost.
At the edge of the woods, where the pattern is clear.
At the edge of the woods, where eyes are ears.
At the edge of the woods, where the heart is a child.
At the edge of the woods, in an autumnal light.
At the edge of the woods, where a shout gives no sound.
At the edge of the woods, where our hands are empty.
At the edge of the woods, where love has no mercy.
At the edge of the woods, where the fungus gloats.
At the edge of the woods, where teeth are stones.
At the edge of the woods, where the grass is at home.
At the edge of the woods, when you’re so far from home.
At the edge of the woods, where the wolf’s everywhere.
At the edge of the woods, in the unending stare.
At the edge of the woods, where the water is deep.
At the edge of the woods, where the wood knows nothing.
At the edge of the woods, where trees are melodies.
At the edge of the woods, where we eat red berries.
At the edge of the woods, where crickets chant.
At the edge of the woods, where there’s nowhere to turn.
At the edge of the wo
ods, when you know where to turn.
At the edge of the woods, in a still Bacchanal.
At the edge of the woods, where the dead hold hands.
At the edge of the woods, where we are the dead.
At the edge of the woods, in the wood’s arabesques.
At the edge of the woods, where rain is impending.
At the edge of the woods, where pride will crouch.
At the edge of the woods, where the heart howls.
At the edge of the woods, where silence is golden.
At the edge of the woods, where her face gives light.
At the edge of the woods, where the ink’s on our hands.
At the edge of the woods, where tongues are gentle.
At the edge of the woods, where knowledge is weeping.
At the edge of the woods, where the skeleton sings.
At the edge of the woods, where the woods will eat us.
At the edge of the woods, where thistles preen.
At the edge of the woods, where trees are feathers.
At the edge of the woods, where it goes up in smoke.
At the edge of the woods, when our watches slow.
At the edge of the woods, where the drone is of flies.
At the edge of the woods, where the news is of silence.
At the edge of the woods, where the clouds are webs.