I scare one off and rip the other,
Drag the dead tree clear for winter wood,
Thinking good things about the dead
That only the blind of soul won’t love.
SPRING IN THE LANGUEDOC
Rows of vines, cleaned up and tended
Like military graveyards in the north;
A magpie horseshoes back in guilty flight
Or at a yellow cartridge in the scrub.
A bee clings early to a flower
As if it might be last year’s flame.
Warm grit under belly: a snake
Takes time to cross the sunny track.
Thyme and sage and olive died by winter
When they pledged undying love through storms and fevers
(Final and official when they said it)
Not knowing that undying love dies soonest.
WAKENING
A stiletto of light insidiosed
morning into the black room
pushed by a man stricken
with medieval pox
galvanized, Vitus-minded,
a jump-reaction to rip
the paysage like a painting into shreds
with halberded hands
when the shutters swing out.
A slight refraction of the haze
mars the hills and villages of dawn:
when I read the Divine Comedy at twenty
I didn’t know that thirty years will
pass before my fingers turn the page
to nightingale and stonechat voices
plaiting their song
into an anthem of the Casentino.
DEPARTURE FROM POPPI
On days of leaving
Flowers come
Rain holds back
Clouds give the sun a chance.
Driving away,
Blue sky fills the rearward mirror
Before a bend is turned.
Paradise draws off, a glint of flowers
Ahead, clouds like robbers gather
To discuss the lay-out of a forest.
Go in, trees starken:
The only land is Travel,
Recalling sun and flowers never met.
LIVING ALONE (FOR THREE MONTHS)
When you live alone
No goldfish or canary to adorn
The baffle between room and sky;
When you live alone –
Reveille out of bed at the alarm:
A dim pantechnicon of dreams
Darkens up the cul-de-sac of sleeping
Suddenly a flower of smithereens;
Do ten-minute jumps so that the heart
Won’t burst at running for a bus:
Bathe;
Set breakfast: appetite’s topography
Of battlefield hurdles, to infiltrate
And leap the parapet to wideawake;
Dump supper et cetera;
Then do your day;
And when dusk threatens
A fresh skirmishing of dreams
You (like a soldier between campaigns)
Devise a meal before lights-out
And bivouac –
When you live like such –
The person that you are turns two
Divides into a body and a voice
One moment stentor and the other glib
(Morality contending: talks
To the stack of flesh that cannot speak)
But only to hear the voice’s tune
Flagging words both ears must listen to:
On the activating of what’s gone
The switching on from plasmic and bewitching times
Where you thought yourself in love but weren’t
Or when you said: I love, but didn’t
Or would, but couldn’t:
But no denying love’s starlined coordinates
Crossing the heart of positively did:
The onrush, the complete positioning
Of being in love, and loved,
When the one same voice and body sang
The breath of passion into memory,
Into death via love –
The faces, her face, the truth
Of love that lasts forever but could not:
Yet giving life along the way
Through mist’s uncertainties
Because it was and did.
Living by yourself, you talk,
Reshaping the heart
To fill the empty spaces
Out of spaces that you one time filled,
Making the alone-day,
Breaking the day like a stone.
HOME
Landfall after the storm, going home through
White waves crumbling along the shore
Like piano keys pressed by invisible fingers,
Blue sky unfeeling what the sea does
To your boat, winds and subtle currents
Insidiously concerting.
Getting safe home through the storm
Provides no harbour or grandmother’s face;
Waves turn you back as in a mirror breaking,
Each cliff falling on the soul
Like an animal with endless teeth.
PEARL
No wonder Job loved God.
He lived. God let him live,
Gave seven score years beyond his testing.
Job knew excoriations on his skin
Catastrophe dimmed one eye then the other.
He bounced words against God
But never despaired.
In gratitude God let him live
With friends and fatted kine
And fourteen thousand sheep.
God tested him, and let him live.
Pearl died without a Book,
Silent words flitting like dust
Till the dust inside her settled.
No winds could fan the dying fire into life,
She felt the dust settling,
Eyes from her wasted head saw the dust falling
And through the dust she saw me,
Cleared it with a smile to say goodbye.
LANCASTER
At twenty-two he was an older man,
Done sixty raids and dropped 500 tons on target
Or near enough. Come for a ride, son:
Hi-di-hi and ho-di-ho, war over and be going soon.
He opened a map and showed the side that mattered,
Thumbed a line from Syerston to Harwell.
Our bomber shouldered up the runway
Cut the silver Trent in May:
Three years in factories
Made a decade out of each twelve-month,
From the cockpit viewing Southwell Minster
Under a continent of candyfloss,
Fields wheatened green recalling
Chaff blown and remaining corn
To soften in my sweetheart’s mouth,
Then into a hedge and crush the dockleaves into greensmear.