the tree full of purple damsons,

the sleeping church.

To send each of you

Ashen and screaming

Stumbling back to the house.

You I can understand

In whose country snakes are mortal danger.

But what can I say of you

that is not perturbing?

Jack snug-in-the-box

Snail, thrush has gone!

Down drawbridge!

The dykes are breached,

the lowlands flood daily.

Up periscope!

Tortoise: lettuce!!

these first two trumpets, cerulean,

a sky Ulysses knew;

then breakfast

and nausea.

Such flowers garlanded Eden.

A specious immortality,

ointment, on the other hand,

a perfumed hope of promised land;

Dionaea’s fringed delights

Dissolve into eternal nights,

But Heaven preserve who into amber’s

Deadly, slow, tectonic clambers

and memories, on one appointed day

at eleven-thirty, when the guard

is changing outside  Buckingham Palace

and office workers are thinking of lunch,

let all buses in London, when (next) they stop,

kneel, put out their ramps and touch the pavement

in memory of me. And then move on.

impales its prey upon a spike

upon a chosen hawthorn tree –

presumably to keep for tea,

while robins, on the other hand,

bounce to and fro upon the land

and there and then, with flaming breast,

the hapless things they catch, ingest.

The blackbird all its adult life

has just one husband or one wife,

spins on one constant ground of choice

the golden figures of its voice,

unlike its cousin, who prefers

a chain of Northern hims and hers

and when the going’s tough takes South

the liquid honey of its voice.

Oh how I wish one day to know

which bird I most resemble, though

I sometimes doubt if (truth to tell)

I could resemble any well.

As I observe the farmyard owl

as it observes the lesser fowl

which one would I, if choice were free,

the eater, or the eaten, be?

Considering how often love

is in my mind, am I a dove?

And then – alas! – I hear me talk

and know that underneath’s a hawk

like that which quarters next door’s field

exploring what the grasses yield,

but even as I think, its prey

plead cogently the other way.

And as I speculate, perplexed,

on what I should consider next

the unpremeditated song

persuades me that to choose is wrong,

that I should think, as Auden’s bird,

such abstract questioning absurd,

yet – is it decent not to give

a single thought to how you live?

To which replies the feathered brood:

“all song is ipso facto good,

and all may soothe the savage beast.”

which does not help me in the least.

in innocence  is love;

vice versa, not: so

Let it be enough

That one of you wears

White socks and trainers.

The gates, under the dark bush,

Entering its lair

As Dragon, Hero

Is the world for a moment,

Falls asleep as Worm.