Well, my young comrades

who tell me that you do not use the word,

I have lain awake

half this night beside my sleeping love

wondering. And now

as sleep reclaims me and my body aches

I think Love is blind

as a new kitten. What purpose is served?

Do you not wrestle the obdurate angel,

massive as granite,

for a glimpse of truth?

Do you not obsess after beauty?

Then in the name of what? O, I am too old

to deny the claims

of the infant Love God (who I think

Is a lot like you,

untargeted and with a world to win).

Somewhere a pheasant calls, harsh, plaintive.

The sun throws sharp shadows of my fingers between clouds

from the northwest. A leaf hangs by a cobweb, spins in the wind.

Bushes rustle. The surrounding trees chorus our day’s business.

The night’s perfume, the stars, have given way to colour

Heat on my face and shoulder. My fleece warms on the low wall,

the Indian cushions under an exploring fly.

Beyond the washing line, the hammock, across the grass,

the half-seen folly and the unseen pond, birds sing.

In the summer room you load the camera, in the corner of my eye

you photograph the poet at work.

The wind mutters, fingering my pages, ruffling my hair,

lifting my t-shirt. Everything green or growing is touched, responds.

Heat.

I remember California. My thoughts

murmur. The air smells vegetable.

The wind pendulums the long tree-held swing like an invisible grandchild.

The sky slips to slate as it dips behind the trees, then snow, then sea.

You touch my neck as you pass. The plants, the shrubs,

dance to different rhythms in the same wind, as we do.

The tossed tree quiets: no apple falls to lie

with others on the trodden grass, among the tall, vivid daisies.

How long can this last? Winter nears.

I am relearning the seasons

ii

This panorama contains everything:

ramp to the summer room where you write tomorrow’s speech,

shining tablecloth weighted with house bricks,

sheds, trellis, woodpile and compost heap,

vegetable patch with flower pots on blue posts,

flower beds, rough mown grass to the trees,

grey oak pergola, pampas grass at the water’s edge,

hammock, swing, telegraph pole, container, parked car,

neighbours’ pink house, hedge, gate.

A small woven basket dancing as if on water;

against the networked green and brown, tree trunks or twigs,

glimpses of dancing rainbow.

A tiny insect two lines on waits for my verse,

a legged comma masquerading as a full stop.

A dried leaf skitters on the patio, cold fingers stiffen.

What is rehearsed here?

iii

The news, which we have avoided, is not good.

Yesterday we joked of Ragnarok, but a pall of smoke

covers much of Asia. The morning glories echo a past sky,

the wind is shifting to a Northerly, the trees tell

of breakers on a cold shore.

Yet it will turn. Something

will happen.

iv

Sooner or later we must go inside

where the sun, perversely, through the open door

lighting herringbone brick and a wooden chest,

and the profusion of arranged flowers

burgeoning from pots, vases, jugs, with even hanging apples,

speaking of past centuries,

argues from continuity to a future.

Beyond the kitchen window a small bird

flies up into the greenery.

Harlequin and his lover stare over the cat basket.

Music is playing in the next room.

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?

humming with revolution,

sported with daughters of the sun and moon

by forest, by ocean,

and sighed with a passionate adulteress

in a rose garden.

I have disputed with intellectuals

in the Parthenon,

legislated for a great city

when the regime began.

I have read my poems to my darling

beside a broad river,

and talked into the night under the stars

in the summer weather,

and I have been happy ever after

married to my lover.

All this – and at your wake, Richard,

I cried for me and cried for you -

reminded of all we haven’t done

and all that we will never do.

Something wakes her,

straining at the cobalt night to hear

a sound, an intimation, need. The light

puts thought on hold;

the moonscape that she sometimes knows is hers:

she is moon-cold.

Outside is sapphire,

and the pools sea at dusk, where the sun dips

round ruined promises.

She is all ears

straining the silence; she is a cat

in a high tree;

the wind

comes to her whispering:

set me free

like a child

she must still her heart to hear:

search for me

and she will

that is what it means, Muse:  searcher,

midwife, surrogate.

Harlequin moon

On the day Punch and Judy

renewed their marriage vows, he

went to the neighbourhood watch,

took leave to care for Baby,

and poured away all the Scotch.

The moon, dumbfounded, turned first

this colour, then that; settled

for harlequin. Mr Punch

In his new guise as Pierrot

took a job in the movies,

met a starlet over lunch,

spent the afternoon in bed:

the moon turned back to silver.

New moon

for Ted Burton, opthalmic surgeon

First the analysis, instruments modern and complicated,

assistants measured over weeks charting its motility.

Then, on an ordinary day, to his work

where the familiar preparation cleansed body and mind

for a final analysis,

all his experience brought to bear on the crazed surface,

searching its secrets

from which he might judge and refine his judgement.

Next, the chemicals

no more than necessary to make the glaze malleable

and patience while it worked, whispering to the picture:

with a scalpel the delicate business of loosening,

slipping into the junction, prying it from paint,

little by little, bathing the revealed surface,

reborn to the light and vulnerable, in a protective bath while he worked.

Time passed.

And, the raw pigments made to withstand light’s blinding and bleaching,

fixing to this old marvel

a benign lens through which sight could be perfected,

he straightened to assess his work………

Not like torn Acteon, Phaeton fallen

Into the sun, drowned Icarus;

he did not aspire so high as to see

himself each revelation of the new world;

a single glimpse was his and enough, like the Patriarch,

And perhaps to die peacefully, in his own bed.

 moon at rest

On one such perfect summer day

when the pale moon travels a deep blue sky

and our cats are sleeping in the house

dreaming of rabbit and of mice

and butterflies bask on the thistle heads

and a soft breeze ruffles the water reeds,

when the apple tree is weighted down

and the pheasant watch the ripening corn,

carry my ashes to the compost bins

and there, with family and friends

your audience and chorus, pour

onto that gentler, nourishing fire

the little that was once a man

where the long green grass snakes nest and sun

The sun neon red lost to the horizon,

the world’s rim stained red with it,

the air chill after the city.

(And why did I never live

in that remote farmhouse

with my thoughts and the four winds,

The radio is my familiar

the news, Stravinsky, Pergolesi:

the dawn hides behind my hand.

Or across the border in Canada

or Oregon in a tepee

anonymous, careless and profligate?)

But I will breakfast with Caroline

and write to several charities,

and throw myself on the mercy of the court,

Scant of breath and defying augury

2              Square Dreams

“Judith;” I said “This is for children.

Create me a Chair in Ontology,

Catastrophe and the Human Psyche.”

So she murmured in the Dean’s ear;

the alumni had a whip round:

I own a Porsche and service graduate students.

Yet despite appearances

I am little the wiser.

3              Madonna

Distracted, she dandled a Putti

who put out his tongue and a large member,

hot-bricked, lay on the floor laughing:

woke in a muck-sweat, trembling,

smelling the pit. Prayer

was mother: Hush, all is well.

And all is well, she thought,

packing her few belongings, remembering

the narrow bed, the small high window.

Jack snug-in-the-box

Snail, thrush has gone!

Down drawbridge!

The dykes are breached,

the lowlands flood daily.

Up periscope!

Tortoise: lettuce!!

where my father fed

is my destiny.”

the salmon said

to the sun, as it leapt

from the river bed

where the gravel kept

its ancient watch

and the live eggs slept

that the young fish hatch,

and the boy catch sight

in the liquid ditch

of the fry’s flash, bright

as a sixpence spun

in the morning light.

And his heart’s undone,

as the salmon start

their marathon,

but the salmon’s heart

and the growing boy’s

are a world apart

from the constant noise

in the salmon’s brain

of the ocean’s poise

to the soft refrain

that the youth repeats

as he casts again

till the arc completes

in the blameless sky

and the soft deceits

of the gaudy fly

take the creature’s eye.