Why

I was the tiny living lung
of the Earth.
I was breathed briefly,
its exhalation
and we were one.

What more can I say?
Love paved the way
before I came,
the planets wanted some sun.

The universe awoke
and it wanted us to know:
an exaltation to time, and sums.

A Poem for My Sister

From so painful a beginning
come endless forms
most beautiful
and most wonderful....

Slapped into softness
by a loving hand,
you're the girl who saved
a homeless cat,
its back like a time-trodden
council flat fag-pocked rug.

You nurtured it to health 
and it lived for ten more years.

You became the girl
who'd be the apple of
the world's eye: kind
to the elderly, talkative
to anybody. Beaten 
by bullies' jealousy:

your looks a poor veneer
for them to rag on,
but your soul - the thing
they so coveted and wanted
to spoil - remained pure
inside that airy-light grace of yours.

And now you're an auntie.
You'll be a good auntie.
You'll be a mother one day.
And you can prove your own
worth.

But what of me?
What do I do?

Well this is it.
Here's a little piece of me.
Take it. It's of no use
to me anymore.

You can't break a gift:
the gesture echoes on
for ever.

For the Four-Fold Man

Blake, Blake, burning bright!
in the forests of the night!
What eternal hand or eye
dare form the Tyger of thy mind?

What the hand? What dread feet
did make the mind which four-fold sees?
And in what raging furnace hour
came the hammer to forge thy power?

Blake, Blake, burning bright!
You bless us with your piercing sight!
Surely now these satanic mills
must crumble, leaving meadow'd hills?

Tomb of Stones

Bewildered, adj.: to be lost, 
physically, mentally, emotionally; 
to be confused, overawed, dazed...

Tempted, wandering amazed
and lost, the Jesus-Lion
seeing heavenly visions, stirring
and slurring vision, bewildered
in the overbearing wilderness
he breaks open into light: 
makes his decision.

Astonished, adj.: to be amazed,
overawed, to be overcome with joy;
to be turned into stone...

And so Lott's wife turned back
staring in wide-eyed double-vision
at the rain of hell-fire dripping like
Mars onto Sodom and Gomorrah.
'Woman,' says Lott, 'I told you
not to look back - you never bloody learn.
Abide your husband - wait your turn.'

Petrified, adj.: to be frightened, shocked,
overcome with paralysing fear; to
be turned into peat, frozen in time...

And so the Bog-Man, lost in the marshes,
his side flowering with a wound,
lay himself down on the spongy salty earth.
The rising tide enveloped his dying body.
His eyes gazed up at the cold night, pleading.
But mockery: he's twisted into history.
A contorted muddle, caressed by peat.

And so I'm rusty, the whole thing a disaster.
This language wants to eat itself up. Old invalid
tongue, rid me of this Tomb of Stones.

July 20th, 1969

And so man's phallus was 
projected up, up into 
the stars: Apollo, the 
chief of the Pantheon,

the void filled up with
the cold, hard penetration
of machinery.

The moon, Diana, hung
up there, waiting. Waiting
for her man.

And so he stepped out
from the Lunar Module,
surveying his prize.

'This is one small step
for a man, one
giant leap
for mankind.'

But down below, Gaia
gawked up in confusion.
'But what about me?
Did I play no part?'

Man's illusion turns.
The Earth turns.
Man turns 
against his mother.

The Serpent in the Garden

                                               The

                                                    serpent

                                                       in the garden

                                                         has coiled round you,

                                                              around your feet.

                                                         It’s found you in

                                                 your apple orchard,

                                          naked in the blossom:

                                  a full moon in full

                            bloom. It’s licking

                     the tongue of air,

                             your scent a fragrant

                                   streak of hair.

                                         It hisses, hiss hiss hiss hiss

                                                    but what it means

                                                            is kiss! kiss! kiss! kiss!

                                                                        You’ve put it on its belly

                                                and it’s beguiled, writhing dustily

                                    before your beauty’s sapphire aura.

                        There’s a taste on its fork now

                                    looming. Drunkenly, it rises

                                                coiling, question mark to

                                                             exclamation, straightened

                                                                    out, tall and proud.

                                                But how? gasps the man.

                                The shaman-woman,

                                        soothing, says,

                                              Easy: where

                                                  once was snake,

                                                       I made you

                                                                     human.

A Thousand Words

How much can be unsaid
in a word or phrase?
Such as, you look wonderful.
What I mean to say is,
When you dance, it's like angels
possess your body. Your small
heels send me heavenwards,
and your gaze is softer than the
bristling haze of the touch of corn.

And when I say, Goodbye,
what I really mean is,
I don't know what I'd do
if I never saw you again,
if I could never hold your hand
again, if you never bestowed on me
again your smile. And,
Please don't ever leave. Please,
don't leave me.

And, I'm happy.
What I mean to say is,
I know that things must change,
that time catches us and we're caught
in its sway, but the present here
is eternal. It stretches on eternally.
Let me be caught in this moment
with you for all time. Nothing could
ever remove us from this. Not even
death could break us apart.

And when I smile, I say all that.
And maybe, one day, sitting in silence,
we'll read the novels of our eyes,
the hushed stories of our mouths,
to each other.

A Thought for a Fox

- for Edward James "Ted" Hughes

In this midday moment's forest
there is something else alive
beside a boy's idleness
and an innocent stare, watching a silent den.

Two cubs arise and sniff the air;
their mother has been killed, no star
of fox to shine a path
through darkness, where they live and are.

With scraps of meat, he tempts the two;
the bolder one pads forth, tentative.
Its brother follows, nervously, and now
four innocent eyes, blind to evil, shine, and now

the first is eating scraps from out
his hand, softly as a dream of fox.
The second dances there behind,
smaller, each pad a moment: time ticks,

and it whines. He lifts the stronger 
of the two into his arms. It writhes
and wriggles free. A cracking lingers
in the air, and then comes a metal noise:

a trigger pin. The first is killed.
The bullet enters the lit halo of the other,
the anima mundi shot to rags. He kneels in tears: 
the poem's there. The poet's born from out the ether.

The Sentinels

In this life, the good
become scapegoats,
fear burns the body free
of all hope.

There's just one rule
to live by:

When Rome starts to smoulder
and its pillars smoke
then get the hell
out of Rome.

There Are Two Kinds of Woman

And although he entered you, 
did he really ever enter you? 
Did you ever let him enter you? 
Want to? Although he parted 
those silken curtains, did he ever
see behind? Did you ever let him 
dip his hand into the waters 

of your mind? So now he is gone. 
I know it - you too. And though he 
came and went, he left no residue; 
I've seen inside of you: behind 
those mirror-ball eyes, you're 
clean and clear. I'll shudder 
at your bedrock. All else is lies


                       ***

Ignorance like fire shall burn you 
      through, then the only 
               thing to quench 
      will be deaf ears for you 
               to speak into, and 
      the kiss of some 
               supine wench

A Dream Sequence of Horses in Five Movements

One night sleeping, dreams pressing heavily

down on me, I become a child, wandering

lost in the vast dark of the American

wilderness. I wander into a paddock,

somewhere in Rochester, Minnesota,

and see the horses, shining like spectres

in the glade: wisps of horse, crystal outlines

in the moonlight as it filters through their manes.

They bray with bated lungs and nay

when I disturb the scene, parting the air

with my presence. In a quiet prayer,

I ask them to forgive me, to have me,

and they both bow: setting aside their iron pride,

and I am happy, I am proud. I climb over 

the fence, over the stoop, and approach

the more golden of the two, bending

to tug at a handful of dewed grass, tenebrous

and tense with the touch of moisture. She

approaches, nuzzling into my palm and taking

the feed: she could have bitten me right there,

stirring me from my dream, but she didn't.

Eyes peaceful and yet watchful, she chews.

If horses could smile, hers would be a rainbow,

showering a spectrum. I look down

at my hands, and they've started cracking.

I glow a light violet, the smell of flowers eeking

out from me. I have become a nocturne, spilling out

fragrant notes. The horses champ, standing there 
still, glistening, and listen.

                                           ***

Now I am a young man, a horse wrangler, on

the sprawling hinterland of 1850s frontier West:

to the East, a dream of Democracy and ahead

of me a peopled land to be unpeopled: Indians

to steal from, settlements to come: railyards,

whiskey bars, tenements, steeples.

It is darkness before dawn, and I have been

on the trail of the horses for days. On the back of

my steed, in Navaho territory. A star is rising

hungry, gulping down the blackness and lights,

breakfasting, turning on its brother, the night.

And before the red tears raw and erupts, there

in the glare cresting a hill, in the morning twilight,

I see the quiet herd. I am about to charge, lasso

at my side, saddles firm around my feet, my steed

tense with understanding, charged with knowledge

of the pursuit: less equals and more my inferior,

implicit in being reigned, implicated with me.

And in the growing grounding of man and horse,

the morning now stirring, I see amongst the animals

a man, walking quietly and proud, as if his feet are

hooves, and the horses know. His feathered hairpiece

bristles gently in the breeze and he seems to put the

beasts at ease. Quietly, I watch and weigh: 

I'll stay, and wait it out another day.

                                           ***

The sands shift, and now I see a woman

riding a horse by the sea, its four legs

lapped at by the water, scalloped in the tide.

The air washes them both and the sea is a gulping,

the horse sparkling like salt crystals, its mane

the white rush of waves cresting and breaking.

Sleeping and yet waking, dream pouring into reality,

the woman’s wet golden locks streak the wind,

the white silk of her dress caresses this velvet horse.

His troughs of muscle quiver like waves on his bones,

his breath the long and steady pull and release of the moon,

and the two of them swim through an ocean of air.

                                  ***

And now I am an old man

at the races, watching

the horses,

recalling

my youth: 
when I was a boy

uncorrupted by 
brutality,

when there was no nullity,

when the beauty 
overcame me.

And I remember 
a dream of horses,

a dream within a dream:

feeding them cubes of ice,

their soft warm slobbering tongues

pouring forth from them,

their heads like the heads of eagles.

So gentle, they could have bitten

me, but they didn’t.

They were so good and strong.

And now I only come to watch them

in order to place a bet,

to watch the hopeless crowd

feast on the American Dream:

earning and losing, betting and winning,

and carrying on the same broken tune.

10/1 on Chariots of Fire:

I put down five.

A scotch on the rocks.

I sit in the stands and watch.

The long shot. A good runner.

He comes in first. The eagles are no more.

The racing pigeons endure.

But how magnificent.

How terribly sad, and sadly
beautiful.

                                  ***

I stir from my sleep

and I am child, young man, woman

horse, old man. But I am twenty-three,

to put a number on it. I turn on my side

hoping this turn will send me under

the waves, back into dreams

where horses endure, strong and wise

and silent. Just let me dream, please.

And I crack and roll across the 
hills: thunder on four hooves:

I am the horse now. I am the hills.

I am the sky now. I have been set loose.

On Solipsism

Here is why I don't believe there is a God:
it is not through lack of evidence, through tide
of rationalist proof, through the benefits
of humanism and secularism, through the knife-glinting
poker-burning bone-racked cries of history's
confess! confess! confess! and convert! It is because
of this, and this makes me hurt:

imagine a life created, purely for the benefit of man.
This is a chicken: you must breed it. You must eat it:
it is good. And this is the cow, the lamb: do the same,
but milk them. Be tender when you can. What sort of God
could do that? Nature's red in tooth and claw - sure,
I get that. But what is red about man? And what man reads
coveting in God's plan? In all those thou shalts and thou shalt nots,

between the beauties and the rots, there lies a burning question,
as I see it: what's so bad about coveting your neighbour's wife
or your neighbour's ox, when man covets the entire world?
Endless economic growth and gridlock: a malign cancer
from that first day, from that first book: be fruitful and multiply.
But after fruit there comes the fruit fly. Yet who should deprive
the fruit fly of its right, when man reigns murder in broad daylight?

I Fear in Love...

I fear writing you into myself,
for that I'll one day un-write you,
through being forced through your
passing day and the overwhelm of night.
You, who I want so badly to quicken
with me into a new shape: two souls
sprung to a new song, enveloping each
other; not a contortion, but an agreement.

I fear writing you into myself:
what part of you shall be unmade?
And of what of us shall be remade?
Will the hand be better played, and not staid,
through the two of us? Can love really
speak openly through us, and not
subdue us? And will Heaven shine
fondly down on us? No rain-tarnished rust?

I long the burn of your singe as you
melt into me, but I fear the burn
too strong, that you'll be chained to me:
we'd writhe storm-tossed on that steely
sea, and sooner or later, eventually,
one or the both of us would sink.
And down into that icy drink - but, no!
I would not have it! My love, I'd never have it so.

A New Panorama

And with the drowning in my ears
came a longing, a longing that
children should be shrouded in light
and kept from harm's way:
kept from no play.

That adults should knife the working week
in the throat, and dedicate
all their days to love, to art,
to softness, to penetrating hardness,
to swallowing, to expressing

the inexpressible. And with the sadness
came a desire to sleep and awake
renewed: to step out into crystal morning
ringing, echoing with new possibilities; 
all bears would be bold

and tigers would gallantly stroll
and pumas would streak the darkness
with riotous speed and swift
and the trees would hang languorous
and sweep our tears away.

And there came a desire: a desire
for someone like you, for someone gentle,
caring, patient, kind, interesting, interested.
And a desire to know you further:
to lock hands and not knock heads,

to climb into the embrace of a rising square
of air and ascend the series of steps:
each step a progression and necessary,
never to stop and tire, but to gasp, Look
how high we've risen: what views!

Countenance

In the silence of her understanding

comes a smile

that trickles like a bead of water

down my ear, to my cheek.

But I don't rub it away:

stay.