Selected Poems

2016

Homage to Matisse

I am unable to distinguish between the feeling

I have for life and my way of expressing it.

1      Nature morte     :     the room

Henri Emile Benoît Matisse je vous salue!

Let me tell you a secret.

Your work goes on.

I’d only seen your things in art books

bite sized. I dreamed there was a bright room

in my head somewhere

which you were making real stroke

by counterpointed stroke

& where I would some day retire

to an armchair in the corner:

the final element of a composition

that perfectly described itself.

& three years later saw the first good

real one /            Basel Switzerland:

Still Life With Oysters. As expected

it cleared the room. I sat humming in a corner of /

homesick. Others came & sighed round the walls

searching for deep truffles. Outside

nature was dead.

Civic Swiss had combed her hair for press-releases.

Her rigour was bourgeois & precise.

Children clambered upon her in

mid-summer in knee socks.

Come away Master.

At our place we can still snap life

open like            oysters.

Yon were one instructor.

Matisse, Matisse.

2      Fait du premier coup

When I first gaped my gums to receive the world

you were seventy-seven years old.

Your age didn’t show. You exhibited

with Picasso in Brussels.

The day you died I was eight

& I wasn’t interested in you.

In 1965 you had rotted eleven years Lyndon

Johnson was in his prime.

By 1967 humus clogged your bones utterly.

I clasped a girl’s pale hips

among Motueka tobacco plants.

It was 105° Fahrenheit high summer.

Her sweat scoured me.

I wasn’t much concerned about you

though I’d quoted you to the girl.

& now you’ve fallen apart through

more than a quarter century.

By that much time again I shall be getting old

& may know something perhaps

about the fact of that first right stroke falling

like a chopper on the block.

3      Falling

We get left behind thank

god. Destruction & success

: two sides of the same blade &

keeping each other honed.

Who needs that kind of death?

When we fail or fall

we can get stoned / go fishing.

Your eyes

twinkle like some vibrant old

men I know whose destructions

will lift up love & wonder from us all.

4      The lever

You have a lot to teach me.

& it should come easier Master:

those endless articulations            walking

eating talking to friends (silence

& listening) & lying

rocking & hunched with women / any-

where when mind spreads to clutch

body            when body eats mind

the way embraces of colour passed from your brush,

rhythms flowing out of your fingers, conceived /

the upright of the shaduf rooted

while its bucket swings down & dips

water for dry animals            brings a

stain of rich colour to the dust where

spring’s green wash

spreads round the motionless fulcrum –

all rhythm contained there, motionless

& I            rooted in my armchair

motionless /

                    Can we begin please here.

5      Une harmonie d’ensemble

The sun comes up Henri & goes down.

In between is a long split-

legged slow-motion dancer’s leap.

Did we break the sound barrier?

I saw cities / chipped stacks of dominoes.

Hah! cried the old crookback

players            slapping down stakes

shaking the last coins in their vest pockets.

Beyond them was the sea moving /

the clonic hips of a loving woman

& a feathered man falling into

her.                              She blinked

like a deep blue eye. His image

disappeared in its frank distances.

So be it Henri / so

be it.

6      ‘The dance’ / ‘music’: 1910

I whip my head                        from side to side.

The dance            .            they dance /

                                                            & ahead of me

musicians gape mouths

from which only groans can issue

deep in the throat /

                              rictus

of simple pleasures.

O Old Dead Man /

freed from age by age.

7      Paris

The clouds lurch down Henri /

heavy levers. Billy & Captain America

explode off Saint Michel.

It’s all good stuff. Luxe calme et

volupté / the townsfolk leave

for the beach              & we

dance northward lugubriously.

Perhaps the cold will sort out our heads.

Perhaps I’ll write a song about it all /

imagining the dark mouths of musicians

open inward upon rooms

of wit & melancholy.

8      London

Sometimes it comes down to this:

Ségal plaster people hurtling

underground, or propped around the squares

rigged out in swords & cocked hats.

Watch the articulated ones move.

They do it fast, eyes shut,

e.g. ‘art’ & ‘music’ are extras we are bound

to feel grateful for. Rather

thank god for friends Henri,

for the woman who takes you in,

for the good quality of apples,

for untidy neighbourhoods where

these cataleptic protocols get no grip.

I kick up autumn leaves & spend my money.

9

If I dreamt less & left my room more

I would be good at figures.

My visions clock themselves in on schedule.

I gap my mouth.

I’m lazy & well looked out for.

10

New place new view

& Rose in the kitchen cooking stew.

Traffic dances past moon comes out.

It’s cold. Like you

I sit in a long overcoat

looking at what I must do

& glad to be about to do it.

11      The rules

Some double the odds on violence.

Their backs are to the wall.

They become stone / they fall.

The blind explore them with white fingers

imagining all men are scored & bitten

& that flowers pushed up among them

when they lay half buried.

Hearing feet clang

in & out of the museums.

Bridge

1

Beneath the splintered bridge dusty oleander & lupin

hang upon the untidy banks of the

Jordan which is perhaps

one of the smaller & scruffier rivers.

If you were a farmer you might think

about alluvial wash & the melon crop. You

wouldn’t think about the blond mentho-

lated cigarette girl

whose teeth signal the good things of

her culture, whose armpits have the cool

fragile curves of the rims of fine jade vases,

whose feet dabble in the stream.

2

It flows from one big lake into

another

                         which is lower & more

poisonous. If you dive into this

one head first you will remain

suspended in the brine head

downward like a pale jellied

half-pear & you will drown.

3

I remember that at Panmunjom

they had worked up some good routines.

For instance the North Koreans though

lacking doves had taught pigeons to land

only on green North Korean

roofs thereby indicating to the world

the peaceful connotations of the roofs

& an American colonel or maybe

general blew his nose into an outsize

red handkerchief thereby indicating

red etcetera.

At the bridge

they lack the gimcrackery of a

secure & complex organisation such as

an armistice compound or a Schloss

tour up the Rhine by steamer

in which the mentholated girl hangs

out her white gentle breasts upon

the rail like little flags & whispers

capitulations to her escort’s ear.

4

The beams of the bridge have

splintered into knives. They are

honed by the one-way traffic.

In the deep Jordan lowlands

you can drop with

heatstroke inside half an hour.

On the Western side the soldiers

sit beneath a broad tree

supervising the one-way

traffic & discussing

cool white mentholated shikse.

ALLENBY BRIDGE, JORDAN

Vanishing point

Our remorseless impulse to the grotesque.

Tell it like a rosary. How else. The

voice sliding off, sliding off into

nothing, the steppe road clear &

straight out of sight. A pair

of yellow oxen lug their plough

among black basalt stones, turning

red soil, blue wild stocks.

On the Druse hills a fragile green

wash. Bare walnut trees,

white almond blossom, tough scrub oak,

asphodel spindle-shanked & scarlet anemones.

& they told me I would find desert here.

The old men pass two by two,

their beards resemble new scarves.

The ground falls away to the west where

at the horizon the spring snows of

Mount Hermon tower like storm-heads.

Through village streets the children blossom in

gift clothes. It is the Eid-El-Adha, the

end of the Pilgrimage, repose of the faithful.

Newly cut branches deck graveyards.

The fighter-bombers pass overhead with

a sound of torn fabric westward

toward some vanishing point.

DRUSE MOUNTAIN, SOUTHERN SYRIA

Ruth

1

If I call you Ruth. She lay

at the big man’s

feet & covered them.

Charity flowed from him

like good sense. He had cut

corn all day, dirt

filled his body’s flaws, he

snored. I have not

so much as stepped

outside the front door.

The sound of wind in the cypress trees

is like you turning over.

If your breath

touched my face now I would

not call you Ruth. You

are not here. You are Ruth.

You looked back two or

three times trying

not to cry. This vacant image

is with me, the

knowledge of your absence,

a space you turn towards

doubtfully, having no choice.

The rest I

grope my hands through

like latticework, the negative

light in which my eyes

blaze, pearly cataracts.

There are things you

touched, they have gone.

My lips move upon a word, Ruth.

You are trees, a sound. You turn

to me with a sound

of wind stirring the cypress trees.

Your breath touches my face.

2

The blood rose out of me

for some who had not died

in makeshift ambulances along the

pitted Damascus road. I remembered

an evening in that white city

when my blood rose towards

you. Kites hung in the summer convections.

Your pale body on the white bed, long

scars across it, green jalousie shadows.

My life crowds up in me.

My thoughts tug like

kites above the dry upward currents.

3

Night wind in the dusty

cypress trees. No part of you

is whole to me, my blood rises for the wind

turning in my bed. Ideograms

of the blind, the violence of memory.

In the light cast upward

beyond your white body your tongue

is a dark fuse your eyes are

touched with red. You grip

me & tread my body drawing

blood. Each dove-twilight, each

morning they have brought up

mangonels against your tower-cote.

You turned sadly towards a

space, each morning

something more of you has gone.

It does not atrophy, I

cannot hold it, your image grows

into what surrounds me. Ruth

Ruth how long before

you cover me again,

simple & small as something done.

The red factor canary turns

out its wings, the cat goes daintily

across the garden the

wind touches my face.

AMMAN, JORDAN

I gotta right.

– HERZOG, SAUL BELLOW

*

Responsibility is to keep / the ability to respond.

– ROBERT DUNCAN

*

Something generative, since it determined the as yet uncertain

‘content’ of which it became, in return, an aspect.

– YVES BONNEFOY

I PARADISO TERRESTRE

5 to start with & in memoriam Ezra Pound

1 Madonna

The world stretches out

                                       time yawns

                                                                  your head, lost

hours, on the pillow burns in its halo

of boredom. So what are we waiting for?

A birth, naturally.

                            O forgive me, this

is no light matter . . . you no she stretches

till your joints crack. You, I do not know you.

She watches little fists & knees in your

belly, I watch her watching your famous

blue tits. She yawns with your mouth,

                                                              with your voice

she tells me ‘it’s not long now’, her halo,

lost hours, burns east of me in bed, I think

this lovely strange madonna has no choice

I think that in the end she will whelp you,

biche, it will be so good to have you back.

*            *            *

2 It’s time

A beautiful evening, early summer.

I’m walking from the hospital. His head

was a bright nebula

                                a firmament

swimming in the vulva’s lens . . . the colour

of stars / ‘Terraces the colour of stars . . .’

I gazed through my tears.

                                    The gifts of the dead

crown the heads of the newborn                She said

‘It’s time’ & now I have a son                       time for

naming the given

                        the camellia

which is casting this hoar of petals (stars?)

on the grass . . . all winter the wind kept from

the south, driving eyes & heart to shelter.

Then came morning when she said ‘It’s time, it’s

time!’            time’s

                                  careless nebula of blossom /

*            *            *

3 Paradiso terrestre

The room fills up with smoke. Their faces are

imprecise with the imprecision of

their perfect intentions, all that loving

menagerie which the old man’s left for

good & which the newborn entered in a

rage & through which he now sleeps: a profound

indifference he will lose the knack of

in spite of love or because of it more

likely . . . oh, I’d be glad if he became

a carpenter & built a house for my

old age: a paradiso, well . . . but earth-

ly anyway, straight planks above a plain

or seacoast, the trees & mountains known, high

familiar stars still bright in heaven’s hearth.

*            *            *

4 A light

I study my son’s face, to treasure it.

Each day (now, & now) it’s changed & I’ve lost

what I love, loved.

                            At dead of night we coast

about the safe house to look at the lights,

I swing them, monstrous shadows veer & fight

along the sumptuous Cornish. Our hosts

all unaware are sitting to the feast,

the dancing girls, the rebec – O those fat

assured Phoenician burghers!            our shadows

race across the rooms, & back, back, to us

the unbidden.

                     He is      so much smaller

than me, I can’t remember how he was

before he got this big.

                                     A light, love is,

swinging (now) above plundered silent halls.

*            *            *

5 He is

Wrapped up in a plaid blanket he is while

we’re standing like so on the broken

porch in the photograph. We can be seen

to be young but he is younger, can’t smile

& I don’t have my hand on her shoulder.

There’s no date on the precious token

but I know it, a sepia tint in

my mind tomorrow            O how joyful all

this is & how time curls up at the edge.

Carlos he is, as of almost now, a

sentimental fellow with any luck,

Carlito for short . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . & for thanks.

Fault line: 3 for David and Ronda

6

Within this small settlement qui n’a que

deux lieues d’enceinte (huh!) november nineteen

seventy-two: the fault line could be seen

wherever your feet were, by nacre

& stinkweed, orange-boxes, other wrack

tossed up & then left where you walked in clean

sea winds, below the clay bluff, below lean

tattered eucalypts, so heavy, a sack

of a slow lovely girl following her

fault line south to Carlito in his blue

jersey, as though you’d hiked it all, now shrunk

back flat & fit having laboured from where

it began, a thousand miles off, we two

tired after a nostalgic all-night drunk

7

at Dave Armitage’s place in Auckland

in late summer, which I can’t remember

. . . I mean what I can’t remember

’s flagging you off on your trek, my hand

waving hopefully in a dim room &

then closing at dawn upon the tender

space where you’d been.

                                        You’d gone already, bare-

headed, hazel-eyed, doubtful, laughing, blond.

& now you’re back & you’ve changed & so have

I           I should remember that much of all

that’s lost. Instead          what I remember is

1. the tired pissed laughing face of my friend Dave

2. a young distrait drifting childless couple

3. Ronda has gone upstairs with baby Joss

8

– oh yes enough, enough, ‘sufficient’ for

a syllogism            yeah: immaculate.

Enough. So it seems that even this late

I do remember . . . dear friends thank you for

that quiet time that island in a far-

reaching forward & backward tempest fraught

ocean of days & days . . . & us in sight

then of the Pacific on a calm shore

in a familiar Pacific city

by a harbour spreading blue sails of sky /

a great transparent cargo sailing for-

ever into its own presence            pity

me, I trusted logic, & so I’d sigh,

though nothing            had ever happened before.

2 for Rose

9

‘If thy wife is small bend down to her &

whisper in her ear’ (Talmud)

                                               – what shall I

whisper?            that I dream it’s no use any

more trying to hide my follies. If trees &

suchlike don’t tell on me I understand

my son will & soon, too. His new blue eyes

see everything. Soon he’ll learn to see

less. O the whole great foundation is sand.

But the drought has broken today, this rain!

pecks neat holes in the world’s salty fabu-

lous diamond-backed carapace & doubt comes

out, a swampy stink of old terrapin.

What shall I say? ‘I hid nothing from you,

but from myself. That I dream, little one,

10

by day & also by night & you are

always in the dream . . .’ Oh you can get no

peace, will get none from me. The flower smells so

sweet who needs the beans? We should move house there

into the