ABOVE DUNTRUNE
I stand up on this hill again
And crave the schrieching wind
To stir within my shackle bones
Its pagan beat:
The dance of runes and druid sleep,
The rock of boatless sea –
My blood worked in this ground
Might remember me.
For here memory stands
Facing the open sand,
Calling home the rustle of grass
And hauling in its hands
The ground and swell
Of these mulls and islands.
And here the sum of all I am
Comes creedless down to this:
Fingers of bracken curled in my flesh,
Heron-wing drum in my brain.
VOICES
I knelt in daffodils
Long before the need was born
To count myself among the rest
A poet and retainer of the bright things
Offered by the gods and clasped in hands
In yellow moments shot through dismal time.
Before all that, prone beneath the blanket sky,
I knew the blood was strong
And the lure of the shadow
Was not the wound of Eden
But the claim of the child
And the unformed cry of the self.
MULL OF KINTYRE
Misted evening, dark among the lanes,
Hazels damp against the hill,
Boy’s touch in a moon-dark shed
And the rolling, rolling sea.
Above the islands, within my sleep
The buzzards circling round.
There is no colour in these lines,
No light on time’s bare walls,
That was not first found painted here,
That did not flow through wings.
TEMPLEWOOD
My ancestor’s eyes are sunken holes
Watching from the standing stones;
Their voices, moon drunk,
Echo in my step
And make the heron lift his neck.
My ancestors’ bones are moving sod,
Furrows in the peat and bog.
They chatter in the night walk
Of their buried sleep.
And leaves that drop to the mulching floor
Know the sound:
The droning life of Celtic blood
Spilling from this noisy ground.
A POET'S HALL OF FAME
What if this blood were broke into parts
To find something lurking there
And in every cell a portrait or place,
A flush in the hand of the player?
Would Emily’s lids flaunt her moor-grey eyes
And send Yorkshire through me coursing?
Would DH lament the soul that I spent
In ivory towers rehearsing?
Hermann might nod for the path I trod
To muses from moralizing,
But, Oh Fritz N., when the blood is all spent
On your heart I’m depending.
EMILY
Night unfolds from day’s routine
- To sleep, to sleep, perchance to dream
And through the wall of mind’s intent
A chink of coloured light is rent,
Besotted by the richness there
And amber aspect of her hair
Once dull and dank and moribund,
I scale the wall to find
A floating spiral round me winds
That throws on every strand and curl
A portrait of this life unfurled,
And reeling I resign each bind
Till contents of the upturned mind
Lay strewn around my jaded feet
And day undoes the heart and dance
That thrive alone in sleep.
CAT TIME
The curled cat slumbers on my couch
Caring not a fig. Her time is now.
And I, deep perplexed by all things,
Watch her stillness stopped at the moment
While I scrawl my heart’s depths
And race with my pen head-long,
Head over heels with my feet dug in
Along a line of time that is always tomorrow
And never as round and still and forever
As this moment in sleep
Of the cat at my feet.
DAS GROSSE NICHTS
Ring around the looming night
Splattered now with blood
Threatens sleep and drinks me in
For hope and soul are once more thin
Paled by the crushing light.
FALLOW GROUND
Virgin on his seasoned bed
He laid me down in street-lamp glare
And bred me callous, breaking ground,
Where soft-mouthed kisses dared not tread.
But driving in, he drove me out
To musky woods and damp mossed lanes
To the shadow of boy on the wall of a shed
To the endless drone of the sea.
Now I find the door is locked
And bolted from the inner side –
The aching night that conjured flesh,
The press, the hard, the yield, the Yes,
Fled storming from this brittle zone
When sterile hand turned sap to stone,
The kissing shed to wall and cage,
Where chisels are dreams
And the dance all rage.
A DESERT SONG
She broods upon the desert storm
- A sightless ache for more –
And clasps at sand the wind hails round
And dusts upon the floor,
Each grain a myriad-reflecting thing
Configurating inchoate imaginings
Of other lives than this
And other moments full of bliss,
Of water-gush on some oasis.
The storm wails down to eerie hush
And tightened eyes blink open,
The smooth horizon dunes run on
In creeping arid monotone.
Her wishes to the sun return –
The sap to quench the numb and burn
Is in a goat-skin by her side,
And water-tight, no man of straw,
He looks for love and sunburned heart
To yield a little more.
TOTEMS
Wash me in streams of womb-red earth
Lick this slip of clay
And dance a dance of coyote moons
Round the hollow of my bones
Till I creep in the dark and howl.
Coil of snake unfold me
Bring me loose at turning’s end
Where centres fail
And time unwinds,
But burning ground remains.
Mute in sleep I hear you call
Wailing down the run of years –
Listen, the dust sighs in my silted breath
And shifts in trails where dream bears lie
Like death in woman’s primal cry.
CAVE DWELLER
Come flesh me out and flesh me in
And slay this iron dragon door
That holds me in its virgin deep
In turrets of my vaulted sleep -
Scaley dreams that wrap me round
And lie between my feet.
PEGASUS LOST
Lace in the ice of the horse trough –
The breath you never breathed –
As you slipped through life
From the heaving womb, a scrap of bone.
Little black foal, still sticky in your mother’s wrap,
I came to find a dance of wings
But all you are is tatters
Smudged upon the frozen ground.
Death has no presence here –
Nothing lurking round the barn –
But absence cowers in my coat,
And I am lost,
Rigid as this steel grey fence,
Holding a hand to your mother,
Waiting for her warming lick
To stir me into life.
ODE TO A POET AND TO A MOUSE
Death, rude and smiling,
There’s a mouse on my floor
I’ve seen it before
But last time I hid upstairs.
What makes it worse
I’m intent on some verse
But the cat doesn’t know, hardly cares.
She’s up for a feast
And cares not the least
For my pen-pushing hobbies and airs.
So I’ll stay in my seat
And count it a feat
That my couplets are rhyming in pairs.
Thumbs through the pages of this bookAnd vestige of intent that closed upon these words
To ruffle many a flight
To life and for the living.
Too long now the tattered cover still
Too long the scribbled marks unseen
For frozen hands that have no business here
Clamour for the measure of a different line.
But still a dust of warm breath falls on me here,
Still the shadow on the open page of this heart.
A DEAD MAN'S BOOKS
Death, rude and smiling,
Thumbs through the pages of this book
I hold and weigh for dint of life
And vestige of intent that closed upon these words
To ruffle many a flight
To life and for the living.
Too long now the tattered cover still
Too long the scribbled marks unseen
For frozen hands that have no business here
Clamour for the measure of a different line.
But still a dust of warm breath falls on me here,
Still the shadow on the open page of this heart.
THE DELL
When darkness drifts the eye-wink shut
And black air hums above the field,
Down where the river’s dry on its bed
A rabbit turns its bristle ear
To the wave of wind in the dreaming grass.
And in the fold of the warmest bed
A finger stirs, then twitches still,
While the night owl drops from a dry-rot branch
To the silent pant of the rabbit’s breath;
His swooping talons slice the night
And wrap around the screaming death
That leaves no sigh in the misted bed.
For the unseen dreamer holds no sound
But the hush of the gong in his yearless sleep.
He does not smell the splash of blood,
Or the cold rain that drips now
From the roof to the catch of his unfurled hand.
POSEIDON
I would lie with everyone
Until the sea swept moats around me,
Between the gulls and hands that hold me
I am washed in drifts of sand,
And fields of faces drift away
On wind-howls swirling from the sea,
Till I am left a single strand
Of lightening-bolt slashed from his hand;
Weed-dripping wet he parts the folds,
His thrashing, foaming horse-drawn waves,
And lifts me from the sinking floor
To lie with fireless flesh no more.
INSOMNIA
Piling inches, the noiseless snow
Drifts soft upon this midnight window,
And the scattered moments of restless sleep,
Like words slipping deep from the poet’s lip,
Gather towers around her retreat
- the self stark beneath the living and show
Stopped still at this moment of snow on snow
Like a frozen freckle forged white
Upon the dark skin of the darkest night.
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