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Mudlark No. 12 (1999)
At a Shift of Points the Chorus Switches by Martin Bennett Martin Bennett read English at Saint Catharine’s College, Cambridge. He then taught in Nigeria and Ghana. He now works in Saudi Arabia. His collection of poems, LOOSE WATCHES, was published by University of Salzburg Press. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Some of these poems have previously appeared in LINES REVIEW, DALHOUSIE REVIEW, OUTPOSTS, HONEST ULSTERMAN, CYPHERS, POET’S VOICE, SEAM, PRINTED MATTER (Japan), NEW SPOKES, THE NEW WRITER, FROGMORE PAPERS, BABEL, THE INTERPRETER’S HOUSE, RUSTIC RUB, NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL, and WASCANA REVIEW. CONTENTS
Bahrain Fish-Market: A Random Inventory
Bahrain Fish-Market: A Random Inventory Ocellated waspfish. Gulf dottyback. Black-eyed Trevally, red snapper, blue-tongue Jack: From where the loudest sound is a sprat Chomping bits off coral, they’re hauled up Into an afterworld of thuds and thwacks, Buried in air, instead of angels Scaleless four-finned monsters wielding cleavers, Gabbling prices across white-tiled flats. Such anomalousness once laid aside, A feast for the eyes as well as stomach! – Proving camouflage can be psychedelic The Picasso triggerfish, for instance; A lapis and yellow Anafiiz whose tints An old master might covet; Sultan Ibrahims Compared to which even a Matisse dims. That juggernaut of the shallows, the Dusky-brown droop-mouthed grouper Sports orange specks. Outglinting rainbows, The silver-sided turquoise-striped Sohal Like some light aircraft shows a logo Of brilliant ochre. ‘Broad crossbars, Transverse bands, blotches, borders...’ – A zoologist, listing them, turns poet- cum-art-critic. The spectrum’s stretched: ‘Ventral part of head and lips deep scarlet; along the body two series of jet-black dots plus a pale caudal peduncle; dental plate salmon-pink, the chin a lavender grey...’ As if Aladdin were, in fact, a diver, There’s no shortage in shapes here either: Bearded scorpionfish, blunt-nosed Pompano, A horned zebra sole, some spotted grunts; Species named after spade, cutlass, needle; A long-tail carpet shark of whose lethal Brainlessness an arms manufacturer Would feel proud; rays that come equipped With electric kidneys able to deliver A two hundred and twenty volt shock; Weird yet authentic double-ended pipefish; The poisonous puffer; big-eyed scad... These flounders are as flat as photocopies From before angles had been invented, Inks smudged, glimmers fading. Now add A sex-and-colour shifting parrotfish – Hermaphrodite champion of the oceanbed – And the most feverish surrealist seems prosaic; Epithets dangle like a severed net... Tropical Stopover Politics a game of volleyball with a too high net, The town wraps all in hospitable smallness. Round as day, The sea’s a diamond factory no boss can fathom. Along the front the flags are genies dancing Or are they soldiers vanished in a mirage of laughter As sky beats invisible blue drums to celebrate New Year arriving on the next down-breeze? Back inland the hats are the colour of rainbows. Wine and sunlight make even the policemen friendly. Masks, stiltjacks, tamtams unlock closenesses that are Everyday’s subconscious sadly hidden from itself. Aeeeiii! All at once the air is alive with vowels. See. Whistling the latest samba from Brazil, there strolls Senor Zephyr In indigo bowler and flowing iridescent tails. The sun blows and with tireless arms the waves clash cymbals. Downtown saxophones rip bumphous doldrums to welcome shreds. But look. La Place de l’Etoile Rouge is putting on her necklace. Salut, tous mes camarades, I must be leaving – Tomorrow I shall carry your memory like a postcard one turns to As soon as elsewhere gets overbearing, o nations With faces of gigantic stone that have forgotten how to smile. Bull in the Chinashop (or a Cliché Subverted) For Matthew Sweeney and John Hartley Williams Once the original bull in a chinashop had charged to a stop and the last prize figurine dropped floorwards with an exorbitant clatter, there amidst his shattered stock the shop’s owner shook awhile in shock. Pulled himself, if nothing else, together. Lifted the phone (which somehow was not broken). Pieced the matter to the police who, wondering whether the man’s as mad as a hatter or just having them on, never- the-less sped hell for leather to the scene of the said offence where the bull, proving actual, is questioned, then charged on the spot for violence without robbery. Seeing red with punishments (drawing and quartering, being sent down to Smithfield Market) – Bull, for want of a lawyer, bellows in its own defence: “But I didn’t come here of my own intent; I was dragged by some anonymous poet with more similes than sense. Any damage I sincerely regret – Say what you like, I was only looking for an exit” Which statement, no translator being about, made not a blind bit of difference. From that day on, whatever the evidence, Bull in a chinashop’s been branded ‘misfit, lout,’ period. (Something else quadrupeds must do without, the shopkeeper was covered by insurance...) The Last of Summer Their branches scoring space like Shiva, wind Takes the oak and the wych-elm dancing. Out in mid-field grass and sunlight mingle To project a viridescent sheen Against else-clear sky: A mellow flash, Some Martian’s April Fool perhaps Though it’s now October and already Swallows are in training for Gibraltar And beyond; our cabbages’ve sprouted Into king-sized turbans, behind the poplars A harvester spouts stubble with a rrrrrr Then sudden whoosh: Signs all meaning Summer’s Gone again. Over barns, paddocks, meadows Thistles propel tiny parachutists Toward next spring, kamikazeish rendezvous With some distant clod. A partridge scuttles past As though on rails. Another snapshot for Memory’s almanac, dapper crests of moor- hens constellate the millpond, its surface Turned pewtery with deep-stewed sedge. Scattering perennial chromes and rust The world’s a wheel that’s got us in its spin: From thinning treetop to thinning treetop Rooks unfurl furlongs of din – Wintry echoes infiltrating southwards Despite pylons’ titanic tuning-forks Patrolling along the landscape edge. A guesstimated twenty times shorter, I dawdle here below the hawthorn hedge – Footsteps going anapest, spondee, iamb – Thoughts pausing between sight and rhyme... In Victoria Coach Station Exhaust fumes, urine, immemorial cigarettes – A reek even freezing cold cannot dispel; Passengers in groups, in queues, in seats As the Rapide from unsunny Carlisle Flexes brakes, with faces in a sullen row The coach for Coventry prepares to go... By the railings a mouth works up-and-down At the universe and no one, the man Attached identikit twentyish, lean. The radiation he emits is all his own. Studs like Braille, his jacket reads ‘Exterminator’ – Fashion advertising a wide berth. Daubed beneath, as if for bad measure, Is ‘Chaos Day, March 4, 1996,’ The tatty dictat, ‘Let’s start a war’. Self-picked anti-hero in a B-movie He cannot, thank Heaven, control, lack of script Recasts him as sidewalk nihilist, Bystander furioso whose mutters Complement the chains about his wrist And waist, spiky violet-tinged clusters That are his hair. Minutes bristle. In a twist He has not envisaged, a squad-car Pulls up. “May we look inside your bag, sir?” Misted breath. “None of your fucking business...” This the expected give-away. Snap search. Routine interrogation. One man’s mess Others’ law, he’s led away. Also a bystander, Though seated, here from the 5:10 for Digbeth I shuffle sight with words, a verbose voyeur: Have mercy upon policemen, punks and poets, O Lord. Defend each of us from over- righteousness; though this bus is no Chariot Of fire and our Arrows of desire are Blunted, somewhere amidst the fume-bleared concrete A dream of Jerusalem, that Countenance, those feet... À Une Femme Africaine (After Baudelaire) Desire kindled by impossibility, My heart’s grown a chart of its own exile, Border-posts on fire, meridians awry. Distant four thousand and salt blue miles Again I see her treading sunwhite sand, Igniting my everyday with night; The cold north sky beneath which I write Is rolled back like so much old carpet, Ocean and desert packed within a sigh – Lithe souvenir! Sinuous spectre! Out of a blaze of loneliness I sing her – Though absence dupes, distances disguise. Dialectic: Staffroom 3 Our unreconstructed in-house Leninist from the safe pedestal of twenty thousand pounds a year ventures that Aleksandr Solzhenistyn got it wrong and did not understand the wider picture Three desks along the moustache of the ex-Major begins to bristle and he fires off a well-worn salvo about ‘Commies, traitors, and queers...’ Raised voices, blocked ears – All around the silence is an unheard whisper going, ‘Let opinions wreak their worst. Those who speak do not know. Those who know do not speak.’ Riyadh Autumn After heat’s annual hiatus (Nature lying doggo, Months minus a single cloud) There comes this quiet defiance In the slant of light, A sudden crispness to each echo And shout. Summer’s embargo Lifted, the air’s loaded with age-old Imports, weightless cargo: Fleeting silver and gold, Exotic hints of cold This early evening in late October – Desert now slightly less so, Its grim perimeter Touched by a world elsewhere Aubade: London N.W.1. In odd-coloured socks I blink from basement gloom; The garden is one more room, though infinitely brighter And more varied, its walls tall weather-beaten brick Supporting nexuses of drains, overhead, Of course, the sky up into whose cloud-strewn ceiling A pigeon unwinds with a whir of wings Then earth-defying clatter. Like mad shepherds’ crooks The hollyhocks sport maroon and indigo rosettes. The goldenrod is botany’s Mae West; A convulvulus raise chalices to the vanished moon. Her wake a scattered necklace of dew, Only the aerials know where she’s gone to. Now enter trim Senor thrush; oriented by daisies He tilts an ear to the twinkling turf, A piano tuner for whom notes mean worms. Down amidst the undergrowth our cat plays tiger. Dizzily I stand here upon Summer’s precipice, Mind aswim with names of flowers: clownish Regalia of dahlia, delphinium, phlox, Dandelion clocks launching seed toward next year. Rhymes: An Irregular Sonnet on Their Elusiveness Neatly beyond the mind’s reach they lurk – That quatrain or tercet pulled up short By hours, days, even years. Nothing for it Except patience, poised between rest and work Inspiration’s unglamorous obverse And frequent sine qua non as writer turns Deep-sea angler. Beneath conversations, Newscasts, staff meetings, their chimed murmurs Promise symmetries other language lacks. Back inside your study, upon sleep’s brink Again the silence stirs. Somewhere between ink And aspirin you haul them in; relax At last, prose left standing, for now outmatched – Self strangely other, not as you might think. Summertime in Italy Brilliant orange smudged with gold a lazily shaped cloud lies along the skyline like a fire eater off duty and relaxing at the beach, driven mildly crazy by a large beaker of wine perhaps while not far inland a sirocco rustles through a Corriere della Sera turning dog-eared at the feet of pines. Ah daydreams, swimming trunks, cicadas! Shades of ice-cream and balloons! The sunlight stores up energy like a horse at a gymkana where differences in colour count more than any prize and lest it get overbearing zephyrs provide a hint of blue. Viviana, my mind’s imprinted with your name and that trip in your father’s boat across Lake Como one madcap June: A mountain squall turned the water miles of green and moments later the weather switched again, a middle distance painter revising his ideas... Inside the Duomo was cooler than any drink and shadowy Ferrara’s belltowers sent the pigeons flocking like a roll of drums. Even the cars are pretty, said your eyes. Up on its hilltop a dozing Arezzo dreams saintly processions across the intonaco of time-cracked walls. Below the ramparts noon signals shadow- squadrons into swift retreat. A team of oxen, colossally slow, seems to collapse a field’s verge. Still as cardboard at the reins, only a yeoman stops them, plough a tiller exchanging green for beige. Back in Florence truculent Tuscan farmers protesting against the latest meat tax set the cobbles echoing like marakas. Too old to pay it any mind, the Arno shrugs a verdant shoulder and then winds on. Cypresses duskily dissect the slopes into neat rectangles and squares. The end of an affair spiderwebs a room in one of Treviso’s five hotels. But basta! Melancholy’s a drone for another clime and season. Ignoring the yells of sandwich-sellers the express whistles, terns and swallows rise above the station at Venice Maestre. How well the tracks know all the operas! At a shift of points the chorus switches From Mozart to Donizetti – Behind buff-and-pastel houses the sea steps out in sequins toward hump- backed islands and a meeting with the moon. Genova, Rimini, Sorrento! My heart’s a belfry haunted by your vowels’ sweet clarity. Only the British Council bustles with busts and does not see the Renaissance continuing in the twilight’s strides, tender depths of a signora’s smile. Erice with its head in the clouds – Selinunte's tumbled temples – Etna smoking like some great uncle recalling the furies of his youth – These and other fleeting scenes, salute! That run downhill from Fiesole when my shoes grew wings and I thought I’d never stop yet now relive in your touch and gaze, ah names like rural sportcars headed for Alpine tunnels, forest’s flickering gallery of shade to which the moon holds the only key... Bird Souq: An Expatriate Guide 1 To keep its spitting, fusty-thobed vendor In chewing-sticks, cigarettes, whatever, A penned peacock spends neon nights, skyless days Revising, then re-revising strides – Moulting tailfan ten riyals per feather: Spot here the champion of palace walks, Fountain-gracer, lawn-lord, Sultan of fowls Reduced at one mercenary swoop To an inessential commodity, The hapless treader of its own droppings; Nearby, some chicks dyed turquoise and pink; There’s a quivering batch of parakeets – Some finches packed like aerial sardines, Wings for now a caged irrelevance, Cost negotiable in case of damage. Watch, further on, uncooing doves and pigeons – A falcon clawing blindly at its pole. Sell-by date notwithstanding, an expired wren Lifts tiny legs as if in prayer, Its life prematurely turned litter. 2 Out of respect for local customs, Mortgage mountain, your next month’s pay-cheque, Suppress all impulse to play the lock- Defying Blake or Leonardo Breaking cages in some Florence square. Birds of a strictly different feather, Observe, but not too closely, that row Of seated ladies veiled from top to toe. (Wayward glint of eye or bracelet excepted, One might mistake them for black silk tents.) A small nest-egg in sales and profits, Their stock of imported fireworks is set out Colourfully across the concrete floor – Roman candles, Catherine wheels, sparklers, rockets. Watch... But stop! Dour cock of the souq, here struts A cane-and-beard-wielding mutawwa, Part neo-Pharisee, part Whackford Squeers, Public Virtue’s guardian molester. Swish-poke-swish of his long cane, a brimstone croak – And vendors, male and female, scatter. Cages clatter; old barrowboys turn tail. Rights, whether animal or human, bah! He scowls, and cannot see this rebel whimsy Dreaming welcome in a woman’s smile, Freedom disguised as a cloud of wings. The Reading: A Nightmare Noon: A letter arrives stating (but, please, no promises) I may be called on to read my work, then a putative date and place. 3pm siesta: Courtesy of Dream Air International all at once I’m there and ahead of schedule – Meaning, to be specific, at the bar nextdoor. Already wine flows freely. Still unsure when or whether my turn will come, I swill the stuff in obfuscating draughts which’d give even a Dylan Thomas pause... As soon as my speech begins to slur and it gets tricky keeping vertical I’m beckoned, noon’s possibility made firm: The audience have been waiting some time. They sit sober as judges; in their midst the smooth white hair of a major minor poet and editor who’s been rejecting my verse, off and on, for fifteen years or more. The scene shifting to dire slow motion: Stranded anywhere between um and er, I realise that, save some unfinished scraps, I’ve left all my manuscripts back home... Would people mind waiting till my partner – a plane-fare or so away – fetches them? The request ends up a last-ditch splutter. Meanwhile, in the mail, another letter: Same editor claiming my last submission is plagiarised from something of his own which, naturally, I have never read... At this point I wake up, stage turns bed; just in case dreams or nightmares come true, I switch on the light, fumble for a biro, start, between silences, to set this down... Song of the Flags Flapping mast-way between land and sky Flags of Honolulu and Hawaii I sing, those of the Caymans, Brunei, Papua and New Guinea, Iceland, Togo, Brazil’s a rhomboid yellow porthole Through which night universally revolves. So many the designs and combinations! Flag of the Boilermaker’s Union (Camden Branch); the Dominican flag on Which the winds stop for a game of Ludo; Tigerish guidons of butterflies, Mountains’ atavistic tricolours, The meandering pennants of rivers, Trans-national flag of light and air, For these too I sing, flags of dragon-breath, The stony unflutteringness of cromlechs, Zebras stampeding stripily across plains, Captain Amunsden’s snow-stained banner Some Eskimo now sports as an extra shirt, Weird metallic flags from other planets, Martian flags as big as the big toe-nail Of the big Red Rock Eater, that of Venus A cobalt blue and iridescent pastel Capable of infinite expansion Or contraction to cater for the differences In eyesight found in extra-terrestrial beings; Flags of Uranus and of Saturn That seem not to exist so much larger And more rarefied are they than our own, Flickering technicoloured flag woven From childhood afternoons in cinemas, Banderoles of Captain Perry’s Crowship Steaming into Tokyo Bay, behind it A crashing green crockery of waves, Mountaineer’s flags buried beneath snowdrifts, A ships’ ensign turned handkerchief against which Swordfish nowadays shine their noses And oysters nonchalantly polish pearls; Amoebae-type flags in clouds and oilslicks, Vast mastless smogs and fogs and mists, Geo-thermal flags of fumaroles, Lava’s slow-spreading red and sable, Farewell flags and flags of flags, flagging flag Of sunset hoisting how many more flags One midnight instant dreamily unfurls Apparent Failure: A Triptych 1 ‘The Best Hamlet of his Generation’: Hard times, neglect, or the corrosive dollar Have reduced X to the hack boffin In a ‘B’ horror flick, emotion’s gamut Dwindled to a single look, his script The odd cliche between special effects For which only howls and screams are needed: ‘Manqué, manqué, manqué,’ leers the subtext, ‘Below criticism, just short of porn.’ 2 ‘The Rimbaud of his Year’: Spurred on By praise he never dreamed might be insincere – Also in the pipeline a bildungsroman Publishers are yet to queue up to print – Here in the lengthening interim Y peddles TEFL to reluctant ears: Muse in mothballs, his voice turned droning curse, He sweeps errors from language’s bottom floor For more than he’d ever get perfecting verse. 3 Legs gone, heart going, Z meanwhile ponders Missing medals, ungraced podiums... Pole packed away, an overgrown wand, That world-beating vault is forty years In the run-up as, with a gasp, he clears The bar of his own body; still inside his chair, Feels himself soar on into the blackness Where no newspaper has been before – Last is first, less seems more, failure success. After Cézanne 1 Hardly a fidget within miles Architecture of the apple A milk jug turned fluted column Peaches no fleas of time can blight An orange so round and still It’s as though hands had sight Eyes could touch Space as scaffold Bowl as pedestal Plate as plinth That table slanted to a critical mass Its drawer’s spheroid handle Irrefutably in place A wine-glass about to vanish in the light which strikes it 2 ‘The strongest, the most sincere,’ How fiercely he peers out, A man with a mission For now frustrated – Let critics, dunces, dealers Founder in their own myopia, Squint a few centimes Or ten million dollars – The bluishness of light Continuing here despite them, Blending with his beard, Bathing his massive brow, That thoughtful eye plumb At the portrait’s centre Gaumont Matinee To a rattling choreography of bullets The actors fly like acrobats, last-ditch yells Ballooning on their wake. Out of range The audience sit munching peanuts; Before they need shout ‘Ambulance!’ or ‘Help!’, The hero arrives dead-on-time to ensure Bloodshed keeps a safely celluloid size. Where is the villain but in some backroom Stirring poisons? How innocent is his Badness that knows nothing else although, yes, The state-of-the-artiness of his weapons (Test-tube tarantulas with radar, Remote-controlled snakes, steel frizbies, lasers) Superannuates the good old delights Of hiss-and-boo. His face is a monotone Of malice, accent calculatedly Foreign with sharpened vowels. It’s hard work. One snicker could be fatal, a volley Of belly-laughter wreak more havoc Than any missile. Yet at x dollars per second Our hero is as cool as buttermint, Distress his oyster. Demented violins – Silence – A cineramic boom! As planned, The whole set goes up in smoke. Foes scuttled, He rides happily into the Ever After aglint with the names of stars. O that all endings were so spectacular! The hero’'s triumph supplies a signal For us to scour pockets for the bus-fare Home. Once outside the coddled dark Our eyes goggle for a focus and ache At the stark pervasiveness of light – Past Barclay’s Bank, Woolworth’s, Tesco’s Narrative thinning out in all directions Then back to where we were before... Nigerian Nocturne 1 Below corrugated iron sheets The cement-mixer sleeps Like some futurist rhinoceros Or prehistoric tank. Moon’s An amulet time has thumbed Into a kind of face. One blink And it might become an eerie drum Whose beat is silence. Still The near beyond pulsates With fiddle-legged crickets, Bullfrogs’ comic bass Now sleeplessly I ponder How to define these colours For which day has not yet Found a name – horizon bars, The shadowy gape of nim trees As stars take up position Behind hump-backed clouds, O sights and sounds lasting Far into the morrow, My head an attic cluttered With phrasal jetsam, Mirrors turning dusty, Furniture that does not quite fit... 2 Dark, then, be my umbrella Shelter me with your coolness which is the loom of hills distilled Solitude Don’t worry yourself so You’re doing fine here where frangipani close their eyes awhile and everything’s drowsy with the scent of trees From verandah to sky then back Night goes bush (Kaduna, Northern Nigeria) Arabia Deserta (Riyadh to Al-Kharj Road) Minor jihads of horns to left and right, We stop-start-stop through noon-dimmed traffic lights; Start, at long last reach the smooth-laned outskirts, City dwindling behind, its umpteen streets Framed hazily within a single glance. Pylonned and gouged and diggered, the distance Fans out into man-made No Man’s Land. Offsetting the swelling gamut of sand, Cement factory flanks cement factory; Our mirror clocks up a quick inventory Of steelrods, breeze-blocks, fittings, girders, tiles – Next year’s palaces, proto-shopping-malls, Suburbs in embryo, contracts by the mile. Here’s another stretch of half-built wall, There a superannuated camel, Fur turned murky as, hard by, the hubcaps, Fenders, windscreens of imported pick-ups Flash and glimmer, that tireless stiltjack The sun rummages among car-wrecks stacked Into a metallic ridge. Purplish smoke- trail the only djinni, crushed cans of Coke This desert of a desert’s flowers, Too much we see in Nature that is ours. FUNPARK 2OOO with all its towers Stands a callow ruin, time as though reversed; Run up against infinitudes of blue, Its big wheel idles, no place to go to, Fortune’s figment, relic of the new. Blues for Giacomo (After Leopardi) So, my tired heart, it’s the golden handshake, The big farewell. One deceit too many, Yes, it’s over. Songsters may croon an ocean; From now on out, stone not moonshine Be our watchword. Twittering hopes all flown, No more eternal this or that, period. Enough of palpitations, no matter how dear Or deluded the cause. Hush. You can despair Your last. Fate’s sole gift for the likes Of us is curtains. The world is mud, A myriad sighs don’t shift a molehill, Boredom and bitterness take all: In other words, relax. Set no store By yourself or nature, let its reign Of ruin wreak its worst, heap vanity Upon vanity ad infinitum... Hothouse At the garden’s entangled frontier It stands, amidst autumn ruin and rust A silvery now landbound Nautilus, Plateglass armour keeping snivelling grey Battallions of cumulus at bay. Inside forms a planet unto itself: Here cold’s converted to tepid dew. Blooms unwithered, last summer stays As though refridgerated in reverse, Muggily immune, conserved from time, A clime of scented swelter. The roof conjures Second heaven whence sound cascades. Water-snakes uncoiling in their wake, Botanists move beneath bamboo arcades To regulate the ornamental day. Buckets of loam, thermometered and weighed, Await feeding to epicurean roots. My head swoons and envisions insects. Somewhere amidst the shadows an orchid pouts; A hundred-hundred shoots begin to stir. Dreamily the green explodes from earth- plugged fuses, hatches suns, meteors, moons; A herb poses as a crested bird. Tiny cacti constellate my tread. Melons Squat meditating on their own girth. Doored tropics! Antipodes in miniature! Down each lush aisle a retired missionary Plants seeds of memory, then, week by week, Watches them grow into jungle towers, Turquoise-trumpeted, steamily crowned. Four, five nods of its fire-bright bell and The tigerplant chimes it’s time to go. Outside, the flower cupped within my hand Is a talisman to light the drizzle And busride home, an eye onto elsewhere. Opinionaters They have prickly peculiar-shaped ears a mere switch of accent can immediately stop working. Their eyes, when expedient, see similarities between chalk and cheese. At the back of their minds lurks a menagerie of facts trained to attack at a sniff of disagreement. Repetition no object, they could go on for years, even centuries, and never ever get bored. This one seethes from a favourite armchair; that one acts the peripatetic pursuing you down corridors then out the door, trampling the quiet of morning, dividing even the flowers into wrong and right. They know more about foreign countries than the inhabitants do themselves, things about you which you’d hardly have dreamed. Useless to object this mightn’t be the case. Here categories come armoured. Logic’s a hitman hired to lead you down some alley and then bring out a sawn-off statistic against which amity forms no defence. No experience is so complex it can’t be simplified beyond recognition, rendered dire and tidy in its own despite, a doubt-proof fit. Like pebbles their certainties are polished to a resounding deafness; in unsaid reply you note how one silent breath is more wondrous than a thousand speeches... Summer Exhibition All dawn-washed rectangles The painting is a lawn Look, even the liverworts have put on colours Although, yes, they could be a myriad other things as well Where have they sprung from? How come in dreams our eyes still see? Solemnity deposited like a sack of swampgas at the door, Beauty takes time off to go skylarking e.g. An Action Replay of a waiter’s race transfixed precariously for posterity in emerald porcelain A pair of pimsolls the size of speedboats Pre-Raphaelite postcards from Hove and Folkestone This metal dragonfly That bottled moon A Ph.D. in Canines sculpted from a bite out of the encyclopedia The All-Comers’ Latin American Dance Championship that on closer look becomes a work by Allen Jones Morris Louis’s giant light-filled molars Sails tinted with primeval landscapes Some monumental smoke-rings from the palette of Frank Stella Blue squares, white squares, grey squares, chevrons A circle’s transcendent glare Or is it just what I had for breakfast This Catherine wheel which hangs so gently and makes no noise A psychedelic nipple O lunar dials and X-rays, sunsets depicted in a tent of flags The painter has each fleck ordered like a hypnotist Suddenly everything is windows, windows, windows I the watcher gogglingly gullible Now before me the sea’s focused into a turquoise pastel In tiny zillions parks flash behind my eyes And gratuitous as a slice of air Birdsong gets the photo it has so long deserved Even a car-axle proves it can be romantic Beef-burgers wax lyrical A tangerine make one laugh A Church in Florence Such brilliant shade, the wealth in colour More sumptuous with each new fold – Vision as miracle. Except through his skill The painter has rendered it still more so And filled a mouldering stretch of wall With hints of heaven: Those frescoed angels Seem to hold gravity suspended. Oxened field, bridged river, terraced hills Diminishing meticulously behind, A Madonna and Child appear a part Of them yet separate, eye, hand, heart Aligned in tangential symmetry – A moving quiet which back outdoors I fumble to find words for, the hackneyed roar Of traffic cannot quite take away from... Portrait His heart ran like a motor fuelled with a mixture of euphoria and melancholy after a little practice too automatic to be called his own. Were his words really his or half- remembered figments, no sooner heard than buried and now repeated like some minor share-holding in the starry bank of another’s fame rendered unimportant by the trees conjuring statues to pick up their stones and walk? Born of neutral zones like railway cars and airports, so many chance palimpsests he made of waiting Between began to seem his not-so-natural element. Striped horses of exclamation roamed the tundra behind his eyes, hooves registering riffs of thunder no dictionary can contain. Shyness he made up for by converting his imagination into a floor for unprecedented meetings, then scribbling notes: Whalebones and grasses, the colours of the spectrum related to reflections upon last year’s Budget, spark-plugs, pinetrees, Catherine wheels, Mozart, Ella, the Acropolis and a bar of snow. His twin muses were solitude and boredom, Nothing Doing forging monuments to a rainy evening spent basking in the adolescence of its whim until the newscaster in genteelly clipped accents announced the latest variations on catastrophe and woe. He would be left brooding on the butterfly’s inadequacy as an image for the soul. O for a butterfly of steel! Yet, he consoled himself, is it not in being gratuitous that, like a magic carpet, poetry’s most aligned to the far-reachingness of the sky? Though just then the door of words banged shut: Once more it was time to go out and tend his beans whose silence he so admired...
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Contents | Mudlark No. 12 |