These poems comprise a representative sample of my best work. With one exception, they were conceived after I first submitted my earlier, unduly obscure efforts to criticism on Usenet and in Web forums. Later poems are still in theory subject to extensive revision or complete abandonment, and are therefore not included. Soon, however, I'll probably add a companion page of light verse and parodies, most of which are older than these examples.
Some laconic notes, mostly technical, are appended to each poem. Many poems have been altered, sometimes significantly, since the date of composition specified, but in some cases I've reverted to an earlier version.
One rides with all his gifts to give
to whom he will love:
reins in, dismounts,
is pointed at, drinks deep; soon hunts.
The eyes, eyes! Ten times the exchange is made
of bone and blood.
Under the moon
ten quanta leap to the aim of one.
Night falls asleep; the environs wake
to an average luck,
no change perceived,
no alarm at the inn where truth was proved.
Forgetful guardians slouch and smile
dice from a skull.
To whom he'll love
one rides his fragile gifts to give.
The same invisible greyclad choir
of deaf contralto cats prolongs
your sleeplessness as mine, the same
streetbustle flute-and-bass for hire
twists glamours from your mind, and wrongs
frostwrite our footsteps with my name
as black as yours.
The intaglio pillars we believed
were tethering-posts for unicorns
are dreamed away by fog; the cold
unspeaking stars walk shoddy-sleeved
and hunched; no watchman moonlight scorns
thiefclouds that pocketed May-Day gold
we couldn't spend.
We lie as hares do, bundled down
to hideflesh flatness while our hearts
grow round and tight to meet the gun
next hunting. Damn this slushfoot town
of netpeek neighbours, tinselmarts
and icebars. Love, revive the Sun
and thaw the sky.
From the tigershark kerb
to the cobraglass cheat,
crackluck pavements swerve,
where the washed-up undulate.
Wrap up warm, limp the walk,
lunch at polywood counters,
tap feet on tinsel struts, and buy, buy bulk,
you comical bargain hunters,
lurching through the sleet for a sale:
here's last year's fashions in a havoc
of illusion; here's a wail
torturing a speaker; here's traffic.
But, franked with fingersmear holograms,
come-ons to fascinate with grabbing,
glosswrap letters play fraudgames
that send me too tripping
off the sane kerb to join the world
in the annual umbrellahide maul
of childhood lust for a fool's-gold,
chocolate-centre, godless Nowell.
Handel of course, and everyone standing up.
Most know the ritual, know when it's expected,
and, after all those arias, standing up
comes as relief, an Alleluia earned.
I truckled round the edges of the pro
scene once, and failed. Without that failure surely
I'd never have been reduced to these enthusiasts,
blowers and scrapers of old Frideric's songs.
Not Bach or Schütz or even Pergolesi,
but bloody Comfort Ye
crap, on and on
until you'd think they'd tire of playing trite
renewals of a message no one likes much.
Christ ist erstanden; resurrexit: words
better than Tate's — but no one's going to rise.
Maybe salvation's simply standing up.
Carlo cares nothing for the sound
of crumhorns at the feast, or flutes
that play a dirge upon a ground
.
No pitch or choice of voices suits
his thought who hears death in a torrent,
betrothal when a barn-owl hoots.
Carlo finds madrigals abhorrent
but writes them; smiles at underlings
and sends his wife a murder-warrant.
In case they scratch he wears no rings,
but keeps a boy to use a whip
and salt. He likes the song salt sings.
His uncle tells him of a ship
that carries fools to Hell. His words
hold sanctifiers in their grip,
but Carlo counters that the birds
build barks of slime and uncles' speeches,
and sail them to a hell of discords.
The fool who sins and he who preaches
a fool who dies and thinks he saves
should heed what lesson birdsong teaches,
taught one who fought against the waves
despite the Sirens' undertow:
Carlo the Prince, whose music raves
of truths he knew he could not know.
Fauré's Sonata No. 2, performed
by Isserlis and Devoyon. I go back
two decades: Feuermann on 78s,
a dark Testore, and the Falklands War.
Fingering; bow-length; breath: a subtlety
made plain. Art poétique
, Verlaine applied
to agogic accents, never quite convinced,
but made me write. I still use grey
too much.
Fanatic of the hemiolia.
Hole in the heart and polio survivor.
Fauvel earless in isorhythmic trios.
Tradition is a variation theme
I copied down.
that's free to modulate,
Let turns to major be her epitaph.
The leopard prowls the field of fleurs de lys
while buzzards watch and chat of carrion.
Among dead lilies neither worm nor bee
dares grope until the sanguinary sun
has set upon the stakes of Agincourt.
Cold fish lie still in rills. No rodents run
where glad young men so gloriously have fought.
A heron spies a stationary trout
and gulps; an outpost archer's terrier
sniffs at a frozen rabbit. In and out,
bodies are chaffered, while the buzzards stare
squintwise and preen their fanciest feathers. Caught,
the rabbit further stiffens, makes good fare
where glad young men so gloriously have fought.
The graveworm that self-generates from meat
alone has tasks a-doing. In the tents
beer squirts like squandered lilies' juice: no seat
of peril, no Roi Arthus here. The scents
of foreign women mingle as they're bought,
and jugs drain to the leopard's arguments
where glad young men so gloriously have fought.
Prince and pretender decorate the field
and with a royal ring Paris is sealed.
Whatever priests and councillors have taught,
the future is the buzzards'. Life's annealed
where glad young men so gloriously have fought.
Farmer MacDonald grazes earthskin, greeds
his sheepshorn neighbourlands, draws closeroot drills
across bare duneheads, and leaves fodderspills
to twist him poison profit out of weeds.
The steelgull gapes for more: for bread that bleeds
pink Jesuses; for Jagannath whose sills
press oxflesh into sex; for cowpox pills
and outdope euthanasia, whiskey and beads.
MacDonald shall be victualler to our fleets;
crop tongues and ears make thudclap Pavlov bells.
The A-to-Z of metempsychose sweets
is in its ninth edition; krillfed meats
may tardy cancer — but it's death that sells.
No evening god walks through these seedless streets.
Da, the man who nods away
comes again another day.
Benedicamus Domino.
Da, the dirty taffy fellow
takes thy bed and Mother's pillow.
Ave Maris Stella.
When the black man takes my Da,
none shall keep me from Loch Awe.
Benedicamus Domino.
Find me where the muffled hollow
blossoms but no moss will follow.
Ave Maris Stella.
Ave Maris Stella.
I am no guru. All I know
are comics, histories, the Brief Lives,
the corners of a Penny Black,
the answers on a Sunday show,
fallible ways to sharpen knives,
and what I lack.
I am no guru. While you sleep
I gather bottles for the dump
and phials of a woman's spite,
not what to tell the local creep
nor periapts against a slump:
I gather dream-lite.
I am no guru. Dye your hair
and bathe and say you're not for me;
back off, applaud the neverwhere:
subsist, be free.
Tongue weather tongue weather tongue weather twist:
by hedge and by Pluto you'd never be missed.
Under distravelled pretence flaps a star:
lent spare for the cryless decider you are.
Tongue weather tongue weather tongue weather tweak:
prepattern your quadrants for undersize bleak.
Stranglers see faces make dyeface reform:
my halfwards refuse your contolerant norm.
Tongue weather tongue weather tongue weather try:
but rapt in your grasp what a speechless am I.
A spill of shatterwine
where thicksole feet walk
in mothery foresteps
(quam olim promisisti)
abstrude, Qoheleth.
Dixit ragtime Dominus.
Beneath my feet bed-scars;
above my head coals;
et in saecula.
Keep this vow
past Jordan:
I am the Lord
thy silky Rahab;
nard the knot,
cover thee —
but cubitum eamus.
Over your head blood,
under your winefeet serpens
saeculorum.
When mending nets beside the Sea
of Galilee,
I heard one call,
Follow me, all.
My brothers followed, but when He
looked back for me,
I turned away,
as if to pray.
Fishers of men, hung from a tree,
sing as the free,
while I ply yet
the selfsame net.
I was a daughter of Israel
and Israelite born.
But I boarded a ship
to trade with Tarshish,
and here I am.
Children ask me questions
I can't answer in the market,
but I will keep what I remember
of the sabbath and the dresses.
When I was twelve years old my father died,
and his brother wed my mother
lest my father lack seed;
and I was his daughter.
I remember the rough beard he grew
and my mother's pimples;
the smells of cattle in the corner;
his sad face when he prepared a funny story.
But here, in that great city Tarshish,
a seller of tanned goods I will be.
I'll say, Dead are the old stories.
For so my father sang, the bearded maker:
Hear ye a new song; dead are the old stories!
Born in a barrow, the beast full-grown
was rude and irrational. Ridden never,
nor prey-deprived, he preached a gospel
to farmers, confounders, fools and bowyers,
and tallied their tithes. The tusks are mine,
he would say, that sundered sea from the land,
food from the firmament; the feet mine too,
hard and hazardous, huntsman-slaying,
that cut down Calvary; cooks, read this
for my dressing.
A single bottle doesn't hit the spot.
A day's recourse is two or three these days.
Pour me another glass; look how it plays,
the midyear sunset with the noble rot,
the classic palette…. This is what I've got:
a wife, a creosote cat, old muttered praise
from cautious critics. Somewhere in the haze
I know there's meaning, but I don't know what.
More warming of the western sunshine might
attach my cancerous head to a risen body
sketched on the wall by God. Though shivered, tight
and hellish frightened, I sleep well at night,
don't know Inferno dreams. A nightcap toddy
battens me down. Don't give me second sight.