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I’m
over here Late October
in the kitchen of your
beautiful home drinking tea from a
queen-of-fucking-
everything cup We get round to knowing loneliness is also olfactory Spark’s cruellest writing says what’s sayable What does your nose tell you
about me? Let me speak as a Russian
nurse Let me whisper
the real stories are never told So they were sitting beside
the belvedere, in shade. And they were drinking,
barely exchanging a word. The sun was shining and
words were beyond them. Past the low stone wall lay
the river. Further off, lost in the thin blue air,
were the island’s three peaks yet to exist, as if they
existed. A breeze got up; the world
tilted and water, seen slopping up the side of a
glass, pushed the air ahead, carrying birds, the clink of
ice, notes of lemon. On the lawn children ran
like small dogs, yelping with a mix of terror and
joy, and occasionally a mother or father appeared
to gather them in. He thought there must have
been days when people forgot even that
they had gone to sleep and woken, re-born. That they had flowed, like
the river behind the wall flowed, huge and
still and countless, grey as all rivers are grey.
The sun continued to shine
and the breeze blew fresher and he drank again and
thought in the eyes of small dogs
days like this will come again.
Memory
of the Unknown (i.m.
Margaret
McGrath 1928-2017) Two years since you
passed Tiny bird-life dying in
your bed My heart’s full for
wondering
What shadow the creature
calls When sundown stills its
feathers
One-eyed I spy the gap in the
neighbour’s fence
Spring has landed hungry
& cold
Damn the blare horn of
indifference
The Pole Star shutters
into view A fraction’s wink makes
light Someone than us less subject
Shakes her hair at the
paler gods Who so cruelly in our
absence Enter the mud hut to hold
us dear after
Mina Loy 1. Flung to the moon Straw man Pelele Watches the night Shadows shrink
bloom Majas in their
livery Under drawn Behold The bird-economies Plumed in syllables The lunar dust Of Goya’s jig Rise from a body In trampoline rags
outsize wig 2. Life-substitute ‘Tween dance
&
word Pelele peaks In the higher air Face haunted by the sun A kinder science rolls Across that lenient tongue Blasé glassy-eyed To the marbled prospects That once were he Paree to
the cooked meats
of
Bowery Preferring languor Sky-worn bliss To the idling coma Of a sculpted wrist 3. Gravity brings Pelele down Unmarked from jinks With the cracked larks To the calf-skin bed Of the tauromachs Feeling atoms of disgust The time-served majas
behind a hand Weep
dry their tears Draw the blanket In a fountain of stones
watch him land
Who can
pay I know you’re there when you’ve gone it’s like falling in love in some eatery somewhere you order everything the laughter echoes I’m looking through yellow paper at a day that looks & smells like roast
chicken Nowhere should be this shadow-free I’ll know you’re there when you’ve gone
Stars No such thing as should I meant it when I said I loved
you what do I remember
overhead constellations
of
bees Volumes I would gladly swim home to get away from place cards & slim volumes for the ambassador’s table but I can’t help loving yours even when I’m dripping wet & home’s nowhere nowhere’s in sight
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