jonathan-finch
Poems published in many small mags, and by "Outposts". Some won prizes. Short stories also published in small mags. Full-length translation (of an academic text) from Italian to English published in America. Recent activities are on author page https://www.amazon.com/author/finchjf / Travelled widely, lived in three countries, fishing, bird-watching, swimming and writing....I think I won't go "home" to Europe...and my reasons can be found in "Collected Selected Words" Jonathan Finch Amazon/Books. It's a memoir-novel as close to my heart as can be.
I sat under the quiet trees all the restless afternoon,
Dreaming of what had been and never more could be:
Bitten the clouds, the declining canopy of air
Weary with insects weary with bats.
Black days black nights.
The benches of the dead set out, the dining dead.
At eight I rose, bitten the clouds,
A dog barked dead and long
Down the river of dead sights.
The thistle over which the dead goldfinch dreams of seeds;
The crimson road that marks the accident.
In courts, in currencies of plenty, wherever you are,
Do you hear the frogs croak, “Katharine”?
Nov 30, 2017
Nov 30, 2017 at 7:06 PM UTC
I found myself in Putney
after many stupid years.
It was a worthless day
before spring comes with all its biting powers.
There was nothing there in Putney
but that February hearse
and all the villainy of incredible memory
born out of pointless love and hope that blackmails.
There was traffic there, that endless vicious fume
of noise; and litter blowing pointlessly;
savage parents; hard and worried kids;
the thundering mess of London all around;
a hop of sparrows on that pointless ground.
I found myself in Putney
where I lost myself so many stupid years ago,
and by that withered house a withered love arose.
“Ah, love,” I whispered, “why have you arisen?”
“You acknowledge me?” she said.
“Of course,” I answered.
“Put your arm across my breast,” she said.
“Touch my still hair. Weep plentifully.
“Let your poor heart break. Strike here across my cheek
“To know what you have lost.”
“My love,” I whispered, “why have you arisen?”
(From the withered house the years were toppling.)
“Stupid questions from a stupid man.
“You loved me and you lost me.”
Then the roar of London hurt my head.
I saw a man go down a street
Where no street was, where no man was.
Nov 30, 2017
Nov 30, 2017 at 7:03 PM UTC
She was that fatal girl who said the worst goodnight.
No one but she!
None could have dished out poison with such right
Perceptive wit upon occasions
Of late merry-making when wine and beer,
Cakes and red cheese, dallied down
The honeyed round.
Skill! Skill!
Such women with such skill!
Super controllers of no destiny!
Jack and Jill
Went up the hill
To fetch a pail of scorpions.
Jill came down
With daisy-chains
But Jack was bitten to ribbons.
Nov 30, 2017
Nov 30, 2017 at 6:59 PM UTC
Oh, you have been so lovely and so lost
While May arrived to purple flowers,
Moisten lilies and the early roses show. But no
Skimmering of joy leapt up to gild the glory of those flowers.
Martins built (so suddenly they came)
And all the swallows, too,
But elegies made cloudy dimness glow in heaven’s blue,
And then the pageant May descanted Katharine,
And Katharine’s untrue.
Nov 30, 2017
Nov 30, 2017 at 6:55 PM UTC
Kathy, lately
birds seem rarer.
Even in the lilacs
where the blackbird whistles,
boughs seem spent.
Foolish men who read their loss in nature’s
always wax too eloquent,
so, while I try to paint
a sense of desolation
in the brooks of heaven and streams of night
(wherever they may be),
I know it’s farce –
an enterprising manufacture making nothing laugh.
I should write nothing,
nothing makes more sense,
although, my darling,
when I mourn for you who travelled hence
(and left me, placing nothing in my arms)
my mind drifts out,
and like a fragment driven by the wind,
I have to write.
I have to wring these vague alarms.
I have to give to nothing something slight.
Nov 30, 2017
Nov 30, 2017 at 6:41 PM UTC
You are no longer smiling
In the garden stacked with afternoons,
Your skirt above your knees,
Gloating and scorning my wish for modesty,
While roses are sticking themselves to bees
And sun is setting on coffee spoons,
A lifted skirt, your knees.
My darling, now when you never smile
In that garden without a fair,
When those peculiar stretches of petals
Are memories better forgotten, being bare,
I can still see you walking across that lawn
And turning to me with dark, extravagant beauty
And your secret held into you like an impossible dawn.
Knowing you hated me then and hate me now,
Knowing you called me “Horror” for a reason, every day,
What point in writing an elegy
That mourns the spurious and grieves for the grey,
Dissolution of love, the continuity of deceit,
Light in the stocks
And modesty peeping out of your socks
If not to celebrate something more
Than everything you were or can ever have been,
Something more because you made me seem
More than myself and surrounded my heart
With so many somber and beautiful dreams
That life grew riotous
Springing the lids of tombs?
Nov 30, 2017
Nov 30, 2017 at 6:32 PM UTC
I found myself in Putney
after many stupid years.
It was a worthless day
before spring comes with all its biting powers.
There was nothing there in Putney
but that February hearse
and all the villainy of incredible memory
born out of pointless love and hope that blackmails.
There was traffic there, that endless vicious fume
of noise; and litter blowing pointlessly;
savage parents; hard and worried kids;
the thundering mess of London all around;
a hop of sparrows on that pointless ground.
I found myself in Putney
where I lost myself so many stupid years ago,
and by that withered house a withered love arose.
“Ah, love,” I whispered, “why have you arisen?”
“You acknowledge me?” she said.
“Of course,” I answered.
“Put your arm across my breast,” she said.
“Touch my still hair. Weep plentifully.
“Let your poor heart break. Strike here across my cheek
“To know what you have lost.”
“My love,” I whispered, “why have you arisen?”
(From the withered house the years were toppling.)
“Stupid questions from a stupid man.
“You loved me and you lost me.”
Then the roar of London hurt my head.
I saw a man go down a street
Where no street was, where no man was.
Nov 30, 2017
Nov 30, 2017 at 10:49 AM UTC
(Crief speaks about crime)
I’ve collected here a few, odd things:
a piece of paper a girl once tore,
a trifle of hair on a ***** sheet,
and a few keepsakes from a ransacked store,
and I’ve put them all in the bag I bought
and have set them in that corner so.
I was planning to leave but the weather changed,
and the sky grew grey with a **** of snow,
so I sat quite still on the bed I knew
and imagined the girl in her darkening years
and my thoughts were goads and devils of fire
so I lowered my head in a rage of tears;
but soon afterwards I stopped to think:
if she comes home now, she will find me here,
and her cupboards upset and her letters torn,
and a man on her bed in a rage of care;
and I think of her neck and defenceless sides,
her naked arms and her meaningless legs,
the substance that moves through nerves of cells
as easy to smash as yoky bits in eggs;
and I frighten myself with my vision then
and the street as dark and as quiet as death
with only the snow like a huge, white ****
floating outside in a cavort of breath;
and I look between my mind and hear
a single cry as intense as life
and afterwards snow, the silence outside,
a fog-horn sounding, a man named Crief
appearing and going down to a pond
to undo himself in the dead of night,
and finding the water frozen stiff
and hard and seamed in an icy blight!
And I whimper, then I jump to my feet,
I prowl past the door, like a beast from a lair,
but freeze in the frame, in the dead of the dark,
for lightly her footstep ascends that stair!
Nov 30, 2017
Nov 30, 2017 at 10:44 AM UTC
“I know she’ll break my heart,” he said.
“I know it certain as any sun
“Chivvies a glitter from a pipe of lead
“Where the poisoned waters run.
“She’ll take me into her thighs and turn
“Me out on a dawn as dark.
“Her face by the dark door, sorrow-stern,
“Will be creased with her smartest lark.
“Loose leaves and the ravelled flowers share
“Much aspect upon her face,
“But darker than any flutter of hair
“Is the part-past, and the chaste
“Abuse and mirror and sickening sweet,
“And battery forecast. And mean
“Her broken look! and her last retreat
“In the terrible City of Seen!”
Nov 30, 2017
Nov 30, 2017 at 10:40 AM UTC
We came down to a pond-
the stem of the **** was bleached
but brazen and bold.
Chidden about the air
was a peppering fury of care,
and a wavering strand of gold, but darker and darker
(what tantrums the landscape threw!)
by the dangerous edge of things, we shouted it out. We’re through!
Tears grew.
We spoke
in that murderous murmur that even the sedge
refuses to voice when choked and hassled
by hustling wind blown over, its edge,
we spoke –
but only wild birds awoke to our “haven”
of heaven-hell-roped.
Nov 30, 2017
Nov 30, 2017 at 10:36 AM UTC