Your hand
near mine
disturbs the silence
more than voices,
yet it’s motionless,
devoid of formulated phrases,
nor has catch-cries.
It resorts
when time betrays
its stillness
to turning gently
like a white bird’s
flight from
empty atmospheres :
flutters, pauses
in an intricate response
to silence, settles
on my own hand
where the dark stain
widens.

And let my feeling like an untamed hawk sit
boldly on my arm in daily exercise; and slowly
let me trim his triumph to my call, and let
the swift unfolding of those tapered wings
whistle the wind to harness and slip down the
undercurrent of the air and cross the gust and
battery to capture in the moment - hour's
eternity, enwrapped creation rapping trapped
joined words.

We arrived (as the brochure indicated) at a treeless station, only  
To find the fond cities dying,
And one or two savage urchins beating
Each other’s faces and tearing clothes.
We learnt later that our relation, Leopold Muckslick,
Having abandoned his job, grew desperately thin, and,
Giving up the Ghost, set himself alight and jumped in the Thames.
(He was unable to greet us.)
After many fretful minutes, filled with the clanging of old bells
                                             and engines letting off steam,  
We decided (and not a moment too soon, either) to board a taxi.
As we drove away, a blue-and-white scarfed crowd
                                                           ­       of a hundred or more
Began to clash with a blue-and-helmeted crowd of twenty,
                                                                ­         at a guess.
Only a side-window of our taxi took a knock
As we screeched beyond the flailing crowds
                                      and cold railings, though                  
We had realised by then that our journey had no sponsor
And our brochure was a nothing-lyre.
We became preoccupied with Leopold,
With water and with fire.

After a time you just feel sad,
Perpetually sad, and weary.
Nothing like fury comes to clothe the day
In fiery robes; you just feel sad,
Perpetually sad.
You drink the tune of sadness in day’s sun.
You linger over it when ****** clouds accost
The premature dusk at winter’s night. Spite
Of no returning you long to see those faces
That have made you sad. Madness should be
Like this : perpetual madness where the grey dawn
Clinks through bars you never wished to see.

A solitary kestrel
hanging like a perfect falcon
in the upper air
his shadow slipping
over wind turned rock and bracken

and a field mouse
swaying like a tawny flower
on a meadow stem
picked in sheer simplicity from earth
and lost by subtle seconds.

How to express this strange impress of words?
Or, culled in the inbetween moments,
little impossibilities budding
perfectly strangely, becoming
possibilities which crowd a little closer,
seeking air, mewing, speaking
and robusing the hidden bud-bid for notice?
Notice me here in one green piece
of innocent horse-verse, nosing dry day.
By day an effort, by night white strikes of words,
struggling through to metaphoric sights,
suddenly, *****, span,
***** and fan this little stage
of mine, here, now lines
and lines of verse con-
spicuously present, myrrhing, purring,
pudding catty-watty to horsey hey-**-**.

I begin with some well-wrought clichés:
a face full of flowers
by a window,
a humming hearth where
the in-folding flames
hold a thousand roses by trestles of soot
while outside the leaves of the autumn trees,
by the iron-root and crocus-foot,
not yet undone of their crimson-chrome,
bypass all platitudinous theories
and reiterate a passionate
reasonless reason for making known
the incredible odour
of sunken hours
when snow had its own
impeccable bleach of flowers
and loaves had no need of wheat.

Drawn under, again and again
I have blundered upon innumerable halved hearths,
suddenly crestfallen,
downcast.