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”?

Stones bulk large:

depleted plovers
scrape their smaller partners
into minute curves and ramps.

This junction
when the bird's weight
******* and ties the shale in patterns
is the sea lords' making.

Stones sit on
like rigid eyes:
their stare worn silly
by the sea's corrosive pull,
their grating interplay --
uncanny masochism,

while the human heel
depletes the simple curve of eggs.

…and yet this leaves
me guilty, this creation,
lifting and stunning
as my fist has often stunned
the delicate fish that dies
and leaves me as a recompense
a heavy flesh, scale within scale.

Light thieves transparently
upon these windows now:

Now clouds migrate
and birches bow into the bowing fields of night

where night and dearth conspire
to fulminate this widowhood,

wild as the smouldering eyes
of the angry child, surprised by the fertile god

that taints the shoot
before the seed has travelled from the root.

You worry me.

Your eyes dilate
as though an extra sorrow
enters them.

What is their colour?

You have told me
but the quirks of memory
forewarn the image
of my search
until a resurrection
seems impossible.

Perhaps I’m colour-blind.

Today I caught a conker
falling from a chestnut tree.
It dovetailed to my hand
and lay quite still –
a little stained but perfectly intact.

The surface shone translucently:
a brilliant, brown-red gloss.

Perhaps you’ll disbelieve me
but I thought : this colour’s like Anne’s eyes.

A little later wings of blue
persuaded me to change my mind
and then a blade of grass began a long interrogation.

Shyly and involuntarily your eyes appear
like music fading to a silent close.

from "Poems People Liked (2)"

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.

I climb the buckled road:
always the smell of dampness
from the moss and in my clothes
the soaking rain.

Scotland’s lost.

The high hills shrug the clouds off
but the mists descend.

Along the road
the ancient deer graze slowly
where the raindrops shatter on bleached stones.

I turn the dead page of her letter
where the ink runs slowly under
water and begin that old procedure:

I will forward every sheet by hand
to hills where clouds burst:

those mysterious postmen
nullifying my deliveries.

Even birds look ominous,
and are.

The pasty trees disclose
no silence:
rook-voice
dandifies this March.

Inside my skull
a hair-line fracture shifts.

The mind’s thin powders
function slowly,
doused in tears.

You stare incredulously
when the bullet’s wild velocity
has entered you.

Your eyes scorch dry,
and slump.

Because the latest messenger has gone,
my pale collections and delivered notes
are scattered everywhere – in trays,
in Cambridge cups and silver-rooms.
(Sticklebacks nest in my larger spoons.)
I am myself a fisher of sorts
and I fish green pike in redundant moats;
occasionally, I am owl of tombs,
a donkey’s back or half a goat’s,
and I call each flower Katharine
by desperate day and night.
I am waking germ in a field of blight
and a heart of heaping sin,
and my mind is mad and has mushroomed in,
and I call each flower Katharine.
And I call each flower Katharine
where the blossoms flame and stray.
My darling, my dearest Katharine,
I have placed my love in clay,
and a dark and desperate flower grows
and gobbles the joy therein –
it is now by night that the brightest day
is shinnying summer-thin;
but Katharine, my Katharine,
Kathy, Kathy, go in,
for my heart has mangled my brain to bran
and my love is ****** and sin.

The loops of hawthorn flutter all day
but my darling, my darling, I’m done
with the wildered stars that confuse the sky
and the blackness that is one.

I call each flower Katharine.
Each beauty begets each pain.
Where the desperate violence lies and groans,
the mind weeps a furious rain;

and last but not least the lupins flare
and I call them Katharine.
Since I went from you, I’ve been horrified
by the cruelties closing in.

Ah, Kathy, Kathy, what will become of you
and your voice as soft and low
as the shadowing whistle of verdurous leaves
stirred by the gusts that blow?

And what of your petalled arms and *******
that were treasures in my hands?
The only ream is a broken star
and a blaze in forsaken lands.

I’ll burn the heart and the mind of flame
and I’ll do my best to win;
but my dearest love, my sweetest love,
I shall call it Katharine.

I am fighting flames and my heart is bent
on the flowers that never rim
a tomb as lost as an oyster-pearl
that I’ve labelled Katharine.
But the label is a useless wrong
for your tiny, bitten hands
and the pitiless pointers going in
to the love-deserted strands
with a waste of pain and an empty sea
and Katharine on my mind
and the leaping storms and the bartered loves
in the summer-winds that blind.

My Katharine, my Katharine,
I have called to you all day
but the night has twined like monster ****
and the buckles burst the way.

I am led beyond by a file of rust
and a palmed hand like a fist
and a desperate ritual driven up
like a dark moon through dark mist;
but I pause and pander to any stem
that is broken into bud,
and the poppies that are fluttering
are jets of your brooding blood;
and every petal and every vein
is Katharine through and through.
What should I care for an Amazon wish
or kaleidoscopic dew
when every English field and fold
is alive with Katharine still,
and the wavering spray of a honey-tree
is an idee fixe at will?

But why should I even wish to write
with thousands who scribble a rhyme?
I cannot begin to substantiate you
with the dull verse I design.
But what would your mannerisms be
if I could not make them sing:
your sidelong glance or the fluttering dance
of your gentle mimicry?
your swearing that was as soft a sound
as the spiralling leaves on pools,
your downcast eyes or your tyrant-love
for the man who broke the rules? -
the rules he made with a wringing grasp
that was everywhere-despair -
a weeping child who was weeping still
though loving your loving care.

My dark-haired darling, you’re bending down,
you’re kissing my lips away.
I am crying until your ***** may drown
in my wavering tears astray.

Your humour is what I cannot bear
and perhaps the tender ease
with which you will spurn my agony
as a maniac’s disease.

I am bending down to the brief, bright plants
and up to the blossom-tree
but every beauty is Katharine
and the light has gone from me;
and everywhere in my silver-rooms
the portraits panic the air,
and conjured out of the merest sound
my Katharine standing there!

I shall take to my tumbled tower again
and the failure-flowers sow,
and the lavender-press of the dying plants
shall tender me to and fro.

I shall never notice the flowers again
but Kathy, Kathy, there is
the violent pain in the misery
of the unremembered kiss.

Remember me, for I think you won’t,
you will think me a beast beyond,
a swirling stream that you visited
that you’ll turn to a dulled mill-pond.

Remember me, for my love is still
in the memory in these hymns.
All night all nights’ hours I’ve repeated here
a thousand, thousand Katharines!

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.

It was a slim blue book, a pittance of acutely sounded words, dropped from a shelf and fell upon the floor, rustling its pages from the full extension to the readers’ counter; and I felt its unmistakable attraction touched in late October of last year; and thought : “This poet who has chanced his world and been ignored, beckons and shields himself from vivisection by an absent readership but I shall tie the broken, knot and mend, stamping today the slip with lustrous ink.”

The agony that peoples
such tormented heights
convulses in stone-breath.

The outward semblance
swells in neat conformity,
the lower thump of blood
curdles inside its chilled contraction.

Sensing outcrops, pale, limp wheat-blades
whitening beside the agonising certainty of beasts,
teethes like a fleshless jaw.

I hold my head up  
out of practice.
I perfect the stance.

The agony confronts me.
                       Stone.
                                 Stone-heights
group in their rigid surveys
me.

The drip sunk in his arm
he looks out; sees the bone beneath the nurses’ skin,
loose in their leanings.  

It is over : death
out of his vein, the drip
sunk in,
the drip with its minced ******* of blandishment.

They will save his life,
abort a quintessential,
struggling gentleness, a life he has
placed in her womb,
a tiny pulse too light.

“It is ridiculous,” he murmurs,
as the pretty nurse leans over, tightening the band.
The blood thumps into strained normality,
the overdose has petered out in yellow urination

dripping tears.
A pull, and it is out
in the bucket.

Squashed, he continues,
suicidal, for tumultuous reasons, small abortions, live.

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.

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-**-**.

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?

Autumn drops from the spit of summer.

It is brown, well-mealed,
perhaps a little burnt;
its plush resplendencies are gone,
its fruits are split.

That spring, that summer
grimace in a scattering of husks, a wizened apple,
is unbearable;

and at the core:
pipped deaths, abbreviations, futures going hard.

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.

The flags unfurled fly gloriously.
Tipsy barmaids fill the empty glasses
gleaming in the publight, frothy with beer foam
dripping from the fine-ground edges as I drink.
Where is yesterday? As lost as week-old flowers?
And regret that turns out pockets – is he gone as well?

I hear the flags flap grandly.
Cannons boom across the brimming beer.
A girl as young as any takes my arm
lifting me to the resurrection.
Voices mirror sounds
as soft as fish v’s in still water.

A neat disjointing:

Frost pricked by heat
melts; the rut of stone
jags at the eye no more.

A universal harmony
creates unnumbered stems:
the earth was never ******.

Condoning the green
mutability of things, he corners
baby pheasants (**** and hen calloohing in the scrub),
twists at the neck. Their eyes
pop with surprise. The good earth
will maintain this spawn gone wrong two ways.

He does not hear the clapping wings,
the hawk big with the misery of things.

A single pebble
crushes;

do not minimise
destruction.

Pellets hold
the small, squeezed grain of bone –
a startling nakedness erodes
it, scars the air
it lies in;

frail and suffering
hung flowers
that hankered after warmth
ooze still their stilled perfections;

and
the innocent beetle
suffers mortally.

Grandiose, magniloquent,
the pebble forfeits nothing.

We are naked, Anne, and caught.

Inside ourselves a pitiless resilience
remains, bounds up, is shot.

The orchid in the spring
still sees it here:
as cruel as me,
as loving and perennial as you.

It is towards a slow keeping-together of themes
from a missal-thrush memory
that words keen and are made.
                                                   The place matters little:
a furrow of ponds, a wet landscape
curved like a dish, the brittle stare and awkward movement
of spread-eagling duck on a cup of ice –
                                                            what do these matter? unless
the memory keels to the retina a shape of things to come,
teases and minnows them down to a flashing fin
in a chamber of shapeless streams, in a chamber
of crosses and thrushes.

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.

It is a rotten morning. The
core of hazels in the damp wood, wet
and drowned, lose identity and turn to gutless shapes. Cloyed
the muddy clay traps the dampness in its dips
and depressions, clings to the shoes and
slows the pittance of steps towards the caked
tree where the mud mutters below the uneven branch, the
bark is crusted over, and the one bird calls out once
too often, level with the woodman’s pile. Turning
aside the dropped stone splashes in the well and then he follows.

She stole upon me as the curved light of the evening
mounted the ladder of the stars. Thigh-white and small
as re-pressed flowers her ******* upon my arms became a
silent impulse and the impetus that strove between
the crushed grass and the risen stem, tight like the angle
of a kestrel’s wing; and unaccentuated by the glitter
of the sun, her night was an unfolding and reprieve of
warmth hastened no less by the peculiar reticence of
paler stars, hung like a cross from the white throat
of cloud awaiting the kaleidoscopic brightness of
confetti, and the marriage bells.

Who are these loved ones
who cannot begin to mend?

If I could see them,
brilliantly rejected -
like wimping ships
dropped under buccaneering waters,
watch the slow horizons empty -
I might smile.

But if I see
the hawthorn creak with buds
a joy unfolds to tempt me,
withers with a bare simplicity.

The world is narrowed to a single sound:
your crying in an empty room.

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.

The tired lock gives
like gossamer.

An old incomprehension
grasps him.

It is a fever
turns him on
like sexuality:

the brute air spanning
nights of stealth:

the steel pick's
quiet manoeuvre
into place.

He loves
the delicate return
that leaves
the loud alarms
intact.

The night lights
fester on his face.
You find him
where the cold streets meet

deliriously clutching at
the shiny packet of his sexuality.

It is a time for cryig
but this *******
has a flavour few will try.

Each undressed woman
draws him on:
a simple thief
who will not buy.

This useless suffering
that strains to pull away
and pulls you with it.

Only cards, your card:

Inevitable flowers
near a girl’s lips
pouting slightly
and her nostrils testifying
to a hidden perfume
neither of us knows;

a man whose blurred face
forces me to trace its lines
and lose them under paler shades
indefinitely fading…..

Only words, three fives,
and finally your message:
painted masks
could not destroy it.

I force words, proudly boast
the nothing.

Only you,
your voice, your love in gifts:
expressionless, expressive.

Diamonds crack.

(from "Poems People Liked (2)")

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.

There were long nettles, sharp thorns, a wasp’s sting;
bruises, cuts, a piece of paper torn, a broken ring;
grey trouser rags and still, pale lips.
We stood quietly. Long mute hours passed.
Someone scattered dark petals from dark, crimson flowers
upon his hair; he being ours.

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.

“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!”

Infrequent vagrant though I am,
to hear the great frosts peal out noisily beneath my heels,
to see the slim hares coast away,
the bronze soils sealed by ice and scattered liberally
with scentless droppings,
brings me to the wonder of it.

I walk through winter’s paces:
bare fields, snapped stalks, rain-lines
smouldering beneath occasional sun,
and beauties multiply.
Where strong dusks pressed the daylight down
we stood…perhaps apart…like compasses.

I TAKE THESE GREEN-LACED LEAVES
I take these green-laced leaves,
this pageantry of spring,
these subtle buds to flowers,
the honeyed blossoms and the ivory race of clouds
the windy dawns have set in motion,
I take all these, and more :
                                           these bluebells
purple with commotion (yet to cover forest-floors!),
these hyacinths that out of more and still more
wild-flowering centres, bring forth myrrh and fume,
I take all these, and the larks that fill and fill further
every horizon as if none held but for
the nutshell-necessity of being tilled
to a central opalescence of singing pearl –
yes, all these, and pearls, voluptuous empires,
I take, I take all these, and you, yes, you,
my dark-haired darling crying on an apple-blossom pillow,
a wavering petal in petals, dark-leafed, of willow, I take forever,
for forever’s sake, all these, for you, all you.

My heart is with this stone.

As silent energy
it forces crisis after crisis.

It slings brutality across your face,
like ice.

It lords it over life.

“Sweetheart”,
you spoke that world unbearably,
like ****,
as beautifully as evening
when the whimbrel’s seven fluting notes
innumerably measure how the distance
widens between earth and moon.

I might have listened
but my heart is with this stone.

A single flame
entices them
to whir against my window.
Once inside
all chaos is let loose.

Like maddened souls
they batter thin partitions.

I can hear them
banging round my room
like noisy kids.

Two are coasting down the flame,
collapsing, fluttering
like mute, sad birds.

You find them dead in lampshades:
unhappy victims of a single impulse:
their greatest escapade
the flame or lamp that was their ruin.

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.

Catching the hard, red cricket ball
I rub it on my trousers, spin it in my hand
and reaching backwards throw it at her.

Hard and accurate the ball
divested of a reason rotates through the air,
catching the sun upon its body, gathering
impetus until the eye is mesmerized.

It happened far too quickly:
the untiring accuracy of my throw
that never would have hit a wicket
folded against her with a gentle noise.

She winced, her hand upon her *****, tried to smile
and started crying like a girl;
and picking up the ball I threw it furiously down the field
and found myself in tears.

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.

Infrequent vagrant though I am,
to hear the great frosts peal out noisily beneath my heels,
to see the slim hares coast away,
the bronze soils sealed by ice and scattered liberally
with scentless droppings,
brings me to the wonder of it.

I walk through winter’s paces:
bare fields, snapped stalks, rain-lines
smouldering beneath occasional sun,
and beauties multiply.
Where strong dusks pressed the daylight down
we stood…perhaps apart…like compasses.

Buttercups,
yellow like honey,
become peculiar sweets
towards the sea
-line where I sit
slighting the grey.

Stars, bubble-topped,
in champagne rise
the firelight of this beaded day.

Blow the blue swallows,
loops of the air,
whose south and southern fragrance
sow the summer day down to the –
say of nowhere newly made somewhere.

Lift all the wheat
the harvester the combine
combining to bind
binding the bound the golden.

Slip all the day
down to the throat
the ear stray
for the sea terns’ splash
or the noise of the stoat.

Graft till the grip
is the tight of crowded lines,
and the seaward trip
whitely stars
as phosphorescence drips
pleasure-presents, those
lips on lips.

It is towards a slow keeping-together of themes
from a missal-thrush memory
that words keen and are made.
                                                   The place matters little:
a furrow of ponds, a wet landscape
curved like a dish, the brittle stare and awkward movement
of spread-eagling duck on a cup of ice –
                                                            what do these matter? unless
the memory keels to the retina a shape of things to come,
teases and minnows them down to a flashing fin
in a chamber of shapeless streams, in a chamber
of crosses and thrushes.

(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!

…clinks in glasses
chilling the lips
unless a sudden contact
is avoided.

…is frigidity –
a grain of water
gleaned by the sun
is preferable.

…lingers slowly
dissipating.
Give me streams
as quick as bullets.

…chills a
red Dubonnet
till the wine
upends the sun’s intensity.

…sways
every eye
towards the skater’s
own uncalculated mastery.

…partners
the gritty frost
that folds the pebbles
in a skein of light.

Ice is the groin’s negation.
Ice is the temperance of nations.

…clinks in glasses
chilling the lips
unless a sudden contact
is avoided.

…is frigidity –
a grain of water
gleaned by the sun
is preferable.

…lingers slowly
dissipating.
Give me streams
as quick as bullets.

…chills a
red Dubonnet
till the wine
upends the sun’s intensity.

…sways
every eye
towards the skater’s
own uncalculated mastery.

…partners
the gritty frost
that folds the pebbles
in a skein of light.

Ice is the groin’s negation.
Ice is the temperance of nations.

Published in OUTPOSTS PUBLICATIONS 1974 (NO LEEWAY)

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.

I can remember you, Kathy,
by a single tree
as sere as it was thin
where a path dwindled
and two robins, or perhaps three,  
(it was a heightened afternoon
and we had argued wearily)
piped pipe thin.
                           Your love since then
has proven me deciduous –
but where my lying fancies stray
I have manacled my mind
to make of us
a devilish cast, a dud tree,
your mouth ******* mine,
and a lark descending wretchedly.

I don’t mind waiting.

Flowers fade.
The stripped stem lowers,
broken.

It is beauty that I’m after.

Sleepy-eyed, golden-snaked,
you slip away. A fissure furrowed
in the stone is breaking in the heat.

Around you shy clouds wheel
immeasurably distant
but between them cliffs are falling.

Trapped, you hesitate.
A dry blood loosens in your mouth. You know you’re dying
and at last I can’t help waiting.

I take turns
in turning you out
or letting your chiding in,
childishly minding you
and dressing you lavishly –
then suddenly ******* you to within
a poppystem-breadth of your nakedness
when you weigh up all mockery as sin
and, mouth to mouth, I am gathered
from my nakedness to your nakedness within.