Long Legged Fly

That civilisation may not sink,
Its great battle lost,
Quiet the dog, tether the pony
To a distant post;
Our master Caesar is in the tent
Where the maps are spread,
His eyes fixed upon nothing,
A hand upon his head.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.
That the topless towers be burnt
And men recall that face,
Move most gently if move you must
In this lonely place.
She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,
That nobody looks; her feet
Practise a tinker shuffle
Picked up on a street.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
Her mind moves upon silence.
That girls at puberty may find
The first Adam in their thought,
Shut the door of the Pope's chapel,
Keep those children out.
There on that scaffolding resides
Michael Angelo.
With no more sound than the mice make
His hand moves to and fro.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.

WB Yeats

Duet

Yesterday, without warning your
Suzuki Alto somersaulted on the M4

with you caught inside, contorted
as the spine of the rust-sunk bedstead

disguised by the garden’s
tangle of dog roses, dividing
coded vegetables

from your lawn: a stage.

Two birds blend
their story on a wire:
you and I

aged eight and nine entwined

by the school piano where
our mother sparkles out
the keyboards certainties

in black and white. I’d keep my eyes
on that portrait of the Queen, feel

soprano notes tingle through your
clothes. Now you can’t even breathe solo.

Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch

Severn

When the weather comes always and sideways
it’s not enough, the settling.
Why is this known only and over as first
and not all over again?

Each time the tide overtakes itself
what’s worked loose is moved inland
on river over-running river
carrying off the tree-chimney-telegraph
wreckage of your way home.

It starts with a lapse, a taking back
of background (breeze and creep and song)
a making room for the massive collapse
of distance, a rolling up of the world
into a wave that comes to an end unbroken.

There’s no way home. Ask the man
who turns in his sleep reaching past
his wife for his lover, his lover for his wife
and cries that the lamp must be put out
and puts it out, setting fire to his hair.

Lavinia Greenlaw

Blakeney Point

Such constancy is no celebration.
Under this careful sky
it is only earth we walk on.

The long day empties.
The small things, so vital, quicken and fly.
Already no song in the garden.

The fires we build along the northern edge
are no more upsetting to the air
than breath. Is this love?

A cure for the visible.
Fern seed gathered this midsummer midnight
would render us as clear.

Lavinia Greenlaw

To paraphrase Judy Brown

If a poem doesn't tell you anything that isn't part of the general consciousness of the world, then it's not doing its job.

While John makes the point that while a single conceit is generally a good thing, it needs then to reach a critical mass and then go beyond itself. It is only a means, a mechanism, not the end.

You Drew Breath

as a boy draws something silver from a river,
an angler from the sea a bale of weed;
as a woman draws herself from a bath,
as blood is drawn from a vein.
You drew breath as thread is drawn through
the eye of a needle, wet sheets through a mangle,
as steel is drawn through a die to make wire.
and oil draws up through wick its flag of fire.
You drew breath as a reservoir draws from a well
of ink and a mouth and a nose and eyes are drawn,
as money and a bow and the tide are drawn;
as up over her head a woman draws
a dress and down onto her a man.
You drew breath as a cloud draws its pall
across the moon, across the car park
where a sky-blue line draws the way
all the way to Maternity; as all in blue
they drew a semi-circle around the bed,
a line and then a knife across the skin;
as in another room someone drew
a curtain around its runner, a hand across
a pair of finished eyes. You drew breath
as they drew you – besmeared and blue – out
and sublime was your fury at being drawn
into this air, this theatre; you drew breath
for the first time – for a second I held mine.

Greta Stoddart

Five Houses Down

I loved his ten demented chickens
and the hell-eyed dog, the mailbox
shaped like a huge green gun.
I loved the eyesore opulence
of his five partial cars, the wonder-cluttered porch
with its oilspill plumage, tools
cauled in oil, the dark
clockwork of disassembled engines
christened Sweet Baby and benedicted Old Bitch;
and down the steps into the yard the explosion
of mismatched parts and black scraps
amid which, like a bad sapper cloaked
in luck, he would look up stunned,
patting the gut that slopped out of his undershirt
and saying, Son,
you lookin’ to make some scratch?
All afternoon we’d pile the flatbed high
with stacks of Exxon floormats
mysteriously stencilled with his name,
rain-rotted sheetrock or miles
of misfitted pipes, coil after coil
of rusted fencewire that stained for days
every crease of me, rollicking it all
to the dump where, while he called
every ragman and ravened junkdog by name,
he catpicked the avalanche of trash
and fished some always fixable thing
up from the depths. Something
about his endless aimless work
was not work, my father said.
Somehow his barklike earthquake curses
were not curses, for he could goddam
a slipped wrench and shitfuck a stuck latch,
but one bad word from me
made his whole being
twang like a nail mis-struck. Aint no call for that,
son, no call at all. Slipknot, whatknot, knot
from which no man escapes—
prestoed back to plain old rope;
whipsnake, blacksnake, deep in the wormdirt
worms like the clutch of mud:
I wanted to live forever
five houses down
in the womanless rooms a woman
sometimes seemed to move through, leaving him
twisting a hand-stitched dishtowel
or idly wiping the volcanic dust.
It seemed like heaven to me:
beans and weenies from paper plates,
black-fingered tinkerings on the back stoop
as the sun set, on an upturned fruitcrate
a little jamjar of rye like ancient light,
from which, once, I took a single, secret sip,
my eyes tearing and my throat on fire.

Christian Wiman

Pupil

I could no more know
myself than this flame
seated in the air
one quarter of an inch
above its burnt root
- so self –contained a form
you’d think it held in ice –

no more know that flame
than one drop of rain
or a single leaf
let alone this draught
slicing across the sill
nudging the little
corpse-boat of a fly;

no more know you, fly
than this cat – the cat
perhaps but what about
the way it holds us
in a gaze so void
of an idea of self
our own can only fail.

Were we to return
that look we might learn
to take something from
nothing, might begin
to steady and see,
figure who we are
in that slit black flame.

Greta Stoddart

I'm Perfect at Feelings

so I have no problem telling you
why you cried over the third lost
metal or the mousetrap. I knew
that orgasms weren't your fault
and that feeling of keeping solid
in yourself but wanting an ecstatic
black hole was just bad beauty.

Certain loves were perfect
in the daytime and had every
right to express carnally behind
the copy machine and there are
no hard feelings for the boozy
sodomy and sorry XX daisy chain,
whenever it felt right for you.

And when the moment of soft
levitation with erasing hands
made you feel dirty, like
the main person to think up love
in the first place, I knew that.
It's okay, you're an innocent
with the brilliance of an animal

stuffing yourself sick on a kill.
Don't, don't feel like the runt alien
on my ship: I get you. I know
the dimensions of your wishing
and losing and don't think you
a glutton with petty beefs. But
even I, who know your triggers,

your emblematic sacs of sad fury,
I understand why the farthest fat trees
sliver down with your disappointment
and why the big sense of the world,
wrong before you, shrugs but
somewhere grasps your spinning,
stunning, alone. But you have me.

Brenda Shaughnessy

At Arundel Tomb

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd –
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-barooque
Hardly involves the eye, until
it meets his left hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptors sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidl they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. the stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

The Mind Reader

lui parla

Some things are truly lost. Think of a sun-hat
Laid for the moment on a parapet
While three young women – one, perhaps, in mourning –
Talk in the crenellate shade. A slight wind plucks
And budges it, it scuffs to the edge and cartwheels
Into a giant view of some description:
Haggard escarpments, if you like, plunge down
Through mica shimmer to a moss of pines
Amidst which, here or there, a half-seen river
Lobs up a blink of light. The sun-hat falls,
With what free flirts and stoops you can imagine,
down through that reeling vista or another,
Unseen by any, even by you or me.
It is as when a pipe-wrench, catapulted
From the jounced back of a pick-up truck, dives headlong
Into a bushy culvert, or a book
whose reader is asleep, garbling the story,
glides from beneath a steamer chair and yields
Its flurried pages to the printless sea.
It is one thing to escape from consciousness
As such things do, another to be pent
In the dream-cache, or stony oubliette
Of someone’s head.

They found, when I was little,
That I could tell the place of missing objects.
I stood by the bed of a girl, or the frayed knee
Of an old man whose face was lost in shadow.
When did you miss it?, people would be saying,
Where did you see it last? And then those voices,
Querying or replying, came to sound
Like cries of birds when the leaves race and whiten
And a black overcast is shelving over.
The mind is not a landscape, but if it were
There would in such case be a tilted moon
Wheeling beyond the wood through which you groped,
Its fine spokes breaking in the tangled thickets.
There would be obfuscations, paths which turned
To dried-up stream-beds, hemlocks which invited
Through shiny clearings to a groundless shade;
And yet in a sure stupor you would come
At once upon dilapidated cairns,
Abraded moss, and half-healed blazes leading
to where, around the turning of a fear,
The lost thing shone.

Imagine a railway platform –
The long cars come to a cloudy halt beside it,
And the fogged windows offering a view
Neither to those within or those without,
Now, in the crowd – forgive my predilection-
Is a young woman standing amidst her baggage,
Expecting to be met by you, a stranger.
See how she turns her head, the eyes engaging
and disengaging, pausing and shying away.
It is like that with things put out of mind,
As the queer saying goes: a lost key hangs
Trammelled by threads in what you come to see
As the webbed darkness of a sewing-basket,
Flashing a little; or a photograph,
Misplaced in an old ledger, turns its bled
Oblivious profile to rebuff your vision,
Yet glistens with the fixative of thought.
What can be wiped from memory? Not the least
Meanness, obscenity, humiliation,
Terror which made you clench your eyes, or pulse
Of happiness which quickened your despair.
Nothing can be forgotten, as I am not
Permitted to forget.

It was not far
From that to this – this corner café table
Where, with my lank grey hair and vatic gaze,
I sit and drink at the receipt of custom.
They come here, day and night, so many people:
Sad women of the quarter, dressed in black,
As to a black confession; blinking clerks
Who half-suppose that Taurus ruminates
Upon their destinies; men of affairs
Down from Milan to clear it with the magus
Before they buy or sell some stock or other;
My fellow-drunkards; fashionable folk,
Mocking and ravenously credulous,
And sceptics bent on proving me a fraud
For fear that some small wonder, unexplained,
Should leave a fissure in the world, and all
St. Michael’s host come flapping back.
I give them
Paper and pencil, turn away and light
A cigarette, as you have seen me do;
They write their questions; fold them up; I lay
My hand on theirs and go into my frenzy,
Raising my eyes to heaven, snorting smoke,
Lolling my head as in the fumes of Delphi,
And then, with shaken, spirit-guided fingers,
Set down the oracle. All that, of course,
Is trumpery, since nine times out of ten
What words float up within another’s thought
Surface as soon in mine, unfolding there
Like paper flowers in a water-glass.
In the tenth case, I sometimes cheat a little.
That shocks you? But consider: what I do
Cannot, so most conceive, be done at all,
And when I fail, am I a charlatan
Even to such as I have once astounded-
Whereas a tailor can mis-cut my coat
And be a tailor still. I tell you this
Because you know I have the gift, the burden
Whether or not I put my mind to it,
The world usurps me ceaselessly; my sixth
And never-resting sense is a cheap room
Black with the anger of insomnia,
Whose walls vibrate with the mutters, plaints,
And flushings of the race.
What should I tell them?
I have no answers. Set your fears at rest,
I scribble when I must. Your paramour
is faithful, and your spouse is unsuspecting.
You were not seen, that day, beneath the fig tree.
Still, be more cautious. When the time is ripe,
Expect promotion. I forsee a message
From a far person who is rich and dying.
You are admired in secret. If, in your judgement,
Profit is in it, you should take the gamble.
As for those fits of weeping, they will pass.
It makes no difference that my lies are bald
And my evasions casual. It contents them
Not to have spoken, yet to have been heard.
What more do they deserve, if I could give it,
Mute breathers as they are of selfish hopes
And small anxieties? Faith, justice, valour,
All those reputed rarities of soul
Confirmed in marble by our public statues –
You may be sure they are rare indeed
Where the soul mopes in private, and I listen.
Sometimes I wonder if the blame is mine,
If through a sullen fault of the mind’s ear
I miss a resonance in all their fretting.
Is there some huge attention, do you think,
Which suffers us and is inviolate,
To which all hearts are open, which remarks
The sparrow’s weighty fall, and overhears
In the worst rancour a deflected sweetness?
I should be glad to know it.
Meanwhile, saved
By the shrewd habit of concupiscience,
Which, like a visor, narrows my regard,
And drinking studiously until my thought
Is a blind lowered almost to the sill,
I hanker for that place beyond the sparrow
Where the wrench beds in mud, the sun-hat hangs
In densest branches, and the book is drowned.
Ah, you have read my mind, One more, perhaps –
A mezzo-litro. Grazie, professore.

Richard Wilbur

The Reader

The Reader

She is going back, these days, to the great stories
That charmed her younger mind. A shaded light
Shines on the nape half-shadowed by her curls,
And a page turns now with a scuffing sound.
Onward they come again, the orphans reaching
For a first handhold in a stony world.
The young provincials who at last look down
On the city’s maze, and will descend into it,
The serious girl, once more, who would live nobly,
The sly one who aspires to marry so,
The young man bent on glory, and that other
Who seeks a burden. Knowing as she does
What will become of them in bloody field
or Tuscan garden, it may be that at times
She sees their first and final selves at once,
As a god might to whom all time is now.
Or, having lived so much herself, perhaps
She meets them at this time with a wiser eye,
Noting that Julien’s calculating head
Is from the first too severed from his heart.
But the true wonder of it is that she,
For all that she may know of consequences,
Still turns enchanted to the next bright page
Like some Natasha in the ballroom door –
Caught in the flow of things wherever bound,
The blind delight of being, ready still
To enter life on life and see them through.

Richard Wilbur

The Lammas Hireling

After the fair, I'd still a light heart
and a heavy purse, he struck so cheap.
And cattle doted on him: in his time
mine only dropped heifers, fat as cream.
Yields doubled. I grew fond of company
that knew when to shut up. Then one night,

disturbed from dreams of my dear late wife,
I hunted down her torn voice to his pale form.
Stock-still in the light from the dark lantern,
stark-naked but for one bloody boot of fox-trap,
I knew him a warlock, a cow with leather horns.
To go into the hare gets you muckle sorrow,

the wisdom runs, muckle care. I levelled
and blew the small hour through his heart.
The moon came out. By its yellow witness
I saw him fur over like a stone mossing.
His lovely head thinned. His top lip gathered.
His eyes rose like bread. I carried him

in a sack that grew lighter at every step
and dropped him from a bridge. There was no
splash. Now my herd's elf-shot. I don't dream
but spend my nights casting ball from half-crowns
and my days here. Bless me Father for I have sinned.
It has been an hour since my last confession.

Ian Duhig

Envoi

Go away. All that’s over.
No more fluttering, squirming, crawling, running.
I’ve achieved stillness, clarity.
Since the tide gave up this one rock
And I’m the only point to reckon by
Many of you have taken me for a sign.
Stop. Stay on the deep.
Wing back down the round sleep of waters.
Deceive them, tell them it never ends.
Give me peace.

But the speech of skulls is strange to birds.
Weary, eager for crumbs and Noah’s praise,
The dove snapped half the glittering twig
Curling green in the eye socket,
Clutched it, flew.

Michael Donaghy

Guilt Wasn’t Why She Was Weeping

Like the searchlights that glare through the nursery's breathmisted window,
Like the static that rasps through the speakers submerging the warning,
Like the heat-haze of summer that ripples the level horizon,
Just so did Helen
take the silvery veils on her shoulders.

And she walked the wall weeping where Priam was eyeing up targets.
Then, like a warrior taking his fieldglasses, softly
Priam called out to her, Helen, come sit with me, daughter
kissing her tears away
whispering, child don't take on so.

But she threw off his hand - guilt wasn't why she was weeping -
And that look that she answered with flashed like a silvery spearpoint,
Like the static that rasps through the speakers submerging the warning,
Like the heat-haze of summer
that ripples the level horizon.

Michael Donaghy

This Bread I Break

This bread I break was once the oat,
This wine upon a foreign tree
Plunged in its fruit;
Man in the day or wind at night
Laid the crops low, broke the grape’s joy.

Once in this wine the summer blood
Knocked in the flesh that decked the vine.
Once in this bread
The oat was merry in the wind;
Man broke the sun, pulled the wind down.

This flesh you break, this blood you let
Make desolation in the vein.
Were oat and grape,
Born of the same sweet soil and sap.
My wine you drink, my bread you break.


Dylan Thomas (dec 24, 1933)

She's not listening to you

She's not listening to you
Warm jumpers can bite
Wooly jumpers used to be sheep
I wish I was a sheep
Do you think she is a sheep?
My mum likes jumpers
Is she your mum?
She isn't my mum
Mu mum used to like jumpers then one bit her
Does your mum bite?
Parsnips don't bite
I bite parsnips
I wish my mum was a parsnip

(from a mental health first aid hearing voices exercise)