‘From the Reveries of a Gentleman’ and Other Poems

From the Reveries of a Gentleman

Where can that good soul have been,
rain pelting, sun blazing,
with ink horn at the ready
by a tavern table, or else,
easy among crooks, barons, varlets,
he slept under the staircase in a château,
and sang to the lute, coming to be,
the music, weightless and strict,
he found in a snowflake.

How did Pergolesi fight his disease
just long enough, a spider’s web hangs
in one corner of that room.

The ragtime composer spent nights underground.
I hope the customers had gone.
Air, now clearing of its gunshot aroma
from the whiskey, isolated
magically the fingers as they qualified
sonorities. Odd birds inhabited
the earthly keyboard, he only touched it,
to hear if the right notes had come.

All this I find myself wondering,
and something lumbers to the front:
I shiver, here it comes, I grit my teeth,
invoke an image for it – the stooped
crew carrying a marble frieze in the Purgatorio,
their crushing guilt, their griefs.

Again it brushes on past.
The spider can’t tell night from day,
but will spin again.



Theory of Dust

Twin haystacks, one at a distance,
both round, shimmer
faintly gilds their tops, vestige
of summer light, summer helped
to store feed for wintering cows,
shadow, shadow at the visible base
balances the stacks, blue pools of it,
blue from moisture.
                    The cottage elsewhere,
forest rushes up to it, then
down, down the rock cliff the sea
climbs or crashes;
the light-house keeper lived there,
his Norman wife, his tin coffee pot,
and from their spouts, morning come,
a milky fragrance drifted, fainter
the older they got.
                    Atlantic howl or smile, haystacks
were not torn to pieces, the cottage
was not crushed, each was a station
for the beyond that spoke all atmospheres,
for a logic mobile as fishes,
for a mystery doing its work.



Live Music in Open Space

Live music heard
      from an open space
still is confining
      and is confined,
irritable drum,
      plucked bass,
ugly the music
      and fearful
gives me the anxiety
      of a child with monsters,
strange faces, the quaint pistol
      and a wind rising
brings me with a wave
      the music closer –
have me, little wind, turn again
      from these horrors of the day,
lighten my infirmity,
      bring to mind
Julia’s dress,
      and Robert Herrick
strolling of old
      in his garden,
her dress that flows
      each way free,
as if she stepped
      to music
down from the immensity.



Nobody’s Ezekiel

He felt no spirit penetrate him,
heard no voice persuading him
to get up on his feet and pitilessly speak;
what in heaven then was this –
look up, trees on it that nod to the world
a blue promontory melts into a thunderhead –
brisk as the kingfisher
a warmth was flowing into him,
dense, touching the heart, and radiant –
the Dreamer has let fly with it in a loop,
it sprang away, winged by blood-heat,
it means to target
whomsoever he might single out –
for no time but hers it dwells on her,
distant at the door, not recognising,
it dwells on her, ageless in her blue, or so
the sick man in the bed
has felt, with an affect so wild
that where she steps ashore, all foam, no feeling,
the crystal shrine is taking shape, he longs for her.

Amor-Shakti
nursed it, Memory weans it,
now circling this other and his person
it hovers, it is appealing, near
with a perfection
not beyond reckoning.


Note
Shakti (Sanskrit, Vedanta) is a healing power (‘potency’) emanating from Brahma.



The Spoils of Lowestoft

Blown from the steppe an age ago,
     all fuzz, doing its cartwheel,
the tumbleweed bowls across
     desert highways: flooring it
along the turnpike to somewhere else,
     you do not hear it click and crunch.

That is why I’m glad to remember
     the foghorns, their conversation;
the bulky luggers, their orange sails;
     through salt air the tread of boots
on the pebble beach travelling up
     to my pillow in the dormitory.

And now the lifeboat, unforgotten,
     solid craft, propelled or not
head-on it took those perils of the sea
     we sang about on Sunday, picturing
in their sou’westers the lifeboat men
     hugging the oars that they pulled back.

For today, time is the sea and not
     the river; into it you dropped
shallowest things, not to be recollected;
     then the sea one day throws them back
as markers; you bite your lip, the sea toils
     to fashion it into a moment’s marker. Still,

the spell of nervous tissue irks a soul:
     anxiously involved in the galaxy
it looked, they did say, for markers of a haven;
     in haste it waves goodbye to a body
only to storm with the storms,
     harden in stones, rejoice in the animals.



Baudelaire’s ‘Le Flacon’ Unrhymed

Perfumes exist that find all matter porous,
it might be said they penetrate even glass.
Open a coffer come from the Orient –
the lock scrapes, the key yelps and sticks,

but just as in an abandoned house, secreted
in an armoire an antiquated bottle,
a souvenir, retained a heavy scent,
there’s life in it, out spurts a living soul.

A swarm of thoughts, twilight chrysalids,
gently shudders, spreads wings, takes flight,
tinctures of blue, frozen rose, blades of gold,
and memory is there, intoxicating.

It twists, it turns in the commotions
of air, with both hands thrusting a dizzied
and defeated soul to the very lip
of an abyss the human atmospheres obscure,

and spills it where for an age the abyss has been
for reeking Lazarus to tear the shroud away
making to move his spectre of a corpse,
spellbinding, the sepulchral love long gone.

Just so, lost to all human memory
I’ll be tossed aside, decrepit,
a squalid, sticky, cracked old bottle;
yet I’ll be witness to your force,

amiable pestilence, and of your viciousness,
liquor that angels concocted, cherished venom
eating at me, my life and death of heart –
still for you I’ll be a winding-sheet.