A little anthology...

PIECES OF FIRE AND HEAVEN


He was alone: a mile each way the beach
was desert with a blue border.
He fiddled the glasses that were his eyes,
he ran up and down the dunes

without moving, he played with terns in the air, their white
plummeting ripostes, and did not mind that he was alone.

He wasn't greedy for the paisley treasures
of air-dancing tortoise-shells, peacocks that close their eyes
to a moonless night, or other, curdy slivers of flight.

To come upon means to invent, they say.
His eye could net them again and agin and be believed,
but was it true the other way?

It was the sea-holly that made him despair
with its bloomed and scratchy leaves

sucking their colour from the waves
beyond Overy Staithe, beyond Gun Hill, on days
when overcasting clouds, flung from The Wash,
scumble dimming blues with greenish greys,

and its roots go down-worming, interlacing dark dune-deeps.

Memory will keep on doing its translations:
as if they were liths of orange

(whose flower-water once candied such roots,
eryngoes that could rouse to edgy sweetness
some merry wives or Essex lasses)

and dripping shimmers off some cobaltic sea,

these leaves were glittering now -- and who would ever believe him? --
with the tangerine metals of scarce coppers

and what he hoped might be the sheeny blues of love
that often flutter past, Eros and Adonis,
lightly touched with lustful mauve.

It was only Icarus he'd come upon, wings unmelted,
still on sea-holly leaves, yet, opening, they
seemed to him at last no small invention, those smalted
fliers pausing there, common as sky.


(National Poetry competition 3rd prize 1988
 Flying Blues; Carcanet, 1995)



SUMMER'S LEASE                   


Samuel Palmer dreams in sunlight
at Shoreham, sees lit greens

still through the veins of leaves.
Fears the corn, cadmium bright

bleeding from the scythe.
At noon he dreams of moonlight --
 
at noon the heat seethes in his brain,
darkens to the tree-bole's shadow.

He contemplates a Kentish Eden fit
for paint, and sketching in his mind

scenes of primary and golden genesis,
feels the pulse of summer glow,

with grief and anger drifting
away, light as fritillaries.

Eyelids shuttered down, recalling the nude
Blake's vibrations in the garden

for Paradise lost in radiant Peckham.
Contemplates fields made pregnant

with God by his pigments --
all the rising wheat undying.

Friends, friends! -- he cries:
We are all the chrysalis

asleep and dreaming
of our wings.


(from In Memoriam Milena; Chatto & Windus, 1973)



AFRICAN GREY


Grey is no more a sombre neutrality
lurking between white and black. His ample monochrome
constantly delights -- the wings of overlapped slate,
flakes of pewter; the breast softly bursts
in pencilled raincloud. Each small head-feather
has its own penumbra; the underbelly sloping
in downy chiaroscuro to smoky whiteness.
The speedy malice of his eyes
mesmerises the unwary: gold-rimmed beads of vital jet
shine with the bird's intelligent quick.
His black beak hooks like a peach-eating hawk's,
strong enough to crack walnut and wood.
At the touch of fingers on neck he'll drop
his head to bask, tight against the bars.
To clutch a grape at will the foot
becomes a hand; the warm dry tongue
burrows succulently. In his beak he shells
sunflower seeds like a nimble seamstress,
and shits methodically. We assume his disdain
and amusement; impatient if ignored, he is an expert
collector of mixed feelings. He eschews pidgin
English and parrots the cat to perfect confusion.
On the ground he wades like a turkey
crossing a water-bed; to sleep
loads his weight on one foot.
But to see him cavort upside down, head tucked
blind beneath a spread wing-fan, displaying
his stop-light scarlet tail in jungle charivari,
is to perceive the form and essence
of the histrionic. Yet he makes that grey
gleam brighter than tropical blossoms,
makes grey as much a privilege
as his spiky wits.


(from Bridging Loans; Chatto & Windus, 1976)



PARTING PRESENT


(for Joyce Belfrage)


The years are replaced and petrify.
Some distant percolation of rain-forest
like a dream still there in daylight
has given me this polished
five-sided talisman:
a piece of tree grown rock
that soothingly fits inside my palms
clasped as if in contemplation
or half-hearted prayer.
I know nothing of chemistry but
what is numinous.

This brown striated coal
glows with fissures of opal, brilliant
insights of purple amethyst.

My hands grow cool
round its locked fire.

Opening them, I see a piece of Earth
cut from a photograph taken by Apollo.
This half-known territory, contours and strata
snapped from out there, may be
history becoming paper;
but startling, the sheer physics
of colour timed across the universe
from some galactic antipodes.

Hold this parting present to the light:
these inlets of ultra-violet sea
swivel to illuminated golden
shores of topaz, semi-precious
like Terra Australia itself now
as I sit at home in the North,
puzzled, wary, looking at my pebble
world from space.


(from The Loveless Letters; Chatto & Windus; 1981)



LOVELESS TIMES


Dear, distant wife, here the bell
does not call us to think on the divine,
leaning on the dark wood of childhood
in clean and singing rooms,
but tolls its signal of terminal release:

men like exhausted fish, played out,
losing the battle with air.
Faith shrinks each second as the coffin's
lowered, the half-alive slowly
hauling in reverse.

I know of a fine homestead built with the craft
of prisoners shining at their exercise;
the rooms cool and spacious with cedar,
fitted with all the fineries of England,
the delicate superior ballast

of our voyage to this under-world.
Imagine them: they were never ours,
such china, such radiant fabrics,.
What grace and ceremonial will suit
the burying of their makers?

At dawn the bellcote summons convicts
blinking and spayed by their labours
from their distant pig-sty; stumbling,
they finger sores where the iron's chewed.
The view from the house is shielded

by a line of foreign trees: so
discreet and civilised, the master
will not let the mistress see them
sweating, working Surrey out of Eden.
Can you imagine pigs manacled

to a Dorset wall by night? I shout
'Let them all rot!' silently to myself.
So discreet and scared.
How visions are by changing views made
insufferable; I watch hours of ships

tacking into time past.
Or is it exile's vision of the future,
the past revising its list
of lamentable manoeuvres?
The shadow on the prison sun-dial

pointing north creeps no nearer you
than I can, my back against infinity.
I practise a smile. My sour muscles ache
in my cheeks. My laugh turns tail.
I wait here at the end of England's

tether, the stale scum of settling minutes.
If only I could reverse the globe's
infamous gravities and let my spirits rise
unnaturally upwards to their antipodes,
to your lovely smile that leans sideways

across your face, to your hooded
and responsive valleys; let the woods
moisten me in a wet September dawn,
the raindrops poised on each twig,
as if History wept for us, wide-eyed.


(from The Loveless Letters; Chatto & Windus; 1981)



REVISIONS


The green half is the old:
    those reeds have hatched
a second roof, wide spongy
    paddocks of moss and lichen
where the weather seeps
    and runs and switches
colours with a watery sun.
    Like aging rhymes on crutches
the tips give way, year
    by year, reed-ends matching
their tiny holes in shadow
    to the light which
withers under the eaves, each
    stalk a worn-out swatch.

The yellow half is the new,   
where the young thatcher's
bristle rows gather
    slowly upwards, his batches
laid out like sheaves across
    the roof. I know of course each
reed's too weak for a pen,
    but this is still a rich
craft of revision, all the same,
    his generous potlatch
of wheat-gold lines
    I'd like to touch,
that true, stubble-edged
    unfalling wave, out of reach.

I keep hearing him at work up there,   
    kneeling to the swelling touch
of an old roof, his fresh reeds
    making, softly, speech-speech-speech.


(from Cicadas in Their Summers; Carcanet, 1988)



VERONICA LAKE

                'The earth was small, light blue and so touchingly alone...
                 our home that must be defended like a holy relic.'
                            Aleksei Leonov (Russian cosmonaut)


They'll take your ashes if you have the cash,
Capsuled and hammocked somewhere between death
And immortality... for a few years only.               
Some trip, precious! -- nearly five thousand dollars
For a teaspoonful to be swept up at five miles a second

Aboard the latest shiny, shiny Pegasus.                   
This is a very dear suspension of dust and
Disbelief: just seven grammes of your old self
Circling our poor relic marble every ninety minutes.           
This pinch of powder, this soupçon of you-ness,

Like the desiccated scurf of the original spurt
That started your smidgen of history ticking,               
Will have to come back down again,
Flaring and smoking, all the way down again.
You can't cheat the snap of oblivion's jaws.

Littering space with gizmos and garbage
Has no more hope than trying to write names
On stone or bronze or water.
Cruising the whirled beauty of our planet's
All very well, but what's the point if you can't see

The brown foot of Arabia or the speedwell
Blue of the seas? The cloud-swirls like
Uncooked pavlova draped from Cape to Cape?
What's the point if there's no fun or feeling? No wonder?
The corporate deals of Celestial Burial Services

Playing half-speed Puck with my bone-dust
And brain-ash is no miracle -- what I'd want's to see
From up there the million places one life's too brief for,
To play my own games with time and space,
Like wondering if that little town by the coast

Of Argentina, down there, across the Plate
From Montevideo, might have a brightening pool
Of inland water near... I'd like to mix up maps and names
And multiply the shades of Veronica Lake
(And a fresh Blue Dahlia?), then I'd zoom out like

A satellite camera or, better still, like
The imagination, and try to find her face below,
Emblazoned on a handkerchief of cloud
Stretching to the Andes, framing her there...
And she's staring up at me, Constance, peekaboo.


(The 1940s Hollywood actress Veronica Lake, she of the peekaboo hairstyle, was born Constance Ockelman. The Blue Dahlia is among her better-known films.                          
St Veronica's handkerchief is said to have shown the face of Christ after she wiped his face on his way to Calvary.


(published in Stand)



MOSES HARRIS AND HIS SCARLET ADMIRABLE


The white lights flickering, the gash of vermilion -- but there's more
of blackness in dwindling summer -- it's long past spring,
long past my greening -- even the lit heaven, the blinding gold,
is clouding -- they used to mark spring once by an early Clouded Yellow,
that lovely dancer they began to name a Butter Fly --
saw a late one last August on a patch of vetch, a field just north
of Cool Arbour Lane -- there's a name! --arbour or harbour,
it's all the same to me --an old sky trapper makiong for the shade --
I'll be stretched out on a white sheet like a Sooty Ringlet
or a closed book -- There's a pattern -- never found it --
we come out into the green world like someone's brighter notion --
Mother Harris was no golden chrysalis -- meet our winter
too soon, Vanessa, don't we? --  Some little brilliance, perhaps --
if fortune gets out from under the clouds -- otherwise -- only other why's --

This bed -- this river bank -- the floor moves --
stop, Putney! -- softly, Lambeth! -- I fight the gauze --
oh they net me, Vanessa -- I feel my life coming off like
pretty scales before I'm pinned, boxed under glass --
the last laugh: can the lepid change her spots? Forgive me --
Now where's Camberwell gone, that took me in her vivid lanes?
All summer I hunted down a Grand Surprize -- caught him at last,
the handsome waver -- and me the smart aurelian leaping about
under the sallows -- oh beauty, Camberwell!

It's late for a fly, Vanessa -- don't stay too long by an old man
who'll not see a cloudy shine in April again, nor a creamy morning
when the dew's like a quick drench of Thames over the fields --
Black and beautiful night arrives on wings -- no good fearing
blackness -- I see the white lights fluttering -- and how
your brightness vermeils my eyes --- always you pattern the mysteries
else I wouldn't have pinned you all, drawn and painted to the end --
you showed me how we murder to copy life -- I never
read you right, never -- the why's of our little flight over
this queer planet -- dear Scarlet Admirable,
imago of my real desire, my coloured art -- show me if you will
how the blossom rises in a winged quadrille --

[Moses Harris was a noted 18th century aurelian i.e. lepidopterist, and illustrator of lepidoptera]


(1st prize winner in the Peterloo poetry competition, 1989;
Flying Blues, Carcanet, 1995)



from      QUARTET FOR THE LION

(i.m. Leos Janacek  1854-1928)


(iv)  Madam, the source


Is it a path or a stream? I love these lime trees,
the flowers blown and falling

that will need sweeping, and the leaves, later.
We can sit for hours, too easily, surrounded by good ideas

going brown. Is it a path or a stream?
Madam, when in 1917 I saw your tears,

your child in your arms, your husband away
to war... It must always come from life, he said,

refusing a ride back home on the tram, all its Brno names
rattling away in German.

The notes don't just sit down on the keys!
Madam, these letters of mine, these small black notes...

Tunes that hit like water. I too need a town with a river
through it like a throat, and the voices rushing,

sawing back and forth, bows on the strings. Intimate life.
He was right, the old maestro, ready to climb the path

up through the forest, to put his palm to the trickle
where the river starts: it is so slight but gathering,

like a child pulling a wooden cart over cobbles,
like the song of the goldfinch which breaks every day

through the bars of her owner's cage, like your voice
through its tears, the shout in the street

before the bullets and the bloody fighting.
It all begins in life: he showed me

how a cadence of love, of pain, speaks and dies;
how strongly its memory rivers into song.


(published in PN Review; and Comparative Criticism 19)



NB  all poems copyright ©  Rodney Pybus 2008