Unearthly Toys
Page 1
UNEARTHLY TOYS
POEMS AND MASKS
NED DENNY
to those who swim against the tide
*
and in loving memory of my father
After having searched the heights and pastures without having found that panther which we are pursuing, let us now track her in a more rational manner, in order that we may, through diligent study, trap in our snares she who is everywhere fragrant but nowhere seen.
DANTE, De Vulgari Eloquentia
…I have been a tree amid the wood
And many a new thing understood
That was rank folly to my head before.
EZRA POUND, The Tree
I would like to thank my grandfather Norman Reid – for the volumes of Blake and Pound, where it began; Brian Patten, Seamus Heaney and Simon Armitage – the ones who wrote back; Eric Griffiths – who saw something in me; Michael Schmidt – for several years of kindly responses, and the subsequent support; Ed Clarke – for the correspondence, the encouragement, and the synchronicities; and, finally, those I have no need to name – you know who you are.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Acknowledgements
1. HOUSE MUSIC
House Music
Who’s She
Rip
HMP Wandsworth
Logos
Three Old Songs
After Cavalcanti
Grislie
Engraved (Come to Daddy)
2. VENTRILOQUISE
Fir
Gazelle
Annunciation
May
Ode (Semilanceata 312)
Era
Faerie
Exiles
Tremor
3. THE SUN
Cloud
Nature & Art
Mining for Bone
Arles
The Sun
Cutting Class
As It Was in the Beginning
Dark Green
Return
4. WHERE WE ARE THE DEAD
Antimimon
Fake News from Nowhere
Drones
Junglist
Matrix
Mused
Reign
Waking
One Below
5. FLAGRANT STAMEN
Rooms
Wheel River
Says
Relic
Goa
Twin Peaks
To Catch a Thief
Self-Portrait as T’ang Poet at Dusk
Voyager
Copyright
So who’s it for, this monumental book
finessed with the pumice stone of my hard head?
For you, the only one able to look
deep within my ravings for a kind of sense,
and who once, in a dream, dared to unfold
the world’s slow reversion to iron from gold:
a feat of graft and sheer intellection.
Here, wisest friend, it’s all yours if you can lift
it or hold it down. Dear girl, God’s sweet gift,
may it last longer than the review section!
1
House Music
HOUSE MUSIC
Consider the architecture of the fire,
this radiant palace receiving in turn
the great bare mouth of the smallest creature
and the mirrored, steel-cored tower
of your pride; consider that soon
that grim ember
resembling the face we all fear or desire
will be the perch where you sing and do not burn,
peace be within thee, vigilant preacher
of the mind-consuming hour
each undergoes and what the moon
must dismember;
and consider while these agile days climb higher,
witchlike as flame – as the stuttering intern
is fanned to a tall and brilliant teacher –
how to step into that power,
that breathing room, the killer tune
you’ll remember.
WHO’S SHE
after Arnaut Daniel
Sweet precision
of the mind-manifesting
voice of the birds, the luminous argot
blown from tree to tree just as we implore
those whom love makes us see more and less clearly,
you inspire me – whose perverted soul sways true,
straight in its windings – to conceive the finest
call, a chirp with no bum note or word astray.
Indecision,
that luxury! No dithering
could touch me when I first breached the snow
of her smooth ramparts, the girl I thirst for
with a wild intensity that is nearly
unendurable, the shining one, she who
has hands whose omniscience exceeds the rest
as surely as love’s gentlest caress bests a
circumcision.
She clocked me, my discerning
between the real deal and the fake – we know
how true gold’s hidden by the lead uproar
of our toys – and as our tongues moved sincerely
she drew her dark cloak of constellated blue
so the boys that speak in the snake’s interest
couldn’t leer at what all babble fails to say.
No spring vision
(birds interpret as they sing)
of flowers limning the unguarded flow
of heaven is fresher; without her, L’Or
gives skin no glow nor JPMorgan’s yearly
profits; within her high castle’s living pew
our seeming leaders might be less possessed,
all who exchange her presence for the Devil’s pay.
God’s elision
in life’s book of our killing –
that only sin – our joy with our sorrow
surely bodes well for his setting some store
by holy communion, wherein we’ll merely
look and kiss and laugh along each bared sinew
as I measure the lovely weight of a breast
where the light, the embodied light, swells its ray.
Ah, derision
for my own solemn honking
bites once more – sound in which we think we go
about the gardens of an emperor,
dreamt court in which we whisper cavalierly
as his money man – and I’d be a fool to
mouth her name and put love to the test:
no saint protects those whose chatter keeps the dawn at bay.
RIP
You are just about to turn for home,
back to the chickens strutting in the dirt
and village gossip and a tonguelash from her,
when something in the silence holds you.
It is a quiet composed of many sounds
(each one as small as it is clear)
that call and call to a distant stillness
our dialect has no words for.
You fall to the grass. The hour’s a song
to empty the skull, moving in the giant sky
and men disguised as mountain pines.
It is as though you have been asleep,
as if you have stumbled out of time.
The dwarves are gone. Their dreamless faces
leer from the rocks and the rocky clouds,
down at the trees whose ascent is music.
You are just about to turn for home.
The minutes pass like seasons, centuries.
HMP WANDSWORTH
Down the rain-sweetened paths of the garden centre
&nb
sp; an old boy handles a broom like a dancer, sweeps
with an unhurried grace that is almost tender
or stoops to pick up the eaten face of a rose,
a toppled plant. Such is the knowledge manifest
in gesture, the genius of fingers, as this wild
day makes an avenue of lindens plunge like wild
horses, as someone who moves from his deep centre
makes the body’s divinity manifestly
clear. Past a fence and a road, the arrested sweep
of HM’s broken clock speaks volumes, conjures rows
of locked sky-blue doors and the illegal tender
of phones and weed in those walls where none are tender,
then the gent who spat in the face of Oscar Wilde
at Clapham Junction station, the tears he claimed rose
that hour each day, and all horrors heaven-sent, a
black wind from the sun that will scour our bones and sweep
us to the end where Love, for ever, manifests.
I have taken a pinch of mind-manifester
(though ‘spirit-’ surely gets it better), more tender
with each dismantling minute, rudderless, swept
by my breath across a common newly-wild
to glare at the glaring brick of the Visitors’ Centre,
to gaze at unearthly cars muscular in rows
and glimpse in tinted glass my face’s cankered rose.
At Neal’s Nurseries, plants are checked on manifests;
I lope by and think of you, miscreant scenter
of what life might be if we could remain tender,
flower-child, dark beholder, prophet of the wild
presence that lives unseen in the woodland’s poised sweep,
of flesh as soul. The wind is at large. Horned clouds sweep
over alleys of grey-green, exultant rock rose.
In a tone wildly calm as it is calmly wild
the rhododendron reprints its manifesto –
with a verve so unlike all wordy pretenders! –
at each outspread upper petal’s silk-cool centre
and an ambulance sweeps down the road’s dead centre,
blue roses keening. Turning, that tender
man flashes me a wild smile. Holy ghosts remanifest.
LOGOS
after Baudelaire
As a child I woke in a book-illumined room
where all possible genres spoke, a soundless blare
of deviant science, art, the myths of Tahiti;
I was about the height of a slim volume.
Two voices possessed me. A silken one feigned care:
This cut-price world’s more sweet than a fondant fancy,
and I’ll give you an appetite deep as a tomb
to shove it in. The other was a kind of prayer,
a mere breath. Come, it said, come! Your dreaming’s a sea
whose dark riptides are flowering, a flowing loom
where the unknown’s woven, and it sang like the air
on the shore, the serpentine air, the air that we
feel flicker at the ear’s meat like its jewelled doom.
I answered with a Yes, and it was there
and then my head was opened, my fatality
fixed as the one who sees the realms inhabiting the gloom
that revolves the stars and upholds each stair,
the worlds behind this vast theatre’s flimsy scenery;
I sense the snakes curled on our shoes and costume,
ecstatic victim of the fact that my voyance is clair.
Since then, too, like the giants of prophecy,
I love the rolling desert light, the sea’s dry boom,
and weep when others cheer and laugh at despair
and even find a savour in the ‘W’ and ‘B’,
and see that so-called truths are not as we assume
whilst falling down a hole with my interstellar stare.
No matter, I have my voice and it consoles me:
a wise man’s dreams are built but a fool’s dreams bloom.
THREE OLD SONGS
i
Yet once more, the plum tree is transfigured;
the birds recite their Angelus again.
Discomforted by the odd green flame,
he douses the patio with weed-killer.
ii
The black widow’s hourglass hangs in our windows.
In our porches, the beetles stroll at their ease.
Dream-weather escalates: tremors, tornados.
Instead of a fire, the cold blaze of a screen
casts blue glimmerings through palatial dark.
Intelligent talk drowns out an exile’s scream;
gates with rust-spotted padlocks keep us from parks
where the sunlight moves from seed to golden seed.
iii
Observe the elusive nature of the goddess:
she is nowhere to be seen in your languages,
but on your vision’s periphery, the garden’s
every leaf is exultant with her presence.
AFTER CAVALCANTI
Loveliness of women and what the heart knows
the ineffable charm a loaded gun has
love’s rationale the blackbird’s 3 a.m. jazz
expertise of white ships when death’s current flows
the sheer unruffled silentness of the snow’s
windless descent dawn air before day’s business
silver and gold and the lapis exilis
a stream’s clear sinew bee orchids in meadows
these things are fine but my darling surpasses
their beauties with a quiet soul that knows no fear
and makes all men who see her feel just so tall
her innate understanding and wisdom is
as remote and as rare as the troposphere
to want to be with her is only natural
GRISLIE
This waterway is of the first water.
This is the art of water torture.
I am the water boatman, dancer on waters,
patroller of a flowing border.
They’re led here at nightfall like horses to water.
They expect watermelons, water-ice,
a watercolour sky, cups and saucers.
My pitilessness is watertight.
I offer water biscuits, limes to suck.
A man offers up a baby daughter.
Their noisy grief slips off me like water off a duck.
They know they cannot walk on water.
ENGRAVED (COME TO DADDY)
To be pinned beneath a ceiling that is beaming
to see that flesh is subatomic gnomes going whee
the pythagorean perfection of the woods
blessed are the undefiled in the way
a diorite craft a white stag flying blind
digital bushbabies their faces poised
on the precise midpoint between joy and horror
and in the mist of tears and under running laughter
the wild boar in the embers of your mind
and I imagined you had rolled into the fire
burning as you slept but I could not cry aloud
and the queen chanting backwards in cabalistic code
from thought to thought from hill to hill love doth me lead
the pausing sidewinding and flowering of time
what red riding hood encountered on the path
yea though thou diest I say I shall not die
a praying mantis shaking you awake
where there is danger there grows also what saves
the goat’s face reminding you of something you’ll forget
the wolf who is standing on the end of the bed
the spreading tree of your polar blood
trembling in the wind from a blue-toned star
(men have not language to describe
one moment of your eternal life)
and t
hat tall tale of how he saw or thought he saw
the wrestler gorgeous george mouth
you’re making it come alive
one who knows how to keep silent in words
the crone and her otters on the roof of the cathedral
following the vision that our minds have seen
and the masks that they wear and the games that they play
and sleep on tap and the bushes full of witches
here at the great centre-stone of earth’s broad breast
good morning mister dragon good morning mister dragon
with void mouth gape after emptier prey
a dazzling pinecone implanted in the brain
predynastic devices a people of strange language
a number too immense for all creation to contain
and they said to one another behold this dreamer cometh
the arcanum of daylight and the leaping buds
each and every one of them a right little terror
and an aged voice that calls from inside the hill
oh kings oh kings you are diligent lackeys
the inexorable approach of the drumming mice
the dungeon master’s fatal error
2
Ventriloquise
FIR
after Bernart de Ventadorn
When you see the sun-made lark’s wings whirr