by Ned Denny
At the edge of the woods, where the sky’s full of spiders.
At the edge of the woods, when the game is over.
At the edge of the woods, in excelsis gloria.
At the edge of the woods, when the dragon flies.
At the edge of the woods, where the gold is mined.
At the edge of the woods, where the flies rub their hands.
At the edge of the woods, where it all comes to mind.
At the edge of the woods, where the words are faded.
At the edge of the woods, where we are the hunted.
At the edge of the woods, where we’re wise as snakes.
At the edge of the woods, where the mind will wander.
At the edge of the woods, where the woods are the answer.
At the edge of the woods, where Rip van Winkle sleeps.
At the edge of the woods, where the day shows its bones.
At the edge of the woods, where the modest rose.
At the edge of the woods, where you watch your step.
At the edge of the woods, where we speak the argot.
At the edge of the woods, where it goes without saying.
At the edge of the woods, where we’re only beginning.
At the edge of the woods, where our sons go to war.
At the edge of the woods, where the woods never end.
At the edge of the woods, when the world is turning.
At the edge of the woods, where you bite on the bullet.
At the edge of the woods, where the woods are perfect.
At the edge of the woods, where bodies are waking.
At the edge of the woods, where a branch taps your back.
At the edge of the woods, in the silent bonfire.
At the edge of the woods, the whole shooting match.
ONE BELOW
The frost is an epoch that will not last
the land for this one day one vast white coast
a single branch where the ice fowls roost
each perfectly empty tree its own wild ghost
5
Flagrant Stamen
ROOMS
When thirty spokes put their heads together
or clay is coaxed into a form and baked,
you have a wheel that flashes round a hole
and a pot whose treasure is an empty space;
we raise a roof and four solid walls
to build a house but we occupy the air;
our being in the world depends upon
mastering the use of what isn’t there.
(Tao Te Ching vi)
WHEEL RIVER
after Wang Wei
i
We have made our residence on the brink,
where the willow is living and dying.
Grave scholars who read us will never think
that the dead inherit everything.
ii
Birds take themselves off into the stillness.
October glows as if painted on glass.
I stroll up the hill with my loneliness,
secure in the knowledge that nothing lasts.
iii
The hazel’s lichen-freaked trunks are my walls.
My great leaf-roof whispers God’s hundredth name.
Alive in the woods, I cook up a storm
that will whirl to the cities. A real rain.
iv
Arterial trees reflecting in waters
hang downwards, suspended over a void:
we are dark heaven’s thin sons and daughters,
rooted in soil we strive to avoid.
v
Country so deserted it seems crowded.
The lack of conversation fills my days.
In the shady depth of the mothering glen
are moss hairs lit by the sun’s close gaze.
vi
The day gives the crisped hills a last caress.
A skein of geese undulates through the sky.
Here and there, an evergreen like a fire.
The clouds descend but find no place to rest.
vii
Come visit me. It’s psilocybin time;
the brambles hold their black constellations.
We can groan in night-long ruminations,
getting ‘lost in the unknown, famous light’.
viii
In the tunnel of this overhung path
the starred moss deepens its luminous pile.
I pick up every stone I see, while
there’s still a chance some pretty feet might pass.
ix
I dream I am sailing into the sky.
The clouds clear and another Earth is there,
a pavilion where we sit together.
We can hear nothing but the butterflies.
x
Satellites scan the world’s inhuman shores.
The mind’s antipodes are still unknown,
but no boat will make that crossing. Alone,
you must step into the sea-monster’s jaws.
xi
A melody blows us over the lake.
We call goodbye in the growing dark.
When I turn, the clouds have a dragon’s face.
Entirety smoulders in every part.
xii
At the palace, the pavements and coiffeured trees
would quickly drive me to despair. Out here,
I stray through a withered chaos of leaves
where everything’s in perfect order.
xiii
Streamlets like schoolchildren hurry down rocks,
the rain spits in my face, the bare wind sings
something I can’t catch. In a dream, I watch
white egrets ascending and descending.
xiv
You can take your monatomic gold,
your organic wheatgrass (locally sourced!),
your chicken soup for the insatiable soul.
To live forever, just drink from the source.
xv
Another dream: I’m with Walt Whitman,
we are standing in a broad stream’s shallows.
His ankles pale, that loneliest of men
is telling me the secret names of the stones.
xvi
An object hums above the forest,
a shining sphere with no rivets or seams.
When I come to my senses, my mind clean,
I find I can’t account for several minutes.
xvii
Compose in darkness: yes. These eyes are clear
enough to discern a world’s death-rattle.
I’m so far out, I’d be invisible
was it not for the moon’s closed-circuit stare.
xviii
I think of Chuang Tzu, the idiot’s post
that was the only job he ever had;
he fields another call, keeping a tab
on the tragic gestures of the willows.
ixx
In late December, the wrecked wood flowers.
Everything opens, unfurls its light
in the disused mansion at the river’s side:
our strange faces, the tips of our fingers.
xx
We have emptied these hands and cupped our minds,
made a salad from the garden’s choicest leaves,
left milk in saucers, tasted the breeze,
hailed the thunder. Now let the lightning strike.
NOTE Wang Wei (699–761), a contemporary of the better-known Li Po and Tu Fu, was in his lifetime as celebrated for his paintings as for his poetry. He had a successful career as a court official, yet after the deaths of his wife and mother spent increasing periods in the solitude of his Wang River estate (wang, literally ‘wheel rim’). This remake of his famous sequence of short poems was an experiment in what might be termed hieroglyphic translation (by hieroglyphic I refer to the true function of sacred writing, whereby an image and its associations are allowed to resound in the mind – centrifugally but not arbitrarily – like t
he ripples of a stone thrown into a still pond). An occasional literary or cinematic allusion parallels the typical T’ang incorporation of fragments of classic poems, songs or chants, the one explicit borrowing being from Dylan Thomas’s ‘Poem on His Birthday’.
SAYS
A truth’s a thing that will not disappear.
I have the queen bee inside my right ear.
RELIC
after Guilhèm de Peitieus
I’m not going to chat no shit no more
these skewed lines aren’t either about you or
the Sacred Heart or those who adore
Grand Theft Auto’s incidents
and in any case I write as I sit and snore
on the fence
I don’t know when or where or what I’ll be born
I can see into the dark and I’m blinded by the dawn
I’m like an Ethiopian called Bjorn
I’m unbearably tense
since one white night my aura was torn
upon an eminence
I don’t know if I’m up or lucid dreaming
my days are lagging when they should be streaming
an infected mind’s less loving than scheming
lives by pretence
and hides itself in the ranks of the seeming
ladies and gents
I’m sick but I’m scared of the touch of death
and all I can hear is the TV’s breath
and my mouth is a state yet I don’t slam meth
and I’ve the sense
that nowadays everyone’s a dosed Macbeth
wishing their end would commence
I’ve my soulmate by my side though I don’t know her well
she’s rarer than words though there’s little to tell
my indifference if she held me or gave me hell
would be immense
though I wonder what it would take to dispel
her silence
She’s the world to me but I’ve never seen her face
and I never gave her cause to spray me with mace
and when she’s distant I proceed apace
through a dense
crowd of beauties whose fingers’ knowing grace
is a gentle violence
I’ve said what I swore not to concerning the unknown
person I speak for who’ll sing it alone
and ponder and place it under a stone
for the elements
a skeleton key a rainmaking bone
produced at my own expense
GOA
Wahr spricht wer Schatten spricht
It was our eyes
that were broken:
the palm tree’s face,
swayed by the night
it shadows forth,
is without flaw.
It was reason
that dreamed, that dreams:
the surf intent
(this one moment
of the world’s end)
as thin white wolves,
lithe hordes licking
the fortress walls.
It was the news
that kept us old;
the webbed sky teems
with unseen fleets,
each unloved stone
love’s nameless hue
in the golden
links of your paw,
full of the dark
speech that speaks true.
TWIN PEAKS
after Li Po
We come into the heights in search of you
and see ourselves, dogs barking at a stream
whose splashes deepen the flower’s deep blue.
Is this real or some strange and twisted dream?
In the silence of the unlifted bell
black trees splay bony fingers above us,
the crag-hanging torrents forget to fall.
Noon. Do not sing. The world is perfect. Hush!
An old man I question looks right through me;
in the shadows, an antlered gaze meets mine.
Too tired to think, I lean against a pine.
Soundless laughter permeates the valleys.
TO CATCH A THIEF
You’ve been dead a generation and yet there you are still,
poised and serene and barely more than twenty,
divine, unattainable.
Incomparable Grace, you marry a prince and grow old.
When I ride in pursuit of the enemy,
though, it’s your face on my shield.
SELF-PORTRAIT AS T’ANG POET AT DUSK
This far from the city one bears no unearthly toy
there’s nothing now here or in heaven that does not fly
the blue air’s shining lamentations are somehow joy
I’m a domestic terrorist a walking thoughtcrime
I’m a coin through whose square pupil you can see the sky
from my star-domed terrace I watch the slow dance of time
a day is the merest gauze in which the night is dressed
what need of many books when I have love’s live ember
the world is always waving like a departing guest
the waterfall’s catastrophe radiates its white
each ghost-drawn tree’s the ideogram for Remember
the unspeakableness of all this is why I write
marvelling how the light can darken and still be light
VOYAGER
The little Love-god lying once asleep…
Let me beam you a song that is the song
of you all, a true story of a cruise as long
as its horror is real and which I still endure,
the red blink of my heart the one thing sure
in this utter ocean as black as it is ice;
of this freight of golden howls, the frail device
of my face parting the tides of the sun
on the endless night-watch, the towering
cliffs of birdless islands revolving past my wing
and my tin feet bathed in the absolute zero
of their wake, an automatic sorrow
running through the circuits of my sea-eaten brain.
The man still inside the blessings of the rain –
fine earth underfoot, a daughter or son
trailing behind and then darting ahead –
cannot conceive of those currents I’ve rode, those dead
winter surges of my shaken trajectory,
the frost that patterns me like a story
chiselled on the tomb of a navigating king;
and nothing to hear but the void pulsating,
the ever-vacant whirr, the ringed orb’s drone,
an iron silence in which no gull praised
branching wave and branching light, no curlew amazed
the humming mind awake with its ghost of a cry
(but I have their records stored like wines, I
guard their lyrics like the dead’s delighted laughter),
not one note perched on that echoed hall’s rafter
where I sailed on through its mansions of bone.
What I did hear, in the permanent roar
of the standing hexagon on Saturn’s north shore,
was a shriek as of a wraith with metal feathers
nitrogen-dewed, vast inclement weathers
radiating outwards like haze that taints the sky;
but none to share the vision, no hand close by
with that shining ratio love unfolds
or its sweet kinship of divine disdain,
far as I was from you who have to dose the pain
of crowded solitude by tricking out your cells
with mimic love and light (those broadcast spells,
intoxicants all); alone I trace the dark,
the paths of night, no companionable ark
but the sole witness of what my craft beholds
on the mean streets of this high sea. Shadows
lose substance as the sun recedes, iced me
thane snows
on Titan, down the unavailing space-grit rains
like someone is sowing porcelain grains;
my dials tremble with an exile’s vertigo,
quake between joy and terror, wild to go
with the towering stream of the central tree
that waves like an ash on a day of storm,
to be sucked along those entwined boughs to the warm
airs and opening worlds of a bird-minded race
(just as no man’s so at home in his face,
so deep in the arms of his darling one
that he does not sweat at the thought of the One
and his lonely flight to the Alone, the mystery,
that he’s never struck by music’s silence
or the blank in the gaze of so-called science
or the immateriality of that and this
or the absence in the depth of a kiss,
conceiving instead a thirst for the furthest shore).
I think of your ascendant woods lit once more,
of leafing spires in the vague city’s maze
and a bright green spire where mantises pray;
I think of those whose minds will discover the way
