as well as ticking, should be burned
within the yard attached to the house.
Periwinkle,
sweet memories,
unerring devotion.
Woollen articles should be cleaned
and exposed to strong dry heat.
A free current of fresh air
should pass through all the rooms.
Acacia, immortality.
Stephanotis,
will you accompany me to the East?
After Afterlude
The leather boats lift themselves
away from their ropes on easy hinges.
One passes the land of the dead
on the bus into town. One returns
from the root of the sky covered
in icicles. I focus on their glasslike
feel, their crystal breathturn.
What do you mean, I am rapid,
flying on breathways? No one
really dreams any more, the bread
of the dream, the haste of the dream,
yet anyone who awakes has overslept
the look of night, grass
written asunder.
My heart passes through the pause,
the whirring woods, the nettle message
of the ghetto-rose, that petalless flower.
I imagined God as a book, not
where you cannot be, eternalized,
non-eternal you, reader in the after
world, dropping your ghost-rosary.
Butterfly Memory Object
The simple outlines of tulips:
what makes these war flowers?
The war recycled like an earthrise
photographed from the distance
of a six-day-old moon.
The crags of their petals
dance out space with the smoothing action
of the mouth’s own slidings
till their two-sided skin
bayonets the softer parts of shells.
Still deadly places are folded
into an unburial ground where resting
soldiers tell the munitionettes
they’re easy to sleep with,
and for your button a kiss.
Black Stone Mantelpiece with Chimney Clock
How much Sunday there was in the half-
discarded days—there and there, the flags
holding themselves ever more high,
stretching as if acclimatized
to the born landscape.
It had got too late for everything,
the lamp-yellow mirrors each contain
a different emptiness, smooth brown
in the eyes, the time of their first brilliance
sewn up like the sleeve stumps
of an armless man.
He makes his saints out of such things,
as if woven of fresh reed behind
this enduring: wide-open silver flowers,
hands that know how to sleep, that lie down
as if made of a single piece after all
that has passed, to rest for centuries
spread-open, starlike, dried flowers
as if in the wells of a paintbox.
With the lightness of a chime’s voice
she gives her consent to the seasons,
all their violet hues tucked in, as it were,
like certain evenings, to this calm,
almost velvet-like air
which is surely not easily introduced.
Red orifice facing the front,
its inward carmine a little more yielding:
will one no longer have to carry
its heaviness? It was calling, as it had been
calling throughout the weeks, all the time,
it needed one in order to feel itself.
The things placed upon it add their comments
with all their heart, each in its own way,
but there is still some other object
on the bare mantel, pushed up
against the white cloth …
This way it is ghostly, it is still the same
heaviness place by place, the windows,
smaller than they were, reduced
and completely in the wrong,
of this self-willed old city, holding its own,
between right and left. Hilly, like light music.
The Chess Queen
Where a scar of sunlight leaks
some Eros for the dead
on to the low mist gap
in a haphazard afternoon
of errands that once existed,
a scarecrow with a yellow star
and silver flowers at her hips
gives the steadfast company
of affectionate immortality
to the dull world mood.
Someone is gone, someone
is sure to go, into the fruitful
afterlife of the ochre-coloured
twentyfirst-century water
newly cleansing over snowy
cobblestones old as the city.
The sound of the sun purifies
the spirits of erased aeroplanes
as long as they shimmer.
Who Is Your City?
The canal’s middle swells with waiting
for odd hours of night in the middle of the day.
North appears everywhere, the now of the snow,
warming ice counts itself away in different
sun angles, like a block of frozen ink
insisting on the line. The water knows
the way down, to the Titanic and her two
sisters. She rouges her silver likeness,
buttons her gown herself, so high, so closed,
her days malodorous from saturated skies.
Do you think it reflects well on our city
to ones who arrived only a week ago
to go outdoors in pyjamas to the turgid
bar district, the Gucci outlets in the city’s
revamped living room? To photograph
a child on the King’s Highway?
Arrival city—where disaster zones have become
more theatrical, ambitious parks obsessed
with self-esteem are honeycombed
with missions and endeavours and offers
of salvation as an incandescent life force.
Gone is the edginess of the city, cleansed
of conflict, argument, debate, protest, ructions
and ribaldry, notwithstanding the spy cameras,
the pop-up shops, the flash mobs of drink-
fuelled petrolheads, the new Purple Flag award.
I still have to define my life through the false prism
of Samson and Goliath, the ailing road perfuming
the heavy curtains of Parliament. We still show
our papers to reveal where we are going.
The street will no longer lie like a doormat
but plunge storeys down on to swift pavements
pedal-powered by driverless taxis. Nobody’s
living there, nobody’s moved in, it’s sitting there
though the visitor centre is shut
and they are lifting the paddy fields on to the roof
which smells too much of museum dust
or pages from faded magazines. The waterfront within
the enabling bygone hedges is made of flesh.
I speak the language, I know how to be a woman here.
Blaris Moor Page 5
