New Poetries VII
Page 3
at the sight of him, this time there’ll be wolves
circling the scrubland where he swears his house used to be.
To the Trees
quick and slick
and full of you,
the you I don’t want,
the you that brims over, brims under my lines, the you I can’t
remake, reshape,
the you I –
just leave it, drop it, walk away. There’s nothing to see here.
Go to the trees,
I always go to the trees, but let’s go
to the tree outside my window,
the one standing on its own, away from all the others,
the one with the great arms stretching up
the one with too many fingers spreading themselves
into shapes so the fierce birds might come to them. Too many for what?
To be just pointing at the sky,
to be just making shapes for the birds?
They must be a trace of something,
of some hand, some principle urging them on –
maybe Maths or God
and God knows we don’t want to go down that road
do we?
Just look at the trees.
I wish I didn’t know any rules, any at all, and then my poems,
or this poem at least,
would move, would soar, would hover and break
into thousands and thousands
of pieces of white material.
The Thorn and the Grass
That day I ran my fingers over my son’s knee
and they slowed as if puzzled by a sudden patch
of hardness where the skin thickened and pulled
me back to trace the contour lines around it. And there
in the middle of his soft flesh that black pin prick
puncturing his creamy skin and my fingers pressing
down on the ridge around it and us watching as a tip slowly
emerged, pushing its nose up into the air. So I pressed
a little harder and this great thorn slid out of his knee,
the unmistakable curve of a rose thorn freed from his flesh.
But then what about the grass, shall I make her the grass
that grows in the cold sand high above the beach,
blown sad and sharp by the wind, swishing her blades
from side to side, waiting for him to run through her?
So Many Houses
When the grown-ups came we scattered like dust
into the skirting boards – and watched
as they swirled and whirled and married the wrong people.
So many rooms and so many houses
they had to spread the paintings
thinly over the walls. We jumped on the beds
and ran in the gardens, climbed all those stairs
curled our fingers around all those banisters
but we stood still on the landings and felt
the floorboards warp under our feet.
All those houses but only one pattern
and they made it again and again as if it were a song
they loved and they had to play again and again,
a song about a girl with skin as white as alabaster
who danced with a man with hair as black as night,
a song about the child he gave her before he left her
to find another who would give her two more
and as we listened to the song coming through the floorboards
it settled into us and we saw ourselves
spread out in a deck of cards across the table,
a fan of children with different coloured hair.
Fence
What is it about the fence that scares me? you know the one
I mean, the one with gaps between its narrow wooden slats
and a length of wire running across its back. Is it the way
it leans and sags into the grass that grows on the dunes?
Or maybe the way it creaks as it sways in the wind, the way it moves
like seaweed breathing in the tide. Is it because it can’t keep anything
in or anything out? Or is it because, despite all that, it’s found
the strength in the slant, the speck of stillness that hides
itself somewhere on the point of collapse? I think I know –
but I wish I didn’t, so I’ll make the turn as fast as I can, so fast
you’ll only just see me do it. It reminds me of you
in that white room, taking too long to die, stopping
and starting, huffing and puffing your way to the door,
dragging your great ribs into the leaves like an old bear.
NED DENNY
The poems gathered here span approximately thirteen years, the earliest (‘Tree’) written whilst living in a cottage in the foothills of the Himalayas and awaiting the birth of our son. Almost half of them were written over a decade later in another cedared idyll – the Duke of Bedford’s former estate on the banks of the Tamar, where Devon ends; both troubadour adaptations date from this latter period, ‘Who’s She’ having been entered for the 2015 Spender Prize along with the following commentary:
I didn’t set out to translate Arnaut Daniel, being somewhat awed by Ezra Pound’s versions of his robust and adroitly patterned songs. Master of the elaborate, allusive style known as the trobar clus and inventor of the sestina, Daniel is the poet referred to in Dante’s Purgatorio as ‘il miglior fabbro’ (‘the better craftsman’, the term later used by Eliot – dedicating The Waste Land – of Pound himself). My unintended remake of ‘Doutz braitz e critz’ began with the gift of the first line, a lucid four-syllable seed and slight departure from the Old Occitan which is usually rendered as something like ‘sweet trills and cries’. This then grew in line 2 to declare the apparent paradox of something both highly ordered and numinous, condensed yet expansive, Apollo and Dionysus in one (‘mind-manifesting’ being the literal meaning of psychiatrist Humphry Osmond’s 1950s neologism ‘psychedelic’).
After the minor liberties of this opening my concern was to echo and renew, in a language less rich in rhymes, the shape and light of Daniel’s original: the stanzas consisting of seventy-five syllables in regular array, and chiming with or calling out to each other like island universes or groups of birds in different trees. It felt like an affirmation of my initial instinct to read, several weeks later, Pound’s contention that ‘precision of statement’ is what Daniel can teach. As for the unnamed ‘she’ of my title, the proverbial cat’s mother, it will perhaps suffice to say that the troubadours were her wise and foolish warrior-devotees. Now as then, it is at the same time a question you might ask in a noisy, crowded room and one that lets us approach the mystery and radiance of our origin.
I like to think that my own sestina ‘Drones’, despite being set in a modern-day UFO conference, wouldn’t be entirely alien to Daniel and his kind. Long live the trobar clus …
Untitled
after Baudelaire
I have not forgotten that bone-white house
where town succumbs to countryside,
the lopped statues of Love and Abundance
loitering in baroque undergrowth,
and, near dusk, the tide of the sun,
which, seen through windows streaked with clouds,
resembles an omniscient eye
observing our nuptial feast in silence,
casting the long gaze of its glow
on the empty plates, the torn net curtain.
Old Song
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.
To Catch a Thief
You’ve been dead a generation and yet there you are still,
poised and serene and scarcely 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.
Fir
after Bernart de Ventadorn
When you see the sun-made lark’s wings whirr
against the counterpressure of that light
and slow until a hypersonic stillness
has him drop, a stone shaped like a heart,
it’s as though you step into a green rain
of envy of those whose smile is no disguise,
marvelling that your chest’s flagrance
isn’t instantly reduced to a spent black wick.
You thought you got love but your thoughts were
simulacra, a counterfeit delight,
for what idea can cage the pace of the kiss
you pursue in dreams and trace in art;
she has stolen your blood’s loving refrain,
nabbed her sweet self, has purloined the very skies
and in so doing’s left a dunce
caressing thin air to the soundtrack of a tick.
You’re no longer the fat controller
of yourself, squinting from a tourist’s height,
since you glanced into those eyes where all joy is;
as mirrors hold death and life apart
they disclosed your second self, free of pain
as a meat suit is nipped at by shoals of sighs;
you’re shut out from your days, as once
Narcissus was undone by his own biopic.
You’d wash your hands of her and all her
kind – whose ways are at ease, whose touch is light –
vowing that just as you once sang her wholeness
now your branching tongue shall flick and dart,
seeing how they close their ranks and disdain
to aid one who shakes in her dawn air, who dies
into the vast clairaudience
in which each open tree receives an old magic.
And in such things, alight under fur,
she shows herself to be a girl alright,
not resting content with the bland park that is
permitted by that celestial fart
but reaching for the fruit that fires the brain;
I’m afraid that you’re a joke in her bright eyes,
roped to the cliff of appetence
with no companion but the music of your pick.
Grace is gone from the world, you aver,
yet what have you ever known but this night
in which the sainted mother of our riches
has been replaced by a doll, a tart,
a bulb-eyed changeling whose synthetic reign
is the false light, a grim tree, which if you’re wise
enough to unspell appearance –
now’s the time – you’ll know for the shade that makes us sick.
Your tame prayer is just a verbal blur
wholly failing to manifest your ‘right’
to her who can be the riskiest mistress –
the cyclone her voice – so why not start
a trilled silence, burn books, begin again;
let death be the force that you ventriloquise,
that end which is the newborn dance
danced in exile by those who are so slain they’re quick.
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.
Cutting Class
We slip by the brick estates
patterned like a lizard’s back,
then suburbs where the conifer’s
black flames stand sentinel;
we pass the clipped, uncanny gardens,
pace through the witchcraft
of the giant leaves of planes,
wade against the smoking tide
of insect-faced and swollen cars.
We skirt the sewage works,
cross over the motorway’s grey
cortege to the dark
matter of the countryside –
Egypt’s pylons scanning the fields,
evil spores in the undergrowth,
antennae needling the clouds –
and we just keep on toiling away
from town, setting our sights
on the grace and madness
of burning trees, as far as where
the truant woods dance
in a light that is breaking all the rules,
to the point at which we start to learn
to stand inside the fire.
Drones
You see the Greys, he said, girding his teeth
for a lime doughnut, they use the owl’s
nervous system the way we use a drone
or hidden camera. Given what I now knew,
it almost seemed possible. When green tea
was announced I slid outside for a smoke,
paced roided grass, watched where stained smokestacks smoked
into the wind’s dead breath, its yellow teeth.
Back in the conference centre, the tea-
fresh crowd were pondering the giant owl
that stilled her car on that night when she knew
she knew nothing, its voice a savage drone
terrible to recall, a rising drone
which turned her body into pixel-smoke
swarming upwards and assembled anew
(‘like I’d been sucked into a white hole’s teeth’)
on that craft that swept as quiet as an owl.
When she arrived home, hours late for tea,
her forehead was marked with a tau cross: T.
She paused, and the air conditioning’s drone
momentarily quickened the cased owl
on the wall, living eyes long gone to smoke,
and shivered through the symmetrical teeth
of love’s lost children (tell us something new!)
who’d come here to share what little they knew.
I thought of the onset of DMT –
that sense of deliverance into the teeth
of a buzzing gleam or luminous drone,
mere seconds after releasing the smoke –
and then of that line from Twin Peaks, ‘the owls
are not what they seem’. I dozed, dreamt of owls
sane and inviolate in all they knew,
and awoke to the guest lecturer: Smoke
And Mirrors, Carl Jung and the Abductee.
With his grey skin, dark clothes and soothing drone
he might have been a priest. I licked furred teeth
clean of dough, grabbed a smoke with my teeth
and headed to where I knew mowers droned.
Love is an owl and it’s having you for tea.
Era
I bought it because of the backwards ‘S’ and the teeth
of the mouth, the jagged lip: DADDIES FAVOURITE
ƨAUCE. He unearthed it in the seventies. It cost me
a pound or a fiver. ‘An error. Unusual. “Under the
radar”.’ His wink made me think of the interloper,
of things renewed, of things reversed. The glass
was
the clearest, palest blue.
When I handed it over, a bird
called from the garden – this is just as it happened,
I have it here – and you read it as DAD DIES. That
made me cry. That made me wonder.
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