by Mark Waldron
And here are all the world’s small stones arranged
in order of roughness with the smoothest on the right.
The Shoes of a Clown
Oh, how I’d love to own a pair of those
long-toed clown shoes. I think I would find myself so engaging
in them. I’d put them on, sit down upon a chair, reach out my legs
in front of me, and happily behold my oddly-shod feet. I’d stand
and slap their long lengths on the ground to generate a flapping sound,
a flapping sound like a crack. Like a Crack! Crack! And then I’d hurry
up to see you, I would hurry backwards up the stairs to show you
my two new shoes, and you’d turn round and apprehend my self
emerging up from them, a genie drifting from its polished lamp,
a plant sucking at its just watered ground.
A cat called Orangey was in a number of movies,
but he didn’t know he was. He didn’t even know
he was in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Obviously he knew nothing about it. All he registered
were the peculiar new locations, the heat of the lights,
and a vague sense of fear, as well as bursts of affection
coming from the people around him.
Of course cats know just about nothing
of the human world at all.
They live in a parallel universe inside the human world.
Mostly smaller than it and fitting into it,
though in places its boundaries stretch beyond
the boundaries of our experience in soft tubular fingers.
Their consciousness would be repellent to us if we could
inhabit it.
Its lack of words and its meat and the fur that we might
experience as being in our mouths.
The paucity of its dimensions, that flatness, would press us
to the ground, make our heads split.
The configuration of their genes is such that they would
bring us down,
would make us blind to everything that from up here
we are able to see,
and open up, at last, a sharp slick world full of certainty
and ease of feeling.
The Uncertainty Principle
I wouldn’t swear to it but it seems to me that light owns
the surfaces of things,
dotting them indiscriminately with its capricious particles.
pok! pok! pok!
pok-pok! pok-pok-pok! pok! pok!
Each, a paintball pellet which,
on splatting, contributes to colour-up the ravenous darkness
rendering it fit for purpose.
That purpose being
to be seen.
I admit I memorised whole portions of you
and under various lighting conditions. I made a bit of a project of it.
There were particles everywhere! An embarrassment of riches!
You held out your hands palms-up
and you smiled at me as they rained down on you like dolphins.
I find it very hot the way particles exist so saucily in two places
at once, don’t you?
Your nipples, if I might say so, have something of that quality,
upon their quantum hooters.
pok! pok!
I would shut out my black mouth if I could.
Not everything
is explicable. Exemplar: I know what I mean. Or I think I do.
You know that intermingled time of night and day
when the sun un-sets, and vanilla wakefulness is still
somewhat subservient to sleep’s dirty kingdom?
Well there I was, inside some 16th century Padua
and I watched agog
as pretty maids in period underclothes scampered
laughing down a palace’s back stairs;
and on those stairs, wedged pressed against a wall
between the ceiling and the floor,
there stood but one enormous Pop-Tart,
napalm hot it was and leaking its delicious sticky milk.
Un-boned, the maidens pulled their smocks away
apparently instinctively as though the tart
were stationed there every time they went that way.
I mention this small curio because it’s surely you
that is the piping tart and me that’s all the lovely girls,
nimble-toed, contriving with each circuit
some concealed way that one of them might trip,
and in her falling, send them all a-tumble into it.
The Fire
The busbied sticks, they lay to strict attention
in their box till he struck one awake
and its hat blurted out its clutch of light.
Soon he let the infant fire begat
of that quick friction off the tip
of its blackening and cringing match
as one might coax a brilliant beetle off
one’s finger to a leaf.
And the reluctant flame it left
the shrivelled stick that it had sucked
of all its sticky milk of flammability,
and there it hung on paper’s edge,
dangled upwards, lingered shyly
on the threshold of its lot.
That ingratiating flame looked back
at his hot face to see if he might
really let it go, if he might let it pick up
its proper clean heat like skirts and run
and rummage wantonly,
laughing and ripping at its own clothes,
distraught with all its joy.
And he did let it riot, he let it dance
and swear such smart filth
as druids did on Mona’s shore
before the panicked Romans slaughtered them.
Uh-Oh Sweet Wife
So, you bust us in flagrante,
me and my other beloved, myself and my infinite
intimate, the world, my mistress world.
Forgive me, but when she lays down her glittery
and genteel fuselage softly in my lap
I find that I must ruffle and placate her immensity.
For thus enthroned she alludes to all of this existence
that must condense
in drips upon the laminate surface of the vernacular.
And when I, tiring of my duty, rise,
I find the world
she goes where I go for we are ditto – she and me,
she is the ground, she is the tree, the branch, the leaf,
the scribbled nest in which I lay
so many times each hour my mottled eggs of breath;
my sucked eggs, my blown
and subtle eggs that whistle like an owl’s seductive
song and have but one aim, to wit,
to woo her and then to lead her to the orchard floor
on which, with the dim-shod night, we’ll creep.
As Though We Hoped to Be Forgiven
The trees don’t lie down to sleep,
don’t slump and break a slow
and hazardous recline, don’t reach out
to take the first cautious little weight
with twigs and thinner branches,
and then their stolid tons
of sombre lumber with the thicker ones.
They don’t bend at bark-split knee
to crunch and snap towards the unmade
rumpled ground, and then don’t stack
their leaves neatly one upon another
as we lay our hands
in meagre piles beneath our pillows in that
vestigial indicium of prayer.
A Glib
You know how glib everything can be? I hate that. I hate how
glib things can be. You know, like:
‘the dark is in the trees’.
What, as in, actually in the trees? (I
despise italicised trees,
bent as though blown in westerlies.)
When I said, ‘you know how glib everything can be,’
I think I knew what ‘glib’ meant.
But now I’m not sure,
because ‘glib’, it seems, has shed its meaning.
And what a charming little word ‘glib’ is
now that it’s dropped its itchy carapace, now it’s abandoned
its tiresome catchphrase.
Also, what a delightful little combo of words ‘glib is’ is.
I could go on.
I keep a glib in my shoe.
Just kidding,
I keep a glib in my walnut
Edwardian cabinet, where it belongs;
in with the other items that emanate whimsical sounds when
you warm them, like the quavering ringtones
of obsolete cell-phones, or the summoning clicks
of extinct insects, or the off-notes whistled
by sailors on whaleboats. I love that kind of thing.
I am charmed, of course, in the way that a critter is suddenly,
and just for a moment, sunlit.
I am charmed for a bit, and I hate it.
Yes I admit that I have ate
that once cool and heavy egg that would
one day have hatched a clever goose of gold.
I cooked it in a pan until it smelted from a hard
into a runny yolk,
and then I promptly drank the molten yellow,
gulped it down and felt it start to burn away
my tongue and gums and teeth whose residue
then blew away as smoke. I felt it coursing down
my roasting throat, through the squiggle
of my blistered viscera,
all the way beyond my screaming shitter
from which it oozed and swarmed and spread
wet metal excrement about my seared balls
and buttocks, before it slowly made to thicken.
And once I’d died of pain, then some time
afterwards I ate away my flesh and bone:
I sank my corpse in acid till no bit of it remained
but just this shiny winding cast, this meandered
single golden sprue that rises from its golden stand,
and displayed like this so well describes a fool.
King Richard I
The Richard the Lionheart poem that I have in my mind
exists so far only in discrete clumps that are like patches
of sunlit ground in an ancient, abstruse and deciduous forest.
These patches are anointed by an oily sunlight and a warmth
that the sunlight brings with it. Creatures large and small
are drawn here, from deer to boar, through rabbits to beetles
and midges; drawn both to the glistening patches of ground
with their macro abandon, and to the love-buttered air
that’s dolloped above them, so that everything teems
with a fecund and sparkling plenty like loss.
Richard’s place in the undergrown whole is as that
of an odour, a taste, no more than a presumptuous mood.
His impalpability, it appears aloof in its lack of concern
for the nebulous world which surrounds it. It’s as though
the king rode through the forest with Captain Mercadier,
both vaporous men wearing unresearched costume,
both ignoring the fauna and flora and the flicker of light in
the leaves; or as though he picked at his as yet unborn teeth
in a manner befitting a foetus, or stroked his astrakhan
beard that’s still drenched in the juice of the womb.
Confessional Poem
Forgive me: I’ve been tempted to make use
of dissonance in an effort to resonate;
I’ve walked all over my principles
in day-glo flip-flops;
I’ve attempted to schmooze when I should
have been rough and abusive;
In the locked bathroom, I’ve allowed my id
to goose my poor ego, scarring it mentally;
I’ve papered over the cracks with more cracks
to obtain a ‘crack effect’; I’ve admired the cut
of my own jib, juddering stiff on a wester;
I’ve planted weeds in other people’s
gardens on purpose; I’ve pretended my eyes
are windows and got drunk
in a room behind them; I’ve pretended
everything’s just terribly droll and awful.
The Meeting
Rooney and I are in a poolside duplex bungalow at the Delano, Miami. Rooney is so famous at this stage of his career he’s almost handsome, his face, over the period of his fame, having come to partly redefine the parameters of beauty. We lounge exaggeratedly on the white sofas as though we were each an item of clothing discarded in a moment of ostentatious passion. Neither of us attempts to strike up conversation as we’re both a bit intimidated by the minimalist vulgarity of the setting that makes us feel a sneaking sense of that nasty brand of paranoia which cocaine might induce. Perhaps it looks a little whimsical of me to have brought us together in this manner, but I believed that in this unfamiliar location our toddling souls might spy each other through cracks in the waxy fabric of the cultures in which the two of us (in common with all humanity) are swaddled; those cultures which, attracted to us since birth by the universal gravity of neediness, accumulate on our innocent spirits just as tumbling, lifeless rocks once did clump onto the baby earth to form this rounded grownup globe. I’d hoped that these agglomerations had not yet fully set, inhibited in doing so by the warming effect of the dilute but pervading narcissism I sensed in each of us (a quality so often to be found in centre forwards and poets (particularly those whose primary carer might have exploited them in infancy as a means by which to regulate their own self-esteem)), and selfishly I thought our sympathy for the other’s shared predicament might spark some sorrow in me and that I might cry as a sad ghost might, revelling happily in his own rich sadness. After what seems a period of hours but perhaps was only minutes, Rooney hears what he takes to be rats behind the walls. The sound makes him think of the grinding together of rocks and that, I’m afraid, distracts me from this my purpose and reminds me of you, my angel, in that rock-pool in Corsica, and that, in turn, makes me think of Napoleon Bonaparte which brings to mind the Retreat from Moscow which makes me picture the frozen bodies of Frenchmen which makes me imagine the Russian spring thaw and of meat defrosting in a freezer because rats have chewed through the wires behind the skirtings against which faux Victorian skirts would have brushed in costume dramas, had we rented out our home to production companies who would have dragged cables up the stairs disturbing those rats beneath the boards where they’ve been chewing on wood in order to slow the advance of their eternally-growing teeth, just as Rooney must relentlessly wear down the sulking beast of his ambition on the frustratingly giving surfaces of football fields. Rooney gets up from his chair and walks towards the windows. He’s lathered in sweet grace that’s made of the love I have for a small boy who not so long ago lay in bed, and listened to milk bottles celebrate in tears a brand new sun.
Poem in which
Dieter (don’t ask) says: ‘What’s it like on the moon Buzz?
What’s it like on the moon? Is it like, a-drawn? Like with,
a-pencil?
What’s it like on the moon Buzz? Tell us, tell us!’
‘We left our detritus on it,’ says Buzz miserably, ‘we left
our preposterous colours.’
And Dieter looks neither plussed nor nonplussed.
‘We left our flag on it,’ Buzz continues, and he mumbles:
‘and our shame,’ and then even more quietly:
‘We took a goddamn dump on it,’
and then he lowers his orange-tinted visor
with his chunk
y-gloved fingers and bows his head.
When Buzz does eventually look up, Dieter sees his own
reflection dressed in its earthling costume coming back
at him like an admonishment in the glass’s delicious curve.
And then Dieter turns to me, and-and-and Buzz turns to me too,
the lickable-kissable bowl of that head of his
all leant up towards me.
He’s smiling I think, a joyous full smile beneath the helmet’s
atmosphere. What an impertinent fish he is,
looking up at a kindly though enormously hungry heron!
Innovations in Naval Gunnery
She never fired her batteries in rage, but did once demonstrate
their exactitude and range on a clear day, two miles out off
