Sir Richard Returns My Presents and Lectures Me About Poetry
I like my poems bawdy, boozy, proud.
At best, they should be dangerous to know.
Let there be laughter, music, friends
Rebellion: landscapes I can recognize.
I read the slim unloving volumes that you sent
But the poems turned their backs on me
Communicating nothing, except perhaps
A bizarre refusal to communicate.
I’d rather read the tags on Lucy’s underwear
Than all this bloodless syntax
That leaves my senses on another page.
from Re-reading
the Tain
Poetry and Blood
The warriors of Ulster in their Pangs,
grown men, made helpless by a curse,
a beardless boy steps up to play
the game of war
in the blood-stained ford.
Cuchulain remembers
the son he killed;
the friend he disemboweled;
remembers Emer’s body.
Her honeyed thighs the pass
that leads down to the ford.
The rolling hills her hips and haunch,
the ridge line of her back,
her breasts the mountains.
When Cuchulain looked at Ulster
he saw Emer, and the wind
upon his face was Emer’s
breath, trembling to climax.
He waited at the ford,
for heroes twice his age,
for fearsome men who knew
death was a joke,
and raced it, laughing,
hunting heads for sport.
They drank and feasted
listening to stories,
of the slide between the worlds,
moving with a woman to the music
of the harp. Released,
to drive their chariots
to where the beardless
hero waited. Where their
deaths were numbered
by the poets. The wound’s
ejaculation, spurting
red seed arcing
wet as Emer’s thighs,
blood-soaked waters
breeding the legend
of Cuchulain at the ford.
from Jessica’s
Flute
Will
Kemp’s Reply
Those marvellous pentameters
march us to the charnel house;
that final scene, where everybody dies.
He claims this holds a mirror
up to Nature’s face.
I’ll show him Nature’s face, it’s split wide open,
snaggle teeth exposed in helpless laughter.
A body bent as Richard’s back, like Goodwife Gossip
convulsing as she gave birth
to laughter.
They don’t do laughter now, they do
Macdobeth and some boring Danish Prince
who feels compelled to lecture us
about the role of clowns.
I’ll not be dragged upon the hurdle
of character development and plot
to butchery at some dramatic Tyburn.
I’ll take the music, toss it to the breeze,
and follow it no matter where.
Through mud and rain
and laughing, dancing, spinning
go, not to the death of friends,
but to their making.
the Tabrer strikes alarum.
Tickle it good Tom, Ile follow thee
Even though she’s spent the year beside you,
you wake to find a stranger in the dawn.
Nothing you can do or say will keep her.
Break the clocks, time will stagger on.
Hand in hand you wandered by the water,
between familiar yachts and café lights.
She moved away and said, ‘I took their offer’
and tore the moon and stars out of the night.
Now she combs her hair. There, in your mirror,
this face you loved. How could you be so wrong?
Neither poetry nor any form of logic
will resurrect the certainty that’s gone.
‘You said you loved me for my independence,
integrity, you said the rest was dross.
So now we face love’s basic contradiction:
I go, you stay: there’s neither gain nor loss.’
She calls it love, it feels more like indifference.
A strategy to keep her heart concealed?
You watch her taxi leaving for the station
and wonder what exactly is revealed.
Between the Lines: a Family Myth
My Grandfather refused to choose
between the Union and Republic,
too busy dreaming horseflesh
to care who claimed the soil.
His brothers cared.
One marched behind the Union Jack
to squalid terror on the Somme.
The other shot that hated rag to shreds
in Dublin’s Easter rising.
When visiting they’d set up camp
in separate rooms and send my Grandad
scurrying with messages: to mother
or muted brotherly defiance.
This was his freedom and his punishment:
the right to move between the lines,
the curse of not belonging
in the place that he’d called home.
I have to say I see my Grandad’s point.
The bitter brother hating war
didn’t stop the endless rain
or sell a horse for two bob more:
but then again, I see his brothers’ too
I know their songs, their stories,
know their heroes’ names
and stand, struck numb,
before the things they had to do in France.
So I shuttle like my Grandfather
between contending propositions
knowing that my place will be
between the lines:
remembering it was
Grandad’s house
both sides blew to rubble.
Dragon
Smoke
Judge the moth by the beauty of its candle
— Rumi
There is a woman who I know.
She is the sum of my ambitions.
Blind to her own magnificence
she brings me gifts of dragon smoke.
Fools impale themselves
upon her thorns.
Risking immolation
I climb the temple steps
to measure my dreams
in the balance of her understanding.
In a dark and smoky shrine
the painted faces
on the blackened walls
watch with strained indifference
as past and future
teeter on the sacrificial knife.
She glows, stained with the blood
of failures. On me
she smiles her welcome.
Holding aloft my heart
she burns away the dross.