For Tom Clark
1.
Undo the red wool knots
It's easier if you start at the ends I say
She unravels it her way
2.
white petal stamen stained
Make a flower pile
Pink is considered
The great cylinder of rust
hums misnomers
in the working grass
Animal music bends
about the axes
The sky could be virtuous fuckless dusk
My face hole eats it
A bricked up garage door is a window
All we were taught
has a prim little swing
in the hands we left at home
3.
I'm not an Englishman today
jumpered Anglo-Saxons in situ
Odd beams are governing square faces
Broke arch in my head won't be mended
by any sort's tomorrow
4.
a cycle herd
Bees pour from
Diana's frozen skirt
while the twice struck redwood soundless croaks
a marble baby cradled -
kitsch tail on arse of Bacchus curls
The broke green stick stands
burning by the door
the white door
5.
He put the car into the back of the foreign kid
the wing mirror left swinging
Falun Gong by Trinity -
with a balancing Polish widow's hat
her gloved hands hardly moving
Town bruisers decolonize some pavement
with lager magic
history demos shops are educated beauty girls tuck the notes in
Eating lunch on green with history of birds
hid in our mouths
Herbert Spencer is the size of my thumb today
Go to dissolve
6.
Lilies sex the church
Consider them
There laid they Jesus in coloured light
the falcon the robin
the woodpecker the kingfisher
in thick yarn kneeler waves
a peeling coffin trolley
eaten walls
"Rich people had the high ceilings but
us we just bumped our crowns"
7.
Tremble, dearest cowslip flower, and shake
The drains are straight
a horse hoof sound
histrionic pylon lines
above torn fleece and threadbare rushes
Dark chocolate earth of Ely fields
where rook food is
and their sure grey mouths are insistent
bleak
Big fat daisies
are set out open
even
now
8.
Prickwillow Soham and Burwell
Bottisham Quy and Devil's Dyke and Wicken
heroic sky
9.
Condensing
green-ish on lazy perspex roof
rain legs
baldhead pigeon swells for no one
mere boy with mod hair
and sticking out eyes
The special kid laughs so hard
and the pencil's stumped
A slack stroke mouth asks
Cambridge that isn't shines its bruises forever and
10.
stone fingers of yore
Insect Jesus
give the pond skin
Newt drops down to murk
and then another breath
happy scarab eyes
tweed shield
I get lip buttons
I don't believe right anymore
11.
Up the stairs to Bedfordshire
my Grandma used to say
"So do you have any friends?"
12.
Skinny little daisies shut up shop
under pastel talking sky
vaulting
Stunning!
ReplyDeleteThank you, Red.
ReplyDeleteDuncan,
ReplyDeleteI'm definitely honoured.
When my Irish Grandma (from County Westmeath) heard that I was off to live in the fens, some fifty-five years ago, she frowned and said, Well, In that case, you great fool, never come back.
Well no she didn't say quite that, but perhaps she ought to have done.
After all, 'twas near Ely, in same fenlands, that Oliver Cromwell, clever demolition expert, plotted the deposition of monarchy, though, as the PR staff put it about, all he was thinking about was his Prickly Pear.
Right, and I am Queen.
And we all know what Oliver went on to do to my grandmother's people.
Neither she nor I should ever have forgiven his lot.
(As you're not an Englishman today, I feel it's fair to say that.)
But I was born a traitor to my own cause.
"So do you have any friends?"
"But seriously", like they used to say back in pre-school -- you've put me in mind of my first junket to Ely on a double decker Routemaster bus, one bright-to-blustery day in early September 1963. A meat pie in a pub and the cathedral...
From the Path (for T.R.)
Shopping on the Isle of Ely and Cambridge too. The same bloody shops everywhere.
ReplyDeleteWe passed that gnarled old bastard's house but didn't go in. Ireland was the worst of his work though his betrayal of the radicals smarts too.
The true republic has yet to happen anywhere.
In a field by itself.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Vassilis.
ReplyDelete