Poems
for Susan
Between non capisco and dimentico
we learn to speak a little: our history
always taking place in the present tense.
Between mistranslations
you’re still not sure he meant it.
‘I mean it,’
he said. ‘I want to work in Canada.
I have a nice face – why won’t you marry me?’
Of night
At which you crane your next to gaze
(And Dante saw ascending,
Ablaze
In sphere on sphere of crowded light,
Beyond a mortal sight’s
Earth-shadowed powers of apprehending), ... (read more)
Bowed from the supermarket, a week’s rations
jumbling the plastic, I saw in shadow
my dead father. He crept the pavement, burdened
as I am not by a lost country.
... (read more)It’ll be dawn before the sawing’s done; all night
cutting it up, yet by dark’s end, a pine,
or cypress moon, fragrant, awaiting finish. I watch
that they haven’t already given
my colourless signature; of your
hands other than to shade
your eyes as the sun burnishes
the windows, then carries on
to the grey porticos of the square.
I see pigeons on the gold-lit roof
of the Cathedral of St Christopher,
and as I stir my brush about
my palette – scarlet is what
I pray for; scarlet that flows under
a vanquished bridge; that lives
with finches in the tops of trees
because, desire, you said,
should always live on the wing.
... (read more)
Born to a seamless ordinance of heat,
Small wonder I remember best Indoors,
The too-small carpets slipping round the floors
And ‘Under the house’, a region to retreat
He meets a man with an icicle voice
who says it is ‘Mind’s disease’
to act impulsively; this man elevates
‘Reason’ to a pedestal, where he worships
at a cold, stony chiselled face, from afar
(& sometimes Peter sees him go up close, to peer,
at something old, cold, & slushy, underneath it –
which, he tells Peter, is a high I.Q.-ed
pickled brain, in a jar).
... (read more)Today in Castlereagh Street I
Felt short of breath, and here is why.
Antony and Cleopatra swam at Mersa Matruh
In the clear blue shallows.
Imagine the clean sand, the absence of litter —
when life says shut
the most you could muster
moments on a lake
pooled passive
or close enough and whispering
the past and only glory
