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27.

The Emsworth awards.
For easing the passage of the soul.
John Stewart. His songs.
That are headlights on the road.
Allan Taylor. A Keats for us today.
He’s put his motorway miles in
for the muse, for sure.
Keats at the wheel, in a sand-coloured Volvo
                                                                estate.
Hauling speakers into Nutwood, and out again.

If your guru won’t take you
past the doors of Stewart and Taylor,
drop your guru.
He’s taking you Nowhere.
In the grey weather and in the midnight.
you’ll need their shining, yes you will.

Course, come to think of it,
Nowhere
could be a fine place.
We’ve all of us shaved its suburbs,
one time or another.
Could be better, for the frail, for the hunted
than even Okinawa.

Paul Matthews, next up. For his poems.
That sweetly flame.
The bonfire of language. Yes.
After the rest’s been read, and then forgot,
the long glow of it, unextinguished yet.
The light he uses for his pen.
Where does it come from.
Some star, faraway.
Faraway inside us all.

Beauty shimmering on the bone
shirt buttons of his syllables.

If you want to, you can remember
your heart again.
Have fun in the work-place.
Wash up with joy, like a monk.

You can grow young just as easily
as you can grow old.
Stephanie’s friend lives on the edge,
so we don’t have to.
So we can tend bantams
with a sunny smile.

And if you need a contract cleaner
who plays the blues,
or would help you with a setting
of Monteverdi,
I know your man.
Call me.

28.

By the way, it’s been three good years.
Three years since I let a poem in.
Since words ran down my arm onto the page.
Since I walked fast on pavements,
looking at my feet, muttering
softly. But not softly enough.
Trying out lines, putting them differently.
Repeating the good ones, like roped asleep
to sunbeams several times.
Giving old ladies pause.
Neglecting to wave to my postman friends.
(Ah, causing offence.
For a postman is a sensitive soul).
Paper boys find reason to eye me strangely.
Then, before I’m properly round the corner,
                                                                   laugh
with the cruel innocence of slow-witted youth,
to a companion draped also in a yellow bag,
pushing one of the cheaper mountain bikes
you get from the Argos catalogue.

29.

How serious - for slowly we’re getting there -
should an epilogue be,
the tail of a tale?

Sad, yes. That goes without.
But serious
is the question.
Can I, the bogus author here,
allow loose ends to gather
at new beginnings
and plan stuff I’ll never get
to hear about?

That could be serious,
and be blamed on me,
bogus or not.

It’s all I can, after all, do.
Walk away. Alone.
Let what happens, happen.
Who can argue, I read somewhere, with what
                                                               happens?
The poem and I,
bereft soon of one another.

You guessed. I think you did.
The mystic, with his soul pushed down
inside his sock, oh like a weapon...
the mystic is a chump.
He looks in books and talks with dorks.
Comes up with the utterly wrong end
of a stick and dares chastise us with it.
The chump.

He fails to notice,
in his own kitchen,
a scarlet admiral,
with autumn miles to go,
fluttering against his window-pane.

And fails, further,
to explain to us,
his head full of Martin Buber,
that lots of folks are that
winged and painted being
from another world.

They don’t know it,
and know it, both.
They’re strange to themselves.
Hiding their hearts
cleverly behind their hearts.

The real and common beauty.
The impotent desperation.
The resignation.
It’s all there.

And the mystic. So called.
What he’s doing is
gazing at his thumb-nail.
Trying, not too hard,
to stop his thoughts.

Ha. but they galivant
away from him, relentlessly.
Bent upon their own
various and splendid missions.

30.

It keeps coming.
Some of us get bit.
Meister Eckhart did, so I hear.
The drummer in the Butthole Surfers.
He could be next.
It’s that random.

What Kenneth Patchen said on this,
he said They keep riding down all the time.
You can’t stop them.
Nobody ever stopped them
and nobody will ever stop them.
Which one do you want
to ride down for you?

Them all, if you please.

It cannot be doubted
that a great deal of serenity
is up for grabs.

Behind bus shelters,
in front of Chinese takeaways,
in flat public parks,
where footballers’ fiancées,
without enthusiasm,
watch Sunday footballers
and Montegos with weather-bleached paintwork
wait for them on the parking tarmac:
serenity lurks.
Angels, if you like, come riding down.

There’s Tao in the spinning
back wheel of a kid’s bicycle.
Shinto in the centre forward’s shout.
Blakean epigrams two-a-penny
along the plain pedestrian walkway
that takes me out the gates.

And. It’s all been going on
for a long time.
Since before the fifties.
Since juniper trees were invented.
The taste of mulberries.
I said, the taste of mulberries.

Leaves the colour of gravel
waft.
Dance the Hully-gully
when a bread van dashes by.

31.

I need a horse
in this poem.
Doesn’t have to be
an Arab or a Palomino.

Though a Palomino
would be nice.
And I saw one,
just last week.

His buttery tail
trailed in the green silk
of the meadow
he drifted in.

Bought a cockerel
from the man
who owned and rode it.
A Scot.

Who looked like,
like Lester Piggott.
Wiry. With a face
cut by time.

And the Scotsman said,
gently, with no smile:
He used to be a stallion.
Things do change, huh.

But for my poem here
I’ll get by
with a piebald pony.
Round fat belly.
Sturdy legs.
A tick on her ear.

Going from mouthful
to mouthful
as the sun melts
behind a pair of bungalows.

Her shadow’s being stretched
and stretched.
But what can I do?
Shadows, like truths, like lies,
come all shapes.
Nothing wrong with that.

Lifted from her pasture
to this poem,
she’ll live on now, my pony,
longer than I will.

Nice for her.

32.

What happened was two things.
One, I drove (sadly) away.
Waving. Weaving past the horse-pile,
centre of the street.
And the little black car, two.
Within its reasonable compass,
flew me westward home
on humming rubber circles.

While those two things happened,
I found a question, like a baby cloud,
gathering in my head.
I’ll share it, should I.

If it’s true a rapscallion,
any one, you choose, even these days
they abound, rascally under
their cinder’d eyebrows...
If he can brush against buddleia
and carry the scent of it
with him to the tide-line
and lay it there amid
the crunchy crabs,
beside a grumpy crow
standing alone in a green,
slippery detritus

and, thereafter, unaccosted,
blamelessly take himself
with a light step home,
sleep with the hint of smile
on his legitimate face,

then why, why must the cook
(hat like a whitewashed tree-stump
on his head) agonisingly
accuse himself, at his doorway,
if his silver ladle, unbeknownst
… no, no

who needs this, in a poem.
Forget it.
Imagine, instead, a slowly exploding feather,
a lawnmower repairman
and a soothsayer’s pigeon.
Imagine something very ordinary
occurring between the three of them
and imagine you only note the event
reflected in the high shine
of a waiter’s shoe.

Go on.
Get on with it.
While I read a paragraph or two
of James Lee Burke’s Cadillac Jukebox
and get pecan nut husks
caught in the cleats of my trainers.

33.

Back to the mystic, aforesaid.
There, one way, he goes,
waggling his fat forefinger,
looking for God knows what:
a mirror, or a handkerchief.
A website through which the cold east wind
                                                        won’t blow.

And there, the other, goes his soul.
Looking for some brummagem moonlight,
for a tough proposition,
for a bus stop or a bar.
For a bubbling pot of ill-starred,
blood-pooled, snake-oil remembrances
that it can hawk, for a sum,
around the spiritual market-place.

For a sum, or a laugh simply.
What matters most’s the deal.
Exactly as you might have expected.
The sense of floating iron in the heart.
The clear knowledge that the talents
in his purse could rip.

34.

So. I should have known.
A morning walk on Sunday
comes to this.
A cross-roads in a harbour woods,
where a heart, broken by irony, stumbles
toward a broken stile.
Already a shingle of leaves
crackles at my step.

It happens every time
a fool takes up an implement
to score a page with his faulty music,
devised of...

…you’re quite right, Annie.
Who knows what I am?
I don’t.
Even on Sundays, dammit, I’m wrong.
This walking on words
is certainly no miracle.

What should’ve been said in a line
has taken all this time.
You want the line?
A version of the line?
OK. Here goes:

A dog-rose in a salvage yard.

At the end of a working day,
a poet eats soup.
Just as you or I might.

Ffff, the breath leaves his nose,
as he seats himself across a sofa,
to read what his rivals say.
Excited by lies, he flies back
to the distance he came from.
To the distance he came from.

Emsworth/Swanage:
September-October, 1997