AFTER THE SILENT PHONE CALL

( i.m my parents, Lynn and Dwynwen)

After the silent phone call

our daughter dries my tears,

paper lanterns litter our lives.

My son pyramids used teabags.

A wintry sun throws prisms

on the pair of terraria

planted with ivy and African

violets - violence shadows my prison.

Princess purrs to newly borns

in the shower-tray, despatching me

to wallow in the bath.

A storm swallows the light,

bulls bellow its arrival, ducks

& geese in serried rows

hypnotised by the storm’s eye,

grey mare merges into greyness

of fegged rain-soaked field.

Cowering dogs return with nonchalance,

with unconditional love as calm

is restored. I vainly count

days not to be crushed

in the house at the

end of the axle-breaking track.

Walking in walled autumnal gardens,

trees like antlered animals rear

into the sky. Gathering fruit

for wine, sloes for gin

inebriation sets in. I forage

for mushrooms, the magic ones,

imagination soars, friends, fairy-tale end.

Carelessly, people slip through craquelure

in paintings of imagined lives.

Great clouds plough straight furrows,

confront coffins at open graves.

Lynn’s smoking extinguishes his life.

Dwynwen (Welsh goddess of love)

her chocolate heart cracks, flakes

and Fiona is brutally murdered.

(I wish I’d told her

of the solitary snow-drop

that grew on the grave

of the dog she loved.)

AN ITALIAN AFTERNOON

Vivace                    A glockenspiel of laughter spills into the stillness

                                of the hilled city, sucks us into its slipstream.

                                A spider spins our hopes on a gossamer harp.

                                Vague memories hang around like cobwebs.

                                Rose Rhapsody, Symphony, Distant Thunder.

Arpeggio              Invisible cicadas on fruiting lemon trees rasp

                                like a bow-scratch boy fretting over his scales.

Forte                      Kettledrum thunder bounces quadraphonic sounds

                                from the mountains which surround the city.

                                The drumming rain drowns the laughter,

Pizzicato                plucks our hopes. Staccatos the cicadas.  

                                                                                *

Adagio                   For the sake of the giddy-fragrant rose

                                the rain must water the thorns,

                                its pain composed under a spreading plane tree

                                in the piazza where we pause on old stone steps,

                                worn and crumbled by feet long vanished.

                                Articulate bells ring from the campanile.

                                September Song, Bright Melody, Lyric.

                                Sky’s the Limit

A capella                An eagle splits the sky.   

                                Hybrid, Climbing, Rambling.          

 Dissonance           We battle in a bee-loud garden against

                                greenfly, mildew, fungus, black spot.

                                Bumblebees bully the crimson mouths

                                of the roses, steal their nectar.

Largo                      Deadheading: dreams scatter from our hands as we offer

                                the petals to Zephyrus, who zithers their flight.

                                Floribunda, Grandiflora,                   

                                Old English, (dewdrops like sobs, transplanted into foreign soil,)

Expressivo            But the fragrance stays in the hand that gives the rose

                                so we gather armfuls for our friends.

                                Avoiding thorns we dream of unicorns

                                of magic briars, of sleeping princesses....

                                                                                *

Finale                    Now, the rainfall is as quiet as a conductor

                                turning the page,  the whisper of a flute.

                                Our rose-coloured lives played out like a score

                                on several staves at the same time.

Coda                       We strain to hear the laughter,

                                as the last rose petal falls.

AT DYLAN THOMAS’ DEATHBED

I recall how cold winds crushed your short

round shape into  rug-heavy suits

but barely remember the grain of your voice

though you recently read the aubade

of the beginning of movements in that village in Wales

and regaled us with tales at so many soirées.

I hospital-chaired all the nights of your dying

trying to evade the certainty that soon

I must dissuade those who will want

to dissect the black box of the wreckage of your life.

Some will traduce you, others tell

how you seduced and charmed them and talk

of their alarm at the tragic blackness into which

you would slip when slumped in drunken slumber.

The patience of the night sustains me.

I stay awake while every clock stands still.

I hardly dare look at you.

A smile flirts with your lips.

Perhaps you are slipping towards

Elysian pastures,

to an inconceivable rapture.

DEAD HORSES

Razor sun scrapes the sand

where the dead horse sinks

like the carcass of a wrecked ship.

Desert dogs shelter in the shade

of the cave of his skull –

they have picked him clean.

The second horse

dead a day or two,

legs stiff and straight.

His death so public.

No pyramid grave for him

just the great waves of sand

and the fearsome sun.

I thought I saw him tremble –

the membrane of his eyes moved,

the dogs already eating a trail

to their new cave.

Ridden hard

by men with shipwrecked minds

who scuttle souls.

The diabolical howl

was me, crying black tears

as the sand ached yellow.

IN THE PRESENCE OF MADNESS

I would not call you mad

though your madsmile madness

gnaws at the awning of your

awareness and we realise

that you are living in isolation

in the isobubble

of your madmuddle mind.

You tap the side of your nose

in that Machiavellian way, as if you have

important secrets to hide.

It was me you came to last year

when you could no longer cope

were trembling the high

tightrope, stretched

ready to

                                                break.

You left a pitched wake in which

I thought I would drown, afraid

that you were dragging me into your

breakdown, into

your mad mildewed mind.

I sensed I was in

The Presence of Madness.

I kept away this time

asked friends politely

                                                how is he?

distanced, detached because

I did not want you to

leave me heaving on the shore

of the osmotically insane.

MEDICATION

Does it matter if it is the medication

that keeps him happy,

hyper, sometimes high as the clouds

scudding the sky

where he is a god

in his own distorted mirror,

where birds trill like flutes,

piccolos,

and sing their paeons in a burst

of mingled sound?

The alternative is to trench,

snake-like and scrutting

in the crumbling earth,

where, like Macbeth, scorpions

scuttle around his brain,

where oblivion closes in like a mist

and threnodies are sung.

The medication takes him

up spiral staircases of space

to an errant jubilation.

THE UFFIZI, FLORENCE

It is surely worth the wait, the long queues, the drifting

along endless corridors into hundreds of rooms

of Madonnas, (with or without child), sifting

through calamities, wars, tortures, tombs,

to reach Botticelli’s La Primavera, Spring’s allegory,

portrayed by the artist with the easy grace

and warmth of early Renaissance art, the integrity

and spirit of the artist embracing a slow pace.

But it is Flora, goddess of flowers, centre-right

casting blossom from the folds of her sprigged dress,

her winsome smile stealing the limelight

from Mercury, the Three Graces, Chloris and Zephyrus.

     This painting sums up the optimism of the season         

     the nascence of spring, a genesis for everyone.

HOUSE SITTING IN SIPICCIANO

How easily you settle into someone else’s home,

look after dogs just met, but sense you have known

for years. Talk to flowers and plants you didn’t grow,

water, deadhead and tidy their leaves.

How, like a cat, you follow the sun around the yard

until the heat is too intense and you fall into the shade

of the verandah with its tiny waterfall, spouting up

then cateracting  down the round stones of wall,

how you induce coolness by looking at the fountain

listen to its tinny sound. How you locate the

source of the loud noise on the verandah’s tin roof

expecting a rat, a lizard or a mischief of mice

discover a solitary sparrow pecking at the corrugation.

How you come to recognize each creak of the house,

which doors slam in the breeze, which swing softly.

How the whipple of wind flaps and flagellates

the ephemeral bamboo fence that surrounds the yard,

like a sound-effects person of the past would shake

a sheet of card to replicate thunder. But it is a warm, talkative wind

that soon gives way to the stillness of the day.

How you watch the dogs run in the vineyard where saliva-seeped

and chewed teddy bears litter the land, lie abandoned, or swooped on

as the favourite toy of the day. How you find a frustrating bounty

of unready fruit; apples, pears, persimmons, figs and walnuts.

And how, in the cool of evening, you sit on a strategically placed chair

to contemplate the sun’s dissipation, wait for the bats to appear.

As the cicadas cease their rasping, trees are sculpted against

the blackness, stars carved out of solid darkness of sky.

And how you get used to the comfortable indulgence of solitude, the fortitude

of freedom that unclogs the mind, and that when the time arrives,

you will be disinclined to leave – relinquish responsibility, the keys,

the dog  leads, the watering can. The anticlimax will be immense.

THE RAGAMUFFINS

Part of a sequence from Ford Madox Brown’s painting ‘Work’

What has that navvy found?

They hear the click-clack of tiny bones,

hollow bones, like a broken

penny whistle that no longer sings.

He spreads the skeleton

of feathery wings –

the weight of earth

has flattened it, like their mother,

in her eternal bed.

The click-clack fills their nightmares.

Their mother’s skull

with sockets empty

of her blue-lake eyes,

her gapped and blackened teeth

loosened in her jaw,

her brittle ribs fragmented,

like an Aeolian harp no longer

played by the wind.

                                *

The girl’s embryonic dreams are of her mother –

the weight of the earth is on the chest

that suckled them, on the pelvic bones

that nurtured each of them in her womb.

Their mother whimpered in death.

The worms flenched her flesh

in whispers. Soil encrusted

ochre bones are all that remains

becoming hollow like the bird’s.

The girl wakes at dawn’s pulse – screaming,

disturbs the little ones,

causes her father to shift his weight off her.

ELEKTRA’S ESCAPE INTO THE HAREM

I wake to possibilities the day has yet to spoil,

now bathed in oils and perfumed water,

my maid has egg-yolked my hair, used the whites

to massage with finger tips into crow’s feet yet

to appear. She kneads my feet, loofas my skin

to a pearly luminance. Pearls and peacock feathers

are entwined into my, long, dark, lustrous curls.

I relax with an opium pipe, drink a glass of sherbet.

I smile and stretch, the opium makes me happy,

yet still the stench of the tanneries assaults me.

The putrid piss pots my brothers collected,

left for us on street corners; the animal dung

my sisters and I gathered to work the hides, before

they were soaked in the tides of the lake

and stretched on frames to dry.

Promised in marriage when I had only a rumour of breasts,

a tickle of pubic hair. I was to be wed to an old and ugly tabaki,

a friend of my filthy father. My grunting, groaning father

who fucked my poor mother night after disgusting,

wine-driven night, who would have bedded me if she

had refused, noticed his lustful, wandering hands

explore beneath my foul sackcloth clothes.

I followed the wives and concubines of the Pasha,

watched them enjoy the fresh air of gardens and parks,

arms linked, friendships, not a care in the world.

I envied their fine clothes, their jangling necklaces,

tiaras, rings, bangles. I wanted to be one of them.

A plan shaped. I waded naked into the lake where I knew

the Pasha would board his boat to hunt ducks.

I emerged bit by beautiful bit. He noticed, approved,

had me conveyed to the harem, I was saved.

So I repose on a low divan, covered in tapestries of mauve

and plum and red with gold threads. My room is sumptuous,

plumose. In my laziness I watch the sun cast shadows

of latticed shutters against the wall, watch the fluttering laciness

of voile curtains. I glimpse a mimosa tree in full flower.

Tonight, the Pasha wants me, will deflower me.

His sheets will be creased and red-stained.

I taste the words: I am a concubine. The Pasha’s

concupiscence wins. I laugh to stop myself from weeping.

  3 - PUBLISHING HISTORY