New Poetries VII Read online

  at the sight of him, this time there’ll be wolves

  circling the scrubland where he swears his house used to be.

  To the Trees

  quick and slick

  and full of you,

  the you I don’t want,

  the you that brims over, brims under my lines, the you I can’t

  remake, reshape,

  the you I –

  just leave it, drop it, walk away. There’s nothing to see here.

  Go to the trees,

  I always go to the trees, but let’s go

  to the tree outside my window,

  the one standing on its own, away from all the others,

  the one with the great arms stretching up

  the one with too many fingers spreading themselves

  into shapes so the fierce birds might come to them. Too many for what?

  To be just pointing at the sky,

  to be just making shapes for the birds?

  They must be a trace of something,

  of some hand, some principle urging them on –

  maybe Maths or God

  and God knows we don’t want to go down that road

  do we?

  Just look at the trees.

  I wish I didn’t know any rules, any at all, and then my poems,

  or this poem at least,

  would move, would soar, would hover and break

  into thousands and thousands

  of pieces of white material.

  The Thorn and the Grass

  That day I ran my fingers over my son’s knee

  and they slowed as if puzzled by a sudden patch

  of hardness where the skin thickened and pulled

  me back to trace the contour lines around it. And there

  in the middle of his soft flesh that black pin prick

  puncturing his creamy skin and my fingers pressing

  down on the ridge around it and us watching as a tip slowly

  emerged, pushing its nose up into the air. So I pressed

  a little harder and this great thorn slid out of his knee,

  the unmistakable curve of a rose thorn freed from his flesh.

  But then what about the grass, shall I make her the grass

  that grows in the cold sand high above the beach,

  blown sad and sharp by the wind, swishing her blades

  from side to side, waiting for him to run through her?

  So Many Houses

  When the grown-ups came we scattered like dust

  into the skirting boards – and watched

  as they swirled and whirled and married the wrong people.

  So many rooms and so many houses

  they had to spread the paintings

  thinly over the walls. We jumped on the beds

  and ran in the gardens, climbed all those stairs

  curled our fingers around all those banisters

  but we stood still on the landings and felt

  the floorboards warp under our feet.

  All those houses but only one pattern

  and they made it again and again as if it were a song

  they loved and they had to play again and again,

  a song about a girl with skin as white as alabaster

  who danced with a man with hair as black as night,

  a song about the child he gave her before he left her

  to find another who would give her two more

  and as we listened to the song coming through the floorboards

  it settled into us and we saw ourselves

  spread out in a deck of cards across the table,

  a fan of children with different coloured hair.

  Fence

  What is it about the fence that scares me? you know the one

  I mean, the one with gaps between its narrow wooden slats

  and a length of wire running across its back. Is it the way

  it leans and sags into the grass that grows on the dunes?

  Or maybe the way it creaks as it sways in the wind, the way it moves

  like seaweed breathing in the tide. Is it because it can’t keep anything

  in or anything out? Or is it because, despite all that, it’s found

  the strength in the slant, the speck of stillness that hides

  itself somewhere on the point of collapse? I think I know –

  but I wish I didn’t, so I’ll make the turn as fast as I can, so fast

  you’ll only just see me do it. It reminds me of you

  in that white room, taking too long to die, stopping

  and starting, huffing and puffing your way to the door,

  dragging your great ribs into the leaves like an old bear.

  NED DENNY

  The poems gathered here span approximately thirteen years, the earliest (‘Tree’) written whilst living in a cottage in the foothills of the Himalayas and awaiting the birth of our son. Almost half of them were written over a decade later in another cedared idyll – the Duke of Bedford’s former estate on the banks of the Tamar, where Devon ends; both troubadour adaptations date from this latter period, ‘Who’s She’ having been entered for the 2015 Spender Prize along with the following commentary:

  I didn’t set out to translate Arnaut Daniel, being somewhat awed by Ezra Pound’s versions of his robust and adroitly patterned songs. Master of the elaborate, allusive style known as the trobar clus and inventor of the sestina, Daniel is the poet referred to in Dante’s Purgatorio as ‘il miglior fabbro’ (‘the better craftsman’, the term later used by Eliot – dedicating The Waste Land – of Pound himself). My unintended remake of ‘Doutz braitz e critz’ began with the gift of the first line, a lucid four-syllable seed and slight departure from the Old Occitan which is usually rendered as something like ‘sweet trills and cries’. This then grew in line 2 to declare the apparent paradox of something both highly ordered and numinous, condensed yet expansive, Apollo and Dionysus in one (‘mind-manifesting’ being the literal meaning of psychiatrist Humphry Osmond’s 1950s neologism ‘psychedelic’).

  After the minor liberties of this opening my concern was to echo and renew, in a language less rich in rhymes, the shape and light of Daniel’s original: the stanzas consisting of seventy-five syllables in regular array, and chiming with or calling out to each other like island universes or groups of birds in different trees. It felt like an affirmation of my initial instinct to read, several weeks later, Pound’s contention that ‘precision of statement’ is what Daniel can teach. As for the unnamed ‘she’ of my title, the proverbial cat’s mother, it will perhaps suffice to say that the troubadours were her wise and foolish warrior-devotees. Now as then, it is at the same time a question you might ask in a noisy, crowded room and one that lets us approach the mystery and radiance of our origin.

  I like to think that my own sestina ‘Drones’, despite being set in a modern-day UFO conference, wouldn’t be entirely alien to Daniel and his kind. Long live the trobar clus …

  Untitled

  after Baudelaire

  I have not forgotten that bone-white house

  where town succumbs to countryside,

  the lopped statues of Love and Abundance

  loitering in baroque undergrowth,

  and, near dusk, the tide of the sun,

  which, seen through windows streaked with clouds,

  resembles an omniscient eye

  observing our nuptial feast in silence,

  casting the long gaze of its glow

  on the empty plates, the torn net curtain.

  Old Song

  Observe the elusive nature of the goddess:

  she is nowhere to be seen in your languages,

  but on your vision’s periphery, the garden’s

  every leaf is exultant with her presence.

  To Catch a Thief

  You’ve been dead a generation and yet there you are still,

  poised and serene and scarcely more than twenty,

  divine, unattainable.


  Incomparable Grace, you marry a prince and grow old.

  When I ride in pursuit of the enemy,

  though, it’s your face on my shield.

  Fir

  after Bernart de Ventadorn

  When you see the sun-made lark’s wings whirr

  against the counterpressure of that light

  and slow until a hypersonic stillness

  has him drop, a stone shaped like a heart,

  it’s as though you step into a green rain

  of envy of those whose smile is no disguise,

  marvelling that your chest’s flagrance

  isn’t instantly reduced to a spent black wick.

  You thought you got love but your thoughts were

  simulacra, a counterfeit delight,

  for what idea can cage the pace of the kiss

  you pursue in dreams and trace in art;

  she has stolen your blood’s loving refrain,

  nabbed her sweet self, has purloined the very skies

  and in so doing’s left a dunce

  caressing thin air to the soundtrack of a tick.

  You’re no longer the fat controller

  of yourself, squinting from a tourist’s height,

  since you glanced into those eyes where all joy is;

  as mirrors hold death and life apart

  they disclosed your second self, free of pain

  as a meat suit is nipped at by shoals of sighs;

  you’re shut out from your days, as once

  Narcissus was undone by his own biopic.

  You’d wash your hands of her and all her

  kind – whose ways are at ease, whose touch is light –

  vowing that just as you once sang her wholeness

  now your branching tongue shall flick and dart,

  seeing how they close their ranks and disdain

  to aid one who shakes in her dawn air, who dies

  into the vast clairaudience

  in which each open tree receives an old magic.

  And in such things, alight under fur,

  she shows herself to be a girl alright,

  not resting content with the bland park that is

  permitted by that celestial fart

  but reaching for the fruit that fires the brain;

  I’m afraid that you’re a joke in her bright eyes,

  roped to the cliff of appetence

  with no companion but the music of your pick.

  Grace is gone from the world, you aver,

  yet what have you ever known but this night

  in which the sainted mother of our riches

  has been replaced by a doll, a tart,

  a bulb-eyed changeling whose synthetic reign

  is the false light, a grim tree, which if you’re wise

  enough to unspell appearance –

  now’s the time – you’ll know for the shade that makes us sick.

  Your tame prayer is just a verbal blur

  wholly failing to manifest your ‘right’

  to her who can be the riskiest mistress –

  the cyclone her voice – so why not start

  a trilled silence, burn books, begin again;

  let death be the force that you ventriloquise,

  that end which is the newborn dance

  danced in exile by those who are so slain they’re quick.

  House Music

  Consider the architecture of the fire,

  this radiant palace receiving in turn

  the great bare mouth of the smallest creature

  and the mirrored, steel-cored tower

  of your pride; consider that soon

  that grim ember

  resembling the face we all fear or desire

  will be the perch where you sing and do not burn,

  peace be within thee, vigilant preacher

  of the mind-consuming hour

  each undergoes and what the moon

  must dismember;

  and consider while these agile days climb higher,

  witchlike as flame – as the stuttering intern

  is fanned to a tall and brilliant teacher –

  how to step into that power,

  that breathing room, the killer tune

  you’ll remember.

  Cutting Class

  We slip by the brick estates

  patterned like a lizard’s back,

  then suburbs where the conifer’s

  black flames stand sentinel;

  we pass the clipped, uncanny gardens,

  pace through the witchcraft

  of the giant leaves of planes,

  wade against the smoking tide

  of insect-faced and swollen cars.

  We skirt the sewage works,

  cross over the motorway’s grey

  cortege to the dark

  matter of the countryside –

  Egypt’s pylons scanning the fields,

  evil spores in the undergrowth,

  antennae needling the clouds –

  and we just keep on toiling away

  from town, setting our sights

  on the grace and madness

  of burning trees, as far as where

  the truant woods dance

  in a light that is breaking all the rules,

  to the point at which we start to learn

  to stand inside the fire.

  Drones

  You see the Greys, he said, girding his teeth

  for a lime doughnut, they use the owl’s

  nervous system the way we use a drone

  or hidden camera. Given what I now knew,

  it almost seemed possible. When green tea

  was announced I slid outside for a smoke,

  paced roided grass, watched where stained smokestacks smoked

  into the wind’s dead breath, its yellow teeth.

  Back in the conference centre, the tea-

  fresh crowd were pondering the giant owl

  that stilled her car on that night when she knew

  she knew nothing, its voice a savage drone

  terrible to recall, a rising drone

  which turned her body into pixel-smoke

  swarming upwards and assembled anew

  (‘like I’d been sucked into a white hole’s teeth’)

  on that craft that swept as quiet as an owl.

  When she arrived home, hours late for tea,

  her forehead was marked with a tau cross: T.

  She paused, and the air conditioning’s drone

  momentarily quickened the cased owl

  on the wall, living eyes long gone to smoke,

  and shivered through the symmetrical teeth

  of love’s lost children (tell us something new!)

  who’d come here to share what little they knew.

  I thought of the onset of DMT –

  that sense of deliverance into the teeth

  of a buzzing gleam or luminous drone,

  mere seconds after releasing the smoke –

  and then of that line from Twin Peaks, ‘the owls

  are not what they seem’. I dozed, dreamt of owls

  sane and inviolate in all they knew,

  and awoke to the guest lecturer: Smoke

  And Mirrors, Carl Jung and the Abductee.

  With his grey skin, dark clothes and soothing drone

  he might have been a priest. I licked furred teeth

  clean of dough, grabbed a smoke with my teeth

  and headed to where I knew mowers droned.

  Love is an owl and it’s having you for tea.

  Era

  I bought it because of the backwards ‘S’ and the teeth

  of the mouth, the jagged lip: DADDIES FAVOURITE

  ƨAUCE. He unearthed it in the seventies. It cost me

  a pound or a fiver. ‘An error. Unusual. “Under the

  radar”.’ His wink made me think of the interloper,

  of things renewed, of things reversed. The glass
was

  the clearest, palest blue.

  When I handed it over, a bird

  called from the garden – this is just as it happened,

  I have it here – and you read it as DAD DIES. That

  made me cry. That made me wonder.

  Who’s She

  after Arnaut Daniel

  Sweet precision

  of the mind-manifesting

  voice of the birds, the luminous argot

  blown from tree to tree just as we implore

  those whom love makes us see more and less clearly,

  you inspire me – whose perverted soul sways true,

  straight in its windings – to conceive the finest

  call, a chirp with no bum note or word astray.

  Indecision,

  that luxury! No dithering

  could touch me when I first breached the snow

  of her smooth ramparts, the girl I thirst for

  with a wild intensity that is nearly

  unendurable, the shining one, she who

  has hands whose omniscience exceeds the rest

  as surely as love’s gentlest caress bests a

  circumcision.

  She clocked me, my discerning

  between the real deal and the fake – we know

  how true gold’s hidden by the lead uproar

  of our toys – and as our tongues moved sincerely