Take a Breath

Observing the process of poetry in another language is not unlike watching someone operate a complex piece of machinery in a restricted space. One wonders how they manage it. There is a recognised comfort zone in apprehending verse written in one's own native language, but to understand work originating outside this zone can be daunting, albeit rewarding.

My own earliest experiences with "other voices" was probably as a schoolboy, through poems from Old English. There is both a strangeness and familiarity that draws one to the verses. Later, when I had the opportunity to offer my own versions of these and other works for publication, it was with the understanding that the inhalation of each breath of my own should be balanced by the exhalation of breath of another poet. That is to say, one offers up a part of one's self to the process in a way that is doubly personal.

That said, poets likely understand the motives for poetry even though they might not entirely understand the technicalities of French, German, Russian, or Spanish, for example, and there is more common ground than not in poems in which the Self is courted or flayed according to the poet's whim.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 48

White Café

Insect wings skitter upright on the water.

Windsurfers catch knots,

slide past swimmers bobbing.

Rotate the scene. Include the white café,

its patio’s parasols.

Gulls trash-haggle, everything

the same as everything

and still the thing goes round,

a world rubbed down to nothing,

in the distance the sound a human makes.

Figures too small to be real, leap

wailing at lapping water, if it is water.

The white café spins Cinzano parasols.

Permit me to escort you to the edge of this.

A sand grain has commandeered the sun.

Rudders cut faces into keener shapes.

The Day of the Dead

Halloween, or 'All Hallows Eve' is recognised variously in many cultures as a time when the living don masks, and dance around fires and otherwise behave in a way that their Iron Age ancestors would find familiar.

It precedes, by a mere 24 hours, All Saints Day, as though a day of special recognition of Christian saints would be in order, having survived the previous night's debauch and death-dalliance. As its alternative name, The Day of the Dead, suggests, there is an uncomfortable undertow of pagan associations that the Church could never entirely expunge, its solution being to incorporate the pagan traditions into the Christian ceremony.

There's a long history of this in any case. In the second and third centuries after Christ, when the early Church sought to stabilize itself, Greek scholars in Alexandria codified Paul's 'mission statement' by using the structures of rival, arguably more popular religions, namely Hermeticism (cf., Hermes Trismagistus, the syncretic combination of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god, Thoth), and Mithraism.

There are many parallels between Mithraism and Christianity. The former arose 3500 years before Christ, and Christians today would recognise many of its tenets. The epithet, The Unconquered Sun, the lamb carried on the shoulder, the symbolism of the Rock, the Virgin birth at the winter solstice, and so forth, were all associated with Mithra millennia before the Christian period.

It's a popular belief that the reason that masks are incorporated into what in all respects is a pagan ritual, is to ward off evil spirits. This is deemed necessary because at the critical juncture between the Eve and the Day, the membrane separating the world of the dead and that of the living is at its thinnest. One can almost hear the dead whispering to one another, or perhaps to us.

Beyond rooms with HD TVs, designer lamps, and super-fast broadband, something lurks still in our subconscious: the dark, fires and sacrifice, the cold hand upon the shoulder.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 47

The Secret Forms of Animals

In my diary, the entry for today,

every word rhymes with every other

more closely

than any word rhymes with silence.

Above my house, swifts

dime-turn in snapped triangulations.

Compare the diary’s previous entries: fly-squash

on windscreens in Kansas, or, in the Sudan

the structural integrity of mud brick domiciles.

Across cat’s eyes and double yellows,

the stringy reds and broken feathers

mark the nature of reminiscence, a seething spent,

a perfect circle traced at last attempt.

My raised hand obscures the sun, the swifts

fetching noon’s high blues

in sprints towards twilight, and Cassiopeia’s early stars.

Poetry and Art

In respect of the title, I refer to painting.

There are numerous examples of poetry written as a result of the poet's connection with visual art. Examples include "The Man with the Blue Guitar" (Wallace Stevens, 1937), based on Picasso's The Old Guitarist; "Mourning Picture" (Adrienne Rich, 1965), based on Edwin Elmer's painting of the same name; "Hunters in the Snow" (William Carlos Williams, 1962), based on Pieter Bruegel the Elder's painting, also so-named. Other examples by W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Jennings, and Monica Youn reinforce the inspirational aspect of poets seeking to re-determine the subtleties expressed in brushstrokes of oil on canvas.

There is a commonality on this approach among art forms. Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, based on works of his friend, the painter Victor Hartmann, is a case in point. Yet, while there is a commonality of artistic sensibility, there are also differences. It could be described as an exercise in 'Chinese whispers' where the original message, passed then from person to person, concludes upon the final hearing as something completely different to that intended. We interpret the world individually, uniquely, and it could be argued that the interpretation of subjects between artistic disciplines lends itself to a charge of grand indulgence, even though the resulting, reactive art form may well stand perfectly well in its own right.

Recently, there was report from an American biochemist who had been studying mud samples from an extraordinarily deep lake, known for its naturally occurring high arsenic content. To her team's amazement, the arsenic-rich mud was teeming with microscopic life. The team then isolated particular 'interesting' examples and applied still heavier doses of arsenic; the microbes thrived.

The scientists' conclusion was that one of two things might be happening. Firstly, the microbes might represent a form of life based on 'base root' DNA, that is, a subbranch of DNA billions of years old that never changed, while other branches of DNA evolved into life as we recognise it today. It should be remembered that oxygen itself served as a poison to early life forms, and only through adaptation did some forms survive and thrive.

Secondly, and perhaps more important was the idea that these arsenic-dwellers might in fact represent an even earlier form of life, and that all life since then was generated by a second movement, in which case it could be stated that life appeared on this planet on more than one occasion. The importance of the latter notion is that life appearing under such conditions might well be replicated on other planets under conditions that we might not recognise as life-enhancing.

This 'otherness' is reflected too in the exchange between the arts, the interpretive, combative quality impossibly surviving in airless, poisonous, primordial ooze, masquerading in stanzas and delicate strokes of Naples Yellow.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 46

Walking on the Thames

Meccano miles to London: carriages

commute in slinky combinations past

the terraced suburbs. We meet at Claridge’s,

comparing life to life within our caste

then catch the last trains home. Across precast

and corrugated scenes a sense of time

connects the sparking track to the sublime.

December skies are quarrelsome. The rack

of weather gullies back to Seven Dials,

Museum Street, and you behind a stack

of first editions. The dust of viols’

muted measures dignifies denials,

a century grown sullen with its ghosts.

The CD catalogues these last outposts.

The peacock soirée ends with Auden’s Spain;

the taxis pass in pairs or not at all

this time of night. We stand in stair-rod rain

and stamp the street’s cascades against the sprawl

of doorways. Saviours loom from lanes, and bawl

their cider sermons in the acid light

where random neon punctuates the night.

Autumn Studies

Autumn in northern Europe. Wet and cold. Leaves totter lamely at branch ends, but only for a moment. A last knock of wind sends them flying across the green and along the road. 

At the kerb, a small dog strains against its lead, its nose pushed into the air, sensing the change, decoding the clues salted into each new gust.

On the mat by the door, a pair of ankle boots my wife has kicked off near the radiator. Her umbrella half-mast on the mat as well, still dripping. 

On the news, video of the first buick swans to settle on these eastern marshes this year, wintering here, for now at least, to escape the harsher Russian cold. 

The morning sun glints along a ragtag line of parked cars, their windscreens a breathless bloom of frost.