SEI MADRIGALI

1

Is it not strange that thou shouldst weep? So gravid

The sweetest song a burdening: the six

Metamorphoses, of violence and sex,

The sensuous oboe touched by sensual Ovid.

Pan pipes, the syrinx, the Orphic lyre;

The waters of the mere, reedy and full;

Poignant the false-relationed madrigal;

The hunter poised, the watcher with the lure.

2

The heron’s flight out of the reeds is laggard

Yet still it climbs. You could have watched its slow

Navigation of the risen dawn,

Its neck drawn back, prehensilely long-legged,

But you were probably asleep, and I

Display too late my early grief. Too late

Pinions of holding lift and agitate.

The heron crests its high-reared heronry.

3

This keeping of delight makes to its strath.

As we must know it, the perturbèd moon

Which is the singular being and yet none

And of the sexual will its grief its graith,

Suffuses, broadens, rouses to subside.

Sometimes the archaic and reflective swan

Ploughs through its image before setting down.

The river-margins thrum with each new tide.

4

So, solace without respite, as when, cour-

Sing through the ear, Italian lute-songs

With preciosities pluck at the heart-strings,

Thy studied dissonance, crudel Amor.

Caccini’s Amarilli I would play

At school assemblies, a warped seventy-eight

Bucking the needle, churning sweet disquiet.

Our loves are dying, we have had our day.

5

What would I have us do, enshrine Sosostris’

Aria from that fey Midsummer Marriage,

Joyous transcendent threnos before mere age,

All-mastering strings quelling things queer, disastrous?

Somewhere within the extravagant gauche plot

Is our true-plight, misfathomed, salutation.

If we should labour back against time’s motion

Still distant are those lovers we were not.

6

What I have so invoked for us is true

As invocation. The Fibonacci range

Of numbers is a constant, like Stonehenge.

Like Ovid’s book of changes to construe.

I can see someone walking there, a girl,

And she is you, old love. Edging the meadow

The may-tree is all light and all shadow.

Coming and going are the things eternal.

HIRAETH

(from ORACLAU | ORACLES, forthcoming from the Clutag Press)

1

I would do gratefully what others claim

They could not: relive my adolescence

If I were granted a special licence

To learn Welsh and love you. Great shame

I cannot speak or sing

This language of my late awakening

Nor ask your pardon, Beloved, nor bring

You my bride into the feasting house

Of first desire, dazed by your wedding dress.

2

Tell me, then, what is my sense of abiding.

Ah, love, are we to labour over these

Mechanic etymologies

Who encountered blank forbidding

Before we gave much thought

To language — touching was vivid sight,

Our fingers talked, we were illiterate.

Abide does not hit home as does inure:

I who have swum in love-words shore to shore!

3

With the miscredence of the desperate

I would blow hot on any fancy and forge

From which the myths emerge

Though keeping separate

Your myth and my version;

I owe you that much from our misprision.

Supra and infra chain us to this session:

Guilt in its medieval court desires

To judge by pain, hands grappled to the fires.

4

I yet hear an unsecured door thudding

Elsewhere in the recesses of my head,

Horseboxes for horses now dead.

What brings this bride to her wedding;

Why does she affront me

With steady reproach like Charlotte Brontë

Smiting hubris for gain at ten-and-twenty;

Bidding curt rule dash curvetting emotions,

Causing blindness to betoken impotence?

5

Things do not suit too well with allegory.

I do not feel emblematic or moral.

Pick up the cell-phone and quarrel.

Let us donate this old story

To the geriatric

Programme of the Poor Sisters of St Patrick.

If I can cap this it will be a hat trick.

I do not think that you have Alzheimer’s.

I could still cut capers with naked screamers.

6

Maes-y-mochin calls us on our hiraeth,

Held by joint patent, of which I largely speak;

So that passion at length grows weak

And strong memory wearieth,

Never draining the pond

Of blood and bile from which gulped cries ascend.

A Nemcon of bright stupor seals the land

Of which our love was and is part-arrear.

I shall have us — vanishing — strike the air!

7

Fantastic logic found unreason here —

Russell’s North Wales, Betws, Portmeirion.

Who now would thrust inquiry on

Beyond necessity of desire?

I would be named: so pledge

Me, language you old reprobate, my rage

Your own eccentric loves drawn from the edge;

Transfigure my proclaimed ineptitude:

Twice-born that virgin bridegroom and his bride.

from ODI BARBARE: I, II, XXIX, XLVII, XLVIII

I

If the soul so glares at annihilation

Name despair one deviant path of wisdom

Music steel-rimmed spectacles make as objects

Claiming a victim

Not moronic but a fell world of equals

Things to fall for deep in our study sessions

Ready metered set to a mark perfection

Staggers away from

Anarchs’ paradiso the infrastructure

Luck permitting love and its grave verdictives

Some have gone purblind and athwart our sensors

Broken not brain dead

Ewig endurances for good and all done

Labour our survival and their reviving

Nonsense too deep meaning a derogation

Torch not untimely

Measure loss re-cadencing Sidney’s sapphics

Not as words fall but as they rise to meaning

Laurels withheld fractured the noble column

Alien torsos

That much of writ · Angular backlit miners’

Profiles · Build up roofing and side supports · Quote

Axioms · Blast access to unsuspected

Caverns of fluorspar

II

Like Carducci meant: barely more than rustic

Not urbane not welcomed the Aula Regis

Rhetoric — uptight the morose consensus

Freely enhanced · I

Hate barbarians taking a stab at meaning

Freaks elision · Tell those who move the circle

Words that have clear biznis before the threshold

Need not profane us

Sacrificial oxen the gift of Virgil

Ruminating white sacrificial oxen

Heaving lyre-pronged heads from hoof-podged Clitumnus

Suffer their garlands

Rumpus uncouth anacolutha bullish

Metamorphs treading out a line the luckless

Fetishizing blood of the lucky victims

Rote ruination

Rimini marred Pisa the slew of armies

Apennine muscular brusque torrents voiding

Panzers Anzacs out of the rocky slurry

Mud-wrestled corpses

Virgil loves bees reads by the way as Plato

In the Symposium on immortal being

What price this verdict to regrouping nature’s

Plenary sessions

XXIX

Plug in energeia to guarded language

There remains folly if you take my meaning

Do you right now face of tribunal charged with

Strict contrapunctus

Senex Pound’s here-valent refusals no more

Vanities than Plato’s tendentious troping

Soul’s perusal eyes of discernment long since

Hazy in focus

So much here well turned as to meaning act now

Truths uncomely witness in things most proper

There are few that lucky if you should count them

Sign the occasion

Briefed at hazard scramble the brittle crystal

Bough from saltmine Stendhal has made so much of

Titan arum rotten Sumatran splendour

Passion of substance

Silicon meltdowns freeze communication

Rabelais forecast in his mute phonetics

Find poetics’ entrails exposed as at the

Pompidou Centre

Reinstatement held to recuse this statement

Ignorance madness being springs of action

Cannot you hear yourself as I can saying

Yes I would burn books

XLVII

Since by death came sexual death’s erection

Let the hung-up accolade just suffice it

Do not now play too much for love the four-horned

Lyre of betrayal

Granted fictions mark we can talk the truth out

Metaphor’s late wardrobe malfunction | granted

We admire its lustrous celebrity hair

Given the treatment

When affinities are released to strangeness

I am not with you in this burthened fable

Is it so well proven we fell together

Ex pupillari:

Neither begging time off for erudition

Doubting even where we should look for help | not

Mystical Strindberg not Kokoschka with The

Nature of Visions —

Whose interstice is it admits the fine point

Try that staunch wound-dresser the wound itself try

Mastering judgement when the highest prizes

Fall to hysterics:

Poppies plough-torn blaze into grand remonstrance

That is nature reigning obliviously

Though not insentient and in place of labour —

Ours — for survival

XLVIII

But imagine shall I the mirror broken

Treading slivers — pray not to be a sophist —

Nor would you find dramatization fitting

Such a persona

So to be whipped up out of wax and stylus –

Pardon affectation — the apparitions —

Paper lanterns paper extinguishers where

Flame is observance —

Made by folly’s competency imperilled

Conjured shards dancing on the leather desktop:

Orpen’s self portrait in the French hotel room

Quizzing his helmet —

He was no combatant — the brandy bottle

Concentrated uppish within reflection

Peril implicate but not here intrusive

There will be shadows:

Granted they hold firm to eluding virtue

Codifications volunteer perspectives

Mathematics’ figures predestinated

Infinite regress

Something sprung here that you may yet recoil from —

Stick with hazardous enigmatic fractured —

Metaphysics’ laboured accommodation

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