What I see in the flames

This new year, amid the crack of ice
And unspecified threats, I look into the fire
For help and comfort, or advice,
As anxious flames leap high and higher.
They're puzzled by the elements they're in,
Crowded down by elephantine shapes
In drifts of darkness they can't contain
While in the embers a salamander slips
In and out like a promise to be given.

What promises have you to give?
Or give up on?

I think again about the phoenix
And doubt the promise of redemption
When looking at the burning sticks;
Yet think of what is going to happen,
Of leaves composting in a bin,
Of yeast cells working through the dough,
Of  a spinning top's brief, trembling spin
And the crunch of frozen snow.
I promise that I'll watch the fire
Till it gives way to smoke, and the smoke
Has climbed the air and is no longer there.

What promises have you to give?
Or give up on? Or break?

How then to live in the space there is?

As apples round into form, from the core
take on the heft of substance, fill then fall.
As birches turning, tall on hills, drop gold, and jays 
shout at treetops, flash blue temper, caw and call. 
As wax wanes, burning in pools, glows and spills,
and the lemon-scented leaf sends down
its downy messengers, unfurls, roots, grows.
As the solemn, solitary child plays.


The edge of space we touch at our finger ends,
we cast out webs, threads, spools, 
hashing up space like cheese wires, cross,
form nodes.  We run along them,
jump, hang in the air. 


How then to live?  As if the moon
were always over snow-lined fields
where crows walk, and the dull blue 
glowing curve of evening cloud, so
the leaves snap with cold at the road's edge
and you know that pheasants hunch
amongst the spikes of sedge and bone yellow
umbels of the winter weeds, but let them be,
coming home as you are to the hiss of the fire.


And what do you see in the flames?

Where would you be if not in this place?

The hydra-headed question, its fangs deep
In wrist and ankle, burns in the cage of bone.
No response of grace or wit, no cry, no leap
Of inspiration can release its grip.
Instead it breeds another question
And another, twisting to escape.

How to be in two places at one moment,
In adjacent, unconnected universes?
Or here, at this given moment,
The watcher and the watched,
The force that thought represses
And the flood dispatched?

How to be in Babylon in time?
Spinning beyond light and shade,
In time for lunch or the end of time?
Yes, a one-way ticket is a tease,
Sharp and fatal as a Samurai blade,
Dressed with oil of cloves; and promises?

On The Bullet, now, from Tokyo
To Kyoto. The country hurries past
Too fast to know it,
Or to know, beside me
The suited man who quietly reads.
He rises and bows, Goodbye," he says.
I rise, I bow, Goodbye," I say.

A conversation never had.
But, in a fine rain, instead,
Among manicured trees, I hear,
Repeated, the same hollow note.
A bamboo tube, pivoted
In the stream, fills and tips and falls,

And knocks a stone at intervals
Long enough to forget, and short
Enough to recall its repetition -
A lonely sound, hollow as a bone,
That, coming back, takes you by surprise.
I'm still waiting for it to return.

How then to live in the space there is?

What's in the box?

Perhaps if I open it, let me see... Crack!
Leering and swaying and squeaking with glee
spiked on a bedspring, out will jump Jack.

Or is there a cat there, fluidly
slipping out, purring and curving - unless
it's dead, poisoned and rigid? Or might there be

a dog which has learned to be helpless
shuttled and shocked, carefully tortured
by a peer-reviewed high-priest of happiness?

If I turned out the box, perhaps I could
still find hope there, a rattling, lone
remainder, a tarnished coin, good

currency, tender still, though very much down
in value. But soft. You've already told
of a perfume of citrus-peel, blown

from the lands of spices, of lemon trees, old,
brittle, but fragrant still, contained inside bright
glossy red lacquer patterned with gold,

a tiny, dried wonder. And something so slight
can, for a moment, by alchemical grace
cast out all evils, put them to flight.

So cup your hands round it, and hold it to your face...
Where would you be, if not in this place?

What on earth shall I draw to day?

Imagine, when you look, how the eyes
Of Rembrandt and Picasso widen,
Their bleak gaze, hard and black,
Your book open like a laugh,
Pencil sharp as an angel's foot,
Your eyes on the scrounge.
Watch fissures in walls and faces,
Narrow and wry, where lenses
Cannot go, where in the dark in the skull
Or in a spiral shell, particles
Dance at one time in different places,
Or in "the infinite spaces
Between the stars" which terrified
Pascal; or in the spaces
Between the head and heart
Where animals watch for prey ...
A line will do, just a line
To wire the air, connect the thought,
Lead from one thing to another,
Hang an apple on a tree,
Place a loaf on a table.
Answer if you can on the way
The questions that come up:
What is hidden in this jar
Or in that lacquered Chinese box,
Where, hard and dry, curled segments
Of tangerine peel are stored
(To perfume ice cream or soup),
Faded but aromatic still.

Cool in the bright air?

You, there in the bright air, are you cool?

I would be, right up there
among the glass-sharp crystals
of ice and octane fuel, dust and minerals,
jet trails, comet tails and blue-white angels
of the upper air,

with earth and all its mess
far off below, its mucky pigments,
bones and hides and dung and sweat,
and self-preserving urgent flesh, invisible
to my frozen, naked eyes.

But no.
I'm still here, on the ground,
just blood-heat, thank you, midway,
contained within an ambient landscape
(grassland and some scattered trees...)
my dampened, stubby-fingered hands
filled with red ochre, and charcoal from the fire,

wondering

'What on earth shall I draw today?'

Just what have you been doing with yourself?

Sheltering by day from the sun I sit
In the cave, in the cool cave, watching the walls
For cracks and crevices to stretch and fit

The shapes of leaping animals that live outside,
Where nothing stands still for a moment
And the mouth of the sky is open wide.

The dust with which my mouth is full,
I spit on the wall, and shape with my thumb
A creature, half man half animal.

It's cool in the shadows in the cave.
The gods who live here are asleep.
I'll wake them with the din they crave.

I'll beat with a bone this tight stretched skin
Till it trembles. I'm not primitive; I know
It's the 21st century I'm in.

And I won't be here for long
To spit pigment on the crumbling wall,
Hoping the picture won't go wrong.

Most of us are waiting for a bus
If not an angel with a blinding light,
Until the screwers come to unscrew us.

The words with which my mouth is full,
I spit on the wall and paint in my head,
A creature half man half animal.
You there, in the bright air, are you cool?

All the lonely people, where do they all come from?

They're sewn from motley, so it seems, threadbare, thin
patches, tattered clothes from shabby, faded scraps
which sag, or don't meet at the seams, show leering gaps
embarrass us with sight of unaccustomed, light-starved skin.

Or else they're sown from serpent's teeth, pulled from the grin
of the reptile's skull, and scattered in the dust,
fleshless and clattering bones who only know they must
hurt, fight and kill, burn rankly from the emptiness within.

Mis-shapen, sad or savage then they seem,
and alien. But who's that kidding? I'll not deny the fact,
the face kept in the jar is also on my shelf.

Love (tra-la-la-la!) proposes that we're not alone, and may redeem,
we hope - if losing it won't kill us first - the act
of living. So tell me now, just what have you been doing with yourself?

Who is it who can tell me who I am?

Why is it that I need to ask the question? Why
Should anyone who cares, be there to know,
On stage or in the wings, which actors throw
Their costumes off, tired of pretence and try,

From shame, to bring themselves to say, " I'm true"?
For actors may stop acting, and not just pretend to fall.
More likely then, that this doolally king can call
No longer for the respect and recognition due

To one who knew so many tricks and scams,
(As you have to, who struggle in the driving seat),
Who now must see the truth, its heart and hands and feet,
And discover routes worn through endless rooms,

The tables, chairs and beds inside his head,
Their range and content and arrangement,
The sadness of the tools eroded worn and bent,
Discarded in corners where the dust has fed.

From the lake of mud that steams and bubbles in the sun,
Rises this old boy, with one foot in the future.
He gazes desperate and bewildered at the questioner
And in a mirror catches sight of a person unknown

Leering back at him with a dark and ancient guile:
Someone else, elsewhere, in a hurricane lost?
Or the shreds of another, carved out of mist,
Who nurses in his skull an angel or a crocodile?

For many selves crowd through the enfilade
Of rooms with doors that open wide for them and close behind,
Where they search through time for others of their kind,
And with a tra-la-la, find joy sometimes before they fade.



All the lonely people, where do they all come from?

Who do you think you are?

Who? is hard. What? less so:
A bundle, a ganglion of fears
and hopes; a reptile brain
binary switching, snip-snap, between
life and the other; an eye, an ear,
a mouth, a nose... who knows?

A memory, mimic, mirror, though
speckled, smeared, unclear,
it gives back little; then again
perhaps you think you've seen
a shape something like yours here,
or heard familiar echoes, you suppose...

There is, they say, nobody in the driving seat
at all; no me, no you, no discrete
self to be, for self itself's a sham,
forms, fluid and dissolving, are our complete
story. Yet, still, we hear ourselves repeat,

'Who is it who can tell me who I am?'

What do you fear? What do you hope for?

Hope and fear in one immense flash gone,
The switch tripped, the end lost in the beginning,
The question on the road, knocked down, unanswered.
Worst of all, I fear not to know what's going to happen
Next, or ever after in the story, when it won't matter
If Jack and Jill are drowned and love is lost for good,
And the dragon and St George fall down together in a heap,
And a straight white line and a single note declare
Every hope and speculation out of court.
Lips, I fear, closed tight to greet the question,
The blank page, the cold eye, the hollow fruit.
I fear the click as the clock springs tighten,
And hands, with nowhere else to go, go round and round,
Empty railways stations and the shudder of rock and roll.
I fear that no room may be left in the heart for fear.
Yet I can still hope in place of fear, on waking up, to hear
The cold song of blackbirds who know the sun will rise, and when.



Who do you think you are?

What are you waiting for?

I'm waiting for the fire to catch, and for the freeze;
for the embers to fade and for the thaw.

I'm waiting for the drifting log to turn,
to feel the crunch of teeth shearing
through flesh and bone, to flail, limbless
haemorrhaging, sinking, lost.

I'm waiting for lunch, for the show to start,
I'm waiting for it all to be over.
I'm waiting for all good things
to come to an end, I'm waiting for all things
to come to those who wait.

I'm waiting for the warm south wind to blow
the scent of lemon flowers over silver
fish-scaled seas, and incense smoke
of smouldering phoenix feathers.


You may as well ask
'What do you fear?'
or equally
'What do you long for'?

You can take your pick...

What have you heard?

What have I heard?
That people talk to keep the unknown out.
I've heard their voices,
Low and monotonous,
Nervous in the dark; heard a woman sing
Of love as cruel and old as tigers;
Heard the shingle shift beneath my feet
As each wave breaks;
Heard empty cans kicked down the street;
Heard the waters flowing past
The unblinking eye of the crocodile
Fast contained in silence.
Today, I heard the new year break
Out from the old with a cry;
Heard a door open and close.
What are you waiting for?

Where's my lunch?

Where's my lunch? Well now, I fear the cupboard's bare!

Time to fall back on scavenging for scraps,
through rubbish heaps and dustbins to survive
or find a meal, and even those yield slender pickings.
Once you'd have found immaculate fish-heads,
-tails and -bones like ichthyosaurs, for cartoon cats
to steal, potato peel and chips gone cold
in papers old as yesterday, and ash and cinders,
the residue of forests, fossilised or live.
Now it's mostly plastic shards and shreds,
old cat food tins and wrappers from fish-fingers.

I've heard we'll burn or bury ourselves yet.
What have you heard?

Whence comest thou?

Out of a cracker, me! A bouncing plastic toy
With a joke inside is my progenitor.
From the bottom of a bottle, it pops up -
A story as likely as any other.
Fish-like, I view the world through glass,
Could spend a lifetime on the answer,
While pulsing screens regurgitate
Equations, theories, prophecies.
Note, in the the margin of the script,
This man - the grandson of a trilobite,
Friend of every plant and animal that's fit to eat,
Of elephant herds and starling swarms, the shark,
The python and the goat -
Is puzzled by the noise he makes,
The ferment in his vat.
"Hey, you!" he shouts at the mirror
Which is shouting back at him:
"Hey, you! Where's my lunch?"

Who will police the policemen?

Grinning like a nutcracker, hell's bells
jangling on his cap, he knows
just how to deal with them
- takes more than a bungling cop
to keep him down!

Slapstick's the way to do it;
leaving mayhem and murder, infanticide,
stolen sausages and the crocodile, all
behind him, with the hangman's noose
still dangling up ahead, he goes
to and fro in the earth,
and up and down in it.
Pleased as Punch.

Whence comest thou?

Are you smiling?

It comes and goes, the smile:
Involuntary, a sign of grace
But forced, becomes a scowl,
Or the fixed grin of a crocodile,
The sneer on a camel's lips.

It's what's inside the head that counts
Yet hard to know, of all that's there, what
To show; and when to check a quiver
At the corner of the mouth, or the light
That builds up in the eyes,
Alive with pleasure or surprise.
But when the gaoler turns his back,
Breaks for lunch, or for a nap,
With no one guarding it,
A memory rises, like the sun in mist.

Yes, I guess I'm smiling now... and yet...
Qui custodiet ipsos custodes?

What do you know of crocodiles?

In sluggish, yeasty rivers, they glide like logs;
time laden. They sleep in mud, clogged
with a cruel sacredness. They lie and weep,
weep and lie, showing that grief's for fools,
and tears are trickery.

Dense and old, but moving fast to kill,
their only wisdom's stony memory. Still
cold and glassy eyes reproach
from long before we were us,
and other monsters were.

They swallow time, and, to keep them safe
their children too, so that their jaws
are cradles, and their mouths disgorge
the future. Their smile knows this.
And more, which you don't want to know.

Are you smiling?

What do you know that I don't know?

"I know how, on the inside of my long, thin wrists,
The oils of lemon and verbena smell.
Where my bangles measure the days of exile,
And the English words you told me how to use
Turn in my mind like spokes in a wheel."

Her story came to me from your memory,
Drawn out through time, and from the order
Of words and places, shuffled like playing cards.
She says: " I have such clever hands.
And memories, that nudge and natter,
Of shopping precincts and motorways,
And swamps that steam in every heart."

What do you know of crocodiles?
Of the wisdom of crocodiles?
Of their hooded eyes, live and greedy,
But still as stones, and their sullen patience?

Handbook for Explorers 46 to 50

46.


Being wrong has formed your plans of travel

As often as being right. The unforeseen

Explains, in part, how hard it was to tell

Useful signs from those of superstition.

You could blame limited intelligence

For errors of judgement and perception;

Admit that when, at last you arrived, chance

Played its part; that what you claimed as reason

Was wild surmise; that the choir, that captured

Your ear, was the wind buffeting the wire

That follows the road; that what you'd endured

Was for nothing, a worm wriggling in the fire;

That what you took to be the Holy Grail

Turned out to be just rags and scrap metal.

47.

The screens that show you, point by point, the track

Of you time and trouble across the globe,

Tell you where you were right and wrong, and stack

Up all your hopes into a flashing strobe.

Yet, if you believe the technology

That enters into every corner

Of your experience and geography,

You will have nothing left to call your own.

Better to look for faults there, too, which race

To reach an unexpected conclusion;

Ambiguities, which suggest one face

For another, challenge beliefs and strain

To restore to a healthy, fractious state

The near chaos you movements generate.



48.



To sum it up neatly, is to close it down:

The story of your travels doesn't end,

And you can't be certain where it began.



The daft voices of your forebears, behind

Your striding shadow, chatter in your brain,

Say: "Keep on this way; one day you'll learn to fly;

The Pleiades will be your destination."

You have the gift of curiosity,

And nothing you meet on the road is less

Than significant; if you look close enough,

Written on each stone you pass is "press"

Or "open";...


...you hear "come in" in each puff

Of wind; a door's half open, always set

To halve the gap, halve that, and halve, half that.

49.

There were things you ahd to dig for on sites

By the road. ...

... No reason to excavate,

Except an inborn sympathy for rites

Practised long before your time, private,

Magical, no longer comprehensible,

But prompted by urges bred in desert,

Forest, cave - the birthplaces of evil,

And of what was good, also, from the start,

Original virtue; this collect too,

Should be Adam's banner, Eve's song of joy -

Not to neglect the animal in you.


The falcon on your gauntlet, thoughts of prey,

Memories of scales and fur, bones piled up,

Strike you with a rhythm that just won't stop.




50.


To look back at all the faults and failures,

Which have led you to this curious place,

Might keep you occupied for years;

Or else be worth a quick laugh, without trace

Of regret or homily, and no text

Drawn from stale notes, no sums or stately sermon.

At best, you can admit you were perplexed,

Still are, by the meagre spread of reason

In the country you know best. Facts are scarce,

Too, in these parts and hard to verify;

The noise of opinion is continuous.

You think, now you're back, it was worth a try;

You say, " I've moved, not far from where I was,

But enough to see how the distance grows."