Who with a reserved voice
spoke for dead
millions. Who appointed herself.
Who prepared

with fear and the Muse
standing watch by turn.
To speak the acknowledgment.

And incredible to me
the poet given and by herself
such valid graces, such statue

bronze-lidded by the Neva
where prison doves coo.
The killed voices, flying up, out,
always.

Collected in Let's Pretend and Selected Poems

Sunset off Key West

I swore a hill city
with people standing all over it waving
glided beyond the spider web

but you said
it was the biggest cruise ship in the world
crawling the moving branches,
soundlessly along the channel.

I swore a great black insect
perched on the horizon, extending
the bowed laundry lines of its wings
to dry at the sun's boiler.

But you said
it was a shrimper plying in to Safe
Harbour after two days out
and offering up its big nets to dry.

Then an osprey snatched a
great sea bass out of the channel
hissing by land's end;
the bass dangled and wagged
in its claws, then a bald eagle
dove from the sun and fought the osprey
till the fat fish dropped down
into the closing waves and the fighters
rushed east screaming over the wood.

But you said
it was a plane joy-riding
over the round heads of the swimmers,
towing behind its long transparent tail
FORTY-FIVE DOLLARS ROUND TRIP FOR TWO
SEE PARADISE FROM THE AIR
Then it dropped white leaflets
onto the beach and soggily into the waves.
And like an oldfashioned sun
the red-haired face of the Ranger
wheeled out of the wood,
his fast walkie talkie wagging
in his freckled grip.

And we could not see:
not hill city nor insect,
bird nor fish, there was
such a light, such a dazzle.

But you swore it was the sun,
oldfashioned, with red
equilateral flames
spitting down behind the weed trees
and shining so loudly,
guttering with such orchestral,
voluminous might,
we could not hear another sight,
nor see another word we said.

Published in Magazine 6, NY

The Garden of Earthly Delights

1

I am the child of a bird
the dark robin's child
I am the child of the fruit

A hoopoe, yellow or blue
thumbs a berry
in the stab of a beak,
looks after me sternly

Clone of a jay
brings me a berry
as big as my head

We fruit in the beaks
and the branches of a garden
without end
that never had a gate,
never a seed scattered,
a hand on a spade

In the garden
what is wrong is put right,
our bodies fruit with bodies,
our bodies dive and swim

I carry a fish for my pride
for my second head

A bird is my head
is the eye that thinks and winks

Nothing is right so
nothing is wrong
in the labyrinthine fruits
of the garden of delight -

2
We crawl, throstlings
into summer's caves,
into the flesh of pomegranates,
strawberries, burst translucent
beads of the wild rose,
gift of our wicked nurses
owl, jay, rat, mouse –

I talk my nonsense
to the owl's surprise
She likes my jokes, bird
of thought, her eye
is a dark home

We crawl into our flesh
Silly, it doesn't quite work

I talk to our mouths,
to our backsides
All is one and one is all
Every mouth is wrong
and every mouth is right

3

A bird stoops to stab me
I crawl into my flesh
Flesh swallows me,
swallows you –

Each bird bends
its beady eyes to love

comical love, that clown,
buffoon of buttocks and breasts

I gawp at your head
You squint through the hole Delight is wholly a garden,
holy fruit, the holes in fruit,
ripe, rotting – ever the
fruit runs riot. and ripens
Anyone can squirm through
you, me and Sesame -

Open wide – what
word or womb or which wide?
A family joke,
a joke of leaves and birds

Faces of innocence
and alabaster arses
we're all here
happy as blue jays
green as woodpeckers

Sharp as the point of flight

All is one is one and one is all
every mouth is wrong
and every mouth is right –

4

Your foot sticks through
the rind, my head pops out
Nothing's a surprise,
what's wrong is right

Swap me a bird head
for two wagging feet

Join the parade, canter, crawl,
what's wrong is best of all

ride inside a husk, a haw, a hip,
dig where your hands like,
you'll find the talking food

and juice is full of running words
and words are flesh
are leaf, belief,
whichever way you fall

Sentences are branch and arm
Forest is word, flesh, beak, desire
Berries are my castle
 
Whatever's wrong is right
and winter's gone for good
and gone to bad
Winter cannot wax
as red as autumn berries

The mouths of birds,
mountainous birds, long-legged,
are crammed with all I need

just what I need,
to live in an orange

to gush in the fountain
that never dries, never dies

5

I dive into my life,
water falls around my black skin
glossy as an elderberry

in the bird harvest
in the zenith
sloshing in the pool
I'm sure I'll live forever

I'm the harvest of birds,
their round eyes spot us,
hanging, falling. We are
the bird who spots the
round, the lozenge, the hip, haw,
the blueberry rolling –

We creep, we jostle
to our fleshy dens
into our fleshpots
forever and amen

In then out
stick in your head
stick out your foot
one foot in, two heads out

Not a foot wrong
and all is right
What's wrong is best foot first,
pure delight

Splosh in, you can't go right
or wrong, you and I –
Gush of delight!

6

O fierce bird
stab me, guard me
so I never die

The spurt of the fountain –
Never dry up, never die
I'm sure I'll never grow old

I am the fool
of the comic garden

I'm the fool and the food,
the child in the belly of the fruit
My mother's the bird of desire

Nothing is right
and nothing is wrong
forever and ever and ever
in the garden of earthly delight

Published in Carolyn Trant's artist's book of the same name
to accompany her collagraphs: A response to Bosch
Victoria and Albert Museum.

Fairy-tale princess tale

In her hands there sat a toad.
'How can I possibly kiss such a moist,
warty, dry, slimy creature? Her hands
wrinkled beneath its advance,
a sucker on her pulse. 'Eech.'
She throws it back on the parapet
of her prince's pond. Tut, it is
the Prince. She clasps him in delight.
Then one day, soon after
the best TV wedding the people
had ever googled, and, it seems
without the slightest look behind,
no bother at all, prince flips
off under the water lilies. She illogic -
where should toad hide but in the
prinzpond - pleads for his silken kiss,
not this grief. Now, a shriek
and she's stepped out of the white lilies,
the royal stare of the future.
Now hop and spy the passion of
the real prince in his warty water-garden.
O toad in your hole of gold water,
one reverse flip, re-enthrone yourself.
'I'll hug you between my breasts,
I'll squat to give birth to little princes,
(mimicking the fat lilies on their pad),
your mother, dad, everyone will be delighted.
And will you forsake your hole
of golden water forever, my own
enormous reptile?' 'Not on the cards,"
lays out the selfish beast; or is it just
a jump too far from the Bowl?
That muddy bottom bears the parade
and the jangling of martial braid,
gold as the hair of the little Princess,
heavy layered by tears. 'But I can't live
out of the bowl of my rushes.
I'm off for my jolly old plunge,
I'll be around at breakfast'.
She throws her big bellied misery
down the palace stairs, looks up,
astonished, no harm done, he looks
down, Mum too, Dad too, the whole
toad clan squints down, their thick lids
drooped. "Why did she do that,
hysterical girl?" Warty times pass,
threshings round the lily stems,
beyond the long ago placid months
        that went to make each
         golden-lidded little one,
    long before our dropsy time when
           everything foretold is done.

Gawain and the Green Knight's wife

For David Harsent

She will hold you by the lip.
 Avoiding the sting,
you roar, booze, slap that table,
 Arthur and Guinevere, fatuous and bored,
rule the indoor nursery.
 The door bangs,
the Knight's head rolls and grins, and
 lo! back under its own arm -

You can't catch her doubled shadow,
 Morgan and the Knight's wife,
hanging and ulalating like two parrots
 in blue moons of neon,
outer exiles, jokers
 dropped from the pack of men,
the blue virgin
 who stares the wizard to stone,

whose voice rises
 in the most banal screech,
owlhead before taming.
 To the hilt of her squeak, her needle,
she scratches her kiss into you,
 in the season's shadow,
incisively into you.

*
That's how I felt, what I said later
 - who wouldn't. Though it was I
took sword, hairy plodding horse,
 went for it - my score? his game?
kept my communion, father eat son
 eat father, and out of this,
out of that cut pack, death's tussle,
 lost, won maybe.

Nobody could understand me
 inside the boys' nursery.
There I stood, entrant, greying,
 thin-faced, no obvious laughs,
dropped from the hand,
 that's how it is, who it was.

*
Now you've a head on your shoulders,
 owlhead -
a word in your ear at last?

*
Always muttering to myself alone,
 (though never of him
whose word I took like an axe
 - or a feather)

how she swings
                           how she swings

how her doubled
                             perpetual shadow

swings
              and stings
                                    and sings

Note: Inspired by the opera 'Gawain': Harrison Birtwhistle's music and David Harsent's libretto. Which turns like the original poem on the conspiring of Morgan Le Fay and her allies against Arthur. When Gawain protects himself from the return blow by using the Lady de Hautdesert's charm, the Knight (really the Lady's husband) lets him go, to shame his male cowardice. What then of the women?

Published in Modern Poetry in Translation

Darling

The unknown whispered a name
before she died.
I never knew her own,
only that counter name she whispered.
As the lamp post springs on golden
in the evening, without a hand,
so she died, fluttering a sound
in the plucking movement of her lips.

*
So I looked for her, didn't I,
in the fishmonger,
among the pink sprats and the white plaice,
among the skates and the veined mullets.
Not a pale hand to see, wrinkled and veined.

Next, in the chain book-stores,
in Poetry, Geography, Gender Studies,
New Age, Religion, History,
not a hand to see, wrinkled and turning a page.

Down the Dress Lust Street, among skirts
this long, that short, on the knee, off the knee,
where daughters were carefully horsing about
in little business suits with velvet lapels
but not a pale hand among the gloves, no.

In the telly audio video store, all to go,
a sale, and computers dancing on my toes
like mad little men, green men
far from the wood, far from the meadow,

to go but not a hand
pale and veined, old as the same water
that quivers into a million passing waves,
retreading itself on the one deep spot
on the globe's surface -
that's her, the unknown, she's the unknown.

*
Fate struck me.
I turned into a bollard,
I was trapped between wolves,
hyenas, furious cocks and frenzied hogs
fouling my face, hands, legs,
through snouts flopping way out
between their back legs.
Trumpeting characteristic snarls,
they ran forward on both my ribs.
In that circus she could have survived
only as an accident, the ghost
of some butchered instant,
the mash of our present time.
Still my bones,
though now the bones of a traffic bollard,
clattered: She's strong.

*
Then though I was sophisticated,
made of metal,
I still craved to embrace the ghost of translucence,
the dead woman beyond the one wave gleaming
and the one path that leads
through the wood to the one wave, gleaming.
See there the pink sprats and the plaice,
the veined mullet and the roan skate
and beyond this slab a storefront
of seals harbouring their breasts
on the meadows of rocks.

*
She hangs in the air
like a wisp of hay on a park railing.

*
She spoke to me confidentially
one night, and to my grief,
(annoyed by her false tone),
I couldn't respond; yet
how was it false,
it was hers and I couldn't respond.
I couldn't respond or relate.
May I stand here with my tongue cut out
forever, embraced by hogs and wolves,
'Come, darling,' she said.

*
It was the sound
she fluttered on her dying lips,
husband or wife, daughter or son,
word for a lover, kin, mate,
beloved and sweetly loved child
wistfully cried for. 'Come, darling!'

Darling, from your one country,
wave to me from your wave
that one second the golden moon clicks on
in the street evening without a hand,
pale, wrinkled, veined, passing.

Confidential. False.

She utters me.