For Miriam
Death – we shall never be that victory.
Only in No-Man’s-Landlord.
And having despaired there, together, forever…
But begin here:
Perched on the roof’s edge, at night
Stars carved in black ink
Make my obsessions intelligible.
With the thoughts that follow between the terracotta
And the dessert forks
I find myself to be a bad-tempered camel
In the dry sickness of the sands.
But where I have lived –
Cathedrals are the old glory, rising up
Loyal as the thistle on the hillside
And the slate-roofed chapels
Spinning their aphorisms into the wind.
Stumble often, stammer, stare.
So I forced a parting,
(Not having learned in our green reverie to forget.
Here the seagull blinks the answers
.-.. — …- . / -.– — ..-.)
And in the interior – so I have heard –
Abyssinia weeps in the gutters of foothills
Of this red zone of blood 1936.
Tragedies are the inevitable abattoirs.
Addis Ababa is the midnight of the watch.
I have heard them shout in the alley ways
Where children weep dry tears of jagged glass.
I said to my shadow (who is my conscience):
The insect smiles in the seam, the cockroach
Reserves to itself a rotting carcass.
It is something to be at last speaking
Knowing all the clefts in which the tongue may fork,
The north-west has become real, not as a bicycle.
Set this in motion too:
Though in this No-Man’s-Landscape vision
I have pursued rhyme, importance, hard irony –
All In the same geography of meaning.
The popular – face-to-face – is
The sole captive of my verse.
The inalienable right to grieve
In the twenty-seventh year of my life.
And in conflict:
There is a madness when the grenade
Explodes like a broken handshake. I
Inhabit the basement and the targeted
Divebomb chaos of screeching realism.
Seize the co-ordinates from their gunsights
Those who have stumbled like sheep to this shambles.
Puff its full steam upon the angry allegation.
I have split the particle. Beyond is anything
That is real: I warn, I warn –
Holding my few poor lines up to the brightness.
They run long or short, like a marriage.
These throats are bared now and
I claim contradiction at last to be
Cut at my own peril.
Oracles, oases, and the next mirage of peace
Are resigned to the depth of irrelevance.
But in truth, my love, the fading light grows wise