Mallarme

To a Woman Dreaming

O woman in the act of dreaming,
with your sweet misnomers, understand
how I can plunge into roadless bliss.
Keep my wing safe in your hand.

The freshness of evening light
fans you with the passing of each beat,
with a force so delicate
it pushes the horizon back,

quivering vertiginous. See
how space is like a vast embrace
which, sick of being born for no-one,
can’t pour itself out or calm down.

Couldn’t you feel the paradise
begin like a concealed laugh,
and flow from the corner of your mouth
to the depth of your one white throat!

Aegis of red sand beaches,
stuck in golden evenings – this is it!
This whiteness of closed flight you place
against the fire of a bracelet.

From the French of Stephane Mallarme

From-here-to-there Portal

From-here-to-there Portal

Not without its own history, this Park
where no one just now goes walking;
once the travellers had their site
underneath its railway arch,

their caravans and washing lines
squeezed into the little space.
No place to run or play, Summer
or Winter when the windows steamed up:

the dogs barked; the fences got trampled;
the Council moved them on - only
July sun bore down on bare gravel.
Beneath the arches, events to be started:

a Mind Body fair was staged -
organic food stalls, herbal remedies
and rain sticks with their tinkling shells.
With idle curiosity I wandered there

amongst the mentors and magicians,
each with a secret to impart:
the ginseng-free tonic, the Healing Ray.
I was a good listener then, as now.

There's grass now, shrubs and daffodils,
and a path swept quite recently,
a straight line to the old brick arch
that's built as sternly as a portal.

A new wrought iron gate half open,
inviting someone to venture in,
with March or April's wanderlust,
in cool sunlight or tingling rain:

There's no one there to meet or talk to,
no one there to impose
their presence on my reverie.
The lingering moment draws me on,

and by the path that's still vacant,
why is it that the Spring flowers seem
like bits of the world refocusing
when the brain wakes from an anaesthetic?

Peppermint Aero Chutney

Peppermint Aero Chutney

It was a fortunate misreading
the kind that over-rides the first
dull meaning in a magazine:

four tigers in a frame.
I see them painted by Rousseau.
One gate at least hangs open:

There's a barrier, ten foot tall,
of dull wood painted green,
where the flowers and pathways were.

The overwriting hand is poised.
I think of William Blake,
his birthplace up the concrete steps.

There's an old VW convertible
that often parks round there,
yellow as a plastic bee.

No shop front that I pass
and pass again is ever the same:
blue as surreal ceramic.

Why does latte come out black?
With spikes up close, they look
bigger than church steeples.

A lemon nestles among the apples.
Being very sorry, or just being...
Acting up or just acting...

Soho Side

Soho Side

Walking the Soho side of Soho Square
I stop and stare: “Who locked the gate on us
in broad January day light?” I enquire
silently, where two girls chat and share. I suss
that they don’t care, don’t notice me; the gate
was never open for these sleek women,
whose English sounds quite confident and bright.
Staring on past them through the gate, it’s plain
to me: Summer has been padlocked away
by the cool giant who wants to ban our pleasure
of lying on worn grass in idle array
until there isn’t any grass – a measure
of potential, in one part of the melee,
for talking up a rapid urban culture.

Rangoon

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=69863052

Rangoon

The Dignity: 11.0, Sunday night,
Rangoon in full tilt, speakers
on high stands. The amp is tube.

They play in front of the pub’s
oil painting, a woman’s face
in red, the height of a man.

A light is trained towards them,
and the drinkers are tuning in:
some begin to dance. There’s

nothing out there, some shops,
a road that needs maintaining,
electric rails the trains follow

out in the open this far North –
only this Rocking rhythm and words
that link us to the rights and wrongs
of men and women, Burmese monks
with cotton sails, riding against tanks.
Another pint: stand further back.

Curved planes continue through the amp and mike
across the road and into space.
Watch them playing: their eyes lock -

the music follows distant streets,
licks into shadows like a liquorice tongue,
goes blind down midnights steps.

The bassist has a 6.0 start;
A leaf curls round; a waist sways.
In the narrow space between the bar

and the stage, couples are making
each moment count. The bar’s
a rose open for last orders. Soon

last tubes will trundle back, and
in silence engulfed by black light
Rangoon’ll dissolve like sherbet dust.

+++

PoetryPivotal 3

Midnight Steps

Something is moving through a tunnel
a tunnel of silence and of brick,
and as it moves further and further away
the sense of the sound does not diminish.

It is born of a mechanism with many parts,
moves on the edge of what can't be heard;
perhaps it's below me or a few streets South
where the railway goes under the road.

The night is not entirely dark or silent:
the sudden creak of a footstep
in an upstairs flat. Three a.m: a cat sits
and looks out, as if seeing the shape

of something that's there, I can't see.
There's a bridge near Jeffreys Street,
where the nuclear waste in steel wagons
rattles on by, at least three a week

and a side alley leading West, down
seventy feet underneath the line. I sleep
with three storeys above me and three beneath;
the walls are thick, and the River, almost black,

flows under us through hidden arches
from Parliament Hill to Anglers Lane,
a sealed light that can't be seen
clusters on the surface, unexplained.

Some more of Eugene Atget's famous images