More for Helen of Troy (3 page)

Invocation

Seeking answers has led me nowhere all morning,

The petering lanes as haphazard as the gusting of the wind,

Brambles snagging the mind,

Rare ideas no sooner articulated than

Dropped into the ditch mud.

But flocks of questions fly deftly through the trees,

Laughing, flicking forked tails in disdain.

They are simple enough, part curiosity,

Part exasperated prayer, lines of identification

Scrawled on their shining flanks in garish profusion.

When did the clouds about Olympus turn to concrete?

Why is only one heaven open these days?

What good are altars without sacrifice,

Hymns without libation?

If all the virgins are reserved for martyrs

Who will breed new fools to die for a cause?

Can I opt out, offer other invocations?

Why cannot mortals become stars, merely celebrities,

Now that galaxies have replaced constellations?

When did nymphs become nuns and satyrs apologetic,

Neglecting Apollo, deserting Aphrodite?

Did we drive them to it?

Did you shrug us off as our wars became too nasty to be good sport,

Deciding that the destitution of our ignorance was small price for Elysium?

Why did you all retire, leaving men to fight alone

Craving the fictional attention of a despotic bully

With three religions all his own,

Each riven by disputatious cults that

Poseidon would never have let compete?

What invocation will lure you back?

Later

All that was left

Was slate grey

In the morning

Tingeing eyes

With the underside of cloud.

Anger subsided with the thunder

The dinge of streets

Exhausted by hot air

Resentful, the sky

Retained a sullen right

To spoil the summer

Unleash another charge.

Nothing happened

Eyes turned green

Old calm

Brought a familiar

Unconsidered smile

A touch

And then the sun.

Fifth Sense

A glance of perfume

Took you to Milan

By blonde hair,

All those rings,

A henge of stones across taut fingers,

A vocal rasp,

Sambucco with the liquorice.

On the blanched olive of your skin

There is no shard of scent,

No memory

Of yesterday or remnant of the night.

Until you reach for a bottle,

Its clear juices

Squeezed from figs,

That fecund fruit,

And fix the moment

For me, the street, the bench,

The grace of your neck at noon.

My Independence Day

My flag has a dozen planets,

Rings intertwined in a confusion of collided moons;

Its predominant colour is black but rimmed with silver,

The severity offset by a golden lion

Who lounges

In the corner, bottom right,

Licking his paws, too tired to bother with a mauling.

All my days are feast days and so it hangs

At half-mast in memory, accusing tribute,

Of all the girls who refused

To revel with me, of all the boys who died

Defending other flags, less amiable,

More demanding. Flags with silly stripes,

Brash primary colours,

On separate poles stuck in desiccated earth,

Trumpets to rouse the hungover before slaughter,

Flags promising the fiction of independence,

Their cloth endowed with injunctions

Against burning, a disrespectful rip.

My flag intertwines the planets with consummate braid.

Gently, of course

Gently, of course, is ideal

But often, how often

The rope, the shoe, the hand, the mouth

Slips

That crucial distance just before the ground.

The expected earth is tarmac,

The bed of feathers a gorse bush, words of comfort

Arrows that find the most vulnerable

To pierce and lodge, barbs forbidding retraction.

Nothing is ever enough

Or timed to matter less,

Money, love nor favour,

Only the letting down is without fail.

The End of the Exhibition

The morning after the masque at court

Ordered by the first Charles Stewart

To blaze the winter far away for one long night,

A traveller from Scotland, recusant,

Was so shattered by the transformation, light to dirt,

He renounced the world, turned monast.

So this room, denied these colours, will seem bereft,

A shadow space, its form unkempt,

The conversation that these pictures brought

Long ceased, mid-sentence, cut short.

In their reassembly, new but separate,

Their lasting fight will be to startle all that's left.

Aspects of Sea

I

Beside

Fresh as sand castle

Friends met this morning as the moat was dug

And reinforced with pebble ramparts we ran free at last,

Never asked why we rampaged

From the tide-line to wave edge and back,

Our yelps and admonitions drowned in the rasp of shingle

The piled debris of a conflict the land always lost.

We could be as careless as the surf of breakages,

Breaking ages, voices raised

In shrill tones as random as thunder.

We children were too busy to stare patiently across the water

Waiting for an incident at the horizon,

A three shift in green from turquoise via olive to forest

A sudden shock of grey – too excited

To mind the swift drench of a shower from an unexpected quarter

A cold rush before the golden sun took charge once more.

There's so much, so much to be done before the tide wins;

Brothers to be buried in hummocks of sand

Ice cream to make drops so sisters cry

Crabs to chase until the years collect

And turn us into lovers too enthralled to turn back along the beach.

II

Under

There is no such thing as darkness.

Here only humans with their pathetic little eyes and fragile ears

Are sightless unless near the burning glare

The poisoned air untempered by healing water.

Sailing free of weight and wind the speed

Is always cruising whether dive or rise

Gulf stream warm or Antarctic chilled.

We glide round mountains

Navigate chasms without stars

Never need a cable or space spy to talk long distance.

We love to watch you sink

Laugh as you paddle home and thank you for giving us

So many ships to decorate with flowers in our garden toy collection.

III

On

On deck fear is loud

Never heard, force ten is louder,

Surround sound

Illegal power

Anarchic dissonance

No plan, no negotiation

With air propelled beyond fury

Water that sucks, spits,

Shoves like a rapist high on destruction

Loving the feel of the ship's disintegration

Strewing debris in exultation

Some to be worn on waves' crests

Some sent as trophies below

To be encrusted

Fondled on the seabed.

Prayer is drowned before the pray-er.

Shatter the amen, buckle ship's buttress,

Flood and reflood

Send its nave to howling heaven

Render vestments rags.

For the fun of it,

The sheer spume-shot laughter

Let them live

These jellied men and salt-soaked women

Let morning bring calm and silent recrimination

Deliverance without trust.

IV

Above

White horses dance in the unexpected sun to spread the gold,

Flicking their manes in the wind that set them free to run all night,

Only spotted by the lights of an indifferent trawler

But they and their gale are soon

Exhausted in this golden dawn,

The taming sun whispers them to deep stable,

Closing a door of brilliant glass, and conjures haze

That joins air and water, uneasy twins told to kiss

And make up in public view.

Leave them to their surliness slowly, without giving offence,

Though they'll never notice; rise from them, fly up

As though backing away from a king.

Sea king now, filling the vision even as distance increases,

Great islands reduced to pimples on the water's majesty

That erupt, outstay their welcome and submerge forgotten.

Breaking free of the sea king's gaze, rising through his myopia,

The divisions in his kingdom emerge, untidy,

Jagged, the pathology of earth.

Why call it Earth when so much is the Sea?

Why call us man when so many more

Are women and we are mostly water too?

Soon the sea can no longer hide his curves

But there his humility ends

For, as the feet become thousands and the miles mimic them,

Though the sky gathers its clouds to shroud him,

The majesty, the royal blue of his coat,

Enthrals the planets in the name of peace.

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following publications where some of these poems were first published: ‘An Incident of War' first appeared in
The Liberal
, as did ‘A Vote for Absence'. ‘Translated Daughter' and ‘A Prayer for a New Goddaughter' were published by
Poetry Wales
. ‘Above' (IV of Aspects of Sea) was in
Orbis
.

‘Presteigne Festival/Gwaithla 25 Years On' was commissioned for the 2007 Presteigne Festival. The first of the Radnor Songs, ‘The Buzzard', was commissioned for the 2004 Presteigne Festival, set by Cecilia McDowall and recorded as part of
A Garland for Presteigne
by soprano Gillian Keith and pianist Simon Lepper on the Metronome label. The full cycle was set by Cecilia McDowall and performed by Rachel Nichols and Paul Plummer for the 2005 festival. The orchestral version, with Orchestra Nova conducted by George Vass, was given its first London performance in St. John's Smith Square on 9 October 2011 and is available on Dutton Epoch records and from Oxford University Press. Cecilia also asked for ‘Aspects of Sea' to be written as text for a proposed sea symphony.

‘The New Senedd, Cardiff ' was commissioned for it's opening by Academi Cymreig/The Welsh Academy. ‘My Independence Day‘ was written for the 2005 Bay Lit Festival, Cardiff. ‘Citrus' was published in English and Serbian as part of the 11 9/Web Streaming Poetry anthology by Auropolis, Belgrade. ‘Deceptive Beauty' (IV of ‘More for Helen of Troy') was ordered by the designer Ewgeniya Lyras who illustrates it in the cover photograph.