Hard-knock blues

in the smokeless liquor haze

his balalaika strings

torment the air

with pain

his fingers wander

the memory tracks

the chord-filled lines

where he is lonely

as the poet

Osip Mandelstam

the ice jug on the bar

looks cold as a turnkey’s heart

now a picolo player trifles

with his bluesy rhythm

a woman whips up the will

to dance holy carnal steps

a lovely gift

to hungry hearts

I see the man is worn-out

but he is not ready yet

to hand his Adam’s dust

back to the clay

now the woman shakes her soul

to his convulsing strings,

opens her generous heart

smoothes her waist and hips

to the rhythm and grace-notes

of his finger tips

she knows he seeks comfort

that in heartbeats of time

he cries from his soul

the pulse of lost love

it shows in the veins

of his taut-stringed neck

grabbing for a branch

in the deep dark well

he knows we all drown

but he licks sweet honey

from the leaves of his tune

on his way down

the hard-knock blues lament

Maya Plisetskaya

Through a brass lamp lit window on a tv screen

I see Maya Plisetskaya, at 50 years, muscles lean,

animate the stage, her arms and legs insist

while woodwinds and brass resist

Easing the tension. And she gives us the chance

To see the dancer become the dance;

I am rapt before her blazing soul in motion;

She becomes the bolero, like an insistent ocean,

like the petals of roses on the dunes in a breeze,

like the waving fruit of branches on swaying trees;

She makes me light like butterflies in a sunny grove

or the airy laughter of brave surfers in a cove.

I want her to dance till the barley waves at the sky

till the swallows swoop with sunny joy,

till the lions and tigers all grow tame,

till she moves so fast she forgets her name.

Like a spirit, the wind dances the dust on the street;

But I have never see a spirit with her dancing feet.

Like a white sail-boat cutting the ebb-and-flow,

Like the foam on the silver edge of the lake below,

Like the beat of the tide on the arc of the shore,

Like the rhythm of my heart asking for more.

Through a glass darkly I see this strong woman

who faced down Stalin for the sake of the human. 

wedge tomb

Sun shafts from the south redden the stony solitude;

The strong septal stone and standing double walls warm;

The wide stone roof is the flat kathedra of time;

The cairn stones now compose the wind-sung enclosure.

To its grass-blade tips, this green field is soul unseen.

The tomb skirts the radiant impenetrable,

A higher meaning permeating the cosmos,

Beyond nature’s fundamental physical laws;

It does not require a god’s certified existence

For a look of wonder to earth epiphany.

Intrinsic value has no periodic chart;

It throbs, like love, in our impulsive eagerness

To be enchanted by stones, stars, space and meaning;

The sublime soaks stony lanes and the Milky Way,

Inescapable awe imbues our star-waste being.

We take the wonder to be objective and real;

In the mud-script of an ancient field read aright,

We return to the mud what we take from the mud;

We recite the poetics of stone to affirm our faith in value,

Renew a seasonal covenant with the gods of meaning.

Here souls sense something deeply moving, yes, numinous,

Belonging to a world that inspires devotion;

It matters utterly that human life goes well,

No matter the mystery that defies account

or the inexhaustible depth of a wedge tomb.

Sunset is a solemn moment of a time past, a time new;

It is not a sure sign of a singular creed;

It is when pilgrims listen to the roadside tales of others;

Voices find solid tone and connection where stone walls whisper;

Where horned sheep straggle shared stories make vulgar gospel.

Women march

The French polisher van has a message:

‘Wood has life; we give it soul’;

Jesus on the bumper of a blue Allegra

Turns right through a no-right-turn sign;

God moves in mysterious ways!

Televisions flicker Trump's inauguration;

On the frozen streets women 

protest patriarchy, chant 'equality now'.

A sign in an apartment window warns:

‘Keep your rosaries off our ovaries.’

Poem fest

 Like a priest monk he chants his poem in formal tones,

while flicking tongues of flame lick the sooty fire-bricks.

The dappled women sit closer to the turf fire

bathing in its golden arrowy tabernacle rays.

He checks to see they shine in the palm of his hands.

He confesses to them in a proud penitential voice

that he is in the filmic poem visually.

He says the spoken words sound wayward in his larynx,

that his mind finds its feet only on the floating page.

They seem to understand if their faces tell.

He announces that they’ve been to a kind of karaoke,

and salutes them for colluding in the pretence

that he is me-the-poet and worth listening to.

His finish is a second of self-extinction.

To one couple his thank you is in vain;

They have stepped in for shelter from the rain.

Peter Wojnarowicz

Skinless on the wet sidewalks of Times Square,

He hustled to survive, an abused kid.

On perilous Christopher Street pier,

Its urine-smelling shadows,

Where men’s hungry lips traced lines
down men’s lonely bellies,
He could breathe the freedom of birds.

On the warehouse loading dock on the Hudson,
He drank a coffee from the Silver Dollar.

And read Funeral Rites under the swamp-yellow glow,

Headlights moved across a wall;

The ocean tested the rotting pier posts;

Tin doors complained out loud like seagulls;

His Marcel Duchamp was flaking off the wall;

A rock had holed Rimbaud’s face on a window;

The place was dying like secret hobo railyard lore.

The reel behind his stoned eyeballs saw

A junkie saviour serene above criminal Saint Genet.

He could teach Jesus to be serious
About the least of his brothers.

She thinks of Aleppo

She watches the sea twinkling blue and green

and the boats brighten in the small harbour

as if they have heard rumours of sun and wind.

The mastheads quicken and wave the wind in

to the sound of ropes against metal and wood.

She asks me, Do vegans’ bodies rot more quickly?

She tilts her head back to the buttermilk sky,

Gulps a scalded tang of salt and surf and sun.

An agile yachtsman steers his boat out to sea

With the easy familiarity of an old postman

Gripping the handlebars of his bicycle.

She says, What counts is the living, the eating,

the drinking, the sleeping, the laughing, the loving

that every soul needs. A fisherman unloads

a sheen of striated fish from his blue-and-white boat.

Sapped wills flap blue and black light in the box.

On the shore a hulk is splayed open like a gutted fish.

She says, When I saw them crawling in the square

they looked like lizards dipped in dust but it was the children,

their skin burned off and their bodies broken.

The sweat shines in drops on her forehead and lips,

trickles with her tears in streams down her cheeks.

She watches the white wake of the boat cleaving the water.

She says, We die into the blackness of fainting but the mind

and memory can live on in writing. She thinks of Aleppo.