I Crave Your Mouth, Your Voice, Your Hair

Pablo Neruda:

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.

Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.

Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day

I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,

your hands the colour of a savage harvest,

hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,

I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,

the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,

I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,

hunting for you, for your hot heart,

like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.

Translated by Stephen Tapscott

The Way Through the Woods

Thinking about the renascence of nature exemplified by the way our garden path had become overgrown by weeds and accretions of rich black soil, I was reminded of this poem. Of course, this is set in springtime, but there is also that sense of combined hope and melancholy within it.

They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate.
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few)
You will hear the beat of a horse's feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods….
But there is no road through the woods.

Rudyard Kipling, 1906.

:o)

Arithmetic on the Frontier

Rudyard Kipling, 1886.

Not one of his better poems by any means, but it's apposite this week.

RIP Andrew.

A great and glorious thing it is

To learn, for seven years or so,
The Lord knows what of that and this,
Ere reckoned fit to face the foe--
The flying bullet down the Pass,
That whistles clear: "All flesh is grass."

Three hundred pounds per annum spent
On making brain and body meeter
For all the murderous intent
Comprised in "villainous saltpetre!"
And after--ask the Yusufzaies
What comes of all our 'ologies.

A scrimmage in a Border Station--
A canter down some dark defile--
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail--
The Crammer's boast, the Squadron's pride,
Shot like a rabbit in a ride!

No proposition Euclid wrote,
No formulae the text-books know,
Will turn the bullet from your coat,
Or ward the tulwar's downward blow
Strike hard who cares--shoot straight who can--
The odds are on the cheaper man.

One sword-knot stolen from the camp
Will pay for all the school expenses
Of any Kurrum Valley scamp
Who knows no word of moods and tenses,
But, being blessed with perfect sight,
Picks off our messmates left and right.

With home-bred hordes the hillsides teem,
The troop-ships bring us one by one,
At vast expense of time and steam,
To slay Afridis where they run.

The "captives of our bow and spear"
Are cheap--alas! as we are dear.

:-(

Latitude I

I spent the last weekend at the Latitude Festival near Southwold, and am still a little shaken by it. To be honest, I didn't have a great time. It's difficult to explain why, because I did like the music, and the poetry and the theatre and all the activities; yet I felt slightly on edge nearly all the time. Even when listening and watching a great band, there was a part of me that just didn't want to be there.

I suppose it was the ambience that hit me, I just found that the crowds were too much for me, for all that time. Perhaps only one day at the festival would have been fine. I liked bumping into people whom I knew, though. Perhaps I'm just a particular type of middle-aged middle-class person with a narrow social orbit. Although Latitude was in the far east of England, 350 km from home and seemed to be full of Londoners we met half a dozen friends from just around the corner from us in Bishopston, one of the men I cycle with in Bristol plus his girlfriend, and also a couple of my south Bristol friends / acquaintances. Then I met with two of my cousins, two of their children (whom I'd never met before), and my brother's ex-girlfriend. I think that I was only relaxed when I was talking with or in a group of people I knew. So socially the weekend was great, but I was still uncomfortable.

It's strange that I feel like this, now. When I was younger I was much more sociable and was completely unfazed by such crowds, but gradually it's become less and less of a pleasure. I must be turning into a grumpy old man.

I only went to Latitude because Moonface enjoys them so much. After my last experience at Glastonbury she has gone to many festivals either on her own or with friends, but we enjoy each other's company so I decided to try again. The other factor, I suppose, was the chance to meet up with my cousins from that side of the country; 250 miles is a long way away and I hadn't seen Kate for many years, and had never met Lydia & Darcy, her daughters.

So it looks as if Moonface will be going to the next few festivals without me, except for the odd day trip. She's got at least two more lined up for the rest of the summer - good for her.

*******************

On the plus side, I have decided what would make a good weekend for me: exploring a city, seeing some art & architecture, eating & drinking, then going to see a band in a pub or club afterwards. City breaks are generally fun, but I've never tied any music into the weekends: that might make them even more memorable and exhausting.

:-/

Against Coupling

by Fleur Adcock.

Against Coupling

I write in praise of the solitary act:
of not feeling a trespassing tongue
forced into one's mouth, one's breath
smothered, nipples crushed against the
rib-cage, and that metallic tingling
in the chin set off by a certain odd nerve:

unpleasure. Just to avoid those eyes would help-
such eyes as a young girl draws life from,
listening to the vegetal
rustle within her, as his gaze
stirs polypal fronds in the obscure
sea-bed of her body, and her own eyes blur.

There is much to be said for abandoning
this no longer novel exercise -
for not 'participating in
a total experience' - when
one feels like the lady in Leeds who
had seen The Sound Of Music eighty-six times;

or more, perhaps, like the school drama mistress
producing A Midsummer Night's Dream
for the seventh year running, with
yet another cast from 5B.
Pyramus and Thisbe are dead, but
the hole in the wall can still be troublesome.

I advise you, then, to embrace it without
encumbrance. No need to set the scene,
dress up (or undress), make speeches.
Five minutes of solitude are
enough- in the bath, or to fill
that gap between the Sunday papers and lunch.

Sweet

:o)

Automatic Dylan Thomas ?

The BBC Wales Automatic Dylan Thomas Poem Generator!

Automatic Dylan Thomas,

The dewgrazed moonless rabbitcatcher
Burning by the seaship,
With the rarely lightgrey salmon

Seesawing while the musical publican
On the bible-black birds loudly
Goes to hang against the blinded night.

or

"I dreamt finally
By the fishwives of the fishwife
Dreaming harshly on the webfoot cobblestreets
On thoughts of tides
Where lovers lie loudly
And all the rodgered farmhands sing and kiss."

:o)

On GMT

On GMT

The clocks changed last week,
An hour lost and time compressed
The days now short.

So, under cover of dark at five
Winter comes bold and battering to our doors.
No sun to scare her
The pale air chilled like old bones

And in the deep layers of unused drawers
We retrieve our last year's clothes,
Musty, scented with Spring's last traces.

Another season passed.
The cold creeps near.

:o(

Starwars Poetry

John Levett.

SDI

Ten miles above the tits at St. Tropez
A satellite’s remote, panoptic eye
Is tracking us and quietly waiting for
The gesture that could culminate in war;
You scratch your nose, I finish my ice-cream
And screw the silver paper in the sand.
Your milky skin is tanning like a dream.
That ultra-violet shadow is my hand.
The camera rolls on, its frozen lens
Picks out the agriculture of the Fens
Then swaps the filters for the infra-red
Cupolas of beleaguered Leningrad.

You shift and turn, your shoulder-blade could be
The smooth lid on some high-tech armoury
And fear stirs in the craters that begin
To open on my weakly bearded chin.
White clouds wind like a turban round the peaks
That top the Himalayas, and the sun.
Its compost of alchemical techniques,
Transmutes the globe and lets us focus on
Calcutta pullulating with its poor,
The psychopaths that bleed El Salvador,
The human tides of Tokyo and then
The terrifying silence of Phnom Penh.

The earth speeds up, its shrunken polar caps
Like parachutes tumescently collapse,
The tilting coasts of snow give way to ice
Then bergs of light on Asian belts of rice.
At eight you plan to have the hotel fix
Your hair and come to meet me in the town,
Its chill and its salinity that pricks
And tightens up a skin that’s nicely brown:
Those stars we hope to drink beneath tonight
Are pledged to North America, their light
An Ice Age brilliance turning even now
The obsolescent hardware of The Plough.

SDI = Satellite Defense Initiative, I think. Reagan's porkbarrel for the arms companies.

I found this poem quoted on the Singletrack site, of all places. They must be a cultured lot, these cyclists.

;0/

Seamus Heaney

I bought Seamus Heaney's "The Spirit Level" last month, knowing that he is a Nobelist, a multiple prize-winning poet, world-famous.

Yet I could not enjoy his poetry at all; his language and imagery are too convoluted, seem too fake. There's a deliberate complexity in his work, an inconsistency of subject which makes him hard to read. I'll try Beowulf when I see it, but you can keep the rest.

When I compare his verse to that of Kate Clancy, whose "Slattern" I also bought, I find that hers is more direct, more accessible, with a clarity of description and allusion that Heaney just does not show.

:o(

Towards the End

One of our cats look as if she is slowly dying, as she is hardly eating, is wasting away and spends time on a seat in the garden, doing nothing, not moving to protect herself from the drizzle, not watching the pigeons when they land upon the lawn in front of her. She is skinny and scabby, and looks twice her age.



Kate Clanchy (in her Slattern volume) says it best:

Towards the End.

A wrecked street-cat got up
and shadowed us, came home
and sat an hour on your lap
in the laundry cupboard.

You counted the lice
that massed on her shoulders,
dispassionate, calm
as a man from the census.

We made her live for a while,
had her sprayed and injected,
swaddled her stiff in a towel
as a mummy;

forced milky drugs
through her shut wax mouth.
You stroked her vellum throat
with one finger, put her shaking

and small in my arms as a bird.
She pushed out a paw
as if promising something.
We smiled when she purred.

And woke in the night
to modest hoarse snorings,
fine scratchings in corners,
her peppery smell; to an itch

on our hands that matched,
palm to palm, that reddened
and spread, opened, bled.
Ringworm, they said. Then worse,

quickly worse; a shriek like brakes
skidding, wet sick on the carpet,
queer lucid red, one bony worm
that uncoiled to a comma.

You shrugged when I screamed,
cleared it bent-shouldered,
laid her flat on the floor
as a joke-cat, steam-rollered,

but her breath kept coming,
kept lifting her skin worn loose
as a dust-rag. She was light,
she was just greasy bones in a bag.

I called to her, called baby, love,
reached for your hand. She made
a rusty choking sound, squeezed out
a last tiny shit like a stone, then

you turned away I think,
I know I cried.
There was not enough between us
to keep a cat alive.

And, prompted by an unpleasant email exchange with Kaa last week, this also reminds me of my visit to Nancy a a year ago, of some kittens which she insisted upon rescuing from a canal bank where they had been dumped to fend for themselves. Her goodness and emotion contrasted with my older, more cynical attitude of wanting to leave them. Who was right? I don't know what happened in the end, but two of the three were quickly farmed out to friends, and the other shat in the living room. My disapproval, no doubt, contributed to our subsequent spat and split.



Coincidentally, the kittens were all black, triple bad luck, and found close to a hamlet called Les Moses.

:-]

Plain Soul

Plain Soul

On that vast plain where the cold south wind plays,
Where in the long, dark nights the weather-cock grows hoarse,
My soul spreads wide its raven wings
More easily than in the warm springtide.


************

:)

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things.
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley.

This is one of the poems which I half-remember from school, and from which I can quote odd lines. I remember it whenever I see how insubstantial are the works of man, and how raw nature takes over whenever given the chance. I think that in this instance, the memory was prompted by seeing how detritus is accumulating and plants are growing, at the unused entrance to a garage opposite our bedroom window.

:o)