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Saturday 8 January 2011

Clarity


Obora Hvezda
When on the tram I can remember nothing
And the soil enlarged.
Crawling to a mean distemper
Trying to be heard.
Roads on runners
tyres on craters
feet on feet
and angry corners
Standing at the slamming upspring
Dust and muck and charge.

Trying to recall earth by song
Hearing just a slipping pier.
How do we know with nothing growing?
How do we hear with concrete showing?
In which ash-ache
does bliss benevolent
scarlet banner
bones
come near?

I score along the highway
To keep myself alive.
Markets high recall to me
Nothing I have known.
They are not skin or wood or wild
They are not friend or bone.

I slink into the forest
I scrabble quick, woodwise
Is there a wisdom in footknots?
Nothing we've not yet tried.
So laugh at me among up-bones
In sky all wired and wide.

My hands raw into snow hoops
for months they recognize
October to December
slash searing blue and night wide.
in whispers
fear lessens
oak trees outface lies.

It could be blessing or ending.
It could be a prayer or a blizzard
Yet I remember the footnotes
Your berries the colour of blood.
and I remember the endnotes
irreproachable thunder of lace
on the faces
of rivers
and stones.
That recall the places
I transgressed to know.
ice-dilated sight.
the exorbitant light.
Forests and monsters
Are awake at night.
The night they're awake in
Is one that I knew
a faultless white thunder
of rain sloping stars
a looming
an easing
coalescing
of prayers
and wolves with blue faces
who stare
and repair.

(Do you recall, when the moon comes,
We'll be told as we go on our way?
And we'll all have a way to be told on?
And we'll all know a rhyme at the end of the day?)

Snow creeks
Madness lessens
slopes off to its hearth
surrounded by those
that attended its birth
the valleys of crystal
the caverns of trees
the keening white branches
the swamp squandered leaves.
the berries all roistered
the eagle up high
the cloak of the piglet
the glistening sky.

I can shut my eyes in the forest
of lies
for the lies and the truth
are both under the roof
of the blue and black sky
and the stunning of ice.
and I wander through holes
in dim-darkening ground
and the woodsmen around me
do not make a sound
and beneath my eyelids
I can see the snow
and the berries that stain
and the holly that grows
and the urgency outside
is that which I meet
with the silence of blackness
I feel with my feet.

(Do you recall, when the moon comes,
We'll gather and toast at the port?
And we'll know the port that we stand on?
And we'll know the colour of pearls and of thought?)

I can shut my eyes in the forest
and witness the whitening trees
the branches that kindle the torrent
the opening and closing of leaves.

Eyes closed see the same as eyes open.
Black wooden pillars and tender white lakes.
Webbing of roots and a wide solar sky
A high star-stone building, white red and awake.

Little Red Forest Girl
Walking to Granny's
Walks away from the path.
The snow suspended,
The trees reply
The wolf responds
The black birds cry.
Is it your blood that I see on the snow?
Did you start the palace which promised to grow?
Is it your name that the rowan recalls?
Is it your bone house where snow softly falls?

Little Red Forest Girl
Outbrave the hunter
Cut nothing down
But what figures your crown.

I walk in the forest
and walk to be free
Oh red forest girl
Recall me to me.
No listless absenting
No smell of escape
You walk in the forest
In the forest you wait.

The dawn is denatured
Outside in the dust
But here in the woodland
I know that it must
- Come, when the wind rises
and when the sun speaks.
When berries are broken
their bodies decree
the lustrous of waking
the crashing of rivers
in woods I believe
that our thoughts are repeated
by swollen encounters
and glistening snow.
In trees I remember
The places I go.

Writing for an audience

Who do you write for?
Write for the press.
Write for the Pope in his very smart dress
Write for the mice that sit under the boards
Write for the masses and write for the hoards.

Who do you write for?
Write for the queen.
Write for the man with the glass tambourine.
Write for engagements and write on bequests
Write for the girl in the lavender dress.

Write for your teachers
and write for the noise
that sits on the tube train with smart equipoise
Write for the tramp with the flower in her hat
who sits on the ground with her white ginger rat.

Write for your breakfast
and write for your life
and apple bum bowers
and being too nice.
Write for surprises
and write to be sure
and the blue hatted man
who slips in through the door.

Write for your brother
and write for your Dad
and the neighbour with false teeth
and you when you're mad.

Write to remember
write to forget
write to tell lies
and to get out of debt.

Write for the oak trees
because they stand sturdy
and write for the squirrels
all nutty and wordy.

Write for the fairies
quite nonpareiled
and the knots in the wind
holly veiled.

Write for that crack
in the half torn down wall
write to earn cash for the dolldrums toll.
Write for your fans
and write for your stories
and write for your losses
and write for your glories
But most of all all when you take up your pen
write to remember you're real again.