CONTENTS

Swanning with the Bishop | Radio vortex | On the Beach at Aberystwyth |

 



Swanning with the Bishop

Sordid in slurred light
the bins and kitchen outlet grilles
down a curving side-street in Soho.
The cravings reverberate 
off a frame of odours,
pinpoint the dealer,
red crow eye 
blinking but never skidding 
over
a hundred discs in three minutes-
he knows who's going to buy it,
pricing up the lost bands 
to weary craving gourmets.
£100 on the nail 
for 'Meet a New God', 45, 1976, Australian. 
Yes! to surf heavy metal, Yes! to high-tone political modernism, yes! 

Skidding over the schemes
we gate-keep for the paper paradise:
fishing talent
for the temporary ego-tank.
I bring a lilt
to the Bishop's attention. 
His skin is thin, 
sensitive 
to light,
aubergine-coloured with rage.
He sneers.
Three feet of foul sheets
to flatter the failing
of the wayworn pining amateurs.

Carrying out the learning and forgetting
we fall through a martial artist monk,
an intriguing housemaid, Bohemund King of Antioch,
an impersonal but self-entrained structure,
Harlequin stealing sausages, a designer of tanks,
the mannequin of Paul Poiret dressed as a scarlet Tatar,
the grey thirsty eye of the security camera;
dissolving the members of memory
to dive in the 
oscillating
	flashing
		urban sluices.
Let one setting harden 
let another pale and blow away.
Is it over soon? did you bring any biscuits?
Don't you have anything faster?

We are sharp and scattered and glassy
in the 1950s café
then we drink a lot
and admit our failings are each other.
Cognoscente quaffing ignorance,
the Bishop is malcontent. Empty pages,
a case of malefic possession
NOT IN THIS FORM
by the spirit of a deceased dormouse
CONCEPTUAL-PASTORAL.
But Bishop, we have
to deal the fixes to the transfixed
pour the doses of the Holy Ghost,
soothe and sharpen the craving. Roll it out.

What if one of these
got inside the national projection room,
froze the curve of distortion, to
start and stop and start the shared illusions,
the suppressed breaching beneath our feet?

Fetch me some silence, bag up 
these svelte folios of academic modernism
waving the world away, such
wincing signifying Marxist milksops
questioning everything they don't own
sick and faint with fineness
devouring prestige with greed and discretion.

But what if the next script 
came from some outlaw prince
-conceptual, psychedelic, deconditioned-
come back from some Western isle
for a new game of life 
-a new childhood, played with our selves as pieces?

This one's an offer of parts as extras
in some Rimbaud's biofilm,
the third this week 
reading the words on his leather jacket
COW. We are to line his streets and bay,
Escapee! swallower of flies! short-order stupor!
Put a wiggle in your walk!

Maybe we'll find oh, some melancholic kitsch
we can all get drunk to?
Joan, don't do it!

Another Nature Book bound in bat leather,
decelerated maunderings from the master of the monochrome nuance,
ten thousand lines each on nine rural ritual walks on one leg
hand-crafted in a hare-brained hush:
it goes down at each end and sinks in the middle.

The Bishop stops reading Small Arms Monthly
sets fire to my drink.
But Bishop, if it was
a Constructivist whose symbolic machines
set social space on edge
like tiles?

I order nettle soup with rude peasant bread,
he shouts for scorched offal, runs it down:
step one, we void and impale
the stuffed, scented cadaver of Gripweed
on the boundary as our banner. Two,
my new series
of Ming Dynasty opera texts, wholesale
wrought bronze hats and reclining
duets on duck-embroidered pillows.

Our red-eyed shepherd
rips another typescript up, recalls:
He who shares stupid ideas
knows one actual, shocking, fleeting moment
of being an idiot.

This opulent opacity-Take off those silver spurs
and let's pass some time-
so forthright and full of textiles,
the Bishop pale as snow
fumbling the classic typescript
-what's her name? Agalma?-
we fret over with hardened picks,
it rings, each flake-
fastidious, frothy, spirally symmetrical.

Consequently
the café college advances to three
with the new seraph, distant and feral in a dress,
serene and terrifying and Bacchic
fetching the drinks. She even spoke to me
and she said
Benign old parsnips! casseroled
with fish caught in drains, agog
at the chic of the suburban bars,
take an edge. Get a pledge. Burn it all. 




  

Radio vortex

Glass cubes and aluminium cylinders
set out a city of primary forms 
composite, allowing movement in three planes

Greek violence in Egyptian space
isometric hoplite, flattening field
in frieze perspective, to arrest recession

crab, mailed, on intermittent spiral
helical, shimmering bolts fire sapphire dust
spinning smoke grains mark thin pistons

clock scan of rotary beams
solar swathes from perforated drum
adorned with beasts and jingling wheels 

soaked by impingent radiant colour, vortex
is spiral channel for skitter of silver crab
the mark of the new moon on fused dorsal plane

crab demersing from receding wave
tawny, speckled, flat; colour keyed to sand
colour vision through refringent wash

crab vapour from the surface of a star
flashed outwards with pulsed ichnographic spiral
- spectre caught on empty paper leaf

held up on this aluminium tower
on a jet of choliambics 
erect, in civic oratory's

slipstream, opaque screen
like chalk ground spread on canvas
for recoilless bolts of bodiless colour
hard red, hard green, silver and black, 
thundering and screeching at each other. 


(based on descriptions of Terence Gray's productions at the Festival Theatre,
 Cambridge, and the poems of Joseph MacLeod, who acted in some of them)


On the Beach at Aberystwyth


After twirling
the long green course of the Ystwyth
I woke up facing the whole curved sweep of the beach
and picked up
a lump of what is called babalwbi,
fossilised coral, a lump of air with tunnels parting it
thrown up from the sea bulging with the likes of us,
the boats full of dark-haired westerners, and
words you soften at the start and slenderize at the end.

space built up of passages that interconnect
but never go far, could we use that
for a littoral chain-stitch
not rich in roads and towns
where what stops in Skye
might start in Marrakesh? the maths
taken to max by coral washed-over by
nutrients could tell of
trips from Brittany to Cumbria
with cattle and verbs and blue beads
endless surface and no outside?

The grumbling old men
hadn't written the books I wanted, leaving me
Loose on a beach curving away out of sight
I picked up shells and stones.
Trying to adjust my brain to the coordinate geometry, 
Something I can hold in my mouth like ystwyth,
aberbabalwbi.

Not the ocean
Checkless moving around one fluid northwest axis
But the concept of the ocean
The very wash of our geosophy
emergent glass with 360 panes and no centre.
Making headway through the Celtic archipelago
A boundless littoral 
Unrolled like linen
where you are never any further away.
The mirror washing in shears twin planes (texts, codes) of social laws
Of phoneme arrays
Spanish town names matched to Irish ones
Shimmering plane of beached wave drafting curves.

A cassocked figure leans from the pier
And shouts down
Distinctly, but in Welsh,
Where are you from?
What is social structure?
How is experience organised?
What are the rules which permit you to identify?
Beth ydy yr ystrythur cymdeithasol?
In the middle of this sea province
How we think of it is our choice
As a set of excellences recorded in strict verse
A line of hops between soft coves for coastal vessels
The movement of formal groups conducted by sound
Or the running of beef and hides down to arid Spain
A set of symbolic objects tied to real ones 
for the purpose of exchange;
the way we go is what we find
a non-scalar map of references (lugged to either side) (the keenest ear this side of my head) 
pointing out from either side of my head 
where my senses lie collecting:
suspend now the eastern investment and the French routes,
hang on to Tartessus
the monopole of the whole pastoral recession:
bales stamped with words in Punic business hand:
at St Malo
heathland grains, buckwheat made up into pancakes
the prevalence of cats by the fishermen's dock:
out on the Western Approaches
waiting for the clouds to part
and show the conduct of the stars:
standing off from a Cornish promontory
the Cyclopean villages visible inland
stone jambs where timber is an import
the sheltered gully, green, down
to a porth with the fishing smacks drawn up:
at the mouth of the Ystwyth
wading through the surf shouting about a hot drink
falling along the predrawn lines of least distance.
Or, how was Spain before the Spaniards
Whether Pokorny was right about those Berber cattle breeds
Or come to that the Iberian verb system
An eager sort of Bronze Age dog
Or a kind of sheep used to travelling by boat

Silurian drifts of air wafer like the surf
turning lateral sibilants into chain alliteration
how much of the Atlantic
in each pore of coral? how much
of the oceanic culture strain
secured in me?
[A scale pattern]  
A living pattern dissolving at a glance
Jitter to hold the thing jittering before me
The eye failing for want of cleats
On a skittering scaled surface
Lost a dust of clattering sounds
In the topos of borderless egoless states
Seized in a net and unseized.
not clarified as posts, made of individuals, personalities
Social that same old riddle
Always starts in the middle structure
Where language flows through foramina
And runs in gently expanding circles
Suspended from itself
Amounting to a family

But what I think is where I live
by the estuary calmly funnelling craft
from the outcomes of the Parisian Basin
And its weatherproof hangars of goods and ideas
For an hour each side of high tide

Out here, populations don't aggregate
They carry poems in their head
Packed in rules of assonance
A kind of enforced surplus of symmetry-
(This crossed the water sometime) - 
Memorising the faces of hundreds of sheep
Consulting the neighbours and people like that
Linguistic waves, slowing towards the western edge.
A ripple deflecting on with holes.
(what's this? ethnicity as mispronunciations?
the border as
an awkward lump in the sound cone?)
Poetry in the absence of cities
Fused with kindreds
As the superindividual might.

From facts into grammar
A board
Within which space has callable rules
Of transit & contingency & address
The shingle addresses the whole question of proximity
The ocean horizon sketches
A momentary domain of knowledge
Turning over and over
Too small-cut to possess memory
the smoothness of surface records contact time

the theme of forgetting. And forgiving.
I pick up stones 
from the storehouse of the beach
and as a way of losing the knowledge Hillel urges us to lose
throw them away again -
she threw me in the sea off St Ives
and like a little bit of Avonian driftwood
I bob into shore here on the bay
getting back to the values of icecream and sunshine
A little light rain
To bring the ocean to a scale we can handle
In a cylinder of enough
Forgiving and forgetting
Iam what I think,
The culture is what it says
The ocean starts where it ends

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