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COLLECTED POEMS     THE PAIN CLINIC     THE FORDWYCH HOUSE EXTRACT     KEAT'S HOUSE     

Part 1    

Part 2     

Part 3

Part 4   

THE PAIN CLINIC

PART 1

Tell me, how may I know him, how adore

From whom I have that thus I move and live,

And feel that I am happier than I know.

John Milton – Paradise Lost, Book 8

I leave you after two years, an affair

Of the heart, something resolute I dare

Not resolve, the mind is the spirit’s limb

And the search of sojourner or pilgrim

Towards or from that of saint and martyr

Whether history or now or another,

Grace is the spirit’s breath, grace is the heart.

‘The light of life’ as Bede said but the start

Of a poet, that lodging of the end,

Outlasting this world, truth without amend.

Between the tombstones of St. Cuthbert and

St. Bede between destiny and England,

The stone sheared for nothing and Cranmer burned

And from your closed city a poet turned.

The end is illusion and lasts until

Magnolia blushing into April,

Fastened white each closure holds to remain

Fragility whiter than April rain

After a storm when blue alternates more

Nature’s irretrievable metaphor.

And the blossom of an April night is

The colour of day and diminishes

Only eternity, to tell of love

After or before is but to tell of

The rain that dingy blooms on branching pall

A shadow natural as betrayal,

The days love used, from each enough to bring

The magnolia’s storm-white opening.

I leave behind a poetry from life,

Words and their waiting, words for day and night,

And I have been a mother and a wife

And darkness flaunting seen from depths of light

When dawn’s reflection turns the earth below,

The lasting rise of night trees plunged to snow.

Beethoven mapped time a territory fit

For sojourn of the diffident spirit

And Schubert a lyric for love’s folly,

Yet love is enough to outlast return

Enough also for love’s celibacy

Love is the spirit and its end alone.

I hardly noticed but a love divine

That when Bach spoke at last was lodged with mine.

These days and their kind will not come again,

From the limits of language to explain

Without fear how indifference breaks its blue

Among stripped trees residual and new,

Winter’s startle is on the origin,

Without love should I know how to begin?

Wisdom is a journey back to the child

Rudimentary without end and wild

Once from an unknown travelled horizon

Where shadows then were but the bleak unshone

Of this world and a stone to point the way.

When, before men talking, I tried to say

Of love before I left, but to no end,

With me calmly suddenly came a friend.

What is poetry between then and now

Except that you looked long at the landau,

Stooping quietly watching everything

Wondering whether anything lasting.

I thought neither morning nor afternoon

Was a casual departure, how soon

Must the landau leave, you were not to care

Or for its passengers kept waiting there

And the gathered and curious women

Remarking, and all the while you watched them

The sun was high and dark over midday

Privet and darkness on the surface lay.

How soon must the landau leave, quietly

Waiting, after you could not say to me.

Love is a part of Grace as poetry

At the last distance of eternity,

That sublime and inconsolable reach

Where man must first take his leave of Nature.

Love is its own, the only eidolon

And lonely as man’s leave taking among

Friends and among the stars of his journey,

It is poetry’s certain and tardy

Harbinger, timeless in exultation

Before itself long after love has gone.

And from humiliation and despair

I kept the white snow to form in his hair,

Love in the holy blue of a new dawn

Is certain as Keats’ Ruth among the corn.

Hold your hurt deep as the body bereft,

As the novelist writes her own story,

To leave what is lost, to keep what is left

Is a woman becoming her glory.

Branches pull with smoke drawn from a willow

Ascending and stars transfix their morning,

Art cannot imitate Nature to throw

As nothing imagination’s awning

Far over the high and casual dark of

Winter trees, as nothing and remaining

The stars at daybreak or a woman’s love.

Love that is memory’s last desiring,

The smoke drifts downward though love unrealised

Must flow as the willow and never dies.

Joy came shyly and when all else was gone,

After thirty years’ searching we were one,

Timeless the heart the seamless difference,

Joy is the knowledge and experience.

I give the learnéd my last vanity

To wear the mantle of humility,

For to live is to be ready to die,

Joy is the only earthly answer why,

Nature in time and art is beauty’s truth

And truth is the joy between man and earth.

No longer to know the poet in me

Nor all the laurels of eternity

For I am the sound of an outworn word,

Yet new as the listening I never heard.

An Irish immigrant in Coburg Street

Gave birth, she could not know it would be meet

That the Nobel Prize nineteen forty eight

Was that evening given to Eliot.

In Leeds behind Lewis’s for three years

The sounds of the synagogue reached my ears,

Over Brudenell Road I was to know

The permanent anatomy of snow,

Survival but the wind upon a wall

That for some escape is impossible.

And the early fifties flickered neon

By the white wall of Torre Road station,

Unnavigable the repetition

The darkness between self and horizon.

To keep alive the suddenness of love,

The memory that poetry dreams of,

To receive, though isolate and untold,

Nature from the reflected mirror’s hold

Is to have known with an equivocal

Heart the knowledge yet of good and evil.

And unwept in Eden these stars once shone

And the light from a jet plane pales among

Them, poetry is love’s diminishing.

The end is an infinite reflection,

Distance without shadow or beginning

And unlit far as the constellation

Of a single star or an unlit sea,

And love is to approach infinity.

With nothing to go on but my own heart,

Untaught I made a poetry apart,

Old words and their welding to new courage,

Found a truth lost at the end of knowledge.

Poetry is love loud enough to hear,

Joy the difference of a timeless fear,

At the leave-taking a poet is told

And the last look backward out of this world

Is to salvage for its prodigal worth

With a poetry between man and earth.

Life is the spirit and its denial,

And the space of an echo and listening,

Where the mind and heart are tongues in a trial

Of words to speak the spirit’s suffering.

Man’s inability to interpret

Nature is her legacy, a poet

Must learn how to stand in supplication

And with nothing to bring but a notion

Of the senses intrepid in waiting,

Just to know her and know her desiring.

Then her epiphany usurps the mind,

And leaving the temporal man behind,

Restless always and outside my own day,

Sometimes life in absolution will lay

With me, and the poet urgent between

Folly and Nature’s passion to redeem,

Yet, and in the way of love, receives life

With all the trembling wonder of a wife.

Early November poplar leaves swathed far

And remnant on London’s light green smoke are

Still formal in a late sunlight, moving

With a certain airlessness and breathing

With a little breathlessness, tremulous

As human diminution. But surface

Leaf, unlike man, is buttressed from within,

Only the highest leaves are not given,

Topmost of the Lombardy and its last

Configuration where a leaf is fast

Held as a truth, as a man at the end,

Darker the poplar than night is darkened.

And the alien corn needed no forlorn

To toll to my sad self by Keats forborne.

If beauty is truth, truth is no more than

Time’s journeyman seen as a Grecian urn,

Truth is this world and neither columnar

Evening within the last darkened poplar

Leaves, when light is yet preliminary

And stillness a delta form as only

The Lombardy’s column of paper leaf

Without wind or rain, where stillness and earth

Burn, nor the firmament of memory,

For love is the spirit’s reality

And the last look backward out of this world.

If truth were known, love would remain untold

And Meaning but a Grecian urn, other

Than the time of memory or Nature

Or love.

             The poplar levels a dross of

Stars and fixed eternal they tell of love

With a poet’s indeterminate hand

Or the spirit they alone understand,

The moments of the asphodel are few

As the colour of day that Marlowe knew.

Forever before are the pine stars hung,

And that lodging of the end left among,

A landau’s possible finality,

Its truth but the spirit’s futility

Seen as the sun in sojourn in a dream,

As love seen when enervate betrayal

Is love, random as the spirit between,

From truth betrayed, truth is made possible.

Truth neither knowledge nor experience

Knows, time converges on the difference,

Time before itself has laid its burden

On me, days as the pine-black stars spiral

Downwards and the distance of that region

Called truth is truth itself and lasts until

The dawn that blooms its passing on the bough,

Meaning may be no more than the landau,

From the equation of life and the earth

A poet and a man can answer truth.

Love is not love of another only,

The space of the spirit and its journey,

Though time should rear itself from horizon,

As such will I hold love from illusion.

I was neither poet nor that evening

Your daughter over the phone, by morning

But a woman become and you had died

And given me to the world as a bride,

And such I shall be, though as a widow

I journey the ruins of fallen snow.

Only the stars remain familiar

And to draw a first few from the further

Unlit or an evening’s hesitation

At the sidewalk of London’s far neon

Is enough as the known unwritten word,

The fallen snow over Brudenell Road,

Only love is first known in a world where

Once falling snow was curling in his hair.

Then the epiphany sometimes after

Hours and the day’s accustomed dullness wears

Through and coyly surging makes from laughter

And tears, yet new reality and bears

On the earth’s back news of its memory.

And to receive even at the distance

Of time, beyond night and day and history,

After the knowledge and experience,

Is to hear as a child unheard listening

And yet to see with eyes out of this world

Where the space between Nature transcending

And immanent joy are the words untold,

Where man is left with nothing but to find

And to tell of the little left behind.

Between hearing and memory still heard,

Sometimes only silence hears with the will

Of poetry harnessed to its last word,

While the mind is left to implore until

The heart is first known, ripened from remorse,

Its refuge but the wind upon a wall,

Imagination is the last recourse,

A reparation after joy unstill.

Joy is neither nemesis nor hubris,

Existing in time’s isolate design

And lost as its desiring and stasis,

Joy is a poetry no longer mine.

The end is memory’s first testament,

Frail as life when light strikes, its argument.

More than thought such is the spirit of man,

Derelict wind over level spaces,

The end or the words for time alone can

Pull through and sometimes the spirit faces

Itself, random and new, the way the day

Blooms eternal from branching darkening.

It goes before and has nowhere to lay

Its head, an echo of time aligning,

Much as the sun on March forsythia

Tilts the firmament to a blue below.

Memory more than its own idea

Apprehends the spirit in its first flow

Of joy, both lost and won from each last search,

Then is the shadow but a passing reach.

When I was last at Wentworth Place, the end

Of my father’s life was unimagined,

That night in Hampstead near the end of June,

Nine months at most, you died to everyone.

‘I’m watching the pain level’, her final

Words remain, remain uncontrollable.

He dies ‘looking only into the eyes

Of nuns’, he dies ‘a blessing in disguise’,

Quite suddenly at the hands of a fast

Driver, can anyone recall his last

Words, something, I can remember nothing.

‘But don’t you think his death was a blessing

In disguise’, I was unable to tell

You father, ‘I’m watching the pain level’,

My father was unable to be told.

How can I write without him who made me,

Without whom my days are now as nothing,

Enough it was to wait for poetry

To struggle with the heart and its meaning,

Here I wait for I know not how to find

Him or how to follow without a star

To steer by, at the masthead of my mind,

From those that burn through a darkened poplar,

Reminding me with their heat that I live

Over levels of tidal undertow,

As nothing more than a need to believe,

Between air and earth a wind to follow.

Here I wait for I know not where he goes,

Death is a woman in beautiful clothes.

Innocence contains its own betrayal

As April lies uneasy on the bough,

Black where the reaches of a poplar pale

Against necessity or here and now.

When words are facts and cannot be unsaid,

Poetry must learn to write itself, then

Can the spirit speak as the open dead

To those to come, of the unconfessed men

Who need only themselves and rise or fall

And know enough of the range of the heart

From the passion of their own betrayal

To that innocence at the spirit’s start.

Morning makes shadows from blossoms as few,

April breaking is a blur over blue.

April is the poet’s month, alternate

With the lasting once of its own wildness

When evening’s moving rapids flare a late

Horizon, and the day’s distance and less

Than its light left in a storm of poplar

Leaves to flood black over an April rain.

Splintered boughs are the colour of a far

Time and ransom for a rosary’s gain

Perish and bloom the cherry and apple

As cloud in a blue tumult to become.

April and infinite over evil

And blossom yet poetry’s opened womb,

So the word born as briefly to defy

Must sing of its forbears and never die.

The world is smaller now that you are gone,

Time, that mirror image of horizon,

Waits in the wings at journey’s end and makes

A mockery of destiny and breaks,

Imagination’s fugitive breaks and

Falls as the mind’s shadow over England.

Poetry matters, before you without

Words and less afraid, an old man about

To die could not be told, would not be told,

The heart cannot hold, only the words hold.

No longer a daughter I watch a storm

Clouding low over Cholsey and Pangbourne,

But before it breaks, such cloud waits, enough

Unlike time, to gather form or the ruff

Of a Tudor king.

So many are the nights at the world’s end

And with nothing to show to a new day,

Dear heart, poetry alone cannot lend

Hope for that which is too far off to say.

The watch listens as the condemned must wait,

Imagination runs the mind to ground,

Often is the heart itself and too late

For poetry’s mercury to be found,

The words always existed, their author

Time alone, life the waiting yet to be,

And the spirit has nothing to confer

Higher than the wind levelling the sea.

Yet known unknown the diffident spirit

And the consolation for its retreat.

The times when poetry seems to answer

Nothing and that written is held in doubt,

And Nature is not always an offer

Of refuge for the mind with no way out.

The heart remains in an open entrance,

Vacated and sudden the room is found,

That unleased sojourner the spirit once,

Its loss as its desiring and uncrowned.

April wind moves in the space of nature,

Clearing still cloud from a face of marble,

And the poet’s heart dictates a metre,

Resolute as the knowledge of evil,

Where even the spirit can be afraid

And poetry and prophecy are made.

And so my father went to the Selby

Road, sent out high on morphia to be

Killed and some say he tried to move away

As though he had something to do that day,

Afterwards drawn on the coroner’s plan

His shopping bag where it lay and the man.

His conversation was almost cheerful,

No one thought anything remarkable,

And the relatives, even as he hurled

Between until surgery and this world,

And the relatives, and the veteran,

One of the few to come through Burma, can

Pull through, and the relatives said you were

Terminal that once you were my father.

To fear the self is to suffer evil

Both in its knowledge and experience,

Enough to remain though the spirit fail,

Vulnerable even as innocence.

Random once, its joy inherits the earth,

Its language the beauty of truth’s fable,

Found with a hallmark outlasting Keats’ truth

To form proof of the spirit’s betrayal.

A jet soars not more surely to the sky,

Its first and downward wake remaining pure

To a diffusion further from the eye

Than evil’s anchorage or man unsure,

And poetry hurts at the source of pain

That the end of life is written in vain.

Your face came back to me after so long

And you spoke with your eyes reminding me

Of something forgotten in a last throng

Remembered at the end of a journey

Unprepared for and unheard, my father.

Morning cloud crowns the flaming tongues of May

When leaf full turning loosens the poplar,

Something unsaid that will not go away,

Leaf hold such as the close flight of a moth,

Its delta form a green unstill to live,

Impossible to divide man from wrath,

There is only the time left to forgive.

The sky has flung its foam from shallows wide,

The firmament marble on the ebb tide.

Poetry is a helpless surrender

To a future charged as the memory,

An order of words nothing can alter,

An inextinguishable wish to be.

Equally helpless before suffering,

As such the stammer after earth’s beauty,

Stunned into muteness a poet can sing

From the heart’s unrehearsed futility

And pain held as fast closed hands of the young,

There is nothing after the spirit’s cry

That rearranging in a makeshift tongue,

Poetry or voice of an unasked why.

Turned to words from courage enough to fear,

Unreachable, their faces disappear.

Words to turn the wandering spirit round,

Worthless that usage of the heart without,

Meaning is no more than a mirror found

Self- reflecting, its end outlasting doubt.

Poetry is born alone in the breech

Position having no other way out,

Unable to crown its labour of speech

Unless the spirit tears from pain life’s shout.

When May broke light the world rolled like a blue

Iris backward at the retina of

Time, for the hours of the spirit are few

And bewildering in a wake of love.

Bach scored two violins as love could be,

Love such as only the spirit can free.

Over the window glass at Wentworth Place,

And London as memory was starless,

Truth before beauty was poetic truth,

That exaltation of Cortez and Ruth.

For the Urn was largely bravado, not

The whole truth but the senses only, what

Is truth but a man watching a landau

And wondering. Then or now are as though

Immaterial and know not either

Guilt or remorse, mostly we are somewhere

Between hope and despair, mostly between

What chance has done and choice has left undone,

And truth is irresolute as fear is,

Truth is the undone, the undone that is

Done and is starless as memory or

London starless.

                           From the ruins of your

Love I am more your daughter, such ruin,

Love was never like this. Love is first known

By its own infinity as glass so

Reflected, itself diminishing shows,

From darkness further than horizon’s hold,

A mirror in the dark, love is last told.

And you said nothing at the end, nothing

Mattered, though love at the end was something

That mattered and snow was curling in his

Hair, such ruin, love was never like this.

And I am more your daughter than I know

And glass so reflected never lets go,

Her lifetime for a moment held his love.

I have not written for this world but for

The spirit, remaining uncertain here,

Wondering where the words will come from or

Afraid always when poetry’s own fear

Of emptiness leaves me yet with nothing

But time itself in passing and aside,

And words unknown and beyond my knowing

Before an ordinary silence died.

I am no more than the unerring flight

A few birds make of themselves from among,

Carelessly following a new day’s height,

August’s calm and northward repetition.

I’m tired of my years and the word’s owing,

The end no nearer to its first knowing.

And a time will come when these words will not

Be mine but love in passing must remain

Love whether that of Liù or Turandot,

Trembling before it breaks into a name

Known once or beauty seen from aftermath,

Love once known is held by the spirit fast.

Such a cold it leaves, a planetary path

Where that lost is remembered at the last

As a shadow’s inexorable hold,

As darkness only time can consummate,

Where Nature points the way to truth untold,

And love, poet or man, is isolate.

Poetry must first unclamp love to start

Dismantling its scaffolding from my heart.

I have seen a poplar still as saffron,

The colour of high drift and Turandot,

August restless trembles into late sun

And sky nearer than the Thames surface, what

Am I, enough to hear Sylvia cry

Or love yet know as once from memory,

What is poetry if the sun must die,

Love in another form if love could be.

The heart is a far uncharted planet

Seen from the light of a star’s interval,

La vita è così bella but the heart

Remembered holds the dip of the world’s hull.

And utmost yet the way that love is brief

The poplar draws a river to its leaf.

To learn to love the world that cannot love

Back and this is a poet’s hardest task,

To live without return and to know love

When time is a last struggle to unmask

The glazed eye unflinching from a passion-

Flower’s day long late and blue September,

Poplar leaves darkened olive blown begin

To pall and a poem must suffer Nature.

At the fall of the firmament a star

Rayed with the blue of a day from its dart

Of life to the end opens both hands far,

Thrusting bewildered a fugitive heart,

A closed blond hinged over darkness, to fail

Threefold, a seed hold over betrayal.

I who know nothing of the absolute

Value of words and can only show you

My heart, forborne and yet irresolute

Even as heaven and earth or those few

Moments when their alignment and time on

Hold and knowledge a tardy eloquence,

Where Nature’s definitive expression

From love’s reach and the heart remembered once,

How from truth and the tumult of language,

A space such as the poplar’s night and day

And new words for old outlasting their age,

Poetry is born with nothing to say.

And morning breaks its gold only to flow

Back, impenetrable, through the willow.

There is nothing this night from which to heal,

Moving indivisible stillness, love

Must be as both, being universal

Enough to salvage from a refuge of

Darkened stars something with which to redeem

Nothing, a day’s difference, winter’s young

Imagination and darkness when seen

As blue transfixed or passing after flung.

The beginning missed is urgent and new

Where winter has grained under bark light, how

In dreams an open road runs straight and through

The heart, its way a waking to avow.

Yet to surrender and to such control

Show me the end before and make me whole.

How shall I address the world when with you

I could not speak at Carden Avenue

Where roofs ascending slope a downward wall

And the cherry blooms imperishable.

And for four hours you said nothing of her

While I talked to control the utmost near,

The freedom of spiritual murder,

And further yet than the freedom of fear.

And more than the unsaid the unwept tears

Of Eden for the knowledge of my years

Or the simple tears that would have saved you.

Beyond poetry, or then and now, you

Looked at her in the landau my father

And for four hours you said nothing of her.

Unopened rests the green magnolia,

Trees from the lake raise unapproachable

Horizons, Hymnus Paradisi, a

Blown smoke blown, levelling its form while pale

Winter receives the waters of Kenwood.

Less than a day’s random, that unlit space

Where earth has sunk its cornerstone, and should

The shadow falter the poet must face,

To follow as once, journeying high snow

And drifts of words along the way to form

Love such as only the spirit can know.

Magnolia unfolding April’s storm,

Before the retina from colour seen,

Walls of closed carbon darkness lay between.

What is the life of a man worth on this

Night of war where Nature waits as before

Calm with stars when time, a token of his

Life, from memory what am I here for

Listening to the darkness incongruous

With birdsong over a world no more than

A day’s journey, a night the sound of us.

London’s blackened boughs without leaf or man

Rust gratuitous pale bark from neon,

Drifting silenced through the new day’s bird-cry

Indifferent residual and saffron.

The spirit is ready only to die,

As a poem defiant enough to live

With the hallmark of a last need to give.

To wake to that first morning after war,

And men among distant trees were moving

The cut sound of a poplar from its saw

And love away from its own believing,

Until and leaving me emptiness more

Than love’s denial further than reaching,

To remain rearranging new and raw

And Nature leftover open breaching.

Earth’s depths nearing traced branched and darkened snow

London domed yellow with snow’s reflection,

Palpable only in dreams as the slow

Shadow runs or love’s configuration,

The spirit dancing each honeycomb cell,

A poplar’s incline branching time until.

When the early cherry bloomed earlier

Than snow, time was a casual repair,

Time as such and less than the space between,

Man is a reckoning of horizon,

Towards or from, and the space of Nature

Random as the purple in the fuchsia.

Distance or the heart, only time is seen

And love the distance fallen in a dream,

Man less than his own length when distance stalls

And truth no more than where the shadow falls.

No more than your end or the way the green

Rapidity of the century, green

And almost formal at the motorway,

Beat a green oscillation where you lay.

Before and after and the words untold

And April’s leaf dark halo to immure,

But a woman become to walk the world

With an isolate controlling rapture.

Late wind a black tide smooth over branch moan

April sepulchral bleeds magnolia,

Forsythia flames in blond abandon

A night cut from stars and Primavera.

While out of the languid featureless dark

And London’s high shadow rain softly laid

Its burgeon, to colour first with night bark

And day and passing seem and never fade,

Ordinary, the way of poetry,

Or how impossible love waits on me.

Dismantled from a dream where cut trees were

Carried from the air to level and core,

April opens at mountain fires further

Than the fall of Kurdish children and war,

Emerging bloom whitens on urgent bough

To pall to night clouds’ darkest hemisphere,

Between love and war leaving then and now

That consummation the end has with fear,

Or that of a willow yet pruned exposed

Projecting the highest roof of heaven,

Falling calmly dust and shadow, as closed

Space arches out unbroken leaf and rain.

Downward from Kenwood and Parliament Hill

The sun smokes on tree dark impassable.

Green of the coldest, London and April,

And sky full unreached grey at the world’s shore,

Shadow at leaf start lets its colours fall

Lasting three months uncontrollable war,

Memory obscured yet undiminished

Soars and with a last leaf crowns its ruin,

As sad green dark, forsythia finished

Burns to green aftermath waiting for rain.

How can a poet suffer or be sure,

Experience alone for mentor, where

Donne and Lowell were masters of Nature

And poetry now unrecognised prayer.

From an arc of night and day as shadow

Inexorable light flows the willow.

The first star leafless at the season’s height

Draws through a poplar and an evening’s light

The disparate, the grey stars of London,

Man and Nature’s reach for consolation.

Nature takes her form from a memory

Before time and is governed restlessly

By the stars, man is her shadow, Nature

Subject to itself and as betrayer

But his own refuge, an oblivion

Starless as the heavens’ recognition

Or the grey stars beyond his counting, we

Are the children of chance or memory

And the stars journeying, memory makes

The man as the last dark a poplar takes.

Wind-blown at the sky’s edge and night moving,

Startling light to the heart of a willow,

And space round horizon’s corner turning

Beneath cut leaf the space of love’s shadow

Falling from darkness and night leaf open

And surging a star’s tumultuous day,

Endlessly enclosed, burdened unbroken,

Closed willow arching overflowing May.

Or held happening yet cut and utmost,

The balanced whitened rapid melt of flame,

Cloud drifts marble leaf darkened pearl and lost,

Space unrealised softly wells night rain,

Love’s beginning, the end that will not let

Go and love is an infinite regret.

Light of the willow, June listless among

Leaf-torn disarray, heavy with storm pull,

Arching high collapse, darkness as day hung,

Opening the earth at a willow’s full

And plunging hollow and shifting of heft,

Of leaf shuddering blue and hewn surmise,

Morning’s black burning through planetary cleft,

Light igniting leaf as flame cindered lies.

And love burned its last within black willow,

Sun dark’s vertical still dissolution

Unarched uplifting fused torrential flow,

Blazing existing sacrificial June.

Poetry or love’s unfaltering age,

An empty actor on an empty stage.

Flow kindled willow from August’s arched full,

Well the long shadow outlasting night’s hold,

Space translated green, pouring a still hull,

Stammering wind-told, love left manifold.

Love that you should be but form and willow,

Bringer of that first eternal silence,

To grow leftover, sightless heard as though

Indifferent or yet beyond speech to sense

A way forward. Youth, a solid new moon

Clearing green dull stars and night’s lengthened throw

Downwards and the end opened wind to tune

Moving space and leaf magnified and low.

Stammering wind-told, love’s first tolling slow

And isolate heart, bewildered willow.

Leafless either solitary or aligned,

Outward and upward are inwards inclined,

Indivisible the poplar ascends

Its highest fingers outstretched, and descends

From the reached isolate to horizon.

Eliot gave thanks in exhortation

For the lesser light and the Light Greater,

A light that more than a decade later

Burned on the cage at Pisa. Direction

Impermeable, passing confusion,

Nature in thinly placed uncompromise

Is upward moving as Keats’ wild surmise,

And distance, the heart and the hand’s wringing,

And Pound finished told of the light singing.

Let the poetry to come be as sleep,

After reality silent as day

And night dissolving, random words to keep,

The end and all its dreams folded away.

Nothing remains to turn towards, waiting,

But a lasting frail imagination,

New sunlight raw on severed bark resting,

Much as poetry’s freedom lost and won

Or intermittent as an endless saw

Ceasing, only to gather its harvest,

Charged elemental, time falling before

And memory named alone rendered waste,

The time of love that time cannot assuage

And a poem will not accept subterfuge.

Love has no beginning, no end, although

Existing in its own consuming late,

Winter whispering green weave and willow

Empty as this disconsolate planet.

Love held by the spirit will not let go,

Returning unrealised to assail,

Remembered and once high green thrown willow

Strung with London’s night, winter’s open pale.

Truncated still dark, strands a darker weft

And the mind’s shadow remains to the last,

Fourfold the stripped tree pierces the earth’s heft,

Emptying firmamental from the past,

Leftover in St. John’s Wood, willow fall,

As a girl lost, Karachi and Nepal.

All summer long I watched a willow grow

And bore to full arching its long sentence,

For I exist only as an echo

The makeshift sound of Nature and silence.

What am I left after seeing you whole,

Fragmented into bark, a saw’s searching,

A poem is not within man’s control,

A thrown fan opening its leaf, lurching.

How from an empty hand flared a green arc

High as the hollows over willow laid,

The grain snag sheer or upward veer and spark,

A shower of corn-coloured rain and blade,

Sunlight and aftermath separate old

Strands of momentary young winter gold.

And quietly before your window turned

A landau, casually halting between

The dark high and midday privet, I learned

That beauty is not truth, truth is not seen.

Wondering, an old man was without fear

Quietly watching a waiting landau,

Truth heard or imagined as pastoral

On a Grecian urn is but time in thrall,

And the constellation by which we steer

Is time and is all any of us know.

Life storms unstill an evening’s colourless

Winter moving, black sodden with dry rain,

Night trees disturbed receive a featureless

Wind, a distance that will not hold again,

And long as a kaleidoscope changing,

Black as smooth branched rain. Imagination,

That fixed and single star still reflecting,

The brief high flare from a mirror broken,

Must stand with the casual ease of youth

And stare, when a poet would turn away.

Rain vestigial over night wind and truth

Whitens into bark and another day,

The closed airless walls towards hold the drift

Or drown of light along a mirror’s shift.

Since then I have learned not to be afraid

Of silence, for love has its own terror

Of loss, poems out of the end are made,

Choice and Chance, unavoidable error.

A language alive involuntary,

First drawn precipitate, an after cry

Able to absorb light’s lost primary

Lasting and face alone unanswered why.

And unknowing certain as words finished,

A pause random and without origin,

Earth’s uneven echo undiminished,

Distance silence or circle yet begin,

The return alone source enough to pare,

Its aftermath the only arbiter.

Without warning, words unfaltering came,

New with the emptiness of a moon’s full,

Before me unknown, the silence the same,

Poetry’s aftermath its own control.

Gone the need to belong, poems that man

Between truth and beauty estranged and known

And infinitely ordinary can

Understand or words for the earth alone.

Forsythia’s level February,

The end ripened as the moon’s first full near

And Meaning and without apology

Through Sylvia’s blacks pulling clear of fear.

Quietly I wrote how love seemed to me

And life offered itself for poetry.

A poplar spans the distance before me,

Between the poplar and eternity

The journey is an ordinary day,

Or the simple words to redeem the way

The light from every moment lost and won,

From rain, turns its leaflessness into stone

And straw and rain over London burning.

And poetry is made from the corner-

Stone of this world, enough to bear Nature

Or to let fall a poplar and the end

Enough for either betrayer or friend,

But to tell of the straw petrifaction

Of the poplar and of leafless high rain

Or the grey stars over London burning.

Before and after began unaltered,

An accident almost, without surprise,

What is language but the heart disordered

And freed from the need to apologise,

Sometimes only silence seems to matter,

Branching under winter’s whitening tide,

With no way out, a span and void to dare

In depths unstill and stillness opened wide.

A poem sudden with that protracted burn,

Unfolded, whored to sheen of moth and height,

Amaryllis without a moon to turn

By, poetry spirals into the light,

And Wittgenstein asked that his life be told,

Life be my apology to the world.

Or out of helplessness opening born,

After the stir and wind found still of March,

Youth with time’s intolerance yet can warn

How after or before leftover search

And fail, when all the kept cannot console,

And lost and given unremarkable.

Time left to Nature’s rapid near control,

Imagination unredeemable

Lasting once as only life will allow,

Motley worn, a used cajolery cries,

Words from nothing rendering then and now,

An arc left to juggle and sympathise.

Words offered first to the spirit until,

Firmamental, earth’s banks break blue April.

And words from nothing turn and turn about

To no end, leaving me headlong after

The bewildered wake of their haste, without

Knowledge and burdened with time’s waste, the share

In its end, its abandoned disarray,

And Nature’s new full mute recognition

When the spirit sojourned along the way,

Days open standing in starlight’s mention.

Words have their destiny, an origin

Of silence, who am I that they should come

To me as love once enough to begin,

And all its freedom known both lost and won.

To harbour the spirit and magnify,

The poetry was written to defy.

Cut green from willow a star softly grew

Over an abyss of bark and span of

High shard, emptiness spared piecemeal and new,

Flowed full ungathered waters from above,

Floating closing windborne, an unsalvaged

Willow hollowing out its last surface

Even to the blade’s thrust as through assuaged

Shadow, as day left in a willow’s space.

And under winter’s natural smoke drifts

A moon’s first pale, the end and all that’s known

Burning residual, a willow lifts

An ebb of life night charred into a poem,

Imagination to mirror or mar

The willow’s stump opening a green star.

That the silence break, O God O April,

From downward leaf, as green and darkening

Forsythia leftover falling full,

Mentioning the broken sun in passing.

Rain, a slow smoke weighed down the wet layers

Of ivy, softening young urgency

Yet olive, rigid with poplar leaves, years

And to the last leaf above me the sea

Left splintering sand sheer over its tow

Below, far white the tide’s first surface near,

Enclosed sunlight kept, April’s abject snow

When poplar branches ripened disappear,

The surf’s negative, let its darkness be

Earth’s full unmoving white transparency.

April and terminal full letting go,

Far out to drift the known, the word’s order,

Darkening high forsythia’s green flow,

To bank the highest day with rank dolor.

Trapped, the spirit’s inexpressible slow

Lost countdown to its own recognition

And repeated last affirmative no.

Poetry, the end already written,

Yet over ivy briefly blooming seen,

Vanished white and growing fragility,

Life itself or the mirror of a dream,

Rearing from near and closed infinity.

April’s passing ivy deepened livid,

Stalked red in iris, stray wild May orchid.

Poetry or that green interstitial

Night of November ivy brief with rain

And evening’s late preliminary pall,

Time’s horizon nears and smokes into rain.

Life or that featureless experience

Found and left after words have come and gone,

Then an emptiness of days and dreams once,

Besieges reality and time won,

Unravelling syllable from belief,

The spirit and its fast vestigial cry

Mixing uncontainable silence brief

With knowing unresolved, until and why,

And Nature’s meaningless philosophy

Cast as death or the rhythm of ivy.

Across time and water on Dover beach

I entered from where there is no turning

Back, earth had stained its colour into each

Remembered stone, darkening the leaving

Sea, a sound leftover of the wind’s still

Burning, grained unloosened under night smoke,

Silence, a sleepwalk enclosed fast until

I lay down as a stone sea and awoke.

Voices receding toiled, whispered among

Stones and under the sea to no avail

And stone that flowed in hell itself a young

Moon returned to float high a windless sail,

Lost to the world I am become its mime,

Mahler, Rückert, alone with wasted time.

Out of the untongued stone as day immured

I stumbled long after and poetry,

The end of years from every fear was cured,

Its harbouring circled me entirely.

And towards, yet I had journeyed all my

Life when the birds round Wellington Square brought

Me into their throng, an unserried cry

Primary through green hewn of air unthought,

Unfolding leaf leading to a garden

Where at last I have put my shadow down.

How many the times without hope, often

Still following wondering and aground,

Waiting, unable to die or to live,

There is only the time left to forgive.

The end is now as the day I began,

Isolate and become necessity

Keeping a vigil, imagination,

Wayward erring, approaching destiny,

Layering reality and its leaf,

A reparation startled from the earth

And the single unknowing of belief,

Existing after knowledge brought to birth.

Involuntary, poetry’s echo

Follows before and what road it comes by

Or where it goes, sometimes Sylvia’s low

Smokes prepare a way, an answering cry,

Imagination melting into snow,

A world more high and white than I could know.

Earth’s surface shallows towards or before,

Morning’s darkest utmost unbroken sky

Levelling alive the topmost thrown shore

Until lime and leaf are colourless high

Reality, wrought after emptying

Divested air nearing full summer leaf,

As dreams lose a shadow’s deciphering

In the sun unfathomable beneath.

In cities where I run from pursuer,

Falling or hiding, searching always for

The end, a cry to the last sign from air

Stifled and closed, where words written before

Language, outside translation, through dream’s mute

Mirror reflect the lime leaf absolute.

Evening lowered June’s unending shadow,

The century outspread unearthed its deep

Beech floor, thickening layered dome and low

Close leaf and rain, hazed full, forged seasons seep,

Hollowing time’s sodden and closed dry breach,

Where branched unfaltering fast cathedral

Height, and fallen lasting subsuming beech,

Or the leap of infinity in thrall.

And May weaving fragile unbroken web

Unopened, at reach to its last open

Firmament, whispering the smoke and ebb

Leaf reared in utmost eclipse of heaven,

Where earth and darkness were emptiness, each

Silence underfoot, full still husk of beech.

A mute sorrow lies at last too deep for

Tears, the heart’s sword plunged so far that no one

Can remove it, nothing survives its core,

Love ebbs in vain for a prodigal son

Who will not return, our lives over glass,

Revolving the doors of Wellington Square.

Time left adrift short, the crucial days pass

After light’s white sear, love beyond repair

Reflected on a window’s negative

Turning, turning love so far, love become

A name’s anonymity, left to give

Memory abandoned turning time won,

Each silence departure, a waiting guest,

Absence arrival turn and will not rest.

Nothing can console, not experience

At the end of knowledge, only the cost

Is left to fray, time dissolving and once

Held constant and sure is now as a lost

Anonymous son or a life mask of

Itself, a loss enough to be afraid

Of loss alone, as love come to this, love,

The last covenant poetry has made.

How lime from young impenetrable dark

And intensity of dying leaf sears

Its first green surface in an Oxford park,

August’s disparate yellow tolls my years,

I struggle loss and Pasternak, yet know

Akhmatova’s levelled Tsarskoye Selo.

You came to Wellington Square for the last

Time before I left, approaching, a gift

In your hands, darkness framed the evening’s fast

Held fragmented light, low nearing at shift

Of shadow, dimensions within a dream,

And windless emptied air without echo

Or distance, soldering horizon’s seam

And open neon with a last stalled throw

Of shadow closely miming your return.

For those few early minutes and evening

In the garden, a lifetime left to burn

Incombustible, holding everything

In its place, inscribed for your visit were

Your words for a birthday the day after.

Wind ruffled still the ochre leaf and brown

Pale of lifted feathers, chance and sudden

Alignment at source burned leaf and robin,

Orange incombustible as choice won,

Charred dry, and its first fast fallen colour,

The winter red transubstantiation

Of a bird melting with last leaf before

October’s lost rigor and windless rain.

Proximity and pageant, no more than

Poetry’s far insomniac silence

Could keep Zhivago back from the rowan-

Berry, or a motorway in ordnance

Of pine, a bird’s young song at the end where

The Grosse Fuge’s heart was an answer.

Why have I no answer, what road did we

Come by that the way is lost forever,

In a crowd at St. Giles’ fair without me,

From a crowd I saw you as your mother

While you walked among them, a space so small

Lay between us, at the century’s wane

And colossal sound how impossible

The simple words we cannot say again.

Distance I crossed as a child, its threshold

A lit kaleidoscope, reality

On every side was what night neon told

From a fairground’s enclosed infinity,

Unremembered words the heart cannot hold,

Such a space yet vanished in a crowd’s fold.

So that the lime tree absolves my sorrow

Let me live but long enough to return

Its first consoling symmetry and know

A towering last leaf was not in vain.

I who amount to nothing, awhile have

Been lifted high as the topmost unknown

And narrowing bough where far fugitive

Leaf engulfed wells imagined upward hone,

Loosened lasting tidal levels over-

Flow utmost ruin, oppressed unhewn spring

Spans green glass to origin and surface.

Before the old man of the sea, over

Piecemeal, large tardy leaves are hollowing,

Standing beyond him in first bridal lace.

I watch the rapid leaves begin to fall

Turning full the helpless air and downward

Moving space of its last diagonal

Green spoke, an undersurface turned towards

A far light untouched by the sun, its raw

Lime calm hurts yet vulnerable and new

As a white shadow, sorrow’s metaphor.

Such a space and white sear of leaf, how few

Will remain leaves to the end of winter,

Each white leaf exposed white arching spoked thrall

And memory I knew as a mother

And a poet, the sword strokes were mortal

And every leaf was overturned surface

Brief as May snow or lime’s last carapace.

Impossible want waits on me, autumn

Was almost over before it began,

Vanishing with everything I had known

In the whitened low shadow of its span

And calm irreversible surrender,

An open surrounding emptiness left

When tired memory could go no further,

Waiting as an abandoned child bereft,

A train in a dream derailed, or the way

An outgrown silent mother hesitates

Before the world still unable to say

How birth’s vestigial hour remains and hurts,

To walk the world alone and bowed with blame

As once she held life to bestow a name.

Hurrying dreamed and startling towards me

Through Wellington Square, how before you reach

Me the dream is after over empty

Derelict space where I remain and search

No longer. And sometimes in dreams I write,

A fugitive blueprint out of nothing

Where vacant listless insomniac light,

Written and trapped, an uncomprehending

Babel resembling the reality

And open sleepwalk of words unwritten

Yet resolved as the end of a journey,

Tired words only the heart can awaken,

The heart that gives its life for Nature’s mime

Is after found alive and lodged with time.

Emptiness assails, fallen forever,

Days as leaf gone from me yet remaining

Unsubsumed, far dissolving, easier

To write poetry before lime passing,

Anything than trying to speak after.

The banked day floods over only to drain

Away, my children become chimera,

Nothing is left, emptiness beyond pain

Curls slow low leaf and settling abandon.

At the sea’s threshold a gardener’s rake

Gathered each unmoving leaf, there wind-mown

The low sea mound of memory awake

Branched high darkened layering horizon

And curled among leaves stillness weighed as stone.

Love was never like this, now no longer

Am I needed or yet necessary

Or even remembered as a mother,

What have I done that only poetry

Has dared to come so far and still steadfast

With my name. Before and until are known,

Memory’s earliest words will outlast

Derision and address the world alone,

No longer a mother but an outcast,

A journeyman’s words but wares for the earth,

How I named you beheld aloft from vast

Time and a lonely deliberate birth,

And you cry delivery from evil,

Dealer in words, ‘What did I doo to all’.

What am I left beyond an empty page

And the ceaseless endless reordering

Of what cannot be put right, words assuage

But only in the lifetime remaining

After time has gone. Always an empty

Page, to the end unrecognisable

Before it becomes my own, and every

Familiar line sometimes casual

With the unrelenting formal stammer

Of my life. Words unknown, until and torn

From time left, Lacrimosa and desire

Mnemonic as a tree overwhelmed borne

On the wind’s confrontation, memory

Yet young with truth struggling into beauty.

There was no warning, no last dismantling

Only a memory of what had been,

And effortless emptied air denying

And altering everything I could mean.

And after, almost unremarkable,

As long since passed and unnoticed love, there

Was nothing left or recognizable,

A willow unmissed taken from the air,

Felled from the heart, where rapid airless earth

Overturned at the root and open wide

Gape, closes over with a willow’s worth

Leaving nowhere to escape to or hide.

Once a miracle’s last reprieve, a year

Left to stand and quietly disappear.

Why have I held back so long, unable

While the willow was before me to reach

Out and touch its first green beaded struggle

To survive, a branchless stump and beseech

Of light alone for brief curtailed beauty

So many times flooding your last decade

With a fixed young transient urgency,

And mixing lumberjack and willow blade

In refuge and desire. I had to write

When there was nothing left, not a shadow

In its existence and seasonal night,

Distance or space from memory laid low

I can no longer look back as a child

At love, to the end still a willow wild.

And fire was still burning high on Primrose

Hill when a water carrier hosed out

The fast held November flame, stone billows

Raked into low smoke swelled propelled without

Heat and resembling disintegrating

Willow, sparked through London’s night haze an arc

Firmamental and driven spiralling

Unencompassed darkness. A single spark

Charred wind and rain, and a willow’s bark sawn

Mimed its last upward arching mimicry,

And flowed brief sparks of ripened willow borne

Downward with sudden blond infinity

Among green strewn and precipitated

Willow, young full welled and to pietà felled.

Love that was resolved long before the end

Of a willow yet remained forever

Impermanent, outlasting the deepened

Close green beads lost unravelling after,

And once the space of an interstitial

Shadow in low summation held and left

Behind, love unknown was still and crucial

And insubstantial was its bitter weft.

How a familiar unrealised

Willow was constantly allowed to grow,

More vulnerable with each fullness, prised

From the earth its last decade, the same slow

Way that sawn off at the stump, each time drew

Star-green willow miraculous and new.

You did not try to go away you just

Did not come back, there was nothing sudden

At first only longer silence, I must

Unravel how I went wrong, how often

Somehow failed to see that I had lost my

Son, yet almost impossible to know

Where to begin. Memory’s endless why

Stalks my dreams staggering early as though

Always unanswered and more so out of

Sight, behind ahead as shadows I reach

To from the nowhere of abandoned love,

As why left at utmost echo and search

Holding everything in its place, nothing

Is near at hand anymore answering.

I would not have missed being a mother

For the world, each day now the broken still

Along an open triangle after

Perspective exposed a rail of light, shrill

Knife-edged and diminishing to the end,

Somewhere at the core and itself a closed

Circle, a pool of light, earth had darkened

With its ore, and mixing oil and rain hosed

Through the shadows perpetual surface.

The same way as dawn appears leftover

Sometimes with late stars, unreflected space

Between permanence and illusion where

Memory alone reaches full circle

And light breaks unconjured to a last still.

But it was not your growing up so much

As your growing away, and to the end

I’ll never understand how slowly such

Sudden judgement, your worldly needs opened

Wide memory’s store and you walked away

Leaving a childhood behind forever

Cocooned with the agony of the day

Without you of unfinished days after

And nothing new to go back to or why

As only an echo to go on. No

One who has not lived this enough to cry

I am your mother yet will ever know

Her pathway’s permanent illusion where

Sometimes dawn is late with stars leftover.

Love, that you should come to me after so

Much sorrow, after years keeping only

The earliest light, before love’s shadow

Spread as a tide of endless night, slowly

And calmly engulfing each day until

Death was a beacon over the water.

How long have I walked through margin and rill,

Narrowing confines and horizon where

The critical shadow is reflection,

A journey without end, a compulsive

Upholding current, imagination,

Just as love survives always fugitive

And near, yet weariness planetary,

A mirror’s coastal light, my destiny.

I wanted someone to say that it was

All right but there was no one to console

Me and no one as you were then because

The future was no longer a control.

How I remember that evening before

The assassination of Kennedy,

And childhood’s calmly detonating core

At the menarch’s tremulous history.

Middle-aged without you always alone,

The years had become a sabbatical

In hell and fear was night’s diurnal hone

Vacillating and inexplicable,

Its possibility so suddenly

Made real as the menopause was to be.

Surprised by love, in labour in a dream,

I remembered that I was a poet

Bearing down love again, enough to seem

Almost real.  It was already too late

For life and yet too early for love, why

Was my last child born waiting as a day

Waits before its end and sensed only by

My mind or your own vanishing away

As love alone that cannot be returned.

How have I missed you never having known

Your bonding or your birth, absence I learned

To live with nursing silence to atone,

I give myself to the world, memory

New with time, with its own identity.

It was nearly two years before you were

Able to return to the home of your

Youth as a brother reconciled after

A long estrangement, but anything more

Unlike the return of the prodigal

Son could not have been imagined. Nothing

Was left to prevent the improbable

Evening and still a closed daylight changing

Into its last endless February

Night, and the darkened stars were not in their

Places, unlooked for after memory

Mushroomed fluorescent from the empty air,

Horizon was just a fugitive star,

Only the stars remain familiar.

The vestiges of their incandescence

Are everything I have known, light without

Shadow, inconsequential in a sense

Of time, a grey unlit arena out

Of which the known and the unknown must be

Found.  While April abandoned derelict

And irrelevant with austerity

Makes night as day under Nature’s edict,

Unable to assuage the agony,

When poetry or life without meaning

Threatens life itself in a jeopardy

Of words found and lost to their echoing.

As the scuttled stars a primary cry

Beyond earth’s echo lasts and will not die.

Always leftover, the end like a thief

Came in the night, unreal and ignoble,

And in the disarray left behind, brief

As the flight of a Passover angel,

My first-born son went away, brother rose

Against brother with almost nothing left

To say and a blind rivalry that chose,

Leaving nothing behind.  And yet bereft,

A mother searches in vain a former

Order holding everything in its place,

Searches to remain, only to see her

Children as days that end without trace.

‘He was lost and is found’, the last echo

Of the prodigal son I used to know.

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