An Answer For “No.”

“Milkmaid – lie with me.” 

                                    “Ploughman - dream on!”

“ Bailiff, I saw rude things this morn,

the milkmaid suckling a cow’s teat.

Sure as I’m born, white milk trickled.”

“Milk that stank of  . . ?” 

                                    “Witchcraft?”

“Witchcraft. Thank you, Ploughman.”

“My sweet bewitcher - lie with me.”

“Not you as well!”

                              “My rosebud, peach. . .”

“Hands off now!” 

                               “Suckler . . . I fear

your vileness was observed! Promise

to lie with me or magistrates shall hear

how you sent the ploughman for his frisson

to the horse’s wobbling rump as they turned the sod,

how, calling curses on our living God

you’d strip your girdle off, and give yourself

to joy with goats and donkeys!”

“Sir . . . you do jest! Begone! Such twaddle!

I’m to my milking.”

                                 “Maid, this is not ended!”        

“Well, Master Bailiff . . have you told the town

how Satan’s handmaid rips the hearts from frogs

and compacts these with feathers, which,

fed to young boys would make them daemons?”

“Nods and winks, Lord Justice, nods and winks!

The town smells woodsmoke.”

“Then have the turnkey fetch her. Ensure dry logs.”

“Madam, charges are laid that rest with me.

These can be set aside, and made as nought.

I have that power. Do you but lie with me.

I’d dress you in fine silks and tulle.  You’d live

in Great Hall, take tea with ladies, yours . . .”

“My Lord, what’s that they cry outside?  It sounds

like ‘burn’”

                  “Aye!  Burn the witch. But why,

when to be my wife would save you?”

                                             “Sir, my honour

is with God to give away. Who’ll speak for me?”

“Blameless you’ve no need of defence. Guilty?

No defence could earn your life. Your hope’s in silence.”

“Burn the Witch! Burn the Witch! Burn the Milkmaid Witch!”

“Shut the doors against that yelling. Jurors –

this harlot maid has whored herself with Satan.

One day a black cat’s her Familiar,

next day a raven. Her ilk search hedgerows

for hemlock, monkshood, belladonna. These

they makes ointments of . . whose spelling

lets them ride the air you breathe!”

                                     “Burn! Turn her on the spit!”

“The turnkey swears how in prison

she charmed the sparrows to take crumbs

from her lap, lips, fingers, while from the tip

of all three breasts – poured Satan’s milk!”

“In Christ’s name - burn the Witch!”

“Turnkey, what help? I do so fear the stake.”

“I’ve  nightshade leaves, which, swallowed,

turn torment to dreams and fading breath

before the fetters. You’d see no glowing torch,

nor watch your flesh ravel up like knitting.

Pay me in pleasure, against your dungeon wall.

You shake your head. Hag! Is your maiden hole

worth more than easy death? God damn your soul.”

“Burn the Witch! Save us from Satan’s yoke! Burn her!”

“See her writhe and shriek as they drag her out.

 It’s said if she screams when on the pyre, her soul

 goes with the flames into the fiery Pit.

 Silent, she’ll rise with the rising smoke

 to meet our Maker.  Few that well have died . .”

“Ploughman – the tavern! God alone is satisfied.”



(This poem written with the plight of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani
in Iran in mind)

Sweetheart

Your

sweethheart

was the one

with whom delight

did not spark desire.

There's one such, only one.

After innocence has gone

the next one, and the next, lights fire.

Something you can never catch again

is done.  But your lost sweetheart lingers on.

Just for interest, I have reworked an earlier poem as an ETHEREE

Pearls

 I

found them

one by one.

Cut glass. A chime

of bells. Mists shuffling

in  the sun. Old wood with

scent of lavender. Laughter

where children run. I hoarded them,

unmatched, unlit. And in time you came

to be the thread, the thread to string them on.

Four Cantos on the Island of Salina.

2010

Along with overweight and fast-food boxes,

laughter rotted by drink and sleeplessness,

the trippers bring their mobile jabber  . . ,

“We’re on that beach. Yer know! The one

that’s in that film. An’ d’yer know some tosser

called Neruda? Yeah!  Sprayed on the effin’ cliff!

“Neruda Rules!”  Neruda?  Who’s ‘e play for?”

. . . and never look beyond the frosted glass

that separates these dreary purlieus,

the island’s present, from its past illusions.

“Can’t hear yer for the feckin’ jet-skis.

And feck!  Me signal’s goin’. I’ll call yer back.”

1994

There is no construct “self.”  It’s a conceit.

We choose from fictions that we show each other.

Even the names we use may be unreal . . .

A actor in middle age adjusts his cap, then -

“Pablo . . hold just like that. Take three . . . and . . Action!”

And nothing moves except the shifting sea,

lapping the edge of simulated grief.

Professional, as if he himself had written

Neruda’s Cancion Desesperada,

written of brown limbed children, beloved Matilde

who now must share his artifice of mourning,

wishing – perhaps – love, gratitude and time

had not made them islomanes and called them back.

1950

Most times there is little here but sound.

Sound of the small waves at the water’s rim.

Sound where the wind plucks harp-strings in the grass.

Sound of the church bell calling them to prayer.

And el cartero’s jingling cycle bell.

Was it for such as these Neruda came –

seeking for sounds his questing ear could meld

into his Twenty Songs of Love, his pain?
Or did he hope in exile here to find

something much simpler - peace, wherein to wait,

wait until Chile sought to call him back?

2010

“Needed a piss,but. Gotta betta signal.

Came down the beach a spell. Guess what?

That effin’ spray-can artist’s bin down ‘ere!

Tellin’ it like it is  . . . in green this time,

Colore de esperanza. Can’t clock that!

Some manky dago lingo by the look.

Next bit’s easy.  But why the feck’s he say

“Come back Neruda.”  “Neruda lives, O.K?”

Gloss

Cancion Desesperada,    Song of Despair

el cartero                            postman

Colore de esperanza        colour of hope.

Two Stoned Poems

Stones Circle


Like nomads at the vernal equinox
my stones grow restive.  I'll double-lock
their shed!  I've a life's work there,
catalogued and safely stabled.
But you can't squeeze gratitude from stone
when the thrust of bud and time
unlocks their wanderlust.
There's my footloose granite, anxious to be gone;
quartz nursing itchy feet;
irascible old pumice, rotten
with travel bug. Batch of globe trotters!
They'd cluster, cheek by jowl
on common beaches. So while they plot
I'll crouch at the keyhole, alert
to the changing tempo of their rumbles.
At all costs I'll fence that huge momentum.
Feckless collection!  I've offered them a roost,
an end to voyaging.  And yet, like madmen
furious in asylums whirl, they roll
and roll and spurn their meals of moss.




Doubts in Limestone Country


The compass memory hesitates between
a sense of longing and of not belonging
in other shires. Stone walls?  Stone sheep enscribed
in strata mapped like ribs of half-ploughed bone
beneath the torn edge of an autumn sky?
Or chalklands perfect as the shoulders
of girls asleep through afternoons
of slanting rain, all their misgivings blurred
in the first unfocussed signatures of love?
Bone, shoulder, reassemble.  Choose.
The needle locks.  The traveller no more
can set his charts of time or place, or force
a pathway through his self-,deceit,
wanders and doubts his craft.
Rib or shoulder?  Shoulder or bone break?
Doubts like a lodestone with its instinct snapped.
.

Carol From an Island Without Trees

These are tunes of empty weather,
the sky too much a brawl
for wing and feather, rain
to corrode the vestiges of summer,
the Atlantic ransacking all.

Sing of a loveless island swept
by unlovely weather,
shoreline of grey and ochre where
one seabird sprawls and slides
from citadel to citadel of gale.

Weather for beak and claw,
not wing and feather,
that gongs in sea-caves,
raves of the ended summer
and nothing done, and this
is the end of singing weather.

Then the song, like wing and summer,
like love and feather, is gone.

Posted for the Theme Thursday prompt - MAP


MAPS


Years later, maybe, you'll come upon old maps
boxed with your youth and dusted with misgivings.
And perhaps  they'd crackle if unfolded, 
as the first frosts hard on the heels of autumn crisp the leaves.
Beware! They lure like carillons wrenching you
back over moorlands where the curlew grieves.


Leave maps as metaphors you tramped among . .
A boot-cap scuffles and chunks of rock dislodged
whirr down to silence, falling far too long . .
memorials of hushed October glens
where voices drift miles and the ice-axe chink
lies like a bell note on the misting air.


Sip your memories in the firelight, but . .
let your maps be, or your finger
tracing paths once taken, could lead you
to years that rise like runs of scree,
and browsing through your autumn days, unfold
times creased with use and truths that dropped apart.
For those far, remembered hills could clasp love-close
dried blades of grass that pierce you to the heart.

In Your Own Words


Four vowels comprise her name -
say deft, say kiss, dance, death -
four smoke rings, linked exemplars
of her faculty, her advocacy
and her carnal grammars.

To formulate the margins of her eyes,
four steps to duskfall, moonfall snared
to mirror her momentum and her style -
say topaz, amber, auburn, black -
her lip and boyish shoulder, archer's stance,
and one impatient gesture of disdain,
an earlobe tethered in a straying curl.
Laughable? Now say charm, say warm, was warm.

Or perhaps subsume her
in four fragrances, four dialects
abandoned but still braiding
here with then - orchid, Havana,
Lentherique, quinine - to wrench the noose,
affirm and reaffirm her.

Nothing is willed or planned or made
inevitable - ever, say is it ever? -
even by chance, by one too many faces
in a room - but somewhere
leaves ash to smoulder
as she left scents on gowns, in cars -
whisper October, whisper smoke and gold -
forsook her shoes by doors left open -
say go, don't go, grown old -
or charred the lips of unfamiliar tables
with her frank, familiar,
discarded black cigars.

Prolonged Immersion.

Rebuke, or pity? Spurning all life-skill guides,
oblivious to shellfish jaws and stings that leave
sure swimmers keeling, she dived young, keen to prise,
eviscerate and string the seeds.
                                                  The first heave
mesmerised.  The seven sea-tentacles unfurled,
artful to drag her down. The laden wrecks
rebuffed her questing hands.
                                             The glass-green swirl
yawed, paused and shifted her past hope of land.

Meshed with slow swells she grins and glides,
adrift on moon-drugged tides, which at their flood
roll, roll her  shorewards, till brine cold rhythms guide
this prisoner from deeps misunderstood.

In the sea's time, formless remains are hurled
naked, flesh gorged by seabirds, spent, unpearled.

 Revenant


At parting, saying -
"Let us agree we both prefer
'Goodbye' to tears.  Learn to accept
and not condemn. The past
never was the future's stage."
A carriage window sliced this valediction.


Work, infidelities and towns
slipped by to undiscovered ends,
while the unquiet ghost for half a lifetime
turned triumph - yes, even that - to puffs of smoke -
(Mists laid on English shires at twilight,
fingers on a candid lip in sleep . . . )


Then in some undistinguished capital,
Buda?  Trieste? - in just that sort
of backwater cafe where conversations
hatched against despair
stutter towards another rented pillow,
the smoky lights revealed -
skin no longer absolutely young,
the smile that lay in wait -
a dress that could not - surely -  be the same?


"No logic, dearest, please,
or laying blame.  I answered only
the motiveless appeal of happiness . . "
(Quoting another poet! At such a meeting!
I should have . . . )
Ah, but her fingers, placed
with such complicity, such care,
placed where the bloodstroke like a habit burns,
sought my acceptance of her affirmation.


My actress on her stage,
ageless and English,
her tear precluding tears.