Poems
A day spent scratching civilisation’s sores –
Amnesty calls for Urgent Action;
a ministerial mouth, mean as a steel trap
closes another deluded seeker of asylum
behind barbed wire; civil liberties
are spooked by terror; girl children
trafficked to sexual servitude –
and I’m spent too. Not even that trusty spur,
the great-grandmother of my children
dead in another camp, another winter, another story,
can prick this chilled indifference to bleed –
although my mind’s rubbed raw, my heart
is dry as yesterday’s crusts.
... (read more)
By the filling station on La Cienega a burger joint
somehow survives. This Sunday morning
a pink Thunderbird sags at the kerb,
and an old Studebaker, paint flaking.
... (read more)for Susan
Between non capisco and dimentico
we learn to speak a little: our history
always taking place in the present tense.
Between mistranslations
you’re still not sure he meant it.
‘I mean it,’
he said. ‘I want to work in Canada.
I have a nice face – why won’t you marry me?’
Of night
At which you crane your next to gaze
(And Dante saw ascending,
Ablaze
In sphere on sphere of crowded light,
Beyond a mortal sight’s
Earth-shadowed powers of apprehending), ... (read more)
Bowed from the supermarket, a week’s rations
jumbling the plastic, I saw in shadow
my dead father. He crept the pavement, burdened
as I am not by a lost country.
... (read more)It’ll be dawn before the sawing’s done; all night
cutting it up, yet by dark’s end, a pine,
or cypress moon, fragrant, awaiting finish. I watch
that they haven’t already given
my colourless signature; of your
hands other than to shade
your eyes as the sun burnishes
the windows, then carries on
to the grey porticos of the square.
I see pigeons on the gold-lit roof
of the Cathedral of St Christopher,
and as I stir my brush about
my palette – scarlet is what
I pray for; scarlet that flows under
a vanquished bridge; that lives
with finches in the tops of trees
because, desire, you said,
should always live on the wing.
... (read more)
Born to a seamless ordinance of heat,
Small wonder I remember best Indoors,
The too-small carpets slipping round the floors
And ‘Under the house’, a region to retreat
He meets a man with an icicle voice
who says it is ‘Mind’s disease’
to act impulsively; this man elevates
‘Reason’ to a pedestal, where he worships
at a cold, stony chiselled face, from afar
(& sometimes Peter sees him go up close, to peer,
at something old, cold, & slushy, underneath it –
which, he tells Peter, is a high I.Q.-ed
pickled brain, in a jar).
... (read more)