Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
As usual Uncle Tacko is trundling
his Flea Circus to the end of the pier,
and the Island Princess is embarking
for a trip up the Straits and around
Ynys Seiriol with its nesting puffins,
its elderberry woodland purpling.
And the dogged chambers of my heart, open
and close, open, close, like an harmonium.
All the familiar sounds – the Flea Circus crowd,
the paddlers in the pool, the revellers
on the hotel lawn next door –
For Annabel Honor-Lissi
In those stark dreams when sleep shades into waking,
dreams that haunt the light like a taste in the mouth,
or a name half-remembered, half-forgotten,
I am always travelling – this dawn
along the black tops and the turnpikes,
from the Texas Panhandle north east
to Casco Bay, Maine. Ahead is the thought
of moments, or a non-stop two day drive:
from the sun-belt’s stubborn, garish pandemic;
via the fame of Dallas,
I listened to Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman.
I liked the keys’ silver superstructure,
and the ebony stick with its subtle bell,
and its tones – mellow, lustrous, shrill, caressing.
So, to and from school, I chose to pass
a second-hand shop with a clarinet
on display in its eclectic window.
I saved for a year. ‘No,’ said the man. Next day
it was gone from the display forever.
My daughter took up the instrument
unprompted. Her daughter has followed.
If Ezekiel’s watchman, or, rather, God’s
had been on the job there would have been
some sort of heads-up – a cornet perhaps
if not a fanfare – that the Parish Church clock,
put in place in 1867,
would be chiming again, hours and quarters,
this summer morning. But it just happens –
almost surreptitiously, like some
member of the chorus in an opera
sneaking on late from the wings. And late it is
by a few minutes – as before it was fast.
Days after we had travelled east of Eden
we invented clowning and slapstick,
juggling and tumbling, magic and music,
and idleness to ease our banishment
from Paradise. So, for ninety minutes,
in this rare and aerial space of changelings
and kaleidoscopes, we watch acrobats
and clowns, conjurors and knife throwers turn back
the epochs as if pages in a book.
Like a sudden rush of snare drums, a brief
and heavy shower accompanies
the finale –
…though striped in part was not, in fact, a tiger,
or feline in any way, but related
to the kangaroo, so a marsupial,
with a head and muzzle a bit like a bear’s,
and the dimensions of an Alsatian dog.
Somebody named him Benjamin – a joke
probably: the last of Jacob’s sons,
and Israel’s progenitor. Some footage
survives, in black and white, of the animal
in his small, bleak cage in Hobart Zoo.
The newsreel’s pompous and slightly smarmy
voice-over,
DRIVING INTO THE DARK
DRIVING INTO THE DARK
WHAT THE HEART REMEMBERS
CIRCUS
THE CLARINET