Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
They lie after loving in a shuttered room,
lit with an underwater vagueness,
replete with jasmine. They hear but
do not listen to the hoopoe calling
in the almond tree or the goats clinking
softly in the olive grove. They no longer
even hear the roar of the cicadas.
She lies in his arms. They sink into sleep,
lovers drowsing in a perfumed sea.
The spate plucks willows weeping from the banks
and careers them swirling, whether or not,
From the long window on the half landing, I saw,
almost as soon as you had filled the small bird feeders
under the pine and come inside, the big beasts land
to eat the scattered seeds – three wood pigeons, two turtle doves
and a solitary magpie – then a cat appear, the birds scramble
and you again, shooing.
From where the hawk stoops, I heard the magpie’s
irrelevant chatterings, saw a tableau of live flesh;
saw our Victorian suburb from where the airplane flies –
The tide is at its ebb. Late sun quick-silvers
the narrowed estuary, where river and sea
conflict and oyster catchers race upstream.
An ice cream van’s jingle jangle sounds
across the almost empty sands. ‘O sole
mio’… And you are suddenly there –
aged three – digging with purpose into the dusk.
Your daughter – that longed for, longed for joy –
already strives unprompted towards the sun,
scrabbling beyond the bounds of her play mat!
‘…n’aria serena doppo na tempesta!…’
How calm you are,
The Duke owned both banks. The pleasure steamer,
stuttering, washed his clay into the current,
older than property. His oak woods moved
past us into dusk. We disembarked and
strolled between lascivious, attic blooms
to where, before the Great Hall, his Grace
had let the play be set. Like smoke on summers’
nights, the plot unwound down the lawn’s gentle slope.
The crossed, cross lovers mazed each other
but we knew how it all would end neatly –
the affluent young,
Though there is no evidence that Busby
Berkeley was a descendant of Bishop
Berkeley (in spite of the Californian
connection), who would deny that George
were the spiritual, or, rather,
philosophical ancestor of Bill.
Bishop George Berkeley, John Smibert, circa 1729
Busby Berkeley circa 1935
Hundreds of girls’ legs opening in unison
is a pure if anachronistic
example of the Irish Divine’s hypothesis.
And Busby was keen on fountains too!
Fountain Scene from 'Footlight Parade',
'Février' from Les Tres Riche Heures du Duc De Berry
July
We are rather formally attired
for country pursuits in the ducal woods;
August
me with a tie and you, I uncover,
with white suspenders and matching knickers.
September
Intimate stranger, forever touching
for your least kindness, forever surprising;
October
unpredictable as light,
Built well before the Mahdi sacked Khartoum,
like a ledger or the Church of England
our house is square, accommodating. Swifts,
each May, pronounce their southern benison
on ashlar cornerstones and dead masons…
A butterfly, lost in the wintry cellar,
seems closed as death but wings part knowingly.
O peacock eyes, how you seduce from purpose
and time! Imperial birds cry harshly
in paper gardens… At dusk, in indigo,
swifts dissolve. The house is white, seems solid
as a steamship.
The Assassin
Lucheni had waited all day in the pines
above the lake. When she passed, he begged.
Her equerry dismissed him. As always,
self-absorbed, she saw nothing: an anarchist
with a grand and personal design.
On the quayside at Geneva, a week
later, Lucheni, the labourer,
stabbed Elizabeth, Empress of Austria,
with a homemade knife. Her husband foresaw,
like her assassin, anarchy: armies
entrenching in Bohemia;
The high windows caught the sky, varicose,
livid. The house was empty, unlived-in.
He hurried down wide paths strewn with rose petals,
wind-culled and faded. He searched borders,
bushes, her features imaged and snared in shapes
of angled branch and thorn, an orange sun
searing gun-metal clouds, the fountain sprouting
papery leaves, its bronze boy greening alone.
Ivy’s grasp crumbled artifice, obscured
the basin inscribed with a sonnet.
Soughing of breath or the wind in the arbour
summoned him into its close.
A nor’ easterly blew – over Dutchman Bank –
on the front at Beaumaris, so we had
our chips, fish and mushy peas in the Vectra,
watching the ebb tide slowly, slowly expose
the furrowed gold of the Lavan Sands
and the cormorants and oyster catchers
skim the waves, when, suddenly, a herring gull,
that voracious omnivore, that frequenter
of rubbish tips and landfills – the colours
of its plumage pristine, as if painted –
landed on our bonnet and,
A SORT OF KADDISH
A SORT OF KADDISH
THE MOLD CAPE
A SORT OF KADDISH
FROM A BALCONY