Letters to Kai

2.

 

            e solo, in parte, vidi ’l Saladino.

                        Dante, Inferno, Canto 4, 129

 

The dead weight of spotless sky.

How hell made light of us.

Traffic we’ve dodged.

 

I offer this list and a chair.

Let’s sit on the porch then

and talk this day into being.

 

Then I’ll take to that couch,

as I’d imagined, affording no stillness,

no fabric to speak of.

 

The galaxies spin and spiral about

that point where all gazes met.

Dizzy thoughts borne on a breeze.

 

Were they all we ever meant?

Did I picture a dry unmown lawn beneath

a pale lunar fingernail scratching heaven?

 

 

            30 July 2024

 

 

4.

 

                                                Re James

 

Take your draught and let the tide have you.

Hear how the orchestra of silence

made dreadful noise through this wedge in time.

 

It works on the hunch that things we do

to stitch and mend the tears are as constant as

the chorus of a million cicadas on a summer’s day

 

audible only once they’ve ceased.

They come as little thoughts

making it known that once more

 

each being goes into the breach

for which it was made.

You’ll embrace then

 

a superfluous peace.

And so the pen glides

in the way that only you professed.

 

 

            30 August 2024

 

 

6.

 

I should like to see three fresh faces, if I could.

A woman with long plaited hair and studious glasses

posing in front of old books with their special scent of dry dusty wood.

The pen and paper before her exist solely for their looks.

“I don’t care what you think”, she says. “I can listen to Chopin’s Nocturnes.

Arrau, Ashkenazy, Rubenstein. Whichever I want.”

She orders No. 16 in E-Flat Major for its mood of

patient work, achievements, late shifts, with gentle thrill.

“He lets me down in the finest possible manner.

For you, the aim cannot be the same:

the ending will be someplace else,

somewhere perhaps more tangible.”

 

A man looks back at her with the studied, almost supercilious, gaze of an author

wondering what her game is and whether she plays to win.

His brown hair is unbelievably tidy.

“I play no instrument”, he says.

“My keyboard used to be a pen, but now I just dictate.”

His brown eyes belie a blue gene.

Her blue eyes hold him attentively at a distance.

“Once the work is done, the rest”, he says, “is a playful tip-toe

across elevated stepping-stones irregularly set above wet rocks.”

The way is found for them thus

they have nowhere to go.

 

            8 September 2024

 

8.

 

Must we go back to that murky pond I dreamed of long ago?

a place to which I’ve been pointing all this time

where nothing’s so elusive you cannot feel it

and rocks don’t resist water.

 

The flinty arrow of sorrow is embedded in its target now

(the consequence of flight and bloody accusation)

yet I see nothing in her face if not new light.

 

After all, she guided me one day – just once –

to reunite us through a fog.

And so the stone was never in the way.

 

We figure out over and over again

the meaning of our currencies

and value of our words.

 

Am I really back then?

back to imagining the dark lady

who speaks in even tones,

steps lightly on my back.

 

            14 October 2024

 

Letter #12

Her name was Cloudier but now

known to you as Storm

 

never in the same place twice but

nevertheless she strikes and

 

illuminates a moment enough

to mistake her lex talionis for

 

cool vengeance of she who docks years and

subtracts pleasures judiciously saying

 

‘no matter how well spent

it’s spent with no account now’

 

Could the mind be cloudier though

and that path ahead a faultline?

 

So walk backwards uphill

Get nowhere on life’s treadmill

 

But restore the knee of wisdom

the sanity of tiny relics and sadness

 

of riots past and pagan screams

and all that disappeared under foot

 

                                                                        8 January 2024

Letter #10

The pertinent thing you see

is the Pantheon

 

which channels light

not water

 

and replenishes each day

The impertinent thing you don’t see

 

is unknown to theology

That’s the thing to look for

 

as you won’t trip over it

nor will it hit you

 

Follow the scent of dusk

As it darkens

 

and no owl takes flight

you’ll be hollowed out

 

or swallowed up

into an apter metaphor

 

                                                                        7 December 2023

Letter #8

Octavian messed with us

as August inherited July’s sun

 

and I appointed someone

to do my skiing for me

 

Then thunder struck

and it occurred to me

 

that being so little

of unknown pronoun

 

being lost to me eternally

returned to me unexpectedly

 

namelessly and so ethereally

compared to he who was imperially

 

Octavian

and was blond they say

                                                                        20 November 2023

Letter #6

                                     ‘Do I wake …?’

Keats

 

Her joke’s on the onlookers

who make a spectacle only of themselves

as they crowd her room each day

 

By night she forgets to exist

The galleries and all their work

obligingly go dark for us

 

Impish experiments thrive instead

like the unexpected gift

of a cake stall in the middle of hell

 

Such a beautiful humour is so inhuman

it’s a cloud that hovers modestly about her

rendering her unreachable

 

                                                                        27 July 2023

Letter #4

 

‘Prithee say on.’ Hamlet, II, ii

 

Let the knife do its work

and cut the loaf

 

as we live invested in a body

of preposterous ideas

 

Abandon hopes plans ships

and yourself

 

The yard’s a mess of fallen twigs

Sodden turf records

 

the prints you left

but couldn’t cover

 

You heard the gate creak

and her foot disturb some gravel

 

Her fragrance and image

flowed between your fingers

 

Her crumb of sustenance

and drop of toxin

 

needn’t disappoint you

now you know

 

she prays you

say more

                                                                       11 July 2023

From panic to this birth breath

 

Panic

 

We begin in discord

in the poem of the goat-footed god

 

Pan

of panic

and pandemic 

 

But then I promise to breathe again

only when I remove my self as the obstacle that became me

 

So

 

Walk

Don’t walk!

 

Fuck

Don’t fuck!

 

Panic

Don’t panic!

 

Our rule is you’ll never know

when you’re following rules and when you’re not.

 

You’re a child of diversity

enslaved to uncertainty.

 

You were given gods as you were given empires

that make and break the rules.

 

You were left playing in the garden

when that horror began.

 

Look

Don’t look!

 

You look like a random child who wouldn’t exist without war

without end

without the breath of labour

and the final breath

 

I am the fright

and the trip you didn’t see

as you were walking backwards

 

not walking

not fucking

 

The rule is panic

and nomadic

 

And someone called and I heard no echo

but heard all about the panic spread by

miasmas, clouds and black holes

 

and I loved you more than any virus

more than the ways and byways

that led you to me

 

before all signs were pointed in wrong directions

before the twisting of reinforcing

 

before grounds were made immaterial

reimagined while no one was looking

 

I said that if you can you must

and yet you cannot

 

you deliver nothing

but doom

and blackmail with a smile.

 

The world is the image in the mind of its being

The pantheist in you is not grasping that pandemic

 

and panic

that peoples all your minds.

 

 

Flower shop

 

That involuted orchid

opens out to be

its own question

and proffers its own beginning

 

Buy back the terror

of the touching fingertips

of young tulips

that regard only themselves

 

Never ask the roses

what they really want

Never choose them

nor be pricked into actions

 

the end of which

is not in sight

 

 

 

One rose, then, for my endless love

 

I saw you in a forest

just as a welcome shower of rain began

 

I couldn’t tell how it was

that you moved like that

 

between the growing trees

with such animal limbs

 

Could someone tutor me?

The graces of your soul

 

translate to gestures

and the gentle way your hand

 

may have touched

How little do I understand?

 

The forest gives way to a garden

that you overlook

 

fresh in gumboots

Your mind is fully at play

 

the earth gives softly beneath your feet

Could the thought be more vivid?

 

But just in case you didn’t see

the slip of paper

 

nailed to your tree

What on earth could it say?

 

The crude and beautiful word or

not a word nor even art

 

but just a childish doodle

a drawing of the heart

 

 

Let’s wander

 

The park has no gate

and so it asks us for nothing

 

The lawn spreads away behind us

but there’s no sign to tell where we were

 

Life like this is an unmarked surface

on which we cannot help but stand

 

on a trail of pretexts

And when we part

 

one of us will be the lesser

found lurking here wondering

 

For all we speak no one will hear

the words we came to say

 

We will’ve forgotten the softness of skin

the brownness of our eyes

 

and the temper of the day

Branded darkly

 

there’s the question-mark on the surface

and in our tone of voice

 

Did I hear thee well then

murmuring this conversation’s closed?

 

The park admits all comers

but the lawn admits no answers

 

 

A lesson, then, on College Hill

 

Learn about what a body can do

what cannot be put to paper or to flame

and when to empty the mind like a bin

 

When full daylight barely lights the Way

there are too many objects

 

When all possibilities

will have been

recollected

comprehended

realised and

half forgotten

 

then

and only then

may the universe sigh

and once again contract

 

 

Panic

 

Love

Don’t love!

 

Breathe

Don’t breathe!

 

Think

Don’t think!

 

There’s a growth on your thoughts

as it spins from your gut

 

gets twisted and knotted thoughts out

unknotted

 

We are tied for love

and bodies know what occurs next

as they cannot help but breathe

that birth breath

as if each breath

even their last

were a rebirth.

 

It’s motion that muddies the water

But stillness clarifies the soul

 

What you think your soul is

becomes your next cry

 

as the mind’s in struggle

and every breath’s an effort

 

or a push against the weight of others

lasting till failure

 

To decide who will write whose epitaph

and fret about it no more

 

means to go where the breath is

the only thing left to attend to

 

without division

It’s a tender and pliant baby thought

 

a sensation of rain on a sweaty body

and an unknown lady who smiled

 

or the heart reaching through the earth

for someone in distress

 

a force of silence

an end of waiting

 

for nothing but

this birth breath

 

 

For Frankie Chu

September 2023

 

Letter #2

  ‘… most experiences are unsayable’, said Rilke.

 

That crowd’s dispersing anyway

and its famous din’s gone with it

Can’t you hear it dying down out there?

 

Permacrisis was last year’s word

but we enjoy its trochees now

as they stumble off the tongue

 

One moment there were flashes

Now there’s only this light on

over a table that holds the news

 

Admit that there’s no connection then

between events and how it feels

to be another you

                                                            5 June 2023

Mansion

A small staircase makes an inexplicable obstacle

to a hall that hasn’t enough light

 

There are suitcases to be searched

for things to discard before we depart

 

In the kitchen food scraps wait to be thrown out

while all this time the sun has been letting us down

 

And a vehicle’s missing making us wonder

how we’ll get away from this damned mansion

 

I could understand why you were so inconsolable then

Wasn’t frustration the meaning of our job there?

 

But a young man appeared saying I’d frightened him

and led me down to another overgrown path

 

Trials like his aren’t wordy or argumentative

but nothing got done without noises and scratches

 

They tell me this labour of ours lasts only so long

and release promises a return to mother

 

 

18.04.23

Machiavelli’s muse

 

Thankful for as much warmth as darknesses afford

they sit between flickering hearth and stone walls

 

as the lady darns

Outside snow flurries sing

 

how you are hostages here

They slowly repair their knowledge

 

of the agonies and strife

joys and communion

 

as events they may stitch together from

voices in the streets or sightings of departing horses

 

Enclosed as a bottled essence

each darkness would be equal

 

were it not for such tales

informed by rags and veils

 

 

 

10/12/20

 

A lesson on College Hill

Learn about what a body can do
what cannot be put to paper or to flame
and when to empty the mind like a bin

When full daylight barely lights the Way
there are too many objects
strewn like tumbledown boxes
hovering liquids
talking books

So light
light thing
talk me through
and lighten my way

When all possibilities
will have been
recollected
comprehended
realised and
half forgotten

then
and only then
may the universe sigh
and once again contract


          3.11.14