Contents
The Old Lad
1
Flags and Candles
4
Forty Forty
6
A Play of the Word
7
Cassandra Tells Fortunes
12
Kaspar Hauser
14
Empire State
15
Ariadne to Theseus
16
Love Songs from Plays
18
Contours of Fall
20
Cassandra and the Night Watch
22
Rush
23
Element It Has
24
The Deal
25
One Thousand Nights and Counting
26
Martial Diptych
30
Tale of the Story-of-All-Stories
32
The Fool and She
37
The Tinsel Man
38
Dream-I-Believe
40
Fire Came
41
Rendition
42
The Switch
43
The Execution of Saint-Just at Thermidor
44
Old Smile at the Roast
45
Jones at Jonestown
46
Catworld
48
Cassandra and the King
49
A Walk by the Neva
50
Mandelstam
52
The Shivers
53
It Too Remains
54
All Things Bright
55
Country Birthday
56
Number Three
57
Long Journey
58
Lit Windows
60
Thinking:
Earth 62
Hometown Mystery Cycle
66
Cassandra by the Wall
70
Blues for Cassie
71
Cassandra
72
The Old Lad
I close my eyes and see them waving cloths they found.
Rags and things a thousand feet above the ground.
Making calls they made and saying words they said.
Here comes a girl in red to be the girl in red.
There go the men in shirts. I will not focus in
on any face again and, as I focus in,
arms stretch out as if
There goes the superstar!
I go on trying for years to not know who they are.
Looked for ways to cope with coping with this shit.
Woke up at four, damned if I hadn’t hit on it.
Smiled about it, thing my skull has always done.
United with the old lad, sang in unison.
Felt the soft foam falling from a rigid prow,
gainsaying all there is:
Now don’t you worry now.Couldn’t believe I’d cracked it, like the wide-eyed folk
who think all strangers function as a spy-network
making the stuff that makes the papers. Smiled a smile
beyond belief in presidential-spokesman style.
Ran back and forth a century from ape to ape
to seek what’s
not okay by so sincere a gape . . .
Okay the neighbour’s starving and okay he’s here.
Okay a billion times the bit we gave last year
let’s funnel into rubbish bags and tie the ties.
Okay the trains are pulling out and full of eyes.
Okay to sport a badge, okay to wave a cloth.
Okay some went forever and some won’t sod off.
Okay the ones like Cheney, whom you mustn’t name
and spoil the poem, do the motherfucking same
as ever, and okay the poles to north and south
are vowels: meat and drink and sex to the one mouth
of the only lad, no worries. It is not a smile
that makes you ache. It won’t be over in a while
like mine, but I keep trying. Here it comes again,
and now I’m going to die one day and don’t care when,
why, with whom, or who remembers what I did.
The smile is wide and smaller only than the lid.
Do it in turbulence as well, I’m a total mess,
but beaming like a stewardess at the stewardess,
who learned to do it years ago from her old bones,
and can do it hissing info into hidden phones
when the time comes. I fly the blue Atlantic sky
in my last century and yours and by and by
my eyes are holes, my heart is air, my knuckles shine.
Only God controls the Fasten Seat Belt sign.
It’s all He does. I turn a frail page of grey
and all the news that’s fit to print this Saturday
is printed there this Saturday. The news that’s not,
the old lad’s grinning over in a book he’s got.
He’s pointing out what’s funny and it’s everything.
We’re starting our descent and I am done with him.
Flags and Candles
Flags line up an hour before they’re chosen,
wave back along the row at others like them.
Candles sit in boxes or lie still,
sealed, and each imagines what will happen.
Flags will not accept the explanation
of why they were not needed as they are now.
Candles feel they’re made of stuff that’s soft
for a good cause, though maybe not their own cause.
Tall flags love all flags if it’s their flags.
Small flags are okay about immense flags.
Candles doze in xylophones of colour,
thrilled their purpose may be merely pattern.
Flags are picked out one by one. The others
muster in the gap and say
Gap, what gap?
Candles dream of something that will change them,
that is the making of and death of candles.
Flags don’t dream of anything but more flags.
The wind is blowing; only the landscape changes.
Candles have the ghost of an idea
exactly what the wick is for: they hope so.
Flags have learned you can’t see flags at nighttime,
no way, not even giants in a windstorm.
Candles learn that they may do their damnedest
and go unnoticed even by old candles.
When I wave flags, flags think it’s the world waving
while flags are holding fast. When I light candles,
candles hold the breath that if it came
would kill them; then we tremble like our shadows.
Flags know nothing but they thump all morning.
Candles shed a light and burn to darkness.
Forty Forty
History covered its eyes and counted the way
kids count: getting faster
then slowing to halves, quarters, sixteenths
but nonetheless faster,
faster in words but slower and slower to reach
like Zeno’s arrow,
though finally all the way to some fat figure
ending in zero.
Then History turned and blinked: right there
stood a boy by a hedgerow,
holding his hands to his eyes and saying
I’m coming to get you!And his confidence in a game he had
quite misunderstood
was awful to see and if History didn’t correct him
others would,
so History ventured slowly towards him
and—I don’t know how—
very gently took little hands in big hands and said
hide now. A Play of the Word
Something was done and she ran from a town
and I’m glad it was done or she wouldn’t have come,
but she wouldn’t have gone and she’s long gone now,
so I’m wondering why and remembering how.
Her hair was the various colours of leaves
in the fall in a heap as we watched her asleep
and we stood there like words with the ink still wet,
as reminders of something she’d likely forget,
or read in the morning and scrunch in a ball.
Her eyes were so wide that they had a seaside
and a faraway sail in one eye then the other
till I envied my brother and I’ve not got a brother.
Her mouth had this shape that it made and you can’t,
we tried it all week and our lower lips ached
as we pointed this out and she didn’t know how
she was doing it. I’m sort of doing it now.
Her hands were so delicate delicate things
were careful with them and the length of her arm
was an hour when I saw it at rest on a sill
with a twig in its hand that’s in my hand still.
Her body was everything nobody knew
and discussed in the dark till it wasn’t that dark
but her feet were so callused they made it clear
We two will be getting her out of here.Something was done and she ran from a town
and I’m glad it was done or she wouldn’t have come,
but she wouldn’t have gone and she’s long gone now,
so I’m wondering why and remembering how.
You all have your tales and we too have a tale
in the form of a play that we stage in the day,
it’s a play of the Lord, it’s a play of the Word:
if it had to be written it has to be heard.
And we opened the barn for the costumes and sets
that have always been there and the dust on the air
would set us all sneezing and telling old jokes
of old times and old shows in old years with old folks.
And one was the Maker and one was the Man,
and one was the Angel and one was the Stranger,
and all the old lines were as fresh as cold beer
in a morning in March in that field over there.
But she was so puzzled her mouth did that thing
and her eyes were a mist and her hand was a fist
that she held to her chin till our play was complete.
Then she started to laugh. She was right by that gate.
It isn’t for laughter we play in our show.
It’s not at all funny. It isn’t for money,
it isn’t for love. But she laughed and her eyes
were the fog as it shrugs in the face of sunrise,
and her ribs were the sea in the shirt she wore:
we were sickened to follow its suck and its swell,
she was out of our reach, she had always been,
but that was our choice, if you see what I mean.
Something was done and she ran from a town
and I’m glad it was done or she wouldn’t have come,
but she wouldn’t have gone and she’s long gone now,
so I’m wondering why and remembering how.
Why are you laughing, we wanted to say,
till one of us did and we wanted to hide,
and her glistening eyes had no answer to that,
so we waited like birds for her swallowing throat
to be still and it was, and she stared at the ground
like a book of her own to be counted upon.
Everything here is made out of card.
Take light from the World and you’re left with the Wordwhich she seemed to be trying to show in the dust
as we crowded to see and could never agree
what she said after that—that our Maker was sick
of his Word? That our souls could be drawn with a stick?
That our Man was a rainbow, our Angel should hang?
Or the other way round? But whichever way round
there was nothing to do but the next thing we did,
which was take it in turns to repeat what she said
having tiptoed unnoticed away on our own
to the elders and olders who had to be told
what a creature she was and how little she knew
and how hard she was laughing and what we should do.
But I was among the ones crowding her light
so her shadow was gone but I wasn’t the one
who asked her to tell us what
should have been done,
in a voice with arms folded and uniform on.
Something was done and she ran from a town
and I’m glad it was done or she wouldn’t have come,
but she wouldn’t have gone and she’s long gone now,
so I’m wondering why and remembering how.
And he asked her to say what the Maker
would say
and a few ran away. I did not run away
but I want to have done, so I sit on this gate
where there’s nothing to wait for at all and I wait.
And she looked at who’d said it and looked at who’d not
and she stood and she started to speak from her heart
what the Maker would say. I can say this to you.
For who lives in this shell of a town but we two?
The elders assembled like stones in a boat
but it sailed as it could, while it could, when it could,
and then I saw nothing and now I see all
and I wait and there’s nothing to wait for at all.
And the wind caught the fire with the last of its strength,
the fire they began for what had to be done,
but the fire caught the town and it burned in my eyes
till my eyes were the desert an hour from sunrise.
And I talk of we two, but it’s me on this gate,
with an echo of wind when the song has an end,
but the wind didn’t do what I too didn’t do,
and we won’t breathe a word till there’s reason to.
