Frostbite

That they were warm once, those feet
That carry you off in the other direction –
Cold, clean, foreshortened kisses (and now you) confirm.

That I have known shivers at hand –
The fear of false judgment, of yet being dulled
I hid from you, uniquely, them, sometimes, me.

That I have alarmed every beacon I had
For less than an acquaintance I will not regret;
There was pleasure there too, every pent upon languish.

That they take you away from the most kindly omens
And prove you to be unidentical with
Some heartening love line – I can’t grudge such feet.

Knowing them to have been warm, once,
With tentative heat.

After Sidney Again

Distracted Nature, idly discontent,
Now minded to undo as to regret,
Tracked down her own back catalogue’s extent,
Her pair of voids still in their fading set.
And as she wondered what she might have meant,
Despite occluded sight, her puzzling let
A watery ray fly from its wonderment:
An indecisive, though a worthy get.
A realisation to reproach the past -
An art to turn the easel, blur the line -
Now animates that accidental cast,
That flighting colour that pens in all mine.
When my thin prism breaks up Sidney’s black,
BELLA’s eyes alter, and then falter back.

Lilac Bicycle

There is a melody among the spheres
A modest and untraceable refrain
That furls itself behind accreting years
And waits to watch morn’s mantle blush again.

There is an elegy beside the grate,
A sense of passing bound up with the heat,
That, all the same, vouchsafes another’s life,
And knows its own rekindling in defeat.

This is a threnody for what there was,
A jubilee for what’s to be instilled,
The memory of some once treasured cause,
E’en now not lost, as much as freshly tilled.

This is the hymn for her who wields the dawn
As her conveyance through a land once lorn.

The Lover Disputes A Journey

My ladyes a-gone to hell
For all that I could say her no,
That summer winds there wax too hot
She swore she were afire to go

“Where better”, sings she “for a ghost
“Than phantom manses for to dwell?”
I told her that her sprite was pale
And that her skin’d be burnt by hell.

I told her that she needed light
Cast by the moon and not the fire
The dampness on the curtain wall
The skull, the tongue and the desire…

She scorned my bones – she spurned my song –
She built her an enchanted craft
Then cast out on the flamed lagoon
Sailed as it blazed from prow to aft

I watch it like a burgeoning star
On its diminished brightening way –
I feel the night air bid me stay –
I’ll follow it yet, howsoe’er far.

Wild Laistrygonians

To want eaglehood is a habit of mind

When you’re voyaging sullen through leaves on the line

But best taken back –

product of the wrong track;

as you watch them in harmony, seeming to breed

Without profit or sepal or interest or seed

Lowlands’ own Air-Triffids, seeming to resent

economic fashions that never quite went

For their certain coming.

If never quite happened,

They remember their slight with their static round cunning,

Systematic when slackened –

The yaws of starfleets obsolescently new

Primed against the dew.

Lamento paternale

C’è la problema d’erudizione
Che dopo il libro sta la decadenza -
Fra eremito Herbert e saggio Spenser
Un letargo attenda coltivazione.
La dilemma rimanga in traduzione
Cossichè invece di meno potenza
Vediamo effetti della circostanza
Un’ ostacolo sempre di creazione.
Il poeta bisogna di traghettatrice
Per lago di filosofia navigare,
Senza volluttuosamente sbagliare
Resistante la cattiva più tentatrice,
E alle ninfe concettuali non dare
Il regalo di qualcosa fatto o fare.

To a good housekeeper

This Glass of Steel unpartially doth show
Abuses all to such as in it look… - SIR WALTER RALEGH

If smelting is an unattractive trade
It’s still of use for tolerance and test
Silver and slag heaped and indifferent laid
Are stratified and sold out or caressed.

Since metallurgy has come on apace
Your table should be dressed in minute care
The kitchen knives kept each their proper space
The armigerous, the cutting and the spare.

And lest you, lady, prick too sharp an edge,
Then tarnish cherished silver with chaste blood
We find in common currency a sledge
Its softer mettle made of metal mud

But not to be employed on holidays
Nor trusted with the whiter company
Of cloth and kindness – above all, always
To be washed up before confectionery.

When steel is doctored it may be misnamed
Stains can be unapparent when no less
Corrosive, and embedded, unashamed,
Blades silted something lowlier than mess.

Well whetted, then, you see off dulled disguise,
Silver knives, lady, brightening your eyes.