Chain Alley/Iffley Road Ballad

What do you fear, my young man and handsome,
Clashing with an engine,
With a nineteen-sixties hardback in your hand?

Sure you fear ink won’t kiss you
They can’t but forget you,
Less than Arnochan’s sixties old tome of your hand.

Further do you fear, o young man and courtly,
So hurrying curtly,
Your substitute scarf round the bones of your neck,

They cannot but scrape such hashed frames of the tarmac,
Where no countenance breathes,
And none can infer your best drape on that neck.

Perhaps you are fearing, straight young man and hurried,
Her wistful judgement,
That she can’t but, while straightening the greyening light

Straiten from her head what might have been as well,
And were you even it,
Youth stiffening from possible light?

Then say for us too that you fear, lorn young man
Lettering services,
How will the wake invitations spill out?

Where will the space be and how firm the driving,
If they shine, will the mourners enshadow your time?
Can a tightrope bloat into a rout?

Don’t dwell in your blood on the fear, good young man
That the devil is idle, as veiled and viled
Indolent, indifferent, and not of your set –

For God will not spare you and no soul will swathe you,
As the driver is cautioned
And self-regard waxes round your heart in jet.

Swan Burning

So splashes can be seamed, and riot
Purely elegant; so discomfited widening
Glances harmonise with wild, ordained wings.
The train-left gelled-out form ennobles water,
Whatever branches snagged flaxed quills.
And other rivery things fear neckpace, or bustle
Dully, surlily, fast, and only
Some slime and weed ties fast in eddies,
With burlesque taste for what is true.

On the bank to keep in sight
You have to mud ankles to face,
Have to slough and fool about and paddle,
In non-change-of-state mirey stuff,
To keep looking at that which is better than solid,
Looks like air and looks at earth,
At you - the hiss hangs in the wet.

And the language is barred,
And the chase is barred,
The bank is discouraged, the forest reserved,
Chopped down forest for Bagehot Queen.

But it crosses the mind with bright surety -
Suppose you rode full princelily, bore on leopards
And lilies 'midst leopards and swans, were named Henry,
Or Edward, or Lionel, or Thomas of Woodstock,
Suppose better you reared your own fledgey throat,
Careered on that richened muck, spoke without words,
Turn away still would she. No nature, no Queen murkifies,

That affair is not banned, but disallowed wholly,
In a sacred and lace disacknowledgement.

'Go, for thy stay, not free, absents thee more'

I now begin to understand the gap between some gaps,
And the way that some are dreared, and others
Can't weigh down at all.

It depends what's being stared at, I think I clock it now,
Like an underbelly dancing on a kitten or the pad
Of a spider in a readverted glass.

And if the grapnel has attached to definite repast
Then a gulf of week or hours is only a varied step,
If the eyes that lit up parting can prolong that mutual suck,
Like a purring Aztec idol licking up obsequined blood,
Then well - but if you look on long at the retreating head
And it sinks in that the head replaced the eyes and will be eve -

Lie through singular warm ages when you needn't quite be there,
More there then than when poising on that farewelled immanence.
If you said in fourteen lifespans you would come straight back for sure,
What a warm-drink haze of waiting could be boiled up and borne.