Of moment

Living began as an orderly promise,
contingent on doing, now and then on changing,
feeling a little, rightly not too keenly,
amid unrelated regretted confusions.

Went on into the dark,
prone to trusting; such new jangles eased
by unrulier patterns of nervous engrossment.
A tentative nature snarled up in black thatch.

Till life, like some off-road half-roofless frereche,
demanding in general ways itemised things,
requiring no less than to be kept up somehow
whether or not calmly, seemed navigable.

Perhaps ship-shape - but hard to narrate;
until I knew the meaning of his livelong moment,
that mad unsparing patron of unsteady truth -
Moments - more than a breeze, freshening cold informants

Of the coming of death, and the time when that matters:
No hour of despair, after all; happiness is called that;
Just the line where things happen to inch you along -

where the mind is pressed and that old, dense fog
turns out to be water, to be drunk and swum. 

The Furies

with thanks, tribute and admiration unending to Arabella Currie

I know nine guests, nearer than muses
(yes, a hostage does well to keep playing the host),
languid their pallets, sanguine our wakings, a languini of scallops and losses,
trails come with the dew, flaked skulls gleam, bright moultings,
heady that stew in the air where I've hacked at their licence,

cannot know which or who was the first I caught slouching,
folded away in some grand-mother's pocket,
fending away some slow cousin's advances,
her clear eyes myopic with grit and leftovers and warm itchy nothings.
What was the moment that might have been left there is something I do not care, try, to remember

- unintriguing sins. They are kind to me
who will always come back, if in flight, if misguided, if staring away
to the old Hunter's Tryst where the fewmets are sweetbread.
Purification, high-soundingly Doric
once the figment I fed on myself, I now offer

more than half forgotten, less than barely persuaded,
a pattern of feints and hastily musked covers,
to the Aesir, my patrons, who yet say they love me
in similar steps, waver to resignation,
for they know the signs of the prey of the things they usurped that we might hope for honour by day.

But how can a lover who turned to light opera
not take out that debt at the court of the Night
never to be paid nor repudiated
what to that is thElectoral roll?
I think I have sometimes conceived of a passage, alone, without luggage,

then I pass the stairs where my guest-friends lie,
and sometimes writhe up to revolve spare black tongues,
and their strokes, rendered, feel emollient as stupors,
and their mocking and semblance of singleton's outlines
are gentle and gamey, see off all known faces.

The courts of the morning left for laughing matter
In the shrieks of mendaciously canny red kites
Indifferent to beauty, contemptuous of less;
Their song serving or seeming to scratch out all our tracts
I let myself into whichever the lodgings today's tizzy fixed for the letting of love.