First Thing from Fairy Castle

“Ah, I live in Mulgrave, not in York,

This drive ends my job.” Peaceable eyes

Alighting on a sky textile grey,

Over the fairy fashioned trees.


A wide house, a tall castle, a white card

To convey place and construe laws of exit.

They dream of Mulgrave, all the wounded kings,

And oligarchs, and, of course, poet snobs,

Like me – it sounded better when he said it –

Our pumpkin rider – “Mulegrave. Muhlgrave. Moolg.”


If it was fairy it was solid, very,

And as you walked upwards, a journey stuck,

And trappings of the south drummed out your legs,

And work extended, though it did not grate,

As if the place made forge-slogging your art.


It did. Because you owned your forge, you were it,

It was, too, what you did. I needed

An essay and a lot of unread dross to classify me,

Like a narrator of Chaucer,

Walked in on Malory.

Ditty on an unread text. To JAY, Muse, was this due...

Judy ain't no saint

No a saint she ain't

Though Renaissance paint

-ers relish her taint


No, she's Old Testament

And chops up a gent

Of Assyrian bent

By his bivouacked tent


Indeed she's a Jew

(Jesus was too)


But he comes later

A Lover, not a Hater

And his poetry's greater

(Worthy of Pater?)

A Cento

As if, on water, that unfocused she

No match lit up, nor drag ever brought near,

In her consists my happiness and thine.

So bide ye in the Maiden Tower,

While others fight for thee.


She is foremost of those I would hear praised,

I will talk no more of books, new faces, other minds.

But o, photography! As no art is,

Faithful. A dream. O light upon the wind.


But in behind our path they closed,

Though fain to let us through. I believe

I heard your master sing – ‘Poor maidy dear!”

They shall be speaking forever,

The people shall hear them forever,


And I murdered William Moore, without the leave of thee,

Her minion-knights, the gong-tormented sea,

It’s not the selfsame bird of columbine,

What’s mine is yours, and what is yours is mine.


[To some extent in order of appearance - Larkin, Shakespeare, traditional, Yeats, Tennyson, Leonard Cohen, Hardy, Joni Mitchell.]

The Catalogue

The light cutter is not usually counted,

The diplomat’s runner, the drape of the raptor,

The shrill of the raptors in diplomats’ rooms.

Seaworthy with her puffed mockery,

Worthy only of green sea, then, but so worthy.


The patroness watched that merchantwoman skip,

And hummed with curled lip about silk bales and mist

Of her power that could propel them.


The first of the kings’ ships is very knowing.

She knows every flaw and beats them all up,

But still doesn’t know what to do

Except lie and laugh on familiar sand

Between spear-carrying jokes…


They view singers with suspicion there, but love them.


That Salamonian ship will, if bound for Troy

For the learning and burning, return via Cyprus,

Then maybe out north, out west, out and crying.

God, they fight as they cry there,

They cry as they dance, shedding what they glug.


Paler sails, darker ropes, and blooded rigging shadow them,

The tearsongs clang on shields of Myrmidons.


Slighter figure, seems much taller, eyes that draw and fillet dolphins,

Smaller number, seems much sharper, voice of murderous melody,

When the Myrmidons are marching, or afloat upon the sea,

See the vanquisher the bearer, see the purer, fairest sins.


See that eye survey the landing – see it see its colleagues slack –

There a king of rapid pity, there giants’ lewd sorority –

See the lip curl on the wine-glee, as hands draw the casket back –

Achilleus, she’ll have none of warming charity.

And the arms of Thetis’ bairn can caress and can convince

And the smile of Thetis’ child congeals as an appeal dies.


True, the train is newly started, and will be unravelled,

In a fit of starts, a route of delays, a slew of necessary songs,

And there will yet come Diomed, and that grey opera-star,

Idomeneo, and Ulysses, she will be quite overbooked,

Small red, long black, Ithaca, London, here

We stay and stay the distance.

The Glum Reply

Indeed you say you’d choose that oyster’s life,

And you mention a crop of things that charmed you

In passing, like the shell-rills and the pearl,

And now assume a tranquil sort of shine

Upon your well-timed slumber.


In doing so you let your lot encumber

Your energy in reaching down to mine,

We have an upstream current too –

Sometimes we’re cornered, we are snagged

In bursts of fits of moving a to b…


Regarding your non-gains, I cannot see

That you’re so short on aspiration – after all

You’ve ordered me. But just in morsel form;

Your passionate passionlessness will yet depart.


And you’re so sure I cannot reel off art,

And only am it? I drive me quite hard,

Hard enough to know what regret is, what work’s not.


You know your way about a wide shore-length

That’s no use to me where I brood my jewel,

Where every image is a sludge of grit,

And one that sphincter-tears and carves in and distorts, mars, sours,

This art that is production, that must be, that pulses me an exact mile

And half from all prodigal’s lies. You and your homage and your…


I can be realist and not be dour,

I can grind through the dirt and shine the more,

I can be pretty but no piece you seek –


You, with your round of boring sparkle, reek,

I don’t dislike you and I’ll hear you out,

But don’t think listening now redeems a thing,

And don’t think my glint isn’t just innate,

Or that your extended and misread splashed

Attempt at sight doesn’t make me more than irked.


The view you shirked,

Like a slept-out lecture – no I don’t play –

And this is what I’ve said before, you know,

I grant you you are near your pile’s

Arid circlet. We will speak again,

But it’s not thinking that you’re well out of now.

The pair of us shall never really talk.