White Knight with Beebox

Possum

  There you go, fast in a long swagger,
   cool cat on a hot night,
    impenitent and gleaming.

  You, your siblings, grandes dames of the band,
   slick as spit on brown limbs,
    mount, rear, are flung

  with aplomb against the surly clouds, printing
   claw and brawn on dome and mind,
    your plunge all defiance.

  ‘I can’, your name says in Latin. You do,
   leaving a reek, year by year,
    in my stone tent’s pitch,

  hooking your way by stubs of wire, fleering
   back at a ruckle of twigs, launched
    to bypass rhyme or reason.

  Small clown, prince of the raw, moron
   with blazing eyes, keep watching:
    you are not alone.

Kyrie Eleison

  Father of each, as of all, remember those
  Who are folded between our hills, in a little town
  Stiller, so far (we are grateful) than Bethlehem:
  As, Mr Stabb the butcher; and the tousled boy
  Who sees you into and out of the video store;
  And keepers and pilers of cans in the supermarket;
  And the ancient sweetheart who sold me nineteen volumes
  Of knowledge pruned and compacted, for a song;
  And the moulder of surfboards; the framer of estates
  As things sublime and beautiful; and the girl
  Refreshed in her uncertainty by the boasts
  In gleaming journals; the tugger at lolloping dogs;
  The blethering wiseacre making his point at the pub —
  Same point, same pub, same audience once more;
  And the watchers, reluctant, absorbed, of white nights
  To no imaginable good; and the fishers.
  Be as you must the Lord of living and dead,
  And school us afresh, afresh, in the ways of mercy,
  Who remember a little, and confess that we forget.
 

A is for Apple

A is for apple, the succulent flesh in its ripeness
 hung on the strut between brace and brace:
and E for exertion, its trio of prongs ostentatious,
 ever outreaching, never a face.

I, as it seems, is purely an agent, surveying
 tellurian bands in their novel ways:
O is what happens when eyes and mouth are enlarged,
 fetched to wonder in Earth’s maze.

But as for U, whose beggar’s arms, uplifted,
 offer themselves to scouring time,
nothing is too much trouble, they say, and mean it:
  throw us a reason, we’ll throw you a rhyme.

Dreaming the Bridge

after Claude Oscar Monet, Bridge Over a Pool of Water Lilies,
   1899: oil on canvas

This way the light is all gone and a velvet abyss
opens, you hope, for solace. Darkness
teems with darkness. Something has bundled place
for time to hold, and sent it away.
  You cannot remember your name.

A voice confides that we live in a rainbow of chaos,
its arc a wave in a lost sea:
and you think that you think of words on a warrior’s gate?
‘The world is a bridge: pass over it,
  but never build a house.’

There was a time when mammoths crossed the Seine
as though to pace by Notre Dame
and take the Rue Saint-Jacques: a time for Xerxes
to clog the Hellespont with ships
  and span a way to death:

time for Roman engineers to fling
arch over arch in the Pont du Gard,
holding a cup to the lips of thirsty Nimes:
time for ‘When your enemy flees,
  build him a silver bridge.’

None of them lingers now. Only Monet’s
Japanese bridge, itself the match
of lilied water, air in green array,
earth’s rondure, and for gift
  the mind’s dark fire.

Extract published courtesy of John Leonard Press
© Peter Steele