NIGHT FLOWERS
BY BARRY VAN-ASTEN
2010
The poems in this second collection of verse reflect the darker elements beyond the veil of perception, the ‘midnight blossom’ that seeps into the soul and shapes our sleep. Some of the poems were drafted a decade or more previous to publication and there are a few which were conjured on my journeys through Scotland and Wales while there are others collected from published anthologies. Just as the veil is thin between this world and the next, so is the veil between prose and poetry which runs like a shadowy brook that ‘meanders with antique weariness’ and is easily crossed in places. Poetry is a universal language, the contours of which enhances the spirit and widens our emotions; all poets have a unique voice, yet we must remember, we are merely individual snowflakes in a vast snow-storm!
Barry Van-Asten. London. 2010.
TO AIMEE
It lives and dies - but who can tell
What lease of love life grants us well?
The delicate touch of affection, given
By a pure heart: the light of love, that's driven
In the wonder of soul, with you, in me
And the bloom of love in its infancy.
The rapture; the look of tenderness
Exchanged between us in that kiss!
Your hand in mine, I cannot forget
In an eternity of age and weariness, set
Upon my heart... to glance upon your grace
Where gentle eyes looked long upon your face...
And in the embrace, your lips upon me, fell,
And I reeled in eternity, under your spell!
BIRTHLINES
It is in my mind to be
Rested, in this dark urgency...
Gnarled god of infinite beauty,
With ancient tongue, the hills awake
To nature's call and the season's duty;
To the magic and menace that you make!
And in these things we love the most,
Great beasts of boughs are lost to us.
They wear the darkness like some ghost
That rattles around the rooms of a house.
With their bulged limbs of lump and grot
Deep-twisted through the roll of land;
Green-skirted in your rooted rot:
Horror and history, grooved and grand!
Gorged on darkness, this heart finds
A terrific sadness, deep, that clings...
Death strikes where the river winds
Through a changed landscape that sings
Of experience and gnosis, of hedgerows lost;
Of pathways and barrows and Saxon slain...
To wake the sleeping sylvan ghost
And thunder over mound and hill again!
AT BRECON
In the old ways and the names, have I
Steadfastly learnt to grasp a stone,
Crush it in my palm, and look away;
Away into a past...away into a sky...
But haunted was I by the ghost of a hornet;
The countryside darkness crawled over the deck;
Hidden by trees: the hoot of an owl
Softened our sleep and our dreams were set.
And beside the crushing Usk's mighty flow,
We slept, to rural music and witchcraft's call;
A ritual on the water as the boat gently swayed
To a landscape known by the Roman, long ago!
The stars told their own story, by darkened bowers;
A mythical grandeur struck retina and nerve;
Blood swelled to the time-aged rhythms, we knew,
And a Carpathian of longing for that time was ours.
And I shall return, to the place, one day,
And look upon each stone and lament;
Lament for the passing of all sacred things,
And the dear ones we love, that pass away.
CHALK GRASSLANDS
The day wheel turns – the air is ringed
And teeth of dark assembly grow;
Her flesh lawned in sunned ecstasy,
Sipped and sweetened by geological rage.
The night holds the riddle of enchantment:
Marjoram, wild thyme, early gentian… time rolls
The nerve system, jerked into existence
By the mode of the mind, sublime…
A moon-gulf of wisdom approaches
Like an engine of tears on the wane;
Eyebright – the ghost song’s arising
In the tor-grass, on the hills again…
And the dead they are here, they are cheering,
They come, as lights across a distant port;
Dull with death, and enthralling,
The embers of their thought, console me,
And retain a sense, a deviant call
Where the heart, vacated in heat
Is lifted to the contours of magical thought –
A voice – the brain’s delusion in regret!
The stars, they are laughing, above us
And seem to know, we’re here;
In the planes of new life, young seed
Where darkness holds the animated spirit…
Wild rabbits tunnel the chalk…
Speeds across the heath
And hides in the flowering undergrowth
From the ever-hungry beak!
Thoughts elevated in soft song,
Thistle-mown: the furrows shall remain;
Where stone curlew and Adonis blue
Sometimes measure and haunt the chalk hills, again.
SPRING EQUINOX
You have looked into the dawn, my love,
To see a string of black bound pearls -
Fragments from the darkened tide
To muse upon the world!
From the window's shifting menace,
A storm has come to pass...
Sometimes a terrible guardian
In the shape of Briareus;
Sometimes a sleepless wanderer
In the pallor of Saint Alastor...
Yet, the park, fresh with snowdrops,
Is also as dead as you are!
And your lips, red and eager,
Spun of gossamer glass -
Do you feel the sea wind's salty
Corrosive whispers pass
Beyond the darkness, sleep of death,
Over sea-world's gleaming?
A rich meadow of love is upon us,
Where stars are born of dreaming!
TO FOYERS
By the Loch, the dead lie easy,
Masked by the veil of world's clay;
Eternally thrown to strange spaces
In the mists of hearts gushing away;
Away into a stone enclosure
For all time to stand and declare -
In the madness of the moon that outshines me,
An ogre of enchantment lies there.
And the great pagan gods of old
Shall tremble at the dark storm's force
That shakes through the woods and the hills,
To pulse with the waters course.
Yet what menace of years still haunts?
What elements of ritual press near?
The pilgrim journeys far, and strays
For something evoked and eternal lies here.
And those eyes peer from the shore
To thunder through ruins and roll
Onwards, into after-realms, and fall
Like a great beast at the brute of the soul.
And I will build you a garden
Out of ivory and stone,
By the meandering shores of Loch Ness,
For love and legend and time gone!
[Loch Ness]
THE TOTEM ELECT
Under the steed breath and warlock eyes,
His granite stare lifts a Canterbury miracle
And a death... Lips like a drained lake, reveals
A winding path amidst the sunken graves...
The thump, thump of hideous thought
In gloomy gardens... violated remains
Castrated to the crack of horse hooves,
To jab like wax-work, and become
Insane at some vile ache of time.
And at the summit of imagination -
Black angry marks; a widow's tongue
Cuts like some cancer through the heart,
Snorting at pantry fever and kitchen dust.
While above the tree-tops, from a steeple
Swooped a raven, thrashing low
Over columns and pillars, to the waterside
Where it earthed with ineffable joy,
And placed itself upon a pendant.
Here it wove for a thousand years:
Dreams and domes and all things lost;
All things smothered in their prime
By twilights charging at dawns...
Some dead foetus tumbled down
From out of the summer lightning;
Performing staggering etudes
In its unsteady playing.
An idea came to me:
Why not show it life?
I'll take it to the idol room
And breathe into it, intellect!
HAM HOUSE
Death in Tunbridge Wells - 1682;
Its unbolted memory has never left these walls.
And its iron ghost climbs down the centuries, and walks,
To rattle, blundering through our thoughtless days now.
This is a house of dignity, a sombre war horse
Poised on the edge of its stately decline:
A mummified relic of the seventeenth century,
Swallowing modern age; force fed with our time.
Autumn has bludgeoned in, finding its way
Between the locked gates and the rusted rails;
Unfolding before me in this strange light,
Hidden from searching eyes, lost in the maze;
Unattended and overgrown behind the gateway,
Forgotten and spiralling out beyond control.
Yet in the moonlight, chambers grind
To their passion-filled decline.
And through panelled rooms, she'll walk tonight
And enter the Great Hall in her phantom glide;
Winding towards the Great Stair and the chapel door
That's thick with each season's remembrance that dies.
Misshapen trees slant from the house, listening
For the sledgehammer thud of Victorian whispers
Among the flower beds and spread boughs that
Still harbour the thumping crimes of yesteryear.
An aeroplane breaks the still and desperate air
And a seated girl springs to her feet again,
To push her lawn mower over the wide sweep
Of tree-shadowed expansive ruin before her.
The carved busts in the brick walls groan and grin
Over the East Front's low shrubs and hedgerows,
Listening to the barbarous hum of twentieth-century:
A whirring mower; a plane in the distance that fades,
Where perhaps once a strummed lute was the only
Sound heard to the faint crackle of fireplaces in rooms!
Clocks for ever ticking - guests talking...
While all around is the slow crumbling and
Shutting down and boarding up of interiors.
Here, some suicide has scratched his name
On the library window pane: John...tun 1780,
(He jumped to his death at the age of seventeen).
A gentle breeze blows between the boughs;
A wheel barrow is pushed by a girl in overalls.
The sun behind a cloud, white and grey,
Looks towards the horror of the house again
Kept from its natural decay; clambering
And stuttering through present time
And sad for the sleep of eternity.
[South Front Terrace: 22nd October 1996]
AUREAE ROSAE -
THE HEART'S SADNESS
Listen! For the heart no more sings with time
As the wind drums it's hollow dreams in chain...
It is the heart that seeks it's joy in pain;
Perfected in darkness, to fall in its prime!
And now, wasted between ourselves, I sigh
For time turned back and those things, now past;
Where a tedious curse in the heart was cast
Upon one who lingers in days gone by,
To mirror the wonder of all, and see
The sorrows of dreaming that I embrace...
And still those eyes leave their awful trace,
Where things unsaid, remain: I'll return, maybe...
But I cannot comprehend those cold eyes now
That kept me from the world I used to know.
And I knew nothing of love's ways, or its pain,
Pursuing by degrees where passions flow
Into the changed worn ways of long ago;
Into the eternal ache of emptiness again!
And the rose hath long wound it's frail wanderings
Through the dark dimensions and the lonesome night;
Stronger than the stars and the charmed moonlight,
To fathom the beauty found in all things.
But those lips of unwritten time shall fade;
Fade strange, in the endless curve and strain
Of other lips, in other ways, to fall lifeless again!
But between the risen art and this slain shade
Are meanings to things in which I care:
I sought love in sadness and never found it there!
And I'll turn away from the songs of love, I said.
When innocence falls, my heart shall follow
The dread whisper of betrayal, and tread
The dawn of desire...this rosy globe of sorrow,
To rest among the weeping rushes, calling:
Who is passing? Who leaves the dark silence there?
Who steps between the scented blossoms falling?
But I'll find no voice returning on the air.
And with ribbons in the wind, I will sow her name
That the heart's sadness shall bud and bloom in beauty.
I shall wander far and wide, with this accursed shame
That dared to keep me from love's mystery.
And in turning from life's pure ways, an eternity
Of shadows and what could have been, eluding me!
O flower of inevitability, I now see beyond
The dark continents of your tender kiss,
Where more is lost between the light and this
Utter nothingness that I cannot understand.
But what blissful past returns again to weep
Like some cathedral ghost, outside time?
This triple-throated scribe of love's pantomime
Is time's honoured maid in the regions of sleep.
And the hollow tapping’s of a God, still shakes
At the memory of love, thrown into sorrow,
When I would to her sweet lips, softly go...
Yet what rage grinds against the soul, and wakes
The pitiful heart without her touch,
That given would have meant so much?
LEANDER
Down below the waves that keep
My restless heart so incomplete;
Wet with kisses from the deep:
Swim with monster fuel, my sweet,
Through the blue energy of aqua-sleep -
Drawn by darkness and defeat!
Let the pearly chambers of your heart be still -
Caress the cool suspension of liquid blue,
Where the dead dance by a dim lit oracle...
A brain burst of baptism shall subdue
And kiss the dark reaches of worlds that chill
The soul that's cleansed and born anew!
And in submerged sensuality, she
Is leaving her dread decline;
Under the rolling, galleon-haunted sea,
By the light of an incandescent shrine;
Under the water's dorsal-finned beauty
Beneath the black bewitching brine!
DEATH OF MR BARRY PHILIP VAN-ASTEN 1969-2009
A biblical wind opened out
A track way from the heart that passes
Through a mind mapped by science and doubt -
His life was all acids and gases,
And Dante and Chaucer and churches
And old books and nettles and thunder
And teapots and ghosts and strange forces:
Froebel fellow... laird something or other...
And numbers and hills and dark places
And rivers and Shakespeare and stone
And legs and eyelashes and faces
And death and bird-song and bone...
A man of great thought there's no doubt -
At sunset he peacocked with ease;
A mind switched by solids and salt;
A poet and painter of dreams.
But bored at the prospect of life -
He absorbed knowledge forbidden by time:
His love was a cascade of failed rites
Crucified in their prime.
And with a handful of secrets and songs,
Torment was damned to his knees;
He thumbed for the meaning of love
As he unstitched his heart at the seams.
THE ALIEN BROOK
Dark continent of reeds
Where a mythical world unwinds;
Sunrise stirruped to its mystery, broad,
And the jasmined heart in decline.
An echo of time, repeats and runs
Through meadow's dwindled pulse, and blood
Booms in veins, where hornbeam and ash
Reclaim a dead fox with its hunting claw.
Stood, as stranger, though always touched
Veiled glamour of long ago - I'll retain
A memory of this evening, between us,
Immersed in magic... sleep shall flow
Through Tudor brain, moon-milled by woods
Beneath a bat-black oppressive sky,
Purposeless over pebbles now, its course
Meanders with antique weariness,
To sigh, where owl-haunted beauty persists
Between star and steeple - a steady pace
In blankets of twilight - the heart beats
To an ancient song, sung far away.
HER WITCHCRAFT
All this artful energy is divine, and legend -
Never a watched moment lost in tenderness;
Never the ghostly whisper of your gentle kiss,
Always the sweet surrender of the damned!
Look! Our frail past eclipsed by time;
Our meanings shouldered far away...they grew
Under our heartache, pushed past their prime...
Inside, I knew, that fateful day, I knew
Something stupid was summoned which closed our eyes;
Eyes drawn by exhaustion at the dread end game,
Making no sense at the mountain growth of lies...
And in this, I carefully erased your sacred name:
You have drowned me in your crafted world of pagan joys!
THE BIRTH OF PAN
This earth calamity;
This new-born man:
Short on form, long on reason...
At the coming of the Golden Dawn
Wood whisperings reveal: Great Pan is born!
Born into a world absorbed by war
Where darkness is thy maiden whore!
And at the fount of our man-god, take
This treacherous rot of globe and make
A Kingdom, wonderful with gold
And goat-god lust both brave and bold:
Awake! Masturbating man of old!
This root of life;
This earthward bowel:
This token charmed from midnight foul!
Here, vomit up your history
To see the scum of Sodom pouring forth,
From the night to light this mystery;
Where loathsome is the flesh within
The sanctity of salvation's throne,
To reveal a great god, shook from dust;
His thighs thick with honey lust:
Mad, for the passion-bashed clitoris of fire
Where his seed shall flow and never tire
In the endless gash of mortal desire!
ON HAMPSTEAD HEATH
Man of earth - titans and wraith stones;
Dwarfed by hornbeam, alder and ash...
Acorn jewelled moss paths, bluebells and nettles;
Dark places of anemone and dead man's rot.
Songs of grass: the honey-haunt of weeds,
Shaken in shafts as shadows darken
And sink beneath a bridge.
The lakeside strangeness had disappeared
And seemed less strange, somehow...
The chalk bricks, white as maiden bones
Stood weary, turned on time... Green pools,
Poppy-bruised, where the corpse of years remains...
And here, the dead where pathways cross
Reach from roots and ground elder stems;
Hoof-thuds vanish down a winding track and
Ale-exulted blood still courses through the wood.
The oaken brain, like a steel box, contains
The dream of history, grown dim and flowing
To the magic and menace of reeds by night
And lips of twilight found me there.
LINES UPON A PORTRAIT OF MR EDWARD ALEXANDER CROWLEY
Lion, you fix your stare upon your prey
And sit, as some oyster-gorged demi-god;
With eyes like Death's nostrils, smoking hate,
And your fingers manicured like vampire stakes.
Dreamer of discord and demons and darkness -
Confuser of hearts and sex: you sit
Like a bow-tied Osiris, adrift in the tomb,
With a brain full of chess nonsense...
And the menace of Choronzon's distant star
Penetrates beyond the confines of mind,
Bent with hunger, the soul assumes
A persistence of darkness that remains
As you stagger shaven-headed into the unknown -
Nosferatu bringing pestilence from afar...
And in old age - a portly Pan
Sipping Cognac at the Cafe Royal,
Manipulating forces around you
With simple gestures and words of power.
And his eyes through winding pipe smoke glare
As death flowers, amidst the stones,
Dark with pagan poetry... Flames
Toast his solemn heart... He comes
Like a huge bulk of Godhood, summoned
To the enchanted scent of flesh and song!
And in your defence, Monsieur Beast,
A sigh of surety and relief,
Handed down and placed in hearts -
A kiss from Kingdoms great and far:
A law unto our lovely star
And a dream of love for who we are!
Sat like Satan in your Trinity room -
Great Beast of your mother - Leamington man!
Lilith-scented, you huffed and you puffed
Through the galaxies of faith and waste;
Through the gardens of the damned
And every haunted place... But
What was said? What bombs of wit
Were delivered before the camera click?
With your sails full, you were unstoppable,
Crossing continents... a cocaine colossus
Who had outgrown the human, and known
The habitation of the Gods, and what they are.
But the human lingered still, and sat
Heavy with its failures on your brow -
And now, what man of iron will shall come
To watch over the aeon, and sing
A lament for the World Ash, wonder sap?
A song of all time, to bring
A light from afar, to worship still -
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
Love is the law, love under will.
AT THE SHRINE TOMB OF BISHOP OSMUND
Constant love shall idly wait
Like a ghost within the wings,
To seize upon some tragic fate
That the sore heart brings.
Born upon the balmy air...
I know that thy soft tread is near,
In gold and silver curls, so fair,
By dreams that swiftly bring thee here.
Through tangled woods and phantom dells
Where you walked in blush and gloom;
Forlorn to the darkened world, that tells
How sweet the love that haunts the tomb.
And like a ghost within the wings
That tears the world asunder,
Are we to see what change it brings
When mirrored to your wonder?
But now I see the snowy drift
Of roses kept from bloodless lips;
I see how oft' your name can shift
Towards intelligence, that slips
From Heaven's grandeur, where passions play
Upon my heart, and found it so
Rich in madness - sleep shall slay
The shades of day that come and go!
The spectre prompts - I hear your name,
And I, with all my soul, stand by,
To play my part in the scene of shame
Where two doomed lovers in arms, must die!
Where evening fades and heart's refrain
On those who care to love thee more.
I would, but for doubt and greater pain
Of broken heart, on thee, implore
That I, in solemn mood of night
Could not foretell thy ills of mind;
For my soul aches by pale moonlight-
Beams that cannot be defined!
And yet, shall twilight seem the same
That sinks to the splendid strain of day?
Or the dying notes of your whispered name
Recall to me your pensive way?
No, not to the day, shall I stare,
Nor to those soft lips look for fate...
The curtain falls like some dread nightmare
Upon a world where love was too late!
[Salisbury Cathedral: 28th August 2009]
TROUBLED BY TIME
To the memory of A. E. Housman.
Born, in the year of Darwin's 'Origin',
Where secret worlds of unrest grow;
His inward lips were tenderly pressed
Over the lines of Juvenal.
His passion: silent - humanity's ache
Under the touch, lies far away...
And in the night, there is no sleep
To stamp over the angles of each day.
Words lived, yet he was dead,
Caught in a season's oblivion.
His sombre thoughts were all but lost
On boys to which the war had won!
Ballad-whistling, yet still no-one,
For he would not stay...
His spy-hole on the liturgy,
Kept like photos locked away!
Now, he is going into rooms
Where his heart lies with the dead;
His romance found in Latin graves, and
All that need be known - was said!
Not wanting to remain, no,
Our poet-scholar built a tomb -
A small wound bleeds his sex away,
To flow like wine in printing bloom.
But how could a passing flower give
Life to old bones and dust,
When sorrow thought it fit to stay
And cauterize his lust?
AT HILLTOP
Sun-ringed, day of June - foxglove and mint;
A secret place where beanpoles rise
Like antennae towards blue space,
Beyond the bee-hum and the gooseberry...
And there, the rose-way into rooms
That yawn, dark, worm-weathered beams,
Are dead of dust and comfort now!
I felt a compulsion, an intense need to touch
All the fireplaces in the house;
The hearth, being that magical portal
Where the hours and world and time, passed
Into the realms of long ago, scented by honeysuckle.
And your bed, demure, covered in Edwardian propriety -
I heard, your sighs almost lift the wallpaper, again.
And in the garden - strawberries and rhubarb...
A pathway through the raspberries, winds,
Vortex-like, to the lantern sway
Of peonies, lupins, and poppies...
And at the sound of sheep, I felt the need
To take a small stone from beside the gate!
But how dark those rooms that contained
The ritual of creation and moth-mooned lore,
Over interiors of wasp-windowed witchery, where
Gentle eyes peer from a forgotten modesty
Like ink wells under candle light,
That can say nothing, anymore!
WHITE NETTLE
I looked upon a rose, and saw
The gothic-lipped mist of evening
Kiss each petal beneath a summer moon,
In the dark-time brush of the woods.
And ghosts and magic filled the air
Like cinnamon to the nose, and
Those I used to know came by
To see me standing all alone
Between moon dew and black boughs,
Tracing my shadow's outline
Amongst dogweed and wild garlic.
Yes, the woods in May were fragrant,
The oaks and the birches, all stood,
Breeze-born and stupendous,
Weathered by elements and time.
But my love is a mythical witch,
Typhooning from the North,
Bound for the cruel starry gloom
And the endless abodes of night.
THIS ULYSSES
This angry fellowship of the heart;
This dark seasoned spell, that dams
The flow of love's beauty, and fades
Beyond the enchanted reach of the stars...
And the touch of long ago, still haunts
Like a kiss in darkness, to remain;
An echo of this constant growth
That cannot truly live or die.
O lover, my demon sigh of despair;
My noble god of limitless soul
Who sings and slumbers in the mortal brain -
Strong in spirit and arm; gentle of mind...
But in me there is some whispering dread
That keeps me at its side, always,
To watch in the hollows, and handsome, hide
A memory of love on these dead lips of mine;
Dead as the passion that bloomed in youth,
To look, Calypso-eyed upon love and grow;
A love unmoved in every mood - I go,
Into a dream that I cannot change!
IN WAKE WOODS
Those seven ages of man, look upon
The star-bashed solemnity, and give ease
As the sky trembles to a canopy
Of ancient trees - the shire-sturdy oak.
Where I in all my moods of change
Could not look upon those sad-haunted woods
Or feel the mild February rain
Fall with secrets, never mine.
Where a time echoes to the muse of life
That dwells where hearts hurt, and scare
The impassioned soul of girl-turning-woman
To remain at her shaped idyll, once more.
Shadows are pulled by the light and the dark -
Spring soothes in avenues, to red campion, flows
As the woods ache with old anger, to unfold
With light in the bee-drone, and valerian.
A mist is upon me... if lips had met -
Silvery-wet, and softly painted
To tortures of the heart's distress
And a love no longer there, nor true.
An innocence lost, now masked by shade
Where the ceremony of death, stains
And lingers dreadful beneath the moon
That the inmost eye too soon, should sail.
Pale Will, with his myriad lines
Shows how little times have changed
In matters of the heart, for love
Is death, un-measured, destroyed by word!
Black cedar, where you stretch and twist -
The rhythm of the woods can never catch
That firing stem, that growing bud
That circles the aged wood... a glimpse
Of foxglove and betony twined - a link
Where the burnt mounds lie hushed in sleep;
A sleep of sun-dappled paths, that hold
Things in which we care to remember, no more.
And the brush and the birdsong, did give way
To the call of the beasts at eventide
That echoed like the twinkle of Iscariot's feet
With each step a betrayal... But night nears
And moonlit pools like phosphor pits
Plop to the falling of decay and death;
The bulge and bloat of boughs, creak
An unearthly music, cloaked by night.
The hunger and harmony of woods, are shown;
Its bluebelled sanctuary - a mad things delight!
That thunderous mill pond, in the rain;
The crossing of footpaths like words that wind
Between blackened mounds and mud-filled hollows,
With the beat of roots, below each step.
Let the clouds gather, grow dark and brood
Over the mill water, turning the reeds.
Birds now fill the vacant space, where
The grinding of wheels and great sluices were heard:
A haven of a time when the wood was worked
And horses stamped the long days away.
But how I have left those tearful woods;
Left those trees and buds, to walk
With lips aflame and tormented heart -
Eyes like death's-heads in the dark,
And the fourteenth day of that dread month
Left me, haunted in those hushed groves.
A wind in the musk mallow, shrieks,
The forked path, shrouded in mist,
Glides in veils over columbine
Like wisps of history that won't be lost.
The dark boughs beneath the shade
Twist towards the light - they move,
Beneath willow eaves, water tracks glisten
As something fearful and ancient,
Through the old wood crawls.
The witch-o'-the woods, still
Dark and autumnal as the mill;
A ring of reeds, shadows the pond;
Rustle in the breeze, they sing
A language lost to us, and strange.
Roots, tugging at the river's roll
Where life flows throughout the wood.
Iris, violet and sorrel, sway
Beyond clumps and the bosky bole, towards
The scent-filled serenity of the daisy-glade,
Where dwindling red was overcome
By grey - they are long gone!
It lives and dies - but who can tell
What lease of love life grants us well?
The delicate touch of affection, given
By a pure heart: the light of love, that's driven
In the wonder of soul, with you, in me
And the bloom of love in its infancy.
The rapture; the look of tenderness
Exchanged between us in that kiss!
Your hand in mine, I cannot forget
In an eternity of age and weariness, set
Upon my heart... to glance upon your grace
Where gentle eyes looked long upon your face...
And in the embrace, your lips upon me, fell,
And I reeled in eternity, under your spell!
BIRTHLINES
It is in my mind to be
Rested, in this dark urgency...
Gnarled god of infinite beauty,
With ancient tongue, the hills awake
To nature's call and the season's duty;
To the magic and menace that you make!
And in these things we love the most,
Great beasts of boughs are lost to us.
They wear the darkness like some ghost
That rattles around the rooms of a house.
With their bulged limbs of lump and grot
Deep-twisted through the roll of land;
Green-skirted in your rooted rot:
Horror and history, grooved and grand!
Gorged on darkness, this heart finds
A terrific sadness, deep, that clings...
Death strikes where the river winds
Through a changed landscape that sings
Of experience and gnosis, of hedgerows lost;
Of pathways and barrows and Saxon slain...
To wake the sleeping sylvan ghost
And thunder over mound and hill again!
AT BRECON
In the old ways and the names, have I
Steadfastly learnt to grasp a stone,
Crush it in my palm, and look away;
Away into a past...away into a sky...
But haunted was I by the ghost of a hornet;
The countryside darkness crawled over the deck;
Hidden by trees: the hoot of an owl
Softened our sleep and our dreams were set.
And beside the crushing Usk's mighty flow,
We slept, to rural music and witchcraft's call;
A ritual on the water as the boat gently swayed
To a landscape known by the Roman, long ago!
The stars told their own story, by darkened bowers;
A mythical grandeur struck retina and nerve;
Blood swelled to the time-aged rhythms, we knew,
And a Carpathian of longing for that time was ours.
And I shall return, to the place, one day,
And look upon each stone and lament;
Lament for the passing of all sacred things,
And the dear ones we love, that pass away.
CHALK GRASSLANDS
The day wheel turns – the air is ringed
And teeth of dark assembly grow;
Her flesh lawned in sunned ecstasy,
Sipped and sweetened by geological rage.
The night holds the riddle of enchantment:
Marjoram, wild thyme, early gentian… time rolls
The nerve system, jerked into existence
By the mode of the mind, sublime…
A moon-gulf of wisdom approaches
Like an engine of tears on the wane;
Eyebright – the ghost song’s arising
In the tor-grass, on the hills again…
And the dead they are here, they are cheering,
They come, as lights across a distant port;
Dull with death, and enthralling,
The embers of their thought, console me,
And retain a sense, a deviant call
Where the heart, vacated in heat
Is lifted to the contours of magical thought –
A voice – the brain’s delusion in regret!
The stars, they are laughing, above us
And seem to know, we’re here;
In the planes of new life, young seed
Where darkness holds the animated spirit…
Wild rabbits tunnel the chalk…
Speeds across the heath
And hides in the flowering undergrowth
From the ever-hungry beak!
Thoughts elevated in soft song,
Thistle-mown: the furrows shall remain;
Where stone curlew and Adonis blue
Sometimes measure and haunt the chalk hills, again.
SPRING EQUINOX
You have looked into the dawn, my love,
To see a string of black bound pearls -
Fragments from the darkened tide
To muse upon the world!
From the window's shifting menace,
A storm has come to pass...
Sometimes a terrible guardian
In the shape of Briareus;
Sometimes a sleepless wanderer
In the pallor of Saint Alastor...
Yet, the park, fresh with snowdrops,
Is also as dead as you are!
And your lips, red and eager,
Spun of gossamer glass -
Do you feel the sea wind's salty
Corrosive whispers pass
Beyond the darkness, sleep of death,
Over sea-world's gleaming?
A rich meadow of love is upon us,
Where stars are born of dreaming!
TO FOYERS
By the Loch, the dead lie easy,
Masked by the veil of world's clay;
Eternally thrown to strange spaces
In the mists of hearts gushing away;
Away into a stone enclosure
For all time to stand and declare -
In the madness of the moon that outshines me,
An ogre of enchantment lies there.
And the great pagan gods of old
Shall tremble at the dark storm's force
That shakes through the woods and the hills,
To pulse with the waters course.
Yet what menace of years still haunts?
What elements of ritual press near?
The pilgrim journeys far, and strays
For something evoked and eternal lies here.
And those eyes peer from the shore
To thunder through ruins and roll
Onwards, into after-realms, and fall
Like a great beast at the brute of the soul.
And I will build you a garden
Out of ivory and stone,
By the meandering shores of Loch Ness,
For love and legend and time gone!
[Loch Ness]
THE TOTEM ELECT
Under the steed breath and warlock eyes,
His granite stare lifts a Canterbury miracle
And a death... Lips like a drained lake, reveals
A winding path amidst the sunken graves...
The thump, thump of hideous thought
In gloomy gardens... violated remains
Castrated to the crack of horse hooves,
To jab like wax-work, and become
Insane at some vile ache of time.
And at the summit of imagination -
Black angry marks; a widow's tongue
Cuts like some cancer through the heart,
Snorting at pantry fever and kitchen dust.
While above the tree-tops, from a steeple
Swooped a raven, thrashing low
Over columns and pillars, to the waterside
Where it earthed with ineffable joy,
And placed itself upon a pendant.
Here it wove for a thousand years:
Dreams and domes and all things lost;
All things smothered in their prime
By twilights charging at dawns...
Some dead foetus tumbled down
From out of the summer lightning;
Performing staggering etudes
In its unsteady playing.
An idea came to me:
Why not show it life?
I'll take it to the idol room
And breathe into it, intellect!
HAM HOUSE
Death in Tunbridge Wells - 1682;
Its unbolted memory has never left these walls.
And its iron ghost climbs down the centuries, and walks,
To rattle, blundering through our thoughtless days now.
This is a house of dignity, a sombre war horse
Poised on the edge of its stately decline:
A mummified relic of the seventeenth century,
Swallowing modern age; force fed with our time.
Autumn has bludgeoned in, finding its way
Between the locked gates and the rusted rails;
Unfolding before me in this strange light,
Hidden from searching eyes, lost in the maze;
Unattended and overgrown behind the gateway,
Forgotten and spiralling out beyond control.
Yet in the moonlight, chambers grind
To their passion-filled decline.
And through panelled rooms, she'll walk tonight
And enter the Great Hall in her phantom glide;
Winding towards the Great Stair and the chapel door
That's thick with each season's remembrance that dies.
Misshapen trees slant from the house, listening
For the sledgehammer thud of Victorian whispers
Among the flower beds and spread boughs that
Still harbour the thumping crimes of yesteryear.
An aeroplane breaks the still and desperate air
And a seated girl springs to her feet again,
To push her lawn mower over the wide sweep
Of tree-shadowed expansive ruin before her.
The carved busts in the brick walls groan and grin
Over the East Front's low shrubs and hedgerows,
Listening to the barbarous hum of twentieth-century:
A whirring mower; a plane in the distance that fades,
Where perhaps once a strummed lute was the only
Sound heard to the faint crackle of fireplaces in rooms!
Clocks for ever ticking - guests talking...
While all around is the slow crumbling and
Shutting down and boarding up of interiors.
Here, some suicide has scratched his name
On the library window pane: John...tun 1780,
(He jumped to his death at the age of seventeen).
A gentle breeze blows between the boughs;
A wheel barrow is pushed by a girl in overalls.
The sun behind a cloud, white and grey,
Looks towards the horror of the house again
Kept from its natural decay; clambering
And stuttering through present time
And sad for the sleep of eternity.
[South Front Terrace: 22nd October 1996]
AUREAE ROSAE -
THE HEART'S SADNESS
Listen! For the heart no more sings with time
As the wind drums it's hollow dreams in chain...
It is the heart that seeks it's joy in pain;
Perfected in darkness, to fall in its prime!
And now, wasted between ourselves, I sigh
For time turned back and those things, now past;
Where a tedious curse in the heart was cast
Upon one who lingers in days gone by,
To mirror the wonder of all, and see
The sorrows of dreaming that I embrace...
And still those eyes leave their awful trace,
Where things unsaid, remain: I'll return, maybe...
But I cannot comprehend those cold eyes now
That kept me from the world I used to know.
And I knew nothing of love's ways, or its pain,
Pursuing by degrees where passions flow
Into the changed worn ways of long ago;
Into the eternal ache of emptiness again!
And the rose hath long wound it's frail wanderings
Through the dark dimensions and the lonesome night;
Stronger than the stars and the charmed moonlight,
To fathom the beauty found in all things.
But those lips of unwritten time shall fade;
Fade strange, in the endless curve and strain
Of other lips, in other ways, to fall lifeless again!
But between the risen art and this slain shade
Are meanings to things in which I care:
I sought love in sadness and never found it there!
And I'll turn away from the songs of love, I said.
When innocence falls, my heart shall follow
The dread whisper of betrayal, and tread
The dawn of desire...this rosy globe of sorrow,
To rest among the weeping rushes, calling:
Who is passing? Who leaves the dark silence there?
Who steps between the scented blossoms falling?
But I'll find no voice returning on the air.
And with ribbons in the wind, I will sow her name
That the heart's sadness shall bud and bloom in beauty.
I shall wander far and wide, with this accursed shame
That dared to keep me from love's mystery.
And in turning from life's pure ways, an eternity
Of shadows and what could have been, eluding me!
O flower of inevitability, I now see beyond
The dark continents of your tender kiss,
Where more is lost between the light and this
Utter nothingness that I cannot understand.
But what blissful past returns again to weep
Like some cathedral ghost, outside time?
This triple-throated scribe of love's pantomime
Is time's honoured maid in the regions of sleep.
And the hollow tapping’s of a God, still shakes
At the memory of love, thrown into sorrow,
When I would to her sweet lips, softly go...
Yet what rage grinds against the soul, and wakes
The pitiful heart without her touch,
That given would have meant so much?
LEANDER
Down below the waves that keep
My restless heart so incomplete;
Wet with kisses from the deep:
Swim with monster fuel, my sweet,
Through the blue energy of aqua-sleep -
Drawn by darkness and defeat!
Let the pearly chambers of your heart be still -
Caress the cool suspension of liquid blue,
Where the dead dance by a dim lit oracle...
A brain burst of baptism shall subdue
And kiss the dark reaches of worlds that chill
The soul that's cleansed and born anew!
And in submerged sensuality, she
Is leaving her dread decline;
Under the rolling, galleon-haunted sea,
By the light of an incandescent shrine;
Under the water's dorsal-finned beauty
Beneath the black bewitching brine!
DEATH OF MR BARRY PHILIP VAN-ASTEN 1969-2009
A biblical wind opened out
A track way from the heart that passes
Through a mind mapped by science and doubt -
His life was all acids and gases,
And Dante and Chaucer and churches
And old books and nettles and thunder
And teapots and ghosts and strange forces:
Froebel fellow... laird something or other...
And numbers and hills and dark places
And rivers and Shakespeare and stone
And legs and eyelashes and faces
And death and bird-song and bone...
A man of great thought there's no doubt -
At sunset he peacocked with ease;
A mind switched by solids and salt;
A poet and painter of dreams.
But bored at the prospect of life -
He absorbed knowledge forbidden by time:
His love was a cascade of failed rites
Crucified in their prime.
And with a handful of secrets and songs,
Torment was damned to his knees;
He thumbed for the meaning of love
As he unstitched his heart at the seams.
THE ALIEN BROOK
Dark continent of reeds
Where a mythical world unwinds;
Sunrise stirruped to its mystery, broad,
And the jasmined heart in decline.
An echo of time, repeats and runs
Through meadow's dwindled pulse, and blood
Booms in veins, where hornbeam and ash
Reclaim a dead fox with its hunting claw.
Stood, as stranger, though always touched
Veiled glamour of long ago - I'll retain
A memory of this evening, between us,
Immersed in magic... sleep shall flow
Through Tudor brain, moon-milled by woods
Beneath a bat-black oppressive sky,
Purposeless over pebbles now, its course
Meanders with antique weariness,
To sigh, where owl-haunted beauty persists
Between star and steeple - a steady pace
In blankets of twilight - the heart beats
To an ancient song, sung far away.
HER WITCHCRAFT
All this artful energy is divine, and legend -
Never a watched moment lost in tenderness;
Never the ghostly whisper of your gentle kiss,
Always the sweet surrender of the damned!
Look! Our frail past eclipsed by time;
Our meanings shouldered far away...they grew
Under our heartache, pushed past their prime...
Inside, I knew, that fateful day, I knew
Something stupid was summoned which closed our eyes;
Eyes drawn by exhaustion at the dread end game,
Making no sense at the mountain growth of lies...
And in this, I carefully erased your sacred name:
You have drowned me in your crafted world of pagan joys!
THE BIRTH OF PAN
This earth calamity;
This new-born man:
Short on form, long on reason...
At the coming of the Golden Dawn
Wood whisperings reveal: Great Pan is born!
Born into a world absorbed by war
Where darkness is thy maiden whore!
And at the fount of our man-god, take
This treacherous rot of globe and make
A Kingdom, wonderful with gold
And goat-god lust both brave and bold:
Awake! Masturbating man of old!
This root of life;
This earthward bowel:
This token charmed from midnight foul!
Here, vomit up your history
To see the scum of Sodom pouring forth,
From the night to light this mystery;
Where loathsome is the flesh within
The sanctity of salvation's throne,
To reveal a great god, shook from dust;
His thighs thick with honey lust:
Mad, for the passion-bashed clitoris of fire
Where his seed shall flow and never tire
In the endless gash of mortal desire!
ON HAMPSTEAD HEATH
Man of earth - titans and wraith stones;
Dwarfed by hornbeam, alder and ash...
Acorn jewelled moss paths, bluebells and nettles;
Dark places of anemone and dead man's rot.
Songs of grass: the honey-haunt of weeds,
Shaken in shafts as shadows darken
And sink beneath a bridge.
The lakeside strangeness had disappeared
And seemed less strange, somehow...
The chalk bricks, white as maiden bones
Stood weary, turned on time... Green pools,
Poppy-bruised, where the corpse of years remains...
And here, the dead where pathways cross
Reach from roots and ground elder stems;
Hoof-thuds vanish down a winding track and
Ale-exulted blood still courses through the wood.
The oaken brain, like a steel box, contains
The dream of history, grown dim and flowing
To the magic and menace of reeds by night
And lips of twilight found me there.
LINES UPON A PORTRAIT OF MR EDWARD ALEXANDER CROWLEY
Lion, you fix your stare upon your prey
And sit, as some oyster-gorged demi-god;
With eyes like Death's nostrils, smoking hate,
And your fingers manicured like vampire stakes.
Dreamer of discord and demons and darkness -
Confuser of hearts and sex: you sit
Like a bow-tied Osiris, adrift in the tomb,
With a brain full of chess nonsense...
And the menace of Choronzon's distant star
Penetrates beyond the confines of mind,
Bent with hunger, the soul assumes
A persistence of darkness that remains
As you stagger shaven-headed into the unknown -
Nosferatu bringing pestilence from afar...
And in old age - a portly Pan
Sipping Cognac at the Cafe Royal,
Manipulating forces around you
With simple gestures and words of power.
And his eyes through winding pipe smoke glare
As death flowers, amidst the stones,
Dark with pagan poetry... Flames
Toast his solemn heart... He comes
Like a huge bulk of Godhood, summoned
To the enchanted scent of flesh and song!
And in your defence, Monsieur Beast,
A sigh of surety and relief,
Handed down and placed in hearts -
A kiss from Kingdoms great and far:
A law unto our lovely star
And a dream of love for who we are!
Sat like Satan in your Trinity room -
Great Beast of your mother - Leamington man!
Lilith-scented, you huffed and you puffed
Through the galaxies of faith and waste;
Through the gardens of the damned
And every haunted place... But
What was said? What bombs of wit
Were delivered before the camera click?
With your sails full, you were unstoppable,
Crossing continents... a cocaine colossus
Who had outgrown the human, and known
The habitation of the Gods, and what they are.
But the human lingered still, and sat
Heavy with its failures on your brow -
And now, what man of iron will shall come
To watch over the aeon, and sing
A lament for the World Ash, wonder sap?
A song of all time, to bring
A light from afar, to worship still -
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
Love is the law, love under will.
AT THE SHRINE TOMB OF BISHOP OSMUND
Constant love shall idly wait
Like a ghost within the wings,
To seize upon some tragic fate
That the sore heart brings.
Born upon the balmy air...
I know that thy soft tread is near,
In gold and silver curls, so fair,
By dreams that swiftly bring thee here.
Through tangled woods and phantom dells
Where you walked in blush and gloom;
Forlorn to the darkened world, that tells
How sweet the love that haunts the tomb.
And like a ghost within the wings
That tears the world asunder,
Are we to see what change it brings
When mirrored to your wonder?
But now I see the snowy drift
Of roses kept from bloodless lips;
I see how oft' your name can shift
Towards intelligence, that slips
From Heaven's grandeur, where passions play
Upon my heart, and found it so
Rich in madness - sleep shall slay
The shades of day that come and go!
The spectre prompts - I hear your name,
And I, with all my soul, stand by,
To play my part in the scene of shame
Where two doomed lovers in arms, must die!
Where evening fades and heart's refrain
On those who care to love thee more.
I would, but for doubt and greater pain
Of broken heart, on thee, implore
That I, in solemn mood of night
Could not foretell thy ills of mind;
For my soul aches by pale moonlight-
Beams that cannot be defined!
And yet, shall twilight seem the same
That sinks to the splendid strain of day?
Or the dying notes of your whispered name
Recall to me your pensive way?
No, not to the day, shall I stare,
Nor to those soft lips look for fate...
The curtain falls like some dread nightmare
Upon a world where love was too late!
[Salisbury Cathedral: 28th August 2009]
TROUBLED BY TIME
To the memory of A. E. Housman.
Born, in the year of Darwin's 'Origin',
Where secret worlds of unrest grow;
His inward lips were tenderly pressed
Over the lines of Juvenal.
His passion: silent - humanity's ache
Under the touch, lies far away...
And in the night, there is no sleep
To stamp over the angles of each day.
Words lived, yet he was dead,
Caught in a season's oblivion.
His sombre thoughts were all but lost
On boys to which the war had won!
Ballad-whistling, yet still no-one,
For he would not stay...
His spy-hole on the liturgy,
Kept like photos locked away!
Now, he is going into rooms
Where his heart lies with the dead;
His romance found in Latin graves, and
All that need be known - was said!
Not wanting to remain, no,
Our poet-scholar built a tomb -
A small wound bleeds his sex away,
To flow like wine in printing bloom.
But how could a passing flower give
Life to old bones and dust,
When sorrow thought it fit to stay
And cauterize his lust?
AT HILLTOP
Sun-ringed, day of June - foxglove and mint;
A secret place where beanpoles rise
Like antennae towards blue space,
Beyond the bee-hum and the gooseberry...
And there, the rose-way into rooms
That yawn, dark, worm-weathered beams,
Are dead of dust and comfort now!
I felt a compulsion, an intense need to touch
All the fireplaces in the house;
The hearth, being that magical portal
Where the hours and world and time, passed
Into the realms of long ago, scented by honeysuckle.
And your bed, demure, covered in Edwardian propriety -
I heard, your sighs almost lift the wallpaper, again.
And in the garden - strawberries and rhubarb...
A pathway through the raspberries, winds,
Vortex-like, to the lantern sway
Of peonies, lupins, and poppies...
And at the sound of sheep, I felt the need
To take a small stone from beside the gate!
But how dark those rooms that contained
The ritual of creation and moth-mooned lore,
Over interiors of wasp-windowed witchery, where
Gentle eyes peer from a forgotten modesty
Like ink wells under candle light,
That can say nothing, anymore!
WHITE NETTLE
I looked upon a rose, and saw
The gothic-lipped mist of evening
Kiss each petal beneath a summer moon,
In the dark-time brush of the woods.
And ghosts and magic filled the air
Like cinnamon to the nose, and
Those I used to know came by
To see me standing all alone
Between moon dew and black boughs,
Tracing my shadow's outline
Amongst dogweed and wild garlic.
Yes, the woods in May were fragrant,
The oaks and the birches, all stood,
Breeze-born and stupendous,
Weathered by elements and time.
But my love is a mythical witch,
Typhooning from the North,
Bound for the cruel starry gloom
And the endless abodes of night.
THIS ULYSSES
This angry fellowship of the heart;
This dark seasoned spell, that dams
The flow of love's beauty, and fades
Beyond the enchanted reach of the stars...
And the touch of long ago, still haunts
Like a kiss in darkness, to remain;
An echo of this constant growth
That cannot truly live or die.
O lover, my demon sigh of despair;
My noble god of limitless soul
Who sings and slumbers in the mortal brain -
Strong in spirit and arm; gentle of mind...
But in me there is some whispering dread
That keeps me at its side, always,
To watch in the hollows, and handsome, hide
A memory of love on these dead lips of mine;
Dead as the passion that bloomed in youth,
To look, Calypso-eyed upon love and grow;
A love unmoved in every mood - I go,
Into a dream that I cannot change!
IN WAKE WOODS
Those seven ages of man, look upon
The star-bashed solemnity, and give ease
As the sky trembles to a canopy
Of ancient trees - the shire-sturdy oak.
Where I in all my moods of change
Could not look upon those sad-haunted woods
Or feel the mild February rain
Fall with secrets, never mine.
Where a time echoes to the muse of life
That dwells where hearts hurt, and scare
The impassioned soul of girl-turning-woman
To remain at her shaped idyll, once more.
Shadows are pulled by the light and the dark -
Spring soothes in avenues, to red campion, flows
As the woods ache with old anger, to unfold
With light in the bee-drone, and valerian.
A mist is upon me... if lips had met -
Silvery-wet, and softly painted
To tortures of the heart's distress
And a love no longer there, nor true.
An innocence lost, now masked by shade
Where the ceremony of death, stains
And lingers dreadful beneath the moon
That the inmost eye too soon, should sail.
Pale Will, with his myriad lines
Shows how little times have changed
In matters of the heart, for love
Is death, un-measured, destroyed by word!
Black cedar, where you stretch and twist -
The rhythm of the woods can never catch
That firing stem, that growing bud
That circles the aged wood... a glimpse
Of foxglove and betony twined - a link
Where the burnt mounds lie hushed in sleep;
A sleep of sun-dappled paths, that hold
Things in which we care to remember, no more.
And the brush and the birdsong, did give way
To the call of the beasts at eventide
That echoed like the twinkle of Iscariot's feet
With each step a betrayal... But night nears
And moonlit pools like phosphor pits
Plop to the falling of decay and death;
The bulge and bloat of boughs, creak
An unearthly music, cloaked by night.
The hunger and harmony of woods, are shown;
Its bluebelled sanctuary - a mad things delight!
That thunderous mill pond, in the rain;
The crossing of footpaths like words that wind
Between blackened mounds and mud-filled hollows,
With the beat of roots, below each step.
Let the clouds gather, grow dark and brood
Over the mill water, turning the reeds.
Birds now fill the vacant space, where
The grinding of wheels and great sluices were heard:
A haven of a time when the wood was worked
And horses stamped the long days away.
But how I have left those tearful woods;
Left those trees and buds, to walk
With lips aflame and tormented heart -
Eyes like death's-heads in the dark,
And the fourteenth day of that dread month
Left me, haunted in those hushed groves.
A wind in the musk mallow, shrieks,
The forked path, shrouded in mist,
Glides in veils over columbine
Like wisps of history that won't be lost.
The dark boughs beneath the shade
Twist towards the light - they move,
Beneath willow eaves, water tracks glisten
As something fearful and ancient,
Through the old wood crawls.
The witch-o'-the woods, still
Dark and autumnal as the mill;
A ring of reeds, shadows the pond;
Rustle in the breeze, they sing
A language lost to us, and strange.
Roots, tugging at the river's roll
Where life flows throughout the wood.
Iris, violet and sorrel, sway
Beyond clumps and the bosky bole, towards
The scent-filled serenity of the daisy-glade,
Where dwindling red was overcome
By grey - they are long gone!
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