After Beirut//Paris/etc, from Sicily

The van bumped slowly,
before me     in the headlights
walked a woman     in a raincoat,

I like living
in colonnaded
or high-ceilinged places,
where sunlight sleeps in caves/ paint-peeling
cities that are not often
invaded,

leaving a beautiful life
would be the hardest/

(I passed through Montmartre in the summer,
the leaves were already falling)

I strolled through Piazza Armerina,
smiling at the rich scenes      and night
and sweet and pregnant
street corners

it felt that life was like
those boys in Pasolini’s
<<Mamma Roma>>, jogging round the estate
to see something
lovely      that would soon
not be there,

“He was my uncle,” I said/

I could see the children in the cars
speaking,      I could not hear them/

but it’s probably the hardest
for those that remain      like at the end
of Mamma Roma, when they whom we love
have gone      but we were not there to see it/
and the ones that flock around
to comfort you/ are fellow workers you
tolerate or happen to
know as acquaintances, not even
a family resemblance or
strangers

-/-/-/-/-/-/

she took me to a wine bar/ she was sweet and
like a mother
/Manuela served me whiskey/ asked “Is he staying here?”
Manuela it would be so nice
to hear you say “December”
/my fingers smelt of basil,
/the road to the farm we’d paved
into a wild mosaic
/un’altra cosa
whiskey is like other people’s amazement
surprising your blood, like sweat or
under the stars with no jacket/ headlights
plunge into such a deep hallway
on the plateaus/ of these hills made of branches

I couldn’t help it, she was Parisian

I couldn’t help it, she was Parisian

and leaned her head back when she smiled, which was

teasing/ and magnificent,

I passed through Montmartre this summer, in fact.

The leaves were already falling.

Why am I writing

in this predictable English metre?

Probably all the Yeats

in the A-Level class at Stoke Newington

with the student Polydorou. What a name, ’many gifts’ in Greek,

straight out of the Iliad;

I took some students in Piazza Armerina

cherubim for explorational play

and adults for conversation,

enough to pay for diesel, tolls and ferry boats

to Greece, and back perhaps

to that closed-up room

of a sickly Edwardian child,

the oiled-wood hall

on the dripping wet rock

green with sea-moss

that they call England.

For Bill, 2

I didn’t realise winds blew so high

until you pointed out the clouds

moving above those ruins in Salisbury/

you showed me your electric piano

returned my forgotten CD

by someone embarrassing,

I was by Geneva on your birthday

I posted a message

wasn’t that when they found you,

in April you liked that video by Aphex Twin,

sometimes I wonder

if either of us could ever

have survived long enough

in this work of wankers, William

~For Bill (final draft)

I remember some photos, siblings arranged like a tree;

exploring the attics, and finding your things.

I wore some shorts of yours (I was ten or eleven)

and a schoolboy beret; and for the last two years, Bill,

I've been riding your bicycle from Salisbury.

Yes, I've been riding your bicycle,

up and down the river Lea, and all over East London.

That means such a lot to me. I remember you

looking inside my first camera.

I enjoyed talking on the phone. Even if I was about to leave,

by the front door, picking up the receiver,

I tried not to hang up too quickly,

especially in recent years. Not long ago we spoke

for half an hour, three quarters —

you talked about evolutionary biology and mathematics,

the NHS, victims of war,

female professors, your time at UCL;

it felt good that you were interested

in what I had to say on ancient Greece

— smell and memory strangely alive now,

days rushing up through the tears —

I cracked the oversized hub of the back wheel

carrying bottles of water downstream; I clamped the jagged fragment

to my desk to hold pens. And OK, due to a frosty derailer

the bicycle frame got torn on the towpath

opposite the brewery at Hackney Wick,

I got a new one at Bethnal Green,

but along with the dynamo-driven lightset

and all the moving parts

I asked them to save the front fork from it.

Mon oncle.

I keep it for truing wheels.

Eternal September Again

I was at my brother's house in Newington
took a walk to Dalston
at the crossroads, licking my canine
running keys through my fingers
the year had flipped, weather was bouncing,

my mind was on the outside/
the evening was easy/
that dip in the Kingsland road, a ribbon/
she was wearing dungarees/ I wasn't interested/
sky had showed us something/
she had no black nail varnish

\\||\\||\\||\\

the sky had slipped over Clapham/
distant red seam, edge-flaking sky-metal,
like the back of some ... filthy cave/ buildings coated
in NASA drips/ leaking space-stations/
it's hard to over-do
how that part of Battersea depresses me,
streets a wave
of lava from the power station/
I am still inhaling you/
you were a surprise/
Camden weed
winter on the schoolbus
taxis over Hammersmith

                  

•••••

It was nice of you to mention

and allow me to intrude

briefly in your education

it looked like you were having a good time

the Bow Road like a curtain

I was stuffed in an office in Rome

exhausted red aperitif

up and walking/

you told me to lie when the time came,

you allowed me/

Heart-attack or apoplexy? Hot blood

boiling the water in Vardaris Cove

and surfacing to warm island-stones

warming wind-cooled jelly skin

and the hollow rock there breathing

At Waltham Abbey, after Pasolini's *Canterbury Tales*

Waltham Abbey/ cloud mound/
Sun Street, market peels

I was imagining some utopian school
away in the mud-mist/

was it in Kingston Hospital
under ether for the appendix

where I dreamt of the girl in the tenements?
It was the future, a tall adobe-like estate,

sloped on the edge of a northern city,
under her kitchen windows,

the dream a whole summer.
We left the city-edge into wilderness

via buried motorways and transit pipes.
Air vents like the carpark/ at Holy Cross Waltham.

Rimini

In Peter Pan club/ the port club/
the Adriatic like a paddling pool
stars had fallen in,

-Could I pass for French? I asked,
-The French are more milky, she said and do sexy eyes,

I told her, under the music, that I was writing a ...
sequential cubist triptych
about disco,

*
The road-sides crushed space and air onward
triangular
and panned out and crushed in, forward,

I pushed my knee to the crossbar
showing change in speed with my body
sometimes I felt myself rush away from myself
with my body left behind and empty, and I was a too-light nothingness rushing downwards,

I sometimes felt metal drawn in with my breath

I would never want to push my nose against concrete,
or roughen soft internals,

rather than cascading metals
the rear gears were now iron boulders
big falls with 'thunk'

I needed no drink
and made sparse stops
like three meals a day

but I would have to stop surely
for some oil.

####

walked through Walthamstow from her cafe
and cinemas with Egyptian pillars
deep in the maisonettes of Edwardian workers

the estate ended in concrete slopes
carving underneath access-roads
and looping round reservoirs, becoming footpaths

"Angie" I said "did you know this was a valley?"
She remembered its path through volatile islands
"It was wide and our picnic rug blew into it,

there was a picnic area on the low grassy banks,"
I said "It had green railings and was like some kind of
leisure centre?"

we stopped at the cafe by the mattress store
the warehouse deep in bramble was as long as a fallen tower

the long ramp to the monumental incinerator
homeless men gathered and moving in their camp underneath it
//

Nicoletta

and realising her surname
descended from Priam
daughter of falling Troy, and the shadows of Hackney
swinging like black fire

or blasted sculptures; flickering / 'Hackney' I wrote on the board
'golden slope': warming to my theme
on crash-sites of kingdoms; chaotic,
and sweeping with broom

by river leaks and chemistry sets
in the heavy flaking basements
I could still feel the blue air
buried in the sky above
intense and lingering,

yes and the granddaughters,
smiling life connected, knowing nothing of the crush
but those falling black shadows,

and being something less than a guest
(their young, long-haired fathers
born free of that baggage,

the youngest sons of Priam
who had known no fighting,
who had been kept from the war in Thrake,)

leaving unnoticed
five hundred talking/
still a stranger to their happiness,
that was my feeling.

INTO THE CITY AT SUNSET

Rusted path: hardened snake,

defunct narrow-gauge

through winding surf-creeks

Toyota’s speeding

crawl through eucalyptus

“sacred way”

cut into sun-slope:

grass-eyed waiting rooms

yellow-flaked

behind the white, rough-crowned city,

the mountain gulf

overturns the plains,

sky-cave of spiral

drainage of the sun

casting glens transparent,

stirring the windscreen,

tides of the sun

unbury infinite detail

shadows in pistachio

traps and deliria

tangled, running,

gaps in the orchards,

the agricultural structure,

ancient woven base

to the mountain Geraneia;

dykes and rock-barrows

waving down to Megara

from Geraneia’s wooden circuit-wall

of strawberry trees, forests,

open-air altar slabs,

straining the Toyota

through fretwork of interwoven

orchards clicking

as they move together

in the heat of summer;

insect, wicker,

dead bark shed

from the budding mountain,

Toyota playing

The Doors’ “The End”

(idols carved by trunks and shadows)

“ride the king’s highway”

at school I’d fall in love

“ride the highway west”

and by March become depressed,

May air made one malleable,

brought the scent of journeys,

bitter August, alone,

thoughts of others’ holidays

“the snake is long,

seven miles — ”

and sad foreign songs, from over the oceans,

the liquid snake-head

with death in the day-shape,

tides of the sun,

night-softening,

life melting into porous

caves of the blue

scrubbage of nightscape.

And the period of the guardian moon

after wild evening

and the streaming light of the streets subsides.