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.

*/*/*/

*

The three Minoan girls on Naxos
dark red skin, depth like amber/ distance/
red tea of shadow and leaves
in a glass, was their skin,
slim with black-brown hair, like curling blades
black dresses, ragged folds,
round hexagonal sunglasses

Remember riding in formation in the Near East?
It was so beautiful like hinged insects
we folded in the wind
and knew instant futures

Pelt traders, cool basements,
Athens boiling brains from the feet up
crossing to Psiri, sat on the step
the man folded back from his zimmer-frame
asleep just like that,
bottle of water and tobacco laid neatly beside
like a desk

peach pulp hot on the pavement dropping
light bulbs on Kolonou burning in the day

air-conditioned zone, guarded mall in ripped city
streets lead down to a pool of leaks
a lake at the old airport, I crave red words
the ones beginning with K and ending S
such as 'Kalos', 'Knossos',
puddles of clay
'Ariadne' is a black and white word, dappled, bruised,
like the moon, left behind.

/\/\/\/

The dust filled my hair
like sea salt, I was blonde with it,

the column advanced, with fuel replenished,
the cracked fruit of the deep rocks oozing for us,

the children are uninitiated and wake wild in the night
we eat sea-fennel salt-soup my clothes are soiled
with the wind's effusions erosions
from within I am *purified*
with the grainy wind, the dirt worn in
is colouring, is only more smooth earth,
I think of you and like a shepherd
my heart plays songs in isolation, sweetness,
echoing to fill the valleys,

yet I am a protrusion in the desert, a standing reed
or bullrush and we are *all* that we were made as,
our kingdom, of sweat and eyes and white horses
leukippoi who purr, who would eat us

/your eyes like dark-edged coves glimmering
in rising heat waves, we stopped at fresh springs,
feminine bowed sippings, I went hooded like them
tracing across rocky hills with water fillets

to cradled lakes or sea-coasts
with their arms spread, the roofed downpath of mature trees
a hall of shadow
hiding tuffets of hair, loose green and curve-falling
and laden with spears; but the day blazed these tunnels,
the naked spurts within -

I followed your train, it was the sun who tore me to pieces
unabated, I was filled with love,

you were made a laurel tree,
a thousand leaves not falling apart
I saw you in the stream, spawning,
gathering the sands and forming an island.