~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ (the poetry) WORM ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 21
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Base Camp

Base camp. Nothing much to write
home about. They’ve brought my bed
down to ground floor, filled shelves
with climbing books, pictures of summits,
maps; put ropes and boots outside.

I can still edge sideways to the kitchen,
testing the balance of steps as over
scree, and watch from the belay
of chairs people coming and going
in the cul de sac. My eyes still rise

over ridge tiles and cowls, with rare
smoke to old dreams- Lhotse, K2,
Annapurna, Everest, Illimani.
My peaks were ticked off in peat smudged
Wainwright guides: Book Three,

The Central Fells: High Seat,
Pike O’Stickle, Blea Rigg, Ullscarf. "Don’t,"
said the day nurse "try to go up
again.". Calf Crag, Thunacar Knott,
hall, stairs, banister, landing.

I could make it backwards, wedging
my backside into each stair, pushing
up and out with hands, shoving
the stick up ahead of me, locking
it over a stair rod for the next pull,

not telling anyone. Yet that’s
the point. After. Chat. Writing it up.
Getting the pictures back. You don’t
stay long, even for views. Several
counties, spread like years below you.

Lost Luggage

Through the Art Deco
cream station
the trains squeezed themselves
like long leather caterpillars
with dark clown's eyes
and slits with numbers for teeth.

Up dusty concrete steps
was a hint of sunlight:
the kind you get in posters
in chestnut waiting rooms
that have crossed their arms
and stopped coughing.

It was Belgium and I was stateless.
Nobody minded, yet. I tried
my fragile French; the glum officer
replied in guttural Flemish.
Had he seen the English party? No,
or maybe yesterday. I was
a camera without a film,
a ledge without a pigeon.

It was the souvenir tea-towel
that saved me, proving
the shaded frontier
pushed out like a pregnant belly.
The trains were smoother
now, without doors,
with names like Napoleon, Leipzig;
the final one, ultramarine
and shaped like a missile

set off the alarm bell
that shrilled till the vault
came in like a fractured
skull. I woke then, to sun
through the raindrops
and gauzy white curtains.
It was England, and you were long gone.
I lay with my headache all morning,
marooned in the tunnel of loss.

Indian Craft-shop

I could have lingered longer
Where the lilting music played,
And the sensuous smell of sandalwood
Scented the sultry shade;
And her sari rustled with whispering stealth
As it swept the sanded floor
And I lovingly fingered the shells that had once
Been tossed on an Indian shore.

Far in the darkest depths of the shop
Where the green-eyed Goddess gazed
Where the tapers burned with a soft thin smoke
And the shining soldiers blazed;
While ivory lovers - shameless and lovely
Clasped in erotic lust
Carved by the fingers of men who had loved
And now were withered to dust.

I could have stayed till the night was dark
Watching the tapers burn,
But the music ceased and the girl blew out
The tapers one by one;
And the lovers were put away in a drawer
And laid there very neat,
As I cast one lingering glance around
And went out to the dusty street.

When I Am Chinese

These days, the whiskbroom of heaven
cuts a swath toward us-
Quan Yin stands steady
before the planetary mango
singing her high-pitched dissonant solo

The ants are confused, find
the bathroom more interesting than the kitchen,
and night-before-last a small spider
nested in my hair, then rushed across the café floor
toward a humming table leg

We found each other on the corner
of Columbus and Vallejo
but I was reserved-
at Caffé Trieste
I'd gone into a large silent bubble

When I become Chinese
even the loud drunks
don't really bother me-
that night, when I floated in
I was already on another continent

The loudest drunk - drunk on fear
wore a shock-mask, drank espresso
and wove a spiky ribbon through the air
while the opera in the background
rose and fell

Quan Yin rests, she sighs
I search for spider wisdom
in cafés, keep a jar of faux pearls
on the dresser, worship trees
in the neighborhood

There is nothing better than your company
as I pass the large produce markets
on Stockton Street, people waiting
for the trucks to be unloaded,
or pouring mounds of small silver fish into bags

If we hadn't found each other
I would have walked down Grant Street alone,
we wouldn't have sat eating whole Tai snapper
with fennel and white beans,
and sipping jasmine tea with biscotti and gelato

You noticed too
the world had shifted
as we walked up Broadway
then drove past mansions
overlooking the spits of cloud

Creature of

He parts his hair over the inside corner
of the left eye; leaves a 20% tip
inside an unfilled water glass;
walks to the park on Sunday morning
as if his spaniel Barclay
had not been pureed by a pit bull.
On 34th Street, in the laundromat
beneath Willy’s Gym, the woman
of his dreams both wet and dry
fails to meet him for the 174th time
as he trudges his laundry
to the Splash-‘n’-Spin on 32nd.
She observes him through the window,
Someday – she sighs – that man will die
with clean socks on.

Tambourine Man

( for Bob Dylan's 60th birthday )

His hair a thicket, voice a rasping saw
cutting through cant and conscience's decay -
my scruffy hero channelled youth's dismay
and changed the world in 1964.
His music called to me: I heard with awe
wild songs - they wheeled and soared above the day
then, swooping, drove indifference away.
Glad to be young, I stood at heaven's door.

He calls again, and how could I resist
a ragged clown behind a reverie
still chasing wraiths within the day's grey mist?
It's darker now: I cannot sense or see
a way ahead, but I can dance. Hey! Mist-
-er Tambourine Man, play a song for me.

The Black Seam of Sheet Vinyl Widens

Black erupts from the seam
where sheet vinyl puckers from the wall—

its texture of a muscle straining
to divorce itself from tendons.

Worlds pass within the black
gap, soulless and voiceless:

parts of Crime and Punishment
left unread, the Bach Invention

neglected on the stand
of the hundred year-old piano.

These forgotten asteroids gather
in this solar system, orbit

around an ultraviolet star where unvoiced
protests or capped desires burn frozen

in liquid nitrogen. Their gravity
dissolves the lazy bonds beneath,

their matter blackens into the vinyl breach
like stains dissolved in bleach.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

No one paid much attention
to them at the time:
the members of the dressage class
who asked all the wrong questions,
claimed to be graduates
of the Bucharest Equestrian Academy
and stabbed with stubby fingers
at inscrutable qualifications.

Where in Manville could one buy a scythe?
How much was brimstone by the tonne?
Everything was noted,
added up and multiplied by 3.5
— or so the rumor had it.
Conversation, though, was out:
with sharp, darting looks
they policed their silences.

The day a bitter wind
elbowed its way through the bushes
was the day they disappeared.
The security camera caught them
at 5am outside the stables —
four furtive figures in theatrical rags
fiddling with a lock.
Didn't get the horses after all, it seems.

A Parliament of Owls

White-faced and flustered
from the cornucopia of lies
I walked among the towers
basking in the solemnity
that wisdom dictates that
wisdom be.

The parliament of owls
falling out of grace
times temptation to match the tempo
of the wandering souls they meet
stings the mice in hapless nocturne
and eat their bodies whole.

For they know more;
the mice know less.

Then I glanced into the whitewashed sky
looking for the draught
enlightenment would bring,
but towers are prisons and
owls are killers.

Then the speaker
at the podium shakes
in shadows ominous.
wisdom whittles time miraculous
shifts white the cornucopia.

Thus the lies will wash away.
for I am the genre deceived.
and I am white-faced with wisdom of drink.
for knowledge flows freely
from milk and wine and
cornucopias luster
when wisdom is meek.

A Wood in Somerset, Iraq

Stone still in opalescent air
trees wait supportively

light splinters on new leaves.

Sun for the seventh day
blesses an English spring.

Two thousand lives away
this anticyclone fires up a storm
that drowns a nightmare world
in ochre light

The peace I feel
leaning against the powerful fist
that grips the earth, cushioned with moss
back shaped, kind as an elephant,

finds its reflection in a furious world
of men who sleepwalk,
fall on their mother's skin,
give screaming fire,
act and react,
but cannot take it in

while birdsong fills my head
sharp as the sunlight
sparking on those tiny points of green.

One hammer headed woodpecker,
knowing no better and no worse
fires off his rounds.

I should be suffering
but the world is folded at my side,
its front page images of death
have left off stirring
in this gentle air.

Bird’s Eye View

As if I worked for him (how could he know
the weight of all my cares?) a robin hops
towards me from the border; then he stops
to watch me push my mower to and fro.
He looks for worms along the fresh-cut line,
while I seek inspiration for a gem
to stun my critics—how I’ll dazzle them!
The bird has his agenda; I have mine.

My chore complete, I settle down to wring
the essence from our interaction. Now
a sharp deflating insight has unfurled
its wings. (I had been contemplating how
absurd it was for such a little thing
to think himself the centre of the world.)

The scruffy dog's significance is much discussed:
as a symbol of fidelity - ridiculous;
and for the quattrocento bourgeousie,
not exactly the emblem of success.

The lovers stand, demure in their Sunday best,
private passion, and public ceremony.
in awkward silence, irreconcilable.

Around the grey, echoing galleries,
escaped students and secretaries,
embrace baroque bouquets -
on Valentine's day, proud to display,
what privately they feel:

that love matters most, to most of us,
despite the small, cynical world snapping at our heel.

Walkies

He swears he'll never get another - Bog loves him.
That boy will brush against his leg and say,
'Walkies' in Woofish. And Bob understands -
bonded they are - he, fluent in Woofish,
and Bog with a Dogtorate in his master's voice.

All manner they study - slow snow verse,
quick splash step, rumbly growl, rain beat.
Unleashed, they stroll - Bog scampering ahead,
pantoum of a dog - chasing sticks, turning, chasing -
and palindromic Bob - sharp-tooth-eared

derecomposing all the way to Gull Chase.
Woof-eee!
Did you ever see a sight to match Bog
rolling in Mulch Pool? Or Bob mouthing
wobbly vowels for hours until the snappery latch

and slobbereese of flop and lap.

Westwards, tower tops peer out from the glow,
so Tower Bridge's double beckoning
lures the eye back east, where even sunset
leaves the sky's steel burden on each building
unchanged. These clouds are witness to the threat,
beyond the cranes, of Boudicca again,
St. Paul's in flames and falling, and the slow
march to Spitalfields of Wat Tyler's men.
Everything goes on and back, like the cast
of gold and earth over the river's face;
underneath, it follows its ancient pace,
seasonless; sword sacrifices and skulls
line its belly; on every tide falls
the impassable, all-pervading past.

First Things

At dawn for the sake of argument,
though it might easily be dusk,
pigeons at home
in the cupola's intricate mosaic,
each exquisite tile glazed
with copper sulphate and iron.

Stray dogs steal carp
from the courtyard pool,
the onyx inlay of its balustrade
white as the nearby fields of ripe cotton,
so relentless in their collective thirst
that what was sea is now steppe.

The few trees are ancient,

heavy with pomegranates
and men are bending to prayer.

© Sue Butler

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Oppin the Wyne

Deir freind,
Of richt I aucht mirry to be
Bot I am lyggand heir seick yitt.
Pure me !

Throw birland myst, undir na cloke of grene

Yow come agane in wedder wode and kene
To veesit me. Latt us drynk togidder
And mak guid cheir now yow haif come hidder,
For to be fow, my freind, me think it best ;
Anither langsum yeir I may nocht lest.

Oppin the wyne my freind honorabill !
And in this meter be merciabill.

( lyggand : lying, wode : wild, hidder : hither,
langsum : tiresome, throw : through, wedder : weather,
fow : full, meter : matter.)

© Brent Hodgson

The Pig and the Pearl

See how it pains him, wedged inside the cleft
of his hind hoof? He's limping, ma'am. You've seen
the way he hops, and shuffles to the left,
and tries to shake it free. A navy bean,
a pebble, some dried dung, it's all the same--
you shake your head, you smile, but truly, ma'am,
I wouldn't pull your leg. Oh, sure, he's tame,
but still, he's just a pig, no more. A ham.

Beg pardon? Yes, of course he doesn't bite--
your pig's a gentle creature, I admit--
but even so, what makes you think he might
have any use for that? He rolls in shit!

Ma'am, with all due respect, my word upon it--
take back your precious gift. He doesn't want it.

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Author's contact details:

David Anthony.................... http://www.davidgwilymanthony.co.uk
Charles Corner................... ccornner@mindspring.com
Ian Emberson.......................IanEmberson@aol.com
Martyn Halsall...................... martyn.halsall@ukonline.co.uk
Brent Hodgson.....................brenthodgson_ayr@yahoo.co.uk
Alan Ireland.......................... http://www.kiwidollar.com
Fred Longworth.................. stereo1@cox.net
Rose M. Kelleher..... ...........kelleher@ramblingrose.com
Richard Lawson...................rlawson@gn.apc.org
Mark Leech......................... markjl77@hotmail.com
Rod Riesco ........................ jumpcatrod@aol.com
Scott Smithson.....................puck1967@lycos.com
Peggy Tahir........................ ptahir@yahoo.com
Alan Wickes .............. ........ Alan.Wickes@ekno.com

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Compiling Editor:

M.A. Griffiths (grasshopper@wordbug.freeserve.co.uk)

Gerald England (http://www.nhi.clara.net/gehome.htm)

Sandy McKinney (mckinney3@earthlink.net)

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