Words words words

you’re a crazy woman
with yr beads and yr bangles
you’re blind to the world
but you’ve got eyes like a hawk
you’re magnificent wild
you’re timid and frightened
you’re vague and romantic
you won’t let me talk

you’re so ruthlessly quiet
and thoughtful and clever
so uneducated
and eternally wise
you’re so graceful and gauche
so abstract and sensual
you’re so calm and collected
with your come to bed eyes

and you’re crazy to think
that you can dance like an angel
then you dance like an angel
on yr dirty kitchen floor
you move like the wind
you shine like the moonlight
you’re nervous courageous
I’m left wanting more

this river … the morning cars hiss past, boats go a’fishing, runners
jog the concrete sidewalk, on bicycles ladies take baskets of the early
catch to market, uniform’d children to school … the temporary wooden
footbridge … we buy fruit and the makings of an hotpot … helicopter
gunships, who’d a thought it, misfortune rising ‘gainst the hazy sun ..
on billboards she earns her bread in lingerie, skindeep … the music
mp3, hummin’engines, wheelspokes … prowling this jungle, there she
stands in a doorway, sitting on a bus, swayin’ ‘long the sidewalk, girls
with soft names, long hair and promise … in wicker greens cheap and
bundled await the morning marketeers … electric guitar … O, Juliet
waits, he will come, he will come, whitefingercaressing the casement and
on strong waxed thread her carved and sacred beads, the servants
practising lewdness belowstairs, the priest confusing himself
theologicallistically, too many words, like a whale, like a camel, like
a weasel, nothing is the matter, parenthetically, and all the while the
little grey men, who flourish, take silent mental notes and later make
careful reports and in the small hours, the very witching hour, the door
screams from its hinges … the vapourous clouds of madness role down
MainStreet … et dans cette petite ville … in the meadow white egrets
rode the backs of water buffalo, the dusty track, in the rice paddies
the crop was harvested by invisable peasants, the silent line its steep
embackment, the snake quickly wriggling away … TakeFive … Just Stop
Traffic … there was a rainshower to which we listened … you should
read “Gwerful Mechain’s “The Female Genitals”, translated from Welsh yes
it is, and a fine piece of writing indeed … last week we took bread
meat an weggiebobbles down to the sea and came away quite melancholy
imagining it rising, the sunthe windthe great outdoors .. and Ophelia’s

Edit - the link to Gwerful Mechain
http://transfinite.thought.org/sourgrove.html

What is this property of land : the weeds
you are tangled in : the cries of the ghosts
of slaves : car, car, said the crow - they roared by.

the soundtrack is Scarlatti and through the at low volume earphones
the late afternoon children outside and the birds … running is it
like writing? just putting down the feet, one after another … fugue,
or the bubble of pronouns through my consciousness, this, this, this,
this … it’s easier to post a poem from the archives, man, and drink
that duckbonesoup! … I slept all afternoon whilst she played on her
computer … harpsichord music is so sensual, although this recording
is of a pianoforte … the Bach? … laughing happily in its mountain
bed, softfernleaves & short grass, letmeyoursatyr be in this yr park,
she, she, she, she has this way of smiling and then she she she she ..
we … the sunlight on the water in the mountain stream in its little
bed and up above in the softhanging pine branches the throaty warblers
sang … words join together like that, at the hip, and down the slope
a small path leads, ‘neath trees … the scent of mountain pines, the
village lost far below, on animalskins we .. gently the water trickles
its patterns of sound and light o’er those polished rocks … oh my
that duck soup, that ducksoupducksoup callin’ callin’ me … O,o,o,o
in silence on the mountainside, the stream flows, see its dancinglight
hear its soft song … a halcyon flash of blue, her long black hair O
the thews of my back see nor clouds nor storms in this clear sky above
see, Ophelia, this is where we sport, away tha little castle, foulpile
o’rocks, alive I wash my face clearwatermountainstream and you undress

I’ve got ninety-eight and a half cases
of aloe vera shampoo in my garage:
if you take ten then I can let you have
a fifteen percent discount. Cash up front.

***

The third brother to die : my aching tooth
against his chest for warmth : the second
to die - my father - driving the Landrover,
a tour around the farm - ‘67.

The first farm vehicle was a Mini van.
A series of beat up old Landrovers
followed: one needed a hammer to get
into reverse. We were coming down

from the top of the valley : the narrow road,
autumn bracken, cold draft through the dashboard,
an afternoon wet and grey, the walrus,
television even, unknown, distant.

I don’t know why this one slim memory
sits so quietly in my mind. Pick up
the hammer and hit the gear stick, stuck in
the gateway where now there are ash stumps.

What kind of cattle, mother, running wild
In the ffridd of this Welsh valley Did they
Herd them on ponies or were they led about
By small boys on pieces of string tied
To nose and horn? Small boys with sticks and stones.

But now this ffridd is circumscribed and there are sheep,
An altogether different culture : farming
Changes, develops, deploys : from the Ty-y-nos
The ax is hurled - mechanically - into the woods.

… the gable
Of the royal hall crumbles and collapses.

The men
who’d brutalized the plump Kuwaitis
fried
on the road to Basra.

Zeus,
on distant Mount Ida,
kept up with the news
on CNN.

Across the miles of desert,
where the wind endlessly shaped the sands,
the sound of war was like that from
an amusement arcade, as when,
walking along a beach
past the suck and the hiss of the sea,
one hears the artificial noises from
the pier’s arcade.
And looking into the darkness one sees
the concentration of the hunched figures, eager
for distraction and a windfall of loose change.
The images of absurd violence
were like some Monty Python sketch:
“Don’t jump a light
in downtown L.A., folks …”
- we see a doped-up brother in a beat-up
Chevy jump a light
downtown - “… the police will be onto you
in a flash!” - from its ambush behind
a billboard . Hello Boys! . a black
white squad car rolls onto the freeway
with a throaty roar - “There’s no escaping
the long arm of the law.” - four missiles
streak from the squad car,
incinerating the beat-up Chevy.
From the fireball one wheel
wobbles slowly to the gutter.

From the North and West clouds
blew over
distant Mount Ida,
obscuring the view
and silencing the singing larks.

Zeus looked down,
when a gap appeared,
onto a patchwork of olive groves
and at the wheeling crows.

I was sitting waiting for my noodles, looking out through the door at
the motorbike taxi guys lounging on their motorbikes and I couldn’t
really see clearly - the faces, the smiles - too much LCD and watching
the blinkin’ cursor. I swore silently, the english way, but my noodles
…
I was sitting eating my noodles and the owner’s or boss’ or manager’s,
who’s definately the chief noodle stretcher anyway, his wife, wandered
up and down, uncomfortable in early pregnancy. She makes the breads
and fills them with chopped lamb, which is probably goat, but
definately not pig. Hari, hari, hairy ram, strong meat for the soul.

& another day midday heat we sweat in
& waitin’ she came in sunlight behind
her cheap tacky dress just a brief glimpse
I caught if I could paint brief memory
ex tacito not guilty yr ‘onner …

Cordelia dies, that is the tragedy, the rest could be mere
melodrama. How can it descend so quickly into madness in the first scene?

The two sisters the pantomime ugly sisters - has Marina Warner written a
book about this yet? [The Leto Bundle was great!]

Nothing, the great 0, [Polythemos the vicious one-eye]
Nothing will come of nothing, [only daughters(?)]
“That’s a faire thought to ly betweene Maids legs”
And she says
“wa you mean?”
He says, “nothing.”
The darke and vitious place where thee he got.

Cordelia stands in white to be sold
as they fawn and scrap around her.
[Bonded.] Lear says in my magnificence
from here unto even here these meads and walleies
to you and your issue - nothing! - rivers,
mountains. Kent looks on, he can not conceive.

Like lechers we onlook * on kind Cordelia,
lickin’ our dirty lips * awaiting her crisis.
Lear gives to Gonerill * and Regan also,
but to Cordelia nothing (which he can not give).

And Gloucester is a little dazed. His sons.

I take coffee, sit mid-morning and slowly
wake. Bitter sweet, last night’s clothes, these rags
I wear to sleep alone, the taste of now:
the guy in the noodle shop with soft sad eyes
looking at me as I sat, a knowing
smile, waiting for me to leave, undressing
me in his mind. Curve and shadow I bless.
But nothing more, only there, selfishly
secret thoughts, no thought of mine. I’m alone
with this holy grail of male lust aching
between my legs. I wash the clothes, hang them
up to dry, then wash myself and my sadness
briefly fades. Outside walking down the street
I know I shine, my body in a cotton dress.

My language and culture have produced
Shakespeare, Joyce and the fuel-air bomb.
An infinity of freewill has led
to genteel debate on the rights and wrongs
of torture: Old Alfie baken caken
musin’ strategy (please, the gods, let Homer
have been ironic, hymnin’ the cold bronze),
ineffectually we rant and rage
in opposition, each plastic excuse
practising the formal syntax, the auld
lady collecting beets by the sacred
fire he sits the flames nothing in his eyes,
his cold eyes calculating ignoring
the smokin’ cakes, the flesh minced of all
livin’ persons hin the him’mediate
vicinity. Sir! Very good, Williams,
that will be all. Oh, and on your way out
ask them in the office to please send in
my tea, will you, thank you. Mrs.P should be there.
And the fat Italian tenor sings, she
has travelled over mountain, over sea
to bring the English gentleman his tea.
Well, quite. It’s something Johny Foreigner
should jolly well take note of, that’s all
I can say. He can’t say he hasn’t been warned.