Poetry Recipe

Take a heart
Fresh and young preferably
Starve for twenty years
Expose to the elements
Let it be well and truly battered
Extract its juices
Using a variety of implements
Until it’s dried out, grey, a mere husk.
Take the juices
Which have been palced in the appropriate vessel
And reduce to almost nothing.
Put the almost nothing
Where almost no-one can find it.

Poetry International, CV’s of the Poets

I am not “a world-class immunologist”
Or a world-class anything
Or any class of immunologist,
Or other ologist, logist, or gist.
I am not “a regular and spirited broadcaster
On a late-night cultural chat-show.”
I do not hold a post in general creative contentment
At the University of Grand Emolument.
Far from being an internationally acclaimed poet
I am not nationally or locally acclaimed
Or indeed recognised. Hardly anyone where I live
Knows I am any srt of poet at all.
The Poetry Editor of Faber & Faber did once introduce me
As “a poet” but I detected something odd in the tone of
his voice,
a subtext on the lines of “I’m just saying that to humour
him
he’s a crap poet, not a proper poet like you and me.”
The poet he introduced me to
(“former Arts Officer and Poet in Residence to a firm
of solicitors”)
Took one look at me and turned up her pointy
little nose
Even more than it was already turned up
(If that was possible)
And walked off
Rather fast in the opposite direction.

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai in una selva oscura Dante, Inferno Canto 1

The path peters out.
There is just a wood.
There never was a path.
So what was I following
All those years, so doggedly
Convincing myself those bent grass-stems,
Those ambigouous impressions,
Meant something, led somewhere
I was supposed to go.

It has never seemed darker or deeper.
And this is something you can’t avoid.
Whichever path you follow or don’t follow
The wood by its nature gets darker and deeper.
The wood is a wood. It gives nothing away.
Time to learn wood-craft, listening out
For what the wood is really saying,
In its own untranslatable language.

Remedial Yoga

On the walls of the B.K. Iyengar Centre
Mr Iyengar wraps his legs around his neck
like a boa constrictor;
or floats above the ground with the folded lightness
                                                of an origami bird.

The teachers all worship the revered master;
he said the body should adapt itself to the pose,
not the pose to the body.

The next position will be a hanging one.
For this you will need two blocks, a blanket,
two ropes, and a heavy wooden cross.

Your arms will stretch away from your body,
The palms of the hands turned outwards.

O father, if it be possible let this cup
pass from me: nevertheless not as I will
but as thou wilt.

Sounds come from outside: people playing tennis,
the indifferent multitude.

Clouds boil and spiral above the skylight,
but darkness has not yet covered the earth.

Something, somewhere, which had long been resisting,
something held in and fixed and rigid;
a whole system of thought, a way of being,
some buried pain

is just beginning to give up its ghost.

This agony may be worth it.

There are breaks in the grey and warm sun.

Estuary Terns

Time after time, on this bank, looking towards the other,
Looking with yearning at the unbuilt shore, the green pines,
The sun catching their tops, making them glow like moss,
I’ve wondered what might lurk there in the last wilderness,
The dappled stag, the coarse-bristled boar, the secret,
   amber-eyed lynx,
The whole enchanted world of Uccello’s Hunt by Night,
Those long-dead huntsmen in their red tunics,
Their moon-coloured mounts and arching hounds,
Hunting not so much for stag or boar
But as a mark of caballería or cortesía,
Not so much for game as for the grail, like Arthur’s knights.

 Fantasies, pure fantasies. But this time soberly on the actual shore
Walked by dogs, by families in the real world,
I look through binoculars – an absurd figure, perhaps,
Unable ever just to be, and to see, here, now –
I look not all the way across to the far side
But halfway across, in the middle of the estuary
Where buoys mark out the good, the passable channels;
Out there the terns are fishing, plunging from fifty metres
Into the shallow, fe