May Diary

1

I heard, as it was, the noise of thunder:
A ritual screech rent last night's timid silence.
My body, wired through an eye of a needle,
Hung on naked electrical wires writhing.
The cold sacrificial dagger called:
At night we - awaiting the ritual screech -
Are Iphigenia altered.

2

I am sleeping, and in my sleep
I now behold:
A nightingale tearing the abyss with its warble,
The tract down which a burning comet spills
To greet a Dionysus pouring joy from jars of clay;
A satyr hunted down
The wildly foaming waterfalls,
An owl clawing shimmering clocks:
This wilderness is measureless to men,
So please don’t wake me up to hear
The coughing of your hairdryer.

3

Sun burnt my vacant temples.
Here is the rattletrap that brought me here,
Where I am not wanted,
Where I am ashamed to be.
Sun knocked on plastic windows
And, thwarted, burnt itself
Behind the pregnant hills.
When railways err the wagon leans
Onto the breast of ready rape,
But pulls away and disappears
Back on the line.

This landscape threatens rust
In memory as pheasants cock
Their heads,
Alert.

4

Poetry is a well full of tears,
And asphodels are planted all around.
Trespass not with litmus tread
Draw up no certain path across.
Be careful in drinking the salty essence spent:
Now reader, neck it down,
Or taste it not at all!

5

The scribblings of my pen
Will write the dawn out sooner
Than Dostoyevsky's grin burns
All the letters down,
Than Hardy's women slumber
In the line breaks.
Two or three lines more
Until the Sun spills out,
Yet fictional amidst
This Ted Hughes mist.

Something stranger has to creep
Across the page.