Dark Threes

Tredegar ward has many gods, mantled in ancient flesh
mouths agape, or chewing at invisible threads of fate
making whoopee with the sandman as if it were 1923

minds are loosened, clothes shed, and Carnival whirls in awkward
shuffles across the medicine floor
looking for contact in a world turned upside down,

run aground, leaking life-force in tiny defiant winks
and bloodless wounds, haemorrhaging memory
in simple rhythms, presenting complicated algae

at the altar of Eros. Crazy Jane unpicking the hem
of her nightie, ancient hands of spotted papyrus,
occult prestidigitation, preparation underway

for another journey, beyond the remit of nurse
or geriatrician, beyond the origami attrition
or wheeled chair, on towards her ghost-visitors

those who whisper from behind the ice-henge
of death, seeing through closed eyes, bringing
continuity to the human slippage of change -

impersonal fires dim in the boundless desert,
He walked this way once before, she can sometimes
see his footprints, still sharp despite the wind’s insistent kiss.

Knowing this, I withdraw into the cowled
dusk, a Baader-Meinhof Buddha out of time
drinking a heartful of this glimpse of empty mystery


Kh
21.2.07

IMAGE: Vast, Empty, Calm (2006) Photo of Iranian Maranjab Desert by Mohammed Reza Tavaijoh

Wasted Youth

For John Keats

“I always somehow associate Chatterton with autumn”
John Keats Letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, (September 21^st 1819)

“The life can burn in blood, even while the heart may break.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais (1821)

In Pisa, in the palace
where Shelley wrote Adonais
they shoot up heroin now
and syringes group in the
corners of the ruins
grasses growing through them
as they continue from the cracks.
Spent little cylinders
flecked with the rust of blood.
The view from the gallery
is part antique, part industrial
and it’s ugly where it’s not frozen.
The surface of the Arno
flotsam forming letters
legends dissipating in the flow.

In Hampstead in the garden
by the plum tree twice replaced
unseasonal flowers are in bloom beneath
where the older tree shaded only grass
and a place for a chair.
Rest for a small brown bird
with a song science calls unremarkable.
The lawn here well tended
wealth and fame of patrons of the arts
securing pleasance and the friendly
shadow of a library.
Here lived a friend
he called close with a candle
to witness a droplet of breath
on his bedsheet
flecked with the rust of blood.

James Piers Taylor, 4th February 2007 London

IMAGE: Sketch of the Dying Keats (1821) by Joseph Severn.