From "Palestine" No.1

Their feet stumbled down snowy slopes, and crested little knolls and hills. Now and again one of them spat, making a little dent in the snow that tufts of grass also pushed through. They were coming closer to the most built-up area of the neighbourhood, and as they once more gained the grey main road the buildings began to loom up ominously around them. They were dark-windowed and grey, marked sootily from years of traffic fumes and only washed by rain. On either side these hulking tower-blocks stood, many of them disused and vacant. Here and there were boarded-up windows and gaping doors. But there were also, as they progressed, windows lit by cheering yellow light and sometimes mysterious twinklings of red light in attic rooms. The architecture of most of the buildings was sparse and industrial, as if they were nameless factories, office-blocks, high rises. As their feet crunched through snow M and Robert grew used to craning their necks to see far above them. Now they began to see tenements and brownstones, run-down and shut-up. In this part of the city most of the buildings seemed to be great dark granite office-blocks, that at night became giant monoliths of silence, and that looked down, as if despairingly, on M and Robert wandering below. Further away, against the horizon, they could see the great sleek skyscrapers of steel and glass.

M knew that they were traversing the perimeters of the Chicago suburb called Palatine, nicknamed Palestine. This was a fairly bland and unobtrusive little town, an outgrowth of the great lakeside conurbation of Chicago. M liked the place, the quietness of it, and often came here to drink, and sometimes just to think. He always called the place Palestine, and for him the name had a cheery feel, biblical, almost Christmasy. Just like the great familial mass of suburbia that lay beyond the place where the towering high rises began. Pacific blandness of the mid-west, that great land holding its Illinois like a vast plain of sleep. From the dull roofs of the suburbs, you could transgress the limits of the great city at night itself, with all its dark towers and endless secrets sleeping by the lake. 

Tree Studies

A Flowering Cactus, drawn in 2015

Poem of April 2016

What of your loves, your errant loves,
When men have loved before you?
They have already traveled that weary path,
They have already written that story.
What does it mean if there was a park
Where you glanced at her, and she glanced back,
At the back of the trees, in the gathering dark?
What of your loves when a man long dead
In an old photograph, turning his head,
Loved as you loved, a sturdy wife
That once was young and full of life?
Was there not some summer when they wrote stories
In love letters, and stopped to smell roses,
Is it not possible that pair knew
Something pure, something true?
Faded glory, the stockbroker's bride
In an old photograph, turning aside,
You can look up the dates when they lived and died.
Marrying a widow in an Anglican church,
With nosegays and posies and perfumes and such,
And a new inkwell and a Sunday hat,
What does it matter, all that?
My grandmother's fox stole,
My grandad's straw boater,
For the sad milkman
And the minister's daughter.
And they taught them to write in copperplate
And hesitate slightly at the gate,
With an opera air, and a popular song,
Battling for glory now gone.
What kind of eye did they look from but mine,
Our forebears in time?
And what makes us live, what makes us divine,
They must've been shown a similar sign,
They must've been able to read the lines
That we can read, and be resigned?
It has all been done a million times.

For they did nothing thoughtlessly!
It was for them as it is for me.

"Idiot bard! I wrote this poem,
He wrote it too, that predeceased us,
This is his kingdom and his realm
That he has leased us,
I am the first and everlasting man
That ever speaks thus".

Pharaoh's Death Bark

Pharaoh's Death-Bark was coloured green,
Of the hue most often seen
In corn before its ripening;
White-robed priests in straining team
Had launched it on the sacred stream,
With incense for an offering.
Pharaoh's cedar cask had come
From the heights of Lebanon,
Inlaid with gold and silver spun,
With lapis and carnelian.
To the Chamber of Double Truth;
Where the scribes await the proof
Of his heart's undying youth.
Thoth, the god that keeps the case,
And black Anubis, jackal-faced,
Calmly wait the appointed place.
Where it will be reckoned whether
His heart, when weighed against a feather,
Will prove the lighter or the heavier.
Lightness of heart betokens one
To be transfigured in the sun,
A purer kingdom thereby won,
An Eden and Elysium;
A field of reeds, another Nile,
That flows eternally, undefiled.

Poem of Feb 8th

Near the grey burn in spate, 

Hangs the solemn cell. 

Hard by the abbey's gate,

And under its spell,

Prison of crumbing stone

That covered well

He who was born great,

Therein to dwell.

Seven hundred years hence

Under the crumbling hill,

Will the old tales make sense

And will the sign still

Make its significance

Or be upset quite,

By the magnificence

Of that serene light. 

Seven hundred years have passed,

Under the rainy slope,

And the meanings hold fast,

Never quite losing hope. 

Would we were Gods not men,

Then we could see

The heroes that lived then,

Wiser than we. 

What for the Sibyl is the word

What for the Sibyl is the word,

And what the form of address

That can most keenly glean from her

The mysteries of success?

What prophet or poet can read the runes,

And what seer can translate? 

Who holds the key to the hidden room,

And who knows the forms

That the Gods will take? 

We who are mortals cannot know, 

What journey's end awaits.

We are the puppets of the Gods,

the playthings of the Fates.

Either to sweet Elysian fields,

Or down to Hades' gates.