POEMS 2000
There
were ups and there were downs,
there were
leaps and there were bounds;
but no
uppers and downers
and no
leapers and bounders.
* *
*
Millenium
bug
Billennium
mug
but no
millennium bug-gers
and no
billennium muggers.
January 2000
A feeling
familiar from long ago –
frustration
that the words don’t flow;
and all my
books stare out blankly,
I don’t know
what to write quite frankly.
Last night
at the Acumen party
I talked
with John Heath-Stubbs.
He suggested
I abandon rhymes in serious poems:
well, here
goes, farewell to feathered rhymes,
now I’ll
only chime internally.
I listened
to a radio programme about Brodsky,
that only
compounded the question of rhyme,
and as he
wanders in the sky
I still have
to give him time,
but Lowell wrote
unrhyming sonnets and that was no crime.
23rd
January 2000
The first
swallow of spring
came
tiptoeing in
with her
soft modulated voice
muffling out
the mundane noise
and all was
erotic not neurotic
and bathed
by candlelight.
Oh, I would
rather be Quixotic
and with
windmills to fight
and make
these lines exotic
and not to
take flight,
but Russia
is still despotic
and
suspicions lead to fright.
This cold
spring I can’t count
the Chechen
and Russian dead.
7 April 2000
When
my body’s gone and I am on the other side,
cry, if you
want, cry
but don’t
let fears hide
behind
tears.
Oh, if then
I could fly to your side
when you are
beside yourself
and guard
your health
and yours
too my darling.
Hear me then
in the whistle of the starling
and,
ambrosia filled, I’d have no ache
to share the
Mandelstams’ nut birthday cake.
25 April
2000
Black ink,
melan-choly
I feel
wholly
black with
shades of grey
and ‘grey is
the colour of hope’.
I don’t know
whether I’d cope
in Moscow
though I am of sound mind.
May 2000
Awkward in
the triangle,
the words
don’t even dangle
on the slope
of language
and even
later they didn’t engage
the
fundamental.
Now the
triangle has collapsed,
our regular
meetings have lapsed
and at dates
I have to clasp
and my
smokers’ lungs still rasp.
To pluck the
rose you have to grasp
the thorny
stem or cut with a clasp-
knife or secateurs.
My daughter
has shed her haute couture
clothes and
I offered them to you.
Now minutes
I’ve left are few –
an
interpreter can also act on a cue.
April 2000
March/April
2000
Sunlight
at last:
a smile in a
cafe,
a caffeine
surge,
my eyes
rove.
The music
doesn’t blast,
no chance of
an affair
but no need
for a dirge:
oh for the
oak grove.
April 2000
Subterfuge
and secrecy and black caviar,
Jacques
Prevert is 100 years old and we know who we are.
Iranian,
Russian and Azeri is best by far
and Shusha
whispers tunes in my ear
that I have
nothing at all to fear.
Subterfuge
and secrecy and black caviar.
May 2000
And if I
solicit solitude,
like stars
in outer space for all their magnitude
are but a
drop in the ocean of sky:
then you
will one day know the reason why.
For solitude
is not loneliness,
but
opportunity for meditation
to rise
above all medication
to perceive
The One, no less.
It’s not the
stars that shoot
but the
meteors burning up
in the
atmosphere like suicides.
June 2000
The four
year old boy bangs in tears on the window pane
as his
mother and father leave for College.
Soon he’ll
be in the hands of his step-brother the rapist,
and I
interpret these dreadful words for the NHS therapist.
FOR
DEBRA AND A.
The clouds
were the colour of your skirt.
We used to
talk to a boy who hurt.
One day, one
of our hour long waiting for him days,
I told you
how I often couldn’t remember the colour of eyes.
In a flash
your hands blindfolded your eyes
and you
said: ‘What colour are mine?’
and I said:
‘Grey.’
In a second
you took your hands away
and there
were two eyes the colour of pale honey.
A dramatic
gesture, yes, unexpected
even from
the good art therapist you are.
Weeks later
he came back hurting 40 minutes late
in a new
jacket and sweat shirt:
can we two
help this Kurd with his fate?
15th
June 2000
FOR
DEREK SUMMERFIELD
We decided
he was not in the room,
in his haze
of pessimism, sickness and victimism.
For ten
years under a psychiatrist
in Turkey
who for two hours a week zoomed in on him:
and their
baby slept on in the push-chair.
But his wife
was all eyebrows and ears,
on her face
no sign of his bruising,
but he was
invested in his ‘illness’:
the reports
it would mean,
the
responsibilities he could abnegate.
As Derek
entered the end of his monologue:
and their
baby slept on in the push-chair,
we attempted
to bring him back into the room,
but this
talk was for two or three years in the future,
not just the
immediate features that faced them.
And I
returned to the inappropriateness
of the word
victim and again approved
the word
survivor. Pacified in the chair
all words
could wash over him
but she was
awash in the waves of his moods
that off
medication exploded like a runaway kettle.
And their
baby slept on in the push-chair.
July 2000
FOUR TANIAS
With homage to Kuzmin’s poem in ‘Alexandrian Songs’
One was the
poet Tania Voltskaya,
one Tania
was a presenter on TV,
one was
Tania from Bashkiria,
and one
Tania cut my hair for me.
The first
writes erotic poetry,
the second
is an actress and costume-maker too,
the third I
interpret for
and the
fourth had studied atomic physics.
The first
took an interview off me at home,
the second I
fell into conversation with at London Bridge Station,
the third
came to us when she was out of hope,
the fourth
was all in grey at the Turkish barbers.
The first
wore a grey houndstooth suit at the Pushkin Club,
the second
was dressed in orange and black,
the third
should be mother of the year
and the
fourth was from Odessa.
Three
Russian speaking Tanias
but the
second spoke no languages –
we sipped
our coffees
till we
clasped each other’s hands
and
exchanged first names
never to
meet again.
And the
other Tanias:
the first is
at her dacha near St Petersburg,
the third is
in South London, her kids at College,
the fourth
cuts men’s hair
and are all
bound by our meeting and this poem.
6 July 2000
AFTER MICK
THE OSTEOPATH
Call them
visions, lucid dreams, visual hallucinations
or just the
imagination:
I decided to
keep my eyes open
and
disregard them, by pen
strokes to
recreate in words
interpreted
like I do for Russians, Turks and Kurds.
Here I stand
or rather sit
at the
crossroads,
formulating
the next five year plan,
no babies
around to feed Complan
but many
books already conceived.
This week
off the Internet leaves me relieved.
ABOVE MY
STATION
For the
second time I have arrived
at Victoria
Station an hour early!
Somehow time
has contrived
to give me
time for three cups of curly!
It would be
natural to turn surly
but surely I
will derive a poem.
My left eye
is bloodshot with a gelatinous lump on the white:
it has given
me an awful fright,
hypochondriac
that I am with a wealth of symptoms
so I write
this poem impromptu,
no Betjeman
in a London station,
do I as a
poet have ideas above my station?
Or can I
really claim the title ‘Poet and Translator’?
After all
this can only be judged later
after the
lines are written,
after the
loves have smitten,
the kittens
have grown into cats.
15 July 2000
It is July,
yet we’ve only had two days of summer –
the weather
could not be dumber;
dull rain
falls, skies overcast
force people
to remember the grim past.
Light
filters through the great conservatory
of Victoria Station,
where the false oratory
of
announcements rules the roost.
Black coffee
gives this poem a boost.
The women
come and go thinking more of Leonardo
deCaprio
than Michelangelo;
an abandoned
copy of ‘Hello’,
here ‘it’s
dangerous to say “Hello”.’
Yet the
crowded bustle
involves my
bad, not evil, eye.
15 July 2000
KALKAN
The bronzed woman in grey
is sitting five paces away
in this Kalkan cafe.
Lucy told me my smile was fey
on the back cover of my Yellow Book.
Here I can almost stare and look,
as she clicks her big blue biro.
Long had I left the psyche of the giro
and I am not a refugee with vouchers,
but like a river finally debouches
into the open sea, my life stretches
its legs on the steep slopes of Kalkan.
3 August 2000
In my dream a brown shark
among the trout in a village havuz,
and ‘shark’ means East in Turkish.
The kids were bathing in the pool
and I call them out with a shout.
INSTEAD OF A POSTCARD
Here I am on the sea again
in Kalkan Southern Turkey.
The sun beats down
but I’m in the shade
and last night we had a poetry reading,
that started at eleven at night.
The Turkish language is feeding me
and I fear my Russian is suffering.
I’m missing the Can Yucel festival at Datcha
by two days. This village is better than a Russian dacha,
however I have been unable to catch HER,
the elusive woman of the holiday romance,
indeed I have not been tempted by any ‘roman’.
I write and read only poetry
and here in Kalkan
it pours out like virgin olive oil.
Not once has my blood boiled,
though my hosts’ kids are wild.
The gentle waiter at the cafe
gave me a poem I called ‘The Child Inside’,
which he wrote on military service
and we read it in Turkish and in my translation.
There are very few street urchins
here but lots of sea urchins.
On holiday I’m not really perching on the fence.
*
I left behind the London bustle.
Memories of Friern and Dr. Russel
were activated by Murdoch Laing,
who explained to me the Clang
syndrome and the Knight’s Move,
that I first read about in Mandelstam’s
Journey to Armenia.
Here in Kalkan I explained to Barish the waiter
that not only should he cherish the child in him,
but the mother, father, auntie, uncle.
*
I swear the sea murmured ‘och aye’
in reality, and Laing Murdoch I
have you and Jane to thank
for this salutary sally
into the land of my youth.
Truth is I’m having a bally
good time in Kalkan South Turkey
and the past months seem so murky
as the chorus of those incessant cicadas
with their Adidas footwear
scrape into our last hours of sleep.
Did you too visit hypnogoggia last night,
for we had called it up in words.
If Kalkan is a shield, where then are the swords?
5 August
2000
KALKAN FOR
JULIET
The bay has
turned from the millpond
‘milky
harbour’ to the ripple of waves.
A cool wind
blows under the cafe awning.
I didn’t
explore any caves
underwater
or on land,
didn’t go to
any raves:
but the
language I understand
and I swim
in it and dive in it,
goggling at
bronzed legs and limbs
and all is
peaceful and tranquil,
though if I
stayed here longer
it might
become boring.
*
Soft the
rain falls
but bed does
not call.
Books line
the walls:
no more
falls.
Soon it will
be fall,
tall trees
will shed all
leaves. I am
still enthralled
eavesdropping
on words’ calls.
August 2000
FOR MAIDE
AND FUNDA AT THE PUB BY THE MF
So there we
were sitting in the pub,
you drinking
lemonade and eating sandwiches
and me
risking reading a poem to Emine in Turkish.
The
sandwiches were club
and you were
like two beautiful wild white witches
and the poem
was on the borderline – of kitsch.
I cannot
imitate the wordplay in Russian or English,
but on my
life, the poem was not a glitch
but
heartfelt, a little stirring, a little whirring.
Funda and I
told the story of warfare with Social Services,
a letter as
ammunition which I translated as bullet,
then the
second bullet and he said then a grenade
and Funda
said then a bazooka
and then the
Tanki and then a whole Russian invasion.
We laughed
so much he said: ‘Laughter
is the best
medicine’ as we went downstairs.
You left,
Funda, and Maide and I
worked on
why
even
glimmers of love
I associate
with illness
and how
these circumstances were different.
My true
beautiful friends –
3 words to
you two in English
and 2 words
in Turkish,
as the poet
said.
6th
September 2000
That stomach
churning feeling,
that head
slightly reeling,
is more
likely from hunger
than any
emotional thunder.
Yet how
similar it feels,
the recorder
playing the same old reels,
a love that
has been hung,
a sensation
of going under:
but I nipped
it in the bud.
September
2000
Perched on a
stool in an Archway cafe,
no doubt my
brother Andrew was here in his day,
waiting for
the dentist who has sent me away:
bridge
broken on a fruit and nut bar.
I breathe in
not nicotine but tar.
Last night I
saw cracked lucent lines
with the corner
of my right eye
and wondered
whether I’d get a first migraine,
but then I
got no headache, no pain.
18 September
2000
TOLLIS’
CAFE
The morning
rain falls softly in Kentish Town,
umbrella by
my side I watch it come down.
Because
there is no room on the board I’m having a ‘Full Breast’.
It has been
adjourned the Paula Yates’ inquest.
The Russian
pop singer’s wife has glossy black hair
in tight
curls, would he share
her with me
as a Muse?
c18
September 2000
THE RUSSIAN
MUSE FOR K.L.
She could
have crinkly, glossy
black hair
and wear all black.
She must not
be bossy
or I’ll take
my poems back.
Perhaps she
will never know this poem
is inspired
by her alone
or that I
write it in bed by the lamps Ohms,
true the
brain is the most erogenous zone,
but drugs
can dose it up,
like the
water cup
waits for my
morning medication,
which is
probably a substitute for meditation.
Today,
locked out of home, I read hundreds of pages
of Michael
Kuzmin, in café, pub, at neighbours and downstairs.
How could
one put on anger’s airs:
this was a
heaven-sent excuse to read for ages
poetry that
defies my four hour homelessness.
So I am a
dinosaur (‘with e-mail’, Pavel said)
as old as
the monster of Loch Ness;
bless Nessie
Graham the Muse of WS,
and bless my
many Muses while I write in sleeplessness.
18 September
2000
FOR
REZA AND MUHAMMED
1
This is the
poem that can’t be written.
This is the
tongue that has been bitten.
This is the
language that holds its tongue.
This is the
body on half a lung,
yet still
singing its Persian heart out.
2
This is
death driving his black cart out,
the elder
brother of depression and parting.
This is a
paranoid premonition starting,
this is more
than wounds smarting.
My friends,
how can I tell you that poetry is healing,
that here we
can discuss both thoughts and feelings?
3
In the very
writing I calmed myself,
the elder
contemporary of Will Self,
yet still my
poems are on the shelf
waiting to
marry with a publisher
and become a
couple and bear couplets.
So let there
be no uplet
or continuance
of punishment
of an
innocent language.
‘Proactive
and engaged’
let them
haul me out of depression
by their
healing expression.
14th
October 2000
FOR FUNDA
AND MAIDE
It’s early
morning, end of the weekend
and the
Medical Foundation seems to be a decade away,
but still my
thoughts turn to you, good friends,
with whom I
indulge my Turkish word play.
Once, at
Oxford, thirty years ago,
I hung white
sheets over my bookcases.
I was
feeling so low,
I needed to
hide their whispering book faces.
Now, so far
on, a lot has really changed:
more
literature is ranged
on the
shelves and there are more Richard selves
but the
essence, the core, remains the same
and through
the fame or non-fame
my bed
remains double
with no
partner except the double
of myself
who died in a mental hospital
over 30
years ago, and I miss that person.
16 October
2000
FOR
MAIDE AND FUNDA
Your smiling
faces, your laughter
still warm
me and ring in my ears
more
powerful than my tinnitus.
Thus health
for ever after
will conquer
even MF fears
because as
you’d say, ‘innit’ and I add ‘us’
to rhyme,
for that’s what we 3 do,
laying the
last word on the line with its impact,
thinking in
metaphor and abstract.
Perhaps my
ears were all in a hurry
when I
visited the RFH for Les Murray,
but with that
poet I made no pact,
perhaps my
mind was too slack,
the audience
too chic or slick,
but I got
more out of Michael Donaghy.
16th
October 2000
It
is approaching midnight,
the time of
waking nightmares.
My friends
are not sleeping,
drinking tea
and smoking cigarettes
and
thinking, thinking, thinking
of the past,
the past, the past
and their
home country, home country.
There was a
girl there perhaps,
yes, I’m
sure there was,
two hearts
broken in two,
now
separated by a gulf, a war,
a
demonstration or more.
Asylum costs
them dear
in terms of
another kind of fear,
and M’s
missing tooth proves racism
in England,
even here.
16th
October 2000
‘If
I had a guitar
I’d sing
myself to sleep.
My poems are
so sad
they make
people weep inside.
Sometimes
the soldiers attack me
in my sleep.
It’s all back for me
when I close
my eyes.’
But, my
friends, it will pass,
take some
English classes,
drink herb
teas, shut out the news,
live in the
present and future:
good advice,
but perhaps it’s
not yet time
to take out the sutures:
the wounds
are still there –
it’s not a
given that they’ll ever heal.
16th
October 2000
‘We’re
miners united
we’ll never
be defighted’
The poems
have been on strike –
they have
not struck
and now I
try to stoke
them into
action
lest at one
fell stroke
they should
abandon me.
Like a
stoker I must take out the ash,
be careful
not to throw out burning coals in the trash,
for it’s
from them that come words’ clash,
the heavy
thunder, the lightning flash.
So the words
are pickets at the mine:
I can’t pick
them, they are no longer mine.
It’s on
myself that I levy the fine
though I am
buoyant and feeling fine.
Now they
queue up and stand in line –
hungry,
jostling, breaking into these lines.
9th
November 2000
The coal is
the goal of mine
no either or
but ore,
excavation
and archaeology
for the
words are recorded
and it is
geology
and the
ingots hoarded.
I’m a
dinosaur,
an old
fossil –
but
surviving is possible,
of that I’m
sure.
Layer after
layer the lines go down
yet the top
level of the poem is oldest,
this is not
the open field but the town
yet here too
it’s ‘the survival of the fittest’.
CAFE
POEM
In Turkish
‘kent’ means town,
so are we
sitting in Townish Town High Road
at our
favourite cafe: Tollis?
Today
there’s no need for brollies,
clear skies
and autumnal sunshine,
cappuccinos,
espressos not wine.
The sign
reveals: ‘Full Breast’ –
‘Full
Breakfast’ wouldn’t fit.
Writing here
has been the best,
reluctantly
I quit
to walk to
the Foundation
buoyed up by
my caffeine ration.
Never will a
computer be able
to write
this poem at this cafe table.
My brain
waves have more cables
to tune into
these sophisticated fables.
I see though
an adequate dictionary of rhymes
could be as
much help at times
for poet and
poetaster
as an
electric toaster
that grills the
daily bread,
or a needle
threader
to pass
through the thread,
pulling
behind it the camels
through its
ever-vigilant eye,
though there
are no rich in heaven
and troubles
in Jerusalem town
are still at
the eye of the hurricane.
13th
November 2000
Tollis
A
feeling of abandonment for a moment,
relieved by
a smile and squeeze of a hand.
There is a
difference in torture and torment
like the
sharp rocks and the round pebbles on the strand.
An ocean of
emotion is a cliché,
yet there is
sense in each
word. It
laps the beach,
the sand
drinks it in: I have not cheated
in French
for the rhyme.
4 December
2000
Reading
Anton Chekhov in Russian I chuck off
my
abandonment of prose.
Yet it was
more serious than a pose.
Vitaly
Shentalinsky in Moscow 1990 said I was
‘poisoned by
poetry’, now I’ll clock off
short
stories and novels,
a course of
detox that’s novel.
4 December
2000
He’s beating
her I swear.
The bare
facts bear
me out. She
didn’t arrive.
Bare fists
drive,
anger
driven,
‘lessons’
given,
and it’s
only trouble and strife that he derives.
4 December
2000
Alexander
Blok virtually stopped writing poetry
after the
Third Book,
but there is
a terrible beauty
and symmetry
in the pains he took.
Nowadays I
cannot accept ‘The Twelve’,
deep into it
though I have delved,
the first
poem I ever translated:
I came to
his lyric poems belatedly.
4 December
2000
‘Nice one
Cyrillic’,
Russian
scores again,
first prize
for lyrics
and in
translation there is gain,
though not
in transfer fees,
leave that
to a small Club,
the premier
league of novelists.
Once I took
vocabulary lists,
quested for
words in dictionaries,
now I am an
interpreting aficionado
with a ready
version on my lips and fingertips.
4 December
2000
Since the
age of 18 I have not been averse to verse,
but for the
last years I couldn’t see the pro in prose,
a poetry man
from top to toes.
I never knew
what I had to lose,
concentrating
on the bloom of the rose,
rather than
the earth from which it grows.
‘Prosaic’ is
a prose writer in Russian,
and its
poetry is my pillar and cushion
and I was
able to languish
in its
language with and without anguish,
on hunger
strike against those words that finished at the end of the line,
with James
Thackara’s ‘The Book of Kings’ I broke my fast,
the term is
over, the liberated novels join my cast,
poetic prose
joins poetry – I think this will last.
4 December
2000
Tollis Café
FOR MY
FRIEND MAIDE
You are my
ceylan,
my güzel
gazelle.
You
interpret like me for people
who have
been in jail an’
more yet
often your face is wreathed in smiles
and you make
me laugh as well as Miles.
Do your
sessions like our friend Funda’s
swing from
laughter to tears
like Russian
literature
‘laughter
through tears’? Under
those smiles
lies the pain we all share
but was not
inflicted on us there,
that is the
difference:
we feel it
as we interpret the essence
and it is so
ugly that we starve for the pretty,
the
beautiful, and didn’t Dostoyevsky
say that
‘Beauty would save the world’?
14 December
2000
FOR
FUNDA
I would not
see you as the Muse of Tragedy, Funda,
for
sometimes we have fun, da?
But at times
with some of ours your face shows such horror
that our
worlds seem to be collapsing too
and sympathy
becomes total empathy,
but always
you extrapolate and extract,
not like a
politico or a religio with a tract
but like a
wise woman within the contract,
launching
themes and words through me with tact
and I feel
we are a couple in the triangle
yoked to
carry his or her burden.
I know the
delicate rhythms of your speech
and you
respect mine:
it’s not a
question of preaching or teaching,
more like
translating poetry on the line.
As they
offer up to us their suffering,
and victim
means sacrifice in Russian
we try to
suck out the poison drop by drop
lest it
spoil a lifetime’s crops,
after
beatings by Mafia, soldiers or cops.
They come
from capital, town or village:
to work with
them, to work with you, is always a privilege.
22nd
December 2000
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