First Quatrains Part One

HE RUBAIYAT QUATRAINS 2005

QUIRKY QUATRAINS FOR RUSSIAN POETS

Tarkovsky père is in the bag,

his poems fit as fiddles.

Violins are anti-violence –

that was Shostakovich’s bag.

*

Daniel Andreyev is on my shelf,

discoverer of extermic worlds and self.

Barefoot he would have walked his way to health,

but was arrested by secret service stealth.

*

Alexander Blok bookmarked the turn of the century.

He recorded the Stranger’s and Beautiful Lady’s entries,

the coarse behaviour of Red Guard sentries,

Russia crucified on her silver birch trees.

*

Akhmatova valued art over life,

created an aesthetic paradigm:

she became three husband’s wife

but none of them gave her a good time.

*

Mandelstam handled prose in the Egyptian Stamp:

‘I think in missing links’. But there came the cattle wagon’s ramp:

his biography should have had nothing to do with the Camp,

it was always closer to the flickering oil lamp.

*

Olga Sedakova’s poetry is by no means over.

My translator’s eyes will often rove her

lines. Poet of the Wild Wild Rose,

God forbid that I turned her into prose.

*

Ilia Bokstein, arrested on the statue of Mayakovsky –

‘Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do’.

Vladimir in his grave would have shouted f-offsky,

after the Camp the Holy Land accepted you.

*

Aronzon – I pause for breath –

too soon you died your death.

Why do I feel you unknowingly bequeathed to me

the totality of your poetry?

*

Larissa Miller – you are the opposite of a killer,

which is not a lifer but a lifegiver.

You display such life and poetry skills

that I feel I could come off all my pills.

*

Velimir Khlebnikov: verily I would not write you off,

though I haven’t embarked on translating you.

These days I have a hacking cough,

but still I smoke and burn like you.

*

Alexander Vvedensky – I like your double ‘v’,

for it like you confuses me:

but in poetry and in women I like complexity:

take me off into your sky to ski.

*

Alexander Pushkin: I have to push one in for you:

you are so ‘rodnoy’, so kin,

though undoubtedly darker skinned,

and your poems are a magical rag bag too.

*

Daniel Kharms, being out of your way

means impoverishment, I say.

You’re able to be absurd, yet pray,

turn day into night, night into day.

*

Boris Pasternak has the knack

of complexity and simplicity,

from the simple past turns back

to the early verses’ complexity.

*

I have not a lot of clues about Nikolai Kluyev,

again he’s a complicated cove.

I’m sure one could strike treasure trove

in him: his craft is definitely clev.

*

There’s something oddsky about Brodsky.

His brain is high up in the sky,

where it’s cold cerebral and sublime

in the rarefied aesthetic atmosphere.

*

Prigov’s Buddhist chanting whine I cannot stand

but his satire of Sovok I understand,

though he slapped my wrist for calling him a satirist,

for his surreal realism he is on my list.

I sent my friend Ros to visit Sergei Gandlevsky

and they walked together in the woods round Moscow.

I translated him for Rotterdam Poetry International:

blizzards of words are made up of flakes of snow.

*

Andrei Voznesensky used to send me

faxes of poetry with commentary.

That was when we were working on ‘On the Edge’,

since then our correspondence has been on the ledge.

*

I met once with Yevtushenko on the lawn at the Writers’ Union.

His anthology of Russian Poetry shows he knows his selected onions,

but then Alyosha Voskresensky defined him as ‘our deputee’

and I said ‘other definitions’ were known to me.

*

I guess I’m jealous that I’m not a Russian poet:

it’s not enough to be a translator and know it,

that wonderful language – I have to feel its soul –

I don’t want it piecemeal, I want it wholesale.

*

Katia Kapovich writes beautifully in each

language, Russian and English.

In Russia they tried to divide her soul,

but she comes back with a double soul.

*

Negar is the youngest: the joker in the pack.

With my own rhymes I try to tack

the course of her line endings. Email sending

accompanied our poems forth and back.

*

Ella Joffe is the opposite of a graphomaniac:

her rare poems always have the craic

of a voluntary Russian exile in Finland;

friendship with Liza put your ‘Autumn Sonata’ in my hand.

*

I read Yesenin for months in my hospital bed

after I had leapt over death.

He breathed into me snow, spring with alcohol on his breath

and taught me that suicide is not the only death.

*

Nikolay Gumilyov, you took me off on your Africa travels,

showed me rare birds of flight, giraffes and camels,

protected me under fire and in love’s travails,

yet still were shot at 35 – to no avail.

*

Nazim Hikmet: you are an honorary Russian poet

in your Soviet Union exile.

I combine your languages and style:

for me you too have not died yet.

*

Tatiana Bek, I was only for a short time at your beck and call:

this translator works in bursts then returns to his own poems’ thrall.

You showed me in one poem the ability to grow old gracefully

and since I haven’t seen you for years, I haven’t thanked you fully.

*

Timur Kibirov – it’s me who’s lame,

like your namesake Tamerlane.

You took on Lenin’s childhood

with the wit and arrows of a Robin Hood.

*

Philip Nikolayev, you used to be an interpreter,

grasped the veins, arteries and aorta

of our languages, then went to the heart of the matter

writing poems till one couldn’t tell which tongue was your Mother.

*

Dimitri Obolensky, prince, knight and professor,

meticulous reader and lucid translator.

I overburdened you in our last reading together.

Just before Tsvetaeva you stopped – and we never met again later.

*

Max Voloshin’s hospitable table at Koktebel

bearded to him many poets from these quatrains

and he wrote poems about the terror times like a prophet rebel.

This was where Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva picked up pebbles.

*

Marina Tsvetaeva, the ai and eye and I are in the centre of your name,

surrounded by the sea and a blossoming flower.

Akhmatova saw you in a letter from the elderflower,

a mother and mother of poems you became, but never an elder.

*

Victor Krivulin, we made an odd couple, hobbled, me pillless,

in Leningrad.

We worked together on Mandelstam as I did as an undergrad.

An underground man, you too died young and that makes me sad.

We translated each other and that was not bad.

*

Mikhail Kuzmin – I came to you late on Sedakova’s recommendation.

Your ‘Trout’ must have broken the ice with trepidation.

Pasternak had wanted to be a composer and musician,

but you combined music with poetry harmoniously, without friction.

*

Dmitri Vedenyapin, we lost touch before I could translate your ‘Shroud’.

You’d translated my Octets to OM and Masha visited me in London,

and I to you in Moscow for Pasternak’s Jubilee for which I was proud.

My illness flared, I in Leningrad, pills in Moscow, by which I

was undone.

*

Yevgeny Rein, my early translations of you were berated

for being full of mistakes: politics, or did they really exist?

At the Pushkin Club and the ICA, our rapport was created,

M, D, and P, for us are more than letters on a list.

*

In the Writers Union I met Levitansky.

He gave me his books, but my reading of him is scanty.

Then in London I got documentation of his heart condition,

all I can do for him in the future will be a few translations.

*

Yelena Shvarts, in the bleak present your poetry gives me heart,

translated by Michael Molnar and Catriona Kelly.

Petersburger, in at the underground 70s start,

editor of Aronzon. I’d rather read you than watch the Telly.

*

There are some 60s poets who are difficult to find:

Krasovitsky and Okhapkin I have especially in my mindset –

to the unprinted heap let them not be consigned.

Yefim Slavinsky searched them out for me on the Internet.

*

Arkady Rovner, you and Victoria Andreyeva with Gnosis whet

my curiosity,

and this time it was prose as well as poetry.

Your hero Shamsky had an orthopaedic boot:

by fate I translated it into my reality.

*

Vuctoria, your last photo reminds me of Aronzon’s Rita

before she died. I could not have had a sweeter

poet friend. Author of ‘The Beautiful Complexity’

and ‘Dream of the Firmament’, your exit grieves me.

*

Anri Volokhonsky, you bring the East to me,

a dash of Khlebnikov and a perfect lyricism

in your description of the maple tree –

but I still think of all the isms I’m closest to Acmeism.

*

Mikhail Lozinsky, they say Stalin let you out of the camp

to complete Dante’s Divine Comedy with Paradise.

Your Shakespeare translations were in allegories’ camp:

in the 30s and 40s those tyrants’ hands threw the dice.

*

Anatoly Nayman: you have a right to appear here,

as a poet as well as Akhmatova’s secretary.

We met in Moscow with Amanda Haight at AAA’s anniversary,

your poems to your granddaughter dispel the century’s fears.

*

Gennady Aigi: I should write this like you without rhyme,

which in Russian and my recent poetry would be unique.

You chew on your Chuvash and poems to your daughter Veronique:

Peter France translated you – an Angel book that guardians time.

*

Ravil Buharaev: a master poet with his sonnet wreath

in Russian, English, Hungarian and Tatar.

I wonder, with your pipe smoking like me, how you can breathe

enough to broadcast and let your writing run so far.

*

Lydia Grigorieva pushes up poems in her rose garden

but she’s not pushing up daisies.

Author of ‘Onegin in a skirt’, I beg Pushkin’s pardon,

you’re a poet who confronts prostitutes, druggies and crazies.

*

Unknown poet of the Arsenal Mental Prison Hospital,

your anonymous naming is always a mouthful.

My friend Victor Fainberg, 70s dissident, who brought your poems out,

brings out in me as many poems as these poets bring out.

*

Hamid Ismailov – forgive me I never translated

your facsimile Russian newspaper of poetry –

the only work we completed from the Uzbek together was Belgi.

Your BBC Central Asian Service still stands by me while the Russian

and Turkish ones ignore me.

*

Marina Buyvalo, psychiatrist and writer, friend of the poets,

especially Aisenberg,

you’re here because you support and inspire me.

Whenever I bump against a Cold War iceberg that they’re spying on me,

you say: ‘So, Richard, do you really have any State Secrets?’ and in mirth

we submerge.

*

Peter Norman, my friend, you’re more than Akhmatova’s interpreter

and bodyguard.

Being blind when you have such a fine library is hard.

In London a letter came to you addressed: ‘Asile des jeunes

femmes Russes’.

You translated Tarkovsky and knew well Rossiya and Rus.

*

Isaiah Berlin is or was the Guest from the Future,

but no one can tell where the future starts

and this is its most exciting feature.

I see his ghost still visiting my future constantly without fits and starts.

*

What to say about my teacher Richard Pollock,

who after Russian knows that in Turkish fish is balık.

To start Russian and give up French was my wish,

streamlined under your tutelage I took to it like to water a fish.

*

John C.Q. Roberts, after Marlborough College, you introduced me again

to Voznesensky:

his book has a tidemark on it when on Dartmoor I sank into a marsh.

Long hours of one to one tutoring. Despite years at the GB-USSR

association, you remained without a K.

In the art of poetry translation but never diplomacy this student may have

outrun the master.

QUATRAINS FROM THE QUADRANGLE

John Fennel had the garden room at Univ –

soon he was to become Russian Professor.

In your last year at Oxford it’s important where you live.

He visited me in the Warneford, but did not become my father confessor.

*

Tony Stokes and I exchanged Russian ideas and Squash strokes.

He was an extremely good scholar and bloke.

Some years after I left he suffered a stroke –

I remember his coffee with chicory at tutorials not long after I woke.

*

Anne Pennington was soft-spoken and sacred –

the sort of person to whom one could tell a secret.

Unfortunately her secrets of Russian philology escaped me,

but her Vasko Popa Penguin translations had a profound effect on me.

*

Konovalov at great age finished off his professorship,

lecturing on Byliny (old Russian ballads) to just the four of us,

but one of them was Kate Fleming, more attractive than hip,

so I attended his deinaugural lectures without fuss.

*

Should I tell you the secret of my second class degree?

Joe and I were waiting outside the viva room with Professor Auty,

who was vivaing me on the aforementioned philology.

Joe recited to me the plural of old Russian nouns ­– and inside

what was the question asked me?

*

I took my schools from the asylum of the Warneford.

During the Tolstoy and Chekhov paper I could afford

to take a walk outside with Robin ‘Byron’ Harrison, my old schoolmaster

and invigilator

up to the golf course. Friends, Squash, Russian, translation and later

illness: that was my Oxford.

*

Of these friends Bob Moxon-Browne is now a judge –

I on the other hand onto the financial ladder have hardly budged.

Murdoch Laing buys international airport leases.

Saleem Vahidy became a Chief of Police.

*

Julian O’Halloran is on radio and TV waves,

there must be some of us who crave.

William Shawcross writes about the UN –

I’m not sure with whom of you I’m in.

*

Shiva Naipaul my fellow Oxford author,

presented exclusively 60’s music on offer

when in 78 I visited him and Jenny:

I miss him more than any.

Shiva made a study of student suicide –

luckily I was not on his list.

Of a heart attack, young he died.

He was a thought activist as much as a novelist.

*

John Slater, the lawyer, introduced me to Michael Rosen,

then the author of the play Backbone and a lampoon on All Souls,

by saying: ‘This is McKane, he’s a pseud’,

it was more an intellectual insult than rude.

*

Red-head John Slater challenged me to a Squash match

after I’d had to drink a pint of sherry.

I hit the wall and the ball in my merry

state but I carried through my boasts – strikingly won that match.

*

Once walking in summer through the quad at Queens

with my brother Christopher in our Bandannas and white Levi Jeans,

a wag said: ‘Where are the other five?’

I took this that we were Magnificent, and oh so alive.

*

A Rhodes Scholar said: ‘Give me a pole and I’d punt the Atlantic’,

punting was the nearest I got to the Romantic,

unless it was a first kiss at the Rose Revived.

Happy memories have to be recalled to survive.

*

I squirreled into the Squirrels Squash team,

beat the College No 3 on tranquillizers.

But the breakdown which I still dem-

onise played me into the hands of the despisers.

*

Every Sunday a shy man called Lippiat

would come to my room on Logic Lane

to borrow my round hot plate,

a big boot like mine now made a disability plain.

*

That hot plate was a temptress

for on it with my jezve I cooked Turkish coffee.

In times of happiness and distress

my friends after dinner would flock to me.

*

Bill Garvey was a good friend, who became a master carpenter.

Those were the days of the soulful ‘If I were a carpenter’…

I brought back his order of Bafra cigarettes from Turkey –

he played Squash with Tony Stokes and me.

*

I eschewed OUDS and amateur dramatics,

though I auditioned for a slave owner with a Russian/Turkish accent

in Androcles and the Lion by Bernard Shaw. Psychological tics

had started but I never knew I would be sent

‘up the hill’ to what we’d have cruelly called The Nut House.

My Akhmatova was already accepted by Penguins,

when especially in Mandelstam I went on a carouse

of cryptogram hunting. I laughed inappropriately as though I’d had

four double gins.

*

Shortly before the mental crash I visited Redmond O’Hanlon

and his wife Belinda and we had supper.

This was literature, humour and conversation hands on:

how could I so soon after be on my uppers?

*

Destruction can come so very fast: from Oxford

only fifteen years later I realised this as I launched myself from the ledge,

building up over years the feelings stress,

one sudden misinterpretation and you’re over the edge.

*

‘Look before you leap’ is hopeless advice.

I say: ‘Look and don’t leap’ and ‘Look back after’.

You can undo your life in a split-second trice,

and there’s absolutely no return from the hereafter.

*

Lucky are those whose cry is heard as a cry for help.

The sleeping black dog of depression has to have its yelp.

They dog you especially at night, those negative feelings,

life’s joysome reel leaves you and your head is reeling.

*

My diagnosis is ‘atypical schizoaffective bipolar psychosis’.

heavy – but I manage, though I note that it is more than neurosis.

I’ve played with the concept of the Russian bipolar bear.

Outside my own control, I do take lithium and for Modecate

my bum I bear.

*

The question being psychologically healthy poses

is can you lose your psychiatric diagnosis?

Everyone know I’m more expressive

than schizoaffective or manic depressive.

*

But at St Thomas’s Dr Sergeant, consultant not conductor,

insulted me that I was ‘only here because of stelazine’.

Later, a few months after writing a sister long poem The Crown of Gorse

in tough old Friern Barnet I was under Patrick Campbell, a better doctor.

*

Friends know my emotions are not dampened,

only by my jump my mobility is hampered.

I can’t run, but my lines can

and despite all my sympathies for prisoners, I’ve never been in the can.

*

But I wrote a torch song: ‘Let me be Me’

that I’m going to pop in here.

I am fast turning my material into Vox Populi:

do you approve, John, if I borrow your melody?

TORCH SONG

If I find myself held in detention

for singing words of freedom

I’ll cut through the tension:

let me be me.

And in my time of torture

there is still a light that shines on me,

shine through my blindfold:

let me be me.

And if they attack my brain

with their age-old waiting game,

I‘ll sing through the bars:

let me be free.

And in the interrogation,

when they fire those questions at me,

I’ll hold this torch song up,

for you’ll be thinking of me,

thinking of me, thinking of us,

thinking of us, thinking of me,

whisper words of freedom:

for I’ll be thinking of you.

April-June 2004

‘But he lacks the killer instinct’, they said about my Squash prowess.

Also I was probably drinking too much to reach the highest.

Smoking I started seriously in 1974

in Friern Hospital and that I am still paying for.

*

In Squash the bread and butter shots

are those close and parallel to the side walls.

The lob, the drop shot, the smashes’ swats

and the boasts and diagonals are the killing balls.

*

I write left-handed but played racquet games right-handed,

now they are all just words not actions,

but when I visualise, half-dreaming, I Play Squash left-handed.

Once I had lightning reactions, now I rely in my poetry and interpreting

for swift reactions.

*

I’m drive n down to Henley by a Blue named Neil McDonald

for the Oxford County Championships

and find myself at the top of the list – I’m appalled –

I’m playing the first seed: pip-pip.

Two games to one up I get a bout of cramp,

exit the court and eat a teaspoon of salt:

‘You’ll spoil your osmotic balance’, says the marker and ex-champ.

I go on to win but in the semis McDonald grinds me to a halt.

*

What did it mean in the 60s to be fit in both senses of the word,

to score birdies on the golf course rather than score birds?

To have a powerful drive but not drive and to have a low sex drive,

to break down when my manhood had barely arrived?

*

Murdoch Laing dropped his stuffed wallet

off a party barge in a canal lock.

Wet-suited, Christopher and I dived for it

but searching on the muddy bottom we had no luck.

*

We invited Isaiah Berlin to speak to the Russian Circle.

His stream of historiography positively burbled.

It wasn’t that I’d had too much Stolichnaya vodka and

sandwiches but this poet found it difficult to understand.

*

Peter Levi said: ‘Even if you were in a Russian prison I would visit

you’. Mentoring or tormenting, which is it?

But we enjoyed together levity as well as specific gravity

and he wrote poems about gravelponds and nature outside the city.

*

‘Chairman Mao, he make Warden Sparrow into bird’s nest soup’,

this was high standard Oxford graffiti.

I found him gentle and understanding tout a coup,

when from hospital I went to his All Souls’ party.

*

After I had me Lizzie, her father Stephen

Spender gave a small reading at our college and Shelley’s, Univ.

After, in the Master’s Lodge I was able to give him the impression

that via being a translator I was becoming a poet – if only I’d live.

*

In memoriam T.J. Binyon d. October 2004

Tim Binyon was laid back, a Bryusov scholar,

about nothing did he get hot under the collar.

He tutored me on Mandelstam when I’d become paranoid out of my skin

and much later he wrote an excellent biography of Pushkin.

Tim Binyon had told me one tutorial that perhaps one day:

‘I was at Oxford with Richard McKane’, people would say.

I only record this because he died the other day

and dead men can’t mean what they say.

25 years after Oxford I interpreted for Flora, Tim Binyon’s step daughter,

with a Kurdish stammerer. Flora was a speech therapist with a stutter

and I have one occasionally myself. So when I plosively uttered

a string of syllables in Turkish: the Kurd announced: ‘You have it too!’

*

I loved the games not of football but bar football –

I could call upon my Squash wrist.

The overseer of the machine was called Yusupov, a Univ grad after all,

and I got to fulfil that newly-created position first.

*

There was a contest to hit a laid back five iron

out of the Radcliffe quad. I never indulged in this odd

tradition, content to sharpen my wit and iron-

y, and ignore the replacing of divots and sods.

*

It was possible to hit a golf drive quail high

and in the evening at the Shakespeare Club to eat quail eggs.

The poetaster Dave Raine made me quail.

He did not assault me but my feelings assailed.

*

Walks round Christ Church water meadows

with Bill Garvey and Robin Ormond.

25 years on I met her again at the Troubadour,

the same time as Andrea who became my Hungarian translator.

*

The Squash ball makes a line through the air:

when it hits the wall that is they rhyme right there.

A rally can last 4, 14 lines or more,

a poem – but to develop this metaphor might become a bore.

SHORT RALLY

Racquet ball wall

Racquet ball wall

Racquet ball tin

Racket

*

Red-faced almost apoplectic,

fit bodies thrown in a controlled epileptic

fir. The ball becomes red hot,

but this is only a game is it not?

*

Perhaps I shouldn’t have given up coarse fishing,

because spearfishing was ultimately more violent,

though both of them provided me with hours of meditation,

anyway Oxford’s absence of sea and lake meant I had to relent.

*

Wish, fish, dish, the childhood rhymes,

like the best call out for each other.

They provide for my verse a perfect paradigm –

you find them again and again in life like a brother.

*

We share the Mediterranean sea,

Classics, Seferis, Durrell and Cavafy.

I don’t want to think my breakdown broke us apart,

but it was a big shock to both brothers’ hearts.

*

For this poet, the past becomes the present on the line –

the future is your reading it – the ultimate pay-off.

I may write for nothing, but that choice is mine –

I’m certainly banking on someone though they may be way off.

*

Conversations with strangers are as important

as attracting them to your public readings.

Once you’ve touched them, given them a portent

of you, part of their soul will be heeding.

*

Passengers’ eyes may be vacant opposite,

but their own problems they are positing,

starting conversations may not always be apposite

but occasionally they are startlingly exciting.

*

It seems these days my poems require commotion:

I can’t write static at home at a table.

Even though I make the same coffee potion,

the computer also can’t seem to enable.

*

At Postlip, when I was a youngster,

Oyster, Urchin, Scampi and Lobster were our cows and heifers.

Harry, the gypsy, learned me to milk full-hand

and the language of cow and pig to understand.

*

Thirty years back I wrote about

‘riot wracked Iraq’

and mentioned the Gaza Strip

but I didn’t foresee Afghanistan kicking off after my 77 trip.

But Krivulin in Leningrad said rightly

that I selected to be in ‘deadly spots’,

but they don’t enter into my dreams nightly

because even then I am too much on the spot.

*

Interpreting grounds one in the short term future,

though delving in the past is therapy’s feature.

Feelings and thoughts – language is their creature.

Time heals and you can take out the wounds’ sutures.

*

For John Rundle

Torture’s scar tissue is not the only existent issue,

more obvious is the effect on the brain,

not just in flagrant epileptic fits

but in anger and irritability, when everything gets on your tits.

*

It’s good to say boo to taboos,

to woo rather than be wooden.

You have to say boo to a goose,

to bid rather than be bidden.

*

To beat around the bushel

is better than hiding your candle under it.

Will they elect a further Bush, Hell who can tell,

and have their light hidden under him?

*

There are Ericas in America

who now have real fear of flying.

Politicians have grown hystericer

and make up for it by lying.

*

Ad hoardings have their place,

take up vertical space

like above graves the gravestones.

Wonder if they’ll be buried vertically, my bones.

THE POET ON LEAVING THE CHILDREN’S GROUP

AT THE MEDICAL FOUNDATION

What can I say about you all?

Perhaps a poem in the morning will call it up

before I go to the Medical Foundation this afternoon.

How many plastic cups

of orange juice and squash

we’ve drunk together squashed

round the table at the start of sessions?

How often we’ve listened and interrupted our impressions

of the week, our memories of the past

when life in London is moving on fast:

English, school, growing several inches,

sometimes pushing off bullying which is more than pinches;

letting out the things that really trouble,

still seeing the parts of the world are in rubble

of manmade earthquakes.

Being junior interpreters for your parents’ sakes

can never be easy – I sympathise, it makes

me ache too though I’ve done it for seventeen years.

I do know you’ve all still got fears,

some are difficult to express in words

but we try to concentrate on all your feelings – towards

your being able to cope with them, to hope with them

for the future in the present.

I am not leaving you and though my present

is less than you all gave me,

it is also the poems you give me that will save me

from being very sad on Wednesday afternoons.

I’ll remember pictures, poems and tunes,

smiles, laughter, deepnesses and sometimes tears,

the fact that I am almost old enough to be your grandfather

but also that I was not a teacher that pushed you farther,

but a ‘group worker’: it sounds strange but we do good work,

and though I only interpret for Russian speakers, Kurds and Turks,

I worked with many children in over eight years from so many countries.

Feelings don’t grow on trees –

now I’m not sure what that means –

except we attach feelings to different scenes

and they can begin to run riot before our teens –

touch them carefully – it can be painful –

share them with friends here – it’s always gainful.

I’ll be in touch with you always though not quite with you.

I’ve seen your joy which means elation,

seen the telling which means relation.

I’ve been touched by your doubts, your fears and tears and feelings

and seen your trust and confidence building:

I’ve been lucky to be right there at the picturing, the telling

and I wish you all good lives, good touch with your feelings

and may you always remember the expression of your impressions

round the table in our so many Wednesday sessions.

11 October 2004

Going to the Uzbek demonstration

against a regime that’s monstrous.

On the train the women are more beautiful

than ever and the sky is cloudless, sunful

and this may not be my last day on earth,

for each day is a multiple birth

and the days of our lives are not innumerable

but we must demonstrate life as much as we are able.

11 October 2004

I find myself talking a strange English

to my favourite waitress:

‘I hope you have a good career with your diploma’.

It’s not just diplomats who have to be diplomatic –

for this poet and Neruda it’s almost automatic:

yet good diplomacy means not pulling punches,

means intuitively following your hunches.

11 October 2004

With just the look on your face you gave me succour

at the station, though you didn’t look at me.

It was enough to know, stranger,

that you are in your own reality,

safe this morning and out of danger.

How did I know? I didn’t really –

what storms and consternations could be behind that serenity?

I, with my hair long and sleep short last night,

when I fought for a distant friend’s rights,

am running late for an important appointment:

this interpreter can still spread words’ ointment.

12 October 2004

Father Thames – flood me with your sense

of history as we cross you on the railway bridge.

Flow with your immense propensity

for attracting living, drowning and dead.

You lie on your dirty, yet made river-bed,

plenty of liquid assets flow in your banks,

one of this city’s treasures.

Crossing you, walking by you is always a pleasure,

and though you are not blue as the Bosphorus

for centuries you have offered us

your reality, your symbolism.

Your effect on London’s metabolism

is one of faithful constancy,

of stamina, of just being there,

the aorta not the artery –

the river our hearts share.

12 October 2004

FOR CECILIE

And instead of writing to Anna,

somehow you put a kind kind of spanner

in my works and I find myself

writing a poem to you, knowing full well

as you told me that no one has done that before.

So, we are talking alone outside the launch

and it is dark black night around.

It is just my hunch

that we are both now lonely and that may be bound

to be as the others’ bunch go off to a pub

and you decide to go home on the bus or tube –

I didn’t enquire. We talked about

my finding Anna attractive,

but somehow that didn’t detract, if

I’m not mistaken, nowt

from our friendship. Your face is so expressive:

in it I sometimes see the horror of our work,

but then it softens to an almost excessive

degree and I think of the brickbats you may get with work

and hope that you can press on with your impressionability,

can couple strength and resilience to your ability

to be cool, calm and collecting only a small pay cheque.

Dealing with writers’ lives by prison wrecked

and regimes forced, on a daily basis,

requiring rapid action from crisis to crisis,

putting up with office devices,

yet being a peacemaker not divisive,

you and your friend Lucy have to be decisive.

Our prisoners are the servants of Time –

and their repetitive constant rhyme is their unfound crime,

yet the reduced time you’ll give them is so valuable.

You will have to be tough and flexible

at the same time. Here’s this poem – you may heed it.

It’s a friendship poem and both of us need it.

13 October 2004

MIND WRITING

Should Mandelstam’s ‘Stone’ be ‘Rock’?

‘Kaya’, Turkish rock, the Russian feminine ending,

in Jamaican the word for love, blending

our thoughts as we read them,

our words meeting as we heed them,

without their sound we can still read them.

Ratushinskaya, Politkovskaya, Ahmet Kaya, the pillars of rock,

which rhymes so percussively with shock,

those tactics they had to adopt in their art,

taking the risk that they would be dropped and hard

from the heights but their words sank like stones,

ducked and draked on lakes in forbidden zones.

Their poems, articles and songs

articulate human rights and wrongs.

15-16 October 2004

Though I’m hárassed

I can’t afford to go to Paris:

pressure of work

for Russian and Turk.

I’d set up appointments

I couldn’t cancel

but I really meant

to come and one day will.

My stomach feels hollow

though I’ve just eaten.

My feelings I’ll follow

though our intention’s been beaten.

I waste no time in cafés –

I buy writing time at the tables.

With this pencil I have an affair,

consummated whenever I’m able.

It’s natural to feel despondent,

when house buyers don’t respond

and prices being not correspondent

throw one into the slough of despond.

I wish I could wave a magic wand

to waft away your despair –

we are not goldfish in a muddy pond,

we need to breathe fresh air.

16 October 2004

MY HAIR TAKES ME BACK

The occasion could have cut me to the quick.

I would have gone to the bathroom to be sick.

And in there: ‘Why don’t you cut your hair?

They don’t allow hippies in here.’

It really was the opposite of fair

but I retorted in anger not in fear.

I was back in 68

and it opened my poetry’s floodgates.

The quirky Oxford Quatrains

could not be restrained.

I cut my hair and they kept on growing:

thank you for your jibes that got me going

and reminded me of a specific cruelty

in the guise of patronising wit

that could have driven me into the futility

of petulant responses, instead

I used you to jump back into the pit

of memory: the 60s when we were young,

the Beatles and Stones songs were sung,

my hair was long

and I was not capable as now

of singing my own song.

21 October 2004

LONDON BRIDGE

Where the women drink their coffees

lighting up their cigarettes

and the men read their newspapers

concentrating on the sales and lets,

where the crowds are interchanging,

never settled never stable -

I sit here at this café table

And over paper my pen is ranging.

I was soaked through by a cloudburst –

a woman said: ‘You only get wet once’.

I walked on, had no need to curse.

I look up – I’ve missed my train –

down to the electricity in my brain.

23 October 2004

You have a story to tell

and I am the man to hear it.

It will work out quite well

for you have no need to fear me.

Everyone has a story to tell

but they yearn for someone to hear it.

Telling the tales in poems is all very well,

but the publishers just might not clear it.

So the story is untold,

the books are not printed,

let alone sold, lust but for gold,

silence – was this what the State intended?

23 October 2004

On your birthday, Wilding, though we’re apart,

I hope your lion-cub heart will be sung

a Happy Birthday song from all along

to wish you tidings of great joy

which you bring to this Dad, both man and little boy.

24 October 2004

There must be a reason why

I just missed the Victoria train.

Whistle blew a blast as I

hobbled down the stairs.

I sit here in the sunshine,

reflecting on my poesy.

John Clare is in my bag.

I’m getting to know him again.

Breakfastless stomach is feeling queasy.

Writing poems can be so easy,

like shelling peas.

Listen up please:

I’m preparing a statement.

When comes the final abatement?

Is it with the silence of the grave,

when the coffin contains its ashen treasure trove?

Or is it in life the silence of the ash grove?

26 October 2004

Something is niggling me inside

about which I’m not proud.

Shame is a powerful feeling:

is that what I’m feeling?

Pent-up, it does nothing for me to hide

it, but I cannot speak it out loud.

It’s like a lump of concrete

in my soul secreted.

It may be it’s an unknown shame

that need not be named.

Others might not feel the same –

then there’d be no excuse to make myself lame.

26 October 2004

FOR OLGA

What can I give you?

Only a smile in farewell?

The counter often separated us,

now the wide world will.

You’re going back to Russia,

to your piano and guitar –

music, songs and poems

will always be where we are.

For many months your café

became my poems’ cradle,

boosted in the evening and day,

you brought coffee to my table.

I look up and see our friend Camille

gathering glasses in the next door pub.

This café at Victoria will always feel

more than a gentleman’s club.

It’s not my Atheneum but my Athens,

my London in Petersburg:

this is where my inspiration happens,

where I spur my writing urge.

Six months seems the normal rotation

for waiters and waitresses.

Though you’ll be gone Victoria station

will continue to carry passengers in happiness and distress.

I’ll be moving soon, using another route,

but at Victoria I had some victories.

Though I didn’t shoot a shot

I wrote the wood from the trees.

28 October 2004

I miss my visions of fresh green light

in summer through the yellow curtains.

For me they don’t spell out curtains,

after the first time my apprehension was light.

I’ve migrated to another bedroom –

soon I’ll leave Bromley for good:

now I think I’ve dug down to bedrock,

I prepare my poems better than food.

At work each hour of interpreting is like a layer,

there’s no doubt I’m a contender.

I like being tough and tender,

on the stage of life I am a player.

And the feelings lay down layer on layer.

Their explosiveness is delayed.

The subconscious plays a waiting game,

whose thin skin is flayed and who is the flayer?

29 October 2004

Fed up, frustrated, still I have to reject the novel,

even with a synopsis at it I’d cavil.

It’s almost as though with time I’m having a quarrel.

I’m holding myself over a barrel.

But I’ve come to know that when I’m feeling irritable

it enables me to write against the grain.

My lines have a drive to make me stable,

they come to the rescue again and again.

The long poem in quatrains has dried up,

perhaps it has run its course.

No more words like a voice at night gone hoarse,

but I’ve drained whole bottles not just a cup.

When the thirst returns I’ll come to it first –

I wrote it in four line bursts.

29 October 2004

Queasy feeling in the stomach,

but I am the son of my father Mac.

In my closet this autumn still lies his mac.

These words are like tic-tac at the racetrack,

risky bets, unstudied form,

alphabets in jumbled form,

poet-formed, lined up in lines,

not with barbed-wire spines

but delineating territory.

I am a Channel Island and this is my story

and I get a guernsey on Guernsey.

There on the links

there are sand bunkers

and concrete bunkers.

Lancresse provides the links.

Once I scored there a 78 –

on my card a 7 and an 8

from tussling in the gorse.

I finished the course

with a blind wedge over the German bunker

and the birdie putt for a 2 – exhilarated, I sunk her.

29 October 2004

I’m writing up a storm

equivalent to the storm

I feel inside me.

Warm Turkish soup inside me.

The pop music bubbles.

Lines, take away my troubles,

my presentiments of disaster,

and her, I haven’t asked her

out, though she is inside me:

I’m not alone when I write poems

for those beside me, for those besides me.

29 October 2004

POEMS NOVEMBER 2004-

Turn the tap of poetry

that leads to the pipe,

that leads to the tank.

Don’t force it American style

for you have to see:

say it in French devoir à voire,

a reservoir.

1 November 2004

Never always dating but never out of date.

I hadn’t heard from you lately,

why do people under pressure swing between love and hate?

You put your cakes on friends’ plates

and put them in for raffles –

but I wish you’d be more unruffled by fate.

1 November 2004

Upper class voices talk English to the Polish barmaid.

My Switch Card has gone out of date,

but I have tomorrow morning’s fare –

coins in my pocket, a shell and a turquoise,

a gift from Shirin who didn’t realise it’s power,

remnants of some German rolling tobacco

and my pipe thingy. I could survive an age

with this support system. My half is half drunk,

my glasses upside down lying nonchalantly.

In fact I like that word and perhaps I’m nonchalant

myself, taking this drink before the Pushkin Club,

in this Pub opposite the Police Station.

I talked in English and French to my mother

about ‘la grande aventure’ as my father

had put it in English, literally on his death bed.

2 November 2004

Just five minutes to go –

see what the words will do,

though I’m feeling low,

I have to see this day through.

The music annoys me,

yet hope buoys me:

that over life’s noise

we’ve become men from boys.

MOVING

Irritable, body restless,

not just because the train’s late.

Moving, I’ll take less

books – my clothes, files, a few plates.

Is it a risk to leave on display

a wealth of Turkish and Russian poetry?

I imagine no literary thieves

would relieve the shelves of this weight!

So in limbo-land between homes I wait

enervated by simple domestic tasks:

not much of me is asked by my daughter,

final bills of gas, electricity and water,

contact the Council about its tax,

don’t bother about the non-existent Fax,

get a phone connected at the next place,

work out if the emails need a new phone number to trace,

get the heating switched on,

hitch on to a new GP,

always put the seat down after I pee,

smoke in one room and sweep up the tobacco debris,

or better still smoke outside.

I’ve deleted the Temporary Internet Files,

though I had nothing to hide,

now I should make inroads into my Inbox,

a sort of overload detox.

I’d like to leave my Sent Box

as a sort of Selected Emails

but to select them down into a Selected

is a task I should not fail.

The train pulls into the Station,

a humdrum poem has found its station.

8 November 2004

14 LINES ABOUT IT

Just for the writing of it,

when words don’t seem to fit,

when it’s a struggle to keep my pipe lit,

when I know I’m not writing a greatest hit.

The nicotine is beginning to hit,

another reason to quit or not to quit,

so in this Algerian café I sit,

smoking tobacco not shit.

A few lines I’ve writ,

an hour before I have to split:

this is just a little skit

based on the rhyme ‘it’.

Suddenly it’s become a sonnet:

fourteen lines – I’ve done it!

10 November 2004

There may be no sense in writing when the vessel

is empty, but even the strings of Veysel’s

saz were often idle. On this poem I could sidle up,

even though it’s empty, my caffeine cup,

the effects swim in the bloodstream

and these words are not a whisper, not a scream,

though all around the pop music plays

and the waitresses carry their little trays

and the speakers drown out the speakers.

I take on board that I am aching inside,

that life has given me a bumpy ride,

but my secrets I’ll hide in my poet’s divan

rather than confess them on the analyst’s couch.

10 November 2004

These are my last days of taking the Bromley train.

I congratulate myself on remaining sane

despite the crush of rush hour

and I have seen poems and conversations flower,

the latter especially after the pubs close,

and though take aways may assault my nose,

I have mastered the art of the snatched poem

written on my knee going away and home,

so that the train becomes the poems’ crucible –

I dipped my ladle in as much as I was able.

These days phones need no wire or cable

but my refrains are infinitely more subtle

and mobile than the perennial: ‘I’m on the train’!

10 November 2004

No worries that I don’t attempt the grand form

and these days my poems are far from elegiac.

Somehow you have to keep the ashes warm

to be able to light a major fire.

Words dim when the mind tires.

10 November 2004

LAST POEM IN VICTORIA STATION

I never thought I’d come to the end of the lines:

I am going to where new perspectives rule.

This trip is going to be the end of the line:

in going I know I’m not playing the fool.

As I sip my last coffee all is cool,

a few friendships I’ve made here:

now I look to the future without fear.

12 November 2004

MOVED TO THE RETREAT KINGS LANGLEY

14 NOVEMBER 2004

PHARM ASSIST

Where the oxen ford the Isis,

where you intervene in life’s crises

with not only flimsy green prescriptions

but kind words never scripted.

Where platoons of addicts

beat their way to your Chemist’s door

and you work too as a locum

and do a lot to fight their boredom;

knowing you and of them how can I say I am poor?

I still activate my card in the hole in the wall

and only go a little overdrawn

and I’ve spent time when I could have read

your gift, Orhan Pamuk’s ‘My Name is Red’,

the CD player for Cohen is in the loft:

I’m writing this gentle poem on the bucking Tube

remembering our meeting which was exuberant.

27 July 2004

THESIS TOPICS OF MELIKE

Like an enthusiastic ballerina on tiptoes

you pirouette between thesis topics

and I am not the one who knows

which of these you should pick.

I only know that our talk does not drown

the poetry that emerges from it.

I would pick you, when I am up or down,

to give incipient mania or depression a hit.

So from the young women suicides in the town of Batman –

and I am not Robin, Hood or Superman –

to women’s rights in Kurdish journals in Turkey,

then you feel gender-typing in psychoanalysis is the key.

Dear Melike, you may lick them with your thesis.

I am not saying there is ease in your choice.

I hear so many feelings in your voice –

to the Kurdish amputee you are more than a prosthesis,

but you give me words, eyes, legs, hands and though we don’t touch

except in greeting and parting, you are my friend, my arkadash

and that means much.

I can touch and feel your soul

without even touching your body:

touching and feeling souls is one of the poet’s roles,

touching and feeling bodies can be anybody’s.

When we give each other the two cheeked kiss

in greeting and in parting

it’s not a bad start or ending

to our conversation face to face.

We both love to listen to each other and wax lyrical,

talking of poetry, prose, a bit of the political,

not forgetting Can Yucel and the satirical.

Forgive me, but this is not doggerel or catterel

and you are thinking of a thesis on gender and the psychoanalytical.

15/16 November 2004

In my new home I love the fizzing of my brain

when I lie on my bed listening for trains.

If truth lies in single grains,

we can’t aim for a full harvest,

there is no sparagmos after the Parish Breakfast.

But on the cross the tortured Christ

though he tried hard to take on all suffering and sin must

have known (he’d pushed his fate so fast),

that he was neither the first nor the last

to be tortured for religio-political reasons.

Certainly a son of man for all seasons,

but he planed against the grain, that’s plain.

17 November 2004

FOR CORINNE

You are far enough away from me
not to transmit your awful cold
and the emails you send me are virus free.
I'm sitting in a cafe in Fulham with a double espresso
trying to do your bidding
and write another poem to you.
The prospect is far from forbidding.
I'll find words to express my warmth for you,
to send warm to your cold
though it's all in the head not your soul.

I'm on my way to Julia's lunch,
pausing before I meet the PEN friends' bunch.
You'd love to be here, I know,
I'd love you to be here and so
perhaps I'll write another poem
after the event.
No doubt a little spleen will be vented
at the perpetrators of recent events,
but I hope we won't forget the real tyrants
and their regimes - against them we must keep up our rants.

Sunday 21 November 2004

BRIEFLY AFTER THE PARTY LINES

So many people crowded in one room,
there was scarcely room
to talk let alone walk.
I managed to converse
in prose not in verse
with a woman from Oxford
who 'was a spy for a while', then worked for Maxwell
in Pergamon (Purgatory) Press,
but I was more impressed
by Maricia who runs a charity
for disabled children in Petersburg...

Sunday 21 November 2004

(Monday morning: went down with cold…)

No Libbie to

slake my increased libido –

I’ll have to write it out by myself,

that’s a better consummation than abuse of the self.

As usual it’s lonely even on the bookshelf,

but I control my moods with writing

and though real sex would still be exciting

I get a contact high from close friendship

and one day she’ll come in to my desert island, that ship.

24 November 2004

LATEST FOR CORINNE

I told no one, actually I forgot,

that in my stolen bag were also W.H. Smith vouchers,

hard gotten leaving present from the PEN WiPC lot,

the two thieves who got away with it can vouch for that.

I hope they like Class A heroic Turkish poetry

and perhaps they’ll give Katia Kapovich’s book a try, aptly

called ‘smoke break’ because that is what I was about to do

before going through the tunnel to Finsbury Park Tube.

I turned to give directions to

a man asking to go to Hounslow –

unfortunately I was too slow

and turning on my booted heel,

my black bag was gone –

that sinking feeling,

I found myself screaming ‘My bag!!!’

and answer came there none.

24 November 2004

FOR NATHALIE

I can’t think this computer is like my lost exercise book –

I write poems right onto it so rarely, but hey, look:

it contains most of my work, emails and the potentials of the Internet

and inside it is lodged and logged your own website,

though your poems for some reason didn’t come up this time,

there were you, the poet,

and alongside your biography your red lips, beautiful hair, face and eyes

that give mine sight,

that see in exchange these words, black on white in an email,

all four want to see our new books, and we want to see each other

in reality

and we live in that hope. Tonight, after midnight, I long for that to be.

The rhyme is not, but we are unique, poets male and female.

28 November 2004

Starting a new notebook

is like crooking a lost sheep –

shepherd and nymph rejoice,

better than catching a fish on a hook

and keeping it in the keepnet,

the sport we enjoyed as young boys,

better than catching a butterfly

with Nabokov’s little net

for pinned it will surely die,

better than laying down to sleep.

29 November 2004

FOR MELIKE

Out on the station bench

in the black drizzly night

when I’d missed my train

you offered me one small black woolly glove.

In French I swear you called me ‘tu’,

but in Turkish it was back to ‘siz’

and I am so happy to know you

in all languages, tenses and cases,

will even learn from you a smattering of Kurdish,

one day will cook you a simple dish

so we could dissolve any stereotypes

and be dosts to each other

and avoid traditional hype

and without bending our genders

to be not needy yet in friendship need each other,

to give a voice and hearing to each other,

to listen, then apart recall, remember.

30 November 2004

FOR MELIKE

‘Sweets for my sweet, honey for my honey’ –

blasts out and it really is not funny

and disinclines me to write immortal poetry,

but against this forebackground I’ll still give it a try.

I’m in the Euston Pub I feel is ours,

though our balcony is closed.

I got them wrong again, the train hours

and in the Pushkin lecture I dozed.

I haven’t retained a face so vividly

in my faithful memory

for a long while –

it’s not just your hair, it’s your smile

and above all the words you say –

and we’ll never lead each other astray.

30 November 2004

FOR MELIKE

Your smile is not like her smile:

I don’t superimpose my women’s features.

Who knows? Perhaps we may not share our futures

but I will muse on you for much longer than a while.

I am not frightened that we share our souls –

I feel our trilingual conversations make a whole,

unsplittable in themselves.

I am not high and dry on the bookshelves,

but grounded in reality and surreality.

Why settle for quantity when there’s quality?

These days I ignore the plurality

and address you alone in actuality.

This sonnet round closing time first took me ten minutes

and I poured a full measure of my soul in it.

30 November 2004

Sitting at Highbury and Islington

waiting for a train to Finchley.

My tongue doesn’t come down like a ton

of bricks – I must build this poem delicately.

My life is coming out of a lull,

no bye byes for us, baby.

I cast a coin in a wishing well

and it splashed back a ‘definite maybe’.

1 December 2004

FOR ANDREW

Death turned out to be the ultimate authority

in your short life, from it you drew

your final handout, your final benefit.

It’s ten years since you died, Andrew,

and still I’ve never written you a poem that’s fit,

though through floes of my life you butted like an ice breaker.

Ten black candles burn on your virtual anniversary cake,

our memories of you are getting more opaque

and in her old age you’re in oblivion for our mother.

We, the survivors, talk to one another

about the possibility of your predeath recovery.

If death can be a discovery

to those left, you tested it first, Andrew, brother.

I’m sad you’re not sitting opposite me at this café table,

then no one else is either, so I am able

to concentrate on you as if you were living like my absent friends.

Andrew John, I’ve made a sour feast of your beggarhood,

but remember when we played Little John and Robin Hood

as children and you batted straight and bowled swingers.

Sometimes I see down and outs on the streets and they are dead ringers

for you and though I don’t give money, I bring you to life for them

until it’s scary

and every coffee or sandwich I get them I’m giving to you too.

Today at work I told a lot of people

of your anniversary, but it was good old John Rundle

my fellow poet who reacted: he’d lost his brother aged 23,

a fighter pilot, shot down. ‘He could have been talking to me,

helping me in this state and I miss him,

I will never forget him,’ but over the years though I’ve missed you

at the same time, I realize I’ve too often dismissed you

and I, unlike our mother, am able to remember.

Now I sit in another café in your patch in Islington

and it is winter, the second of December.

2 December 2004

I purchased two lighters and two bic biros

and a pack of handy andies,

resisted the Mars Bars and candies

and for almost two decades I’ve been off giros.

Here they’ll make bacon, sausage and eggs.

Above the poverty line I don’t beg,

not on my uppers, not down on my knees,

my poems are still able to please:

some merciful God heard my pleas –

now I’ll not yet drink my cup to the lees,

rather drain this black coffee to the dregs

and rush to the train on sturdy legs.

3 December 2004

TESTIMONY

After reading Sylvia Plath on the train

Committed to living until I die,

never again will I contemplate suicide.

I erect a simple structure

to ensure my own poems’ resurrection.

No property do I own, only books, goods and chattels

and I will them to my daughter and favourite people.

May my body be buried or cremated but my books and papers not burned,

and let them say of me: ‘He sought poetry in life, in friendships

and fools spurned,

and he was after life in life not the afterlife.

3 December 2004

NOUGHTS AND CROSSES

Why do they call it the Cross

when it’s really the plus?

Is it because Your News multiplied

swifter than adding implies?

It was a strange arithmetic

in the garden of Arimathea:

three crosses in a row

had led to three noughts,

then You rose, You rose

and rolled over the zero of the boulder,

only three days older.

You rose again, so the Bible says –

was death crossed out

and brought to naught?

4 December 2004

On my first visit to Campsfield

I felt the authoritarian system

but I gave the lads a book of Mandelstam,

which didn’t prevent their fate being sealed –

they were railroaded, deported back to Israel.

They wrote me letters and emails from Jerusalem’

sent me photos of their favourite parrot.

They told me it had been their only book, that Mandelstam:

all UK gave then was the stick not the carrot,

and a beating, they claimed, in a police station in Dover,

when three of them lay on their leader

to protect him. I imagine in Israel their trials are not over.

4 December 2004

Though I went to bed after three

it wasn’t till after eleven that I woke:

this man sleeps soundly after the words we all spoke,

so our conversation stimulated and calmed me.

Now late morning, a rare Vogue cigarette smoked,

I don’t want to go an inch from this notebook.

Yesterday at the Turf Tavern the coke

in the braziers outside made my croaky,

reminded me of the smoky Aga fumes in our childhood kitchen.

See, at a domestic level I can pitch in this poem,

an honoured guest this weekend in your home.

5 December 2004

Though I am not Kurdish,

I am wordish

and it took a Kurd

to get me back to Oxford.

You object to my simple rhyme dish

because with sharpened vowel it’s ‘tooth’ in Turkish.

Is this poem sounding a bit kitsch?

And didn’t we discuss all this

on a walk in Blenheim grounds:

and all this is grounds

for a close friendship,

wandering like ships in the evening in a slender mist,

in three languages subtle mists,

entering through a wicket gate

into a sloping field with trees,

walking not the two of us, but three,

walking though we would be late,

comparing the privilege of the castle owner in this village with my fate,

after the exercise, sound slept, I fish wishes in the exercise book,

realizing that it is never too late –

and I write this as you sleep in late.

5 December 2004

‘Beklemek’ means to wait in Turkish,

but for me it is to be at poems’ beck and call,

whether at the bus station or at this table:

it gives me the edge to fill

the minutes that may turn into hours –

at this juncture your acupuncturist’s powers

create exhaustion and pain in your back and shoulders.

In the bedroom I was in I saw your philosophy folders

and I inscribed for you a gift of Sylvia Plath.

After this weekend to leave I am loath:

it’s as though the dust of ages has been wiped away with a cloth.

I very much feel for you both.

Akhmatova once said in Tashkent she had found

asylum in the homeland,

and Fatma rightly calls herself a ‘refuge’.

Just before I came here I was writing death fugues

for my brother and myself: there’s a huge

difference now: this for me is like two weeks by the sea,

but more: we brought the us out of us, the me out of me.

5 December 2004

I was not at my most creative when up at Oxford:

I was still the apprentice poet not the Master.

And when thoughts got faster and faster and faster

I finished up the hill in the Warneford.

It took me years to get down from the high horse of psychosis,

to realise that the rose is, the rose is

the rose for its petals, thorns and fragrance:

the breakdown was so flagrant.

I’m in a friend’s home at the bottom of the same hill:

thirty five years have passed.

Now when my thinking goes too fast,

I talk and write but don’t forget my protective pills.

It’s the sort of balance I wanted then:

writing and translating and being a man.

5 December 2004

FOR CRISTINA VITI

I am apprehensive that I am in the wrong café –

perhaps we changed the rendezvous:

was it Starbucks by the British Library

or Ritazza here in Euston Station?

Your campaign on Campana – how is it going?

Are the bells tolling for us as well as you?

And are the dawn-worked words flowing

and are your translator’s obstacles many or few?

Today I will not alarm friends, myself or you:

the moments we’ll share will be few –

indeed they may not ever happen

if by mishap I’ve got the wrong place –

then your appearance will be sudden –

my fear put firmly into place.

7 December 2004

Oh pretty, pretty, pretty one, prithee print

your lips so pink onto the imprint

of this book, without a backward look

you’d lift my work that so long took

that was forsaken and forsook.

For your sake now, it’s you I recall:

‘You’re in love with life’, your words broke my fall.

Sitting writing on this train I’m standing tall,

neck not bowed, spirit not cowed,

yoking the oxen of words to our cause

and I look back from the avant garde

to guard your tender back with peaceful arms.

8 December 2004

Today I was not able to spend enough time

thinking of you, let alone with you.

It’s a sign of the times

that we work too hard us two.

I’ll be back too late to phone you,

but I see you, or rather your face in my mind,

between interpretings in those few

minutes – then it’s a glow of happiness I find.

How was your day at your chemist’s?

Do you remember walking in the falling mist?

We have to live not just exist –

the hand of friendship must not close into a fist

but remain open from the wrist

and lips are for words, not just to be kissed.

8 December 2004

FOR INGE

When I think of it, it grieves me much

that these last months we've fallen slightly out of touch.

Here I am on the London-bound train

but this time from Kings Langley -

we can't meet at Waterloo or Victoria again:

a pub or café in the North would be more handy.

When we talk I'd like to tell you

of fantastic new friends and remarkable poems I've met

and channel my enthusiasm for them into you

and listen to your news out of your time of bereavement.

Like hearty men we wouldn't slap each other on the back,

so much as slap ointment on wounds,

ours and this earth's and since happiness has come back

to me and mirth never left me, it sounds

to me that we will have an epic conversation

beyond the daily round's tergidversations:

it will be as usual 'sensationelle' to see you,

and, Inge, our poems will linger as we shoulder our daily work's strain.

10 December 2004

NEW YEAR POEM

First I was taking my notebook on trains from Bromley South

then I ended the year on trains to Euston from Kings Langley.

At Victoria the Ritazza Café was always friendly and handy

for poem writing, meetings, talk and caffe latte by mouth.

The poems I wrote last year numbered in the hundreds.

Some of the things I played a part in and was proud of

included an article on anti-torture interpreting and metaphor

and helping with PEN to get to the West the Uzbek journalist Ruslan

Sharipov.

Daughter Juliet got married to Michael in May in the Church

in Upminster,

where I’d shared jokes and fellowship with the Ministers.

A lean year for translations apart from Oktay Rifat with Ruth,

but a good year for me for reading English poets, Lowell, Hughes,

Hardy, Clare, Auden and Plath.

Books of Larissa Miller, early Mandelstam and Vitaly Korotko hung in

the publishers’ balance

and diminished interpreting and no advances affected the bank balance.

But it was a fantastic year for a new friendship: you know who you are!

In December I even travelled back to Oxford which for me was going far.

Readings full strength not light at the old school Marlborough

and in Dorset with Julie and again with Helen, and at last I’ve found

this bungalow burrow

in the grounds of a Big House in Kings Langley. I have time to borrow

rather than living on borrowed time. I’ll lend you some for 2005

if you’ll allow.

10 December 2004

FOR DUNCAN FORREST

Duncan, you were the gentlest of men,

on your lips often hovered a smile,

but when it came to tortured women and men

your nerves were of steel.

You treated them with courtesy,

whether from Somalia, Kurdistan or Turkey:

the two hemispheres of the globe

for seventeen years involved your temporal lobes.

As a surgeon you must have been a knight –

then your crusade became against torture.

Your onerous honourous duty was to write

the handbook of anti-torture.

Few here knew you were over eighty –

you carried so well your weight of years.

The only thing about you that was flighty

was that flight to death that awaits all of us here.

But you died in your home without a long illness,

a sudden heart attack and gone:

we’ll miss your gentlemanliness,

your smile of greeting, now you’re gone.

But your face shines on in my mind’s eye

and ‘you didn’t die’ is only partly a lie,

for you live on in the bodies and souls

of those you treated at MF,

in the way you strove to heal and make whole

those who suffered and suffer

from that cruellest inhumanity.

You struck many blows for humanity

and your words remain,

though your voice is lost,

we will interpret them again –

you laboured and did not count the cost.

11 December 2004 Richard McKane MF Interpreter

Does Oxford rhyme with Kurd

and distant with Kurdistan?

Can they be inferred with each other

like two close sisters?

For you are a pair, Melike and Fatma,

closer to Gandhi Mahatma

than the tenets of a fatwa.

And I honour your twin presences in the United Kingdom

and realise you bring into my life a fresh wind of freedom and gleedom.

Before one speaks a language one is bunged up and dumb:

you feed me words until they come.

We have three tongues and none of them forked:

to let the wine of conversation flow you have to pull the cork.

11 December 2004

Your voice on the telephone –

I almost can feel your call –

we talk in friendship’s tone.

My moods rise and fall

like the moonswept sea.

I’ll tide these days over

before new year when we

12 December 2004

MISSING THE TRAIN BUT NOT MISSING THE BOAT

I missed the train from introducing myself to stationmaster Bob,

talking, bobbing at me through the glass like a driver in his cab.

‘So, you’re Richard’ he says. ‘Am I that famous?’

perhaps it was the poem I wrote in the nearby café, for you for us.

So I pause: writing poems is my dynamic rest,

like our walk alone on Shotover Hill,

when the dogs appeared you took my arm

and I felt the tremor of your fear thrill.

May God, this Aronzon, protect you, oh protect you from all harm

and I’d settle for our friendship and its poetry above all the rest.

13 December 2004

I will be your protector

in the field of life,

will be your mine detector

in the minefield of life.

Is there anything wrong with this?

I will filter the poison gas

through my own lungs

and breathe out pure air into yours

and give you the kiss of life.

I will speak to you words you understand

and forget about our languages,

forget about our ages,

come in eternally like the sea on sand –

we will so be part of each other’s life.

I will not invade your life

but like waves aching to break

the ship of friendship has to moor

and I will surely reach your shore.

If you back aches I will make a firm corset of my arms,

if your blood pressure is low I will heighten it with my charms,

I will feature as your friend the palm reader reads your palm,

when you need me I will be a sea that’s calm.

Is there any harm in this?

And when we shed a few tears together

we add to that huge salty sea

that is shared by sensitive humanity.

In my cupboard I still have the black leather

jacket you lent me that night by the Thames of wind and rain –

though our bulks are so different, we are our bulwarks.

Is there anything wrong with this?

I may work like a bull in London and you in Oxford:

we don’t question what for –

This friendship of an Englishman and a Kurd in AD 2004.

You protect me, we protect each other

in this minefield of life.

13/14 December 2004

The other day I was asked to interpret into Turkish:

‘You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear’.

‘Um’, I said in English, ‘Shey’, I translated, but I’m pretty good

at metaphor.

These days my nights go on till three in the morning:

is my mind giving me a warning –

is my asylum in sleep refused?

But bright dawn dreams, not nightmares, diffuse

the rays of hard work for practitioners, Kurds, Russians and Turks

and most remarkable of all:

I’m reading the novel you gave me and writing poems AT HOME withal!

14 December 2004

What do they care about my white hair and orthopaedic boot –

they don’t stand out; but I’m more outstanding than them,

and I’ll stand out this half hour on the train, to boot.

In that whole time I did not hear a word aloud,

but pulp fiction, books, mags and ‘news’papers are allowed.

Sit glued in your igloos, my fellow commuters.

Hey, mister, on your laptop computer,

warming your testicles, calculate for me

the cost of silence for a whole non-community.

I stood it out and in my head wrote poetry

that even they could understand.

15 December 2004

FOR CORINNE: DYLAN THOMAS IS A LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER

I like it that you call me a beacon -

can I really show shelter to the seeking?

I'm not at sea but on the train to Swansea

and I'm not singing a swan song.

Dylan Thomas is a lighthouse keeper,

climbing his poems like fishermen’s prayers up the stairs,

lighting our lamps by our bedsides, and besides

I carry a pen-torch for him: he's only sleeping,

no longer wrecked after drinking but reaping

the harvest of his poetising, counting, teasing

words from the fleece of his flock of lively Welsh sheep,

rob-robbing his own words, holding them up to his red breast,

and always the colour green, that fruitful word green

that refuses, does not traffic with going out:

go, go, go,

as he comes into us thriving, rolling on the emerald wave’s crest

to flood our lives with his great, best, green lamplight.

15 December 2004

Loneliness means something’s missing –

no, someone’s missing, missing someone.

Even kissing lips must part.

Science says there is never an emptiness in the heart,

but loneliness is like a hollow hole in it,

it’s important not to say ‘bin it’ –

there are reasons for all feelings:

but even when your parent hits the ceiling,

if your parent lashes out with hand or tongue

violence in the family is always wrong

and can lead even to torture if not bullying.

Loneliness means feeling’s missing,

so someone’s missing, missing someone.

15/16 December 2004

SONG

He was the life and soul of the Club party.

His jokes were crude but he thought hearty,

in fact they were downright crass and rude,

then he’d taunt me that I was a prude.

But better him than the acid type,

who never hesitates to have a swipe,

the demolition literary critic,

too powerful just to be pathetic.

But what of they who’d burn my books,

who hide behind their smiles and looks,

those small minded petty bureaucrats

who’ve become power-crazed autocrats.

I think I’d burn them all in Hell,

freeze off their genitals as well.

16 December 2004

Blue skies and sun: a wonderful day.

The London train is coming to take me away

to luncheon or rather lunch in Fulham Broadway –

you can be sure Julia will fill ‘em anyway.

I leave behind my computer with a translation in it

of an Uzbek journalist’s article – an achievement innit

for a Sunday morning. It’s difficult to pin it

down but I like the journalist in me

more than the novelist’s potentiality,

but God knows will I have to start my apprenticeship

again if I jump poetry’s ship.

A line is a line is a line if it’s a poem on a rose

or hip prose.

19 December 2004

TRANSLATOR’S KNACK

I’m losing my spontaneous translator’s knack –

for hours I stare at lines of Pasternak.

I’m concentrating on his Themes and Variations

but I can’t achieve the variation of concentration

that leads to putting English words on paper.

Yet I can still cut a mean caper

with these bursts of my own poems –

even achieving writing them at home.

Pasternak was my baptism, my confirmation

and the poems of Dr Zhivago are still my Bible.

It is only a matter of time before I am able

to add my translator’s ration

to feed the English readership –

though I never knew him, we have a close friendship.

20 December 2004

I take out my notebook at the end of a long day,

now sitting in the Euston Café.

I read you my recent poems’ oxygen at O2 Centre

and told you of my lurid human rights’ adventures.

We were just like good old friends,

inquisitive about our lives and poetries’ trends.

People don’t know that after one has been driven round the bend

the road may straighten out – it doesn’t end,

plenty of opportunity before the next hairpin rolls

up to grab the wheel from the driver and get in control.

21 December 2004

FOR MELIKE AND FATMA

New Year together in Oxford: what a treat!

You and your sister the writer from Roza @ English Newroz.

It’s sweeter than a bunch of new roses.

It’s designed to quell midwinter neuroses.

We’ve worked hard all round the year –

I’ve put myself in situations of fear:

but come on, we three are risk-takers,

not just sit-at-home Xmas cake bakers.

Yet I would bake a cake of patter-poetry,

rather than decorate a Christmas tree

and I’ll work out and buy you each a suitable gift,

something that would give receiver and giver a lift.

21 December 2004

The tough pin-striped lawyer was suave and svelte

but butter didn’t melt

in her mouth when the poet on the train

read her above the sleepers’ refrain

a few poems to relieve their twin stresses and strains.

So this is what poetry’s for:

an individual accolade!

You got out at Watford,

stranger turned listener –

we put the compartment in the shade.

I bear not grudges but brood,

like a mother turkey with her brood,

upon the capacity of man to be rude

and then accuse one of being a prude.

Good men should be just and true,

a handful of them is too few.

The business of life has to be seen through.

You have to be able to see through things.

They don’t clash, two rings

on a finger are banns apart.

Your heart can never be ringed,

unlike a bird even in flight.

22 December 2004

And I say unto you that language is not words but feeling,

is not, in other words, diagnosis but healing.

When your father hits the ceiling

it’s his impact you are feeling.

‘All this may be very revealing

but you’ve missed the point completely:

the question can be put more neatly.’

22 December 2004

FOR KATIE MELUA

How can you know that in my new home

in the process of moving I was left with only one CD

and it was yours? I put The Closest Thing to Crazy on repeat

as I went to sleep and now as I write this poem

on the commuter train both lyric and melody wash my brain

happily like the black wave of your hair

with its foam of ringlets.

A strong yet slender, tender voice

and a lyric on the edge:

what more could I want in midwinter,

in the time of the winter solstice.

22 December 2004

I bear not grudges but brood,

like a mother turkey with her brood,

upon the capacity of man to be rude

and then accuse me of being a prude.

Good men should be just and true,

a handful of them is too few.

The business of life has to be seen through.

You have to be able to see through things.

They don’t clash, two rings

on a finger are banns apart,

but the heart can never be ringed

unlike a bird even in flight.

22 December 2004

And I say unto you that language is not words but feeling,

is not, in other words, diagnosis but healing.

When your father hits the ceiling

it’s his impact you are feeling.

‘All this may be very revealing,

but you’ve missed the point completely:

the question can be put more neatly…’

22 December 2004

‘I’ll remind you always’,

the Kurd in black said

and it works both ways.

Black-haired and moustachioed:

I’d shared a few words occasionally with him

during this aftermath of the Iraqi War,

not cracked pistachio nuts together

in his native village in the past now dim.

He only knew I was a poet, for

he could see me buried in my notebook. Whether

we’ll meet again is in the lap of God or Allah

but we shared a last handclasp

and the human touch.

23 December 2004

End of work. Christmas and New Year coming.

Tiredness is overcoming me

yet I squeeze out the last drops

of poetry though I’m dropping on my feet.

No snow yet, nor even sleet –

it didn’t rain properly for weeks.

I’ve found new strengths, I am not weak,

and in this healthy exhaustion

I find the needed internal combustion

to heat your hearts and minds by my poems’ fire.

23 December 2004

I sit at our table on the Pub balcony,

without a drink more from tiredness than economy.

Here we’d sat and I missed two trains

and we listened to the strains

of each other’s voices

while you enumerated your thesis choices.

The young Turkish barman comes up

and I explain that I’m writing up

a storm. I say ‘Actually

I’m exhausted’, and he: ‘You never really

know when inspiration will strike.’

We say it in Turkish which seems more apposite –

I’m approaching the New Year on a positive

note and the missing won’t be long.

These days my poems are on song.

23 December 2004

When I write I get a new lease of life

and you’d said: ‘You are in love with life’

and ever since you said it

I want to prove it

as though it’s truth excited both of us.

Certainly it gave me license to make life,

then in your Christmas and New Year card

you wished me a year full of poems. What’s hard

then about my life? I have a reader:

I am a little less needier.

23 December 2004

DEVOTION: FOR JULIET AT CHRISTMAS

This Christmas, I realise, for the first time ever

I won’t have been to Church,

but I hope I don’t leave the Christ child in the lurch

and I love you too, daughter, more than ever.

For reasons of old age

my mother may not be going either

and I am writing this straight on the computer

in my new home rather than with pen on page.

Outside the Christmas dawn is breaking

and my father’s soul is aching

with the traditional mixture of emotions

of meeting and parting with the only child,

anticipation, and a parent’s devotion.

I’ll save and close this file

but I’ll give it to you: a small crystal display,

to keep as your present this holy Christmas day.

25 December 2004

Starting a new notebook

is like crooking a lost sheep –

shepherd and nymph rejoice,

better than catching a fish on a hook

and keeping it in the keepnet,

the sport we enjoyed as young boys,

better than catching a butterfly

with Nabokov’s little net

for pinned it will surely die,

better than laying down to sleep.

29 November 2004

FOR MELIKE

Out on the station bench

in the black drizzly night

when I’d missed my train

you offered me one small black woolly glove.

In French I swear you called me ‘tu’,

but in Turkish it was back to ‘siz’

and I am so happy to know you

in all languages, tenses and cases,

will even learn from you a smattering of Kurdish,

one day will cook you a simple dish

so we could dissolve any stereotypes

and be dosts to each other

and avoid traditional hype

and without bending our genders

to be not needy yet in friendship need each other,

to give a voice and hearing to each other,

to listen, then apart recall, remember.

30 November 2004

FOR MELIKE

‘Sweets for my sweet, honey for my honey’ –

blasts out and it really is not funny

and disinclines me to write immortal poetry,

but against this forebackground I’ll still give it a try.

I’m in the Euston Pub I feel is ours,

though our balcony is closed.

I got them wrong again, the train hours

and in the Pushkin lecture I dozed.

I haven’t retained a face so vividly

in my faithful memory

for a long while –

it’s not just your hair, it’s your smile

and above all the words you say –

and we’ll never lead each other astray.

30 November 2004

FOR MELIKE

Your smile is not like her smile:

I don’t superimpose my women’s features

and though we may not share our futures

I will muse on you for longer than a while.

I am not frightened that we share our souls –

I feel our trilingual conversations make a whole,

unsplittable in themselves.

I am not high and dry on the bookshelves,

but grounded in reality and surreality.

Why settle for quantity when there’s quality?

These days I ignore the plurality

and address you alone in actuality.

This sonnet round closing time first took me ten minutes

and I poured a full measure of my soul in it.

30 November 2004

Sitting at Highbury and Islington

waiting for a train to Finchley.

My tongue doesn’t come down like a ton

of bricks – I must build this poem delicately.

My life is coming out of a lull,

no bye byes for us, baby.

I cast a coin in a wishing well

and it splashed back a ‘definite maybe’.

1 December 2004

Though I went to bed after three

it wasn’t till after eleven that I woke:

this man sleeps soundly after the words we all spoke,

so our conversation stimulated and calmed me.

Now late morning, a rare Vogue cigarette smoked,

I don’t want to go an inch from this notebook.

Yesterday at the Turf Tavern the coke

in the braziers outside made my croaky,

reminded me of the smoky Aga fumes in our childhood kitchen.

See, at a domestic level I can pitch in this poem,

an honoured guest this weekend in your home.

5 December 2004

Though I am not Kurdish,

I am wordish

and it took a Kurd

to get me back to Oxford.

You object to my simple rhyme dish

because with sharpened vowel it’s ‘tooth’ in Turkish.

Is this poem sounding a bit kitsch?

And didn’t we discuss all this

on a walk in Blenheim grounds:

and all this is grounds

for a close friendship,

wandering like ships in the evening in a slender mist,

in three languages subtle mists,

entering through a wicket gate

into a sloping field with trees,

walking not the two of us, but three,

walking though we would be late,

comparing the privilege of the castle owner in this village with my fate,

after the exercise, sound slept, I fish wishes in the exercise book,

realizing that it is never too late –

and I write this as you sleep in late.

5 December 2004

‘Beklemek’ means to wait in Turkish,

but for me it is to be at poems’ beck and call,

whether at the bus station or at this table:

it gives me the edge to fill

the minutes that may turn into hours –

at this juncture your acupuncturist’s powers

create exhaustion and pain in your back and shoulders.

In the bedroom I was in I saw your philosophy folders

and I inscribed for you a gift of Sylvia Plath.

After this weekend to leave I am loathe:

it’s as though the dust of ages has been wiped away with a cloth.

I very much feel for you both.

Akhmatova once said in Tashkent she had found

asylum in the homeland,

and Fatma rightly calls herself a ‘refuge’.

Just before I came here I was writing death fugues

for my brother and myself: there’s a huge

difference now: this for me is like two weeks by the sea,

but more: we brought the us out of us, the me out of me.

5 December 2004

I was not at my most creative when up at Oxford:

I was still the apprentice poet not the Master.

And when thoughts got faster and faster and faster

I finished up the hill in the Warneford.

It took me years to get down from the high horse of psychosis,

to realise that the rose is, the rose is

the rose for its petals, thorns and fragrance:

the breakdown was so flagrant.

I’m in a friend’s home at the bottom of the same hill:

thirty five years have passed.

Now when my thinking goes too fast,

I talk and write but don’t forget my protective pills.

It’s the sort of balance I wanted then:

writing and translating and being a man.

5 December 2004

Oh pretty, pretty, pretty one, prithee print

your lips so pink onto the imprint

of this book, without a backward look

you’d lift my work that so long took

that was forsaken and forsook.

For your sake now, it’s you I recall:

‘You’re in love with life’, your words broke my fall.

Sitting writing on this train I’m standing tall,

neck not bowed, spirit not cowed,

yoking the oxen of words to our cause

and I look back from the avant garde

to guard your tender back with peaceful arms.

8 December 2004

Today I was not able to spend enough time

thinking of you, let alone with you.

It’s a sign of the times

that we work too hard us two.

I’ll be back too late to phone you,

but I see you, or rather your face in my mind,

between interpretings in those few

minutes – then it’s a glow of happiness I find.

How was your day at your chemist’s?

Do you remember walking in the falling mist?

We have to live not just exist –

the hand of friendship must not close into a fist

but remain open from the wrist

and lips are for words, not just to be kissed.

8 December 2004

Does Oxford rhyme with Kurd

and distant with Kurdistan?

Can they be inferred with each other

like two close sisters?

For you are a pair, Melike and Fatma,

closer to Gandhi Mahatma

than the tenets of a fatwa.

And I honour your twin presences in the United Kingdom

and realise you bring into my life a fresh wind of freedom and gleedom.

Before one speaks a language one is bunged up and dumb:

you feed me words until they come.

We have three tongues and none of them forked:

to let the wine of conversation flow you have to pull the cork.

11 December 2004

Your voice on the telephone –

I almost can feel your call –

we talk in friendship’s tone.

My moods rise and fall

like the moonswept sea.

I’ll tide these days over

before new year when we

12 December 2004

MISSING THE TRAIN BUT NOT MISSING THE BOAT

I missed the train from introducing myself to stationmaster Bob,

talking, bobbing at me through the glass like a driver in his cab.

‘So, you’re Richard’ he says. ‘Am I that famous?’

perhaps it was the poem I wrote in the nearby café, for you for us.

So I pause: writing poems is my dynamic rest,

like our walk alone on Shotover Hill,

when the dogs appeared you took my arm

and I felt the tremor of your fear thrill.

May God, this Aronzon, protect you, oh protect you from all harm

and I’d settle for our friendship and its poetry above all the rest.

13 December 2004

I will be your protector

in the field of life,

will be your mine detector

in the minefield of life.

Is there anything wrong with this?

I will filter the poison gas

through my own lungs

and breathe out pure air into yours

and give you the kiss of life.

I will speak to you words you understand

and forget about our languages,

forget about our ages,

come in eternally like the sea on sand –

we will so be part of each other’s life.

I will not invade your life

but like waves aching to break

the ship of friendship has to moor

and I will surely reach your shore.

If you back aches I will make a firm corset of my arms,

if your blood pressure is low I will heighten it with my charms,

I will feature as your friend the palm reader reads your palm,

when you need me I will be a sea that’s calm.

Is there any harm in this?

And when we shed a few tears together

we add to that huge salty sea

that is shared by sensitive humanity.

In my cupboard I still have the black leather

jacket you lent me that night by the Thames of wind and rain –

though our bulks are so different, we are our bulwarks.

Is there anything wrong with this?

I may work like a bulls I in London and you in Oxford:

we don’t question what for –

This friendship of an Englishman and a Kurd in AD 2004.

You protect me, we protect each other

in this minefield of life.

13/14 December 2004

The other day I was asked to interpret into Turkish:

‘You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear’.

‘Um’, I said in English, ‘Shey’, I translated, but I’m pretty good

at metaphor.

These days my nights go on till three in the morning:

is my mind giving me a warning –

is my asylum in sleep refused?

But bright dawn dreams, not nightmares, diffuse

the rays of hard work for practitioners, Kurds, Russians and Turks

and most remarkable f all:

I’m reading the novel you gave me and writing poems AT HOME withal!

14 December 2004

What do they care about my white hair and orthopaedic boot –

they don’t stand out; but I’m more outstanding than them,

and I’ll stand out this half hour on the train, to boot.

In that whole time I did not hear a word aloud,

but pulp fiction, books, mags and ‘news’papers are allowed.

Sit glued in your igloos, my fellow commuters.

Hey, mister, on your laptop computer,

warming your testicles, calculate for me

the cost of silence for a whole non-community.

I stood it out and in my head wrote poetry

that even they could understand.

15 December 2004

FOR MELIKE AND FATMA

New Year together in Oxford: what a treat!

You and your sister the writer from Roza @ English Newroz.

It’s sweeter than a bunch of new roses.

It’s designed to quell midwinter neuroses.

We’ve worked hard all round the year –

I’ve put myself in situations of fear:

but come on, we three are risk-takers,

not just sit-at-home Xmas cake bakers.

Yet I would bake a cake of patter-poetry,

rather than decorate a Christmas tree

and I’ll work out and buy you each a suitable gift,

something that would give receiver and giver a lift.

21 December 2004

I sit at our table on the Pub balcony,

without a drink more from tiredness than economy.

Here we’d sat and I missed two trains

and we listened to the strains

of each other’s voices

while you enumerated your thesis choices.

The young Turkish barman comes up

and I explain that I’m writing up

a storm. I say ‘Actually

I’m exhausted’, and he: ‘You never really

know when inspiration will strike.’

We say it in Turkish which seems more apposite –

I’m approaching the New Year on a positive

note and the missing won’t be long.

These days my poems are on song.

23 December 2004

When I write I get a new lease of life

and you’d said: ‘You are in love with life’

and ever since you said it

I want to prove it

as though it’s truth excited both of us.

Certainly it gave me license to make life,

then in your Christmas and New Year card

you wished me a year full of poems. What’s hard

then about my life? I have a reader:

I am a little less needier.

23 December 2004

NEW YEAR’S DINNER POEM

I love your thinking as you talk

on phone, in person, easily unravelling our narratives.

I too feel better sometimes in my non-native

tongues. Though in Russian I don’t know knife and fork

language, in Turkish I am familiar with this sofra table,

having lived on the South Coast and in Istanbul.

You already give good therapeutic counsel

and in another life I’d have made a good British Consul

like the poets Neruda and Seferis were Ambassadors.

To a certain extent we are commanders

of our fates which have crossed –

if our roads get lost

now we will be fast guides for each other in life

and together in your home we’ll eat New Year Dinner –

with spoon, fork and knife.

29 December 2004

PARTING OVER: LULLABY FOR MELIKE

One thirty. Are you sleeping, perhaps dreaming?

I got out of bed knowing this poem was missing

and could fill the hollow of the night

like a hand in a woolly back glove

and I hold on very tight

to our sohbet of the other night

and know our friendship embraces love.

I lit a big red candle from a friend:

it has a long way to burn before it ends.

We have a lifetime of time to spend,

more intense than that long parting

that came before we met

when I’d become set in my ways.

Now I’ll thrown bad habits away,

live for our lives, not just day by day.

Like a very good poet

you inspire inspiration.

Let that be so, this night and for evermore.

30 December 2004

It seems daring to write you another poem tonight.

A beer, a pipe and the soft World Service

are lulling me into a kind of kind state of sleep.

Soon I’ll blow out the candle with an air kiss.

As the poet said: ‘I have promises to keep’,

and I’m really looking forward to the dawn’s light:

a whole day nearer to our meeting

and my heart is full and beating, beating

the ban I’d imposed on writing at home.

So, work your miracles, my love,

I know you know it’s you.

Settle into my life, my late night thoughts

like white healing snow from above.

Tonight a battle for peace was fought:

I couldn’t have won it without you.

30 December 2004

FOR NINA AND MORIS FARHI

I’m a night worker, I’m a sleepworker –

my brain works in my sleep

and itself only requires two hours,

the rest is to renew the body’s powers.

Can pain be shared, can fingers sense it?

A muscle can go into spasm when you tense it

but the outside hand may not feel the pain,

yet you feel intensely each other’s pain,

bouncing back like reflections pupil to pupil,

and as you both look death in the eye

you still care vigorously for people.

And as fate whittles down the ‘I’

you still stand upright to the letter

and dot it not with English dottiness –

your serious humour goes one better,

smattered with Turkishness and Jewishness.

After our three hours, the three of us,

I emerged not from the curtained confessional

but confirmed in my poet and interpreter’s profession:

we had duly laid taboo matters without undue fuss.

I read you my recent poems to Melike

and we talked serotoninally of the power of melotonin

and mellowed by raki and wine we found the tone in

the midwinter evening and we felt Melike rhymes with Richard.

You build my character, Nina and Musa:

I address the woman and man, therapist and novelist

and we are all three Health Service users:

one of us has to go first:

but the universal fact

is on earth we go and come back,

even visit heaven and hell.

Unlike Eliot I cannot guarantee

that ‘all manner of things will be well’.

As in life with death we struggle

I can see nothing better than that we

continue, continue, continue thus till our last breaths –

and there will be time again for taking of High Tea:

and we’ll gently draw the sting from ours and others’ deaths.

31 December 2004

POEMS JANUARY 2005-

Leonard Cohen is a deep sea diver

who dives down into the waters of the soul.

He is our souls’ reviver,

does not drag us down into a black hole.

But there is darkness in his voice

like the black of the New Year’s night

when we read together by soft candlelight

the Piraye Poems of Nazim Hikmet.

Lucky the day we met, a deliberate choice

that we three chose each other

and now I should be bothered

that in the give and take of life

I take more than I give.

I’ve noticed that I get more

than them from people I interpret for

and from my imprisoned writers,

but for them and you I am a fighter

and I store up the supplies you gave me

though far from a drowning diver, you saved me

so that I could interpret your inspiration into words,

cut and dice them like vegetables

and lay them on your table

to give them for your mind to take as it feels:

poetry too is a sustaining healthy meal.

1 January 2005

When qurban – sacrifice or victim – means darling

and can be said in an Oxford pub over a pint of Carling;

when the spires of the town have become appealing

if only for dreams of the new year, and twelve bells are pealing:

I have the distinct feeling

that I have not been overwhelmed by my past

but that I have found two friendships that’ll last.

1 January 2005

You sleep – the house sleeps

in the grey-blue dawn.

No traffic horns –

not a peep.

And I fuss with my pipe,

eat two breadskins of pita

and am missing my Oxford friend Peter

and in bed a few fleeting tears wiped

of joy, longing mingled with luminous sadness.

Though I’ve slept short this augurs no madness:

this is my season of Melo fruitfulness,

not Keats’ autumn but English Newroz, New Year.

They are twin emotions, courage and fear,

they don’t cancel each other out:

love can put fears to rout,

acceptance of the give and take,

our lives’ ins and outs.

2 January 2005

There are so many things

I wish to say to you, not write,

poems to craft, songs to sing,

but our time on earth is tight.

Perhaps a poet or translator

will pick up my lines decades later

and make them their own:

but to you I offer them on a plate

with olives and pita bread – breakfast in your home.

In the middle distance a pigeon coos –

I cannot call it a dove –

surely no one will lose

by my declaring my friendship, my love?

This time I encircle you in a benign circle,

not with my arms that are physical

but with poetry metaphysical:

this dawn my soul is not sad, but merry, old and playful.

2 January 2005

I seem to have to wait till I’m really tired,

heading towards the reverie of dreams –

this is how my brain is wired it seems –

to be able to get fired up enough to write.

I light the fat red candle,

remember the support of Nathalie Handal

on dedicatees’ acceptance and appraisal

and keep a firm grasp on the handle

and let words do the flying.

Today it abated, my crying,

my internal sea calmed down,

but thousands of people have drowned

in Indonesia, Maldives, India and Sri Lanka

in their ocean that was once their anchor.

4 January 2005

FOR ALEV ADIL

You suggest I ‘write more poems’ but it’s not that easy,

in fact I’m feeling decidedly queasy

with a head cold and smoker’s cough,

but our conversation on the phone gave me enough

strength to muster this poem to you –

and thank you for your friendship’s concern

as old 2004 into young 2005 turns

I printed out my poems of last year in a folder

and turned the central heating down a bit colder

so I would be more awake for you.

And you with replacement

of your radiators imminent

and a stack of essays to mark

found time to call me and lark

around a bit. But hark, this lark is another lark

and sings songs of friendship before the oncoming dark.

5 January 2005

I walk around in your black leather jacket,

tight as a diver’s suit.

I’m missing you a packet

but still poems are bearing fruit.

It’s sunset outside my window,

could night be the day’s black widow?

Then it would have to have been married in life

to the livelong day.

My love,

let us live long, work and write

and still have time to play.

5 January 2005

CHANGING LINES

Alone in the local pub, but somehow not lonely -

for these slender lifelines stretch out to a reader

and now I fulfil your request

and write in blank verse.

You have liberated me in the past

face to face – now accept these lines

I give you, one on top of the other,

a presentiment of what's to come

without the potential sentimentality

of rhyming line endings.

I must have breathed your air in deep

as you spoke those words by candlelight.

Hikmet had it right, mixing rhyming

with vers libre is what these times call for.

But again I'm taking from you –

you don't know how much you give me.

You sowed the idea and it fell on fertile ground,

now I'll give it back to you with interest.

5 January 2005

A late night beer bottle bites the waste paper basket.

I have to be up early to interpret six hours on the trot,

and my mind revolves round yesterday’s

six translated poems from Ella Joffe,

but the height of it was lunching with you, Juliet:

fetta cheese, vine tomatoes and rocket

all from the new fridge that arrived before you did.

You, amazed by the cleanness of the bungalow –

I basked in a kind of paternal glow.

Too soon, you thought it was time to go,

but my watch is thirty minutes fast not slow,

so you drove off thinking you’d be on time –

I take the 30 minutes we cheated ourselves

to write this poem for you, for me

an attempt at a self-lullaby

for the time is approaching two

and tomorrow I have important work to do.

7 January 2005

FROM QUATRAINS (LAST ONE)

AFTER PASTERNAK

But be alive, no live – this only matters,

forget the past, the afterlife that flatters,

love life in its present abundance, my friend,

be alive and burning to the end.

*

Though my body may be totally out of training,

my thoughts and feelings are honed

and my lines are suited for quatraining

and my feet are healed to the bone.

*

Wise people say abysses are to be glimpsed at

not jumped into. As we traipsed the tube plat-

form I saw the void approach as the train approached

but it was only a stepping back that you broached.

*

But I miss you intensely already –

though we were never going steady.

If we’re ready to hold our friendship’s helm steadier,

it’s possible that our craft will be sturdier.

*

A tomato and cheese sandwich settles the stomach,

shows I have not quite lost my appetite.

Almost anything I can stomach

except a cynical critic’s bite.

*

Anger, sadness, happiness or hope:

give me enough rope

I’ll hang them all on the line

and they for me are more than symbols and signs.

This period in the café has served me well.

I am moved by a massive ocean swell

or is it a fresh breeze

that blows me across poems’ seas?

*

Sails fill like lungs but don’t empty.

My lungs were sound in my twenties,

but now polluted by tobacco smoke

early mornings and late nights I croak.

*

My dear, your brilliant idea of Coffeehouse Poems into Kurdish

zoomed in on the novelist Mehmed Uzun, he’ll organise that ‘ish’.

Hard upon our disillusionment with my English,

it is something to savour and relish.

*

I’m back writing sober quatrains,

a bottle of ‘Diamond’ water at my table,

last night I got the last train

and to phone you on return was unable.

*

A rush of poems to the head

in intervals between interpreting.

Writing hard always settles my head,

stops concentration from departing.

*

Interpreting the intensely personal,

pro nouns, adjectives and verbs,

leads to deconstruction of the impersonal,

to creation of myths and proverbs.

*

I know you’ll make a good therapist,

you’ll guide people back on the piste,

each other’s lips we’ve never kissed,

but can souls as well as minds race?

*

Float up then your sweet face,

come into my mind’s place,

but I am pushing too hard,

I’ve got to give for us to move forward.

*

A little drop of sense of loss in my glass,

that’s because I can be a moody bastard

but I don’t act the dastard

and my black moods these days never last.

*

Like a yo-yo to the café I revolve and unwind –

it’s a swing in the hand, one of a kind.

Up and down I go, in and out, up and over

and the little string of poetry is my cover.

*

Today I can’t stop writing

with revealing and concealing feelings I’m fighting.

This time it’s not pour toi but poor vous –

not even mainly with myself in view.

*

The shame I felt was a powerful catalyst:

it set off a string of quatrains in a list,

a positive litany of verse,

better than violent tears or a redundant curse.

*

These four-liners fit in the long poem,

three hours to go before I go home,

sandwiched between hard work for Kurd and Turk:

this café is like a humanist kirk.

*

There’s a different quality to exhaustion

when it’s brought about by hard work:

then there comes the satisfaction

of knowing you’re not going berserk.

*

So they’ll accuse me of graphomania –

anyway I’m treated for manic depression.

If I write increasingly zanier

will that create the wrong impression?

*

Are my poems impudent to the point of imprudence?

Impish, do they retain their potency?

I’ve come to depend on them for my independence:

they offer me an immediate, an eternal recompense.

*

I’ve been writing, diving deep for over five hours,

it’ll take longer to decompress,

but I have no need for the ice-pack compress

on the crown of my head – I still have my powers.

*

You said: ‘Let’s slow down’

but that needn’t mean I should wear a frown.

As we slow down, other writing speeds up.

If I let you down, I’d like these poems to pick us up.

*

Smoking up a pipe storm,

the accompaniment of these poems.

In Jevdet’s Café it’s warm

and the tea is more than a totem.

*

If my heart bleeds for the two Kurds I’ve seen today,

a woman with voices, an intellectual in dismay,

let it bleed too for the two who missed their appointments,

who missed their two-weekly treatments.

*

As interpreter I am not a ventriloquist’s dummy,

I have to be eloquent not a dummy,

to be at turns brother, Dad even Mummy

and treat with words their lives that can be so crumby.

*

Coming to the end of a long self-counselling poetry stint

the best often emerges at the end.

Sometimes I marvel at the feelings by dint

of which I keep myself as my own friend.

*

I’ve written till café closing time

but not even used up all my rhymes,

they seem to be a renewable resource

like a mountain spring source.

*

If I stopped I’d let the little tormentors in,

but there’s a sound mentor in

me that composes off-line

even while asleep, in other words all the time.

*

In Selchuk’s nightmare we were in a strange motel,

white sheets over our mouths we held

and we were terrified as hell,

but we were the experts on fear – as well.

11 January 2005

*

Integrity is like sand,

gritty in the hand,

only there because of the ocean

of feelings and emotions.

*

Radio 3

The aching Mozart violin

could soothe the whole world’s violence,

this grey dawn waking

taking the short night hence.

*

Pining is for the pine trees,

not in the present for me,

but missing you is not misleading me,

I admit that freely.

*

Ten more ‘new’ poems of Aronzon in an email –

more translations to travail,

rarely of a dictionary do I avail

myself: but if I should fail to get him across?

*

With those who die young there’s always an intenser sense of loss,

whether it’s Jesus Christ, the poet on the Cross,

or Aronzon’s self crucifixion at the same age –

and neither of them saw their poems on the printed page.

*

Perhaps the oral tradition

should be called the aural tradition,

words have an aura,

an eternal either orer.

*

It’s called ‘intense longing’ for a reason:

you can’t imagine it being ‘out-tense shorting’,

but there’s a sporting chance

the long and short of it will be sorted.

*

The pub’s the same, the beer’s the same,

but one of us is missing,

but even with poetry’s musing

I can’t summon you up the same.

*

Yet musing on you is not abusing

the terms of our truce:

but is it a form of using

you and do you want this poet’s use?

*

It’s good to settle into forty minutes of writing:

it’s the closest I can get to being

with you and that’s always exciting –

but it’s through my eyes I am seeing.

*

My friend Rod brings Cali, Colombia to life for me –

the beauties, the beauty, the extreme poverty.

He reaches in his pocket and finds a broken cobblestone of memory:

perhaps the beggars appreciate his eccentricity.

*

For the poor will always be with us,

so it’s a long haul arrangement –

with your conscience you have to be conscious,

overgiving or overtaking can lead to derangement.

*

Perhaps one of you is looking at the screen

enjoying the to and fro art of email –

not a letter or a postcard or a poem but something in between:

may our servers never fail!

*

Lack of contact doesn’t mean

we don’t think of each other,

au contraire, one mustn’t be mean

with thinking positively of each other.

*

When you said you’re going to write poetry I was thrilled –

perhaps I play a part in your conversion:

at narrative you are incredibly skilled –

I wait on tenterhooks for your first versions.

*

My notebook, you are my solace,

you’re like the solar sun

and lunar moon in one:

you are, quite simply, ace.

*

I ponder on my use of rhyme:

it has something to do with time-

ing, half comic, half tragic,

half propping up the agit.

*

Sometimes my poems flow so freely,

but I know they’re not dictated:

the dictator could not be so free –

by the authorities he’d be slated.

*

For Quatrains there’s Khayam’s Rubaiyat,

Jelaleddin Rumi, Nazim Hikmet

and Akhmatova, could one choose to buy at

a better bazaar stall than that?

*

A frustrated mood can suddenly relinquish

into a fountain of poetry.

Poems within us languish

then surface like from a seed a tree.

*

The parable of the sower and the good seed

is one of the origins of mathematics.

Poets force-billeted in attics

should spend more time in the field.

*

You might think that interpreting is a giving profession,

but I say it’s take, give, take,

but when you are taking up the words of a confession

it’s another take on take.

*

INTERPRETERS’ ARCHAEOLOGY FOR SELCHUK

Layer on layer the experiences are deposited in the mind

but if you take a ten day holiday you will find

the stratigraphy becomes disturbed

and you feel pronouncedly perturbed.

*

THE SHOPPING FORECAST

Harrods, House of Fraser, Debenhams, Doggone Bank,

the shoppers’ protection office issued a sale warning

at 4am Greenwich Mean Time.

Blood pressure rising sharply.

*

Katja, the German on the train from Kings Langley as I learned later,

is learning Vietnamese, already reads Chinese and Japanese with ease,

works at SOAS, so as I’d read her a poem in my notebook fluently

and with ease

I proudly declared that I was a poet and Russian and Turkish translator.

*

I’m sitting in Tas, one of my favourite Café haunts –

I’ve had manja: garlic, greens, herbs and yoghurt

and broad beans with red pimentos –

washed down with a poem and coffee, I’ll take them away as mementos.

LOOKING AFTER YOUR SOULMATE

Are you swimming, looking after your soul and back?

Though we haven’t lost it – I want our fresh friendship back.

I’m not about to burst or crack,

our short, self-imposed parting is meant to be positive not black

and at work I have been the opposite of slack.

Have we managed to get the sleep debt back?

But there’s so much missing, so much lacking:

the face to face, exchange of poems, the phone contact:

let’s not rush but to proceed with tact

sounds as though there’s less longing, less care

than that which for you I share.

18 January 2005

Half an inch above the paper, pen poised,

hesitating before the poem’s equipoise,

trying to shut out this café noise,

to write gold without alloys.

Creative waiting is one of poetry’s ploys,

knowing when to strike or strike,

to get on or off one’s bike:

now they’re not many poet miners at the coal face,

other sources of energy serve the human race:

is the rat race still the master race?

18 January 2005

LANGLAND GARDENS

How much longer will I be coming to these peaceful gardens,

where often these days the season seems to be Melo autumn,

not yet winter and not quite spring of the heart I mean,

but now I am greeted by fruitfulness – the green

of grass, plant and bush that cushion my falling in love.

I am smoking my pipe above the garden lawn,

too busy writing to you and in no wise forlorn.

I can’t remember the myth of ‘L’aprés midi d’une faune’

but floating in my mind with your smile you resemble a faun.

Gentle reader, this bucolic should not give you the colic –

and sometimes a lullaby is more fitting at midday –

I’m more tired then that at midnight and, hey,

what a miracle between interpretings to write a love lyric!

19 January 2005

Je menerais dans ta vie, cherie,

la musique de mes mots en Français,

un tonique pour coeurs blessés,

un vers par coeur syllabotonique.

Pas le panique du Titanique,

mais l’âme de Leonardo da Vinci

et les anges de Michelange.

J’apporterais a ton fauteuil

pour ton oeuil clair

l’air de toutes cultures, de notre future,

pas pour les critiques, les cyniques,

mais pour toi, mon amour – unique.

Je manque ton sourire,

ton capacité de me faire rire,

mais le bonheur et le plaisir

d’écrire a toi – c’a dure et m’inspire.

Ces petites poemes composées sur la route

sont assez bohemes. Ils posent pas des doutes,

mais toi et moi nous devons discuter

nos sentiments, mais pas dans les discotheques.

Chaque langue a son gout,

chacun a son gout,

et je penses qu’ont peut trouver une langue civilisée

dans laquel on peut écrire, parler, partager.

La vérité n’a pas peur du temps

Conversation avec S. Adel Guemar

Heureusement on sentait le temps, le temps du santé,

le temps pour lentement rallentir,

et maintenant plus d’une semaine que l’on ne voit pas, on ne parle pas,

on na’s pas de contactes ni téléphoniques, ni éléctroniques,

mais je penses a toi, et peut etre tu pense a moi,

et je desire partager cette puissance lyrique avec toi,

et tu es bien proche pas loin du tout,

viens, asseis toi dans çe coin, et tout

vas commencer encore une fois,

ou ma foi envoles sur les toits

de Londres, et si je n’ai pas torts,

t’approche dans ton apartement en Oxford.

20 January 2005

Bless these wounds for pain is immortal

and takes us to the portals

of the afterlife. We have to catch all

feelings of their healing,

their openness is still revealing.

We two have to do what we have to do –

continually seeking wholeness of body and soul.

22 January 2005

I am a gold prospector,

but my love is not a flash in a pan.

I’ve written I’m your mine detector,

my lines scan but cannot scan your brain.

We cannot read each other’s thoughts

but words can reveal and conceal their feelings.
our short parting needs a little healing:

that we both may fight to care for each other.

21 January 2005

Ma petite faune,

je vais t’appeler sur le téléphone,

et puis nous rapellerons notre passé,

notre future, notre future francophone.

*

Ma fille a glissée dans ma tete,

l’idée d’aller a l’église,

idée forte et pas bête,

pour moi – une surprise.

La vie est pleine de grandes soupires:

c’a veut dire que sa pouvait etre pire,

la respiration et un sort de transport d’air,

avec un grand éspoir – j’éspere.

*

Je reconnais des mots inconnus,

je deshabille la langue,

et voila elle est nouvelle, toute nue,

corps soupple, sans mensonges.

*

Enceinte avec moi, chere maman,

tu déja sentai la poésie francaise,

maintenant tu a quatre vingt deux ans

mais en francais nous somme plus a l’aise.

*

Maman, tu és assez proche a la mort,

mais je t’offre ces petites poemes d’amour

dedies a ma bien aimée

et a toi, qui m’aime comme mere, quand meme.

*

Maman, c’est plus facile de te dire ‘je t’aime’

en Francais que ‘I love you’ en anglais,

et bain, c’est plus facile pour moi pleurer en francais,

sentir les mots pas sabotagés.

*

Maman, çe qui est triste de ton rapprochement avec la mort,

qu’on avai, toutes ces années, a mon avis, torts:

c’est a peu prés cinquante ans qu’on ne cause pas en francais,

le francais de mon enfance, do ton jouissance.

*

Et voila touts tes sentiments sont ils seulement de jeune femme

pour Rilke, Verlaine, Baudelaire, ton passion pour l’ame literaire,

vont ils aux flames et cendres du crematorium,

et me voila, poete anglais, ton fils en larmes, dans un état de moratorium?

*

Maman, maintenant je me fache

que cache dans mon maladie psychiatrique

il y’avais plus de trucs sentimentales et mentales

que nous ont éloignés, mais je dis a çe moment-ci ‘lache’!

*

Maman, c’est ton fils, çe matin plein de soleil, qui parle,

oublie que j’crie sa dans une poeme:

tu commence a avoir confiance de cette part de ma vie, mon art,

a le fin de ta vie, peut etre cette fois on peut etre bohemes!

*

Mon amour, ta mort ma mere, çe jour-ci:

vous étes dans mon Coeur:

si, je suis triste,

mais avec un merveilleux bonheur.

*

Et sa c’est comme il faut,

totu a fait ‘normale’

comme un dit de haut,

quand tout est vachement pas normal!

*

Jouer, jouisser avec les mots – c’est mon métier –

mais un et des autres peuve remarquer

que l’amour et la mort sont pas lier

par le tumeur de mauvaise humeure.

*

Peut etre j’éxprime mes sentiments dans ces poémes

sans regarde a votres reponses,

et voila sa veut dire on n’a pas le balance,

avec toi, ma belle, on peut rallentir l’amour, mais maman ca va rester

avec nous, ton ame?

*

Ils vont te dire, Richard, tu es triste:

‘You are so sad’ but there’s a twist,

çe merveilleux bonheur que je sent

est un radicale et plus bouleversant sentiment.

*

Je répéte – je te fatigue, lecteur? –

l’amour et la mort sont forcement liés jours par jours.

Tu le resents, Adel Guemar, poete, jorunaliste, auteur,

mais toi et moi, mon ami, nous causons aussi de l’interpretation

de vrais tortures.

*

Hiere soire on a causés au sujet de la poete Azerienne

Negar, qui dit ils en a des coeurs qui doivent etre casses:

assez fort, n’ést çe pas, mais comme la colle refais la piece brisée

plus fort,

on a penses que peut etre elle n’avait pas tort.

*

J’aime une femme qui fume:

comme mon computer je t’allume.

Ce n’est pas un autorisation de cancerisation,

simplement j’aime la flamme dans ton ame.

*

Et maintenant, tenant le main de ma vieille mere,

jouant avec lest mots, je suis fiere,

mais voila le plus grand decision de cette après midi,

va’t elle rester dns la chaise ou s’allonger sur son lit?

*

J’ecrivais, observateur, poete sans pensant

a votres responses,lecteurs inconnues,

mais tandis que les dedicatrices sont connues:

c’est quelle éspece de aveuglement conscient?

*

Richard, ne rate pas le premier communication

après le silence: vous devez avoir confiance

pas dans l’amour propre mais dans le reanimation

de l’amitie, pas meme cette langue belle – de ton enfance.

Sans bague – j’encercle ton doigt

avec une blague, et je ne m’excuse pas:

cette maladie est que je suis tombe amoureux avec une francaise:

ces Quatraines et la langue francaise.

*

D’un balcon haut dans un arondissement de Paris

une jeune femme arache des fleures bleus et les jetes dans la rue,

son homme, pas son mari, est parti,

et jamais ne lui verra plus.

*

C’est un ancien histoire, mais a çemoment

je bois une biere tout seul a notre pub,

ca ira mieux de partager un boisson

avec toi ou rendezvous a ma soirée au Pushkin Club.

*

Je ne sais pas si c’est possible de lire ces vers en publique

en Angleterre. Suis je un dinosaur, une relique

avec des rimes d’un ancien age?

Mais c’est pour les jeunes que je fait cette raportage.

*

Le vrai sagesse s’agit quand on sort de la deuxieme enfance,

quand on arrive a danser les mots sur la page

en beau unison avec le sort et la chance.

Et oui, Akhmatova: il n’y a pas de mort, pas de vieux age.

*

Personne ne peut m’arreter,

meme pas la police de pensees.

La poesie roule pour vous,

mais pas pour les loups, les voyoux.

*

Ce soir je vais appeler Adel –

il sait que je ne suis pas sonné –

il est mon camarade fidele,

et Melike, elle sait que dans mes vers elle est renommée.

*

Mais je retourne a mon boulot –

pas seulement de te plaire,

mais de faire preuve: ‘that I care’,

mais dans mes vers je suis comme Mr Houlot.

*

Ca fait rire parmi les larmes,

ca je veus achevré.

Hugo a dit ‘le chevre

vole’, critiques aux armes!

*

Je n’ai pas mes notes de nos conversations

téléphoniques et pas beaucoup de letters

éléctroniques – je crains de perdre

nos mots, nos pensées, nos sensations.

*

Encore une fois ca va tres vite,

mais c’est la poesie pas notre amitié,

to vois – encore une fois j’évité

le mot juste: en francais c’est l’amour, ca c’est la vérité!

*

Traduction çen’est pas le trahison,

et traduire ces vers peut etre

sa vaut la peine. Le traduction

du Russe pour plus de 30 ans est mon raison d’etre.

*

Ca coule, mais quest que ca veu dire

‘recule’? Un mot significant,

mais je n’ai pas un dictionnaire, des livres francais a lire:

je voles aux ailes – le grand poet néant.

*

J’ai lu mes poémes aux festivaux:

recognition – oui ca vaux

la peine et le PEN Club, pas Monsieur Le Pen,

le Bosphore, la Neva, le Thames et la Seine.

*

Je ne peux pas courir,

mais mes vers courent pour moi.

Tiens, je peu voir ton sourire,

ca je crois – c’est ma foi.

*

Si, qui sait? – en Uzbekistan Aronzon a pris le decision

de se suicide sous les effets d’hashish?

Lecteur, frere, c’est que mon speculation,

mais je sais que la terre a perdu un poete riche.

*

En avant mes poémes avec un regard retrospective.

Regarde ton passé, Orphee, Eurydice – elle vive,

et toi Theseus, tu dormais tous le temps après Crete,

tu ne voie pas la voile noire? Parricide, comme tu est bete!

*

Alev Adil, copine fidele et poéte qui me donne un frisson,

tu raconte dans ta poéme que tu est le minotaur;

mais je n’avais pas peur dans notre restaurant,

pour nous le fils d’Ariadne est le telephone pourtant.

*

Cristina Viti, que les filles au bibliotéque Italien

appellent; ‘la femme au dictionnaires’,

je me trompe, je ne trouve pas l’italien,

avec ton mec Campana tu ne peus pas etre doctrinaire.

*

Daniel Weissbort, ton Francais est mieux que la mienne,

mais je crois que mon Russe et pareille a la tienne.

En traduction tu a fais 30 ans de tutelage,

et moi, je commence en Francais a nager avec les vagues.

*

C’est moi seulemnt qui es responsible de ces vers –

frenetique? Non frere Christophe, mes pieds sont sur la terre.

Oui, on a bien marches a l’ecole en France quand on étaient petits:

‘Salut, les McKanes’, et l’etranges mots: ‘bitard, et bitardeaux’.

*

Je sais que les gigolots de poésie ne rigolent pas.

Moi je m’occupe de chercher l’am d’une seule femme.

Je ne marche pas a quatre pattes, mais pas a pas,

repas après repas, tout seule cette nuit, j’abris nos reclames.

*

Si j’etais un riche homme, si j’etais fameus,

si j’etais Seigneur de Blenheim our des autres lieux,

si j’étais ‘le roi d’un pays pluvieux’,

pour vous, le peuple, ca serait mieux!

*

Vous profites de mes rimes:

ils sont des vrais aides memoires –

ce ne’st pas un crime

de donner a les jeunes: l’espoir.

*

Parfois dans ma vie j’ai croye que j’alleai creuver,

mais maintenant je garde ma sante –

mon corps est bien, Ribert Desnos,

et pas de crainte au sujet de mon cerveaux.

*

Lecteur tender, je peux m’arreter quand je veu,

mais la musique nocturnelle sur le radio est si belle

et je cherche la balance entre nous deux,.

Deux heures approchent – mes ecirvain prisoniers sont dans leur cellules.

*

Les Exiled Writers Ink vont lire a Paris

avec les poétes surtouts Iraniennes.

Finalement je suis jaloux. J’ai envi

de lire comme éxile – ca me gene.

*

Suis je l’étranger abatttu par Sartre?

Moi je dois ouvrir mon parachute.

Apres la majesté de Chartres,

art religieux pour moi c’est la chute.

*

Attention, çen’est pas un traduction,

ni un reductio ad absurdum.

C’est vachement hors de tradition,

these lines you never heard ‘em.

POUR MA FILLE JULIET

Bonne fete – may you have a good fate.

Belle vie – it’s not just me

qui te souhaite

a life with love without hate.

*

Dying is easy – everyone does it –

it’s the extraordinary living that undoes it –

the dying I mean

and a premature death is not my scene.

*

To love till death –

us do part? –

well that vow is only a start,

only the first shared speech breath

*

Sickness and health,

absence or presence of wealth,

they’re factors not just for the couple,

to which we each have to wed ourself.

*

On one’s own it’s not always lonely, the tipple.

Once my selective hearing at a party heard nipples for nibbles;

and the daughter of the house for offered me a ‘leg’ –

right or left? – instead of the breakfast egg.

*

So we continue unaware of what the closest one is thinking of us –

or are we? I have a strong male intuition

that wishing or the condition of volition

is something that involves the two of us.

*

Longing, yearning, the state of missing someone,

not in desperation but with a physical, metaphysical element.

If the temporal and spatial factors are a fact and done,

you still have to communicate somehow: that was meant to be.

*

To indulge in a bit of telepathy without parapsychology’s

paraphernalia, it helps to have some idea of schedules.

Friend, reader, you may be incredulous

but doesn’t this poem on paper communicate more than technology?

*

Am I spinning philosophy today, writing at home

and do I have a right to in this poem?

The ploughshare still turns the loam

and that is its true treasure trove.

*

‘Poetry is not like archaeology’, Anatoly Naiman wrote me in an email,

‘if you try to take up where Mandelstam left off, you’ll fail’;

yet stratigraphy of lines and pottery of poetry

I discovered in Anatolia – well, Anatoly, I gave it a try.

You write that the sixties for poetry were your time

and I wonder if they’re not mine,

though they were broken down for me

they’re mending and catching up with me speedily.

*

There are men between elder brother and father

who defy the title ‘amca’ uncle,

in Musa I may be searching for

him and perhaps you in me – that’s not unkind.

*

Interpreter for Gillian in the therapeutic triangle,

which my friend Nader calls the circle,

I was loath to be a father figure

till I figured out it was a viable role.

*

But I am father to my daughter,

brought her up almost on my own for over ten years.

It was she who quelled my fears

of parenthood: little presents and poems I created for her.

*

There is a parent dormant in the grown child

that cares when father gets wild

and obsessive, possessive of Time,

depressed or manic: these concept rhyme.

*

Forgive me daughter for my years of instability,

forgive me for realising my ability

to cope so late, but not too late in life,

and forgive us – we couldn’t stay together – your mother, my wife.

*

The years passed, you got married

to Michael – I haven’t tarried

long enough on this earth –

it’s only 24 years since your birth.

*

I’m tuned in to a French station on the radio.

When I worked in Knightsbridge I had a mate at the café called Giorgio.

We laddishly joked about the Italian word ‘ucello’.

Hell, oh, I was prouder of the café than the work I had to do.

*

I almost now called John Berryman my hero.

At Princeton years later I succeeded him as Hodder Fellow.

Then, he chose a bridge, I – a window.

I survived – he left a widow.

*

And all manner of things will be well –

have no truck with the devil, with Hell:

you have entered Heaven again on this Earth:

the most natural state from birth to death.

*

You see your dearest ones face to face,

not through the prism of prison or through a glass darkly.

Your six senses are remarkably

keen and Time has found a harmonious pace.

*

You coolly calculate the risks together,

the setting off in the fine weather

to Scotland of your souls – you’re on a roll,

rolling in the metaphorical heather.

*

A McKane and a Campbell

from English and Scottish PEN

will fly to Istanbul,

where the regime still bullies unrepentant writers.

*

For C.

Serenity, serene as the calm sea’s face,

a consciousness of right time, right place:

in the balance of attachment and non-attachment,

in a state of commitment, not detachment.

*

‘You’re transplanted to Herts’

as Mick by email retorted.

Once he used to treat tortured

people with his heart and healing hands – and I was his voice.

*

Friends, Doctor Fry and I, we ate chocolate ‘for the serotonin’,

when I said at that time I was in love with no woman,

you diagnosed unerringly and honed in:

‘Can you love God, then?’

*

Do we as creative writers share with the Creator?

Mother, I guess you were pregnant with me as you crossed the Equator,

a life on the ocean wave, on the ship out to Australia?

I’ll have to ask you sooner rather than later.

*

My father and mother got cancer

within a month of each other.

For their chemotherapy treatments they drove in the same car:

their immunity shattered, they joined the community of sufferers.

*

Shalford rhymes with Oxford

and Tabard Gardens Estate rings of Chaucer,

but only the bare necessities at times we could afford

on our static pilgrimage, I and Juliet, my daughter.

*

We overlooked the Trinity Arms

in the finely appointed Trinity Church Square.

More upwardly mobile and fitter I climbed the stairs

of my life, but still held no woman in my arms.

*

A missed opportunity to have a coffee in Charlie’s Café

with my daughter, where Mustafa’s read my Coffeehouse Poems.

I’ll ring her when from MF I get home,

telephoning her at least is a simple affair.

*

‘Love the stranger in thy midst,

keep the hand open, don’t make it into a fist’,

remember our walk in the autumn mist,

remember that we never kissed.

*

A lump developed on your neck.

You deal well with others’ shipwrecks,

but in your worries about malignancy or benignness

it was to me that you turned in your time of stress.

*

Accept or reject: if early suicidal tendencies don’t just lead to attempts

at many ages,

but also to frequent acts of sabotage,

continuing possibly into one’s dotage,

then does one’s living perpetually remain fate’s hostage?

*

Big Richard advises me: ‘Go easy on the empathy’,

knowing my sympathetic feelings for the underdog,

but this need not really be part of a crisis symptomology,

still I would like to return to childhood and sit by a log fire with

a favourite dog.

*

Harvey, from California, my first therapist,

announced after videoing me: ‘Very professorial’.

Although in the best sense of the word he was professional,

he accepted no money from me: ‘That’s for your future’, he’d insist.

*

The Kurd talked in his session about

Yashar Kemal,, Mehmed Uzun and Orhan Pamuk

and I told him I too knew about

their books – and I’d met the three of them to boot.

*

Spearing fish sometimes gave me feelings of guilt,

then I’d forget the thrill of the hunt

and concentrate on the blood I’d spilt:

I’d be overwhelmed and go under.

*

Years go by until I really hear the dawn chorus,

the same goes for feeling the powers of Horus,

or is it Ra – do these perceptions make a difference for us?

If I’m a sensitive poet should not I feel more for us?

*

Sensitive to myself but not enough to others –

that may be why I lost some brothers –

but the one for whom I care now the most,

her I so hope I have not lost.

*

‘All’s well that ends well’ is too often said

in the middle of the first scene,

when the end cannot be seen

and the play for us is still deadly serious.

*

You came onto the stage

at a crucial stage

in my life and despite an age gap –

it happened – you make and made me happy.

*

Poetry is a matter of energy and flow,

of knowing when to go fast and when to go slow,

the roar of flames and the candle’s glow,

the heat of summer or the winter’s soft snow.

*

I use pipe tobacco to boost me and slow me down

in the short term, but it’s inexorably wearing my lungs down.

I hack and wheeze and smoke like a tramp-steamer:

one day I’ll have to quit this false support scheme.

*

The last three weeks I’ve out thatchered Thatcher –

sleeping on average four hours a night –

but now I am seriously catching

up on sleep and that is only right.

But it’s not lack of sleep that is interesting,

though it’s always inevitably testing:

it’s what you do in the waking hours

and whether you can fully exercise your powers.

Micro-dreams are possible on trains:

when you fall asleep for minutes under the strains

of fatigue. The tiny dreams can be significant,

though refreshment from the naps is insignificant.

In my dozing

I was proposing

to you but in what language?

In my dreams!

*

On the speedboat to Herm my Guernsey grandpa’s pipe flew overboard.

We smoke for the nicotine hit and to ward off boredom.

For short term gains, long term health risks go overboard:

I became part of the Clan, St Bruno, Black Cherry syndrome.

*

One day, Richard, you’ll have to stop writing and edit these lines,

otherwise they’ll never ever get into a book;

give them a long, sober second revisory look,

take as many pains as those they took to write.

*

You, friends, to whom I deal this pack of poem-cards,

did you realise I still hold them to my chest?

But I would expose most to my best

friend, if showing them to her was not so hard.

I took a risk – I showed my hand,

but it was made of words that hand,

of poems, not ever spoken face to face,

and words are like the holes that make the lace.

*

It’s we who trigger memories,

not they who trigger us –

no, this sounds too patronising,

too pat, for the past can be demonising.

*

Afternoon and I’m in a pleasant state of reverie –

the time, Adel and I agree, when we

are close in daydreams to night dreams

when one is in a world where all ‘seems’.

*

I close my eyes and conjure up your smile,

see you facing me, your lips mobile.

We’re talking about your thesis, remember –

can we both breathe life into these embers?

*

These half hour train journeys on a diurnal basis,

the silences, the strangers’ faces,

perhaps commuter lawyers can solve many cases,

as for me I work on my poetry crasis.

*

In another country, another tongue,

I could have drunk strong cigarettes

and eaten prison – note not the nouns but verbs

and in another thrown on a log fire aromatic herbs.

*

This bowl of soup, this can of drink

give me new life and I am in love

with life, with you – I do not think

but feel and know – yet I am a strange cove.

*

OXFORD IN HOSPITAL

The older man with the long face in the bed by me

suddenly announces monosyllabically ‘ease’,

but I hear it as Turkish ‘iyiyiz’

which means: ‘We’re well’ but were we at ease?

*

Now, getting on for forty years later,

an eminent interpreter and translator,

yet still modecated and lithiumised

I may be naïve but I’m getting wise.

*

If a Russian translator was translating me

long after I was gone and dead,

or a Chinese penetrating my poems’ character with ease,

after consulting God, I’d give them the Nod – and their head.

*

God gave Noah the rainbow sign,

no more water the fire next time.’

James Baldwin lived in the 70s in Istanbul,

associated freely with Frank Kennedy, the British Consul.

*

Too drunk to remember John Freely’s invitation

to his epic New Year’s party, I burbled a poem instead.

The Consul General approved,

it was never poetry that proved too much for my head.

*

And all around Lyn Waters and her daughters,

the ‘y’ in all their names was their trade mark –

made their mark on me and student Turks

and about my feelings I was not entirely in the dark.

*

Wylla felt the pain in my heart like a taut drum

as we danced close in a disco in 73 in Bodrum.

Later I sent her a recording of my The Crown of Gorse,

years before with smoking my voice had grown hoarse.

*

Lyssa, I wrote for you – and me:

‘Rest now, you have earned it,

learned before time the secret of dying,

be at peace: now on this earth we shall never meet.’

*

It’s only a 7am train I’m getting

but I’m het up as if I’m getting

a plane. Sleeplessness abets

writing – but I have to hedge my debts.

*

‘Deus conservat omnia –

the crest on the Sheremetev Palace –

no doubt Akhmatova knew it rhymed with insomnia.

Read me bedtime rhymes of Christopher Robin and Alice.

*

I write at night for my sleepless friends,

those who vainly seek asylum in sleep.

For them I have deep promises to keep,

especially for those who think the road ends.

*

What of the one with the beautiful hair,

who overloaded pills then phoned me there,

who in desperation wanted me to care,

cried for help – and I was there.

*

Tonight I saw many faces of my loved ones –

I could have chosen grasses or stones

and running water, Peter Levi’s ones

in his elegies, but I chose real dream faces, though not flesh and bone.

*

I don’t know whether it’s worth trying to sleep –

call it one of my white nights.

I still wish to be your white knight,

weeks of silence were not easy to keep.

*

These days and nights I am not sure of chivalry

and bringing in the heavy cavalry

still means nerveshed all round:

I prefer the round dance of these words’ sounds.

*

I choose my words carefully,

but sometimes, John, I leave the prop

on coarse as I come to land carelessly,

but the other day, co-pilot, you switched me to fine, caringly.

*

Perhaps this night’s vigil is preparing for the service

at Upminster church. Climber, beware the crevasse –

coming down from this height could lead to impasse –

but last night I thought I was in the depths.

*

My poems are not running away –

they’re sitting pretty on the page:

‘Life is not short.’ Fatma said, ‘It’s very long.’

In helping others we both grow strong.

*

These days and nights I’ve cried a river,

but with no quiver of paranoia.

Did Cupid draw an arrow from his quiver?

I fired off poems – and they didn’t annoy her.

*

It’s almost a choral symphony,

many voices, pure polyphony,

but I don’t feel dictated to,

blue freedom is the dominant hue.

*

Not since my Turkey poem, The Crown of Gorse,

have I ridden this night horse

so skilfully, but three months after that one I fell

to earth: Friern Barnet hospital was certainly not heaven

though also not hell.

*

If you think about it, to burn the candle at both ends

is physically by the laws of physics, impossible:

but this is what thinking about close friends,

at night, one off, I promise, makes possible.

*

And I go deeper into the night of my soul

that hears the screams of the tortured,

for me it is not real their hellish hole,

but interpreting is not vicarious – I would not use that word.

*

Why did the chief psychiatrist at MF

tell me to write a poem that the government should lay off

nanny goading the people to lay off

booze? A ruse? But earlier he had said I was in a position to any

opposition to say f- off.

*

Nina said the brain requires only two hours rest,

the body much more. Every night her pain tests

her but John tells me the brain feels no pain.

Neurology is becoming a newer ology by night and day.

*

This writing feeling is like after skin diving.

Those many hours I swam off skiving

off the former marble-carrying boat:

it’s pipe smoking that has caught me by the throat.

*

‘You remember everything’, you said,

but I have selective memory

and its retrieval is targeted

at toi, at vous, not just at me.

*

I also have a fertile imagination,

can almost see the pagination

of my New and Selected Poems,

though they are far from dry and home.

*

Nazim is the pseudonym for a younger Kurdish poet –

he’s sleeping now for it’s 9am – I know it

for he does not sleep till morning light.

Little does he know I too stood duty for the young century last night.

*

The Marxist interpreter argued that mental pain does not exist,

on another issue a colleague raised a curse like a fist

at his rudeness in Turkish – I could have kissed

her there and then: ‘It’s only comradeship’ she would have hissed.

*

We stepped out of the fundraising church, Julie and I,

for a quick one off cigarette.

Sean had to roll her one smartly

for I hadn’t gone back from my pipe yet.

*

By the unlit fire, Juliet Greener

and I sat till three in the morning,

without juniper gin or mother Juniper,

heart to heart, mellow advice and warnings.

*

Warneford Hopsital is a menacing name to rhyme with Oxford,

why not call it ‘Green Leaves’?

That august institution cannot afford

to stamp on those who fall and have difficulty arriving and leaving.

*

Pain in my liver: is this hypochondria

or will my old hepatitis turn to cirrhosis

and take me before my lapsed psychosis

does, before I see the translations of me into Hungarian

by my friend Andrea?

*

Is it still a dialogue when it involves more than two people?

I propose a polylogue for I am not talking a couple.

Too often there’s gin rather than a genie in the bottle:

mother’s ruin they call it: with proverbs who am I to quibble?

*

Somewhere in Ireland outside Galway,

Tonita rises for another day –

she’s closer to me than many

and had the bravery to declare it anyway.

*

She sent me first ‘My Name is Red’

by Orhan Pamuk, then three Collecteds:

Lowell, McGough, Kavanagh – they’ve all been by my bed,

but her gift of ‘Touched with Fire’ I haven’t yet read,

by Kay Redfield Jamison, I’ve started it now actually.

Sisyphus puffs as he pushes his rock, his lithos.

The Greek myths’ ethos

is extreme and exemplary.

*

Cross fertilisation of crops and ideas –

but what if they’re genetically modified?

Do our genes modify our dears

and can conditioning still edify?

*

Global warming is not out of our hands,

I mean the universal warmth of an embrace,

a closeness, a kiss, a clasp of the hand,

all these things that melt the encroaching ice.

*

Once I was interpreting in London after

an earthquake disaster in Japan:

the end-pushing therapist says, pointing a press photo out to the man:

‘This is like the havoc you wreak on your family.’ Um, er.

*

A cup of coffee is not a cup of coffee

unless it’s given and received with a smile.

A surly cup of coffee is like a cup of curly

plonked down real greasy spoon style.

*

This poet consults his addiction

for coffee more often than a dictionary.

Writing with coffee is part of my diction,

a way of moving the pen while stationery.

*

I’m revisiting an old friend in an old haunt,

Tolli’s Café, where it was my wont

to talk with James Thackara and write verse

and sometimes count the goldies in our purses.

*

A beer in a pub has a different effect

from coffee – but from both I draw inspiration,

not just from my solo efforts

but because even alone there I am part of the congregation.

*

Here we drank something together,

here we sheltered from the rainy weather

of day or soul and when we return to our table

the chairs know if we are single or a couple.

*

I really like Roger McGough and his Monika

but in Rotterdam at Poetry International his moniker

was Roger McCough,

but I’ve written this before and once is quite enough.

*

To write like kids playing in a playground,

jumping, gambolling, feet off the ground,

to feel the surge of life-energies,

like a pilot diving, to withstand the gees.

*

I’ve felt like writing a long poem for 25 years,

then I hit on writing it as many tiers,

little block of quatrains or four liners,

morsels in a full course for the poetry diners.

*

UNDERGROUND WATCHING

How beautiful you are – you make my day,

sitting cross-legged as the tube sways.

Black pin-striped jacket over green T shirt:

you remind me of her – and my eyes observe, don’t flirt.

*

‘Do not display any vulnerability,

strive with all your ability

to be the rock and not rock the friendship boat,

be the knight’s castle – but not remote.’

*

I want to wake up in the morning

with a novel to translate stretching out,

to give a continuity forming,

from time to take time out.

*

At the same time I want to split time

with these four liners,

add a couple of rhymes,

fashioned for old timers.

*

May the good Lord preserve us

from rhymes that go clang in the night

and get lost like good dreams and nightmares’ fright

when daylight dawns and once again preserves us.

*

Pamuk’s ‘Snow’ in Turkish fell with a thud

as my hand relinquished its grip

as I napped. Snow is beautiful as sea and is in my blood,

not in this air on this short train trip.

*

The competition is to write in any café

in any of my moods of the day.

I repeat I come here not for food or coffee

but for the people who accompany my poetry.

*

Sylvia Plath before and on the train: I read again

all the poems of 63 and some of 62 and 61.

They are all tricky ones,

but not that bleak and black – life still breathes and reigns.

*

I smuggled back six of my big volumes of Pushkin

from the about-to-be-sold Pushkin

House. Perched inside my bungalow window ledge –

never again will we have a falling out.

*

In the Sade Café I met a Persian waitress called Hale,

which she announced means ‘halo’.

To another poet I was saying hello,

languages surround me here like ballet.

*

It’s interesting to sit here flashing back incidents

into four liners: such poems have no precedents

in my own work: I turn them out like film scripts,

more available than those I kept for years in files’ crypts.

*

Persians ask me if I like Khayyam

and I have to ham

it up for outside a few Rubais,

he does not strike my eyes.

All that wine and moonlight

but the speaking pots are better

and the thump of the fight

with the clay of the potter.

Nazim Hikmet’s rubais

with a modernist bias

approach a philosophy

which is more my philosophy.

*

Akhmatova wrote more than A Train of Quatrains,

a half century of half the Twentieth Century,

in translating her she allowed me entry

to the thought trains of poetry.

*

Burning Mandelstam’s poems in the Univ Master’s Lodge

on the fire was one of the lowest points of my life.

What did it was not my frenetic cryptogram searchings

in him – there was a chemical imbalance that endangered my life.

*

Did I become a Cold War hero or casualty

translating forbidden Russian poetry?

Did I admit there was a danger in reality?

With glasnost the world caught up with me.

*

Olga Sedakova told me million print runs

might adulterate even a great poet’s message.

Joseph Brodsky believed poetry should be bought on shopping runs.

And what’s that got to do with Jacob selling his birthright for a

mess of potage?

*

I dote in my dotage

and admire people of different ages.

A quote is only quotable when it has porterage –

and when is it a quote and not plagiarism?

*

Preparing for my reading at Swansea,

no need to drop a tab of ecstasy:

at the end pick up the tab for a pint of Guinness for me,

enough that there be the susurrus of midwinter leaves of poetry.

*

I know what being inspired is,

but it’s harder to inspire.

It’s easier to expire

than to keep breathing.

*

After I interpret her visit to the psychiatrist she says:

‘I get no pleasure from anything in life.

Let the doctor give me the needle of euthanasia.’

As a Kurdish minor in Asia

Minor, they screwed up your young life.

I talk to her about winter passing,

the black clouds breaking,

and my heart too is aching –

but I find no answers.

*

I put all my eggs in one basket,

carried them round to her house,

cracked their shells and we made an omelette,

then we had a little carouse.

*

Have we killed the goose that laid the golden egg?

Did we stand on each other’s toes and now have not a leg

to stand on? I write these lines to search for an understanding,

now more balanced, level-headed and still standing.

*

All experience is food for thought

and has to be inwardly digested,

lessons learned cannot be bested,

but this time was I caught out?

*

The soup cools as I smoke.

No words I spoke,

but I wrote them in my notebook.

It’s a strange brew I cook.

*

I sit listening to the conversation from the next door table,

they’re filling in an Eastenders’ Quiz.

It’s none of my business

but not to pick uo fag ends – I am unable.

*

So even in boring themes I find the unusual,

make poetry out of the casual,

overhearing and observing,

the poet serves as well as being self-serving.

*

The café sequences:

a consequence

of wanting people around,

hence to be busy, not homebound.

*

Today they come thick not fast,

like viscous engineering oil.

Genetic engineering’s foil:

to find the poetry gene at last!

*

I am in a meditative mood,

a little off my food, a smidgeon depressed,

but poems come too when I’m in a brood,

even when it’s fallen – my crest.

*

‘Look for new beginnings not endings’

was something like Alev said: how can there be endings

when one is right in the middle?

But perhaps it’s worth unravelling the riddles

that prevent one building on the beginnings.

I am over half way through my innings –

but up my sleeve I have a few tricks:

I could still hit the world for six.

It’s strange to be at the airport

without a farewell message for you.

Are we so fraught and caught

up that our lives are in the waiting room?

*

Travel can decimate and create

writing – which will it be this time?

I don’t want to obliterate

our past for the sake of the present time.

*

Row on row they wait at Heathrow

their planes’ departures,

and as usual I try to capture

the moment, having risen at cockcrow.

*

I’m flying to Istanbul

on a writers’ mission.

Our commission is a trial observation –

glasnost to the full.

*

I have to pull my weight

and throw it around a bit.

It’s been a long wait

before my first hit.

*

My kit: black jeans and jacket,

a light blue sweater with a stain on it.

Books in my bag: Amphora, Coffeehouse, Hikmet,

Mandelstam, Shakespeare and Rifat.

*

Physically I used to travel better,

but now in my mind I’m fitter.

Now I have no reason to quit,

I have to see it through that ‘it’.

*

Perhaps these are little diary jottings

and my poems are indeed ditties?

By writing am I blotting

out the wounds, shame and pity?

*

The airport burger and coke settle unhealthily –

this writing will never make me wealthy,

but its purposes are manifold –

hope I don’t die before I get old.

*

I smoke a last pipe before

looking for my colleague Jean.

I have so much to live for

others and sandwich my life in between.

*

On the tarmac

engines revving up –

no looking back –

the only way is up.

*

In the air the usual icebergs beneath

after penetrating through them with wisps of fleece.

Air hostesses always have brilliant white teeth,

and in all languages thank you and please.

*

Hours after landing I’m in a lahmajun joint

and the rough and ready meal does not disappoint,

washed down with ayran or buttermilk –

I’m back in the land of my ilk.

*

The busy poor folk round Taksim Sqaure:

what relation do they have to those in the hotels there?

And why when I had the first evening to spare

did I turn down the fish restaurant for more humble fare?

*

It’s because I wrote a lot here

in restaurants, teahouses and coffee ones –

it’s because I say without fear

I’m a mixture of a populist and one of the elitist ones.

*

I like the high-flown and the low,

the nightingale and the ragged crow,

the rose and the gorse crown

and picking you up when you’re down.

*

The fish would have tasted nice

but come at as healthy price,

but this red-brown tea in its clear glass

cuts across all elements of class.

*

The open door of the cheap restaurant

lets in the last February night air.

It’s not as though I didn’t want

to be dosts, to be a pair.

*

But as it is, my words accompany you –

my distant companion.

The bread pannier

is whistled away – time to pay what’s due.

*

How much will they charge for thirty lines,

feathered with double rhymes?

My God, I owe this restaurant sixty pounds –

to repay them I am honour bound.

*

My memories go round and round

as I digest the meal –

familiarity in the pit of the stomach is found,

there it’s not always fear one feels.

*

The rolling-pin flattens the dough –

I’ll linger with another tea –

it’s to these sort of people I owe

the ability to be really me.

8

My legs are feeling the cold.

I’ve had no beer or wine to drink,

but here I’ve bought my soul

some time to muse and think.

*

Tomorrow I may make a speech

defending freedom of expression.

I wish my words would reach

to the unjustly imprisoned.

*

Nazim, can you hear me?

You know this peasant fare.

You’d wish I could spear me

with my words a torturer.

*

I slept too much on the plane,

my sleeplessness unsettled in my hotel room.

I listen to the neighbour’s shower boom,

have a beer and smoke again and again.

*

It doesn’t help that I have a headache,

not to enter into any heartache.

It’s really my soul that aches

for the pains oppression makes.

*

At home I interpret torture,

here too I’m carrying a torch.

I keep its flame alive with caution,

a candle burning at a threshold’s porch.

*

All will become clear at breakfast –

the thrust of the Press Conference.

Will the news break fast –

freedom of expression has to be experienced.

The more extreme the verbal experience,

on reflection driving the traumata hence,

what was sensed acutely, not automatically

meditated upon, merges into the poem’s reality.

*

They say it must be desperate interpreting for torture victims:

but I say they are survivors per se,

and there’s also a professional for ‘em

and sometimes they start to heal from the words we three say.

*

In the same way as flashbacks recur,

certain phrases are repeated.

The mind naturally errs

after the head has been beaten.

*

So torture is for intimidation,

not to extract information,

for the latter pickings are slim,

but the former terrifies her or him.

*

Psychological maiming is more apparent than physical:

reader, don’t look at me quizzically –

I can read a tortured mind

and the book is often blanked out I find.

*

Torture is the ultimate censor

of freedom of expression:

the forced confession

for me is the greatest incenser.

*

If it wasn’t for our anger,

where would we be, we interpreters?

In the swing is the danger

from empathy to wrath, to…?

*

Anger is yoked to vengeance,

to a settling of causes,

but is there any chance

of bringing their guards to account?

*

Intenrational law would claim accountability,

but virtuaslly no country has had the ability

to apply the law to the lawbreakers –

too often they themselves are the lawbreakers.

*

To the glee of torturers in Turkey, Iran and other countries,

American and UK troops after the intervention

in Iraq abused the Geneva Convention –

human rights don’t grow even on western trees.

*

‘The fish smells from the head’ – torture starts from the top,

in war it’s never at a stop.

The summit of the human pyramid is sharp,

even steeper than the ridge or scarp.

*

If there are torture republics

and this is made known in public,

then glasnost and making it public

is a start to have them licked.

*

Until the mentality of authority changes,

until bodies and mknds are no longer firing ranges,

until we realise man is the weapon of mass destruction,

especially when he is under tyrannical instruction…

*

We’ve seen the photos

of what a few Brits did to looters

after the torture regime of Iraq.

Human iorghts in wrack and ruin.

*

Bob, the stationmaster, gave me my ticket

and said: ‘I’ve got a heart as big as a bucket.’

I said: ‘I hope neither has a hole in it.’

‘Then I’d have to fix it, dear Henry.’ Panto innit.

*

I probably call them quatrains

because I often write them on trains.

‘Quot’ sounds Latin to me,

all words are quotes really.

*

It’s only in ageless freedom

that one can achieve wisdom.

Sages know their onions,

stuff them with their sayings.

*

Selma says she least likes my autobiographical poems –

then she doesn’t know well my life at home;

but I still strive to turnn the personal

in verse into the universal.

*

I’m feeling terribly hungry.

Perhaps at this moment in Hungary

my translator Andrea

is feasting her eyes on my Amphora.

*

You don’t have to have a caravan to be a gypsy.

You don’t have to drink wine to be tipsy.

You don’t have to be a pretty flamingo to dance flamenco –

just remember the sixties, Manfred Mann, Paul Jones & co.

*

‘Sympathy for the Devil’ always unsettled me

when Jagger chanted: ‘I shouted out who killed the Kennedies,

well after all it was you and me’.

In poetry not in songs I seek my remedies.

*

‘Always remember,’ the Captain said,

‘the drowning man can pull the lifesaver down,

the both of you will drown –

and what use is saving lives when you’re dead?’

*

I believe in flashback doctoring,

taking control of the recurrent image,

like significantly altering a poem on the page,

but unfortunately most practitioners are too hectoring.

*

The interpreter has to push the limits,

not only of concentration.

But if only I could get my mitts

on those who ran and run concentration camps.

*

In a couple of years I’ll have put in twenty

interpreting for torture survivors at MF.

For some people that would be plenty.

The rarest words here are ‘Jesus Christ’ and the ‘F’ word.

*

Old interpreters never die –

their words go marching on

like peaceful marchers in the field,

never to surrender or yield.

*

The Brazilian waitress is more than a bonus

to writing in this Lebanese Restaurant.

Already having an audience of one puts an onus

on writing what I need or want.

*

As I relax into these words snug in the snug –

though they are a poor substitute for hugs:

is it my pipe with its permanent fug

that pulls from under my danceable feet, the rug?

*

I’m less tired after work than when I start.

Do I have a very strange heart?

I wore it on my sleeve –

you rolled it up and away, but can I afford to grieve?

*

The singer’s language I cannot understand

but because it’s a song it brings me no strife.

If I was married, this could be underhand,

this staying in the bar, if she were at home, the wife.

*

On the table, my upside down specs,

a pouch of Clan pipe tobacco, a Beck’s,

this nitebook, an orange lighter:

am I an intellectual, am I a good writer?

*

In Turkey, when I used to declare I was a poet,

new friends would ask me for my ID card.

Virtually unpublished in England, no one could know it,

and here proving it is more hard.

*

Certain characteristics cling to the poet.

I guess that line, you have to toe it –

though being the Byronic romantic is out of fashion,

you have to do something with all that dynamic passion.

*

You said I combined descriptions

of love and pain with a social role.

I wouldn’t mind that as an inscription

on my gravestone above the grave’s hole.

*

Sometimes I feel like a heel

when the accosting beggar I cannot heal.

It doesn’t make a sliver

of difference either, crossing his palm with silver.

*

I’m slowing down now, tiredness of ages

slipping over me like a bedtime book closing heavy pages,

yet I can’t rest for I have to travel

home, out of the labyrinth of London to unravel.

*

A whistle, train pauses longer than usual:

electricity, we will use you all

from generation

to generation.

The icecap on the world’s head,

mirrored by the Antarctic one:

this symmetry is under threat:

colder world is turning into a warmer one.

*

But ultimately global warming

is not as dangerous as lobal warming:

greed and anger are based in the brain –

and so is the capacity to keep the world sane.

*

Within all of us are snow and ice,

the sun that warms by day,

the moon that shines at night,

the rain that falls so grey.

*

The acrobatman walks the tightrope with his balancing pole,

balancing mania and depression – the twin pole.

In the sawdust ring beneath the clowns and fools play their roles:

at the circus and the Globe the gentry are there with the proles.

*

The punter thrusts his ferrule-shod pole

and the punt glides forward on a roll.

The thrust of a straw poll

can influence the voting of the electoral roll.

*

‘Poles apart’, they say for North and South

alienation, as alien as the fresh water from the mouth

of the river debouching into the salt sea,

as the iceberg melting now more readily.

*

‘From the water you can only see the tip of the iceberg’,

Ule spoke this saying and it seemed deep.

But man is allergic to freezing water, can’t emerge

alive and ice melts most like tears we weep.

*

At times most of the North is covered in snow

in blanket solidarity. No

chinks in the snow and ice curtain,

implacable as the Cold War and just as certain.

*

More realistic than East and West is the North South divide –

Brodsky followed down Leningrad/Petersburg’s longitude.

On this subject there’s room for more than one etude,

but sometimes you have to spin the globe on its side.

*

I’ve always been fascinated by the words ‘world’s axis’,

ever since reading Mandelstam’s ‘Wasps’.

Axis and wasp in Russian are connected to Osip

by their common syllable ‘os’: syncrenicity in practice.

*

Mandelstam and I know the polar night,

though we’re outside the Arctic circle.

It’s when there’s not a single sleep’s particle

and the dark proceeds with terror and fight.

*

Siberian counts as East and North –

I’ve never actually been there.

Quite a few people from the Gulag came forth:

for them like the Holocaust survivors, we have to care.

*

The Stolypin cattle trucks tracked eastwards –

humanity was taking several steps backwards.

When the zeks arrived they became wards

of the State, guarded by dogs and guards.

*

The Arctic convoy crews have not been decorated

as they deserve. Not always did the Guardian Angel

escort them to Murmansk and Archangel.

The ships ducked and swerved as the torpedoes detonated.

*

The trawler Gaul decades later sank in suspicious circumstances.

My friend Olive campaigned for and comforted the crew wives.

It was not open, the Government’s stance.

For what intelligence did they lose their lives?

*

The subject of intelligence gathering,

surveillance, torture and extraction of information

under torture are still, to understate, bothering

me, ever since I started learning real Turkish and Russian.

*

My wife and I in Princeton, we joked acidly

that the Ministries of Torture and Poetry

were allied. A good try –

but they are poles apart decidedly.

It was awful being in the same body

that had once been flooded by

squash-playing endorphins.

It was like the blue sea without dolphins.

*

The shoreline is the surest lifeline

when you emerge from the sea on terra firma,

the lines become less labile, firmer

more confident in their life signs.

*

You swim often, but you only drown once,

though the waves often beat the pounds into pence

and advance their movable fence

and on the unwary bather pounce.

*

I have only in England body-surfed,

never mounted the 60s surfboard,

but a surfeit of little waves cannot be scoffed

at – the sea by temperament is never bored.

*

I return to mountains and the sea

whenever a health issue is bothering me,

mountaineers, divers, surfers hanging ten,

and those are by no means exclusively men.

When body and mind go into rallentando

and all I want to do is lie under my eiderdown,

when the dreams I dream I forget,

still I hope short hours of sleep will refresh.

*

If I overslept my station badly

I’d finish up in Northampton.

But I’m not about to madly

missy my stop – end up in the wrong town.

*

It’s not the pallor of the passengers’ faces –

it’s the total absence of conversation,

as though we are going to places

in a nation without languages’ principles or notions.

*

The writing always slows down

when I’m thinking down not up ideas.

I write for you, my dears,

these poems and the talk of this town.

*

I sense that someone still feels I’m self-indulgent,

that my lack of publication leads to resentment

and envy. I don’t feel able to go to the Book Fair reception –

my ego was painfully I from the inception.

*

Shirin says she has achieved a balance in her life,

and she’s glowing at the O2 bar with it all.

I take away three chapters of her The Birds of the Desert novel:

it’s powerful and passionate, cut through me like a slice of a knife.

*

Exiles, when they become ex-idle

again after the traumata subside,

can teach us not to dawdle –

wherever we are our living is always on our side.

*

Lonely thoughts they say, but their energy is shared,

the same electric impulses fire each brain

and a re more common than language words

which don’t always couple with thoughts’ train.

*

I choose to not go to certain events,

convincing myself I Have to give vent

to my own writing in an evening in at home:

but perhaps people should stand in the way of this poem.

*

Cristina said ‘Quatrains’ remind her of the word for grave fever

in Italian. I can only remember ever

having one fever – in childhood in France –

but these quatrains lead me a delirious dance.

*

The telephone has become a weapon in my poet’s armoury.

I sit on it at home for more hours than is healthy

reading poems to Alev, Cristina, Penny and Adel:

but in the autumn they’ll have a book to read them in as well.

*

I’ve virtually stopped reading my poetry books

and rare novels. If this looks

suspicious, it does wonders for spurring writing –

though with the term for reading ‘vicarious experience’ I’m still fighting.

*

Consciousness raising is as important as fundraising.

People can’t raise children if their village is razed.

Preconceptions and prejudices have to be erased.

The freedom song is still the most powerful one to sing.

*

My Africa is the young people of our group

who suffered at the brutal hands of troops.

They may be badly housed here and short of money,

but they enlighten my world with their testimony.

*

I could rock and roll-call your names but we might

not want that. Can we find a peaceful fight?

Will there ever be justified justice –

let not the situation just be as it just is.

*

Yes, Status Quo is a veteran rock group,

but none of us want to return to the way it was:

swift movement forward is not the prerogative just of troops,

yet we have to examine the struggle’s cause.

*

I reach out to you whose stories are still locked on your chest,

to whom tormenting thoughts give no rest:

come, get them out of or off your chest –

the rest of us will receive them as we can best.

*

I love you bloody foreigners

and the way you use our English.

Teaching it was an earner for me –

when I was a bloody foreigner gavur in Turkey.

Rhea Seferiades said: ‘Look on your past life as a fairy tale.

If you keep it inside, something will fail.’

All this at the Pushkin Club at the Latvian Centre:

she opened a door of perception and bade me enter.

*

‘All my life I’ve loved the opposite sex too much’,

your summit and your downfall – my hunch.

Rhea – you’re Greek to me,

and not Greek to me.

*

I don’t aspire to be a Greek God,

but a demigod, demiurgic, a poet, now you’re talking.

I see them appear demigoddesses and demigods

often when I’m hardest working.

Sitting in the garden after packing the Pushkin Club Library,

I asked Lucy, Verena, Georgia, Catherine and Suzanna for

a rhyme for anchovy,

for ti was sitting on the pizza. When I came up with John Bon Jovi,

the others laughed but Catherine ‘rubbish’ed me.

*

Covers and books in handfuls passed through my hands:

is this what remains of Russian culture?

What is Russian in UK and the Pushkin Club’s future,

with the young in face of clubbing and rock bands?

*

My rap may not be gangster but oldster

and I found my match with Jake, Verena’s youngster.

Lucy and I are of a kind punsters,

we consigned no Puskiniana to the dumpster.

THEORY OF RELATIONSHIP

The sea changed in my eyes before the meeting,

how could it not faced with Honour Killings?

But my eyes have probably changed colour –

Preciosa once interpreted that and my face’s pallor.

I’m waiting for the last train from Euston,

for all the cosmos like an astronaut controlled by Houston,

for this journey to Kings Langley may be further than the moon –

would you agree with me, Albert Einstein?

This time there was Energy but Mc was not squared – too soon

we declared a split, too many hoops

we put each other through. Now oops

there goes another failed theory of relativity,

but I sense there is a remarkable specific gravity

between us and, more importantly, a degree of irreverent levity

tha will buoy up our friendship so it will endure.

This relationship our poems may not cure

and it is not unadulterated fun:

you yourself implied that it is lopsided but one is never one

and, Dostoyesvky knows, one plus one is more than two

even without children. I can’t see you

but here I can still conjure your spirit I love

and I am more than a juggler of balls above

my head – I’m still in deep up to my waist

and these words, my time I am not wasting:

I guess I’m pasting an accurate declaration

of my position, but nonetheless it is a clarification

in verse, for that forgive me –

I care for you. I care for our universe

and this night I got the order right.

FOR SHEILA KASABOVA

OPENING UP TO THE MAX

ON TEARS AND DOGS

We talked about Liz Hart’s proposal

theme of Tears for a meeting and of my proposal

in a doze. Tears are as interesting as dreams,

their origins as complex, as fluid,

and they can be clear and liquid-lucid.

I told you that the results in the eyes

of wearing a mask in the salt sea are similar to when one cries.

You told me of the tea(r) room in South Africa

where, aged five, you sat by a Lake of Tears:

we’re both as impressed by the volume and meaning of them here.

I told of the young Kurd who’d been dry for years,

though he’d been tortured and his father had died,

who found a dog in the village and took him up

into the hills – and cried, and how I

interpreted his tears with mine

and Helen said: ‘You see men cry too’.

I gasped when you told the story

of the vet coming to put your dog Max ‘to sleep’

though you didn’t use those words,

for our dig in Princeton was called Max.

You sat on the sofa, Max between you

and your friend the vet. Max, in great pain,

got on the floor ‘to be near to the earth’

and the vet gave him the injection

and you sat side by side and cried

for a long time before the vet ‘scooped up’ Max and left.

I told of the Kurdish shepherd boy who had a sheepdog

then was savaged by an army dog

and had a great fear now

and that Melike only takes my arm when dogs are near.

This all has something to do with tears

as our conversation did and my eyes welled

as we walked about tears spurting

and ‘rain and tears are the same’,

tears alone in bed at night

and tears shared,

and we finished by saying that we were fond of each other

and we ‘must have lunch together again’,

though we’d left it say seven years since meeting in Tolli’s.

We also agreed that working in human rights

really screws up your private life.

Late in that lunch I said: ‘If I am the sea,

I may not be aware that I overwhelm’

and you that ‘tears are an undryable well,

both statements I paraphrase.

For some of us crying is not a phase

but one of the deepest expressions of feelings,

though it may leave the eyes and Is reeling.

When interviewing new interpreters

I ask the non-trick question:

‘How do you interpret tears?’

25 January 2005

FOR GILLIAN BALANCE

I’ll keep your four white roses from our Chechen lad,

though two have now had their day.

As for us two – though we don’t always ask each other –

I, on my part, have had not a bad day:

‘the Englishman’s highest praise’ they say:

real tears first then, with my close friend’s sister, that laughter,

to paraphrase Frank Sinatra. He gives my lines a swing.

I wonder whether you’ve been painting,

or ‘plotting to deftly stab on an individual dab of red paint’.

I can see you Christmas card to me of your home tree

and three birds soaring, peeking through my curtains.

People forget, don’t they, that when you draw the curtain

at the end of a tragicomedy – it’s not curtains –

for it goes up the next night.

Old friend, I’m boiling the midnight oil,

painting this poem with my oils.

May we never burn out, dear Gillian,

may our love of humanity never burn out.

5 February 2005

My psychological metabolism has returned to normal

but not, thank God, to boredom,

but still it is like for all

the world returning to earth from heaven’s kingdom.

From four hours sleep a night for two weeks

I’m back to a conservative six or seven:

was I alone in a poetry-writing heaven

for of matters of the heart we did not speak?

There were internal troubles at work.

I decided to translate a Kurdish novel from Turkish.

At my new home I arranged papers and shelved my books –

I guess I’ll always remain bookish.

But what was lacking was our talking

face to face, on email or telephone.

It was not as though we were walking out

together, but I sensed friendship not alone.

10 February 2005

How did this poet miss Valentine’s

when I had enshrined

you in dozens of poems?

It’s quite simple: we’re not yet at home

in a relationship.

My poetry’s face

may have launched a thousand friendships

but there are aspects of my past I haven’t faced –

and I still fear shipwreck.

15 February 2005

To paraphrase Alev Adil’s email:

‘Look not for endings but beginnings’,

for life cannot be on hold for long.

Create memories that’ll be strong.

The past may ache with more than nigglings,

it may both hold and hold up the future.

Came a time, my heart awoke

and my poems spoke for mine if not ours

and this feeling is something more than friendship’s powers.

16 February 2005

FOR ARMIDA AND GERMAN GIL

AT KINGS CROSS AND ST PANCRAS

I

This St Pancras bench is cold enough

to give me pancreatitis: this liver is frozen.

Still, to meet my Mexican friends I’d chosen,

so I guess I’ll have to tough it out.

A friend says my moods radiate on my face like radar –

then does my voice boom like sonar?

There’s over an hour delay on the train from Nottingham,

but my brains – I’m not rotting ‘em –

good opportunity to write some verses:

this perversity is a minor reversal –

the poet should never be averse to a bit of diversity,

for time is not our adversary:

it serves us – we serve it

and ultimately – we deserve it.

II

I’m snug in the wrong, ‘joli’, as you put it, Pub –

I feel like hibernating here like a bearcub.

It’s difficult to imagine I’m at the universe’s hub –

sometimes I feel more like a cast-off hubcap

after a pothole mishap.

I drive myself but am always driven,

a passenger but not a bystander.

When the heavens are riven

I am clean as the blizzard-driven

snow – a pure white wizard

spelling out my poems’ magic,

at once comic, at once tragic,

light as snowflakes, heavy as a snowdrift –

I’m sure you catch my drift.

III

You’re coasting down southwards

an hour late, and I cast my mind forwards

line by line. I have difficulty

jumping ten or twenty

minutes, let alone years on: there’s plenty

of time in the present

without presentimenting sentiments

into the future. By this I meant:

here I am on the line –

I level with you, I am a man of the moment –

and is this a bad or a good sign?

16 February 2005

I look for your face in the women in the crowd.

I pace Istiklal Street in Istanbul and mumble my poems out aloud.

Most of my poet friends here have long been wrapped in shrouds

and tomorrow I’ll fly to England above the iceberg clouds.

Fear of arrogance prevents me from being proud.

Patriotism in the UK is now the province of the far right,

and freedom, Rebecca said, in the US is the watchword of the

Republicans.

It’s easy to associate with down and outs and publicans

and yet to be not Christlike,

but, by saints alive, I’d like to turn over a new leaf

of Rod Wooden’s Colombia book,

for here too the exterior world is always there to look

at – thus giving the interior, balance – and relief.

3 March 2005

Istiklal-Taksim, Istanbul

FOR ISABELLE

TRANSLATING PUSHKIN

Translating Pushkin’s poem ‘I loved you’

forty years on, it was a dream come true.

I couldn’t have done it if my own feelings hadn’t come through:

this poem is more than an expression of my dark Russian Oxford blues –

it sums up a love and friendship so honest and true

that it allows the poet to share his love with other yous.

8 March 2005

HOLDING BREATH

Your air was my sweet inspiration

as though there’d be no expiration

and I’d often be exultant

of my friendship triumphant.

But weeks have gone by – no contact,

and now I don’t know how to act

or value my self-worth

as I’ve fallen back to earth.

But even in the mundane,

while the rain humdrums on the windowpane,

neither of us are to blame,

though it flickers, it burns, the candle flame.

I hold my breath, don’t blow it out.

Heal my life. Don’t give it a clout.

9 March 2005

BEFORE PEN MEETING

when in doubt turn to Pushkin, Pasternak and Shakespeare.

Lean on it, don’t aggressively shake your spear,

beat into ploughshares your swords,

believe against belief the pen is mightier than the sword,

the word is more powerful than the bullet:

the trigger you must figure how not to pull it.

Spears, swords, bullets and triggers

are all, dig this, metaphors:

but the pen is the biggest producer of metaphors.

9 March 2005

I’M FINE: ENGLISH DISTINCTION

You are not feeling well.

They ask. Fake it. Fake it like hell.

Why bring the other down

as well as yourself? Play it down, the frown.

It may be a false part, but act –

the performance can change the facts.

Morale is the moral –

in that there’s nothing immoral.

9 March 2005

‘There were three for the crossfire,

my brother died in my arms,

his body sheltering mine,

but when I picked up his firearm

and the murderer’s clicked run out of bullets,

the trigger I could not pull it,

and father in his crying would always say –

I would have died for a drop of his –

‘Why, oh why did you not pull the trigger’.

I was only just a little girl, a teenager,

but this older person in me now cannot forgive that little girl.’

‘But undoubtedly you’d have been killed.’

‘Then we three wouldn’t have met in this world.’

The only justice was in sharing our images and words.

March 2005

I

Silence is not incoherence,

neither is it nothing –

in its term of pregnancy

it sings a silent wombsong –

then words are born in multiples,

fully-formed phrases and sentences,

but between each word there is a silence

and a longer pause to be read between the lines.

II

I wonder if words are like particles

in the silence of space in the atom.

On a more banal note, the Bee Gees

are singing: ‘It’s only words’ on the radio in the café.

The coincidence tickles me.

I am reluctant to get out my Pushkin tome

from my bag, but by Jeez

I’ll write verse that dares disturb the universe

and adds a shot of energy to this everyday London coffee.

9 March 2005

A FRIENDSHIP TALE

She was tender, oh so tender,

soft as skin that is not sore.

She didn’t mean to hurt him, or he hurt her:

but neither of them knew the score.

So soft the beginning, so tender,

though little of each other they saw,

they were thrilled by their friendship’s splendour,

neither racing for an easy score.

But then one went too fast for the other,

or so the other perceived,

but oh how it did matter

that less communication was received.

Will they catch up with each other,

if only as young friend and much older

and will tender that still hasn’t turned sore

still tender for them friendship-love in this life’s store?

16 March 2005

Although I’ve not been paranoid,

I sensed there was something wrong with my thyroid:

sleepy in the day and up to 3am –

something not quite right, eh em?

So back on to the Carbimazole,

though I’d been zapped with radiation.

Hyperthyroid stole

my energy, sapped my jubilation.

It gave me anxiety

which I could have done without.

It made me excitable,

could have knocked a relationship out.

Thyroid, thy will not be done –

but can the damage be undone?

Give me back a balanced metabolism,

ruled by me, not illness’ diabolism.

16 March 2005

If the teacup is not half empty but half full

and most women are not half beautiful

especially when you stir the sweetness in them

and all births are like the one in Bethlehem

and we all become sons and daughters of God,

then why don’t we force the issue and endpush for a better world?

16 March 2005

Computer crash – functions lost:

is it irretrievable the cost?

Years of putting in files,

inadequate backup the while.

In the morning I pause to think:

the computer is not my food and drink –

if the files are lost – they’re lost.

I have hard copies in files of most.

Still it’s a psychological blow,

and there’s a train of associations in tow.

?17 March 2005

You’re in London but probably heading back –

a meeting today we’ve lacked.

How is it going your back?

Good to have communication back.

I worked at MF till eight thirty,

these days I’m feeling less shirty –

of sleep these nights I’ve had more than forty

winks – to that debt I’ve made my retort.

Lessons can be taught

but not always learnt at over fifty.

Still my thought process is nifty

and I’ve emerged from being overwrought.

Years of emotion can be caught

at a distance, as I’ve written

those nights I cried buckets. St John’s Wort

is an alternative for those this way smitten.

Salt waves of the ocean:

the weather is calm

again after the storm,

after the commotion.

Perhaps our moods come like the weather,

equally fickle to the forecaster.

If someone could invent a mood thermometer,

it would be a quick way of making silver.

All I know is the quicksilver falls and rises,

for guessing the level you don’t get any prizes:

it’s evident from the expression on the face,

for how the pulse and heart race.

A spirit-level can gauge the vertical,

if you are standing on your own two feet,

but lying stretched out horizontal –

even then balanced sleep is no mean feat.

21 March 2005

Jesu, they’re talking in the carriage, mirabile disu!

What’s gone wrong with the English reserve?

And the sun, it’s shining too!

The weather’s taken a positive swerve.

Coats have been shed –

I’m not having my usual sleep –

this is all penetrating my head

like an arousal beep.

Men more relaxed, women prettier,

an occasional laugh –

more’s the pitier

this may be a one-off.

Perhaps it’s the time – not your up-to-town commuters,

mutely staring at their laptop computers,

besuited, suited only to work some

more hours. Today the train is not irksome:

the speed of sunlight

transports us bright.

23 March 2005

Dreaming back to Oxford where inspiration

was not in church choirs or spires

but in a fit mind, body and poetry’s sensations,

mens sana in corpore sano,

that never seemed to tire

until the out-of-the-blue breakdown

for which there was no tonic: an utter down

that made me neglect the remaining town and gown

for thirty five years after we’d all gone down:

until, at the insistence of two Kurdish sisters

I paid two heartful visits as their guest

and laid the ghost of what I regarded

as my Russian-Warneford inquisition,

so much so that I am now in a position

to open the gates of the canal lock

and let the memories barge in,

unblocking for the first time the blockage

and at last connecting my youth to my old age.

23 March 2005

And when I die, my spirit will haunt the cafes and bars

where I wrote this poetry for so many hours

and chatted to and talked down

bar people, waitresses, waiters,

friends and the stranger customers

as was my custom er –

in the cafes and bars of London town.

24 March 2005

EASTER SUNDAY

Last night’s beer and a double raki

and just some yoghurt doubling for breakfast,

no answer on the Kurdish novel from Saqi

and financial troubles round Easter,

plus my hyperthyroid and the overcast weather

all combine to give me a slight hangover.

It’s more metabolic than alcoholic or melancholic.

Whatever. This Sunday we should rejoice and feel holier.

Christ is risen. Halleluliah! Halleluliah!

His three day death was not a failure.

He cracked his Golgotha and the grave’s prison:

is He indeed risen?

27 March 2005

ROCK SONG

Well this guy was on methadone,

he had a method of his own

of transfusing sympathy

from the girls in the pharmacy.

My girlfriend got hurt –

he was more than a flirt,

burying his head in the sand.

She gave him a finger

and he took a hand.

She gave him her finger

and he took her hand.

She gave him a finger

and he gave her two.

She gave him a finger

and he took her hand,

hand arm and all.

It really is a pity

if you listen to this ditty

and don’t take it as a cautionary tale:

if you do heavy drugs

and poverty hugs

they’ll kill your life without fail.

She gave him a finger

and he took a hand.

She gave him her finger

and he took her hand.

She gave him a finger

and he gave her two.

She gave him a finger

and he took her hand,

hand arm and all.

Now you’ve listened to this story:

it’s about drugs, blood, not glory

and perhaps now you understand:

if you do heavy drugs

the needle tracks

will lead you from rave to grave.

She gave him a finger

and he took a hand.

She gave him her finger

and he took her hand.

She gave him a finger

and he gave her two.

She gave him a finger

and he took her hand,

hand arm and all.

1978-2005

The pen hovers: behind it is the thinking.

The pen pauses: in its ink there is no inkling

of what words it will write:

like monkeys on typewriters

it could eventually write the Bible,

then for plagiarism be liable.

If each word we use is a quote,

it’s only in the order that they are spoken or written

that departs from the verbal rote:

though I love and honour my languages

I have reached the stage

when all the words on all the pages

can really only engage

a small portion of what I want to express.

I wish to be at the sharp end,

like Caxton inventing the printing press,

though the computer is my friend,

I am under poetry’s holy orders,

trying to expand languages’ borders.

24 March 2005

Seek not inspiration unless it inspires.

I climbed my dream up Oxford spires –

they were shattered as a student to be built again.

After madness it’s good to be sane,

to piece together not just life but dreams:

the past is more flexible than it seems,

not set in stone, fluid as water

but it can be compressed. Today in this café

I thought of her,

and enveloped her in this philosophy

and she is deep in my heart and mind for me.

24 March 2005

EASTER SUNDAY

Last night’s beer and double raki

and just some yoghurt doubling for breakfast,

no answer on the Kurdish novel from Saqi

and financial troubles round Easter,

plus my hyperthyroid and the overcast weather

all combine to gve me a slight hangover.

It’s more metabolic than alcohol or melancholia.

Whatever. This Sunday we shoold rejoice and feel holier.

Christ is risen. Halleluliah! Halleluliah!

His three day death was not a failure.

He cracked the grave’s prison.

Is he indeed risen?

27 March 2005

The Extra Cold Guinness slips down

a treat and is almost too good for me.

I don’t have sorrows to drown

and no inaction to bore me.

Long chats on the telephone man to man

convinced me that I am on the right track.

I went to Julia’s lunch party

and knocked a white wine back.

After I set out to find

a visiting Kurdish playwright who is blind,

a former prisoner of conscience

but our agreed meeting became a nonsense:

from Fulham to the Kurdish Centre

to Newroz celebrations

in Alexandra Palace,

by tube bus and minicab but all in vain.

I write this after the Pub on the train –

this line is my placenta

and the carriage is my womb place –

my poetry is more than daily nutrition.

I helter-skelter

back to my spring shelter home:

no rain is pelting.

No wasteful day – and I’ve caught a poem.

28 March 2005

3.30 AM

It seems that everyone’s asleep

except for me this side of the pond,

and I had a promise to keep to sleep

but I can’t wave a magic wand.

Above all I hope you are sleeping,

my love – for loves must sleep too.

Poets are better than most at keeping

awake at night and hours they sleep are few.

My friend Nader says there is a difference

between insomnia and sleeplessness:

I hope we suffer from the benigner –

for long it’s not been the midnight to niner.

Is it the trains or my trains of thought

that disturb my night’s rest?

Or is it plain modern-old-fashioned stress

under whose canopy we’re caught?

I hear the sound of distant cars

roaring down the M25.

I know that I’m still alive

when I’m sleeping, to fall into it now I have no fears.

But still it does not come,

like an out of tune piano

played out of rhythm

it refuses the diminuendo.

So this is my vigil: into these poems

to instil calm in myself and you –

to give them peaceful homes

and comfortable beds too.

Long ago lovemaking

deserted my bed,

but sleepmaking is universal – two hours for the head

they say these days, twice that for the body.

Is there anybody

sharing my night hours’ watch?

If this becomes a habit we must watch out. 30 March 2005

I woke up from the trench

of sleep, thinking tranches of French.

Notre monsieur is a bit hunchbacked

these days. His hunch is no longer packed

on one woman’s basket,

yet still the task it’s

the same: to extract

poetry from the tracks

of life – and love.

* * *

Debris on the track deliberately placed near Cardiff

and a fire on a train near Newport. As if

you’re not faint-hearted enough. You’ve departed –

make sure you arrive while alive.

A train of thought on a train that ought

to get in on time. There’s many a slip twixt the rhyme

and the line that runs straighter than my spine.

I slept as the sleepers clicked beneath,

woke up with a jerk at Swindon –

one day a wedding train in London

may await and love the covers beneath.

31 March 2005

ON RECEIVING THE LIVES OF RAIN

BY NATHALIE HANDAL

from ‘The Hanging Hours’ by NH

‘… the people I know

will have tears flowing from their eyes to their hands

before they wipe them off and continue.’

The morning your book came through the door –

it was either it or you –

I had spent a sleepless night waiting for sleep,

kissing French poems and English ones,
I snatched an hour and a half,

sensing your love for me is in the air,

your poems too are on the wing.

I wrung my hands when I was not at home when you rang,

stored your voice ‘for nineteen days’.

It just doesn’t seem unfair,

that our nights and days are parted:

you in your New York apartment,

me lying low in my bungalow:

I burn enough as it is.

But I offer you this three-cheeked kiss,

not French but Russian

and call up the spirit of our Pushkin.

You are not my daughter or next of kin –

we are under each others’ poems’ skin.

4 April 2005

The GP fingers my prostate –

apparently it’s not too cool –

so now will my nerves be prostrate

until the tests prove I’m a fool

to worry? But taking my father as an example

at this age – I have ample

time to live even if the answer

is cancer. From that he went on to live for twelve years,

then the end was sudden from the pituitary.

Perhaps I should take Geoffrey Godbert up with these new fears

and let him write an authorised obituary.

April 2005

POUR MAXGAMMON

Je suis accroche a un rocher,

alpiniste loin de la piste preuvee.

‘Vais je creuver? Vais je creuver?’ Je crie en silence

et la montagne reflet son transference.

*

I say to the man reading the Racing Sports:

‘Can you keep my seat while I go to the loo?’ He retorts:

‘If someone wants it… Only bums reserve seats.’

But I get a lovely smile from the girl opposite in reaction to my fret.

FOR JOHN RUNDLE

You say your poems are crap

and you say it with vehemence,

but by a process of elimination

you are cutting the crap.

So John, it’s not a waste

to reject the waste:

the food remains and your poems have taste.

early April 2005