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

FOR LUCY’S BIRTHDAY

When birthdays are celebrated by get togethers

they seem to come round again quicker.

This year you seem to have got it together

depite your work getting trickier.

So here we are gathering in a pub on your turf,

but even inow in our ears rngs the surf

of silenced imprisoned voices

that mean we can never totally rejoice.

It’s not quite the first day of spring,

but for me your party is more memorable

than Charles and Camilla’s exchange of rings

and I feel an honourd guest at your table.

I am always happiest where I am, and I’d rather

like to think that soulmates do find each other.

9 April 2005

I said: ‘I love life, women, my friends’

and though I can’t make ends

meet I will meet a meet end

without going round the bend.

I draw into my last poems

a feeling of beng at home.

In the pub a woman walks past,

her beautiful tousled hair needs no comb.

On antibiotics for my foot I’ve had my last

alcoholic drink for a week,

but I don’t feel like a geek

and I’ve never been a spook

and I sense my father’s spook

not spooking me but remnding me of the road he took.

9 April 2005

I write differently:

not a laurelised stream of poetry,

perhaps something more tender or more irate.

The duty of the poet is to create

not to serve old fruit old fruit on a plate

or darling buds of May to budding darlings

or just to extol the virtues of nightingales and starlings

or write lovey-dovey for the luvvies.

Apple juice and orange squash bevies

are all I’ve been on tonight

and I swear there’s no acid in my soul,

but I have to put a whole lot of iron in it – no use being anaemic

even to enemies I can’t now be inimical –

but oh Christ, don’t let me forget life and death are more comical

than tragic.

9 April 2005

‘There is always time’,

I used to say in my prime.

But time is getting shorter

and I ought to make my will,

which I now see means the future

and I will.

My body once fell off the windowsill,

intestate I would have died in my prime.

13^th April 2005

SAILING TO ISTANBUL

AFTER ORHAN PAMUK AT THE OXFORD UNION

Now for me it’s a thrill to take time

round midnight as you retire to bed

and my head’s incredibly tired,

to write not balancing on the high wire

but on an upright chair at your home table.

By a miracle we were able to hear Orhan Pamuk talk

and chat to him, have him sign our books, walk

together to the King’s Arms and talk of ourselves

to ourselves, and now in dreams we can delve

into memories of Istanbul and let the potassium and phosphorus

in our brains sparkle like lights on the Bosphorus,

and if it’s a melancholy pull

that means we’re learning to know what these Istanbuls mean.

13 April 2005

Almost forty years on I board the Oxford Tube opposite Logic Lane where I had a room for two years in Univ and cross Magdalen Bridge when I come to it and it exactly spans my poetry.

‘I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now’ from Dylan and the Byrds, which sounded such a facile cliché then makes perfect sense now. A certain naivety or openness keeps me young: I’ve loosened up. You’ve loosened me up – teased the knots out of the tangle, kneaded the taut muscles of my life with the massage of your message of friendship and made this young man happy.

14 April 2005

SONG

I’m a poet, A translator, when I die later,

my life will be on everyone’s lips.

There’ll be photos, quotos and critics’ quips,

they’ll gossip about my private and public slips.

But what I have now after this Oxford trip

is poems, memories that will equip –

me for my journey on through life

and though I might never take a wife

again, I’ll winnow the grain from the chaff

and share my harvest of the bread of life.

14 April 2005

I love to see you smile and laugh,

it gives a radiance to my soul.

Though you’re not my other half,

permit me to say you make me whole.

*

I wish I’d known William Shakespeare:

the wit, the depth, his hopes and fears.

But in using his beautiful English right

we approach him as day follows night.

14 April 2005

FOR DEREK

If Epicurean is the opposite of Stoical,

give me the epic cure any day!

‘Have I got it?’ The question is still rhetorical –

let not the answer be cancer.

But I can’t imagine giving up being a dancer

of words from my brain waves

or my not enjoying the great play

of life and playing an active part

before my soul is parted from my earthly heart.

14 April 2005

These shocks to my system

seem to have some inherent system

like rhythm in a cycle of poems.

I apply them to myself,

apply them to my health,

carry them almost beyond death,

drown myself then come up for breath:

it’s as though I’m overwhelmed by time and work

but the Englishman, the Frenchman, the Russian and the Turk

in me bear the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

in different ways: some singing a morale boosting tune,

others dissolving in a sweet melancholia,

others trying to be a little bit holier

and reciting the ‘Our Father’.

I’d rather be myself than have my mind altered:

in cosmic terms my death will only be a faltering –

one of the population less,

but I a blessed with this late-flowering poetry

and though my life will have been less

long-lived than the life of a cherry-tree

and it’s fruit cannot be eaten

my friends can say I was not beaten,

my daughter will beat another track

and I tired to take torture victims off the rack

of suffering for the last seventeen years

and never neglected the craic of poems

and infiltrated Russian and Turkish verse into homes

and here and there engendered the opposite of fear.

14 April 2005

FOR ADEL

Sacrifice and victim are cognate in Russian and Turkish –

so what does this tell us?

The concept of the martyr mentality has been inadequately researched,

clicheised to houris in Islamic heaven.

Vengeance, retribution, calling to account

count differently in different cultures.

Outside poetry it is not enough to say with Peter Levi:

‘The language will judge.’

There are words for bomb, bullet, fist and peace,

but in face of them the words pale

bone-white in comparison.

If I could make the torturers eat their words and swallow their sick…

But it is on the order-ordure givers that I’d turn the big shit.

I’d click guns to empty – the torture chambers,

clamber this poem up the ladder of their conscience to the very top,

with Adel Guemar and Ariel Dorfman as my allies shout out,

whisper our poems till they stop:

having realised their retrieval of information is virtually nil,

having realised till they made themselves right ill

that the fear they think they engender in torture

lights a worldwide double-edged torch

that burns and burns a fire both ways.

When they ‘play’ with the peoples’ bodies, souls and minds

they are playing with fire. Let the flames of justice burn them:

the millennium has turned.

The sacrifices to savage gods burn on the fire:

we survivors huddle by that fire,

honouring its burning, then we have to move on, move on,

and conscience will catch the cowards all,

and the world will be caught in the bright fire of justice.

14 April 2005

Orhan Pamuk heard ‘prison’ instead of ‘prism’

and went off on a Freudian tangent.

The interviewer joked about his ‘ism’ for ‘ison’

but the diversion was nothing if not plangent.

I like slips of the tongue or pen –

one of the origins of my rhymes –

prose – I think of Shirin’s novel – sometimes cuts me open:

I should elevate to it more time.

But for six months I’ve been on a poetry writing spree

and soon I’ll have to be reading me,

editing The Poetry of Richard McKane,

how grand!, my first book of poetry in this country

at an age when I could be hobbling on a cane,

having missed the iridescent prism

of the young poet’s book,

with many a backward look

at fellow writers in prison,

never taking for granted the freedom

of living and writing in the United Kingdom.

14 April 2005

My love, let me call you that, or further

my darling, for it would be just so in French,

today my thirst I’ve quenched

not with lucozade, tea, coffee, apple juice and sparkling water

but with poems and thoughts of you, my friends and daughter,

until you’ve all become so omnipresent

that I feel you are reading these poems over my good old shoulder

and spurring me on presents in the present

reaching left to right into the future.

I am indeed a strange creature

and I have a strange habit, an addiction

to writing poems in my own strange diction.

None of you can totally comprehend me

but no secret service will apprehend me

as a secret agent. I’m a cut above miffy

and if this rhyme seems iffy

it’s to my friends I dedicate my service –

weighted with poetry: ‘a votre service’!

14 April 2005

Quite apart from anything else: it’s fun

entering into training for entertaining.

Words weigh lightly on the lines as they run,

when I’m tired their the opposite of draining

It’s easy for me: I leave you in peace

to get my rest in peace,

leaving a huge piece of me behind

unpublished and unwritten for you to find.

At the moment I’m feeling in the blind

dark but untying the bonds that bind

me to the earth can mean a second birth

here no more voluntary than the first:

with life and death we’re blessed not cursed.

With death we sometimes get a run in,

a practice jump to get our hand in,

but there is not so much a dearth of death studies

as most of them are mirthless and bloody.

Especially in the afterlife sacred or secular,

life, my dying father said, is more funny ha-ha, less funny peculiar.

?April 2005

POEM-PRAYER

I climb my poem up the monkey-puzzle tree –

it’s the closest thing to a prayer to Thee:

then I realised I’d never used the word Thou

in my poetry until now, until now.

There is still doubt as to my diagnosis

but this poet knows his poems

as well as his body and his mind.

If God is really kind,

though we may still doubt his existence

I ask for his assistance

to find words of comfort

and become a rock, a fort,

no, softer – a father dove’s nest

to my daughter, my friends I love best,

and then in peace I’ll rest.

16 April 2005

It’s possible to write too much in one voice:

I should aim for the laconic, the polyphonic.

Writing here is better than a double gin – a positive tonic,

all around the marathon runners, women, men, girls and boyce,

volubly enjoying their postrace pints of lager

and in this after Easter station pub life looms larger,

something from an Airbus to a Zeppelin but I don’t feel crippled in

it, just observing through my eyes: the window on the soul,

and as for the latter it now seems to matter

that I said in a French poem that it couldn’t survive a massacre.

But I’d quest for eternity in the infinity of language

on this earth and what I’ll leave with ageing with the age

in my poetry in notebooks or on the printed page.

17 April 2005

How selfish to think that when I strike the rocky reef of death

my grief will be more than of those who still draw breath.

My friendships will not be wrecked –

I will simply have moved up another deck.

18 April 2005

THE RUBAIYAT OF

RICHARD McKANE

‘He’s suffering from logorrhea,’

or harder caught between two stools

or a rock and a hard place rears

its head and something runny as hot wax, but this is not too

wise for fools.

*

A descendant of Oom Kaltsoum comes on the CD

in the Lebanese Café Bar.

The bread here not the place is seedy,

an ideal fishing spot for poems for an hour.

*

I did not come for a kebab to the Ancient Grill

but to indulge in conversation and poems’ thrill.

I sit here chewing the fat with good old John Rundle,

old friend, on life, work and poems we get a handle.

*

It’s an old myth that the art of conversation

can kill poetry – that somehow words are rationed.

If the feelings are there they want to be expressed –

and you can always later ‘blame it on the poetry expressed.’

*

Early this morning a phone call came from Prague –

Radio Free Europe wanted me to do an interview

about my ‘Open Poem to the President of Uzbekistan’.

I’d harnessed Pushkin, Shakespeare, Akhmatova, Hikmet to

my point of view.

*

I am enjoying the disbursement of my coat

and that spring has finally burst in.

Before the earth thirsts in

the heat, I’ll create spontaneous lines, not by rote.

*

As a boy I stared at the quill fishing float

for hours, now I marvel at what this rollerball quill wrote,

skating over the thin ice of paper:

all three are an equally serious caper.

*

A tiny lump of kneaded bread paste,

slightly stale – here’s no waste –

on a tiny hook at the end of the line:

reel in the roach, perch and poem on an old fashioned line.

*

The middle eight is the hook of the song –

by then you know if it’s going right or wrong.

I write a better lyric than most pop songs –

it’s just my bank balance that tips wrong.

*

It’s a dismal differential – £5,000 earnings

in almost forty years from my poems. I’m learning

the immense freedom of writing for free,

for freeing the words, for my friends, my peoples, for me.

*

This poet lives on air, in cloud cuckoo land,

free as a bird sings melody he works the word.

I write my poems with my left hand –

I don’t even need a pen, can be inferred.

*

I wonder how my unknown Uzbek translator

tackled my controversial poem.

I proudly imagine an old transistor

receiving its broadcast seeds in a Tashkent home.

*

Almost time to leave the Café

after this latest scene in my poetry affair.

My fluency is perfectly fair.

I’m totally pro its effects.

*

Tobacco, poetry and a Speckled Hen beer,

an hour before the dawn of another day,

I greet my sleeplessness without any fear –

I am the maker and its my judgment holds sway.

*

You have to work with your bio rhythms,

though sometimes they’re led astray.

Pet loves like cats and dogs may stray

but they too obey wild life’s theorems.

*

Yoghurt eaten, pipe smoked, beer drunk

and, above all, poems written,

read into brief sleep to be sunk,

sleepless syndrome smitten.

*

After a long writing session coming out of the Ancient Grill,

having said mirupafshin as goodbye to the Kosovan waiter,

I realised that to recapture childhood’s bemusement and thrill

it’s enough to start learning a new language one might perfect later.

*

I can work with disgruntledness,

can dismantle frustratedness,

this one may be as simple as feeling hungry,

and bursting for a pee!

*

IN THE PUB

She felt my hand shake as I offered

her the light she asked for.

‘It’s sleepless nights’ I proffered,

‘and hard work and what for.’

*

I said: ‘I took you for a friend,’

and she said: ‘I could be’.

She’d written her email before the end:

nurse direct, ‘Get on thyroxin’, she said to me.

*

I’m brewing up a helluva head cold,

but my writing actions have not been too bold.

These days I feel I’ve grown more old,

but the crotchety rams are still in the fold.

*

I guess the sun is over the yard arm

and a light beer won’t do me any harm.

I’m on a break from spring sowing at the poetry farm,

drilling my poems, no rain – I’m calm.

*

I left behind my coat and sweater.

If the weather gets any wetter

I’ll catch my death,

as it is I’m holding my breath.

*

I’ve blown into half a dozen serviettes,

they litter my table beyond etiquette.

I’ve got a cold but the beer is just right cold.

I feel warm in my heart – but cold.

*

Incessant pipe smoking

shows it’s addiction.

Smipe poking

would be dyslexic diction.

*

I’m not spoon feeding you reader,

more spooner feeding here:

rhymes smack of spoonerisms –

my favourite ‘isms’.

*

People tell me to read Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake

and that in me it would awake

many things – but I don’t yet want to sail in his wake:

it’s my own furrow I want to make.

*

Ulysses I read after my first 69 breakdown:

I thought I could read it through my pillow.

It’s therefore no surprise that novel is not a pillar

in my consciousness – I was swallowing pills down.

*

Joyce is the joy of choice.

Joyce is the boy’s and man’s voice.

Joyce is Dublin’s noise.

Joyce is words’ choice poise.

*

There is no photo of me hunched over

this black notebook with the hard cover.

I write like thousands of others –

but what we write differs.

*

Formerly oblivious of the traffic,

I suddenly look up and observe.

My concentration can be terrific

when from the task in hand I don’t want to swerve.

*

I’ve mused a coffee and a beer,

but I still have over three hours to kill,

or rather give life to here.

The drugs of poetry still give me kicks and thrills.

*

I explained to the therapist John Schlapobersky

why I wasn’t suffering from graphomania.

Since his mind is not pesky

I didn’t need to maintain further.

*

I slept better last night, thank God,

was eight hours in the land of Nod.

Morpheus must have given this odd

poet and activist – the nod.

*

It should warm me, this chicken soup.

Part of me wants to be at the heart of a group

and give and have their support and backing

and forsake this solo tracking.

*

There may be freedom of thought

but if it doesn’t reach into speech it ought

not to be called freedom.

So we strive for freedom of expression.

*

Belles lettres

should be one’s raison d’etre:

beautiful words and letters

written to unshackle the mind’s fetters.

*

Several hours here means I’m well in the loop

of popular music. I’m still pretty pooped

from the last week’s writing activities,

with their emotional impact inevitably.

*

Elizabeth and Lucy D. have a distinct handle

on the humour and structure of these quirky quatrains

and in America, Nathalie Handal

would approve the fantasy trains.

*

Sometimes on trains in half sleep my brain seems to shift for a brief

time in my head, afterwards I feel a considerable relief

that rather than exit through my skull, mouth or ears

it remains to cope with ‘the hopes and fears of all the years.’

*

The intelligent farmer never needs to cull:

this prolific poet still knows where a lull

is called for: the poems pull

on their lines and the tension does not fall.

*

The energy floods back. Tired as a dog

I’d been catnapping at the table

sleeping a few minutes like a log

before the writing again begins to sparkle.

*

I think of Deriev and Gritsman,

who first valued these poems,

for them they were hits, man,

because in them Russian too is at home.

*

For I handle my poems like a Russian,

in which I do 80% of my reading.

Cut me – I’m bleeding Russian

blood, and it’ll also do the bandaging.

*

There’s someone missing who has not come yet,

someone to meet whom I haven’t met:

it could be him or her, the unknown reader:

I need him, I need her.

In an attitude of gratitude

to the vesperal conversation’s plenitude

I utilise the Latin racinas when an Anglo Saxon dude

would use one word: ‘ta’ and that’d be far from rude.

*

I am in the here and now.

I am here, and now

can reflect the here and now

that will be there and then.

*

You implied my word-love can carry me away:

the stream of consciousness could hold sway,

but I say I am not agin either way –

the stream of passionate words cannot be held at bay.

*

Round Museum Street the Cafés have a different vibe,

the people walking the bollarded street are more alive.

I’m out on the street for the first time this year,

not put out on the street, though stony broke I fear.

*

My index of being well off was ‘I can afford a cappuccino’,

in these days Tolli’s is still run by Tino,

now it’s more affording copy paper and ink jet cartridges –

you see my ambitions have somewhat enlarged.

*

You have to admit that poetry rhymes with poverty

and both of them are as common as earthenware pottery:

one has glazed eyes, the other glazed bowls,

down the lawn of life they run biased like bowls.

*

If I look across at the British Museum with my X-ray eyes

I can see all the Mummies and Mummies and Daddies inside,

all the hundreds of thousands of artefacts

and clearly displayed all the art and facts.

*

Though it’s cold outside

and no one’s by my side,

on this notebook my pen glides,

my eyes take slides.

*

Needle is low. Almost total exhaustion,

why and what is it for?

As the train pulls into Watford

I squeeze out last drops of petrol for a poem’s combustion.

*

Thyroxin may be a toxin

but it’s a necessary evil now.

The thyroid clocks in,

train seat becomes pillow.

*

They sweep me away with their rhythms and blues,

a little bit of Plath, a little bit of Hughes,

some Dylan and some Dylan,

a bit of Geoffrey Hill, then Harry Hill and who says we’re over the hill?

*

Bright eyes, whites like fresh white paint,

pupils black, photocalling without restraint,

add in your most-loved colour iris:

eyes we desire, eyes perhaps that desire us.

*

Make up your eyes as I watch you on the tube:

the green pencil, the powder, the mascara brush.

I would not be a square but a cube

if it didn’t fascinate me your masquerade rush.

*

Painting the lips is an everyday act,

even in public it’s not tarty:

the lip gloss after the lipstick red or pink as a heart,

pretty as a picture slipped on for life’s party.

*

I’m faced with a dilemma –

and she’s not called Emma –

rather to gather up all my close friends into one book,

though I’m not a shepherd and I have no crook.

*

It’s not that people will flock to my readings,

but that my poems will be given a space for breathing:

for me a poetry book in my own country is a novel concept –

I should have done it long ago, except…

*

How good it is to enjoy a beer after work,

in a fishing place for poems where no shadows lurk –

see, I’ve slept three hours and not gone berserk,

despite it all I know how to cherish my spark.

*

It may be that my poetry is decidedly quirky

because it’s origins are embedded in Turkey,

which became it’s ark and cradle,

along with the Mesopotamian Tower of Babel.

*

Civilisation is the missing word

and the seeds for une langue civilisee.

Civilian police inject fear in the world.

Rarely the word ‘civilised’ do I say.

*

Avantgarde culture

reaches the future

in the present on the structures

of the past destruction layers.

*

The women making up are painting their portraits,

still alive not virtual, they highlight their beautiful traits.

I admire them in public everyday

so have no need to go to the gallery.

*

I feel most secure when I’m at a table writing:

I can freely let my pen and mind do the fighting:

that great pacifist struggle which comes with freedom of expression,

when you are no longer bound to make an impression.

*

There comes a point in sleeplessness

when one becomes consciously reckless

and pushes beyond the artificial borders

and risks disobeying human nature’s orders.

*

But if one thrusts in measured lines

the brain waves inevitably rest behind

them. I bet cerebro-spinal fluid

mediates the ego and the id.

*

She made the sign of the cross with her finger

on my forehead then added the nought of a kiss.

I write this poem with a feeling of danger

for I’ve never allowed myself to think of her like this.

*

The beauty and beast of memory is when you recall the past

it suffuses with its intensity your present.

How long you let that memory last

then, on its resilience is dependent.

*

In a conscious effort to change my mood –

for I was in one of my deepest broods –

I decided to look out rather than inwards

and thus found momentum to move forwards.

*

It’s not for nothing they say in all languages:

‘on the inside and on the outside’,

terms of the mind too can last ages,

then even inmates may not be on side.

*

My mind is not a prison,

but if it were, a rainbow prism

would span out through my cell bars:

all this I saw in Rejep Marashli’s prison postcard.

*

The location of prisons is fixed,

but I feel the imprisoners are more prisoners

of their consciences, isn’t

that right? This question has to be asked.

*

Late evening, sips of black coffee give me energy

but some say after the surge you go flat.

The last time I saw you was at your flat –

I hope since then we’ve both recovered some energy.

*

It’s good to sit outside for the first time this early summer.

The beat of these poems is drumming

on the table and they’re humming along,

both poems and songs.

*

How will I winnow the chaff from the wheat,

in other words select and edit my book?

It’ll be no mean feat –

but by hook or by crook…

*

Head propped on my right hand,

pen swooping in my left.

I think I need a rock band,

without their backing I’m bereft.

*

I need their support for financial reasons –

to make money from poetry is not treason

and given the ratio between rock and poetry earnings,

we poets have a helluva lot of learning to do.

*

When Bruce Springsteen screams ‘The E Street Band’

on Ice Cream Songs, it’s hard not to be excited.

When Rod Stewart ‘finds himself a rock and roll band to lend

a helping hand’,

it’s different from poetry’s incitement.

*

They’re as different as the chalk cliffs of Dover

and the Cheddar gorge or cheese,

but I believe with my brother Andrew there is a cross over

and I seek it in both of these.

*

Then my favourite singing waitress comes

and catches me stormily writing –

she’s so much younger than me – it drums

into my head rock, ballads and poetry writing.

*

Her guitar no longer hangs above the wine rack.

I’m not making tracks, more laying down a track –

read me aloud, reader, read it back

to me, this melody – tonight no melancholy, no black.

*

After you’ve gone through the poem barrier,

your brain is actually working at the speed of electric light,

you’re flying faster than a Harrier.

Yes, you are on a peace mission to redress the world’s plight.

*

There is a thrill in words’ thrall

and these too may just enthral you,

even after I’m dead they won’t pall –

across that great divide they will still call you.

*

What I’d call a ‘pale’ ache in my heart,

or perhaps it is more pallid.

Despite most people having pure hearts

there are parts of life that are squalid.

*

‘Turn the shit into fertilizer’

was one of my first therapist’s teasers.

Under torture, lies are

de rigeur, does that ease him or her?

*

I’m just overstaying, though I’m still warmly welcome –

one beer and a coffee for twenty quatrains is fair dinkum:

I’ve written up an electric storm,

no powercut and this evening is warm.

*

An hour to go before my train

but I’m only 35 minutes from the station.

I have no one to whom to explain

the reason for my peregrinations.

*

The excuse, as usual, is poetry and it’s not a lame one:

if it was a sublimation of life one could blame one,

but the two go absolutely hand in hand

and they have been know to lie together in the sand.

*

It’s coming up to ten o’clock,

time to leave the unwritten poems in the brainbox,

soon I’ll share with you the stock

in a branded brand new book.

*

Unlike Pasternak translating Titian Tabidze,

it is not the words that write me, I say,

though they may flake out on the ground,

unheard like snow, without making a sound.

*

‘Courage’, I say it in French, to rhyme with ‘large’,

for one needs a big-ventricled heart these days

and the voices of a ventriloquist whose dummy says

what he can’t say to the world at large.

*

Mes petits poemes je vous aimes comme ma vie.

Vous me faites envi

d’exprimer tous mes sentiments –

j’essai pas exagerer et mentir.

*

Bonheur et tristesse,

les resultat d’ellesse.

J’ose de dire que ce n’est pas les choses,

mais les gens qui les questions posent.

*

Tout le temps les poetes posent des questions ritoriques,

on ne peut pas fabriquer les reponses des lecteurs,

ainsi que c’a complique

le denouement du poeme et son explication.

*

Et mainenant je suis fatigue:

but I have to find the needle in the haystack

before I can hit the hay or sack –

and the sun is still shining anyway.

*

I could have taken the train home,

slept on it and collapsed at home,

but it turned out so profitable to spend these hours

relaxing a bit and writing in my favourite café bar.

*

It’s a relief that the spectre of cancer

has receded. I found an answer

to it in deepening a few friendships

and launching a lot of poem life-ships!

*

Often after shipwrecks the survivors

are relatively physically unscathed

compared with after some disasters,

unless in freezing water they’re bathed.

*

But when lives are wrecked

that can mean even more than a car crash,

inflicted or self-inflicted, by heck,

and often it’s accompanied by a massive lack of cash.

*

And what of you, I used to write to so often:

trust me, my heart hasn’t hardened to you but softened:

thinking of you now, I still feel the glow,

though our orthodox communication has ebbed low.

*

Apparently I said in the Radio Liberty Interview,

‘I have a passion for human rights’.

The Uzbek Cycle to Sobirjan was not a casual view

of an outsider but I was defending my own rights too.

*

FOR HELEN BAMBER

Writing poetry is one way of contemplating the void,

the abyss beneath and not avoiding it,

but holding oneself from jumping in it,

it’s probably even better than recording it on celluloid.

*

If death is the abyss, the void, the emptiness,

then we can glimpse her in serious illness –

and suicide attempts. If we recover, and that’s not a given,

we should not forget that glimpse for which we’ve striven.

*

This afternoon my strike rate is impeccable –

this old cockerel is finding the grain here eminently peckable.

I could rule the roost in this café till cockcrow

and write many quatrains serried row on row.

*

The Latvian waitress, reluctant to speak Russian

joins Rachel, who comes from New Zealand.

When Carolina comes from Brazil and Lebanon

there’ll be three – and I’ll still be one.

*

It’s ironic, but Byron might understand,

that these lines can’t buy my coffees and beers.

I don’t want the people to fear

me but tyranny to feel the power of my hand.

*

In 1984, Orwell’s year, I invalided myself out:

it was not my disability made me flourish,

with a few close friends I shortened Richard to Rich,

now a raised boot straightens my gait out.

*

It’s nice to get a blonde-eyelashed guileless wink

as Rachel ferries coffee cups back to the counter.

No, reader, it’s not what you think,

but its’ true I’m writing counter poetry under the counter.

*

Among many people I respect

my poetry would be considered incendiary –

here a few friends and strangers expect

great things of me and my poems rather than diary.

*

If the origin of the word journalist is journal

then my attempts at diurnal dissertation

qualify me not just for the quest for eternal

verse but also a place at that crowded station.

*

An hour and half ebullient conversation

with Pat Edlin at a desk by the door of the Medical Foundation

was not just a bonus but a golden handshake,

and here in the café aftermath my mind and ribs still ache.

*

He said his late brother was a manic depressive,

that in the manic phase he was brilliant, best fun, impressive

but at the other pole he’d just say he had headaches.

I told him of my dead brother Andrew – but this first meeting

we made light of our heartaches.

*

And the conversation ranged from your El Salvador

to Uzbekistan, to Turkish, Russian and Spanish

and our group of mainly Africans. We were both pacifist Matadors,

without escapes, not talking bullish, with the ability to add

a prefix to ‘ish.

*

Your strange birthright – half Irish, half Jewish,

gave you rights of blarney and humour,

but as we parted you said you suffered from dyslexia,

and now I remember my psychiatrist friend Marina.

*

As one flounders in a new language –

at whatever age –

we are returning to controlling chaos:

it’s like learning to ride: ‘Qui est le maitre? Who’s the boss?’

*

We talked lapidarily about flashback

control and scenario changing,

about nightmares and ‘going back

into them’. I realised my ideas were rearranging.

*

I had said we were ‘manning the desk to repel boarders,’

but you said: ‘No, to repel boredom’,

touché my friend, a palpable hit!

And I feel you and I were knitted inside a priceless skit.

*

I don’t write poemsinoblivion,

or in a purblind funk –

I love the life I’m living,

I’ll only sink when I’m sunk.

*

I’m tapping my own lines

in a non-espionage way.

People may want to read these warning signs –

I believe this anyway.

*

Death is dicing with me,

dancing me with her dance.

Darkling, I casn ambrace thee

only if you give me th chance.

*

John Keats went through this for many years –

I for only one or two:

the struggle with my hopes and fears

I’m making for you too.

*

If death is a certainty in an uncertain life,

one thing at least is clear –

we go to anywhere from here,

supposedly to less strife.

*

But I’d like to struggle from the safety of heaven

for the world in its present state,

for loving remaining friends and enemies even,

for the survival of language at any rate.

*

Daughter, how you will know I’ll be almost alive –

I won’t knock on tables or use mediums:

of intelligence I’ll yet have a modicum

and my poems for us will strive.

Bruce Tulloch, looking painfully thin,

rounds the bend andhe’s going to win.

Fathers sitting on their chairs,

roar him in, for he’s running on air.

*

Fosbury performs his non-flop Flop,

as high jumper he’s top of the crop.

In Mexico the black power salute,

in Munich terrorists shoot.

*

For a year almost I was a wheelchair case,

6 months on my back, a cripple of the race,

but my brain waves compensated and kept pace:

1984 it was – my nightmare annus horribilis.

*

Since then it’s been up and over most of the way,

sowing no oats but making some hay –

the sun has shone and gone in behind the cloud,

I’ve been able to read thought out loud.

*

An enlarged prostate –barbarian gland –

all I can do is await the verdict -

you mind my pee in my queue – and

no doubt react to my being a tobacco addict.

*

Roger’s friendly voice reads Keats on the cassette,

I’m going to put breakfast spaghetti on a white assiette.

Who says poetry isn’t English’s greatest asset?

Keats’ and my anniversary on Halloween is set.

April 2005

*

A longer pause than usual –

but words, I’ll never use you all,

though not always will you be at my beck and call;

it’s not pride but inattention that comes before a fall.

*

As a farmer worries about getting his harvest home,

I fear a threatening thunderstorm may catch my poems

and lay their lays low,

then there’d be no ears to hear, then no seeds to sow.

*

Now I feel uncomfortably tired

as though my energy has expired –

so I’ll order lentil soup,

that will sustain me I hope.

*

To be able to get the train

I have to take off the stress and strain,

go onto auto-driver,

for driving a train is simpler than piloting a plane.

*

Lentil soup and a touch of cannibalism

as my Bosnian poet friend would say,

since I self-consecrated the café bread in a Christian way.

If it weren’t so devalued I’d like to think I also practise socialism.

*

As Shaban the Albanian interpreter and I walked away from MF,

from the story-teller with his story of boxes in boxes,

our other colleagues in their cars drove off,

we said something like: ‘We’ve got big hearts and they fit theirs

in their box-cars.’

*

So once more into the train, dear friends,

but you won’t be lending me your ears, countrymen.

There’s still this breach between speech and silence

that seems not to be filled by men or women.

*

So we size each other up with our eyes

or rather stare vacantly out of the window.

I’d like a bit of contact with your Is –

you could be in my team, come on enrol.

*

But they read their books and magazine –

it’s spring now, no overcoats or gabardines,

I try to guess the culture of the woman opposite,

but can’t find words in any tongue apposite.

*

Past Wembley Stadium with its arc of steel,

this carriage is a microcosm of a world that’s real,

we travel to travail then travel back,

my neighbour’s cough booms and hacks.

*

It’s difficult to imagine that the wheels of the train

go round and round – it seems to be gliding.

This spring I’ve hardly seen it rain:

that phenomenon has been pushed into a siding.

*

There was a beautiful blonde alone on a Greek ferry I remember,

but she had an Alsatian dog with her.

I was not yet twenty,

there were girls but not girls and dogs a plenty.

Hearing I felt isolated, Melissa Benn

at the PEN meeting said what I needed was fellowship.

I felt I could apply for a socialist fellowship for cleaning

her father’s pipes, thus some wisdom of my own I’d be gleaning.

*

When it seemed in Czechoslovakia the grip of Communism

was slackening,

the Russian invasion was a rude awakening.

But on the streets the voices of the transistors’ resistance

could not prevail against the implacable tanks’ insistence.

*

I’ve written of Jan Palach’s martyrdom –

he has a very special place in my martyrs’ kingdom,

up with the Buddhist monks and Martin Luther King –

it is to them this song of freedom I sing.

*

Chechnya is complicated as a multiple fracture,

but for the children of that country I support my friend Boris Altshuler:

to go to school you don’t just need books and rulers,

but can you teach human rights to a military computer?

*

My favourite late Russian poet friend,

Victor Krivulin, by lung cancer came to his end,

but he wrote some strong allegorical poems

on Chechnya: ‘The Time of Ch’ and it got into some homes.

*

It’s been mainly down to a handful of journalists

to apply the tourniquet on the bleeding.

Anna Politkovskaia is one who’s leading

the field, but poisoned on her way to Beslan she was almost struck

off life’s list.

*

We can no longer afford to be just observers

of the scene and monitoring is not enough,

the going is tough and we’ll have to be tougher,

it’s not just the troops who have to be the right stuff.

*

How can we preempt the interventions,

to not engage the killing troops,

to not unleash the bombs and latest inventions,

to cry not ‘oops there goes another Korea, Iran or Uzbekistan?’

*

I don’t believe in the game theories of chess or dominoes,

though I acknowledge drafts still exist.

I don’t appreciate political cameos

on TV – I believe people should resist.

*

To return to Czechia and Slovakia where the revolution was velvet,

but I fear the Iron Curtain’s returned and it’s not just a pelmet

and Putin’s Russia is going pell mell for consumerism from hell,

and it tolls for thee, even the orthodox bell.

*

And the West is weak though could be strong

if it wasn’t with faculty cuts still not bringing along

those who know Russian body and soul,

English-speaking souls who know the Russian soul.

*

The Classics were not a bad basis for Empire,

though the Athenian was neglected for the Spartan,

as a poet I accept the Stoic but veer to the Epicurean,

but I’ve never forgotten Prometheus’ dissident fire.

*

‘Man, be my metaphor’ and humanism is perceived as out of date –

and I’d prefer ‘woman be my metaphor’

as a means of being transported, but metaphor

is no longer understood and as so – underrated.

*

I’m aware the tyrants are surrounded by stench-henchmen,

and Tony Blair s encircled by his front benchmen,

but I write these poems ‘at the forehead’ for free,

but I have to recognise the dictator in me.

*

‘To understand the tortured and the torturer in oneself’,

I return to the novel words of novelist Gordon Newman:

he gave them to me as radical advice for my health –

if I could confront them ‘in the forehead’ would I be a new man?

*

I’m not giving you an easy ride, reader, I know you’re on edge

with these Coffeehouse meditations.

They should still be forcing houses for knowledge,

far better than one’s own aches’ palpitations.

*

This morning I read some Rene Char,

poems and quatrains and I hope it shows.

I had a lift in friends’ of my brother-in-law’s car

after his birthday party and invited them to my October

book launch show.

*

Poets have not always been non-combatants –

in times of war they should be peacefully combative,

not as close to the ground as the embedded journalist,

they still have to enlist in this struggle as pacifists.

*

If we could only pre-empt strikes with words

and not just those of diplomacy,

I mean a whole new vocabulary

of question and response: tell that to the Kurds.

*

Poison gas poisons the tongue and languages,

the word of command rules across the ages.

The order to massacre the Armenians in Turkish

was the word ‘Kill’ that exists in English.

*

But does it remain easier to defuse language

than to defuse a bomb or clear a minefield?

Humankind has to yield

to dismantle the short fuse of the tyrant age.

*

Confident after my writing session as though I’ve made a good broadcast,

I’ve broadcast the good seeds fast –

a few months they’ll lie dormant before the book goes to press –

they’ll shoot but not the shits impress.

*

I try to use my inversions like a ploughshare,

certain of my editors would say: ‘Richard beware!’

I may not get many modern converts

but I don’t intend to pervert the English we share.

*

‘I’m forever blowing bubbles’ rends the pub air

and for a moment we are ‘United’ in a bubble there

and though I’ll never chant my poems in the stadia,

I’ll score my goals if only in Arcadia.

*

The hubbub in the pub is macho

as a rumble in the jungle.

She was a woman in the jungle, Thatcher,

but I’m more of a woman poet than her and that’s an intentional bungle.

*

And thank God, poet is not gender specific,

nor the Kurdish Women’s Human Rights Group.

I’d rather be a member of the international poets’ troupe

and identified not even by my blood group.

*

They’re still chanting and I can’t catch the words

but they’re bawling their lungs out.

Little pockets of resistance break out

into song, suddenly they’re chorusing like feathered birds.

*

Rachel from Ritazza café at Victoria took over

this Britannia Pub at Euston – now she’s down under.

From the Café below here it’s stolen my thunder,

lightning strikes in my poems over and over.

*

My lighter has broken – flint gave after so many strikes:

it’s always exciting when like Mr Crabtree you declare: ‘A firm strike

and it’s on’. I may be boring you with the fish poem analogy,

but for both you have to wait, catch, play, net and fry.

*

Hunting prey, does it prey on the hunter’s mind?

Hunters pray for a meeting with their prey.

I remember a foxhounds’ meet when I was first out of my mind

at Lower Slaughter and I prayed that the fox would get away.

*

On several occasions in my spearfishing career

I felt a paranoid fear and guilt

at the cold blood of fish spilt,

but under the sea you can’t count the tears.

*

I feel able to tackle almost any high and dip,

except I can’t seem to tackle up a relationship:

at times I go along at full sail,

then I reef in –we’re fearful of the gales.

*

It’s not a case of being in the doldrums of depression

and the effects of psychotropic medicine –

for a time I was more afraid of possible cancer,

of losing my skills as a word dancer.

*

Oh lovely, lovely, love lovely,

if only I were me and thou were thee

and we could call each other us,

in fact indulge in no pronouns’ or cases’ fuss.

*

I have a clear hotline to my Poets’ Corner,

of Dead Poets’ Society I’m an honorary member,

but they’re not dictating to me:

they give their evergreen feelings more than words to me.

*

Can we extend: ‘Do what you would be done by’

as a precept for the afterlife. If I’ll be a poet in heaven

I’d still like to write for people on earth. And ‘heaven

and hell are here’ said my piano master, Smith-Masters, Anthony.

I decide deliberately to miss the next train,

so that I can develop my train of thought.

I’m reminiscing about you again,

the woman I didn’t find but sought.

*

So was this really us?

We caught the bus

but not the same one –

we missed it – that one.

*

I was a little Robin Hood,

but not enough to pay court to Maid Marion.

I was only able to marry one,

alongside my fight against evil for good.

*

Yet I remained in love with life

and made her my wedded wife –

but life is somehow not a woman,

though more feminine than a man.

*

The old fluency is re-established,

the rhymes flow and are lavish.

For weeks they were banished,

now that interval has vanished.

*

In locking horns for PEN with Islam Karimov

I was prepared to cream off

Shakespeare, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Hikmet and Pushkin

and to get under the Uzbeks’ rough skin.

*

The pint of bitter bites –

it’s more the sugar than the alcohol –

it makes my lines tight,

at my round table I have a tiny hol.

*

Tobacco, beer – it’s often coffee – and poetry –

they’re tried and tested these three.

I rarely navigate the supermarket trolley,

and I’m not off mine – that’s plain to see.

*

Perhaps I played into the hand of my old friends’ concern:

it’s difficult to get across to them how much I burn.

Justice and injustice, plain old good and evil,

was I knowingly playing the advocate of the devil?

*

If I gave the impression of being a little depressed

I had swung there or been pressed

into it. It has become an international word ‘stressed’,

but I’m more like Pushkin’s wild flower pressed.

*

See, my mood has lifted.

I am undoubtedly gifted

to give a lift

to others with my gifts.

*

My feet ache – too much walking these days,

but in the round exercise pays off.

Enough to walk on the stage,

enough to face the play off.

*

I’ve changed tables in the pub –

my pen is like a golf club,

gets me into and out of trouble,

I’m only an amateur in that I don’t earn pounds or roubles.

*

She’s pretty, the blonde with the nose stud.

She’s separated from me by more than the balcony window.

Her conversation, I see, is animated.

Do you have to be dead to have a widow?

*

I’d like to put my feet up above the horizontal,

in this city there is virtually no horizon.

Sometimes time has to be confronted fully frontal:

you have to get down on your knees and face your visions and orisons.

*

I’m on a break or on a roll,

but it’s not snooker or bowls,

I’m striking words and pocketing them,

only I’m not docketing them.

(27.5.05)

The guitar plays an eternal riff –

good rock music is always on the cliffs

with the sea stretching below

plummeting between the highs and the lows.

*

Jacques Brel sings ‘Desespere mais avec elegance’,

it seems to sum up his French and France.

‘Desperate but with elegance’ –

we’ll lead you with our words dance.

*

Is this pissed offness just tiredness

or is it my hypothyroid.

It’s difficult even on celluloid

to record lowness and highness.

*

They say it’ll be the hottest day of the year –

the sky is exceptionally blue and clear.

The clouds have cleared

off but they’re massing elsewhere, I fear.

*

FOR NICK

Some poems are best left under the earth,

like certain archaeological sites,

but now there’s no dearth of material in sight for my trowel

and I’m not about to throw in the towel.

*

You can close this book at any page

but I’d prefer you to read it to the end.

I don’t mind if you cut corners or bend the corner of the page,

I just hope in need, in life, it will be to you a friend.

*

When I can’t write my home grown,

translations of poetry always await me:

their seeds, you see, have already been sown

and their sapling fees placate me.

*

The wound in my foot just won’t heal,

it’s on the left side centre not the heel,

so I can’t claim it’s my Achilles’;

though that the Greek mythmakers would please.

*

I still don’t know what the final impulse is,

when after the expandable pause the poem pulses

into life, but I know you have to swing the propeller

and the pump has to be primed to propel her.

*

In poems about poetry I eschew the personal Muses.

Sometimes, I know, reader, these confuse you

with their plurality. In me many fuses

can lead to coups de foudres, but my women, I use but don’t abuse you.

*

The redolent term ‘polymorphous perverse’:

if, from Princeton, I remember rightly,

is when it’s sensualised the whole body,

like a love poems when the totality of elements converse.

*

If I look into my life as to what I have

rather than as a have-not what I have not,

I see into poetry’s rich Aladdin’s cave,

the genie and the genius – but the guineas I have not.

*

Eastern motifs are not casual interpolations in my work –

I’m more familiar than most with Arabs, Afghans, Azeris, Uzbeks,

Kazakhs, Kurds and Turks.

But I don’t read the Bible these days and the Koran for me

is a closed Book,

and the Communist tracts I never took to.

*

Does this mean that on a religio-political scale I’m an ignoramus.

But I find the savour of salt of poetry in Heaney Seamus,

in Mandelstam, Abai, Yunus Emre and Al-Azzawi and Nazim Hikmet

and above all the salt of the earth people I meet and have met.

*

This morning I recorded a CD of Jacques Brel

so I could check what had and had not entered my little grey cells:

the selections of chansons was truly excellent,

Les Marquises I found the most compelling.

*

This first summer heat is so intense,

everyone in the city feels tense,

but it’s only in the present tense

that one could contemplate a holiday in tents.

*

Driving oneself at one’s own expense,

expanding time makes sense

only if there’s a deadline or contract involved,

otherwise twenty four hours does not evolve.

*

Is my age beginning to slow me and show:

I seem to be firing on one cylinder,

or a couple of veg short in the colander

displayed at the flower, fruit and veg show.

*

I know one thing, I smoke my pipe heavily

when I write poetry. That’s not cleverly

done, but for some reason I feel the need to add to the oxygen

to my brain the continuous refrain of nicotine.

*

There is still romanticism in musings,

though all nine muses may be striking.

Frank Sinatra’s line: ‘I find it all so amusing’

in My Way, I always found strikingly banal.

*

Sometimes I wonder when I doze off whether I lose consciousness,

but that would be better than to lose my conscience.

With pen in hand the writer always has the conch no less –

these quatrains I grandly design to turn art of conversation into

poetry science.

*

In The Famous Turkish Café I said I’d charge ten pounds

to put the waiter’s name in my book in one of my poems

It’s a joke – but quite good to me it sounds:

easy bucks for one who makes virtually nothing writing at home.

*

If they didn’t think I was taking the Mick,

I’d do one of those name list verses Virgil did,

Mehmet, Mustafa, Attila, Fazil, take your pick,

but the context – I’d keep hid!

*

My big lunch will obviate the need for dinner –

it’s a fact I’m getting the opposite of skinnier.

Fate’s spindle too is getting fatter,

though, I fear, the thread is getting frailer, thinner.

*

I’m against the syndics of cynics,

they syndicate their cynicisms,

latch on to the meat of poems like bloodsucking tics –

there we are, it’s for you, my exorcism.

*

‘What comes before h e r (the rhyme)

is important too.’ Brodsky wrote me on a card. All in good time,

but now we can’t meet and discuss poetry on this earth

and those points of controversy to which you gave birth.

*

The minute hand chases and overtakes the hour hand

on the café bare clock – if I wait longer, I’ll land

up in the throes of the every Friday talent night

rather than visiting my Ma in her aged plight.

*

Two pounds in my pocket indicate

I’m not a high roller,

but my poetry bowling

along is pennilessness’ predicate.

*

Oh clever, clever, clever Dick,

that abbreviation and combination I cannot stand,

but Musa Farhi calls me Rich

and I enrolled some others into that name band.

*

By covering all the bases

I set up the basis

for not attacking the baseness

of individual Bases.

*

Such as the American base

in Uzbekistan which has caused

such damage to the human rights’ cause,

along with the anti-terrorist race.

*

I close my eyes, hold my head in my right hand, there,

clutching at my long hair that was once fair.

I see some images in black and white,

a few minutes, I’ll be gone and have to hold on tight.

*

My concentration span is up to composing quatrains,

but these days I always sleep on trains.

Something is going on in my head – that’s plain

but it’s not a breakdown (old term) again, again.

*

The realisation that I’ve topped a hundred lines today

brings excitement and affirmation, not dismay,

but it’s almost more difficult to get this array

of poems on the computer at night than to create them in the day.

*

Am I exposing the Secrets of my Craft too readily?

Should I take it a bit more steadily

rather than tossing them out of the casket:

the Craft: some questions have to remain to ask it.

*

Some extrapolate semantics,

others investigate linguistics

but I concentrate on the romantic

and real languages’ trips and tricks.

*

I must be a philologist

for words are my friends,

by loving their gist

I’m faithful to the end.

*

I am a jester but not the court jester,

I can play the fool with the best of

them – then they find it curious

that I am fundamentally deeply serious.

*

For years I have not had a double berth

on a relation-ship,

but in the twenty five years since my daughter’s birth

I’ve found with others and her – friendships.

*

How will I get my catch into your homes?

Now the ink is scarce dry on the page –

it would have been a scroll in Greece or Rome,

longer lasting than the hard disk of this computer age.

*

Curiouser and seriouser, stranger and stranger –

I look round the café bar for a lone stranger,

to whom I can chat with no sense of danger –

it has abated my last weeks’ anger.

*

Good words fly into the vacuum left –

I had been caught in human rights’ cleft

stick for when it comes to prison, torture and abuse

it is very difficult for hope to be successfully introduced.

*

Releases come once in a blue moon,

positive developments, not soon

but later. Bob Dylan, Joan Baez sang the best protest songs,

now they’re absent, new anthems, and something’s wrong.

*

I talk about harnessing a rock band to my voice

and this is not sounding brass or a hollow gong’s voice,

but I haven’t a gang of boys

and solo rapping is not my choice.

*

Stephen’s band called Chanter

played the famous Irish songs –

I’m closer to being a chanter

or chansonnier with my French songs.

*

Does the romantic pursue the unattainable one

but really attain her only in verse.

Does the relationship become an unsustainable one

and is this a blessing or a curse?

*

If the poet is also a man poet –

I’ve just invented this equating term –

is it to his manhood that he remains firm,

or is it his poethood that owns it?

*

Is poetry about sex and gender?

Is poetry not about sex and gender?

I put these as questions because I don’t have the answer,

but I suspect poetry is not asexual and respects gender.

*

Lyric poetry is less prepared

to share the novel’s personae:

to Akhmatova’s eye,

it is the best defence against preying stares.

*

Mandelstam liked poems to take off and fly

and even launch planes from the first one.

But he loved the earth, the truth of the plumbline,

was his first book called ‘Rock’ or ‘Stone’?

*

So many poems written today, but normally one doesn’t need

to look back on one’s tracks –

like Orpheus then one should take heed

but continue, continue, continue to the max.

*

This poet feels totally liberated,

no doubt I’ll be berated

for this statement of freedom,

but this is after all the United Kingdom.

FOR ALEV

TOUCHING

For over a week to have a migraine

is plainly against the grain.

It's late. I don't know whether you're in bed or up.

If your head aches now I would cup

it in one hand - I don't know which is more healing

now, left or right, for living on one's own one loses the feeling

of touching others. That's why I'm writing to touch you.

5 June 2005

Richard

POOR PEOPLE’S DIAMONDS

For Helen Bamber

She gives them one by one a pebble –

and pebbles are the poor people’s diamonds –

from a dish in her room where she talks them down,

not down to them, talks them up,

looking up to them for her stature is short,

but her expanse of humane thought

always brim her cup

of human kindness,

like frothy milk in her cappuccino

round the rim of the simple china cup

in this café where we talked about her pebbles,

circulating London town in pockets,

placed under rough pillows,

held tight against harm in tense palms,

products of the billows of the mother sea:

now I want to say stop to these repeating waves of poetry.

I know this poem ceases on the strand

where the pebbles wait, to be handed hand to hand.

1 June 2005

Museum Street

Richard McKane

It’s rare to be able to write in a waiting room

but this is no institutionalised organisation.

It doesn’t have that sense of Damoclean doom

of a dentist’s surgery of an unhealthy, toothed nation.

Not even the coffee filter is out of kilter

and the people don’t run helter-skelter

unacknowledging each other down the corridor:

there’s an atmosphere of succour and shelter.

I’m so susceptible to this stranger’s smile,

whether unprovoked or provoked by a look of mine.

She wheels her bag with a certan style,

turns on her heel and flashes an ncryptic sign.

*

Her hair was black, brown and tousled,

figure petite, but rounded.

Her spontaneous smile to me, it puzzled –

no words between us sounded.

*

I saw her again as I hurried for my train,

felt like going up to her and saying:

‘I’ve just written two poems about your smile.’

Why on earth was that not my style?

*

Wordless incident concluded,

but that doesn’t mean it was dumb.

A meeting had happened and eluded

us – I feel aroused not numb.

*

Very old man on leaving the Britannia loo –

‘Alright, I’ll leave you in charge,

keep it tidy.’ I say: ‘I’ll attend to’.

It was as though he was passing to me the empire torch.

*

I hang out for a coffee on this balcony

but I’m neither Juliet nor Romeo.

Outside the weather’s sunny,

should give a little life to my libido.

*

My Rubaiyat has to end somewhere –

how does Khayyam do it? I’ll ask him.

I feel a peek at the master

would be justified, not unfair.

I composed a bench-mark poem in French

as I walked down the hill from the GP,

but when I got home it had evaporated from me

and its loss is a wrench.

*

Preciosa’s CDs of Ferré, Brassens and Brel:

am I making a compact with Jacques’ diable

and Ferré’s ‘Thank you, satan’,

or with a language more like black satin?

*

By this listening I hope to find poems lost

in my subconscious, to retrieve them at no extra cost,

like priming an old fashioned pump

or storing water in a dromedary’s humps.

*

I put my pied in it by saying ‘you’re a gigolo as well as rigolot’,

to my Francophone friend; since it was not over the phone I was able

in the end

to say to him face to face that being a poet-polyglot

has dangers: words’ music makes the sense bend.

Let my poetry be the sun sparkling and the river,

be for the receiver, the giver

of life. Let is strive against strife,

let it put the pen in not the knife.

*

The double ch is like a double bind,

most of the alleys in Chechnya seem to be blind,

even radical solutions are hard to find –

peace has to break out in body, soul and mind.

*

It is the arms brokers who break out war –

they give a bad name to the word whore:

on all sides this is the issue that has to be collared,

both the rouble is the trouble as is the dollar.

*

Thomas Dylan and Thomas RS,

if they die very young or old poetry’s riches are less;

if they drink people’s wine or Christ’s their words they still bless:

the lost sheep and the pastor of Wales.

I’m writing a mix of demotic and katharavousa,

I’m writing for Nikos andthen jumping to Musa.

I’m remembering Valery Tarsis and Greek catharsis,

or I’m sending up the critics and their farces.

*

Again I summon up the power of Will,

which was once my constant nickname.

Fame will not change us, heck it

will – I know willy-nilly it will.

*

In my first Oxford mental strife, I developed the litany

which I’d repeat to my other self and me:

‘I, Will, take thee life to be my only wedded wife’.

Now I’m back again, ‘in love with life’.

THE POET

Be he butterfly by day,

be he moth by night –

no he’s utterly a behemoth to fright

the world with this heavy word play.

*

Rainy day – men in macs

watch rainy day women,

eyeing them up to the max –

the both are only human.

*

Ok-tay split means arrow and foal,

this is not so much coals to Newcastle

nor wordplay’s coals to Zonguldak:

Oktay, our translation somehow brings you back.

*

Surrealist movements are often underground,

but somewhere over the horizon

I see their words soaring and rising

like birds with both feet off the ground.

*

Oh, for poetry to have the wings of a dove,

to soar treble, alto, tenor, bass

and all the female parts above –

I’d be open mouthed: an open and shut music case.

*

These robust rubais are proliferating –

they need disciplining those ship’s ratings,

but I’ll eat my proverbial hat

if I can’t navigate my Rubaiyat.

*

If clay needs to be thumped, turned and fired into pottery

by the potter, the poet in turn has to select from the lottery

of the alphabet before he can pot black,

too often he’s snookered, lifeless with the cushion at his back.

*

From the past I can imagine the future,

based on my daily routine:

but my poems are wayward as a teenager,

solo performers, improvisers, not part of any team.

*

Dreams seem to confuse the tenses,

can be retrospective and futuristic,

moving pictures you watch without expenses –

film noire is often their characteristic.

*

In search of lost time,

or remembrance of things past?

Perhaps some translator’s committed a premeditated crime:

this title seems to have stuck to Proust fast.

*

Great books I have read – yes poetry books too count –

but I read the three major novels in Russian of Leo Tolstoy the Count

on a three week holiday as a student in Southern Turkey,

making notes the while and taking vocabulary.

Slow, slow, quick quick, slow,

the dancing feet of the poems.

Chandeliers burn up their Ohms,

candles glow, partners’ eyes glow.

*

As boys near Cheltenham we were under

the dance class discipline of the Rotunda.

At every step I courted disaster,

heart in my mouth not after my partner.

*

From cha-cha to Chechnya

forty years later – see how the syllables leap.

From Victor Souwester to Wayne Sleep,

now I dance words for each of ya.

*

To do the quickstep you have to have nimble feet.

I saw ponies trot and foxtrots.

Surviving a Hunt Ball was no mean feat,

meanwhile at school I concentrated on Greek gobbits and trots.

*

Awkward would be the word to describe

those years. At Marlborough I read and scribed

under Merlin’s Mount and John Betjeman’s ghost,

unsummoned by belles – in that field I was lost.

*

‘On the playing fields of’ Marlborough,

where losers met their Waterloo.

At twenty eight I lit my first Marlboro,

but never ‘smoked’ or flushed roaches down the loo.

*

On a whole holiday I met a tall boy smoking a pipe,

not behind the bicycle sheds but in an outlying village.

For the last 26 years I’ve been smoking a pipe:

the equivalent to my lungs of rape and pillage.

*

The blackboards puffed chalk dust

when you gave them a wipe.

I’d failed the Eleven Plus

and was nonplussed at the slang ‘house swipe’.

*

To call the ‘best of days’ would be out and out exaggeration,

but I learned a lot about literature and started this poetry ‘aberration’.

I only wrote two poems at school but I stored up rations

like ship’s biscuits for when I would be my lines’ captain.

*

Those Cross Country runs in the harsh 63 winter –

all the playing fields were out action by dint of

the deep snow. We ploughed across the white wastes

and our ramshackle trainers left track casts.

*

The White Horse stood on the green turf

above on the hill and trout would rise to the surface

on the river Kennet. The Bridge Building Society had a surfeit

of acolytes – for five boarding years this was my turf.

*

The athletes on the track divided into sprinters

and the longer distancers. I had a modicum of success as a hurdler

and for the high jump converted from Western Roll to Straddle –

there were no opportunities there to get back in the literal saddle.

*

It seems superlative to enumerate the friends I had then –

they – perhaps some will read this – know who they are or were.

Like the brood must leave the mother hen

they’re somewhere out there but have vanished into thin air.

*

The literary and language influences are from then the strongest,

for that is the way my life developed:

by that I mean the beak masters and boys who gave the gist:

I hope I have fulfilled the hopes they hoped.

*

We are still bound by a locus classicus –

I think particularly of RWW. Pollock, my namesake –

unwittingly though Daedalus in myth makes Icarus

crash: sun shone on our wings, we waxed, healthily we ached.

*

I learnt a fluency for prepared and unseen translation

and even came to understand the word ‘oblation’

in the old Communion Service after Confirmation,

but it was in Doctor Zhivago that I found out about Pharisaism’s

equation.

*

There was a tradition in the Shells

that the most brilliant master would teach

the lowest form. I’m not saying that the hell

of mathematics became heaven – but more in reach.

*

Last year I went back to Marlborough with my friend Helen Bamber,

the former Director of the Medical Foundation for the Care

of Victims of Torture.

Four girls in the front row at our reading – I gave it a try,

but did I have to change my pleading for poetry?

*

It’s not often RWWP we get to talk and reminisce

about MC, and for me OM also means Mandelstam

but Marlborough moulded me and stamped

invisibly its gold brand on my forehead – talking of Euripides.

*

When, late starter, I eventually won a few school prizes

I bought all the Greek tragedies

in Greek, but ultimately the surprise is

bad, for I haven’t reread them.

*

My old friend, for you have turned seventy,

you tell me that in any eventuality

the Classics do their pacifist sentry

duty in my life, in their actuality.

*

And you’re probably right – you spotted unerringly

my potential in Russian at an early age –

three other masters also kept my Cyrillic on the page.

Ps but no Qs in Russian of that sort, and we dotted the Is.

*

Andrew Carter picked out for me in Doctor Zhivago:

‘Life is just a moment, just a dissolution

of oneself in others as a present to them.’ It’s forty years ago

but already we are approaching a solution.

*

John Roberts and I got to know each other more

years after I left Marlborough.

He became Director of the GB-USSR Association:

a disastrous acronym given the Cold War situation.

*

But back to Pasternak in Russian and English and his novel:

returning from a Squash tournament in London on the train,

a Scotsman said: ‘I doubt whether I’ll ever see this again.

Laddie, you’re very clever. You’re reading a book and another

one as well!’

*

Flegon was a pirate Russian publisher –

the book in particular question, a slim Voznesensky.

Yomping, oops, in the CCF on Ten Tors in Dartmoor,

the tidemark from a swamp on that book I can still see.

*

No sighting of Anna Akhmatova yet,

she had to wait for 65 for Oxford.

Mandelstam was already a tough bet,

somewhere in the future lurked the Warneford.

*

Peter Levi descended on Marlborough College:

Mayakovsky, Yevtushenko and others were the collage

he presented. We started up an immediate friendship.

For life we remained on a similar poetry trip.

*

When I saw Jon Dancy art our friend Isaiah Berlin’s memorial

service he seemed younger, not limping any more,

(I was now) though decades had passed. Memory is not all –

one also has to call up the past – to recall.

*

Re: composing Latin and Greek verses,

perhaps they were indeed a rehearsal

for my English poetry compositions,

again, you see, I am returning to the Classical position.

*

On the path I used to pass in silence a pretty girl with blonde hair

when I was walking to and from study periods.

I wanted to invite her to the Mop Fair, I was serious,

but it was odds on I wouldn’t dare.

*

I’m not saying my libido

was dead as a dodo.

I didn’t do anything with anyone else,

yet I didn’t revolve completely round myself.

*

Our grids or bicycles carried us into the countryside –

Avebury, Silbury Hill – other names hide

from me such as the long barrows,

by that time we were beyond bows and arrows.

*

Before Archer-y books existed or I knew of cocaine,

the rhyme for my name was the murderer Cain.

It was also before Ginger MaCaine trained

racehorse or those McCain oven chips were on the scene.

*

Not a lot of people knew of Michael Caine,

it was well before my five years on a cane.

Yes, it’s true at prepschool I had been caned –

all these sounds were not sweet to the sugar cane.

Stalin broke special cigarettes wth birch bark

added in the tobacco and packed

them in his pipe with his ‘wormlike’ fingers –

even more than Winston’s his smoke still lingers.

*

‘Siga, siga,’ as the Greeks say, ‘slowly, calmly’,

Churchill puffed on his cigars balmily,

while London smoked in the blitz
and danced frenetically at the blacked-out Ritz.
*
I’ve never been one for drugs and the joint,
or the Bogarting of it, even drinking now I take to a sober point:
decades ago, a bottle of wine on stage and a slurred performance
ensured I’d never again take that chance.
*
The pipe is completely different from the snorkel,
though a therapist might say they’re both oral.
My father smoked one when he was a Colonel
at SHAPE: it’s the nicotine as well as the habitual ritual.
*
Like Clinton declared he did not inhale the weed,
I try not to inhale the tobacco pipe.
My lungs are not for transplanting for those in need
but for a future procedure my lion heart and teeming brain are ripe.
*
Talking of organs: my mother played the organ in the parish church,
and my eponymous music mistress hit me with a ruler that left
my piano-playing in the lurch.
I became a sympathiser of music, not a member of a political
organisation:
more, a lifelong player in the art of poetry and translation.
Editing my book seems to have sent writing new poems out of kilter.
The stark fact of having to filter
my oeuvre exerts a different pressure –
is it that I don’t have the leisure.
*
We are entering the hottest days of the year,
I’m in a shirt given to me by a friend.
Every twenty minutes I have to attend
to a burning sensation to pee – prostate business I fear.
*
I’ve always liked the lighting in this place,
just dim enough to still be able to see the page –
it would be kinder to an older face,
but my friends the waitresses are all of a young age.
*
‘It’s people that make me lonely,
lonely as a grave in the cemetery’,
first the Arab poet said it about himself only;
then in front of my friend he applied it to me!
*
This weather suits you, Carolina.
You look trimmer in spirit
and in body leaner.
I like your black outfit and what’s in it.
Too many passersby to hit the poems’ high.
You cannot see what it sees, my eye,
so a lot of my life passes you by –
words can’t be pictures but at least we poets try…
*
The young, they walk in shirts more often T shirts:
my generation is now in power – do we dish up the dirt?
Someone has to lead a revolution
against global warming and world pollution.
*
I am out of contact with living poets,
now I rely exclusively on the people and books.
In that sense I live the life of a poet hermit
stealing from books, but still stealing looks.
*
If a neutron bomb were to zap my house
and all would be frozen including my mouse:
this would be archaeology without digging,
a Museum to my Muses – no kidding.
*
Death will sweep all my possessions away,
the books will be sold, the CDs I played,
and if I don’t donate my papers to a library,
perhaps they’ll burn in an autodafe.
*
And when my last friend breathes is or her last
my live memory will be consigned to the past,
but my salvation may lie in the collective unconscious,
the sentient words of which I made you conscious.
*
FOR WALT WHITMAN
Post at each corner a good human,
be he man or be she woman.
Linger a while to talk to them
and gather together your poems’ anthem.
*
How silent the closed books stand
on the shelves, only titles and authors on their spines
like a rake’s prongs or pitchfork’s tines
lie, not making hay, not working the fertile land.
*
The fork in the road: you have two alternatives,
but one can always go back, as long as one lives,
to choose again or work through after at ninety degrees –
I am certain in myth they knew this, the Greeks.
*
For them it was often ‘don’t look back’ – but if one doesn’t,
how will one tell who are one’s followers
as well as who is tailing you – isn’t
that by human rights allowed?
*
A feeling of nausea as I ride the train –
I’ve heard of car sick but never horse sick –
different transport causes different strains:
it’s standing room only that really gets my wick.
*
I’ve written all through the train trip.
My whitish hair has grown long, gear and hip.
My mind has always been trippy
without drugs or gear – do I still qualify to be an old hippy?
*
Glastonbury this year was an ocean of mud –
so what’s new in this land of summer floods?
Paddle up the creek without a paddle,
but still the Pyramid Stage straddles.
*
Does insomnia include watching late night television,
or does turning up the sound and vision
enable one to dream into the screen
although it’s not creative but created has been.
*
Bending over me in parting at the party table outside
you kissed the confidence of life and poetry into me.
Though we’ve spoken few words you understand me
and I you – when you read live poetry together there’s nothing
left to hide.
*
I am with you when you’re strong and especially when you’re weak.
I am with you when your brain is relaxed or aches with strain and pain.
I am with you on every day of the working week,
when you are on holiday and when the holy days come round again.
*
‘Ne me quitte pas’: don’t leave me bereft –
in your act of leaving I would be left
with nothing but the memories of the music of your eyes,
played in feeble translation in other duller eyes.
*
In the hours of loneliness, not in the night
but the daytime of the soul,
my stomach feels queasy and in fright –
my other half has gone – I feel no longer whole.
*
Emptiness rushes into the void.
There’s no either nor ore, just unalloyed
pits from which the coal and fire have been extracted
and this poet canary that once sang so sweet to you has been
subcontracted out.
*
It is hard work at poetry’s coal face
but it’s the only way of turning coal lumps into diamonds
and your eyes were like dark brown almonds
and their black pupils sparkled their fire of love in my face.
*
I take from the right, I take from the left,
I take from the rest of the life I have left.
I give back to you in poems what we left,
my right hand knows I write with my left.
*
Once smitten twice shy –
it’s a dog’s life they say,
an excuse to let the sleeping dog of love lie:
but this old dog wants to have another day.
*
Sometimes I feel a whole troupe
of friends, poets and the dead are willing me on to write
and I realise I’m a rock in the great sea of a group
and that puts my loneliness to flight.
*
Why is it rock bands are easier to understand
than poets? It’s not just the heavy metal decibels
and that they drive their guitars like Jezebels,
it’s that poetry’s voice is often buried underground.
*
Poetry from under the rubble
usually means one thing – trouble:
about it or making it. I rarely wander into the bucolic,
even nature with shark, snake and gorse has the vitriolic.
*
As for Symbolism and the symbolic,
being an Acmeist translator
I am still decidedly chary of it;
after death I’ll talk about it with the Creator.
*
Futurism – in Khlebnikov I rate it.
Mayakovsky’s poetry – I don’t hate it,
but sloganising leaves me cold.
Lame though I am, I may be forced to demonstrate before I grow old.
*
My second therapist used to tell me,
if shaken in session I’d always take refuge behind my books.
Well here with my poems in this book-lined study
I’m giving radical therapy a second visionary look.
*
Michael, the therapist, said to the Chechen: ‘In questing for revenge
you are perpetuating your victimhood.’
Many victims don’t become survivors but turn into hoods.
Does the blood of victim-sacrifices still reek at Stonehenge?
*
I often ponder on the nature of torture
in the sophisticated West,
for it’s such a universal activity it must exist:
bullied and bullies sow seeds for the future.
*
I need to refresh on Huxley and Orwell –
at present I know they were not just spinning fables.
In War of the Worlds, Orson Wells
showed the power of thought control.
*
‘It was forbidden to kiss.
It was forbidden to think’,
Oktay Rifat writes in Freedom Has Hands,
but without a mouth and brain what are hands?
*
The hand that holds a pen can hold a sword,
can hack a body and write a word.
In the War to End All Wars,
did the poets die in the trenches for the Word?
*
When Gumilyov saw even the poet Alexander Blok might be conscripted and sent to the front, 'It'd be like roasting nightingales', such an affront, his heart thudded and froze like an ice block.
*
But Nikolay Gumilyov was a warrior poet,
famous for his big game hunting in girAfrica:
not so macho as to be led a merry dance by another poet:
young Anna Akhmatova, then their marriage was soon a fracas.
*
Reader, I keep harping on about joining a rock group –
but why not an orchestra or players’ troupe?
My art, when I’m on my mettle
is more like chamber music and acting than heavy metal.
*
Or I should join a choir, where I could use my baritone,
there I would find fellowship and harmony.
I’m sure it would add to my poet’s armoury
and my verses would find a more measured tone.
*
Even rap rhythms which are dear to my heart
are not from where I end or start.
I began poetry with Classics,
not for nothing do I finish this book with an Epic.
*
I must gather my sheep into the pen.
The poems have been penned
and must be herded into a book.
Even the lost one must be led back to the flock.
*
Poems young and poems old,
they all must come into my fold,
by hook or by shepherd’s crook
they’ll settle between the sheets of my book.
*
The heavy ewes, the sheep and rams,
the producers of the frisky lambs,
the she[herd has all of them in his flock,
the pastor his people from the housing blocks.
*
Months on from when I thought I might be dead,
from when I had written myself off with a spook tumour
I still believe it may only be a rumour
that I am sleeping in my own bed.
*
Someone would give my head a rest,
someone would be my love and bless,
someone would share my bed and stress,
and I would give, not just take, unless
*
it all went pear-shaped again,
with neither of us to blame,
just didn’t get off the ground,
though the friendship was sound.
*
What can a man do for a woman in grief,
when her friends has died and left –
she’s sweeping up the dead leaves
of memories and one of them is very green.
*
Bon jour, oh the joy, the joie de vivre
as though the v of violence has gone
and I am happy drunk or ivre
as the feast in the time of the plague goes on.
*
One closes one’s eyes in sleep and naps,
but beware closing them to the world’s mishaps
lest the soldiers in their army caps
be called in to create more havoc perhaps.
*
‘Universal solutions of world peace’,
noted my Czech friend Jan Kopold,
‘are possibly unsustainable’, though on the increase.
Jan died on his way to see me in Turkey. He was 22 years old.
*
Do I gull myself that the violence will cease?
In cloud cuckoo land lightning still strikes.
Mortality is one hundred percent – we’ll all decease,
but depression-led let’s not get on suicide bikes.
*
Writing, especially poetry,
is the most valuable form of energy.
It can electrify your life
generate friends and for me, perhaps, my former wife.
*
‘In trying to untangle the jingle from the jangle’ –
I’ve lost the rest of the words and tune.
For the public a banner is dangled:
‘Sound bites rule.’
*
When I went down the escalator,
my drooping spirits soared –
a series of women were coming up to me
and I was not down or bored.
*
I want to prove I can perform a smooth landing
and get you off the plane and into baggage handling.
If I’m the pilot, the readers are passengers
but perhaps we are both each others’ winged messengers.
*
Captain of my craft, either plane or ship,
or a rating or steward exercising stewardship,
I’m trying to move you from A to B,
by reordering the letters of the ABC.
*
I lost another quatrain I composed
last night in bed before sleep imposed:
I can’t even remember if it was in French or English:
this poet had a sleep- not death-wish.
*
Pressurised people in pressurised cabins,
harassed office-workers hurrying in tubes and cabs –
all too reminiscent of coffins
flown back from war zones – and the people pick up war’s tab.
*
Vietnam I didn’t watch on TV in the sixties,
even Iraq I followed mostly on radio.
I can’t take war or terrorism’s visual imageries
but I handle the worst atrocities on my interpreter’s audio.
*
FOR NADER
In the cabin-like rooms: three points on a circle,
not as angular or obtuse as a triangle,
we circle the sore points of a monologue
that we transfer into feeling logic’s trialogue.
*
Words can beat and be beaten –
torturers are careful not to break bones with truncheons –
to survive this far the ‘victims’ have to be staunch ones.
Words can be beaten – and eaten.
*
Fighting words, fighting talk,
am I becoming belligerent?
Walk the presidential supremely confident walk:
you have to do more than walk, talk and chew gum to be intelligent.
*
‘There’s a lot of poetry in this head.
Why should it be pierced by a bullet?
The trigger, it’s a tiny movement to pull it.’
I rhyme these words to me that the wise Arab poet said.
*
I am not a war zone correspondent –
I don’t even correspond with most of my readers,
but I know how to fight depression and despondence
and how to bandage bleeding souls.
*
But where’s the joy, the happiness, the mirth,
if you’re constantly trying to patch up others, yourself and the earth?
So work with a joyful song circulating in your heart
and you’ll find yourself a love that will never depart.
*
You know that UNO knows
that it fails on many counts.
If an ill wind blows
up in the world, still time counts.
*
A fellow poet – half Turkish, half Greek,
half something else – a real cocktail,
took me to task for being a cynic
in the poems I’d read in the café. Had I failed?
*
For I myself have riled against cynicism
in this very poem. But when he said he regarded
it as an expression of my anger
he healed a potential chasm.
*
Raving and ranting,
this poet’s chanting,
profits don’t roll
in in the prophet role.
*
Ali and I talked about Yannis Ritsos,
his philosophy and is poetry from lists.
I’m not writing an academic thesis
that’s plain, bit if an Academy beckons me – it’s Plato’s.
*
Ritsos transported Nazim Hikmet
across the Aegean sea to Greece:
two poet’ minds met,
a meta-language that frees.
*
Carla, the waitress says: ‘Low, because he’s writing’
and thy turn down the music.
This place is always inviting
and never freezes me in aspic.
*
FOR JACQUES BREL
To aspire like a spire to the sky,
to dream the undreamable dream,
to whirl the windmills of minds,
to churn weak milk into cream.
*
To attain the unattainable goal,
to sustain the unsustainable role,
to disappear not people but scars,
to reach up and touch the stars.
*
This cat fell on his feet in finding this café.
Here I write my Rubaiyat making hay,
though the sun has dipped over the horizon of buildings.
I hope this is not my ninth life: I’m having such a good innings.
*
My brother Andrew would have dug this spot.
He could have come here with three goldies in his pocket
like me this evening and have a tea, bread and lentil soup, all hot,
and talk so freely with the beautiful waitresses that his eyes would
remain in their sockets.
*
‘Les sanglots sont polyglottes’
I wrote earlier: ‘tears speak many languages’.
When you’re consoled when feeling grotty,
the arm round you is ageless.
*
I’m going to the launch of Elaine Feinstein’s
Anna Akhmatova biography.
It’s really fine: not an essay in hagiography,
and AAA on time relativity is as creative as Einstein.
*
In my life I have so many turning points,
I spin like a merry-go-round.
I give Byron in his Don Juan full points
for lately turning me round.
*
Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin is a tonic.
You, gin? One gin and tonic
please, is an old joke.
Alexander was a tavern man and a jokey bloke.
*
We don’t know whether the cavemen
in caves and caverns
didn’t indulge in tavern
talk similar to modern men.
It turns out that the pyramid inverted
is more than a symbol in Buddhism,
from it’s sharp end trickles the water of humanity, of humanism.
As you told me compassion should be my driving force it was difficult
not be converted.
*
All this on the platform with the train twenty minutes late,
talking of anger, passion (only missing out the concepts of love and hate),
of Shakespeare and all words being quotes, of the Chinese alphabet
of numbers –
now on the train the sheer effort of thinking and words is lulling me
to slumber.
*
To sleep – a chance to sometimes dream:
last night I swam in the sea by a grey pyramid hill
from which half way down there flowed a stream,
and I was conscious it had never been there before, that hill.
*
If I was in therapy weekly
I’d be lucky to have a dream a week to bring
and then it would be through glass darkly,
but it is in my poems my dreams sing.
*
If the subconscious is like the sea
we should not concentrate on the surface.
Actors or performers don’t just make up their face:
but cultivate their recall faculties and memory.
*
Adel Guemar told me: ‘J’ai des trous dans mon memoire’,
I quipped ‘I have dens black holes in mine.’
The projections of memory are the archetypes prophecy and espoire.
Not remembering is one thing, but when it plays tricks it’s a worse sign.
*
‘Do you remember when we?…’,
then the speaker proceeds to try to tell me,
until I interrupt, the whole story –
a good example of piggyback memory.
*
The past is a home, concrete physical objects,
but refugees cannot carry home or possessions:
clothes a few chattels then they’re ejected
into a new world where their past, present and future may be rejected.
*
Memories of experiences can be altered by moods,
a black lens can come down on the camera obscura,
a rosy light may temporarily cure him or her,
more permanently the comfort of a home, a glass of tea, familiar foods.
*
I have never understood why there isn’t medium term memory
between short and long term. Let’s not talk about memory loss,
like an older friend forbade me to talk of death yesterday
at the launch of Feinstein’s Akhmatova. Let’s talk about remembering:
its value, its cost.
*
But the finiteness of memory does mean we have to talk about Death,
the Boss,
for that is intimately involved with writing for the future.
Creative memory guides our pens. His father’s dying made
Dylan Thomas cross –
rage, rage – but today I learned to struggle – with compassion.
*
We worked out that passion was preferable to obsession
but both mean one is in a state of possession –
too easy then to become possessive,
to become a manic obsessive.
*
It’s simpler to poeticise here in this hip café bar
than to rescue someone’s doomed relationship.
If a ship has been holed below the waterline,
to raise it, to save it takes more than a few lines.
*
Sink, sabotage, scupper
can be the way down when one’s on one’s uppers.
Despite that sinking feeling there may be a way up
and out, though you may have to drain the cup.
*
Indeed at the last supper the simple cup of friendship
was drained – it was Judas’ kiss and avarice
that turned it into the poisoned chalice,
but then it was twelve friends plus one drinking in solidarity
and friendship.
*
And one of them blessed the cup and talked about the future
for their sakes,
and, knowing he was going to his death, how they could break
his body in bread and take and drink his blood in remembrance
and by the power of his words his bread and wine were eternally
embraced.
*
For thirty years Yunus Emre chopped wood
for the dervish lodge: this was the apprenticeship
of the great Turkish poet. It was only then that he could
be accepted with his poetry to worship.
*
I feel I’m still chopping wood, not right out of the woods
of disbelief yet, though beyond half way down the road of life.
Yunus, Dante, Rumi, were all contemporaries in life:
the miracle of their poetries is more rich than gold grave goods.
*
I transform rage against injustice
to my wounded and traumatised friends
into the cause of compassion and justice:
revenge only breed revenge, only revenge.
*
From generation to generation
genes generating good and evil geniuses,
the state of the world and nation states,
let not the minuses knock out the pluses.
*
The nature of darkening of doors
leads one to concentrate on births and deaths,
Christmas and Easter
and to not count so much the in-between-breaths.
*
There’s the puzzle of the miracles –
but we see after the healings the desire for no publicity;
then we see the plotting, closing Pharisees’ tentacles,
the choking of a life that could have continued – and not just
to eternity.
*
I talked of Christ, and others crucified, in Tehran
at the British Institute of Archaeology.
I already knew of the poetry of Nazim Hikmet Ran
and my friend called Jesus an end-pusher and that was new to me.
*
I admire people in a hurry to change the world,
though I prefer personal revolutions to mass.
I admire writers and talkers who push words.
It may be blasphemous but at home I consecrate a homely mass.
*
In the same way as I dream rarely,
I have not got the discipline of prayer,
but I make up for these deprivations by letting scarcely
a day go by without launching a poem into the heavens’ air.
*
Meditation need not be wordless –
maybe that shows I’m not a Buddhist –
but words till voiced are silent
as thoughts, if they are calm or violent.
*
It’s difficult to ‘think good thoughts’
as Dag Hammarskjold wrote in Markings.
It always disturbed me that Jesus taught
that thinking was like committing.
*
In breaking down the barrier between thinking
and committing, Christ suggested a more rapid self-expression.
In writing these Rubais often brinking
on the subconscious of sleep, I see clearer this progression.
*
In observing his daughter in the throes of (‘the greatest enemy’) boredom,
my friend, the Chinese poet Liu Hongbin
noted to me that her creative emerging from that fiefdom,
(love thy enemy) positively justified the state she had been in.
*
It sounds banal, but I’m on the last page of this notebook.
For me it is a positive quotebook
though not a prosy autobiography
and not, I trust, graphomanic autohagiography.
*
So that thoughts should not explode and dynamite all the fish
and take an arm or leg off to boot,
I have learned to swim them up and fish
them out into the net of a rescue chute,
*
and float them down to the terra firma
of lines. Thus the control is immediate and firmer.
‘Air, terre, mer’ we boys used to say before fencing
with plastic swords – fifty years later, I’m still fencing.
*
Para is a dime in Turkish currency –
ah, I’ve found a paradigm whose fluency
cannot be disputed. But the cruel paradigm
of the slavery pyramid has stood the test of time.
*
Ali says: ‘It’s very difficult to save the world, Richard.
The sentence is ridiculous, the epics are heroistic.
Produce, produce, produce hard –
have you not hear of the hubristic?’
*
Against the Roman cuss
a hundred free voices of slaves
shout: ‘I’m Spartacus!’
and the real one is saved.
*
How does a rock feel when it’s broken:
that depends on who breaks it,
and what for: how many wrists were broken
of slaves for the Parthenon even, aches my mind.
*
Ali tells me the nature of gladiatoricity
and why London is a gladiator city:
the women make-up, getting ready to fight,
the men don’t make up – and there’s no flight.
*
Shakespeare, he’s very good,’ Ali says:
‘I like dialogues’. ‘Plato?’
I say, ‘No, Chekhov stories not plays.’
Our peaceful duelogue continues, late though
*
it is and the penultimate train is beckoning.
‘Waste of time but time that must be wasted’,
he now chimes up about Swimburne dismissing
religions, but after all this magpie recording I’m not wasted.
*
Two magpies strut the lawn by my bungalow,
perhaps they’re influencing my writing.
I don’t often return before sunset’s glow:
the Ancient Grill craic is too inviting.
*
So I’m a magpie tonight but not cuckoo,
but I am firing on high octane,
this time not octets but quatrains,

FOR ALEV

TOUCHING

For over a week to have a migraine

is plainly against the grain.

It's late. I don't know whether you're in bed or up.

If your head aches now I would cup

it in one hand - I don't know which is more healing

now, left or right, for living on one's own one loses the feeling

of touching others. That's why I'm writing to touch you.

5 June 2005

Richard

POOR PEOPLE’S DIAMONDS

For Helen Bamber

She gives them one by one a pebble –

and pebbles are the poor people’s diamonds –

from a dish in her room where she talks them down,

not down to them, talks them up,

looking up to them for her stature is short,

but her expanse of humane thought

always brim her cup

of human kindness,

like frothy milk in her cappuccino

round the rim of the simple china cup

in this café where we talked about her pebbles,

circulating London town in pockets,

placed under rough pillows,

held tight against harm in tense palms,

products of the billows of the mother sea:

now I want to say stop to these repeating waves of poetry.

I know this poem ceases on the strand

where the pebbles wait, to be handed hand to hand.

1 June 2005

Museum Street

Richard McKane

It’s rare to be able to write in a waiting room

but this is no institutionalised organisation.

It doesn’t have that sense of Damoclean doom

of a dentist’s surgery of an unhealthy, toothed nation.

Not even the coffee filter is out of kilter

and the people don’t run helter-skelter

unacknowledging each other down the corridor:

there’s an atmosphere of succour and shelter.
On the train and at home I’ll cool down.

I see them on the trains, the tubes and buses,

my friends reading my book which is not yet out,

the beautiful souls, divine

divining and solving the problems of lines and mankind

and all the little fusses, the daily grind.

I’m still out and about – I’m not yet blind,

I’m a guest not a ghost – move, death, do you mind.

18 April 2005

Daniel Kharms ebullient rhythms,

the jubilation of his rhymes,

I’m out of harms way

and not just for a time.

So much to pack in

before I pack in,

to tuck into before I tuck in

under the blanket of Time.

Excuse this staccato,

my salad here was tomato –

my prostato is a hot potato –

I come back to life with these mementos.

18 April 2005-04-19 Ancient Grill

Thought into speech

is faster than the speed

of sound,

but can be right out of reach

when needed

and problems abound.

I think I stammer in my head,

and I know I write poem in my dreams in bed,

but recently I’ve transferred thought transference

into poems so swiftly that my inference

was – I was near death. The poems are multiplying

so fast, father, Mac, but I am only benignly applying

the mathematics of reduplication of your cancer cells,

accelerating the graph of my lifetime,

imposing on primordial chaos the order of rhyme

and rhythm. It’s something I’ve been training for

all my life. It’s something invisible that perhaps you saw

in the speech rhythms of our last revelatory conversation,

when you, no longer cross, moved out of the station

our noble trains of thought that crossed but did not crash.

18 April 2005

When you open Channel A like the Man from Uncle

but you have a solo conversation with yourself,

little poet Napoleon, take risks but guard your health –

your life is always more than a malignant carbuncle.

Espionage used to be an adequate metaphor

especially during the Cold War,

for loyalty, treachery and traitordom –

but that was when it was still United, the Kingdom.

Now there are fragmentation bombs –

I guess there always were –

society is fragmented between bosses and bums:

poverty hugs the world everywhere.

I wonder why the poets are felt not to care –

is it because the world doesn’t care for them?

Some pop stars have more brains behind their hair:

Geldof, Bono, Sting, there’s a whole list of them.

It’s not us poets that don’t care but we lack amplification,

we lack Bruce Springsteen’s East Street Band,

the gypsy woman told him to form, for our edification,

rappers – now there’s a streetway, but they’ve gotten out of hand.

It’s not the emotion that is bland – volcanoes have to lie dormant,

eruption floods seas and land –

but this poet is like a cormorant,

returns to his favourite fishing place.

Ten yards of the street in the Ancient Grill

in Seven Sisters Road, I put this poem in its place

and unlike onto Sisyphus it won’t roll down the hill.

18 April 2005

FOR INGRID

She worked in a chemist

but she never took no pills,

not even for a headache

or any other ills.

I didn’t twist her arm

or cause her any harm

unless it was our parting

that did both of us disarm.

18 April 2005

Lack of sleep produces annoyance,

lack of a smoke the same in me.

Where is my usual buoyancy –

where’s it gone my bonhomie?

*

When they insulted the bard, low point of my Univ time:

Shakespeare Club dinner, quails eggs, five types of wine:

barbarian lecturer sings: ‘When I’m feeling grotty,

I put my finger up my botty’.

*

Accidents happen, you’d say, but this was not the Rugger Bugger Club.

Most of the time I was not a landlubber

at sea, for though I played no bridge rubbers

I built bridges with my translations, was partial to friends and the Pub.

*

I remember it all, as they say, as if it was yesterday –

sleep deprivation has that effect, forced or voluntary.

Actually I was writing a letter to the Uzbek President

for a young journalist in custody. I’ll be ‘MF Poet at Large’

not in residence.

*

Because my legs cannot gallop I let the poems do

the galloping for me. I’m not trying to put the wind up you:

I have a firm grip on reins and bridle –

this poem is more important to me than Charles and Camilla’s bridal.

*

If heresy it be, it is not hysterical.

I have a self-taught grounding in philosophy

and the Classical historical

tradition and for these incorruptible poems I get no fee.

*

What delight it was to hear from Norwegian Ole

that he found my Arctic poems ‘utterly convincing’.

Warm-blooded, I’d like to shout a Spanish ole

but reader I don’t want to see you wincing!

*

I love to see you smile and laugh,

it gives a radiance to my soul.

Though you’re not my other half,

permit me to say you make me whole.

*

I wish I’d known William Shakespeare:

the wit, the depth, his hopes and fears.

But in using his beautiful English right

we approach him as day follows night.

*

These poems are the length of a limerick

but they don’t always take the mick:

‘many a serious word is spoken in jest’

is probably my palimpsest.

*

I’ve found a way to live the waiting,

boosted by my pipe and Pan pipes:

I may be under sentence of prostate cancer –

a few week wait: the biopsy will give the answer.

*

Meanwhile in the village of my mind,

the lame, the lame brain village fools

and the fit make hay come rain or shine

and my cassettes are filled on their threshing floor spools.

*

I used to fear like the plague

overexuberance in poetry.

I’m not writing for a blue plaque,

or sprinting to score a try.

*

And I’m saying that I’m being guided

by several poets and minds:

the traffic is not one-sided,

one day, one night in me a guide you’ll find.

*

‘Have you got a mission?’, the psychiatrist

asked me thirty six years ago with his posse.

‘By gum’ now I’d insist,

‘it’s very possible.’

*

My Mission Control Houston

is the Britannia Pub at Euston.

Barmaids Silvia and Anna are Hungarian –

I am always a loner and gregarious.

*

I am not the Good Shepherd nor the flock,

but not quite the lost sheep.

I am not the green grass, not the Rock,

my poems smile, laugh and weep.

*

Poems can be written close to sleep –

reading tips one into it.

Boredom I try to keep at bay,

touch wood, one day I’ll get it.

*

Flow on majestic river,

fed on rain and underground springs.

There’s a spring in the step of this wordgiver,

his legs like coiled clock springs.

*

If the watch breaks we’ll repair it:

like this Musa Farhi said of a young man tortured.

We keep a close watch on our culture –

our death, we will outstare it.

*

You know these poems are based on love and friendship,

the bile in them is protective and prophylactic,

as into other galaxies their spaceship

reaches: I promise their end won’t be anticlimactic.

*

Poems are not dreams but are their next of kin –

so close to each other they are under each others’ skin.

They’re as good a place for dealing with joy, anger, shame and sin,

a good way of putting on one’s life a spin.

*

The cycle writer is therefore a cyclist

and I have invented the quadricycle,

four lines cyclically intertwined:

the twice double bind.

*

The unicycle in the circus tent,

the trapeze artist’s pent-

up muscles, the clowns’ relent-

less patter, the high-wire under weight is bent.

*

Katja shows me her Japanese books –

a prince with wild hair flying on a horse.

Outside the train the weather looks

good – the day will be fine not coarse.

*

Though I reach for the foreign it comes out in English.

Though I’m not Michael Horovitz on anglosaxophone,

like him I’m unashamedly showman shamanish

in performance – both of us not from the Martian zone.

*

Fellow poets spinning our poems,

it’s not a given our books will roost in home.

Will they be ‘on the shelf’

like this divorcee himself?

*

For a good poet pregnancy is even more poignant –

she knows all about waiting you see,

and I await my consultant’s appointment:

‘men’s problems’ – not a woman, I can’t have a baby.

*

I’ve decided the quatrain is my perfect figure of speech:

she’s petite, elegant in harmony.

It’s now harder for me to learn than teach,

peaceful arrows quiver in my armoury.

*

It is not necessarily God who furnishes

me words – unless he is the sum of creation.

The kilning sun too burnishes

the earthenware, the spinning of poems’ narration.

*

A cerise blouse and matching lipstick,

a grey power suit, body firm and compact.

Is it fate dictates which seats we pick

on tube or train, or is there a hidden contract?

*

All those years of translation transfuse my own lines,

they’re like dividends not punishments or fines.

I never on my life played Russian roulette,

but I could stake all my chips on a couple of couplets.

*

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog:

how simple – the whole alphabet like falling off a log,

but I will tell you what Khlebnikov knew:

there is an alphabet of numbers too.

*

After the Exiles reading we wound down in the bar –

it’s not what we eat we are,

perhaps we are these languages we speak,

the words shared each to each.

*

The teacher is constantly learning,

earning more than he or she can teach.

If he or she is inclined to preach

a sermon, his or her own ear has to be discerning.

*

I write on avoiding cutting and editing.

My principle is not subtracting but adding.

In the red is too much in your face – time not for debiting,

time where it’s due for crediting.

*

The pen (or is it pun) is mightier than the sword,

but the mouth is mightier than both.’

I’d never heard the second line until it was shared on the street

at tables outside the Ancient Grill by Reggie N4 – and it was neat.

*

The sun shone, the scrawled number

rang in my head – am I all up in it?

Or is my body too emerging from slumber.

The scrawled number, I’ll not bin it.

*

I operate better at street level.

We three had no need to beg and grovel.

In my voice there’s poetry’s gravel –

I avoid the judgmental gavel.

*

So poet, your façade has been rumbled

and quite honestly I am humbled

not to mention discombobulated.

A tiny bell of hope in my head tintinabulates .

*

I’m refreshed by my alternate night’s sleep –

but she was strung out with three in a row without.

Still it’s up to me to ‘look before I leap’

but when one’s life is sectioned up one wants out.

More in notepad then notebook

*

Poets are granted everything except money –

so they are free as air.

In a capitalist country that sounds funny

and somehow it doesn’t seem fair.

*

So why do governments fear us,

or do they hold us in ridicule.

The answer is radical,

the answer is quite near us.

*

Poems are no longer banners,

poems are not even worth tanners.

A magazine might pay a tenner,

a book cost you a dozen pens.

*

Yet some of us have the compulsion to write –

it becomes a fatal attraction.

In daytime hours or at night,

against distraction, writing without detraction.

*

Nazand wants my poems to translate into Kurdish

but not the torture and tortured ones.

This is a selection I’ll relish:

the nature poems, happy poems – exclusive fun.

*

A prostitute approached me

when I was suffering from prostate.

I didn’t protest my Protestantism,

I wanted to talk to her and desist.

*

A pro propositioned me

and it wasn’t a con.

I blew her off softly,

hard on her and me?

*

When I said I had one night’s sleep on and one night off,

she said: ‘Are you doing cocaine?’

I said: ‘Poems are my drugs’ shrugging it off,

also telling her ‘My name is McKane’.

*

Sitting at home in the delta of my armchair,

watching Elton John on the TV.

I’m not a John yet close to John Clare,

use a condom, no one wants HIV.

*

Sometimes people think I do drugs –

I have a natural swooping high.

You barter hugs and sex for drugs.

We said a friendly hi and exchanged not sex but poetry.

*

What I remember most of our unfleecing meeting

was your huge grey eyes inviting, entreating,

offering me my lost manhood back –

then to my work I had to make tracks.

*

Conversation interruptus, perhaps never to be continued.

I was upfront, part of me wanted my tensions unscrewed,

for so many years it had been down to masturbation,

but this was not the time to be seduced into submission.

*

I wish I’d known Will Shakespeare

who so shook up his peers,

could move a crowd to tears

of sadness and joy, all his writing years.

*

It’s thrilled I am

to read again C.K. Williams,

a Princeton poet of my mettle.

There with his friend Elizabeth I was in fine fettle.

*

And what of Stephen Berg –

indeed a sort of phenomenon.

He translated my translations of Akhmatova on a surge,

his acknowledgement of that point in his Bloodaxe book

virtually nominal.

*

I don’t hold that against him –

he’d become a friend by then.

He was working something out with his dead mother

and I’d never withdraw that from is pen.

*

But he caused a most important meeting

of mine with my future wife:

our courtship was quite fleeting,

our bones jumped each other’s life.

*

All the rapture together

lasted for two short years:

there was no either

oring but after hoped came illness’ fears.

*

Elizabeth or Mallie,

your names ring in my ears –

I allow myself the memory

that still ‘conquers all the fears’.

*

And I gaze upon Bob’s ‘chimes of freedom flashing’

as though I’m by the sea and it’s crashing.

No use lashing myself with hindsight’s false perceptions,

we must both rejoice in our daughter’s conception.

*

The biggest gift to poetry is the people prepared to read it.

They are not so important – the singulars of publisher and poet.

Poetry reading is for individuals not mass market,

with an audience reading though I can be a palpable hit.

*

I return again to Will Shakespeare:

his first name shows the future.

He is the sum of will-power,

oh, Will, I am writing this to you in the wee night hour.

*

If at one fell stroke I was deprived of my English ,

I could communicate in French, Russian and Turkish,

but strike me not down when I’m like a well full-primed,

all of these quatrains I remind you are rhymed.

*

My septic foot keeps me awake at night,

but I am to the bones an antisceptic.

My boot kicks against the pricks of the cynics:

they are the antianybodies, they are the outright sceptics.

*

Rant over. For my Kurdish book Nazand,

I repeat, wants especially my nature poems,

rejecting the tortured cycles, an

aberration too close to their homes.

*

It’s not so much I’m taking dictation

in swiftly writing down these lines –

they do come from deep meditation

on beauty, truth, fear and the fine.

*

It’s almost five am, haven’t slept enough,

if I don’t staying alert will be tough

at the reading of Ziba, Stephen, Nazand and Nathalie,

but I’ll chair it and they’ll see the best of me.

*

On that note, sleep rushes over me,

fifteen quatrains I’ve written at one sitting.

This night air, ink and time are virtually free,

pitting myself against the greats takes nothing out of me.

*

Musa says: ‘I’ll kill you if you die’,

in good old English not in Turkish.

I love things between serious and rubbish,

in which latter Akhmatova says poetry lies.

(new session)

These days engines are not so much turntablable

as have them on the train at both ends.

My modern quatrains run to a tight timetable,

on running them back and fro I have to depend.

*

The slowing down of my writing indicates

like ‘clever people and grocers’, I’m thinking too much,

as Zorba said. Soon my Lebanese meal will come on plates

but I won’t need to wash it down with hooch.

*

As the head gets more tired and tireder

the brain waves become more contained.

The boss here, for music he hired her,

Carolina, my friend, and tonight we’ll be entertained.

*

The left hand becomes ponderous,

relaxed writing shouldn’t be onerous.

On the bar wall there is a blunderbuss.

I hope I haven’t nonplussed you, my puss.

*

I should be used to silence

and reading between the lines,

and when I am writing the reliance

on interval interpretation is fine.

*

I like it when in grey and all petite

you say to me the international ‘bon appetit’,

though it might come out in Arabic or Portuguese,

it’s well known that English doesn’t have two words like these.

*

It’s strange – I’m almost catatonic,

but writing these words is my tonic.

I have to be very polyphonic

to find my own voice in time’s nick.

*

Actually sleep doesn’t overwhelm,

au contraire it whelms the overwhelming.

It gives the chance for well to well,

for in sleep no tears are outwelling.

*

They say: ‘Cut your poems to the bone’,

but I’d be sorry for them anorexic.

I’d prefer them to be dyslexic

like a friend, wise for whom the street is home.

*

Now I’m digesting my meal.

Soon I’ll have to read and learn inwardly:

the task ahead is daunting but real,

to keep the best poems by the weakest discarding.

*

A poet called his lines a novel,

an expansive cuisine nouvelle,

but perhaps he cooked the book –

led publishers a dance, took a better advance.

*

Nearing the end of my writing session.

Once I read for MF with John Sessions

and often have read with Julie Christie,

who rhymes with my co-translator friend Ruth Christie.

*

Why not a bit of name dropping?

It’s better than dropping friends.

I never went in for bedhopping,

never quite made them meet – those ends.

*

Remember ‘Hedgehoppers Anonymous’

and ‘Thunderclap Newman?’

These groups’ names date us.

It’s too late for me to be a ‘new man’.

*

I can’t say either: ‘It’s good news week’,

but certainly ‘something’s in the air’.

Some hearts are as tough as teak,

Elvis, have you got a million to spare?

*

This poem is more of a ragbag rattle bag than Ted’s and Seamus’s.

The drawback in being famous is

if your personality is flooded,

the crows circle, the opened ground is muddied.

*

‘Brilliant! Genius!’ I say to Carolina, the waitress

on writing that, then ‘I’m not allowed

to say that in my family.’ ‘Show-off, boasting,

full of yourself.’ But what’s wrong in writing proud?

*

Her guitar is perched on top of the wine-rack near the ceiling,

but when strings are silent it doesn’t mean they’re not feeling.

Vocal chords like actors spend a lot of time resting.

We looked at each other – the poem, the song were waiting.

*

There is a unique joy in finding the mot juste,

and to make the poem honest and just

in word, gesture and thrust is just

still possible today, just, just, just.

*

In Turkish play means drama, dance and game

and to play an instrument is to steal it.

I’m not an academic, all the same

I tell you this so you can steal and feel it.

*

I think deeper of ‘the shadow of your smile’.

‘It’s only words’, but all the while

a melody arises of a song sung well,

of being uplifted on a deep seas swell.

*

If there are many ‘tus’ do they become ‘vous’?

I am writing to you and you

and in that sense my mother tongue works better:

when we switch from vous to tu in English we don’t need to change

a letter.

*

A few days ago I had a surge of intimations of mortality,

then a pro approached me with offers of intimacy.

For so many years I’ve been intimate in my poetry

that I have laid off the physical for spirituality.

*

I recommend Shakespeare’s poetry in the Ted Hughes Selection

from Faber.

I turn Jesus round to ‘Love thyself as thy neighbour’.

As translator I’ve looked after my authors more than myself,

but now I have to look to my own and own poems’ health.

*

I’m in the Ancient Grill on Seven Sisters

road, only twenty minutes from Euston Station:

the nine thirty four train – I’ve missed her –

in my exhaustion there is jubilation.

*

I’ll drink a bottle of sparkling water

as Jesus’ water of life, as Persian ab-i-hayat

and, not blaspheming, it’ll turn into wine, though I’m at no wedding feast,

as sure as the dough of life rises with yeast.

*

When you’re truly hooked on the drugs of poetry,

how good it is for a gentle fisherman to take you off the barb.

Keep on my net, reader, this is not just rhubarb, rhubarb.

Though I may be trying, I’m trying to break your ice.

*

I say to Carolina: ‘I’ve written 100 lines

in one sitting and they’re not schoolboy lines.’

But what if the restaurant punishes me with a fine

and I am charged at £2 a line?

*

The thought police may be cruising around

even these streets, this town. They swoop without a sound

depressing levers of depression, escalating up and down escalators,

but I swear my poetry is here to protect and elevate us.

*

Carolina reads me her vivid, colourless, depressed poem

having said before ‘It’s crap.’

I say, ‘No one’s Muse? Yes, it’s crap.

You needn’t say that when you make my poems at home.’

*

If my friend the Arab poet can be a crypto-Christian

and use the New Testament as fuel

for his poems, why is it I don’t return to the Bible?

Our discourse on poetry and life was nothing if not Christian.

*

The train pulls out. I pull a poem not out of memory

but out of the pool of my learning.

Does it really matter that I’m barely earning

a living, but will the Lord provide for me?

*

The Asian waitress at Burger King

filled a cardboard cup for me

with ice and water. She was my King,

I her servant then – and the water was up for free.

*

Some sleep, others purse their lips,

their thigh bones join their hips.

I am the Singing Detective, without psoriasis. On train trips I detect

then write poems and at home correct them.

Nevertheless there is a buzz of conversation

in the carriage: ‘Are you moving soon?’

This is now a strange nation

but I’m not going to move away late or soon.

*

Shai, the Israeli storyteller, asked me to speak

part of a story in rhyme to the children’s group.

He also inspired my Cain and Abel speech

rhythm chant rant. All I can say is ‘Merci beaucoup.’

*

Indebtedness is not the same as being in debt:

one has a good the other a bad, red feeling.

I’ve gone well overdrawn this month

but my hand has written well as well as ferried food to mouth.

*

‘Sufficient unto the day’ but it is the nights that worry me

and I’d be happy if I could sleep before half past three.

Doctor asks me what I do till then?

I say emails, TV, writing listening to mellow Leonard Cohen.

*

I don’t focus on hocus pocus –

I’d rather turn the tables than turn tables.

I translated a poem about the dervish crocus

by Pir Sultan Abdal way before his conference hotel in Sivas was burned.

*

As long as you pay back the Muses with beautiful poems

all Nine will work hard for you.

In this England, these modern homes,

on public transport, these Greek maidens work for me – and for you.

*

Yes, by the sweat of my brow there is inspiration,

for breathing as Stephen Watts said is its source,

then it’s also a sweet water course

that courses across all nations.

Whom do I tell and whom not?

I don’t want to yell it out.

I have no blood clot

trying my heart out.

*

I phoned you and after a peroration

got too clinically straight to the point.

It was all in a way a preparation,

not scoring a sympathy point.

*

It’s a big secret to share –

not this swollen secreted gland.

It’s to avoid me going spare,

not that I will – it’s holding your hand.

The light I getting crepuscular,

night’s grip will be muscular,

its hand will contract into am iron fist:

no, I won’t allow that – shall I send you on the line a velvet kiss?

*

Whatever the outcome it will come out right,

it’s better not to give our souls a fright:

that’s the part that that has to continue through all attacks,

fly my soul, there will be no ack-ack.

*

I put ‘say goodbye to Alexandra leaving’

on repeat on the CD. Cohen and Cavafy,

a powerful combination. Alexandria and Alexandra,

and none of us are keening like Cassandra.

*

The late Cohen I was given by my Oxford Kurdish friend Melike.

My Cavafy I sent to Moscow with the widow of Velichansky,

so I am unable to unravel the parallel key:

though I sing along in key, I’m stranded with Alexandra

on the Alexandria quay.

*

And the morning after Cohen again moves me,

‘exquisite music’ improves me.

I thank the makers and the gift giver

and I’m rocked on the rhythms of the river.

*

I wonder if one always loses after leaving.

Yes, losses lead to grieving.

But I’ve been left and left people, women and cities

and I lost them not: that would have been giving in to self-pity.

*

‘Do not stoop to strategies like this’.

As I search for the meaning of ‘like this’,

the song stats to unravel. Yes, perhaps I am guilty of ‘like this’.

Words in poems and sung, the moment imagined instead of the real kiss.

*

On the train a man gets out his Guinness Book of Records cuttings

about lying on a bed of nails, to impress the woman opposite.

He’s in great shape and I’m undoubtedly out of it,

shape I mean – but it’s useful and fun eavesdropping, observing.

*

Another macho man on another trip

gives the woman passenger a tip:

‘When you’re tired look at the sun through the open window

with eyes closed for twenty seconds. It’ll do you fine, I reckon.’

*

The infections bit in: first the foot

then the urinary tract to boot.

Now I’m waiting for the antibiotics to boot up –

let it not be dashed from me that cup.

*

First I felt freezing

then the shivers and shakes.

Now as it’s all easing

its stock I can take.

*

So here’s why the exhaustion,

the reduced internal combustion:

an infection: the emergency GP’s comments

were accurate and well-meant.

*

I cross my legs protectively of my groin,

today no girding of my loins –

from work a whole day’s rest.

This could be bliss, this is blest.

*

It’s not only the mountains that have gone downhill,

their caves have been blasted, their minerals mined,

it is more the mountain people

who’ve now taken on plain minds.

People against word association

don’t know their proverbial onions.

As a pilgrim it’s good to be in association

with such guides as John Bunyan.

*

Like a stand up comic risks

when using the same material twice,

the lyric poet is in the same vice.

I always rhyme poem with home but it’s more than a rut in a disk.

*

In a pub or café if I know a bar person

waiter or waitress knows I write poetry,

it certainly spurs on

the writing, puts spring blossom on the tree.

*

You said, forgive me if I misquote,

it was New Year’s Eve and I never wrote

it down: ‘I have many people who love me

but few who love and influence me.’

*

Though just a poet and translator

I’ll return home later

to essay ‘tweaking’ your essay,

though tweak is a word I’d never say.

*

Time for the next leg of the journey,

on to the Royal Festival Hall,

not for a celebrity tourney –

a gathering of a few poets, that’s all.

*

High, manic, OTT, off his trolley, speedy

are all adjectives for the needy.

If you seriously read me

you don’t need value judgments to heed me.

*

There is ecstasy in craic McKane,

his book costs around ten pounds.

It’s cheaper too than crap champagne

and a different brew from Ezra Pound’s.

*

My China is Hongbin Liu:

I mean him, his flat, his books in lieu

of the country. A forcing house for characterful poems,

a veritable hothouse home.

*

The voice goes last.

On a car the exhaust exhausts first.

By my weakness I’m aghast,

let my weakness for poems quench my fatigue and thirst.

*

I don’t get a red cent for a sentence,

but hey, it’s a free country – neither do I get a prison sentence.

I’d prefer to be valued in the heart

than towards a million get a head start.

*

My stammering has come back again,

one word or two repeat their refrain.

Paid by the word as a court interpreter –

I would benefit financially from my stutter!

*

My first poem written on the screen

had all sorts of screens

in it: altar screen, TV screen,

but still I don’t know what’s going on behind those screens.

*

I not only read into but write into

my friendships. Thus they become invested

with an additional vested interest:

so it’s also literary, the quest to…

*

Pause, draw smoke to saturate the tongue

with the effects of nicotine.

Pipe smoking puts knickers in a twine:

in my state of health I know it’s wrong.

*

Thy say: ‘Allow him his only vice’,

but that is deadly advice.

But trying to quit tobacco

could still be one on, one back & Co.

*

If a computer in French is an ordinateur

it gives a whole new meaning to ordination.

The alternative altar screen rites,

blasphemy in some people’s sights.

*

Be not too florid about your secret

fluency. The proof is in the concrete

building of the poem, you’ll now when the exit

beckons: perhaps to get away from it all to Crete?

FOR SAMUEL, TAIWO AND ME

Though your words to us were cruel

I still had to interpret them and their tone.

I picked up the edge in your consonants and vowels

though they were inconsonant and more like a howl:

for none of us was it completely an unknown zone.

It breaks our hearts but we’re not broken,

not hiding behind the word ‘professional’,

but we’ll have to take more, though this is no token.

After smoking outside we spoke about the words spoken:

your speech on treachery and confidence broken.

I write this at home with soaked cheeks,

listening the while to late Leonard Cohen

and remember how for week on week

of waiting you Samuel listened to your ‘sad music’,

mainly Pink Floyd. I feel slightly sick

to my stomach, grief, pipe, tea and banana

for breakfast. I wish for a denouement,

swiftly, positively in you case,

but fear a government diabolos ex machina

may resolve it tragically. Then there’d be a race

against the decision, against your suicide.

I wonder to whom you gave your Pink Floyd CDs

when on your fate you’d decided,

and claimed only Helen Bamber brought you back.

Taiwo, you didn’t chide.

Samuel, I think you’ll remember her calm

if not her words. Only once my voice broke

after you and I, Taiwo, had that talk and smoke

and about to mount the stairs to another session

I said: ‘You are one of the best.’

If it’s not too sentimental I have the sincere impression

that I’ll be interpreting even in heaven –

for us good souls there is no rest.

23 April 2005

FOR SOBIRJAN YAKUBOV

HURRIYAT JOURNALIST IN CUSTODY IN UZBEKISTAN

Thousands are praying for you,

others hope against hope angrily

that you're still on your everyday trolley

despite the torture you're going through.

This is not about me it's all for you,

in custody in Tashkent.

So young, you're not too young to know

and show a world corrupt and bent.

They'll be gunning for your confession now

with all their worst know how.

Ruslan worked for you all night

and I've had four hours sleep

and you can't see but feel

the tears your friends weep.

It's important that you're strong,

but body and mind are weak,

Sobirjan, it's your jan,

your soul they'll never break.

Be patient, soul, sobir jan,

we'll help free your body and mind whole -

and my jan, Sobirjan,

it'll never be captive, your soul.

Richard McKane

25 April 2005

Sobir – Patience

Jan – Soul

DON’T SAY THE ISTANS ARE DISTANT:

A ROCK TRIBUTE TO SOBIRJAN YAKUBOV

I hear the tyrant’s closed all the libraries in Turkmenistan,

ballet, opera, circus all under his ban

and hospitals in the provinces, idle they stand

and Sobirjan is imprisoned in Uzbekistan,

but they’ll harvest opium poppies in Afghanistan,

but they’re pumping oil in most of the Istans –

and don’t say the Istans are distant.

They say fundamentalists exist in all the Istans

and Bin Laden may be in hiding in Which Istan?

And the West has a stance and the US too –

and don’t say the Istans are distant.

We bled your oil now you’ll bleed it too,

our blood may boil but we need it too,

after Iraq the countries queue –

and don’t say the Istans are distant.

Countries are made up of millions of jans and souls,

they’re led by a few and terrorised by a few,

but bombs, bullets and prisons make eternal holes –

and don’t say the Istans are distant.

25-26^th April 2005

Richard McKane is a member of English PEN Writers in Prison Committee, a poet, Human Rights Interpreter and a translator of Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam and Nazim Hikmet. His The Poetry of Richard McKane 1967-2005 will come out from Hearing Eye, London in autumn 2005.

-----

FOR MARGARET FISHER

There was oil and vinegar in your face,
and they reflected your life,
but there was also a sweet smile
and an infectious, impish laugh.

Older than us, you crocheted the lace
of your psychiatry, never stiff,
quite often angry at injustice, the while,
always your husband's other half.

You'd arrive a bit breathless
off the train from Oxford
into the staffroom. You seemed deathless
to me - but now you've crossed that ford.

I don't know whether you got anointed
with oil before your last 'appointment'
that'll come to us all, but you'd have added
a drop of vinegar. It was your duty
to unmuddle the complex salads of people's minds
at those places we shared, the MF and the Warneford,
and you did it with a particularly Oxford mind
and a special trust that Truth is bitter-sweet Beauty.

Farewell, Margaret.

Richard McKane
26 April 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.

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 Hospital 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.

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.

I love to see you smile and laugh,

it gives a radiance to my soul.

Though you’re not my other half,

permit me to say you make me whole.

*

I wish I’d known William Shakespeare:

the wit, the depth, his hopes and fears.

But in using his beautiful English right

we approach him as day follows night.

14 April 2005

Quite apart from anything else: it’s fun

entering into training for entertaining.

Words weigh lightly on the lines as they run,

when I’m tired their the opposite of draining

*

How selfish to think that when I strike the rocky reef of death

my grief will be more than of those who still draw breath.

My friendships will not be wrecked –

I will simply have moved up another deck.

18 April 2005

Lack of sleep produces annoyance,

lack of a smoke the same in me.

Where is my usual buoyancy –

where’s it gone my bonhomie?

*

When they insulted the bard, low point of my Univ time:

Shakespeare Club dinner, quails eggs, five types of wine:

barbarian lecturer sings: ‘When I’m feeling grotty,

I put my finger up my botty’.

*

Accidents happen, you’d say, but this was not the Rugger Bugger Club.

Most of the time I was not a landlubber

at sea, for though I played no bridge rubbers

I built bridges with my translations, was partial to friends and the Pub.

*

I remember it all, as they say, as if it was yesterday –

sleep deprivation has that effect, forced or voluntary.

Actually I was writing a letter to the Uzbek President

for a young journalist in custody. I’ll be ‘MF Poet at Large’

not in residence.

*

Because my legs cannot gallop I let the poems do

the galloping for me. I’m not trying to put the wind up you:

I have a firm grip on reins and bridle –

this poem is more important to me than Charles and Camilla’s bridal.

*

If heresy it be, it is not hysterical.

I have a self-taught grounding in philosophy

and the Classical historical

tradition and for these incorruptible poems I get no fee.

*

What delight it was to hear from Norwegian Ole

that he found my Arctic poems ‘utterly convincing’.

Warm-blooded, I’d like to shout a Spanish ole

but reader I don’t want to see you wincing!

*

I love to see you smile and laugh,

it gives a radiance to my soul.

Though you’re not my other half,

permit me to say you make me whole.

*

I wish I’d known William Shakespeare:

the wit, the depth, his hopes and fears.

But in using his beautiful English right

we approach him as day follows night.

*

These poems are the length of a limerick

but they don’t always take the mick:

‘many a serious word is spoken in jest’

is probably my palimpsest.

*

I’ve found a way to live the waiting,

boosted by my pipe and Pan pipes:

I may be under sentence of prostate cancer –

a few week wait: the biopsy will give the answer.

*

Meanwhile in the village of my mind,

the lame, the lame brain village fools

and the fit make hay come rain or shine

and my cassettes are filled on their threshing floor spools.

*

I used to fear like the plague

overexuberance in poetry.

I’m not writing for a blue plaque,

or sprinting to score a try.

*

And I’m saying that I’m being guided

by several poets and minds:

the traffic is not one-sided,

one day, one night in me a guide you’ll find.

*

‘Have you got a mission?’, the psychiatrist

asked me thirty six years ago with his posse.

‘By gum’ now I’d insist,

‘it’s very possible.’

*

My Mission Control Houston

is the Britannia Pub at Euston.

Barmaids Silvia and Anna are Hungarian –

I am always a loner and gregarious.

*

I am not the Good Shepherd nor the flock,

but not quite the lost sheep.

I am not the green grass, not the Rock,

my poems smile, laugh and weep.

*

Poems can be written close to sleep –

reading tips one into it.

Boredom I try to keep at bay,

touch wood, one day I’ll get it.

*

Flow on majestic river,

fed on rain and underground springs.

There’s a spring in the step of this wordgiver,

his legs like coiled clock springs.

*

If the watch breaks we’ll repair it:

like this Musa Farhi said of a young man tortured.

We keep a close watch on our culture –

our death, we will outstare it.

*

You know these poems are based on love and friendship,

the bile in them is protective and prophylactic,

as into other galaxies their spaceship

reaches: I promise their end won’t be anticlimactic.

*

Poems are not dreams but are their next of kin –

so close to each other they are under each others’ skin.

They’re as good a place for dealing with joy, anger, shame and sin,

a good way of putting on one’s life a spin.

*

The cycle writer is therefore a cyclist

and I have invented the quadricycle,

four lines cyclically intertwined:

the twice double bind.

*

The unicycle in the circus tent,

the trapeze artist’s pent-

up muscles, the clowns’ relent-

less patter, the high-wire under weight is bent.

*

Katja shows me her Japanesse books –

a prince with wild hair flying on a horse.

Outside the train the weather looks

good – the day will be fine not coarse.

*

Though I reach for the foreign it comes out in English.

Though I’m not Michael Horovitz on anglosaxophone,

like him I’m unashamedly showman shamanish

in performance – both of us not from the Martian zone.

*

Fellow poets spinning our poems,

it’s not a given our books will roost in home.

Will they be ‘on the shelf’

like this divorcee himself?

*

For a good poet pregnancy is even more poignant –

she knows all about waiting you see,

and I await my consultant’s appointment:

‘men’s problems’ – not a woman, I can’t have a baby.

*

I’ve decided the quatrain is my perfect figure of speech:

she’s petite, elegant in harmony.

It’s now harder for me to learn than teach,

peaceful arrows quiver in my armoury.

*

It is not necessarily God who furnishes

me words – unless he is the sum of creation.

The kilning sun too burnishes

the earthenware, the spinning of poems’ narration.

*

A cerise blouse and matching lipstick,

a grey power suit, body firm and compact.

Is it fate dictates which seats we pick

on tube or train, or is there a hidden contract?

*

All those years of translation transfuse my own lines,

they’re like dividends not punishments or fines.

I never on my life played Russian roulette,

but I could stake all my chips on a couple of couplets.

*

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog:

how simple – the whole alphabet like falling off a log,

but I will tell you what Khlebnikov knew:

there is an alphabet of numbers too.

*

After the Exiles reading we wound down in the bar –

it’s not what we eat we are,

perhaps we are these languages we speak,

the words shared each to each.

*

The teacher is constantly learning,

earning more than he or she can teach.

If he or she is inclined to preach

a sermon, his or her own ear has to be discerning.

*

I write on avoiding cutting and editing.

My principle is not subtracting but adding.

In the red is too much in your face – time not for debiting,

time where it’s due for crediting.

*

The pen (or is it pun) is mightier than the sword,

but the mouth is mightier than both.’

I’d never heard the second line until it was shared on the street

at tables outside the Ancient Grill by Reggie N4 – and it was neat.

*

The sun shone, the scrawled number

rang in my head – am I all up in it?

Or is my body too emerging from slumber.

The scrawled number, I’ll not bin it.

*

I operate better at street level.

We three had no need to beg and grovel.

In my voice there’s poetry’s gravel –

I avoid the judgmental gavel.

*

So poet, your façade has been rumbled

and quite honestly I am humbled

not to mention discombobulated.

A tiny bell of hope in my head tintinabulates .

*

I’m refreshed by my alternate night’s sleep –

but she was strung out with three in a row without.

Still it’s up to me to ‘look before I leap’

but when one’s life is sectioned up one wants out.

More in notepad then notebook

*

Poets are granted everything except money –

so they are free as air.

In a capitalist country that sounds funny

and somehow it doesn’t seem fair.

*

So why do governments fear us,

or do they hold us in ridicule.

The answer is radical,

the answer is quite near us.

*

Poems are no longer banners,

poems are not even worth tanners.

A magazine might pay a tenner,

a book cost you a dozen pens.

*

Yet some of us have the compulsion to write –

it becomes a fatal attraction.

In daytime hours or at night,

against distraction, writing without detraction.

*

Nazand wants my poems to translate into Kurdish

but not the torture and tortured ones.

This is a selection I’ll relish:

the nature poems, happy poems – exclusive fun.

*

A prostitute approached me

when I was suffering from prostate.

I didn’t protest my Protestantism,

I wanted to talk to her and desist.

*

A pro propositioned me

and it wasn’t a con.

I blew her off softly,

hard on her and me?

*

When I said I had one night’s sleep on and one night off,

she said: ‘Are you doing cocaine?’

I said: ‘Poems are my drugs’ shrugging it off,

also telling her ‘My name is McKane’.

*

Sitting at home in the delta of my armchair,

watching Elton John on the TV.

I’m not a John yet close to John Clare,

use a condom, no one wants HIV.

*

Sometimes people think I do drugs –

I have a natural swooping high.

You barter hugs and sex for drugs.

We said a friendly hi and exchanged not sex but poetry.

*

What I remember most of our unfleecing meeting

was your huge grey eyes inviting, entreating,

offering me my lost manhood back –

then to my work I had to make tracks.

*

Conversation interruptus, perhaps never to be continued.

I was upfront, part of me wanted my tensions unscrewed,

for so many years it had been down to masturbation,

but this was not the time to be seduced into submission.

*

I wish I’d known Will Shakespeare

who so shook up his peers,

could move a crowd to tears

of sadness and joy, all his writing years.

*

It’s thrilled I am

to read again C.K. Williams,

a Princeton poet of my mettle.

There with his friend Elizabeth I was in fine fettle.

*

And what of Stephen Berg –

indeed a sort of phenomenon.

He translated my translations of Akhmatova on a surge,

his acknowledgement of that point in his Bloodaxe book

virtually nominal.

*

I don’t hold that against him –

he’d become a friend by then.

He was working something out with his dead mother

and I’d never withdraw that from is pen.

*

But he caused a most important meeting

of mine with my future wife:

our courtship was quite fleeting,

our bones jumped each other’s life.

*

All the rapture together

lasted for two short years:

there was no either

oring but after hoped came illness’ fears.

*

Elizabeth or Mallie,

your names ring in my ears –

I allow myself the memory

that still ‘conquers all the fears’.

*

And I gaze upon Bob’s ‘chimes of freedom flashing’

as though I’m by the sea and it’s crashing.

No use lashing myself with hindsight’s false perceptions,

we must both rejoice in our daughter’s conception.

*

The biggest gift to poetry is the people prepared to read it.

They are not so important – the singulars of publisher and poet.

Poetry reading is for individuals not mass market,

with an audience reading though I can be a palpable hit.

*

I return again to Will Shakespeare:

his first name shows the future.

He is the sum of will-power,

oh, Will, I am writing this to you in the wee night hour.

*

If at one fell stroke I was deprived of my English ,

I could communicate in French, Russian and Turkish,

but strike me not down when I’m like a well full-primed,

all of these quatrains I remind you are rhymed.

*

My septic foot keeps me awake at night,

but I am to the bones an antisceptic.

My boot kicks against the pricks of the cynics:

they are the antianybodies, they are the outright sceptics.

*

Rant over. For my Kurdish book Nazand,

I repeat, wants especially my nature poems,

rejecting the tortured cycles, an

aberration too close to their homes.

*

It’s not so much I’m taking dictation

in swiftly writing down these lines –

they do come from deep meditation

on beauty, truth, fear and the fine.

*

It’s almost five am, haven’t slept enough,

if I don’t staying alert will be tough

at the reading of Ziba, Stephen, Nazand and Nathalie,

but I’ll chair it and they’ll see the best of me.

*

On that note, sleep rushes over me,

fifteen quatrains I’ve written at one sitting.

This night air, ink and time are virtually free,

pitting myself against the greats takes nothing out of me.

*

Musa says: ‘I’ll kill you if you die’,

in good old English not in Turkish.

I love things between serious and rubbish,

in which latter Akhmatova says poetry lies.

(new session)

These days engines are not so much turntablable

as have them on the train at both ends.

My modern quatrains run to a tight timetable,

on running them back and fro I have to depend.

*

The slowing down of my writing indicates

like ‘clever people and grocers’, I’m thinking too much,

as Zorba said. Soon my Lebanese meal will come on plates

but I won’t need to wash it down with hooch.

*

As the head gets more tired and tireder

the brain waves become more contained.

The boss here, for music he hired her,

Carolina, my friend, and tonight we’ll be entertained.

*

The left hand becomes ponderous,

relaxed writing shouldn’t be onerous.

On the bar wall there is a blunderbuss.

I hope I haven’t nonplussed you, my puss.

*

I should be used to silence

and reading between the lines,

and when I am writing the reliance

on interval interpretation is fine.

*

I like it when in grey and all petite

you say to me the international ‘bon appetit’,

though it might come out in Arabic or Portuguese,

it’s well known that English doesn’t have two words like these.

*

It’s strange – I’m almost catatonic,

but writing these words is my tonic.

I have to be very polyphonic

to find my own voice in time’s nick.

*

Actually sleep doesn’t overwhelm,

au contraire it whelms the overwhelming.

It gives the chance for well to well,

for in sleep no tears are outwelling.

*

They say: ‘Cut your poems to the bone’,

but I’d be sorry for them anorexic.

I’d prefer them to be dyslexic

like a friend, wise for whom the street is home.

*

Now I’m digesting my meal.

Soon I’ll have to read and learn inwardly:

the task ahead is daunting but real,

to keep the best poems by the weakest discarding.

*

A poet called his lines a novel,

an expansive cuisine nouvelle,

but perhaps he cooked the book –

led publishers a dance, took a better advance.

*

Nearing the end of my writing session.

Once I read for MF with John Sessions

and often have read with Julie Christie,

who rhymes with my co-translator friend Ruth Christie.

*

Why not a bit of name dropping?

It’s better than dropping friends.

I never went in for bedhopping,

never quite made them meet – those ends.

*

Remember ‘Hedgehoppers Anonymous’

and ‘Thunderclap Newman?’

These groups’ names date us.

It’s too late for me to be a ‘new man’.

*

I can’t say either: ‘It’s good news week’,

but certainly ‘something’s in the air’.

Some hearts are as tough as teak,

Elvis, have you got a million to spare?

*

This poem is more of a ragbag rattle bag than Ted’s and Seamus’s.

The drawback in being famous is

if your personality is flooded,

the crows circle, the opened ground is muddied.

*

‘Brilliant! Genius!’ I say to Carolina, the waitress

on writing that, then ‘I’m not allowed

to say that in my family.’ ‘Show-off, boasting,

full of yourself.’ But what’s wrong in writing proud?

*

Her guitar is perched on top of the wine-rack near the ceiling,

but when strings are silent it doesn’t mean they’re not feeling.

Vocal chords like actors spend a lot of time resting.

We looked at each other – the poem, the song were waiting.

*

There is a unique joy in finding the mot juste,

and to make the poem honest and just

in word, gesture and thrust is just

still possible today, just, just, just.

*

In Turkish play means drama, dance and game

and to play an instrument is to steal it.

I’m not an academic, all the same

I tell you this so you can steal and feel it.

*

I think deeper of ‘the shadow of your smile’.

‘It’s only words’, but all the while

a melody arises of a song sung well,

of being uplifted on a deep seas swell.

*

If there are many ‘tus’ do they become ‘vous’?

I am writing to you and you

and in that sense my mother tongue works better:

when we switch from vous to tu in English we don’t need to change

a letter.

*

A few days ago I had a surge of intimations of mortality,

then a pro approached me with offers of intimacy.

For so many years I’ve been intimate in my poetry

that I have laid off the physical for spirituality.

*

I recommend Shakespeare’s poetry in the Ted Hughes Selection

from Faber.

I turn Jesus round to ‘Love thyself as thy neighbour’.

As translator I’ve looked after my authors more than myself,

but now I have to look to my own and own poems’ health.

*

I’m in the Ancient Grill on Seven Sisters

road, only twenty minutes from Euston Station:

the nine thirty four train – I’ve missed her –

in my exhaustion there is jubilation.

*

I’ll drink a bottle of sparkling water

as Jesus’ water of life, as Persian ab-i-hayat

and, not blaspheming, it’ll turn into wine, though I’m at no wedding feast,

as sure as the dough of life rises with yeast.

*

When you’re truly hooked on the drugs of poetry,

how good it is for a gentle fisherman to take you off the barb.

Keep on my net, reader, this is not just rhubarb, rhubarb.

Though I may be trying, I’m trying to break your ice.

*

I say to Carolina: ‘I’ve written 100 lines

in one sitting and they’re not schoolboy lines.’

But what if the restaurant punishes me with a fine

and I am charged at £2 a line?

*

The thought police may be cruising around

even these streets, this town. They swoop without a sound

depressing levers of depression, escalating up and down escalators,

but I swear my poetry is here to protect and elevate us.

*

Carolina reads me her vivid, colourless, depressed poem

having said before ‘It’s crap.’

I say, ‘No one’s Muse? Yes, it’s crap.

You needn’t say that when you make my poems at home.’

*

If my friend the Arab poet can be a crypto-Christian

and use the New Testament as fuel

for his poems, why is it I don’t return to the Bible?

Our discourse on poetry and life was nothing if not Christian.

*

The train pulls out. I pull a poem not out of memory

but out of the pool of my learning.

Does it really matter that I’m barely earning

a living, but will the Lord provide for me?

*

The Asian waitress at Burger King

filled a cardboard cup for me

with ice and water. She was my King,

I her servant then – and the water was up for free.

*

Some sleep, others purse their lips,

their thigh bones join their hips.

I am the Singing Detective, without psoriasis. On train trips I detect

then write poems and at home correct them.

Nevertheless there is a buzz of conversation

in the carriage: ‘Are you moving soon?’

This is now a strange nation

but I’m not going to move away late or soon.

*

Shai, the Israeli storyteller, asked me to speak

part of a story in rhyme to the children’s group.

He also inspired my Cain and Abel speech

rhythm chant rant. All I can say is ‘Merci beaucoup.’

*

Indebtedness is not the same as being in debt:

one has a good the other a bad, red feeling.

I’ve gone well overdrawn this month

but my hand has written well as well as ferried food to mouth.

*

‘Sufficient unto the day’ but it is the nights that worry me

and I’d be happy if I could sleep before half past three.

Doctor asks me what I do till then?

I say emails, TV, writing listening to mellow Leonard Cohen.

*

I don’t focus on hocus pocus –

I’d rather turn the tables than turn tables.

I translated a poem about the dervish crocus

by Pir Sultan Abdal way before his conference hotel in Sivas was burned.

*

As long as you pay back the Muses with beautiful poems

all Nine will work hard for you.

In this England, these modern homes,

on public transport, these Greek maidens work for me – and for you.

*

Yes, by the sweat of my brow there is inspiration,

for breathing as Stephen Watts said is its source,

then it’s also a sweet water course

that courses across all nations.

Whom do I tell and whom not?

I don’t want to yell it out.

I have no blood clot

trying my heart out.

*

I phoned you and after a peroration

got too clinically straight to the point.

It was all in a way a preparation,

not scoring a sympathy point.

*

It’s a big secret to share –

not this swollen secreted gland.

It’s to avoid me going spare,

not that I will – it’s holding your hand.

The light is getting crepuscular,

night’s grip will be muscular,

its hand will contract into an iron fist:

no, I won’t allow that – shall I send you on the line a velvet kiss?

*

Whatever the outcome it will come out right,

it’s better not to give our souls a fright:

that’s the part that that has to continue through all attacks,

fly my soul, there will be no ack-ack.

*

I put ‘say goodbye to Alexandra leaving’

on repeat on the CD. Cohen and Cavafy,

a powerful combination. Alexandria and Alexandra,

and none of us are keening like Cassandra.

*

The late Cohen I was given by my Oxford Kurdish friend Melike.

My Cavafy I sent to Moscow with the widow of Velichansky,

so I am unable to unravel the parallel key:

though I sing along in key, I’m stranded with Alexandra

on the Alexandria quay.

*

And the morning after Cohen again moves me,

‘exquisite music’ improves me.

I thank the makers and the gift giver

and I’m rocked on the rhythms of the river.

*

I wonder if one always loses after leaving.

Yes, losses lead to grieving.

But I’ve been left and left people, women and cities

and I lost them not: that would have been giving in to self-pity.

*

‘Do not stoop to strategies like this’.

As I search for the meaning of ‘like this’,

the song stats to unravel. Yes, perhaps I am guilty of ‘like this’.

Words in poems and sung, the moment imagined instead of the real kiss.

*

On the train a man gets out his Guinness Book of Records cuttings

about lying on a bed of nails, to impress the woman opposite.

He’s in great shape and I’m undoubtedly out of it,

shape I mean – but it’s useful and fun eavesdropping, observing.

*

Another macho man on another trip

gives the woman passenger a tip:

‘When you’re tired look at the sun through the open window

with eyes closed for twenty seconds. It’ll do you fine, I reckon.’

*

The infections bit in: first the foot

then the urinary tract to boot.

Now I’m waiting for the antibiotics to boot up –

let it not be dashed from me that cup.

*

First I felt freezing

then the shivers and shakes.

Now as it’s all easing

its stock I can take.

*

So here’s why the exhaustion,

the reduced internal combustion:

an infection: the emergency GP’s comments

were accurate and well-meant.

*

I cross my legs protectively of my groin,

today no girding of my loins –

from work a whole day’s rest.

This could be bliss, this is blest.

*

It’s not only the mountains that have gone downhill,

their caves have been blasted, their minerals mined,

it is more the mountain people

who’ve now taken on plain minds.

People against word association

don’t know their proverbial onions.

As a pilgrim it’s good to be in association

with such guides as John Bunyan.

*

Like a stand up comic risks

when using the same material twice,

the lyric poet is in the same vice.

I always rhyme poem with home but it’s more than a rut in a disk.

*

In a pub or café if I know a bar person

waiter or waitress knows I write poetry,

it certainly spurs on

the writing, puts spring blossom on the tree.

*

You said, forgive me if I misquote,

it was New Year’s Eve and I never wrote

it down: ‘I have many people who love me

but few who love and influence me.’

*

Though just a poet and translator

I’ll return home later

to essay ‘tweaking’ your essay,

though tweak is a word I’d never say.

*

Time for the next leg of the journey,

on to the Royal Festival Hall,

not for a celebrity tourney –

a gathering of a few poets, that’s all.

*

High, manic, OTT, off his trolley, speedy

are all adjectives for the needy.

If you seriously read me

you don’t need value judgments to heed me.

*

There is ecstasy in craic McKane,

his book costs around ten pounds.

It’s cheaper too than crap champagne

and a different brew from Ezra Pound’s.

*

My China is Hongbin Liu:

I mean him, his flat, his books in lieu

of the country. A forcing house for characterful poems,

a veritable hothouse home.

*

The voice goes last.

On a car the exhaust exhausts first.

By my weakness I’m aghast,

let my weakness for poems quench my fatigue and thirst.

*

I don’t get a red cent for a sentence,

but hey, it’s a free country – neither do I get a prison sentence.

I’d prefer to be valued in the heart

than towards a million get a head start.

*

My stammering has come back again,

one word or two repeat their refrain.

Paid by the word as a court interpreter –

I would benefit financially from my stutter!

*

My first poem written on the screen

had all sorts of screens

in it: altar screen, TV screen,

but still I don’t know what’s going on behind those screens.

*

I not only read into but write into

my friendships. Thus they become invested

with an additional vested interest:

so it’s also literary, the quest to…

*

Pause, draw smoke to saturate the tongue

with the effects of nicotine.

Pipe smoking puts knickers in a twine:

in my state of health I know it’s wrong.

*

They say: ‘Allow him his only vice’,

but that is deadly advice.

But trying to quit tobacco

could still be one on, one back & Co.

*

If a computer in French is an ordinateur

it gives a whole new meaning to ordination.

The alternative altar screen rites,

blasphemy in some people’s sights.

*

Be not too florid about your secret

fluency. The proof is in the concrete

building of the poem, you’ll now when the exit

beckons: perhaps to get away from it all to Crete?

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.