Pushkin’s “What If?”

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On his journey to Arzrum (to hell with Tsarist

Bans) Pushkin left scorching Georgia, attained

Heavenly Armenia, and met on the road the bizarrest

Sight: a rough ox-cart that strained

Up a steep hill, grimly conveying

A body Tbilisi-ward, victim of a slaying

By an enraged mob in Tehran (the men said).

Turned out to be his friend, Griboyed-

ov – poet, playwright (“Woe from Wit”), minor

Composer, wounded duellist, and lastly late

Ambassador to the perfidious Persian court.  His fate-

Filled exit was “instant and beautiful” – none finer,

Pushkin wrote.  But their posthumous meeting was fake,

Just another “what if?” artists make.

(11.1.26) v 1.01

Happy Christmas

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How I hate the trashy, tinselled, messed-up
Art-bereft display of total tat,
Putatively soul-warming, but actually a dressed-up
Pile of blatant commercialism, one that
Yields no joy or enduring happiness – indeed, 
Creates an unassuageable longing, fake
Heartache for hollow toys, only to feed
Remorse at wasted hard-earned dosh, to make
Iller the earth, heaping a rubbishy tomb,
Seeding the seas with a dust of microplastic
To blossom and scathe, in and beyond the womb,
Meting out a less of life: fantastic!
All this I scorn; and yet I love such time
Spent familial with you – despite this rhyme.

(18.12.25) v 1.0

The Third Eye

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Whose is the calm, invisible hand that points,
Directs and controls the machine that frames us and detect-
s how I totter on stumpy pins with pudgy joints,
Some sudden instinct of losses to come reflect-
ed in my boxy, chubby face?  Who is behind
The engendering camera, secretly cradling my im-
age, as a man with a fine mane of hair kind-
ly assuages the cub’s fear that is obvious to him, 
His form and stamp, mirroring mine, wedge-
d squarely against the rocks?  Years later,
Despite quotidian negligence, the photo is still leg-
ible, and the simple truth embodied in its gaze yet greater.
For always, watching and waiting lovingly, there is another,
Selfless presence, a third eye: my mother.

(16.3.1999)

Missing And Meeting Jesus

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I first met Jesus in the Scottish highlands.
I was sitting in my car, admiring the sheep-dotted moor,
When this bearded man-boy appeared.  In his hands
A sheaf of grubby paper; around his body a poor
Grimy raincoat.  He was shod with gym-shoes.
He wished to draw my portrait; I replied shirt-
ily.  Later, on the road, he thumbed a lift.  I refus-
ed, denying him for the second time.  Transfigured with hurt,
He turned up his hands and threw back his head.  Year-
s passed: another encounter, on the posh express-
Train to Vienna.  No picture, he was disguised with the biggest rump
I ever wedged against.  But as he re-appear-
ed from the bog, trouser-soiled and with a bloody finger, I guess-
ed at once, and humbly gave a plaster to this paschal lump.

(4.3.1999)

Night Reflections

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As I look across the successive waves of Clap-
ham rooftops lapping gently down to the dip
Of Northcote Road, then up to the twinkling hap-
hazard stars of the commuting Jumbos in the strip
Of worn and washed-out sky heading to Heath-
row, I note a vague similarity in the flash-
es of ruby brake-lights along the wet street beneath
Me, triggered by the pizza delivery bloke dash-
ing back to base on his L-plated puttering mo-
ped; but I think of the twin-prop job, and my lug-
age on the tarmac, surrounded by machine-gun to-
ting Indian paras, as I waited to shoot out of Srinag-
ar, above the frozen sea of Himalayan peaks, past Nang-
a Parbat, to be grazed almost by its jagged fang.

(10.2.1999)

Defining Chandeliers

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Those who have never stood under a real
Chandelier can hardly understand;
My own doleful, benighted state was reveal-
ed the moment I encountered one first-hand.
As I entered the near-perfect seven-metre
Cube of our living-room-to-be, I was gob-
Smacked by the spider-and-a-half of crystal teeter-
ing improbably above us.  Not by the vague cob-
Webs built out of the lamps’ self-cast
Shadows, which clung to the walls high up under
The rafters; in fact, it was only when I looked past
The superficial that I was filled with substantial wonder
— At how this confection gave out not just light,
But the whole space’s length, width and height.

(13.12.1998)

The Day I Connected

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In the early hours, at the turning of the year (9
3 - 94), when all the tess-
ellated pieces of then high-technology had fin-
ally clicked into place — though I squirm now to confess
These were only a modest Windows 3.1, 
Tattam’s stack (as shareware — good on yer, Pete),
A complimentary Demon account, hellish but fun
(God bless the little devils), and, to complete
My toolset, the first graphical browser Mosa-
ic — I was jiggering around, and it happened.  Bits blurr-
ed across the Net, and a spinning globe proved
That at last I had joined — logged on to the NCSA
At the UIUC, with its mighty, mythical Ur-
URL.  That night, for me, the earth moved.

(12.12.1998)

Amazed In Mantua

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The Ducal Palace.  Past countless halls filled
With broken busts, cold friezes, ghost-
s of frescoes on pitted plaster, inanimate chilled
Hearths and gorgeous, ragged tapestries, through foxy
Galleries, long and lost, snaking across flag-
s of hardest Carrara - and not forgetting the most
Odd picture I have ever beheld: a crag-,
gy isle, and round it a labyrinth cast craz-
ily into the sea - up a stepped, helical part, 
A ramp for Gonzaga steeds, there in that boxy
Camera is a staggering sight: the steady gaze
Of a petrified Mantegna, trapped in a fiction, in a fact,
Of his own making, the Artist married with Art
- As if that Gorgon called Genius had caught him in the act.

(5.2.1998)

The Passage Of Isotropy

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Physics assumes – more or less has to – that its great
And holy laws remain the same wherever
You go; and this, therefore, is the unstate-
d idea that informs all our lives (though never
Propounded as such).  But I have discovered a land,
Beyond an unsuspected frontier, where the rules
Are much different.  Now, the cup I once held in my hand
So firmly, squirms and evades the grasp; stools
And tables that yesterday stood so obedient have start-
ed to inch slyly forward, nudging me cheek-
ily; while previously rock-solid walls secretly part
To swallow up the very things I seek.
From this, I deduce a lemma of my own invention:
Isotropy breaks down for the fourth dimension.

(28.1.1998)

Montezuma’s Head-dress

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As I wandered idly through some ex-Hapsburg eth-
nological museum heaped up with the lumber of emp-
ire – odd foreign objects acquired through the death
Of tedious mad uncles, the marriage of unkem-
pt and idiot sons, and the bribery of oleaginous court-
iers – I came to a dark room.  There, mounted
On the blackest of velvets, I found what I had sought
For years.  The history books have always recounted
That a few score marauding Spaniards conqu-
ered a million war-like Aztecs.  Now I saw
How a bunch of good-for-nothing, greasy hidalgos, pong-
ing of garlic and sweat, could seize a nation through poor
Montezuma: to view them as gods was just natural for a king
Whose head bore this delicate, iridescent thing.

(12.9.1997)

Penelokan

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Out of Ubud the long straight road
To Penelokan is a good fifty miles of up,
Until the town itself, precariously stowed
On the lip of the huge crater’s deep cup.
In the centre, the still-smouldering cone
Of the live volcano; to the right, a blue cres-
cent moon-shaped lake, and to the left, black stone-
cold lava in a sheet.  A site of paradise, no less.
I gazed; and could have gawped more, had
A local boy not tried (“Only look...”) to eke
Out a life by selling me his gew-gaws.  I cussed
Him away, rude and imperious.  This was a bad
Move: clouds fell over the valley and peak
Like a circular shroud.  The Balinese gods are just.

(29.7.1997)

The Tragedy Of...

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Since it brings ill-luck to name it, let’s
Say I am like the monarch of the Scottish Play:
No matter how fair (or foul) it gets,
I pace out my life from day to day,
Happily revelling in each present and motley delight.
I should be weaponed up on my battlements, scan-
ning for the wood that will come, the great might
That may prevail.  Yet I’d be more than a man
Had I the mettle and valour enough to see
Off the ultimate army – a fearsome, ancient en-
emy that affords us neither hope nor mercy – composed of three
Hateful witches called How, Where and When.
In the end, I can only wait, an impotent Macbeth
(Whoops, I said it), to be toppled by that varlet Death.

(23.7.1997)

Surabaya Johnny

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Surabaya airport, Java.  The date
Doesn’t matter.  I first noticed the man
As he puckered and sucked his smouldering Havana with a great
To-do, sat back and proceeded to fan
Himself with a battered old copy of the thoughts of The Great
Helmsman.  He wore a linen suit and tan
Shoes, had hair en brosse and a face whose state
Flickered between weariness and wiliness.  But this is a sham.
What I saw was an Asian woman, aglow
With love as she dropped water with undiminish-
ed patience into the eyes of her stone-still child.  (And so,
- Ta-da! - the sonnet’s obligatory couplet to finish:)
In the light of that mother for whom her son was so bonny,
What am I, but some Surabaya Johnny?

(21.7.1997)

Golden Oldies

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It’s a sure-fire hit with the general pub-
lic when the bug-eyed monsters descend from their improbably rough-
looking flying saucers and proceed, not to rub
Out the primitive earthlings, but to take the very stuff
And essence of their minds and to convert it into a small,
Friable icosahedron to take back
Home as a witty souvenir.  And it isn’t at all
Far-fetched.  As a mundane routine I stack
Up every digital word I have written, and the data
And tools I need for those I one day may pen,
On a single, shining CD-ROM.  Greater
Compilations than mine galactically man-
y have made; but I’m over the moon that when dull and old
A young, alien me lives immortal in gold.

(20.7.1997)

Herd And Scene

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Did Herr Foreign Minister Wolfgang Schüssel really
Call the Bundesbank’s boss a “right old sow”?
The leading Austrian weekly magazine spent nearly
Ten pages going royally (and imperially) to tow
-n on the subject, as it weighed this, and pondered that,
In an orgy of Viennese navel-gazing.  Whether you
Know about the bores in question is simply a matt
-er of herd: ours (oh!) or theirs (who?).
This is yesterday’s News, nothing less
Than history – itself just grubby local tittle-
tattle where meaning is farrowed only later, when the mess
Has cut its cord to the past, and been cleaned up a little;
Then base “Did you hear?”s and “Did you see?”s
Become, behind the scenes, pigging Thucydides.

(19.7.1997)

In Mozart’s Garden

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Act four, scene three: a rich,
Intricate landscape.  Figaro enters in a cloak,
Bearing a lantern.  Dark is the night in which
All find themselves, when, to the sound of a broke-
n chord, masks are dropped, hands touch
And hearts are mended.  After the torments of this Mad
Day, its folly and caprices, the confusion of much
Else besides identities, it is time we bade
Farewell and lit the fireworks.  Let us hasten 
Then, friends, to the dance, to the game, content
In our hard-won knowledge of the need for mutual pardon;
For thus we shall be cherished (if chasten-
ed), as we follow the beat of the march transcendent-
al, at eve, in Mozart’s evergreen, D major garden.

(18.7.1997)

“to proto alouminokharto”

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“You will already know 1002
Other uses for Sanitas...” the wily
Hellenic marketing exec softly coo-
s.  And it is true: it did indeed prove highly
Handy in our London kitchen, that roll we brought
Back from the hillside flat in Kioni, and which cost
860 drachmas when it was bought
From the village shop.  But never will it have crossed
The mind of that modern teller of tales
The 1003rd: as sample, reminding
Us how, at dusk, at the end of his toil,
Helios bent over Levkas towards the mainland vales
Of night, and turned the Ionian Sea into a blinding
Sheet, a fiery surface of shook foil.

(18.6.1997)

In Transit

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Arriving, I found a queue in the gardens, and so ob-
viously joined it.  A pasty, spotty, crop-haired youth
With a rifle (the special essence and limit of whose job 
Was to block admittance to the Vilnius consulate uncouth-
ly) gestured with a thumb towards an office.  Here,
I waited, before being called to fill
In some Cyrillic forms, passing on to a counter (mere-
ly to obtain a stamp) and then proceeding to the cashier's till
Where I would pay (outrageously) for the visa.  But first, what
I needed was a photo; so upstairs, past unravell-
ing electrics, to a babushka with a Polaroid who put the fin-
ishing touches to this epic of the Byelorussian state.  Not
That I was asking much: just to travel
Through a country I was already technically in.

(16.6.1997)

Ubi Sunt?

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Where am I, then?  Pilies gat-
ve, Daukanto aikšte... broad, empty streets,
Delapidated rococo palaces, poor squat
houses (lop-sided and crumbling), feats
Of stucco-work hidden behind soaring white
Northern baroque facades.  Up on the Toom-
pea, down Kohtu and the long Pikk Jalg...tight
Cobbled alleys, walls of ochre, a dome,
Towers and turrets visible over gird-
ling battlements.  So where can I be?  In fact,
Vilnius and Tallinn, though in a way you’d not have erred
Much guessing Buda or Prague.  But, to be exact, 
These Baltic capitals lie centuries further back,
Offering all that the others – and we – sadly now lack.

(3.4.1997)

Maths, Murgatroyd And Murder

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A Saturday.  Maths (of course) the first class
For VIc.  Multiplying the times he has done
So, Mr Kerman checks the roll-call, pass-
ing down the exiguous set of unknowns.  Only one 
Name has to be subtracted: Alan Mur-
gatroyd.  Off sick is the number he
And his mates have hashed together.  But with too-per-
fect rigour, as if a step axiomatic to the nth degree, 
I add: “Up at the Albert Hall, sir, queu-
ing for the Proms.” Decades after, I gather he’s died
In an easily avoided car smash.  I calculate if those few
Seconds and their centimetres had counted, if I was the divide.
For at root, however well or badly we behave,
The sums of our actions are those we will kill or save.

(31.3.1997)

Nostalghia For Bagno Vignoni

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The Piazza d’Acqua.  Andrej Tarkovsky came
Here, rhyming with his creation Gortchakov (a poet
Like his father), who, in turn, would stroll the same
Time-worn locations, brought (and misled, so it
Seems) by the guide Eugenia, following in the foot-
steps of his compatriot, an eighteenth-century composer, un-
named.  The home-sick writer finds himself put
On the spot by the lunatic Domenico: he is the one
Who must bear across the waters a lit candle to save
The world – and himself.  The ersatz biographer at last
Traverses the almost-empty baths’ wet pav-
ing, and somehow regains Mother Russia, and his past.
No such tangled plot drove us to the square;
And unlike others we walked on air.

(29.3.1997)

Sailing To Tuonela

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Arriving at the terminal hall of the western docks
In Helsinki, I entered into limbo.  I thought
I’d hop on the early boat to Tallinn, but flocks
Of Finns, obviously on the razzle, had already bought
Up every ticket.  Weirdly, they milled around
With empty suitcases and holdalls, rather as though
For a stay that did not require clothes.  I found
A place just before departure.  So
Lucky, it seemed – until I boarded what
Turned out to be a ship of fools, packed to the gunwhales
With merrymakers drinking like there was no tomorrow.  Blunder-
ing outside, I saw in the distance a dazzling spot
Amidst the morning’s night: a swan, circling over the funnels
Of a vessel – also full, but fathoms under.

(28.3.97)

The Distance

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A lad, apt for nonsense and foolish acts,
I walked (alone) a new-found city, along a road
(The fifth) of Heaven and Hell – or so, when taxed
To name it, the natives had me believe.  Bestowed
(At first) with massy civic monuments
Of classic and rococo cast, sudden there came
A switch, as stark as white to black. Hence-
forth, a dismal view of dwellings, shame-
fully neglected, decrepit, the people poor, down-
Trodden, sad.  And as I passed among
Them, most fixedly at me nigh all the town
Did stare.  Then, a lady of pitying mien and young,
Said: “You do know you're in Harlem...?”  And I was much
Amazed: for I’d heard that day not a word of Dutch.

(27.3.1997)

No. 1

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Serried ranks of smelly old men
In dubious raincoats had fingered repeatedly
The plastic cover of this by-now ven-
erable copy from the Epsom public library
Gramophone collection — or so it seemed
To this pasty and prim 1970s ad-
olescent.  A shot of the Hungarian Quartet gleamed
Weakly from the dust-jacket front, a bad
And blurred duotone; and on the back,
Ponderous pontifications — long,
Enjambed.  But when I heard the cello’s four
Rising notes to heaven, I knew I was smack
Bang in the middle of the cleanest, most lucid and strong
Classical music ever to hit a score.

(5.1.1997)

Centre Point

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We sat, passive world-watchers, in the Touch-
down Café at the top of a litter-filled Tottenham Court
Road.  Opposite reared up the much-
bruited “modernist masterpiece” – thought 
By many to be devoid of inhabitants bar
A haughty CBI and a gaggle of homeless deep
In its unlovely bowels.  Between us, on the pavements, as far
As the falcon’s eye can see, teem the peop-
le: a blue-skinned African with passionate eyes;
A girl (half-Japanese), translucent in the sun;
A shaggy derelict, with a scab on his head like a prize;
A Latvian punk slouching around for fun.
Here is a turning-point, where the centre cannot hold;
But this time, it’s good, for we are so weary and old.

(28.9.96)