Fresh Air and The Story of Molecule

A poem from Home and Russia, Number 1

Sputnik over En Zed

The rugby field’s on fire. Its giant Sheriffs,

H and H, stand guard between the darkness and my dreams. The grownups smoke while we, whose lives have hardly started, turn and burn our sausages on green and whittled sticks.

Sparks shanghai the stars. Our mothers’ fear, discovered in the shiver of their hats, provokes my cowboy confidence that I, redhot and wild, keep up this Sausage Sizzle and the World, ten-gallonned on my head – whose fatness leaves no room for doubt. But they, who feel they think they know with age some end to all this food and fire and light, look up without the make-believe of hope, and watch while Something bleeps and blinks through Outer Space.

I’ve ditched my star. The Sputnik jitter runs in circles round me still, and my corral is not OK: and somewhere out there, somewhere out of range it winds its question marks across the sky, and bleeps at childish law.

The goalposts gleam. We wrap our sausages in bread and butter. Mother smiles. It’s gone.

Two Still Lifes Painted at the Subject

1 Ode to Autumn for Sarah

A throttled bramble, raspberry horror, jerks in coldbright wind: and rearing, throe-mad, scores the weak white sky with thorns. Autumn works its pogrom: frost-limp nettles, gasping haws, the red and yellow fit of strangled fruit, and traitored colours of the fire become the symptoms of complaint. A bandaged sun drills glassglare puddles in the rut-mud, numb and white. And every prickle, stock and root shakes and shuts. Unknown black birds hoot the memory of plenty: there is none.

Dull evergreens, expressionless and cold: bonestraw grassclumps: clouds laid on the sky like ointment gauze: whipped withies hold their last giant bowl-leaves hazard-high.

Who has not seen you, stretchered on the wind, amidst your battlefield? Two silos freeze faroff in cold-singed fields: and cows present their frozen rumps, unmoving, to the trees.

The scratching fitful hedgerows, wrack and ruined, hem the lane: and branchfalls, sodden-skinned, rimed and rotten, finger where you went.

Three Poems Written in Mongolia

1 the Mongolian Women’s Orchestra enter the Mongolian Women’s Band with the years, whose music, theirs and theirs, like language learned, inevitable, red and super-sound, outplays the days the days that made it mine and beauty beauty adds to it – its stir, its wink, its melt, and anything that shines – this is The Horse that Overtook the Wind: the little men that ride the plain on hearts that will not race again whose hoofbeats knock on heaven’s door – they will not come back anymore the history of hope is short: it has one chapter – Youth. I thought that memories would make me wise but nothing comes as no surprise across the windy open spaces briefly bright their shining faces do with beauty then are gone – the horses gallop on and on and if I played my darndest darndest card, who have no beauty now, no more, what tricks

I take have not the hearts they had before.

The Horse that Overtook the Wind is done, and beauty beauty raced it well – its stir, its wink, its melt, and anything that shines