Solomon Foot of Middlebury
Steered the incorporate body to be free
Through racketing clamour and dreadful din
During the war, the wages of sin.
He taught me, hair white as proverbial ghosts
To reckon with, grapple with, hellish hosts.
The grey photographer, midst the dead
With his kit of ministerial red
Wafts peripatetically there to here
‘Two bombings we will have this year’.
The queen in fine pink, porphyry
Like a corpse beneath a cherry tree
Laughed a mad little laugh with a damasked tone
Deserting Cincinnaty the throne
Perched in the rafter of John Adams’s barn
On the holy isle of Lindisfarne .
Lin Tai Yu the vermillion pearl
Indolent in the sacred whirl
Ceremonial yet profane
...And to the grand courtiers vouchsafed the cure
Saying ‘with this may the air be pure
‘With this be transformed the hearts of Man’.
His Holiness laughed in Lateran.
Spiralling paradox demolished art
And stamped the void on the guiltless heart
To leaven it with holy yeast
In preparation for the priest.
Chanting haditha up he came
The one who doled out credit and blame
From the mountain to which Muhammad had gone
Reliving what the Umayyads had done.
Kannon went up the spiral stair
In pure white, with a blue lotus in her hair
To meet with the hairy man fresh from the wild
Sullen, black-bushy, demon-child
Sleeping in beds of manure and hay
Through the storm-tossed night and windblown day
Myrddin, the madman doubly hallowed.
In the western sky the horizon yellowed.
The sun set over Central Park
And wafting up from chthonic dark
The alligators came to sport
In the cavernous temple and the sea-girt fort.
Richard Icarus is his name
To bless the irrevocable is his game.
The women of the court with heaving breasts
Laboured over the rooves to the swallows’ nests
To find the seaside treasure there.
Niamh combed her seaweed hair.
The gods in the sea, Llyr and Mananan
Suspired in the dreams of Lateran.
With carnelian sides and ecstatic design
The warship of the world was tossed upon the brine
Through the islands (where the White Towns are)
Between Poloesque ‘near’ and the truly far
Steaming off the capes of Cathay
Til the sun rose again by the deeply swift bay.
In the poles, all hands hauled frozen ropes
Daring not to voice vain human hopes.
‘When will the Lord of Cauldholm come?’
‘When all the earth, to the sound of a drum
‘Thrills the triumphal martial blast
‘Keeps the feast but not the fast.’
Phallogocentric kings man the seas
With fleets of twisted argosies.
Flimsy cloths and coral crags
Are carried from shore to shore of slags
And middens whose odours inflame the soul.
The sea-bells together mournfully toll.
Between the same and the difference
Poor Richard! He gave us our ‘simple sense’
To know and not to wonder at
Society. Dick Whittington’s cat
Alighted upon a gabled cliff
Looked down on the sea, saw a painted skiff
And crossed the oceans to the darkest shore
Where foreign princes had gone before.
Mr Inverse, mightily he
Rallied his forces to victory.
‘Forward! For England
‘Come from your fields, come from your forge
‘Come young, come old, come gents and ladies
‘Come Sheas and Callaghans, Costellos and Bradys!’
So he spoke, in agitated tones
In a horrid voice like grating stones
And his men, they rattled their sabres with cheers
That all the powers of all the years
With human strength could not contain.
‘The liberty of England
I want to communicate what I feel
Through force of words or force of steel.
The man who owns the old dog and old cat
Is stricken down in Astolat.
‘Take care of Puss and Fido.’ Hope
That the world inside a kaleidoscope
Endeavours to charge the threefold whirl
Into the baroque tricolour pearl
Future gospel solidified
To the shadows a most meet bride
Made flesh; with neither grief nor glee
It hangs in the rafters of Senso-ji.
Schizophrenia shrilly calls
Through the Emperor’s paper halls
While the Empress from the tomb
Calls them: ‘Come to the inner room.’
Going there we found her mad
With eyes of the dying, abysmally glad.
‘Spring has come to the desert,’ she said
‘Therefore let us have our thanks-giving bread.’
The desert flowers all along
Blossomed, and the strange birds’ song
Echoed through the clear dry sky
Prophesying and to prophesy
‘The real you was always prettier than
‘The ‘you’ they wanted to have’; ‘til when
Burros came galloping over the plain.
Electric fires in the brain
Will hail from Dan to Beersheba
The first deserter of the Law.
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