Revolution, Revolution
At the gallery of high unstudied art
We dined with the ruling elite
Who were unruffled
To see the toilers
Pressing noses to panes
Demanding to see the Titians
And leprous Michaelangelo.
So we made revolution
Bombed Municipal Galleries
Dynamited Libraries
Incendiaried schools, colleges and clubs
Thousands of old statues
Van loads of paintings, books
This was no affectation
This was the day we had waited for.
After the Generalissimos, Tsarinas etc
Had been dispatched, we created the new film
Kino, montage
Pudovkin's Storm Over Asia
Its anti-thesis October and Strike
Kerensky as a peacock,
The new poetry, Men with Movie Cameras.
Trotsky's Agitprop train wound
Into the Don basin and the Black Sea
Red troops cleared the villages
Forced the Kulaks to their knees
Eyes bound,
Heavyfighting with the Czech Legion
In the Dnieper and Pripet marshes.
Lenin's summation on film
Turned the Formalist Poets
Into film-makers
The Anarchist Vertov
Was political trouble for the NEP
Man, Man With a Movie Camera
Bombed at the Box Office.
Brownclad NKVD men
Cleared the cinema
With automatic fire
A greater political opponent
Was Sergei Eisenstein, his film
Ivan the Terrible and Shostakovitch's
Opera Lady Macbeth of Mtensk.
The cinemas were cleared
The intellectuals went to the Gulag
The banning of subversive journals
Fell to Yagoda 'malignant dwarf'
Who was in his turn
Bumped off by Stalin
Fifty years of history
Largely wasted, built on the hopes
And fears of the proletariat
Who rioted again in Gdansk in '70
Prague, Budapest
The years wound in, much butchery
Little sense.
Snow
Snow, unalterably disdaining
On first looking to the sky
Corrosive glance, my unmatched antipathy
What were we comprehending?
Snow, unalterably disdaining
Its never-caring fallingness
Through the vaporous air, cloud bursts
Of breath-taking whiteness
Emblazoned in winter's oppression
Surrounding us with falling momentedness
Grasp the unalterability, passive nullity
Of snow, unalterably disdaining.
Chamber Music
Music from another room
Congeals the mind
Coerces senses
The gentle intercourse
Of string on string
Music of mind, memory
Wasp flits
On the pane, moth to the lamp,
Illumination of past presence
In the shadowed eye
Of the lamp's embrasure,
Hair falling,
On my shoulder
Brown eyes, brown hair
Remembrance
Rain patinas
The hammer clack
Of water on tin
This Saturday's afternoon's
Drudgery
Rememberance
TV set, pools coupon
Struggling for the memory
The dark eyes, hair
The lamplit
Dim places.
Sunday Night in Paris
The lights on the Seine
Are shuttered, fluorescent flowers of life;
The city, in the walk
From Shakespeare & Company to Finnegan's Wake pub
Is spangled, and stars shine
Like clusters of lime and orange in a glass:
I reclaim a pint of Guinness
And a whiff of Parisian
Wine and garlic, odour retrograde,
Spasm of neutral laughter in
The afterglow of the fire:
In the Chapel of St.Julien Le Pauvre
Fireworks of Vivaldi...
Possibly on a faulty Tuesday
Of a faulty year, my Ich
Rang out along the streets
And nestled in the buildings
On fire, the sunset and declined
Below the rooftops, we entered
The Labour Exchange, but there
Was no information, and we
Sat, sat, sat, on into the dusk,
As the Guinness settled,
And disappeared into
The blackened gullet of a day.
De-Decommissioning
This is a word left out
Of all dictionaries
It is our newly-formed catch-phrase,
It is wedded
To all prefixes and Urs;
Ur-city, Ur-necropolis,
Ur-Babel, before
The explosion of languages
Will render all linguisterie
As meaningless and harmless
As a rack of pistols:
Not meant for de-
Deflowering, de-humanisation
Decontamination, or one
From schooldays
Debagging,
Not that either.
Necropolis
How I remember you -
Lewis Mumford
Because, behind me now
Is the necropolis
The wind fans the flames
Of the little candles -
Placed there for the dead
The Padre Pio statue:
But this was the beginning
Of all cities, in the past-life and afterlife
Of civilization;
I wander into the city
Of the dead, it is no more
Than a row of bungalows
Of neat, little thrones.
Letter to an Unknown Woman
She lies on the sand, a Pallas Athena
I picked up in the street. She said 'I'll give you money'
You know the sad story, always unfolding:
And in the lamplight, in the hotel room, here I lie
With an unknown woman, and her story unfolds
In harsh, unsentimental detail.
The Milton we were taught at school, the Blake
Was no preparation for this unpoetic story
Too grimly real, naivety, innocence, honor
I don't know any real words; on the veranda the lights
Don't illuminate the unknowable skein
Of this woman's mind: there is nothing to say
The word love is too rough, too coarse
For this, and for all that I maintain
A chance encounter thousands of miles
From home, is as real as the brushes
With honor and destiny at the doorstep:
The images are unclear, and out of this sadness
This scene, bed, bathroom, light
Is just like the madness we all inherit
I unfold the past, the distorting, reflective
Mirror it doesn't illuminate anything
It's not like Tragedy or Epic, it's real
It hurts too much, and all our blindness
Is uncountable, as the sand grains
Pallas Athena's head stirs, I sleep too.
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