John Ennis

Yes, through dry and ever hollied
dunes, pale granite sands, I have known
the salt crests come with amber. Nights
I never slept, naked, stretching
at birdlight. I spent my days
striding up and down your garden
up the peaks and down dark
folleyed glens; cascading frenzy
poured out of me in happy gulps.

All I could do was grope for pages, my orchard
spirit shaking words.

I still laugh. I sigh, heave
of living. I wander fiery
now that I possess platform to speak,
stumble with incoherence,
can't form words. Dumbest of priests
laugh at my plight.

My lines add no nectar to combs.
With you, I could put the run on malady,
undress my cloudy brow, focus
on something practical.
I pray I will love
with the feint touch
of the butterfly

my heart still beats for, stands
apart. I stall in the season of confessed
and fallow earth. I'll fold my decline away
before the night arrives so that the stars
may the brighter candle my blank pages
after twilight. I sense I'll be made luminous
in my weakness where the ground's slippery
as a childhood rockpool.

I hope to die as I lived out my best work
loved, and giving love, and, at the extreme,
railing that love was not celebrated.
To each his scaffold. Losing the head,
what of it?

Thomas?
Do not
addle me with unctions.

Love that sees us come
hassles the very brambles
in our fiery paths
as friends.
...

1

During Hitler's War, he lit the eyes of prisoners
like stars in a frosty January, soldiers in their hundreds
crowding round him and his première:
a froggy joke at best to Stalag guards, Messiaen
humoured piano in concentration as a soldier.

April and May dawns in his mouldy bunk moulding in his mouth
rusts in that place of starvation, scarce a snail round,
waiting for the first bird calls to jot down as given,
he could not wander the woodlands beyond
the barbed wire to animate the chorus.

That addled him a lot. How in hell to play the piece . . .
The best he could muster was a cello walking wounded
all three strings wailed Messiaen and Henri Akoka
Jew, clarinetist lucky with a clarinet; the old key-sticking piano
Messiaen'd play himself, Jean Le Boulaire, violin,
rehearsals six to lightout in the splashing washrooms,
and there were the ad lib birds, his playing with them on the score
four of the seven movements with the weeping cello
Akoka whimpering it's too difficult. "You'll manage,"
Messiaen growled.

Swastikas sniffed at the bars on the page: Messiaen's
white lie, "it's about doves."

Laughing, they left the madman with his ear cocked
for the birds across barbed wire. "It is all love."

Huts in Gorlitz all chipped in, a new cello for Etienne.

2

Górecki, at the piano, recalled how as a Polish boy
with other boys he ran into Auschwitz when the Nazis left

so many bones, they just kicked them round the place
sometimes a callow skull or two for soccer

and, then, Górecki, he turned away to choke in chords.

3

From daybreak his two manic fists painted the wheeling crows,
the caws of crows, over yesterday's hailstone-battered wheat.
Lightning storms. Deluges. Gales. These pass for weather now.
The sun nails him and his flaming hair out mid-way in our wheat.

Reapers waiting for Van Gogh to finish, we grudge him
one more day of easel and palette.

His eyes into mine swung sharp as scythes, so I got down
(let the cleg-bitten horse go feed a bit on the corn),
offered him mug and more of buttermilk,
but he was too far snared, nor took the drink,
knew he was wasting time as the heavens split and crashed.

Under a rippling poplar after we'd eaten, drunk, pissed,
we heard the shot or one more rip of thunder,
saw him stagger like a drunk out of the corn.

We cut, bound, stooked and stacked his acre
in an hour.
...

My wrists
with their stumps
wave down to Sister Assumpta
in the nave.

I grow soft as boiled rice
Help me, Lamb-Boy, to rejoice.

While I've my own grainy masses,
red tissues in flames, my face
has neither tear ducts nor tears.
I share my obligation
with roof-nesting stares.

He epistles me,
lances his gospel in my side;
flesh credos from my thighs
in a private jeremiad.

At the bread and wine
I bite on one more screech
recall how daffodils
kissed my toeless feet.

I lift my heart
as directed,
wait for more wastage
as expected.

At the consecration
of his body and blood
I could almost believe
in a powerless god.

They rise for the Pater Noster
and I worry about my backbone (will
it hold for long?), rest my head
on coldness of limestone.

Agnus Dei, Agnus Dei . . .
I met you in the pastures,
the bleating of your voice
endures in my ears.

From the communion rails
none dares walk up to me.
I have a robin who picks
dead morsels from me.

She must feed her family,
all her beak-open young.
Anything goes it seems
as final hymns are sung.

Time to scamper down and away
before the wholesome crowd mills
at the doors, waves.

No speech in me anymore, no fight,
no testes anymore; O Love, be calm;
at least today brings sunlight
southwind like a balm.
...

I walk the gravelled arteries
of the Split Hills
and the Long Hill Esker;
all 5k, with scarce grass
thinning like a scalp,
touch in my passing
ash, hawthorn, oak, an Irish whitebeam;
finger primrose,
kneel to bluebells,
bittercress.

Pungency, and its babies,
with narrow leaves
appear, then disappear
among the esker stones.

On the old and active faces of hillsides
yellow-wort and carline thistle
beam in midland weathers.
Millennia like children
hear the polar torrents cease,
watch the arctic ice retreat
till the gravels layered like the couples over there
settle into hills.

All that celtic entourage with kings
righting their broaches
across warring centuries
on their speeding chariots
sweeps across the esker.

Here, years ago, Tyrrell and his men
sabotaged the British.

The land shrugs them off for pity's sake
like night mists, like recurrent nightmares
wakes in a pristine lake with yellow gorse
blackthorn blooms, a marsh with slender sedge.

Not many walking all over it, like heralds
slim students like botanicals
where it's hazelled on the knolls.
...