Peter Porter

This page insists that I explain myself

my poems are over-structured, I am told
but I'm only making good use of my brain

the letters I send you never say
what I want to say, but does it matter
since I write to you concerning me

I let these poems fill-in the proper forms
space is tight, rectangles
for iambs, occasionally trochees
keeping rhythm steady on its feet

but somebody says to be serious
is the way to control your poems - Frost,
Edward Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, Graves -
always out there on the track
audiences cheering them on forever

the loneliness of the long-dictioned rhymer
dining out with novelists and critics -
consider what happens when our words
become professional - literature
forgets it's feudal, its narrow kingdom
of palaces and prayer-wheels
...

Moses had a trusted follower
at a level lower than his own
who helped to carry down the Decalogue
from Sinai. What's not well-known
is that the Tablets this time came
with special offers, if he filled the form in,
of incisive and assured declensions
of parallel religions from established
and adjacent states, Assyria, Egypt
and a place called Pontus. He shook them out
over his waste-papyrus basket -
they made quite a clatter. Nothing, he said,
can match the matchless offers of the Lord.

Later there were so many unsolicited
additionals to be discounted.
Along with his Vita Nuova, Dante
was obliged to include a CD
of extracts from the Summa Theologica
and an offer of a year's subscription
to the whole concordance. Paradise Lost
was similarly intruded on
by Affairs of State in tiny type
endorsed by Andrew Marvell
on reproduction House-of-Commons-
headed paper. Many decades on, Mein Kampf
was outweighed by its onanist inclusions.

Today we know that when tomorrow dawns
all separate offers will be off -
a crowded planet's just an insight
into Heaven or its still invisible
other side, as Hell, and souls will be
unseparate as Blake's hunched grains of sand.
But this we cannot feel because we clutch
our own Complete and Finished Works
and have been promised readership
and plaudits. Is it my impulsive notes,
my sugared sonnets or my wizened words
you'll love? I have a dusty disc which played
will cry and cry and will not be switched off.
...

No-one has ever been his equal
Yet quizzing him in doggerel
Is any Tribune's timid right:
All language is dispersed in light.

The Ordinary sunk in ordinariness
Say he is bald and hard to guess.
The Archons think to find a focus
Might tear its petals from the crocus.

Country Wisdom's top Townee,
His coat-of-arms Complicity -
The bubo of the world when squeezed
Is odium, yet some are pleased.

The Adam Smithy of our need
Commands both vile and pedigree'd.
So Mouldy, Feeble and Bullcalf
Get pricked; the audience gets to laugh.

His works are like Miss Emin's tent -
She sleeps with all, not just the bent,
But stencilled on the flapping walls
Legitimation calls and calls.

Music does it better, so
He has a journey shortly to go
But never come to that fine palace
Up a beanstalk from the phallus.

We writers want him as our Prince
A crazy public to convince
But would he even place a bet
On redemption via the Internet?

The dark house and detested wife:
After marriage, get a life!
Start out defeated - the glory is
Your Art shall seem vitorious.
...

It must be separate from its maker,
his leg-gummata and the sound
of dream's Beethoven - pure
bullying of all who love
his ‘none-so-great-as-me' outreach,
while the root position stays
in soul's retreat from syphilis's
demi-moral storm. The music,
like Vespasian's coins, will never smell
of anything behind the foreskin. Time
has told its fractions - use your voice,
this breaking world is crutch enough
to be a scaffold for the nowhere near.

And her inscription of despair
affords a little time to listen:
she was devoted to a more
oblivious obsession, yet some days
there would be space for music
and a favourite piece would play
among the circling furniture,
beyond the deafness of drawn curtains.
Strange that I can see them, stepping from
the record sleeve, three nuns in habits,
inhabiting E Flat,
empowered as angels to command
a truth more generous than love's.
...

She was the ship I sailed in, or
We twinned as just one ship,
A Mother and a Son, assured
Of one another's grip.
We guessed it wouldn't be for life,
A boy becalmed, a seasoned wife.

Whatever, there would come the storm,
The light propitious fade;
Suburban living was the norm,
A slovenly parade.
Which one would fall, which doomed to drown,
If climbing up were settling down?

The storm would blow us separately -
For her, poor doctoring,
Stifled in her own blood's sea,
I, at her skirts to cling.
Then Education's sad voice hit
My ears and I joined mine to it.

Out on the selfish ocean tossed,
The storm now just a squall,
Apocalypse the only Cross
At all empirical:
My placement was below the salt,
A setting? Or a Primal Fault?

A second ship - this was another
Woman marked to die.
No strong resemblance to my Mother,
But, like her, serving my
Absurd disintegration, taking
Her need beyond a quick forsaking.

Mixed metaphors sail on apace,
The ship goes down and then
A second time the splintered face,
A Castaway again -
A pair of ragged claws might row
Me safely from the undertow.

Quotations like a flag unfurled
In cruel convenience
Showed my position in the world,
The past my present tense.
As mushrooms, rose the childish faces,
A succulence of desert places.

As if in time's conjunctions, I
Flew past the sugared peaks
Of Greenland - portholes bled the sky
For Frequent Flyer geeks -
Life had to make its proffered run
Between extinction and the sun.

Such was the beach I scrambled up,
Like Crusoe seeming saved,
The storm still simmered in its cup
Which through my dreams had raved.
The mind, that navigating hand,
Now sought to drown me on the land.
...

And you, little birds, are waiters but not smiling,
hopping at the sad indignity of that man
(he said Detriot was home) on his second
giant burger; with your quick in-and-out
besieging tables sweetened by the sugared sky
of Cairo, you mock the nicest men with napkins
on their shoulders — would they snap at scraps? —
and your big rivals, we'd call them crows
but they are dignity itself in brown tuxedos,
peering from high perches of a Disney Ramasseum,
speaking faultless American forever,
they must be Prefects of the Underworld!

The little dust we drop our crumbs upon
seethes like the Red Sea Crossing — if this is history
asks a powerless nation, can mere birds
patrol the valley of the Kings each morning?
Three sparrows who have ĥotep somewhere
in their suffix drop beside our just uncovered
breakfast tomb: all food, they say,
is like another wave upon the Nile, a dream
worth sleeping for — the gods immured in obelisks
consider everything; their High Priests clad in aprons
are opening umbrellas as the sun begins
to climb above the masts of potted palms.
...

And here I will sacrifice all rhyme,
that is, I will avoid any of the beautiful
consequences which may intrude on patterns
infinitely more inter-calculable — I shall
be in a world of egregious simplicity,
protected by a cold dependency.

Yet I bungled my own death,
kept alive for days trying to analyse
for friends and fellow-architects
why melancholy has a concave shape
and whether Heaven, ordered to design
a ceiling, would stand in its own light.

Seeing is beneath believing, which is why
air is stonier than its vista — as in my portrait
the set-squares and the compasses make Signs
of the Cross more Christian than the Cross
upon my breast and sleeve. The Pyramids
were told that weight was Incarnation.

Socrates died of a morphic sort of rictus,
Seneca in a steamy froth of blood,
I with a muddle of indignity and plans.
To kill oneself as perfectly as a line
will reach a tributary line
is masonry continuing in one stay.
...