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Trattorie
Unlike the Jungle Pheasant
Itinerary Deferred
Rainsong
Off-Season
Iona
Ministry of Waiting
Worms
Galleria Spada
Rhymes: An Irregular Sonnet on their Elusiveness

1

THE HUNGARIAN WAITRESS IS THE ONLY ONE
who understands even a little English
as two Japanese newly-weds put on
a lesson in etiquette so deeply elaborate
it might be ritual, a free table-show
that has the locals laying down their forks,
just short of applause: Tenderness squared,
how in turn she serves him, he serves her,
now improvises a spaghetti sandwich,
now pours twin-glasses of cut-price wine
three-wheelered in weekly from Frascati:
‘Brindisi!’/ toasts all round: A Peruvian
and then this British divorcee grin
ruefully from our separate corners.

2

ALL AT ONCE THE AIR ABRIM WITH VOWELS
as back in the kitchen a cook launches
into ‘Le donne son mobili’
accompanied by clattering plates.
Noses ultra-Roman in their dimensions –
friendliness of the Syrian to my right
balanced on a knife-edge, across his face
scars that might make a gladiator proud.
The regular in the corner winks
and sighs. Beneath a hotly-spiced cloud
now enter a heap of kidneys from heaven –
every seven minutes or so the next train
for Lazio parallel to the window
and trailing whistles, thunder, oblongs of light.

First published in Liminal Pleasures, Issue 1, Spring 2006

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UNLIKE THE JUNGLE PHEASANT he had no alluring tail-feathers to shimmy at her, no exotic symmetries, no stripes and tufts and eyelets. Instead he wrote (and often rewrote) letters, paying as much attention to style as possible, embellishing the margins with greetings labels provided by the GPO. Sometimes she would reply, sometimes not.

Like the jungle pheasant, however, he was not put off. If anything, her indifference made him more determined, awakened a patience which might almost have been genetic; as though this is what he had been waiting for all his life, who knows, even before it as well. Again he would clear a space round his word-processor and, readjusting her photograph to a more intimate angle, redouble his efforts.

Three, four years, a hundred letters and the odd sonnet later, she overlooked his imperfect rhymes and agreed to marry him.

Now the only letters he writes her are inside his head. She, on the other hand, leaves him notes on a daily, even hourly basis: ‘Hoover your study.’ ‘Get another packet of cornflakes + some milk from Safeways.’ ‘Petrol for the car; phone bill; gas bill; ironing.’ Then, dangling from the handle of the locked bedroom door a capitalised: ‘SLEEPING. DO NOT DISTURB.’

Her photograph has disappeared. Unlike the jungle pheasant he writes furtive and costly letters to his lawyer. Meanwhile, somewhere between practicality and fury, her notes multiply: ‘Empty wastebin.’ ‘Clean tops in kitchen.’ ‘Sweep patio.’ Returning home, he finds them scattered like small discontented leaves throughout the house. ‘Ring Building Society.’ ‘Renew tv licence.’ ‘Close doors softly.’ ‘Key under mat.’ Sometimes he reads them, sometimes not ...

Sociologists, observing from afar, prepare to add one more figure to their statistics. The shift in behaviour patterns from what prevailed, say, half a century ago has been well-documented, although as yet the explanation is by no means definitive.

First published in Brangle, ed. Carol Rumens

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(Tylos Hotel, Manama)

THE HANGOVER WHICH HAS OVERSTAYED ALL DAY
Shifts me from horizontal to horizontal –
None of them quite the right shape or fit.
To eat or not to eat, that is the question,
Mind being willing, but the stomach weak.
Zairean highlife through the earphones
Outdoing any medicine or tonic
A lilting million notes over, I scribble this
To salvage something from the hourly wreckage,
A feckless penance. Plans for tomorrow
Take on extra polish as if to say
Such a hiatus may sometimes be necessary,
A journey in itself to reach where we were
Already yet re-find it strange and new;
With a thud at once real and imaginary,
The slough of indolence ups sticks
Then vanishes humming through my head’s backdoor.

First published in Poetry Ireland Review

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MONTHS IT LASTED: HEAT’S SHIMMERING LEGIONS
Encamped about the town, the air asthmatic glass
And with the dust disease’s strange taxonomy
Of names, the brain spinning moons on fire.

Now, beating up on the xylophone of roofs,
The rain: Once again the season’s miracle,
Wands awakening the shouts of children,
Greenly opening earth’s locked doors…

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BLOWN IN FROM BISCAY, MALIN OR WHEREVER,
Blancmange-backed jellyfish plug the sand;
Along the front refugees from far inland
Stoicise upon the sea’s forever –

Frayed divorcee repairing his tether,
Crashed broker, ex-this-or-that, maiden aunt
Windowed in some ‘B & B’, its paint
Pastel-fresh, awaiting more clement weather.

First published in Other Poetry

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IN THE CLIFF-SIDE THEY FASHIONED STEPS
Since left empty a millennium
Of all except salt and seaworms,
The sad, vacuous shriek of gulls.

While the mainland clanged with idols,
Delinquent snarling figurines, this rocky outpost
Was tended in God-sent quiet.

No sword like an unerring pen,
Here the Word was kept from harm –
Interlaced with finely wrought gold
Held to be the work of angels,
Not men; minuscule and uncial
Bordered with perennial green and red,
Inks deep as heaven itself.

Seaswirl shattering syllables below,
Moss now crowds the crevices –
Shale on close packed shale, slate upon slate,
Each lintel set with its own quartz cross.

The wind is a forgotten language –
Whether they died here or went elsewhere,
we, arriving by motor-launch,
Do not know…

This is their brooch to the world.

First published in BABEL IX

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VERILY THE PEN IS MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD!
If we’re mere supplicants, then they are file marshals,
Past masters and chair-persons of the awkward clause

Or subclause, professors of the last minute hitch,
Time’s grey monopolists who can hold up days/months/years
With a fingertip. Tick-tock, tock-tick,

Clicks the clock. In-trays out-towering out-trays,
Somewhere between grease and palm we ponder tactics,
Weigh smiles with frowns, reshuffle scenarios: –

The first marked ‘Bombs and Volcanoes’,
The second ‘Patience’ measured in a myriad rearrangements
Of legs. ‘Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho,’

Hums someone, hopefully desperate. Beyond the window
Clouds may go calmly about their business,
But here even the breeze is dog-eared. Dictums

Are trundled down from tarnished craniums,
Numbers dropped like coins into a stagnant pond. Sons & Grandsons
Have been tasked with monitoring the ripples.

First published in Wasafiri, Issue 42, Summer 2004

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‘By walking in the valley of calligraphy he became noted and famed ...’ (SON HATTATLAR, A Biographical Dictionary of Turkish Calligraphers)

JETTED IN ON QUICK CONTRACTS FROM EIRE,
UK, Australia, or wherever,
Some of us see in this sweeping abjadiya
No more than specklish spaghetti
And so, incorrigibly monoglot,
As myopic as a printer’s ‘miim’,
Lump each stroke and dot under the nickname
‘Worms’. “But look, they’re crawling all over!”
One jokingly extends the metaphor,
Hand raised faceward in mock culture shock.

Whether across glazed tile or goatskin
The calligrapher quietly goes on writing,
Upon stucco, coins and parchment, along
Bronze candlesticks, in neon lighting,
Round the rims of goblets, ewers, gongs –
Writes and remembers one Turkish master
Returning from Istanbul to Iskander:
How, on learning he’d mislaid his wallet,
He paid the boatman with a perfect ‘waw’.

Remembers. Writes. Remembers also
The forebear who during a Tibriz earthquake
Remained mesmerised by text’s deft flow
And did not notice the town knocked flat.
Invokes the Sultan of Scribes, Yakuut –
So prolific that, when Baghdad was sacked,
He took refuge inside a minaret
Where, armed with some patches of linen
And a sharpened pen, he went on copying
While priceless inks smudged the Tigris black.

On silken banners he writes, on graveyard gates.
Now he letters some gilded cloudlets –
And for the good of his hand recollects
The pitfalls in any lifting of weights;
That, say, the whipping of a mule might infect
One’s script for days; character through characters –
How some Caliph once writeously decreed:
“We were willing to consider their pleas,
But, given such scrawl, have now changed our mind.”

Across signet-ring and plate and milestone
He writes, thinking between each line,
“Worms, wallahi! As a pen is the hand’s tongue,
Take time; look closer and view a garden
In miniature: That sinuous ‘siin’ hung
Like a literate tendril while underneath
Ant-sized dots troop wise as Solomon,
Cat-faced ‘haa’ gets chased by a dog-nosed ‘kaf’.
‘yaa’s’ a branch dangling two neat damsons.
Here’s a wing-shaped ‘thaal’, there some crescent ‘nuun’s,
A bit of vine which spells ‘Zaa’ then ‘raa’.

“A Sultan’s firman becomes a peacock.
From behind a thicket of alephs
‘Ayn’s’ eye winks. That ‘ghayn’s’ a bullfrog
So busy gargling its own name it doesn’t see
How overhead hovers a rhomboid fly.
If ‘khaa’s’ a hoopoe, ‘hamzas’ are insects,
‘taa’ and ‘thaa’ a species of lily.
‘Lam’s’ now a swart-necked swan, now a serpent
Slinked between low-looped ‘jiim’, foliate ‘qaafs’,
A ‘miim’-made nest dangling graphic thread.

“In vocal violet, green, gold, red,
Diacritic finches perch and sing
Above an arbour woven Kufic style.
With each blink meanings move, glide, shimmer –
The seen and unseen craftily entwined.
One man’s worms another’s Paradise writ closer,
Line upon line unfurls a script to rival
Or eclipse pictures. Calamus turned wand,
A reedpen does what the sword cannot
And conjures life up from ink’s dark well.”

First published in Descant, Canada

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(Rome)

ENJAMBMENT BETWEEN THE LIVING AND THE DEAD,
How painters termed Baroque delighted
In the cutting off of heads –

With deft strokes of brush or blade
Yesterday’s strutting Goliath made
Plinthless sculpture, a youthful David

Heaves away the topmost bit of him
As bric-à-brac for History’s dustbin.
Holofornes the Middle East champion

Becomes a macabre hair-handled lantern
In Judith’s grasp, his body mere meat
Somewhere off-canvas, she righteously complete.

Herodias seems less queen than crumpet
While like an ominous green fish
The Baptist’s face stares upward from its dish.

First published in BABEL XIV

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NEATLY BEYOND THE MIND’S REACH THEY LURK –
That quatrain or tercet pulled up short
By hours, days, even years. Nothing for it
Except patience, poised between rest and work
Inspiration’s unglamorous obverse
And frequent sine qua non as writer turns
Deep-sea angler. Beneath conversations,
Newscasts, staff meetings, their chimed murmurs
Promise symmetries other language lacks.
Back inside your study, upon sleep’s brink
Again the silence stirs. Somewhere between ink
And aspirin you haul them in; relax
At last, prose left standing, for now outmatched –
Self strangely other, not as you might think.

First published in BABEL

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