THE POMEGRANATE LYRICS
1.
A certain application of the casual
a pomegranate on my barest table
collects attention to its autumn red.
Its call upon the mind is
absolute.
It congregates attention like a lover.
2.
Awoken to the cynosure of quiet
I listen to the silence gathered round
a pomegranate on a yellow book.
Like abeyance of words before the
softest kiss
its compulsion to the ear is like a dawn.
3.
Imagine now a peacock spread its tail
beside a pomegranate and not
eclipse the red
and you will reach the rest at consummation.
Accommodate them clearly in your mind.
Each has come to entity like
lovers.
4.
I have this morning calmly taken up
a pomegranate from my window sill,
my hand enjoys a weight of given matter
and fingers have a fruiterer’s fingers’
comprehension.
They contemplate and wonder at the life.
5.
On my table, their common space
a pomegranate and a single rose
has
each its own propriety of red:
they occupy the mind without contention
and each has too the deepest red of all.
7 EPIGRAMS IN A FISCAL YEAR
For a hundred hands to touch you all at once tonight.
but that tumultuous is the sound of four hands stroking!
Then, what does it profit you any to maximize your gains if you suffer
knowledge of damage in
your heart?
Desire for death without permanence, desire for life without pain! yet
to
desist from the golden
poison in the veins!
We’re born naked from the dark and go out naked in the dark,
exchange
your coin for night that glints naked in the dark.
Demonstrate the lift and outcry of your person
that opposite of cringe
is banners in the sky.
Hesitation is always at the edge for what will lie beyond,
let
potential have capacity you put away your doubt.
Life! and you think you have always the rainbow lorikeets,
but the
lights go out in the body, the lights go out all over.
CATULLAN VARIATIONS
I
Budgie you beguile her time.
she plays with you against her breast,
you
so desire her teasing way
of give and take with fingertip
you need to
nip and sharply bite
her there; then she herself, my gold-
en one, has
some dousing of her
ardour and solace from your play:
if I could only
do the same,
have sorrow go and peace return!
II
Let all of love go weeping now
and all who know of beauty.
the budgie
of my girl is dead,
the budgie who beguiled her time.
she loved it more
than both her eyes,
the honeyed thing knew her that well,
just like a
daughter knows her mother.
’d hardly ever leave her lap
but
now and
then to bob around,
its chirrup seemed for her alone.
but now
it’s gone
the way that goes
into the dark of no return.
I cannot like you death
who give
things of beauty the common touch.
my budgie’s
green’s gone
into grey.
I think you’ve done a dastard thing.
look how
you’ve made
her cry so her
sweet eyes are puffed and wet and red.
III
Come and come and live and love
and chuck discretion to the wind,
old
wankers’ mores drop away.
the sun that’s set can
re-arise
but our brief
light is only once
and goes the permanent way of flesh.
then kiss me once, and once again
in your own exponential way,
we’ll
give computer banks a run.
and ASIO won’t track us down,
those
gossipers and malcontents
they’ll do our kissing life no harm.
IV
I’m high as that quick girl who felt
her torrid girdle loosed
at last
when she saw those golden apples.
V
Though you can kiss in ways and ways
how many kisses are enough?
not
all the snowflakes fallen
on wintry Saskatoon, not all
these
harvesttime Barossan grapes
nor all those stars above if each
were seen
discrete and men had eyes
(and time) to number everyone
were halfway
near enough to slack-
en off my lust and liking for
your lips, so you I
love and you
can kiss and talk and hear and kiss.
VI
Poor bugger you, Catullus, stop your whinge
and accept what you see is
now the case.
yesterday, it was, the sun had shone
when any place the
girl’d lead you’d come
and she was loved the way no
other could.
then
anything you wished was her desire
and she was had and gave her music
laughter,
yesterday the sun had truly shone.
but now she’s
washed of
you: let fugitive
be fugitive: resolve, be no poor bugger
but firm and
unrelenting, you are tough.
farewell, my sweet. Catullus now is tough.
he does.not require it and you he won’t ask.
but you will suffer memory wanting him.
I wonder who will call in on
you at night?
if you’ve any life; who may see your beauty,
who do you
love now, making madly proud,
who do you kiss, that biting on his lip?
but you, Catullus, you are really tough.
VII
I reckon he’s
miraculous, that bloke
and, although anathema
humanly,
I’ll
even call him god: he can look at you
and hear your
music laugh.
but I’m an habitue of the dark
since you are in my thought;
the time of
this
here life gives me daily deprivation
and closes up my senses
like a fist; with eyes to see I rarely look
and, where I’d
heard unique
inflections in
a voice, my ears won’t now discriminate
and my
own voice
is numb.
that nullness coming after positive despair,
that nullity molests you
now, Catullus-
you enjoy nothing, so cities and their
states-
men crumple
in the dust.
VIII
I hate and love, why rankle in that dialectic?
there is no synthesis,
it nails you to a cross.
IX
She says she’d rather be her time with me than any other,
than even
with the charismatic one, she says.
but then what your lover says in the heat of passion
put it on the wind
and write it on the rain.
X
When she is with her lover
she really deprecates me
and that becomes
for him his foolish exultation.
a mule feels nothing either, her silence were the true erasure, that
were sound enough, but
here she rails and puts out this abuse,
a crying out she suffer memory that dwells and is acidic.
look, she is
nettled into saying these self-nettling things.
XI
Please invite me over there,
my music and my laughter’s one.
then from
your yes don’t change
your mind but leave your door undone
for me,
don’t gallivant to some-
where else but be at home to wel-
come
me so we
can live and love:
our times will make up memories.
I have lunched and
wined and laze,
the thought of you is with my cock.
be sopping moist:
invite me there.
XII
To desire and desire and
attain at the last
is the true Kosciusko of pleasure I reckon
and I certainly think so
now
I have had you revert,
my golden-muffed, my interrupted love willingly
into my arms when all
of expectation was gone with the wind.
and we will circle today on our calendars, both of us tonight,
once I
used to say, Call no man happy who is not born dead,
but now I stand here before you, myself the felicitous man.
XIII
They dare liken her to you. well, she is tall and shapely and is
blonde, yes, though I acknowledge she is all of these,
how can they
call her beautiful who hasn’t got your sheer erotic presence?
look, she hasn’t
got a skerrick in the whole length
of her body.
beautiful? that Indian-feather choker shows your perfect neck,
look,
you resolve all other beauty in your human being.
XIV
My love, you say our life
will be as one accord
and have across our
years continuance of joy.
god, that you have spoken outright from your inner being
and the tenor
of your words has issue in our days,
that a lifespan is permitted to show our love eternal: my
colleague, I
mean that it have a daily recurrence in us.
XV
Never has any human loved
another as I do you,
never has any man loved
a woman as I love you.
no belief was ever held in anyone at all
as the belief that I have always had in you.
3 VERSIONS OF SLEEP
1. A Formal Sonnet
When we
lie separate at verge of sleep
I remember my being entered you
that well I’d have you remember our prow
-ess of my cock and your clitoral tip
whilst you are slipping down to sleep as well
my love for I’d have entered you far in
to reaches of the dream and have you moan
as you have moaned your pleasure with me full
-y and have your dreaming lips again pronounce
and cry my name my name - oh I’d have done
to you as you have done to me, made green
my general drab and blue the sky for once
to such effect I hear a deep song or
know our times the origin of colour.
2. Morph.
They
are peas in a pod, almost, these svelte
perpetual striplings,
although the
one is paler, more gaunt-cadaverous
I’d say, and
dignified
as hell beyond
the other who has entered me that slow,
that softly it
was transfer of our minds:
the look within his eyes and thorough smile!
It must have happened there in our embrace
his poppy-beads would touch
against my face
and with their scent drive all the pain away
to
somewhere else, outside myself I’d say.
But
consolation’s your most
fickle queen
for slipping off. Still I will be alright
when the
brother, old-young gaunt-cadaver,
comes in to see what he can do and
switches
off the light. Sleep is good and Death is better,
first rate
is not to have been born at all.
after Heine
3. Geography of Sleep
That was good then when the creatures
changed their souls and being at
will.
Now, in times of massive darkness,
where is the flint of ancient
dawns?
But, then, for us, in these times
was chosen the crying richness of
a
single thing, of sleep in which dream
dwells, the liquor of vain
endeavours.
Because eternal, God remains
himself and takes no other form.
But wish
well butterfly and eclipse,
wish well the creature, sad, unable
to be Apocalyptic angel
who changes form in sleep or dream.
after Cassiano Ricardo