from Unth(reading) Clare
De Wint! I would not flatter nor would I
Skill in critique isn’t flattery
(though Bo loves to be liked)
yet in rediffusion of
Petrarch I subtitled his subtle
sex scenes with smut and sleaze! I
painted deadly freaks on Surrey’s
coats of arms, left Drayton to fashion
his own out of his vegetable features.
Now I wake up inside romantic sonnets.
Yesterday, I found myself within
one of Wordsworth’s on the death
penalty, a magistratic drone denying
mercy (that’s Petal Patel sorted
for Bressex Poetry Day). Today,
I scramble out, masked, voice muffled,
glasses steaming, to level
pastures to see how Clare’s spots
mark me see that shallow bowl
of field in Sefton Park, filling
with fog, floating scattered crows
in half-fading light, ghostly specks
of silent smoky grey, as hope –
while commonsense sees nothing
but an image of social distancing.
Clare wrote to Dr Darling about
inoculation. Will I run out of poems
to twist into pricks before I get mine?
A magpie skates down the freezing slates.
4th January 2021
Black grows the
southern sky betokening rain
You know how
this ends: the driving rain
drives you home
again. A murder of crows
in the rheumy
treetops settles. They feel the
change, no
unconscious flapping without will.
Before long,
your legs will be denim wet. Trump’s
storm troopers
stormed. The first drop drops.
Everything
focusses from this: looking and hearing,
shunning and
taking (rolling out a vaccine).
Bouncing in the
mulch, the blackbird with
golden beak
stops to look at you, stopped.
He blurts a
curt ‘chup-chup’, hops where his
brown mate’s
found thorny shelter from the storm.
No room for
you. A thousand deaths a day.
Your best
wishes are dreams without horizon.
10th
January 2021
What a night! The wind howls, hisses and but stops
I love to wander
the vacated Covid streets
as snow falls slow
on the breeze. A single
flake flukes my pocket,
pricks my bare hand. I
lift it out and smile.
What a night! was ever
said in the soft
safety of morning, sun
burning on snow
heaped by glistening tarmac:
escape for Triumph Herald
with spinning tyres
and gasping motor.
Night allegorised so
that even pissing
at frozen bus stops drunk
prefigured the never-
believed in the un- (yet)-
known, as new
sensations flooded
old memories.
In the windows
of parallel streets: peeling
NHS rainbows from last spring,
BLM placards from
unthinkable summer.
16th January 2021
The oddling bush, close sheltered hedge new-plashed
Clare’s going to say ‘oddling’ if he wants to.
This poem’s all tits and bums:
the only human here’s a peeping tom.
All the action’s avian, and its heroes,
the Stakhanovite builders in the hedges,
implementing instinct’s one-year-plan. All
this in the sharp delivery of his gossamer
description. The eggs, 10, he says, or 12,
as though counting them with us, their
‘dusts of red soft frittered’. Hope’s
fore-shining, in the tiniest traces
of the littlest things that nestle
unscheduled, shatters
against news of the Liverpool Variant.
The song thrush from lockdown 1 reappears,
propped and primed along the chimney stack,
peeping
stray notes
like
a saxophonist teasing the reed,
constructing disconnected phrases
into languid play of intricate
intermittent melody: cool thoughts of
Ahmad Jamal looking at undepressed keys,
or Miles listening over lowered trumpet,
staging their forthcoming forming in waves
of silent anticipation. Knowledge is won.
No hungry peasant contracts Covid-19
just to defraud Bo of five hundred quid!
Soon the sonnet will fill with flustery song.
23rd January 2021
