A falconer’s apparatus to recall a hawk.

Wan and yellow and sickly pale.

The unclean thing.

It was a toy, a pet, a child

And when torn to pieces it crackled

Burning apart to the core

With disc-like rays that spread, flashing outwards

Like an explosion in sci-fi, VR-movie space

Imitating a pebble thrown into still water.

The nature of the spirits in question

Was not material to the indictment.

There is always something fading out of,

Or just fading into focus.

The concept of the civil liberty of the individual

Was gaining importance.

The wicked offences of conjuration

And invocation of evil spirits.

The wave of heredity will not be denied.

Copper, made of copper.

The unclean thing again.

I ran into the barn.

Greasy flap lifting on a rainy outbuilding.

I am screaming:

"ANATHEMATIZE! ANATHEMATIZE! ANATHEMATIZE!

I CAST YOU OUT!"

The crawling baby stops at the threshold,

And smiles,

And turns away.

There was a strange side-chapel

With a smaller organ that you pumped

With your feet

For rehearsals.

I remember the room as honey-coloured,

It probably wasn’t

It smelt of mint and camphor,

Polish and dust, damp paper.

He let us

Pump the organ pedals

And play

Chords or scales,

Pulling out stops,

I can’t remember if there really was one stop

Labelled ‘Vox Humana’

But there should have been.

I can certainly remember a brass organ stop with

A ceramic fascia,

Highly glazed

And bearing those words

In a more gothic, italicised face than the

‘Hot’ and ‘Cold’

Of the taps that I also half-remember

From somewhere,

Probably a colleague’s cuff-links.

I imagine that one of us pedalled

While the other touched the keyboard or

Monkeyed with the stops

As we’d have been small.

Everything else,

Of course,

Was printed in Welsh

A scramble of consonants,

Ascenders and descenders

In unlikely thickets -

It looked like a thorny hedge on the page

With Jesus hiding in it every so often:

morwyn - a maid,

gwaith - work,

cwch - a boat,

llfyr - a book,

llythyr - a letter.

The door from the side room,

(It probably wasn’t a chapel),

Led somehow into the chapel itself

And my memories of that are clouded further,

There was a great smell of polish

And the air was clotted with dark shining wood,

Tall organ pipes stretching up to the roof,

The music

And the word of god

Were both delivered from high up,

Resonating in the great wooden roof space.

As a child, the slits in the organ pipes

Looked like frozen, unhappy mouths,

And the pulpit like the prow of a ship.

Everything that could shine, shone

But the colours were all dark,

The light was all dark.

We, well I,

Had a real feeling of licence,

Playing in church,

Exploring unfamiliar corners

And vantage points,

Sucking on a boiled sweet,

Feeling that the image of myself up here

Would be present to me when I stood,

Hair neatly parted,

In the body of the chapel

Half singing along

In the strange language

These old people all knew.

The tunes were

Half-familiar,

The words incomprehensible

And all of the faces were

Pink, pink, pink

Was not it.

Stand calmer

Relieved, growing fur.

Mother in front of the classroom

Inside formed too.

Fiederle nudged, walked.

Fiederle walking again.

Came Fiederle

A gatehouse

Reddish wounds,

Pig,

Butterfly marked

Between pierced stone

One of them in the coachman,

Cautiously,

Summoned up pencils

With questions,

Sat,

Came silkily behind legs.

A cloud of starlings

In the shape of a heart

Then the shape of a vase

Hand, head, diamond, rose, cyclone

The shape of a scarf

Two unfurling scrolls

Shivering points form a wedge.

I was visited in a dream

By the ghost of Martin Derx

His face shadowed and darkened

More grotesque than in life

Where it had an awkward, worn, transparent,

Jutting beauty,

Close pale golden curls.

He tried to persuade me

That he had wanted

To convey the impression of his death,

But I knew in this dream

That he was lost in the landscape

Of the Inferno in which he had taught himself

To speak Italian.

Long arguments hung like seaweed

In the air

And the perspective

Of the bench he sat on stretched

Into a melancholy de Chirico courtyard.

I send him greetings

And a kiss I could never place

Upon his ugly, twisted face in life

Evaporates

Like the moisture on the white

And shining skull

That pushed against his pale

And shining skin.

So many gone into the air

So much gone under the earth

Revenants all.

Floodlights up into the purple air

The trial collapsed in the Central Criminal Court.

A clearing in the Epping Forest

Alive with light from a huge bonfire

"His wife and sister-in-law

Acted as his handmaidens."

Memory can be unreliable

Events can be forgotten

And other events

May be remembered innacurately.

Great swathes of splashy green crash past.

Death is not the end.

Hills slide off and career out of control

Nailed to their axes

By, in each case,

One rain-blown poplar.

Green honeysuckle rapture.

Blue shoulder of hill.

Vatic emptiness.

I’ll lay down my girl on a soft bed of roses,

Let her pale limbs sink in the cream and the red.

I’ll lay my girl down on a soft bed of roses,

Make the sweet, scented petals her rosy bed.

I stay in the hills above the bright city,

Six months of the year and I sleep in the stone.

And cold and hard are the rocks of the mountain,

Cold and hard as I lie here alone.

And the work that I do is to watch here for strangers

To watch for them coming from over the range.

With my glass and my gun I watch here for strangers,

And my thoughts and my dreams are both of them strange.

For up in the sky I see a bright city,

Bright city and hills like the hills where I wait,

But the hills in the sky are all full of marvels,

Let me tell you the marvels that I see where I wait.

There are four golden lions that walk through those mountains

Four golden lions with bright wings of blue

And leading those lions are four perfect women

With horns on their heads like the crescent moon.

Clear streams of water flow down those hillsides

And in them swim fishes in the shape of pale hands

And ghosts walk the hard rocky tracks of those hillsides

Pale blue ghosts with faces like hands.

And I look at my hands as I wait on the hillside

And I see them move on the arms of my girl

And I cradle my gun and I think of her waiting

And I tighten my fists then I let them uncurl.

Soon I’ll follow the horned women down to the city

In the form of a lion with the bluest of wings

And I’ll walk to the house where my sweet girl is waiting

Leap the wall to her garden where the sweet birds sing.

I’ll lay down my girl on a soft bed of roses,

Let her pale limbs sink in the cream and the red.

I’ll lay my girl down on a soft bed of roses,

Make the sweet, scented petals her rosy bed.