AS THE DEER MOVE THROUGH THE LANDSCAPE

So thoughts move through the mind,

The hart’s comical notion,

The inspirational hind.

Some are half-heraldic,

Some have blood and foam on their flanks,

Some you curse for eating your roses,

For others you offer up thanks

That they deigned to enter your garden

Or traverse your headlights’ tight beam,

Though they startled you, never a nightmare,

Though they beggar belief, not a dream.

And yet there are darker shapes prowling

You see with much less of your eye:

Is that a hand under the bushes,

Or loose earth piled suspiciously high?

Don’t think you can fight them with fences,

With sentries or searchlights on towers:

They’re already inside the enclave,

Their face, if you see it, is yours.

So all you can do is stay open,

Let wind, deer and darkness pass through,

Note the slots in the mud by the puddles,

The lines that don’t shine in the dew.

And the three heads held still in the corn,

That you mustn’t let on you have seen,

Are the life that won’t come to an end,

But will be, as it is, and has been.

ARS EST CELARE ARTEM

Reading a student's essay the other day

(Something I do as infrequently as possible)

I came across the assertion that people read books

Just to find out what happens in the end.

Imagine ruining Werther: He kills himself!

Or Anna Karenina: She kills herself too!!

Or even Hamlet: They all die in the end.

What? All of them? Except Horatio.

And Fortinbras, if you remember him,

A minor character, mentioned once or twice,

And played, no doubt, by the same jumped-up young prick

That was Laertes, and, if you think about

Shakespeare this way, must also have played the Dauphin.

All details, since the interest's in the plot,

In who does what to whom. Not how or why.

How different, thank God, is opera,

Where intermezzi and sea interludes disguise

The mechanisms, and drown with superfluous beauty

The squeal of the pulley, the scenery's clatter,

The stagehands' muttered oaths and muffled grunts,

And even poor Mimi's hacking, insistent cough.

(So bad, she ought to be a member of the audience.)

WATCHING THE NEWS

I like it best in black and white.

Then you can imagine the colours.

Not only that, but everything's more distinct.

Like the old films. You knew then who was the villain.

TALKSHOW

That was then. This is now. Poor people, condemned to repeat

The moment of revelation, respooled on video.

So you were, and she was, and I might have known - but I didn't.

A kind of emotional snuff-flick for those who don't know

That every day is a death and each morning a birth,

As I rise and flick the switch and say Let there be light.

And there is, as the dot on the screen fills the room.

SOAP

More real than you and me, that's clear.

If I die or you die, who cares?

If they go, there's bulbfields to pay.

And a whole system of justice to be reformed.

What you find in the corner of your living-room

(Except for the dog-poo and cat-sick) has to be true.

IN FRONT OF THE BOX

Just for a little while.

Before I end up

In one.

WATCH WHERE YOU WALK

Tread carefully. Wherever you set your feet,

You're bound to be walking on bones. The bones of the earth,

A long dead river's dried up skeleton,

The bones of men and women and cats and dogs

And things that only have a name in books.

Walk circumspectly. You're bound to be treading on feelings,

Your own or somebody else's, scattered about,

Invisible in the long grass of general emotion,

Concealed under tufts of reticence, tussocks of shame.

Adders of antagonism, ready to bite an ankle

And make it go puffy, not deadly but inconvenient.

And if you don't move at all - you're in somebody's way.