Douglas Houston was born in 1947 in Cardiff, where he now lives
and works as a literary researcher. His collections are With the Offal
Eaters
(1986), The Hunters in the Snow (1994), and last year's
The Welsh Book of the Dead (Seren).






Pagus

Secretum iter et fallentis semita vitae

- for F. S.


Begin at a bus-stop in sunlight,
The blank page displacing so much air.
Its susceptible plane is being
Infected with language, hesitant,
In blue, and investigating you
Here in the notional, where nothing

Can be proved. The ground we share's still warm
In this most flexible of tenses,
Out where the self reviews its aspects,
Approves registrations of pleasure,
This brilliant daylight keeping faith with
Your garden's private cult of summer.

Beyond the rulings of the lawnmower,
The evident striving for order
Is exultant in the azalea,
Its purple fire annihilating
The lapsed, the mediocre, fixing
Your glade's rarefied orthodoxy.

I relax under good auspices
Elsewhere, still attuned to that context
Of openness and demarcation,
A state of balance where silent air
Is axial to the cuckoo's remark
About us, one note each, repeated.








The Conference

Monkeys shriek around the commissioner
Whose voice rides the metallic gibbering:

    Bummerest specie big man got gun
    Do what boss like big reason
    Shoot kids in head big gun
    Big right kids dead
    Boss give big right kill
    What it not wrong
    Big right bummerest specie.

Speech is much like music,
Tones and modulations,
Harsh cadenzas anger bows
Stabbing "fs" from the blameless strings,
Fine airs played cleanly on the lawn
Where August finds these gentlemen
Tuned to a common interest in flowers.

You leave the conference hall,
A tank of light where men in dark suits
Are spinning cones and swirling coloured ribbons,
Step through the blue glass doors,
Escaping the intoxicating hail
Of high velocity language capsules.
Sitting on a sandstone boulder
You smoke in the mild drizzle,
Unsure how you'll vote,
But used to deals at the expense
Of either God or self-interest.

Driving home, you relax
As the motorway bears you
Fast through the glare
Thrown off the bow of noon.
The wagons stacked
With scaffolding poles
Are taking thunder to Africa,
Static causing minor discharges
As the big rubber wheels
Drone up the summer
Pulling east for the great estuary.

Money and hope, you fancy,
Are both green. You'll sign,
Remembering this, the others
Clasping decisions similarly fashioned.








Communications

While the telephone cools
The feedback starts, your voice
Returning from the limits,
A surge that inundates
The present tense, closes
Like air around me,
Breath and larynx, not what's said.

The contact down our bodies' line
Is acute with electrical delicacy,
The form a marriage happens to take,
Transient, chiefly somatic,
Our bodies inhabiting coincidence,

Like here, at night outside the house,
Where our bodies have some warmth to impart
And parting know it and don't know
What to do with such honesty,
That judges all our motives, will not move.

Above the hill, the stars do our initials,
Displacing wretchedness with recognition,
Like love or prayer or weather
Worn to poor fictions
Repetition sustains
Into change, the seasons
That the heart thinks of as home.