|
|
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. |