PICTORIAL CALENDAR

i
Tapiola (Sibelius)
Castor fiber losing one chisel-tooth
dwines of the opposite whose dentine, rebutted
by no Pollux, grows giant and retorted:
a matchless liberty that seals the mouth.
Worse; for the bent continuing of that growth
returns into its origin: unmated,
now the skull-biting prodigal, self-reinserted,
enters his brain-sty and lodges there till death.
Love will bite stiffly, but you may feed and cry
while its twin gouges too; and will not die
from ivory obsession, its point being paired.
But, gnawing upon nothing, look about
for chance or strength to wrench the killer out:
breaking your mouth so that your life is spared.


ii
Oiseaux tristes (Ravel) 
There have been birds, though, all the winter - parched
anxieties over the peaked rare fox, the acres
corrugated as roofs to ring-on.  Mockers
or pleaders, living on luck or hate, they have searched
the hopeless, found the all-but-useless, weathered
the whittling sky, the ogham of their tracks
ollaved on snow.  Bland airscape soon, and sex,
and all the bonewood parrot-fluffed and feathered.
And then what will they do? Saynt Valentyn
that art ful hy on-lofte, not for your sake
their Burke-lipped wooing in the procreant green,
their more than human heat, their parenthood:
change has not changed them, not will suns unmake
the chill and mood of their ancestral blood.


iii.
Egdon Heath (Holst)
A rock lay in the weather on useless land:
one grimace (of a self neither forced nor chosen)
without an echo; and one gesture, a hand
once-for-all clenched upon This - chronic and frozen
but not into pain or patience or joy; into holding.
Only the shape was insurrect, and screamed, 
only the minerals tolerant of unmoulding.
Can a stone sleep?  Never believe it dreamed.
What Throne, then, moving over the desolation, 
breathing the scarves of mist, bleaching the sun,
printed this atony like a careless thief?
- that single instant grip of incarnation
leaving the rock awakened and undone,
pear-bruised-and-spurted, wrenched as a winter leaf?


iv
Bushes and Briars (Trad.) 
The hard blue the cloud-herd Aeolian wind;
and the trees baby-bald, waving like mongols:
I know the month's mind: now through bushes and
through briars (oh deciduous taiga-jungles!)
the flex-life and the winter-torpid flesh
are to be sucked and burning forth be hunted.
The oldest way to suffer is to wish;
the cleverest loss is when the wish is granted;
Aeolian then sometimes I am uneasy:
acts will exceed, there will be too much sun
to shelter from, the breastless rose turn blowsy,
imaginës revisit one by one,
discorded limbs rebound to locks of time
unkept unkeyed unkempt, the lipping-game.


v
Le Réveille-matin (Couperin)
Well, but the clock at least was vigilant
- duenna-face, duenna-voice, with tongue
to wag the scandal of the seconds.  Blent
caduceus-like together, lost among
their love, their bodies, and the lancet noon
beyond the curtains, time a Möbius tape,
they spared no senses to the chaperone
who threatened all: the cup was theirs to keep.
And tick by tick the clock was filling it;
honey and quinine drip with the same noise,
and who were they to wonder which was here
- their mutual tongues being what they tasted? Not
till the rim wept could they challenge her
who mixed her own secretion with the bees'.


vi
Les Noces (Stravinsky)
Under consent, intention, and with colour
of unchosen jewels - and the rite
of gathered flower-heads that kiss the culler,
the moving petals that are tilled by right.
Under delight, the auditor, the idle
autograph set firm in figures, ward
of the wet portico the rocking idol,
and the impasse where only space has warred.
Pattern of author of strait anguish; praise
of the eventual not found emotion
on which the answer not the question preys;
fish that are older than what ails them; ocean
that cannot fail and is not filled: unmanner
now unmade; rhyme in the making manner.


vii
Jardins sous la pluie (Debussy)
Der Gärtner (Wolf)
Let the twin ivies creep, antler your spiders,
over this white bough, on this web of sense;
there is nothing to be ravished that Invaders
Eponymous have not; captured, that pretence
if no more did not; king of the rosy adders,
built cobra-bolt, invest though your immense
for unseen empire of the covert riders:
summer's temptation and of Providence.
The fated standards flourish over sour
warrens of ant and worm, the sceptres dip
their sorcery to the baths of colder kaisers;
still, virtuous foxglove, yield that cordial flower
in the consensus of the parted lip:
open your lovely bite, my soft scissors.


viii
Daphnis and Chloe (Ravel)
In this high scrubland, wether-cropped, bleak-thistled,
ferment of bees and sun, cool-ribboned air
wafting wild apple: these two rested here,
over the tolerance of the sea; blue-castled
by their solitude; their bedroof tasselled
with cotes of cloud, with fountaining birds, with fire.
Such miracles in their sensual theatre,
vainly the lemur mewed, the locust whistled.
Truly, such miracles: one relenting breast
laid bare to drink his body through the palm;
their double flesh, quick as a wound with trust;
calendars drugged and smiling; and, in this womb,
the long thoughts of night: night comes at last,
and would it be on their side when it came?


ix
In diesem Wetter (Mahler)
Marram and bent-grass; lion-coloured gale
rampant among the hornets'-mist of dunes;
running northeast, a sea curled-axeheads: fail
if you can, faith, in this desolate womb of rains,
for it is reaving weather; and the streel
of desperate clouds, grey panic arch that spans
your aisle of absence, holds no rest at all.
Fail if you can.  But while the hurt remains,
you have your proper food; and that will grow:
no shore too sandy for its brackish blood,
air too enormous for its knitted root.
What idle and exalted scrolls of blue, 
arcadian sun, or sweet-lake-whisper, could
so breed endurance?  And so vise the heart?


x
Preludi autunnali (Malipiero)
Eye-coloured sea, together we read your turning
sun-leaf in Kufic, and your minstrel sheets:
was there no other message than height and morning,
no flux to silver of your carol of lights?
This was the summer birth: no granite awaiting
memorials, beyond the twofold cradle,
no golded letter tarnished?  No room for doubting
your glitter of slow chisels was not idle?
Oh harbour-coloured eyes, what are you seeing
now the sung leaf is turned, or torn adrift,
the sistrum-light of water stilled and greying?
Bruise-blue of shadows; one small yacht beginning.
under the predatory wings, to lift
October sails, and run where the day is running.


xi
Petrushka (Stravinsky)
Till now, to others: when at last it happens
it hurts less finally than the dolls believe:
the hand that held the puppets falls and opens;
the puppets twist, and rise, and are alive.
But now they can no longer move together - 
though (look) the strings are tangled.  The freed limb
searches for muscles to replace its tether;
the muscles have no music ruling them.
But up, slack-sinewed; and a kind of bow
(no longer to a fellow) to the mirror;
then, out of habit, part of the old dance.
Look once around no-longer home.  And now
learn that your world had edges; and, with terror,
stare out across the waiting audience.


xii
Des pas sur la neige (Debussy)
Fold back the snow that haunts us: mantelpiece
and threshold, chimney (all the symbols lie)
are frozen; the wing-burning marigold eye
that lit our cradle will not will release.
Loose the lost summer that may not increase.
Loose the lascivious ivy's fingers, high
on the harnessed oak; loose our enclosing sky
to us, and in the sky its troubled fleece.
Granted, the snow bears footprints: something passed
and, out-of-sight beyond, gapes dead, or hides;
but that was gales ago, and is the last.
What moor from valley, tree from tree divides - 
paled always - now is hugged into a waste
that nothing viable, falcon or fox, abides.