PAUL HOLMAN : from VICINAL

I

She had been earthed
(had I earthed
her by my intrusion?)
eyes no longer turned

upon phenomena I
could not locate.
She considered me a
plunderer, a fecund man,

a madman: one who
scries alphabets
of daggers, of arrows.
Zigzagged tights in a
 
knot in her pocket,
the tip of each
hair luminous as fox-
fire or rotten wood,

she opened the violet
gate at her throat
to release the fractal
silhouette of Pan.


II: ZIGZAGGEDNESS

In the pub garden,
how I jumped at each clack
of that horse jaw!
I had defined
myself as some witch’s
brat from the tale I
read long ago, intent
upon leaving no
record of my life,
but an absence that any
fool might occupy in
capricious play.
Find me by the dis-
placement I create: my
friends burnt in cages,
hanged or drowned
in shallow pools.
So much for the young
man who first walked
along the pink
roads of Lanarkshire,
under the gaze of the
buzzards in the wood,
to visit an idyll
conceived in anger.
Perhaps this or that
odd-looking girl
was my beloved:
eye paint to enable
clairvoyance, bead-net
dress over a sheath
dress, bead-net
dress with nipple cups.
A pallet sprinkled
with moth dust: by what
sympathetic magic
did one drop of
red show in the sperm in
the palm of the hand
open before me?
With thumb raised
to mouth, my ghost slid t
hrough drift, throug
h field, through
double current.
Even in pipistrelle light,
in summer, I hesitated
to enter that
labyrinth, in which
no game is forbidden.


III

From the bus I
gazed at the corrugated
iron walls of the hut near
the airfield in
which the redeemer
lay hidden. His girlfriend
sat outside, smoking,
wrapped in a blanket
of fine wool
to insulate herself
against ghosts. A phrase
heard in an empty room,
the oracle misheard,
interpreted by a
stupid man: I trade gold
for wood. So he had
lessened, wandering
alone by night to
stand naked among weeds
and rubbish in order
to greet the first
dog to climb the sky:
not Sirius but Procyon.