Sennacherib

Oh, Tashmetu-sharrat, love of my life,
Look at how we built up Nineveh:
How high its walls now stand, astonishing
All who know its great antiquity,
An entrepot, these past six thousand years.

By ‘we’ I mean myself as royalty.
My father, Sargon, and the conqueror
Tiglath-Pileser, third of that great name,
My grandfather and a mighty king,
Built not Nineveh, nor ruled from its precincts.

This has been my vision for the state.
But Tashmetu-sharrat, for whom I build,
The fineness of whose features surely is
The work of Belet-ili, Mistress of
The gods, the Queen of Heaven, you in truth,

More beautiful than any other woman,
Have moved my soul to this surpassing labour,
Harnessing the treasures of an empire,
Surpassing even Babylon in glory:
The crown of centuries, the seat of power.

Yet that is but the merest carapace,
The shell, the outer rim, of what I’ve built,
For you, the living consort of my realm:
The Hanging Gardens and Unrivalled Palace,
Mirroring the act of genesis.

The vast enclosure, splendid in conception,
By virtue of its scale and elevation,
Its winged-bull colossi and its sphinxes,
Its scented timber doors, breathtaking murals,
But most of all its vast and watered arbours,

Are all for you, while others merely marvel.
The winged-bulls and sphinxes symbolize
Those aeons past, before the human epoch,
Which we, now, in Assyria, transcend.
We, exotic Queen of all I rule.

That’s, of course, Romantic metaphor.
The Nineveh of my imagining’s
Composed of all we’ve breathed to one another,
And my Unrivalled Palace, graced with Gardens,
Is the Book of Love I wrote for you.

Its scale and symmetry, its illustrations,
The villanelle at its erotic heart,
The temple poems binding its discursions,
The empire of its manifold allusions,
Transcend the ruins of Sennacherib.

For who can live within his Hanging Gardens,
Or on the lofty terraces he built,
Which Medes and Babylonians destroyed
As wantonly as he’d sacked Babylon –
Whereas my verse for you will live for aye.

Marilyn’s men

Marilyn had Joe DiMaggio
Arthur Miller
Both the Kennedys.
I guess I’m Miller
In your case.

Anti-Miller

The crux, the crucible,
For that writer
Was that Marilyn
Be his naïve angel.
I love who you are.

Gentleman

On his knees
To render sacrifice,
He longed to be
Your loubed spike
Jammed in the Rue Cler

Proust and prolexia

I suffer from prolexia –
An insidious disease:
When it comes to orthographic tasks,
My brain finds them a breeze.

This bothers me, as it may mean
That I am none too bright;
For Da Vinci, Einstein, Edison
Could barely read or write.

Dyslexic savants, it appears,
Prefer to think in pictures,
Leaving logocentric souls,
Like me, in mental strictures.

I learned all this; I hate to say –
Was it my loss or gain? –
By ploughing through (you guessed): a book
On reading and the brain.

It is a book you’ll not forget,
It’s called Proust and the Squid.
Its thesis may redraw me yet;
Revealing all that’s hid.

How to use our tongues

There is a passage in The Odyssey,
In which the beauties of Icmalius’ chair
Are brought before our eyes;
Almost so that we, in wonderment,
Like it’s fabled footrest,
Find ourselves mortised in the frame,
Draped with a heavy fleece
And listening, as Penelope
Instructs her house help, Eurynome,
To seat the guest for story.

Imagine that fine Icmalian craft
And conjure, in your mind, the scene in which
Penelope, in her own voice, declares
‘I wish our guest to tell his story whole
And patiently to hear me out, as well,
As I’ll be full of questions, point by point.
I want him, seated in our polished chair,
To tell me of his travels, in good time.
For this stranger, who has come into our halls,
May know somewhat of Odysseus himself.’

All poetry is such an Icmalian chair:
Its music mortised into practiced frames;
Mellifluous rhyme and artful assonance
Cast over it, like Homer’s softened fleece.
Through aeons, both these crafts have been refined,
Since earlier than Gilgamesh or Ur;
And they have fitly shaped the conversation,
From Pindar’s odes to Martial’s epigrams,
Of all that we call prosody or verse -
And taught us better how to use our tongues.

The long summer

We live, beloved, at the complex height
Of what the scholar Brian Fagan dubbed
The Holocene Long Summer, since the Ice.

The implications of all this are stunning -
For religion, for our histories and for science.
Yet few, among our fellow human beings,

Have as yet acquired the flimsiest knowledge
Of the revolution that has taken place
In geo-science, just within our lifetimes.

Today, for instance, we can say it’s known
That there have been at least nine glacial eras,
Broken, every hundred thousand years,

By relative respites, called inter-glacials;
Which last, on average, just ten thousand years;
But ours has lasted half as long again.

The Vostok ice core, from Antarctica,
Allows us to infer that we have flourished
Chiefly in that half as long again.

Yet now we learn that that mere flourishing
Has itself brought quite disturbing change;
Which, we’re informed, could bring us all undone.

What are we to make of this new finding,
Even as alarums ring world-wide,
Of global over-warming, caused by wealth?

Before the onset of the said long summer,
No humans lived in lasting settlements,
Or cultivated fields, or tended kine;

But the summer caused our numbers to explode:
Our technologies, our factories and our yields;
And now we must learn fast, before the fall.

Being in Rome

If they document our lives at any point,
That day in Rome will surely have to feature;
Although, in fact, the ‘they’ don’t do such things,
Neglectful both of being and of time.
Will even we agree on what took place,
Between Testaccio and the Arch of Constantine?

 Here’s my take, beloved, for the record:
After croissants at the Café Barberini,
We set off past the ruined Gate of Paul;
I gestured at the mass of Aurelian’s Wall
And spoke of where the Gothic camps had been,
But led you on across the Aventine.

 How much did I relate of that Hill’s tale,
Conscious of our evanescent parsing?
I mentioned Roman mansions, I recall
And their looting, on the City’s fall –
My mind aflame with histories that I knew,
But what do all such histories mean to you?

 Beyond that one of seven fabled Hills,
We came, as we had purposed, to the Baths;
And there, as I had hoped, your awe awoke.
For there the soaring arches that remain,
The hints and hollowed haunts of ancient marbles,
Sighed ‘ROME!’ to you, with all that that implies.

I’ve written of the Baths of Caracalla
And been immersed in their imagined glories;
I’ve dreamed for years of concerts in their gardens;
Of Shelley’s sojourn there and other stories;
But your gratitude and shining, chestnut hair
Have quite transformed my sense of being there.

If, at Babi Yar

When I contemplate the hecatombs of violence
Done by human beings to one another,
Going all the way back to our collective
Invasion of the hominin worlds beyond
The Africa of our long genesis;

When I contemplate, in sharper focus,
The atrocities of just our scientific century,
From the Belgian Congo via the Somme
To the Cultural Revolution and Rwanda,
My fear and nausea become personal.

No abstract principle or religious icon
Enters the picture. No, it’s you:
The dread thought of such brutality
Being visited upon your singular beauty -
And my being helpless to avert it.

If, at Babi Yar, the Einsatzgruppen
Gunned down thirty thousand helpless Jews
Into a forest ravine, within two days;
What is that, among the tens of millions?
Only fearful empathy stirs one’s horror.

Such empathy arises, like a bloody mist,
When I imagine us among the thirty thousand,
Shepherded out of Kyiv by the SS,
Dread misgivings growing as we’re marched
Into the Wald on a fell morning.

You I want to shelter with my body.
You I’d shield by any means at all.
Your slaughter is the inexpiable crime;
Mine the inextinguishable lament -
If, at Babi Yar, I cannot save you.

This book is Chauvet Cave

Did you know that, well within our years,
They found the hidden galleries of Chauvet:
A cavern, love, that stone-fall sealed abruptly
Twenty-seven thousand years ago;
Immuring so its ancient mural wonders?

‘Chauvet Cave’ are words to conjure with,
Or are once one has come to contemplate
The artistry with which some Ice Age hunters,
Just five millennia before the fateful fall,
Depicted the great creatures of their time.

The subtlety and deftness of their art,
Recaptured from so many years ago,
Must prompt the realization on our part
That these painters, seen in time’s long flow,
Were kin and not remote in kind of mind.

That they could apprehend and then depict
The moving forms of hulking Ice Age bears,
The animated shapes of fighting rhinos,
The eyes and mouths of horses, lions’ heads,
Makes for startled, time-lapse recognition.

Imprinted on the Aurignacian floor,
At Chauvet Cave, were found the stunning trace
Of one boy’s footprints, partnered by a hound,
Who passed that way, a flickering torch in hand,
With wonder etched on his illiterate face.

Imagine, now, you are that vanished child;
My book of verse the opened Chauvet Cave:
What is your torch but wit, or what your wild
Imaginings, at all I here engrave -
And what will be the footprints that YOU leave?

After Vygotsky

Lev Vygotsky was a Russian Jew
Who died at thirty-seven from TB;
But in his time he learned a thing or two
With some relevance, I think, to you and me.
He came up with the idea of ZPL
Which stands for Zone of Proximal Learning,
Being that within which one learns well -
But I’m thinking, what of Proximal Yearning?
If I, through deft poetic teaching,
Had found a way to coach your cautious heart;
If, thereby, tender thoughts had thus been reaching
That secret Zone in you…Ah! What an art!

Oberon’s potion

I suffered – even you will now agree –
A veritable mid-summer night’s dream:
Productive both of roundels and of faery songs.
Remember Oberon’s flowery words to Puck:
‘I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows’?
Here’s a test of just how literate you are:
Do those two lines flow on through eglantine
To the enchantment of Titania and the rest?
We both know now that Oberon’s secret potion
Played me as an ass for a brief, wild time.
But you? Titania? You’d no such notion.

Pink silk dress

You surely knew, when murmuring to me,
Of your luncheon in a pink silk dress –
And what you might not wear beneath it –
There, in your imaginary Paris,
Among big men and the affairs of state,
The feelings your alluring hints would stir.

With that soft stroke, run like a poet’s hand
Over your still firm and nubile breasts,
You plunged my primal brain into a frenzy,
So that the poet’s hand was seized upon
By tropes remembered from Anais Nin,
And drawn towards that most diaphanous dress.

How did you accomplish this in innocence?
Surely, as with the sending of those songs,
Like ‘You can leave your hat on’ – meaning
Never mind the rest, except stilettos –
Or, earlier, those ‘Bette Davis eyes’
Cast upon me, saying ‘You are mine!’

We’d only just been talking Oliver Sacks
And how your deft, chameleon evasions
Tantalize the analyst in me;
You’d just exclaimed, in your so ravishing voice,
How very much you actually love his work,
When there alighted, on my unsuspecting brain,

Like one of Nin’s disarming little birds,
Those murmured words, so delicately spoken,
‘I’m wondering what colour under wear
To put on underneath my pink silk dress.
Should I, perhaps, wear none at all?’
Oh! Instantly, I was your sexual slave!

Ovid on SMS

Just suppose your Ovid had a phone
And consequently didn’t have to pine,
Or send epistulae to Rome by boat.
He could call or text you, all the time;
And, more important, you could send him love –
In sexy voicemails, naughty messages.
That’d cut the distance down a lot
And, frankly, stir the exiled poet’s pot.
What say you, muse? A good idea or not?
I’m teasing you, of course. We’ve both got phones
And your bewitching voice, seductive notes
Are the air in which your poet floats.

Martha Argerich

I dined, at dusk, not far from Pére Lachaise,
Or so I’ve thought of it, since I was young
And reading Balzac, as a Rastignac -
A student, contemplating ’68;
Or Flaubert - feeling I was Frederic.

The dusk was grey and wintery, the trees
Largely bare of foliage and birds.
I sat alone, my earphones sheltering
My consciousness from circumambient
Chatter and insouciance alike.

Then, having kept the beat, to Billy Joel
Sharing with you his old song, ‘Stiletto’,
I chanced upon a singular recording
Of Martha Argerich, in decades past,
Still the young brunette, at her piano,

Performing, with her legendary passion,
The dazzling Rach 3, supreme concerto,
With such elan that I was swept along,
Electrified as much by her as it,
Within the genius of Rachmaninoff.

Isn’t this the pinnacle, my love,
Of all his compositions for piano?
Conceived in peace, at Ivanovka, dated
Moscow 23 September, nineteen
Nine; and premiered, thereafter, in New York?

Her unexampled virtuosity,
Took me further than does Ashkenazy:
She made me feel my very senses were
The keyboard, swept by her electric hands -
It was as if my brain was her piano.

There I was, on that familiar street,
Where I have been so often in my life,
But finding it a flow of deep emotion,
Transmuting latent memories of love,
Triggering synaptic revolutions.  

For, as she played, I felt your animation
Seated with me and embodying
The transcendental music she enacted,
As if I was on speed or LSD -
My psyche drenched in you and ecstasy.

I rose, before the third and final movement,
I danced upon the homeward boulevard,
No longer Rastignac or young Moreau,
But waltzing with you, Psyche, as the Sun
Hespered, pink, behind the leaden clouds.

Then I felt that you were Argerich,
Who have, with peerless subtlety and verve,
Breathed new life and possibility
Into the very keys of who I am.
Oh, play on, Martha! Play the full Rach 3!