Asylum

You say the old masters never got it wrong,

But when Goya painted the death of the imagination

It was a lost dog against a usurious yellow sky

And the dog, a hapless creature who had drawn itself

Ten miles on two legs, stared in amazement

To see the man who once fed him from his plate

Reduced to this.

So I felt this week, the vile soil and everything upon it—

The beggar guest kicked from the table

Before his own dog, and even the honest unpicking

Of art performed nightly and in seclusion.

Like any Penelope my armor is resignation

Although I thought I would lift the bow myself

And draw.

By the morning he is gone

And what to make of this?

The prostitutes hang from a beam like mice

The suitors are piled unburied in the yard.

And some say that it is now much better

And others, that it is worse.

So order was restored

I stared in amazement

                                               •

Perhaps Akhmatova was right

When she wrote who knows what shit

What tip, what pile of waste

Brings forth the tender verse

Like hogweed, like the fat hen under the fence

Like the unbearable present tense

Who knows what ill, what strife

What crude shack of a life

And how it twists sweetly about the broken sill:

Pressingness, another word for honeysuckle

But housewives? Has poetry

Ever deepened in the pail

Was it ever found in the sink, under the table

Did it rise in the oven, quietly able

To outhowl the hoover?

Does it press more than the children’s supper

The sudden sleepless wail?

Did it ever?

It lives. It takes seed

Like the most unforgiving weed

Grows wilder as the child grows older

And spits on dreams, did I say

How it thrives in the ashen family nest

Or how iambs are measured best

Where it hurts:

With the heel of an iron

On the reluctant breast

Of a shirt?

                                               •

                              MICHAEL BLANN

There was a hush, then Michael Blann

Stepped out onto the stage. Michael

Blann, with his pipe and his jukebox head

Oh, he’s your man.

He has a song for all weathers, a pipe

And a voice, and he sings and he roams

He sings to the wind and a dog of how

The trees are all bare and Jack’s come home.

He’s a thin voice, like a spider thread

On days when the sun is late and fine

Live and let live, sings Michael Blann

The wind yields not, but the hills is mine.

He’s no call for fate passing over

His sheep are all angels, the stars are his Lords

He’ll play any part the clouds should fancy

To humble tunes and hand-me-down words

The acts are written in briar strands

And the Pharisees are leaves in the air

I likes a drop pipes Michael Blann

Sing follow hark forward the innocent hare.

He wore to his end a clutch of sheep’s wool

To show the gods that Michael Blann

Went alone, alone for most of his years

But crossed the hills a singing man.