1.

this morning I’m listening to a little country music
by Schubert & liaising with the weather —
the naked sun did lift the sky but then it rained
& now it’s putty & porridge cloud
dragging everybody’s heaven to Leicester
ignoring my plans to mow the lawn
& plant some wild sweet pea seed
under the gloomiest section of holly
where Schubert has finally arrived too
did you manage to plant your rhubarb?
I think it needs a well-manured soil
& a little chimney to grow in
so it doesn’t get smoke in its eyes
but grows long & firm in the dark
not like a shrivelled penis in the North Sea
teaching phonics to KS1 for £9 a year
didn’t make Schubert very exhuberant
nor did beer with Mayrhofer
the poet who eventually threw himself out of
the government building where he worked
as a censor: talk about performance management
what grim times for artists & citizens
the public interested only in dance fads
& minor celebrities sucking each other’s faces
Metternich kicking out Joseph II’s reforms
banning controversial t-shirts in the capital
abolishing trial by jury in certain cases
5 years in prison for breaking an ASBO
over 3 million DNA samples held on file
damaging GM crops defined as terrorism
the Anti-Terrorism Acts making it an offence
to advocate the violent overthrow of dictators
your internet history available
to entire herds of minor government voyeurs
citizens extradited to America with no evidence
profiles of 37% of black men held by police
peace campaigners prosecuted for causing
US servicemen “harassment, alarm & distress”
by holding a sign outside an American base
saying GEORGE W. BUSH? OH DEAR
here the rain it raineth every day
even now in early May
but Berlusconi has been shown a door vero?
Schubert was soon into deep mid-winter
I have done nothing wrong
that I should shun mankind
the road I have to take
has always been a one-way street
I heard a cuckoo at 6.15 this morning
& the house martins are back & building
the sun is trying to see us all again
for the cup final & rhubarb
is shaping to wave goodbye to this grey sky

May 12/13 Norfolk

2*

The sky over the Po Valley reads like a Bisto pack;
it’s a duff way to pay the rent:
describing the describable,
and yet I’ve watched these hills for days and nights,
caught up in an infinitesimal part
of this huge tectonic sigh.
Once grounded, the rain’s designated path is a slew
of mud and road-strewn stones,
each taken so far then gripped,
nudged against unevenness;
too much friction is something to hold fast to:
much in the way that Mrs. Pina’s goat
is more an extension of herself,
even when, dizzy and drawn by illusions of freedom,
it bolts down the wet hill at gusty dawn
while due to leverage and tree-root shift,
the entire garden sways, imperceptibly plied
for an instant, ever so slightly from sloped earth.
It’s perhaps because there’s only so much slack
to take up at any given time
that what remains flaps free:
a soft awning of Ligurian wind,
which billows deeply sifted,
somehow leaves colours of the inter-tidal zone
mixed with tree leaf and shadow, and Rhubarb?
Rheums tube their ‘neathward way hereabouts,
but on the surface? Nothing.
In search of a remedy,
I side-scroll the OS map, reshuffle whole counties
and select a corner of the Rhubarb Triangle,
which gets dragged south to Valverde,
accompanied by the idiophonic metal ping
of a successfully concluded desktop event:
distant pickers grope dim forcing sheds and emerge,
heroic and blinded by searing hill light,
to the hypnotic film score tones of octet for rhubarb,
                              goat,
                virtual jukebox,
         aching root,
                petioles,
                              found objects,
         soul-lack
and Prepared Triangle.
Somewhere between Liszt
and the Ottoman marching bands
dwelt the as yet unfelt, explicit
valvey hoof-click
of the bebop scale, and
Steve Reich’s audient knitting:
a holding pattern; purl one,
a lossless,
ectopic
beat.

June 2nd – 4th Valverde/Milan

 

Copyright © Peter Hughes & *Simon Marsh, 2007.

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Peter Hughes, painter, poet and translator, was born in Oxford in 1956, and lives on the Norfolk coast. His Selected Poems, Blueroads, was published by Salt in 2003, and his most recent collection Nistanimera, was published by Shearsman Books in October 2007.

Simon Marsh is a poet and musician who has been based in Milan for many years. His publications include Bar Magenta (Many Press), The Vinyl Hat Years (Many Press/Tack) and The Ice Glossaries (Poetical Histories). The sequence of ‘The Pistol Tree Poems’ continues to unfold on the Great Works website.