Some More Poems by James Brookes

Audit
after Catullus 5

Let's live and love,
and not have a penny's worth
of dreary old men's gossip.
Suns withdraw and recoup;
when our day's trade runs out,
we must sleep on
through one limitless recession.

Kiss me, a thousand kisses, a hundred kisses,
a thousand more, a hundred more, until
in hundreds and in thousands we lose count.
In love's ledger of so many alleged kisses

not even the audit of an evil eye
could put a price on such a quantity.



In Clitheroe Keep (I)

The point was still to hold the pass, control
the pack-horses' route over the Pennines
- thus, Clitheroe. Up on its hill-spur. Small
infringement, herald of a bad time
like the taxman's strongbox on arrival.
Households squabble, huddle into being
below. A hill-fort's Norman reversal.
Clitheroe as was, where no-one was building
Clitheroe. A rest-home, heroes in choky,
imprisoned beings et al, though never likely
owt to kindle hope, like flame from clinker
but what surmounts the walls, outstays the captive -

A bright wind-marching, east for Pendle hill;
a sinew beneath its heather-coat of mail.



The Ship of Fools in Flames

Bound as they are in oil
the damned
do not fear drowining.

And the jokes are easy and clever
and we're buoyed by mirth
and it's no trick
to draw wine from the river.

We're going somewhere,
it's out of our hands. . .

Only something like a memory
or a pen and ink sketch of this day
without distracting colour,
tinder-keeled and thin as touch-paper,

is phosphorous in water,
is caesium
under oil, is naphtha

or those souls like flames
testing their entropy against the waves.

Poems by James Brookes

A Vision of Sussex as Heligoland

Heligoland is shrinking. Perhaps it was wise
that Britain tried to blow up the entirety
of the German island in 1946
(they had traded it to them for Zanzibar
back in 1909). Now it’s a tax-haven.

Past sundown you had us worried, the long hours
of the sky gathering its spilt watery yoke
through fingers of cloud as we waited for word
timidly, as the odds and the shadows lengthened.
Sheep chorused their disapproval of the flashlights.
And of course, dangling from the barn’s new low-beamed roof,
your twin brother caught you, his own greyed reflection
that would turn at the switch to a damp straw yellow
then later, beneath steady white light, would clear
and be colourless. Your grandfather buried you.

Sussex, it seems, is shrinking. Your farm is a place
where snow is as temperate and reasonable
as changes of seasons expected. Forever
is merely a dimension of its remoteness,
like hypotenuse. Our bureaucrat language saves
embarrassment to the extent that we know thaw
when we see it, as fairly distinct from our tears.
Sussex, our Heligoland, snow-like, delicate
meadow-space, or whatever - at least for a while -
closes, thumbprint to filtrum; the pressure of dust.




Englynd

Gave mere graft, myrrh,
more roads, grist and rage.

Grey moats the sky, greets
migrants. Mist goads
glared mirth. Myths and graves.
Moors; the sleet mints groats.

God grant us meet minds,
manner grief. Give. Save.




Coventry Cathedral

Demolish the feigned; it becomes believable.
Some call to say England, refined by the landscape
artistry of a Junkers JU 88;
the concreting of a trademark dissolution.
The roof-beams fall together to brace each other.
Faith re-knitting in the smoke-gauze above St Paul’s
to dissipate through a montage of coloured glass —
here is the shrapnelled love in the living flesh,
the iridescent tracer of communion.
Why else fast-forwards this pillar, this fallback point?
As witnesses, as voyeurs, as peopled ruins.
Compatible places for such covenants where
redeemable, human, souls might sit down to feast;
light becoming intimate with the horizon.



The First Cuckold

Who does practical things,
like making the buckles for Hermes’ sandals.
Who in the leisure of his talent
pokes about in the cinders
to kill time. Who frets,
who works by job-lot, who clock-
watches ‘til going-home time to
her tears and remonstrance, her soft
vulvic eyelids. Their moistness.
Who mopes; who sullenly forgives.
Who knows, probably, her night
breathing in his ear’s blast furnace
is coked with the salts of other men’s
palates. Who lives for this.