KEVIN BAILEY

A TREADINGof

UNCERTAIN WAYSand

Other Poems

THE DAY DREAM PRESS

KEVIN BAILEY

A TREADINGof

UNCERTAIN WAYSand

Other Poems

THE DAY DREAM PRESS1998

First Published in 1998 by The Day Dream Press / Haiku Quarterly

39 Exmouth Street, Swindon SN1 3PU

Copyright © Kevin Bailey

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSSome of these poems first appeared in the following magazines:

Envoi, The Honest Ubterman, Iota, Poetry Nippon (Japan), Cicada (Japan), The Mainichi Daily News (Japan), Outposts, Hummingbird (US),

Brussels Sprout (US), Odyssey and elsewhere.

Number Two in the HQ Poets series

A TREADING OF UNCERTAIN WAYS

In the sharp pine-wood she stands among the slender trunks. His books are dented with rain drops. Should he rise and follow her, or gather words? (This has always been his dilemma.) Between two loves... Now lost in the dark wood; no hewing out with axes from this delicate place. Night falls. The stars cannot guide him through this unnatural maze. His love, the search for lost paths: a treading of uncertain ways.

WASP

A dead wasp clings to my copy of Baudelaire.

How appropriate that this vicious, foetal thing

should expire on these sickly flowers.

[1]

THE SCENT

He strokes his beard in the crowded street and is not surprised when from his hand comes the talisman of one bitter scent:

tested on his tongue, it seems a blend of lad’s love with lavender, his fingers and clumsy thumb took up:

an indistinct flavour recalling cries, laboured, as by a birth, and now the dilute of a love he touched that will not fade.

THE CRACKED MUG

The cracked mug, used for so long, now has deep brown veins where once there was a pure and unbroken glaze.

Do I love the mug more, or less, for this varicose familiarity: these common flaws, that shock my tongue and scour my lips?

[2]

PER ARDUA AD ASTRA

The hospital had been put to sleep when mad Jack stepped through a large ward window, three floors up, to stride, he thought, on stars and shards of glass to the steadily ascending moon. Alas, one less daft would have known that Newton, though not precise in his calculations, was right, and that he would fall with all gravity to his death. But the lunatic, like his poet brother, is protected when possessed, and he fell, softly, into a bed of roses - the passion of the thorns, and the scent of blooms, reassuring him, that he had reached his destination.

BATHTIME

In this warm bath shared with hairy Agamemnon and loquacious MaratI try to ignore my vengeful wife rattling cutlery.

[3]

HAIRS

I have hairs under the foreskin; dark, trapped hairs, there, under the foreskin; my little pluckings from her, pulling at the skin like wires cutting cheese; as she lay, dead plucked, and recently plucking from me, the intangible benefits of orgasm and seed; taken into her this short endurance merchandize: and yet, here I have her hair, coarse dark hair; lasting for a thousand years hair, trapped under my cell-dying foreskin; pieces of an ignored immortality, privately stored, for this last reference.

WILD FLOWERS

Down this avenue of trees, wild flowers strangled by the wind -

and among them your face,smiling like a child.

[4]

HARE

I found the severed head of a hare,

staring a dry stare,

and gobbing flies in the long grass by the river:

the passing shiver of charnel Nature closing tired eyes.

FOX

Exposing himself from the hedge, the gargoyled face of a fox; panting his shame; doing the quick-change to guilty expressions of movement: skipping off across shit-brown furrows, satisfied with my shock; only a back­ward glance at one who understands.

[5]

STRANGE MEETING

Horse trodden: its skin unsplit and perfectly pressed in mud, the recently dead field mouse was now rigid with frost, when we came upon it during our chilly morning walk.

We discussed, over its corpse, justice and the arrogance of riders; their full weight and class - and how fatal, these crescent hoof^marks, on the scantling art of mouse bones.

JANUARY 11

january 11: today i picked the first primrose.

this should not be. but where the sun shines warmly

and there is water, air, and the nurturing soil

it is, inevitable.

[6]

MARCH THE SIXTEENTH*

Gathering the scent of almond blossom on this still, moon-lit, March night; 1 remember you, and the slight curve of your flank, and the fresh smell of white flesh pressed by my weight - in a depth of sheets met, this odour of love made then - and here, a breeze risen ghost; the affect of cursed body and sense, that knows itself, yet aches: growing satiate - but incomplete.

(*the author’s birthday)

SIREN

With her open legs she offers the shrimp-pink aqueous hole: a little worn perhaps, but honest in its shawl of matted hair -

its nature mouthing out the Sirens tempting call; and like a fool,1 dive towards the wrecker’s shore.

[7]

THE MAGDEBURG MAIDENS (UNWISE)

Stone, maidens we presume, standing confused, with stone maidenheads intact, caressed smooth by mason’s hands who loved them as daughters.

High, on the cathedral front at Magdeburg, their plaits and little bosoms are fixed, unable to ripen and balance round hips that will never bear the weight of love.

At my stare, they each affect a smile, concerned that 1 should place their frozen imago puella on so neat a pedestal.

Only one, with open eyes can read my thoughts, know I think these girls that animate such delicate wrists should live, and hold this new Pygmalion.

[8]

THE MAGDEBURG MAIDENS (WISE)

One more than sage Mahomet would allow, all smiles, these five immortal virgin wives of stone; having proved their parable, are

asking me to choose, which of them will be the first to crack a granite maidenhead.The unbroken purity of these hardy Jewish girls, does not much inspire a manly chisel

to gouge below their folds of early Gothic drapery. Even the Teutonic hosts were not provoked by these smug grins, or inviolate

Semitic bellies. Aloof, they have preserved their loving cups of holy oil for Christian priests alone. And for this sin, they will not burn, but should justly procure a fall.

[9]

UNDER THE OAK

Imagine a single dry-leafed Oak standing tall and mature in a pasture of sun-dried grasses.It is August, and two lovers stretch and shiver their night-blanched bodies naked beneath its swarthy limbs. It has seen much and creaks in satisfaction. Imagine this public nakedness at dawn; the reluctance to dress, the many halts to caress this or that intimate treasure, invested before by night and shy measure. Imagine this love at first sight; this miracle of day and night, and a new day sent with eye-conceiving lust. Now imagine raw truths confronting the light.

FROM A SCRAP OF CINE FILM 1966

Sea urchins, broken on the distant white reef have spread their dangerous spikes and shells all over the fine white sands at Twiga beach below Mombasa.

The old 16mm film of me treading carefully to the clear green sea, fills me with a longing, not for youth, or a less jerky photography, but for Africa herself.

[10]

COUNTING THE CLOUDS

On the red pullover her loveris heaping primroses

that avalanche away from her little, but loving breasts;

rising and falling, rising and falling, with each silent breath.

Across a universe her steady green eyes are counting the clouds.

GRAVE

this child’s gravestone such a little thing hidden in tall grass

[11]

DROWNING

Her creative body moves about him. Milk tears drop to his chest; press their sweetness upon him and leave impressed the invisible, indivisible, stench of love.

She curls, subordinate head rounded down to his breast; coarse hairs scarring her face with sweaty, whorling impressions. Her thoughts, drifting with his heart beat to a fated future;

passive in their train, while his head strains for air above the covering waters of her love; eyeing in panic the magically patterned stars; wondering for omens and reaching forward -

and yet the fixed stone^weight of her love holds him down; drowning like gentle Clarence in a premonition of death - his life ending, open mouthed, in a sea of doubts.

RAIN

White light after rain.Our hands spread on the cold sheets. Spring is cruel again.

H2]

MY FATHER (for L. H.W. Bailey)

My father, his old green cardigan half-slung over the dirty grey handle of a spade, pauses, feet astride the newly dug clay, to light a fag- end, frayed by its brief sojourn in his one secure trouser pocket.

With over-rehearsed ease, he flicks the neck of a cheap plastic lighter: the beacon of sparks and short-lived flame, creating a gaudy illumination that in this so very still twilight, marks his place in the scheme of things.

He has always been so. Love’s own Colossus - a Wonder, my world may never see again.

AUNT HILDA’S VOICE

like a musty room or a Church of England service.

[13]

NEB (for Dorothy Claris Scudds)

Clacks Farm, Nr. Ewelme, Oxfordshire, 7am, 30th. July, 1917.

Ere ‘e comes, all bandy legged and gaiter sowed; an hour late fer sure ‘e knows; Where’s bin Neb? - There’s cows to past un ‘ay t’ throws...”

a >

“The missus slipped ‘er wind last night; yets I swear it ‘ardly showed: I ‘ad to get ‘er lift and shrift, ere she stiffened so...”

PASTORAL

In the copse; no sound, except the sniffing of the dog, and the anger of fallen elms.

[14]

THE LOSS

A chaos of clouds scudding through dark eyes.The hand’s descent from forehead crossing her breasts: the triangulation of thoughts by faith.Fingers lingering to gather sense from the storm* coloured nipples. Silently it thunders in her heart: so silently, that both beginning and end of touch are forgot. So plain the emptiness of these human hands - their miming shape around this loss: the empty, emptying gesture. Quiet tears trickle down, sear, yet cannot find a way: glisten in the lightning’s shock; burn like the jilted child that’s slipped her womb * that nameless lump, some lesser God has condemned to fall, through guideless paths to oblivion. The bruised sky rages, blindly, at such a loss.

I DID NOT LOOK (for Catherine)

I did not look, it was given to me * that sight of your freckled breasts; bats flown in the shaded green cave of your dress; welling up to the light; in my mind, the child I would nestle there, in love, for love’s sake.

115]

INTO THE DARK GARDEN

My breath, foul with the smell of tobacco smoke, never made her flinch, as sometimes, in my anger. I tried to wound her with a putrid kiss.

And as she smiled, and loved, and endured,I would drive myself away into the dark garden, where the sweetness of musk roses enraged

with a scent, tying to her, framed in the open doorway, bathed in a homeliness that drew me back to all that was soft and enclosing.

This was not modern love, but an ancient thing, binding by blind instinct the rough to the smooth. And even now, although she is gone, the cold of the world can never really touch me: her irritating warmth is still within.

MAY

May blossom married to snow. Our separate selves wandering bare rooms.

[16]

THE MASK (for P.S. and LA.)

In a mirror we can change expressions by blinking - from beatific to beastly; gargoyled to Grouchoed. Such a discovery must be that of the actor, hiding away behind the plasticity of flesh; learning to mask the off-stage disasters of their life. Yes - of course; ‘... a poor player that struts his hour’, but how does that help me? When even in allegory lines are muffed, and the badly fixed persona slips away to reveal - a dumb, bare-faced man, twisted and wet with agonies.

Coda

The Cyclops dawn studies with one engorging eye, the eaten men; the chewed'Up, spat out souls that pen a meaning to their lives by night, and sleepless crawl to morning's light, luith hopes of art in tired bones.

[17]

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