ANTONY OLDKNOW

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LOVE SONNET

In those summers of fires and reminiscence
You walk through the flames to get to the others
Who are climbing ladders to heaven through smoke,
People and souls like those frightened insects
Who squirm and crack open trying to escape,
Black things that suddenly burst like little suns
And are gone. And while inevitably
You are entwined in the arms of another
You seem to smell the stench of burning flesh
As the sweet rain begins falling, the cool
Delicate aroma that is almost
Corrupt, like the faint taste of mud in catfish,
And awareness of entrails in you, my sweet
Squirming animal with whom I'm in love.

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SOPRANO

They are inaccessible, up on a platform
Singing and in front of them, violins
And a timpanist. There are others too
Beside this chorus in black all playing
Together, a team, commanded bow
Tie god: unison fingers, unison arms,
Lips, teeth, pumping lungs, unison delight.
They are singing holy songs on a stage.

The god watches. I watch. Both listen. I watch
Outside but run along the lines of notes
And pound and punctuate with my own drums,
Punctuate them all, and if I am in love
With a red rose in a soprano's hair,
She's in a prison and cannot talk back.

I don't know her, but I can taste her lips
And her breath and the music on her tongue,
Hallelujah, she sings, and I'm sure her
Whole body is singing, legs and pubic hair
And those fingers that will go to her tongue
In wonder about kings of kings and lords.
I think the drummer has an ulcer, all
Of these people would burst out into French

If I approached her, she too would, curling
And tensing those glorious wet lips and tongue
And I would think it a wonder I had
To translate my way through to be in love,
Adjective after noun, even though it's English
She's singing, and German music on the march

About a dead Jew with a hat of thorns.
They translate, I translate, King James from Greek
And Hebrew, has her translating with red
Lips and wet tongue his abstract Aramaic
Distant love that I am on fire with
In this dirty room full of cats and watch
All this in a screen through which is a distant
Old church in France with candles and stone walls
And incense I can't smell. I'd like to help
The solemn timpanist, know if he's dead now,
The violinists retired arthritic
Who were so mysterious-and all those grave girls,
Where have they gone? How sad I am: in love
With one of them whose red rose and gold hair
Bless me far off here in my dark. She's as
Close to a god as I'm ever going to come,
A god who sings about gods, gods dying,
Gods coming alive again in the spring,
Laughing gods, gods on fire in the cold rain
That smells of fish and mud, the gods who touch
And stroke wet hair and make it sing and pout
Like fiddle strings, those raucous maypole gods

That twine and enter each other's amber flesh
Smiling and laughing in their wild riot,
Their blood and snow streamers and screaming wind,
Black robed gods with hair full of petals,
Gods who lie down with the cats and dogs in mud
Singing their hallelujahs and hosannas.

Singing to me, she is singing to herself
Surrounded by her black-robed others
Whom I must ignore though she voices all
Their sound, their rippling fingers' strings and drum beats,
She is drunk in place: come out of her dark
Room, she is my elegant god of the mud,
My grass god, my love among the old graves
At dusty midnight god, my lily-of-the-valley
Song thrush, and I love all her singing, her
Body is her soul, my soul, her cloaked soul,
And naked, wet and dry, holy and damned,
Her rose that smells through this mottled glass
And cannot be conducted is my fish and
Fire soul, the eternal grope of my hands.

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IN EVERY BLINK

You are my nickel and dime lover, my
Apple in the straw where we lay girl.
Though you lie among sacks all over me
With your cold shoulders and arms and the purl
Of your delicate snoring makes me sigh
Awake instead of sliding through the furl
Of rushing darknesses after we so
Comfortably drift into, our dream whirl

You all come rushing back with your peaches
Under the rain clatter, that every one
Of you grinning at the sack itch, shed stink,
Rain drip through the roof on bare skin lurches
Of my settling body and yours squirming on
With gentle hate and love in every blink.

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AGAIN

My lips are tickled with hair as I drink.
I am a bearded and mustachioed
Mask of a man shamming eternity,
Hoping a little to look just like fear
As I have seen it in backstreets rattling
With cans in the wind or on the stone walls
Inside incensed churches where a black beard
Proclaims it is a sacred paradox:

Love and the gleaming sword together.
So I taste the eternal fish through hair,
Lick the last red drops of one brief passion
After another inside these stone walls
That pretend to move and gasp and be here
Forever as they die and then die again.

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ME AND THE SOULS

Stones rattle down the cliff I am climbing
Miss me, one hits another stone, shoots out
Into air, smashes the head of a bird
That has been circling and glaring at me
As I climb. Stones and bird keep dropping down
Behind me as I struggle up in harsh sun.

Souls like colored balloons all wobbly
With water inside them come drifting down
The cliff bouncy and bright but each giddy
Latex face tethered to a string is held
In check at a great distance from on high
By a black-cloaked figure with a blank face.

The fragments of my soul cascade downhill
In love with the birds that drown in the lake.

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WHEN THERE IS SINGING I AM NOT THE SINGER

When there is singing I'm not the singer
But I sing all the parts melodiously
And delicately hammer the timpani,
Raise high the horns and blow such high clear tones
That the heavens above ring out with them
As if I were in control of a whole host
Of bearded angels ready to set off
On paradoxical destructions for love.

I am the first horseman galloping off
Down the grand winds, down the dark wet tunnels
Spurring my horse into a blazing fury
Until he snarls with his front steels upraised
To smash the grinning devils like china
And pour the sunshine on the doubts of your hair.

The bells boom out and deafen the ringer,
Bells defiant, making hatred ceremoniously,
Bells full of the teeth of horses, whinny
And snort, swimming through a wind full of bones
And apologetic leaves and lips of them
Who cannot find the ground forever lost
In the madness of their croaking and cough
Music, the accelerating beat dove

In the garden driven passion, the scoff
Music of the afterwards, the runnels
Of sweet liquid on your brow. We jury
And judge this, we both make all this crazed
Torture music, our violins of china,
Flesh entwined with devils in their lair.