Read Selected Poems for Free Online

–
    Leningrad’s vast pool of widowhood,
    who also guard the Rembrandts and rank Gents,
    who stand all day with stern unbending gaze
    haloed with Tsars’ crowns and Fabergés,
    their menfolk melted down to monuments.
    It’s their eyes make me shy I’ve fallen for
    a woman who they’d chorus at
nyet! nyet!
    and make me edgy walking here with you
    between the statues VERITAS , HONOR ,
    and PSYCHE whom strong passion made forget
    conditions of darkness and the gods’ taboo.
4. The People’s Palace
    Shuffling in felt goloshes saves the floor
    from the unexpected guests of history
    who queue all day to see what once was for
    the fruits of just one bonsai family tree.
    IUSTITIA and POMONA in their crates.
    Come winter and the art, all cordoned off,
    ’s wired to a US import anti-theft device
    and opened only for researching prof.
    and
patineur
from Academe who skates
    those ballrooms patterned like cracked Baikal ice
    buffing the princely parquets for the few
    who’ll see them reproduced in some review.
    Watch that elegant glissade as he yahoos
    into the soundproof pile of overshoes.
5. Prague Spring
    on my birthday, 30 April
    A silent scream? The madrigal’s top note?
    Puking his wassail on the listening throng?
    Mouthfuls of cumulus, then cobalt throat.
    Medusa must have hexed him in mid-song.
    The finest vantage point in all of Prague’s
    this gagging gargoyle’s with the stone-locked lute,
    leaning over cherries, blow-ups of Karl Marx
    the pioneers ’ll march past and salute.
    Tomorrow’s May but still a North wind scuffs
    the plated surface like a maced cuirass,
    lays on, lays off, gets purchase on and roughs
    up the Vltava, then makes it glass.
    The last snow of this year’s late slow thaw
    dribbles as spring saliva down his jaw.

The Nuptial Torches
    ‘These human victims, chained and burning at the stake, were the blazing torches which lighted the monarch to his nuptial couch.’
    (J. L. Motley,
The Rise of the Dutch Republic
)
    Fish gnaw the Flushing capons, hauled from fleeced
    Lutheran Holland, for tomorrow’s feast.
    The Netherlandish lengths, the Dutch heirlooms,
    That might have graced my movements and my groom’s
    Fade on the fat sea’s bellies where they hung
    Like cover-sluts. Flesh, wet linen wrung
    Bone dry in a washerwoman’s raw, red,
    Twisting hands, bed-clothes off a lovers’ bed,
    Falls off the chains. At Valladolid
    It fell, flesh crumpled like a coverlid.
    Young Carlos de Sessa stripped was good
    For a girl to look at and he spat like wood
    Green from the orchards for the cooking pots.
    Flames ravelled up his flesh into dry knots
    And he cried at the King:
How can you stare
    On such agonies and not turn a hair?
    The king was cool:
My friend, I’d drag the logs
    Out to the stake for my own son, let dogs
    Get at his testes for his sins; auto-da-fés
    Owe no paternity to evil ways
.
    Cabrera leans against the throne, guffaws
    And jots down to the Court’s applause
    Yet another of the King’s
bon mots
.
    O yellow piddle in fresh fallen snow –
    Dogs on the Guadarramas … dogs. Their souls
    Splut through their pores like porridge holes.
    They wear their skins like cast-offs. Their skin grows
    Puckered round the knees like rumpled hose.
    Doctor Ponce de la Fuente, you,
    Whose gaudy, straw-stuffed effigy in lieu
    Of members hacked up in the prison, burns
    Here now, one sacking arm drops off, one turns
    A stubble finger and your skull still croons
    Lascivious catches and indecent tunes;
    And croaks:
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust
.
    Pray God be with you in your lust
.
    And God immediately is, but such a one
    Whose skin stinks like a herring in the sun,
    Huge from confinement in a filthy gaol,
    Crushing the hooping on my farthingale.
    O Holy Mother, Holy Mother, Ho-
    ly Mother Church, whose melodious, low
    Labour-moans go through me as you bear
    These pitch-stained children to the upper air,
    Let them lie still tonight, no crowding smoke
    Condensing back to men float in and poke
    Their