HERCULES
1
Apples. Bread. Wine. And the camps
are the least accidental features
of a foreign landscape. No sweat
or, at least, the temple is what’s
sliding like greased lightning on
the waves, who are silent as if they
could not even be arsed. But I want
to know. The white flare of his
buttocks disappearing in the water.
He might as well come back gold
as be dead or living in No Place I
can muscle into, as fast as a rat
shoots off into its own space,
letting the bulky air thrust out,
taking its illness out to the stars.
O lyric density! O blindness!
Impossible fruit in the dank soil.
We just drop it in and pull it up,
surprised at the effervescence of
spring water, and the clean bright
buckets that surround us, pitched
in the well, pulled up and drained.
2
The density of a muscled travelogue
or a worksheet. I want to know
what gives when we are all
descended from gods. As for that,
the creation of a nervous system
should cast a new, more viable
taxonomy into their mountain
home. Crab apples upset the baskets
and the entire market’s in a holy
uproar as though it hadn’t bargained
with theft already, as though my
strength were not the dirtiest
sympathy it would ever know. I’m
no more clever than the man I
left with the whole fucking world
on his shoulders. Its bright
striped canopies where gods sleep,
a pouchful of their still profiles.
3
Raiding parties. The mystery is
that I happen so often among them
and do nothing but act the fool
as though I were being paid
by someone else, my ghostly
brother, the merchant. Raids on
the blanketing and divine air
that starts at the groin, flows
up, and out. I want to know if
your prick can lift a man as high
as that wave can deceive the
temple’s grip on our sopping wet
earth. By the breakers, an army
is wondering if to set up camp
is like cracking a fertilised
egg into a jug. I say it is,
and start as fine blades start
from my follicles and (the moon
is high) break wind into a fist
and breathe (the sea is high)
and take off. I’m talking about
the real world. Labour. Raiding
parties on the chick’s sticky yolk.
4
As love shoves its fingers up
the cute boy’s nostrils I work
the dank groundsheet from under
his sweating rump, the silky
bundles of sequestered jewels,
and a tube of surgical jelly
squelches between my fingers,
a cross between light itself
and its passionate entry. All
credit for that. Strictly,
nothing can be had for nothing
is how I’d explain it to Mr
Atlas and his million disciples.
But it’s ecstasy, and how it
bubbles into muscle becoming
spirit! The effort of spirit
to work it loose enough to
enter’s a neat question about
theft, darkness, the market,
the loved one dragged under
by compliant hands, the rush
of blood, the chartered world
on those aching shoulders. I
bite, weave, break on the ride.
5
Legless, the bloodied, rescinded
quest held up against a small
and glittering unit that reels
around the campsite, talking of
the work it has to do. It traces
its life from the hand and into
the vein as a picaresque reverse.
By the splash and drip of blood
I shall be known. The red curl
of the foetus, comma, a grammar
easing its shoulders between the
hard polished surfaces where a
god resides, smiling at nothing
as, easily, I drag the temple
into the shell, stunned by that
slipstream of gold that shimmies
out. Buckets. A count of 100 and
I surface, gritty eyes and empty
arms, unweighted and blind.
ORPHEUS
1
A creamy mallow light and me, crouching, calves and thighs together like the two halves of a clam. How things occupy themselves! in spite of our wearily fixated loves.
2
The first half of coincidence is a turned-up ace. Three more aces in the pack and everything down to luck.
The elegiac number, one.
3
Down here, at Mission Control, I’m expecting a call from my wife.
4
Embarrassed by loneliness I ransack a city for images of the single life. The wailing of all those cows with distended udders in the meadows of the known world. I shall circle the city with their stripped hide? That one’s been used.
5
Inside the clam is edible. I begin to yield. Somewhere another hungry clam will eat me, then I’ll eat him. I’m not as popular in my peer group as I used to be. I’ll have to find another gang of do-nothing creeps. The single life
Brr-brr Biberkopf.
6
One way of not doing things. The light so opaque you can’t see out. Inside a small room a smaller room. Hello. At last – I seem to have found someone to listen to me.
CHRYSOMALLUS
1
The foreground’s filth is bleeding.
I think my mother is a loaf of bread.
The magic is in the dispersal.
It destroys the distance between places.
All of the pieces were buried together.
I think hysteria makes bones and meat.
I think my mother is a loaf of bread.
The leaves are beckoning the wind.
The magic is in the dispersal.
The foreground’s filth is bleeding.
I think my mother is a loaf of bread.
I think hysteria makes bones and meat.
2
They put down the box in the meadow
and taproots around it cried
Mirror, tell me your name.
From the dark heart of the cream
the handmaiden beats a necklace
and I am priceless.
Each object must tell its own
story and be damned
Mirror, tell me your name.
Break out in the chatter of glades
and heave me across your back
and I am priceless.
3
I think hysteria makes bones and meat
imitate a god.
JASON 2
1
With my address tattooed on my collarbone I’m a stranger to my body. Indian ink is blue. It settles in waves through which my own blood weaves. Its own red fades and when I want to go home I shall be blocked. Not by a dam, but by a channel through which the flow is graduated and the wheels made to turn. I could watch them all day.
2
When I came back with trophies I let them speak for themselves, recording devices built into their filaments. The king’s initial awe was rapidly tempered by scientific curiosity. The domes of the city were razed before they could fall.
3
Each sensation is exploratory now that confidence in touch is divorced from the fingers. The cry as the golden fleece is born away, involuntary and inarticulate, makes sense in spite of itself and its wary hoofed grandfather. It turns into a syllable and then a word. A new tongue is born out of petulance tented on pain, drawn fabric through which the whine of gnats can be heard.
4
And if I am thirsty shall I not steal from the steps of the Town Hall, the Observatory (my starry-eyed darling), the Ordnance Survey buildings? Now I’m reduced to knowledge those iguanas recognise my tread. Acres of flesh respond to its office as though our concern had been simple annotation. An object already there whose origin was mysterious. Il Mappamondo, large as the world.
CHARLES LAMBERT 