Maxim gun.
Dulciloquist Dos Santos, swear to them
whose languages you’ll never learn to speak
that tongues of fire at a 1000 rpm
is not the final eloquence you seek.
Spondaic or dactylic those machines
and their dry scansions mean that truths get lost,
and a
pravda
empty as its magazines
is Kalashnikov PK ’s flash Pentecost.
Art & Extinction
‘When I hear of the destruction of a species I feel as if all the works of some great writer had perished.’
(Theodore Roosevelt, 1899)
1. The Birds of America
(i) John James Audubon (1785–1851)
The struggle to preserve once spoken words
from already too well-stuffed taxonomies
is a bit like Audubon’s when painting birds,
whose method an admirer said was this:
Kill ’em, wire ’em, paint ’em, kill a fresh ’un!
The plumage even of the brightest faded.
The artist had to shoot in quick succession
till all the feathers were correctly shaded.
Birds don’t pose for pictures when alive!
Audubon’s idea of restraint,
doing the Pelican, was 25
dead specimens a day for
one
in paint.
By using them do we save words or not?
As much as Audubon’s art could save a,
say, godwit, or a grackle, which he shot
and then saw ‘multiplied by Havell’s graver’.
(ii) Weeki Wachee
Duds doomed to join the dodo: the dugong,
talonless eagles, croc, gimp manatee,
here, courtesy Creation’s generous strong,
the losers of thinned jungle and slicked sea.
Many’s the proud chieftain used to strut
round shady clearings of dark festooned teak
with twenty cockatoo tails on his nut,
macaw plumes à la mode, rainforest chic.
Such gladrag gaudies safe in quarantine
and spared at least their former jungle fate
of being blowpiped for vain primitives to preen
now race a tightrope on one roller skate.
A tanned sophomore, these ghettoed birds’ Svengali,
shows glad teeth, evolved for smiling, as macaws
perform their deft Darwinian finale
by hoisting the Stars and Stripes for our applause.
(iii) Standards
in hopeful anticipation of the bicentenary of the national emblem of the United States of America,
Haliaaetus Falco Leucocephalus
, 1782–1982
‘The bald eagle is likewise a large, strong, and very active bird, but an execrable tyrant: he supports his assumed dignity and grandeur by rapine and violence, extorting unreasonable tribute and subsidy from the feathered nations.’
(William Bartram,
Travels
, 1791)
‘Our standard with the eagle stands for us.
It waves in the breeze in almost every clime.’
(The flag, not
Falco Leucocephalus
poised in its dying on the brink of time!)
Rejecting Franklin’s turkey for a bird that
flies
Congress chose the soaring eagle, called,
for its conspicuous white head, ‘the bald’.
Now the turkey’s thriving and the eagle dies!
When the last stinks in its eyrie, or falls slow,
when the very last bald eagle goes the way
of all the unique fauna, it won’t know
the Earth it plummets to ’s the USA.
But will still wing over nations as the ghost
on money, and the mountainous US Post.
much as sunlight shining through the British pound
showed PEACE with her laurels, white on a green ground.
2. Loving Memory
for Teresa Stratas
The fosses where Caractacus fought Rome
blend with grey bracken and become a blur
above the Swedish Nightingale’s last home.
Somehow my need for you makes me seek her.
The Malverns darken as the dusk soaks in.
The rowan berries’ dark red glaze grows dull.
The harvest moon’s scraped silver and bruised tin
is only one night off from being full.
Death keeps all hours, but graveyards close at nights.
I hurry past the Malvern Hospital
where a nurse goes round small wards and puts on lights
and someone there’s last night begins to fall.
‘The oldest rocks this earth can boast’, these hills,
packed with extinction, make me burn for you.
I ask two women leaving with dead daffodils:
Where’s Jenny Lind’s grave, please?
They both say:
Who?
3. Looking Up
for Philip,
Dulciloquist Dos Santos, swear to them
whose languages you’ll never learn to speak
that tongues of fire at a 1000 rpm
is not the final eloquence you seek.
Spondaic or dactylic those machines
and their dry scansions mean that truths get lost,
and a
pravda
empty as its magazines
is Kalashnikov PK ’s flash Pentecost.
Art & Extinction
‘When I hear of the destruction of a species I feel as if all the works of some great writer had perished.’
(Theodore Roosevelt, 1899)
1. The Birds of America
(i) John James Audubon (1785–1851)
The struggle to preserve once spoken words
from already too well-stuffed taxonomies
is a bit like Audubon’s when painting birds,
whose method an admirer said was this:
Kill ’em, wire ’em, paint ’em, kill a fresh ’un!
The plumage even of the brightest faded.
The artist had to shoot in quick succession
till all the feathers were correctly shaded.
Birds don’t pose for pictures when alive!
Audubon’s idea of restraint,
doing the Pelican, was 25
dead specimens a day for
one
in paint.
By using them do we save words or not?
As much as Audubon’s art could save a,
say, godwit, or a grackle, which he shot
and then saw ‘multiplied by Havell’s graver’.
(ii) Weeki Wachee
Duds doomed to join the dodo: the dugong,
talonless eagles, croc, gimp manatee,
here, courtesy Creation’s generous strong,
the losers of thinned jungle and slicked sea.
Many’s the proud chieftain used to strut
round shady clearings of dark festooned teak
with twenty cockatoo tails on his nut,
macaw plumes à la mode, rainforest chic.
Such gladrag gaudies safe in quarantine
and spared at least their former jungle fate
of being blowpiped for vain primitives to preen
now race a tightrope on one roller skate.
A tanned sophomore, these ghettoed birds’ Svengali,
shows glad teeth, evolved for smiling, as macaws
perform their deft Darwinian finale
by hoisting the Stars and Stripes for our applause.
(iii) Standards
in hopeful anticipation of the bicentenary of the national emblem of the United States of America,
Haliaaetus Falco Leucocephalus
, 1782–1982
‘The bald eagle is likewise a large, strong, and very active bird, but an execrable tyrant: he supports his assumed dignity and grandeur by rapine and violence, extorting unreasonable tribute and subsidy from the feathered nations.’
(William Bartram,
Travels
, 1791)
‘Our standard with the eagle stands for us.
It waves in the breeze in almost every clime.’
(The flag, not
Falco Leucocephalus
poised in its dying on the brink of time!)
Rejecting Franklin’s turkey for a bird that
flies
Congress chose the soaring eagle, called,
for its conspicuous white head, ‘the bald’.
Now the turkey’s thriving and the eagle dies!
When the last stinks in its eyrie, or falls slow,
when the very last bald eagle goes the way
of all the unique fauna, it won’t know
the Earth it plummets to ’s the USA.
But will still wing over nations as the ghost
on money, and the mountainous US Post.
much as sunlight shining through the British pound
showed PEACE with her laurels, white on a green ground.
2. Loving Memory
for Teresa Stratas
The fosses where Caractacus fought Rome
blend with grey bracken and become a blur
above the Swedish Nightingale’s last home.
Somehow my need for you makes me seek her.
The Malverns darken as the dusk soaks in.
The rowan berries’ dark red glaze grows dull.
The harvest moon’s scraped silver and bruised tin
is only one night off from being full.
Death keeps all hours, but graveyards close at nights.
I hurry past the Malvern Hospital
where a nurse goes round small wards and puts on lights
and someone there’s last night begins to fall.
‘The oldest rocks this earth can boast’, these hills,
packed with extinction, make me burn for you.
I ask two women leaving with dead daffodils:
Where’s Jenny Lind’s grave, please?
They both say:
Who?
3. Looking Up
for Philip,
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