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Peter Dent
TOYS
The children watch
the oak-woods felled
and ask for toys -
when red raw hands
must fetch out roots
and force the plough.
They gang about
a timber pile
where shavings fly
like sunlight from the axe.
Toys out of oak,
stakes for defence,
kindling, furniture,
somewhere to sleep...
This precious time
that ekes us out
across the land -
our eyes to the blade,
the first turned earth.
This place our home,
we find a name.
And further wooded places -
now our children's toys -
find theirs.
(from "Focus Germanus: Episodes", 1978)
Versions from the Chinese:
Not knowing Hsiangchi Temple
I travelled in and out
the cloud-wrapped peaks, took paths
no-one had trod before,
gnarled trees on either side.
Where would I find that bell
lost somewhere in the hills?
Next thing I heard: stream-water
snagged on jagged rocks;
sun coming through the pines
took on coolest green…
Then dusk, a lonely pool,
a monk cross-legged there, thinking
on the beast: how he might
keep its fangs from flesh.
(Wang Wei)
These poems then I send you…
Don’t worry if at times
you’re baffled by the words,
but scan them with your fingers,
gently, the way a doctor
searches for a pulse,
pick up, maybe, in signals
of excitement just
that very rhythm beating
there in your own heart.
(Wen I-to)
(from “Night Winds and Dice”, 1990)
SURVIVORS
hoist sail, the sailor said
The stone ship breaking
quietly in the bay
where grey seas steal...
flake after flake
all day and while we sleep.
And yet how many nights,
when blue comes dropping
down on pale horizons,
you wait for us, the precious
few to come ashore.
Shores raking in
the fragments - pebbles, sands,
into a bar where
marram grass and thrift,
unconscious, make their way.
conglomerates of the new,
what you and the poets
make of us,
what some pick up in Summer,
call true gold,
the earth and language
of the tribe. How long
before you turn your back,
walk home, how long
before we're all ashore?
for Eleni Vakalo
(from "Undergrowth", 1991)
PROXIMA CENTAURI
Our hands are not the same.
Your ring against my palm
reminds we as we walk
back home again tonight.
we talk of stars:
Proxima Centauri, the nearest
so the textbooks say,
four light years off.
Your eyes are cowled
and questioning, but even
if we fixed its point,
dark cloud would come between.
We unlink hands grown cold,
play pat-a-cake,
blow into them and laugh.
No special sercets to a life
obscure with love.
(from "Undergrowth", 1991)
ON EVERY SIDE
Praxinoscope Theatre for an eye
Slow-motioning through mirrors
The rapid stills of time Recall
We are the keepers of the secret
The carriers and the spinners
Making sense of what is made
See here the Battery lab laid out
The two position-finder cells
Restored with love and there
A searchlight grazing distant fears
Experience by prior arrangement
Carcinogens A history of dark
(from "Days Out", 1998)
COMING IN
To stardom and elision song that
No-one knows persuasive detail of
A steady climb unnavigating words
Now in it for the long haul cloud-lit
Margin crossed life levelling out
Soft soft velleities high altitude
A stream of text its glass wall
Crazed in questions knowing nothing
Doing celebrates one observation
Frosting on a wing and a prayer
Suite sky-blue its genius loci all
A flutter in the scheme of things
Of worth flaps down reveals
An airy dispensation calling falls
As something out of nothing fades
Mauve in the eyes the distance just
A chemical reaction all four engines
Drone with memory a flashing light
For automatic incident quick shift to
Escape code (angels) go to green
(from "Settlement", 2001)
© Peter Dent, 2005
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