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David Mortimer
PIGEONS AGAINST AN OIL-GREY SKY
They turn as if flicked in acrylic
To shimmer simultaneously
From one side of forty paint-brushes
To the other
Grey-white against an oil-grey sky
Spatula foot-prints
Splotched in still wet
Unblended painterly display
Blobs of physicality
That disappear en masse
And re-appear with wings
Touching imagination
Like a dream of communism
In a glistening sun-sudden
Wince of shower-spilt stars
Sparks flying upward
And blinking our eyes
In stabbing light
To weep in unison
OOPS!
Leftover academics
Full of ideas
And beyond tenure
Past chance of moderation
Are loose in the world
And the world has forgotten
Why it spent so long
Supporting their incarceration
Like clerics in colleges
Clerks in bureaucracy
Politicians in parliament
Once kept at loggerheads
Locked away
The previous kind of university
Performed one former function
In keeping truth and beauty
Safe from wider circulation
TWO PHOTOS OF W.B. YEATS
(i) (two photos)
I look into your face and see an interesting dangerous weakness
Lips pressed and ready to snap through the carapace of insects
Wrying into the camera’s composure, the eyes’ before and after
Wish to be a machine, to be already dead, in history, hover
And two more photos, later and even later, in you reveal
Only the loss of puppy-flesh, of some uncertainty, but still the tempered
Weakness like a road-map in features, the chosen position, the addict’s
Forswearing of pity, uncomfortable with even the idea of forgiveness
Not that I don’t understand the attraction, the Blakean, the Nietzschean
Rejection of slave morality, suspicion of sacrifice and creeping Christian sin
But for forgiveness Blake never denied the need
And Nietzsche in circles of history let his own rhetoric drive him mad
(ii) (the quicksilver at the back of the mirror)
Can we go back in time, or forward
To fight for a soul when the body’s dead?
And why should we bother a toss or a spit
For this race-class-birth fabulist
Unfashionable factionalist
Semi-detached nationalist
Who just happened to hit
A few lyric nails on the head?
But you have a salvageable look on your face
When all’s said
(iii) (cast a cold eye)
Walking in Ireland in 1980
Met up with my friend again late in the day
And this is the story he told me
Of hitching in Sligo at night
Picked up by a carload he thought might be provos
Discoursing through Guinness and other philosophies
Made the mistake of mentioning Yeats
How he thought he was buried near here
Weariness, worldliness, sudden unfriendliness
At the thought he might want to see the grave
A lot of people came to see the grave
But having assured them he didn’t, and being an Australian, they thawed
And told of the time they’d picked up an American
Who told them he wanted to see the grave
And being sufficiently late at night, and drunk
They’d actually taken him
The American muttered something they’d barely heard
About how he’d been made to learn Yeats at home, at school
And after all these years he’d come from America
Specially just to piss on his grave
Right, they’d thought, suddenly warming
To a fine idea
And all joined in
IRONY OF LIGHT
The backwards build of rain-weight cloud from the hills late in the day
Dramatises the sun’s sharpness, purpling the under-shelf packed grey
Behind the scorch bright green of trees, red of roofs, white
Cardboard paint-square city propped in two-dimensional light
Demanding attention, centre stage, screen, canvas, the public glare
Scarifying shadows, shrunk to the other side of walls, the pressed air
Stalled in a vast yin-yang wrestle of power, muscle, slip
Of force over angle of wind, cold and ratchetting darkness grip
Senses, emotions, whatever audience for an impromptu show
Faces east from the hard light, nervously watching, in the know
Concerning narrative and stage-craft and symphonic shape and form
But not what exact twist, hint, shift of meaning brings down this storm
NO-MAN’S-TIME
It’s morning and it’s Saturday and Autumn
And the world seems already delivered
More air to breathe
More light telescoped between
Good Friday and Easter’s elision
Than ever prayer decided
God deserved and got
Panoply of choice, time, space
Like blown glass expanding, inexhaustible
Store in nostrils, lungs, gifted
Beyond a burr in the flesh
Or a taste-bud’s taste for nothing more
Than eating, drinking nothing but
Air and light and tapped, drawn
By a cool straw from unalterable degrees
Possibilities extended, extending
In no-man’s-time
The sky wide as a tree
Copyright © David Mortimer
