Peter Oswald's Poems

2009-06-14T03:12:00.000-07:00

What is this question mark without a question?

GOD TRIES TO SEE THINGS FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF AN ATHEIST

2009-06-14T03:10:00.000-07:00

I speak to the door
And the door does not answer me.
I try all the tables and chairs,
The floorboards,
The entire fabric of the house.
Nothing will make any reply.
I go out, I listen to the wind,
Birds and animals
Run towards me and away from me.
Everything moves in circles of its own.
There is the sea,
Tearing at the rocks
With soft fingers.
I calm myself
But the sea carries on foaming.
I lie down to sleep.
In all the universes
I am the only substance
That can cease to exist.
Time slides away from me
Like shale down a mountain
When a goat slips over the skyline.

DEMOLITION SONNET

2009-06-14T02:46:00.001-07:00

Ladywell has gone up into the sky,
As if she never had been more than thin
Architect's lines, that with a Friday sigh
Are scrunched and chucked into the paperbin.
She has been entered in the book of air,
Where queens are kneeling on a towered green,
And the Sioux dance; whose pages cannot tear,
Printed in lines of light by what has been.
Her demolition has completed her,
Now she cannot be smashed by any hammer;
Steel picks and scoops have not defeated her,
Abstracted by the drill's pneumatic stammer.
But when will I be bold enough to roam
Her floating gardens, enter my old room?

WORDS

2009-06-14T02:45:00.002-07:00

After a week of rain: at last the stars
That were behind it.

WATER

2009-06-14T02:45:00.001-07:00

All I remember is the water
in columns collapsing
into beds and each other
sighing out clouds
and the rain's chatter
and the black gape of the drains after
in ditches mixing
with all the fallen jammed into dams
in the blind stream
till their shapes flowed out of them

FIRE SERMON

2009-06-14T02:44:00.001-07:00

Day starts, a blast of air.

In the green smoke of the wood,
The low Dog's Mercury burning,
Keep on, keep walking.
Flickers of song entwine
With your brain's flickering.

Open the door, sit down
With the saints who are sitting

In the white of the fire
As if it was their living room.

Songs of the Sixth Dalai Lama, Tsangyang Gyamtso, 1695-1720

2009-06-14T02:43:00.000-07:00

From 'White Crane to Litang'

As I was looking to the south
I saw the bright moon rise,
Smiling with my true love's mouth
And shining with her eyes.

............

Mister take your eyes off me,
Look up high in the old peach tree,
Put tobacco in your pipe
And suck – these peaches are not ripe.

.............

Night after night all night I go
Over love's mountain through the snow,
To wake more weary than the dead,
In the sad valley of my bed.

..............

Swan by the water's face
That you kiss and you kiss;
When the water turns to ice,
You will forget this.

WARNING

2009-06-14T02:42:00.002-07:00

A slight slug has dragged
A redbrown stain halfway across
A sheet of paper and there lies dead,
Stuck to the paper. The paper
Has completely dried it out.
At this point stop.

RAT POEM

2009-06-14T02:42:00.001-07:00

Rat you are too fat
rat you are trapped
in the trap of a rat.

Hiding in fewness, shopped
by your womb’s abacus,
from invisible slimness pushed out
by your intricate foot.

Whisker-precise, twitch-perfect
to your tail’s last 0.00

Rat you are trapped
in the brilliance of rat.

Rat rat rat rat
how will you get out of that?

OWL

2009-06-14T02:41:00.002-07:00

Frankly, blankly,
the owl has looked at me.
Black sky behind,
head inclined slightly.
One moment, two moments, three.
Now all the black I have looked at
is looking at me.

SEAGULLS

2009-06-14T02:41:00.001-07:00

wingtip-writing on the sky invisibly,
cup of a y maybe one mile wide,
tail a deep dive, or downglide,
and recover. Then rub it all out,
then self also erased: gone,
then there again between houses,
writer without ambition,
always erasing
and gone again
and reappears plural,
but still nothing –
again carefully
over and over again writing and rubbing out nothing,
gone again leaving nothing
but blots and traceless drifting unrealised notions

MOONFLIGHT

2009-06-14T02:40:00.001-07:00

Countdown.

And in the east, the moon
blasts off, a slow explosion,
rises, on budget, unmanned,
half-helmet stuffed with light,

ascends

into position, docking
by Babylonian arithmetic
and star-navigation,
with its dark side, waiting.

Now the descent,
watched by hushed trees in the screens
of every pond and puddle and stream,
re-entry through the blaze of dawn
and splashdown in daylight’s

pacific ocean

CAT

2009-06-14T02:39:00.002-07:00

I’m walking through the rooms of my dead body.
Light is escaping through the windows, rising
like coloured steam; by long accumulation
compressed into thick boards, but now by seconds
returning to the sun, untwisting from
the fibres of itself, accelerating
as it ascends, like leafsmoke when it climbs
into the wind, suddenly young again.
Patches of brickwork spreading show the pace
of the unbuilding – now whole summers flaking
from the high ceilings fall but falling, lighten,
and fly out of the windows. On a landing
two old officials sit, among the scuttling
of the disintegrating decorations,
and the oil paintings whose green leaves are falling;
they stare at chess, and have not heard, it seems,
and I can’t make them hear. The statue room
is almost empty. The last figures redden
and step down. Documents will be supplied,
and maps, and they will slip away disguised
over the border. Look – that sleepy-spry
cat curled up in the corner of your eye.

LOVE ALL AT ONCE

2009-06-14T02:39:00.001-07:00

Love all at once – heart bursting into head,
Every not yet and now and vanished instant - :
Would crack the brain, like as if all the dead,
Those who will be and those who are at present,
Sucked, great star-cloud, into a garden shed,
Or every rose-seed crammed into one case,
Growing one rose, with the whole world, its bed,
Squeezed in the talon roots. The human race,
Its final number, has to be outspread,
Like refugees on a long road, flung dots
Of difference, fields not murdered into bread,
And roses have to grow in separate spots;
And I have got to love you bit by bit: -
Flashes of scraps, like windows headlight-lit.

BUZZARD

2009-06-14T02:38:00.001-07:00

For a long time, buzzard,
You have been stretching my eyebeams,
Gyring and plaiting them
Like the ropes of a maypole,
Pulling me up but not to heaven.
You have usurped the station
Of the angels, but not their clothing,
Mad tramp gripping the pulpit, shrieking
Into the upturned faces of the fields and woods and pools
That now pull you down.
You are perching,
But still I carousel,
Trailing my long tether
Over the rough ground.

WINTER

2009-06-14T02:36:00.000-07:00

Turkey oak in full jackdaw
Apple tree with ripe stockdoves
Sycamore shedding its greenfinches
Silver birch coming into bluetit

THE BLACKBIRD REPLIES

2009-05-15T16:51:00.000-07:00

He cocks his head on one side,
An old man listening to a child.

Or a terrier tensed for the rabbit
To leap into daylight
Just ahead of the ferret.

Silent as a cheese-taster
Listening to the taste of the cheese.

Or the off-duty seismologist
In the roar of Los Angeles,
Gauging his underground feeling.

A G.P. listening again to the body
Articulating its complex pathology
In baby language.

Not an anthropologist
Interrogating a shaman,
But the shaman
Replacing his ears with the wind.

Mozart on a visit to Leipzig,
Listening to Bach for the first time.

Thin from the larynx
Of exhausted mines,
The seed of a sound,
‘Passchaendaele, Auschwitz, Soham,’
The earth sighs

And
“Peace! Peace! Peace! Peace! Peace! Peace!”
The blackbird replies.

AN EXPLANATION OF THE SCENERY

2009-05-15T15:57:00.000-07:00

After the drowning of the flightless angels
Who had panicked all over the land,
Crying out
In a language now utterly lost;
As the dark shape of Noah’s boat slid overhead,
Silence spread out on the earth,
That had already swallowed
The falsetto chatter of the dinosaurs
And transformed the roaring
Of the whales into delicate stretched strands of radio noise,
And struck dumb the talkative flowers.
After all this had happened,
And the waters, yet again, receded,
The drowned angels
Stood scattered all over the earth,
Absolutely no sound coming out of them.
Then, after some months, no sound
But a multitude of elongating points pushed out of them,
Opening a canopy of fans
The precise colour of silence.
All over the earth silence deepened by some hundreds of fathoms.
And was suddenly broken
By a bluetit