The Cat

The cat would tread on the page as he wrote
and he, tolerant, let it thread its way
between the caught thought and his intention,
his poem taking on a footprint’s shape –
evidence of a native on the isle –
of someone other than just him at home.

Sometimes the cat would be a tall woman
and she’d be sprawled across a chaise, naked,
offering up a poem of her own,
and he would assess shape with avid eyes,
his mouth enveloping each salient point,
and exploring the depths of meaning.

Entwined in each new reading, their pleased sighs
would echo in the jasmine–perfumed room
and the fire of their lust, their love, their doom,
would not be reflected in the cat’s eyes.

The Dead

Where hanged men’s semen lands – there
mandrakes grow;
when hauled from hallowed gallows
ground they shriek
a shriek that tears apart
the midnight air,
summoning the long buried
from cold graves;
a pallid congregation
that appears
at the crossroad’s crepe blackness,
tentative,
careful and slow – as though
afraid – the dead
who whisper to each other
of their fear –
knowing the hanged man hears each
word that’s said.

© R J Dent (2006)

For B.H.
(after visiting the Barbara Hepworth museum, St Ives)

Palmed wood and metal cut through
the cragged moment – a down-turned
no-nonsense Bette Davis hack into
a rock-solid geometric declension
of your own own-ness.

© R J Dent (2006)

Picking Night Flowers

I can and will now write of this as true
(here I impose rose patterns on your sight);
the flowers you pick to have through the night
and what you do with each – and each with you.

Imagine then, lithe, graceful, lovely blooms,
each naked, moist, aflame and embangled;
each plays with each as you choose and entangle,
so each one knows of each other’s perfumes,

until a chain of flowers is enlinked
and air thickens with musks of varied scents;
each rose rosily ripens in assent
and petals splay and spray in shades of pink.

Each lovely bloom flames as it finds the need
and in each rose – the pattern of the seed.

© R J Dent (2005)

Small Victory

We gain days when Shakespeare loses his voice
(Prospero struck mute and Lear out-thundered)
and Rilke’s filigree delicacy falls
into a panther’s cage and is devoured.

Our past has boundaries that are not blurred –
our task is to restore a de-cored yore
and read our present as a corrective.

We have to kill Charles Dickens in his crib;
press his face down into a case of down
and choke him on his own deficiency.

We watch the academics burn the woods
(our rifles empty in our bandaged hands)
and wait for years for someone to bring rounds,
then show us how to load the bloody things.

In the Shadow of the Midnight Sun

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