The old dogs have barked their last and gone wild again:
Too many black nights baying at the moon’s dark heart.
Too many unfeasible tinctures of time dissolved their spirit;
Their ranting, strung-out, babble is gone into the long yesterday.
Who now will raise hell’s roof like late-in-the-day champions?
Names are hung on the wind or some such: fluttering cloth,
Washing on a line, scraps and tatters, ripped shreds of sky
Torn from heaven herself, as worn as the thread of infinity.
Who now will plant moonbeams for the sea to wash
And who would caress the sands grain by grain?
Who mistook love for the sly spit of rain in the desert?
Who sung a song of stone; made the words fit for melody
Moved tectonic plates across the faces of the planets
And who shifted under their wayward drift like a landmass?
And who danced to the end in harlequin, sung a song of sickness,
Kicked both heels down tin-can alleys full of tuneless metal?
Who will forever pipe in golden caves, three-handed,
Harried by the green she-dog and the time-slip of years?
Or who will punch and riff on the beach-heads of the west
Still standing where mist-wrecked shores jive under ivory bones?
Yes, and who will wear beads and feathers and step lightly
In borrowed brogues to hold a mirror to our mouths?
Who will tell laughing from breathing, joy from sorrow?
Who will paint the walls of my cathedrals now?
Who will daub the cloud shapes with shadows?
Whose clawhammer hands will grasp the rainfall
And shake it dry even as it falls?
Why did they go? Behind knobbed hillsides or crowded trees,
Behind atmospheres and deeps, churning magma for the devil’s revenge,
Cooking, in hell’s kitchen, the veal of mischief yet to come?
It is we who cry out, young pups, waning in a sunset of our own,
With a mantelshelf of gimcrack souvenirs, no more than brick-dust.
Who else would curate remains in vaults, preserve and venerate decay?
Books will be written under flame-red banners of awe.
But remembering, that trick of dull, grey matter, matters less,
Now they have gone howling out across the planes of heaven.
Who cares about history, about catalogues of done, dead things,
When eternity screams another kind of life and plays on
With all the symphonies of forever?
© BH, 2016
OK. it’s a sequence. Armitage started it. I wrote Boy and then 432 which sparked a Dada reference to Hans Arp’s poem ‘Kaspar is Dead’ (translated by Ralph Mannheim) in the Thames and Hudson’s ‘Dada’ (pp24-25). That, in turn, led me to revisit the poem and concoct something in tribute. In the absence of my own Kaspar, I was reminded of several, let’s say, cultural figures who have gone before. It began in general but I slipped in references which you might recognise: Iain M Banks, Joe Zawinul, Muhammed Ali, Martyn Bennett, Bowie and a few dead actors. Then again, you might not.
The title, by the way, is another line from Kaspar (image above and on the right).
The main image above is a recoloured version of Hans Arp with one of his sculptures. And, since I mentioned veal the second image (below) is Francis Picabia's L'Adoration de Veau.
The main image above is a recoloured version of Hans Arp with one of his sculptures. And, since I mentioned veal the second image (below) is Francis Picabia's L'Adoration de Veau.
One of a sequence -
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