Mercedes Webb-Pullman

Auden in the mirror – after The Fall of Rome

Pummeled by waves, the piers are
the field; in a lonely rain
trains lash. Abandoned ones
fill the mountain caves. Outlaws

grow fantastic gowns. The evening
pursues agents of the Fisc
through defaulters absconding with tax
of provincial towns. The sewers

send magic of private rites
to sleep; the temple prostitutes
keep literati, all the
friends imaginery.

May Cato, cerebrontic
ancient, extol the disciplines;
Marines are muscle bound, but
pay for food and mutiny.

Warm bed holds Caesar’s double,
a clerk unimportant to
work, like my writes. I do not
form officially on pink

pity with wealth, or unendowed
legs with little scarlet birds
eggs sitting on their speckled
city; flu-infected, each eye

elsewhere, vast, together,
moves across herds of reindeer
golden moss of miles and miles
very fast and silently.


worshipping pan                                

half-lit by firelight
you reach for wine
as flames flick and fog writhes
along the river, while above
stars hum in a clear dark sky
serene as background overture –
your face like a warm stone on my thighs
here beside the river running honey,
spring flowers crowned around your head;
snowdrops and jonquils, sickle-moon-reaped
from a cottage garden a century gone, planted
even then for your hair, tonight
and the salty scent of you woven
with their perfume seeks me
through mint-weed and wood smoke;
beyond life, past birth-blood and
laying out you reach me – your eyes
along the length of my body
capture mine
and I fall
always again
for the first time.

Mercedes Webb-Pullman graduated from IIML Victoria University Wellington New Zealand with her MA in Creative Writing in 2011. Her work has appeared online (Danse Macabre, Black Mail Press, Turbine, 4th Floor, Swamp, Reconfigurations, The Electronic Bridge, Bone Orchard Poetry, poetryrepairs, Connotations, and eBook After the Danse) and in print (Mana magazine, Poets to the People; Poetry from Lembas Cafe 2009, The Readstrange Collection 2010, and two books, Numeralla Dreaming and Food 4 Thought 2012 ). She lives on the Kapiti Coast, is Editor/Pacific for Danse Macabre. Some more poems here: poetrysansfrontieres.weebly.com

Mercedes Webb-Pullman

afterwards


after the hard work of that night
all the laboured hours
slowed to match her slow
harsh respiration
its rhythm almost lulling
unsure if she struggled to breathe
or to stop – as the sun rose
the sound softened
softened
then both were over,  her life
and her death, already
in the past – one hand lifted
in warding off
or welcome


equinox moon


surrounded by a green
diffusion of darkness
heavy as threat
she watches; silver
eye patch
or weathered balloon,
her wrinkled
mercury skin a map
tracking song lines
on my mother’s dead face

Mercedes Webb-Pullman-

Pulling the Temple Down

 

Grapes fruit prolifically,

distended fleshy globes whose seeds

will never quicken.  Air above a desert,

tendrils curl before they fall still

aware of  bitter failure.

Listen: like fowl and fish,

no life can spring from this.

 

We rush away from each other

not waiting to ripen; the flush

of our first bloom frenetic. The inevitable end

falls so softly our minds deny the ugliness

of loss as it touches our lips

brushes by like heavy morning dew.

Cowards who choose a late stand

we tiptoe behind someone else’s mask,

solitary prisoners who follow the queen

in Cuzco’s altar carvings.

 

The god is nothing like before. Quick death

bothers him. Fall means slow extinction;

from the first he knows himself, plays to

that eternal gallery of ever-changing stars.

The wheel turns to our 15 minute fame

then Bau grows morose

and dances us to shadowed pools.

I’ve danced with someone like her.

Wrapped in shining steps, I floated

in slow water.

 

I won’t pretend acceptance;

to be dead, to be old, with everything

behind me. I sit at the feet of my past,

remember Samson, how he lost

everything in the end, and nothing.

Villainous heroes, mountains of arctic ice

monsters that calve in the mind;

love will always betray.

 

Was he really a villain, even to you?

Couldn’t it end there?

But listen –

he let go and gathered them all in,

submitted and died. If you built altars

it was before he imploded blind

on the print of your life, from the frantic cosmos

which judges submission and failure.

As you drove him through the temple

each head that turned tugged him

down and under until, defiant

he leapt to the head of the line.

Mercedes Webb-Pullman-

Shrove Tuesday - emulated cento, T S Eliot

 

He disappeared in the dead of winter;

death, in a dark, in a deep, in a dream forever

and said nothing of 'the life after death'

and when the Fool and the Blind Man stole the bread -

the girth of it and the wharf of it and the wall -

from out the house there comes the dullest flutter

frail and sad, with gray bowed head

aggrieving the sapless limbs, the shorn and shaken.

A dog barks; the hammock swings; he lies

no farther advanced than in his ancient furies.

No, it is we, soaring, explore galaxies

with an osculation of yellow light, with a glory like chrysanthemums

lichen-alive, governed in gametosporous colonies

towards the quick-water, wrinkling and rippling

quietly as snow on the bare boughs of bone.

Angels are at the door: admit them, now.

 

1   W H Auden, In Memory of W B Yeats http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15544

2   George Barker, Sonnet of Fishes http://www.flickr.com/photos/12826947@N05/6837234462/lightbox/

3   Ezra Pound, Canto XIII http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/canto-13/

4   W B Yeats, The Circus Animals' Desertion http://ireland.wlu.edu/landscape/Group5/poem.htm

5   Gerald Manley Hopkins, The Wreck of the Deutschland http://www.bartleby.com/122/4.html

6   Harold Monro, Bitter Sanctuary https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/html/1807/4350/poem3027.html

7   D H Lawrence, End of Another Home Holiday http://jonathan.beaton.name/archives/1861

8   John Crowe Ransom, Dead Boy http://www.poemtree.com/poems/DeadBoy.htm

9   Allen Tate, Idiot http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/idiot-3/comments.asp

10  Richard Eberhart, The Fury of Aerial Bombardment http://allpoetry.com/poem/8601755-The_Fury_of_Aerial_Bombardment-by-Richard__Eberhart

11  William Empsom, Camping out http://www.flickr.com/photos/12826947@N05/6983396869/

12  Louis MacNeice, An Ecologue for Christmas http://www.flickr.com/photos/12826947@N05/6837288692/

13  Charles Madge, Lusty Juventus http://www.flickr.com/photos/12826947@N05/6983421967/

14  Theodore Roethke, The Lost Son http://ninaalvarez.net/2007/04/14/poem-of-the-day-32/

15  R S Thomas, Song for Gwydion http://www.markcwyman.com/contemporary.htm#gwydion

16  Michael Roberts, Assault of Angels http://rachel.moss.tripod.com/rachel/id2.html

Merecedes Webb-Pullman-

The Servant’s Son

a car park transaction in carbide yellow
where illicit acts glow, grow flesh
spread power, revelation on revelation
into a tower of illumination too bright to see

profane in your work clothes
you tend to the nest’s outside

our blood under their thumb, sad brother

sighted violins close into claws
as silver fungus pours poisons
into cubicles solidly blue or green

strippers shake their tails, impotent as eunuchs
to suckle seconds; the earth is overwrought
here is neglect no brother can redress ---

flesh that's hot to touch: pale fruit, bleached seeds

in dance halls vast as vistas, masses
converge among the trees, rising up

I listen in to a closed system and miss
square, red, good-natured

brother, bride, from this mirror ball
with aphrodisiacs of sour mushrooms

emperors dismiss your every season

Mercedes Webb-Pullman-

Gertrude Stein from Paris, 1940

I became a fish tank,

a typical Thanatos pattern

at the peak of its range.

How long the clamouring lasts!

Deep fractured landscape –

form transposed, the incidental

the body falls weeping for,

that makes us hate,

steering wheels obviously

the least expected parts. A man

takes his breath, bladderwrack,

crabgrass, demonstrations,

prisoners in striped coveralls.

Skin blistered long ago –

homes for the orphans, crack

doctors to perform amputations.

“Now we will all

have an occupation’.