HEAT Series 1

Cats and comets / are cousins. / With arching tails / and bright orbiting  / mating swoops. / I used to sleep / hugging my cat / I used to sleep / my nose buried / in her fur.

She herself was on her way to the moon, and if you laughed at the sight of the fish between her legs, she would eat you – and you came out again as a fish. The man had laughed, and half of him had already disappeared, he was staring straight ahead with a pair of black eyes, and he would go on doing that until she chewed his eyes to bits, and when he next saw something, it would be as a fish.

I could be a murderer, a thief, a seducer of minors, this country offered me the lot and in my anonymity, which hung like a protective cloud around my actions I felt my own response. I was beguiled, enticed, with all these impulses seeming already to have been lying, primed and ready, inside me. Vietnam was the sort of land in which I could get lost inside myself, the land of inner opportunity, and I did get ever so slightly lost and I committed one small crime.

Here I am, decades late, looking for things to touch that remind me of the Flowers. I was always between them, like a child between its parents, like a child burrowing into its parents’ bed.
They were unbreakable, the only certainty. That is what I saw then in that darkened bar. Her hair glowing about her patient face. And I was? A mouse he laid at her feet.

Within four generations, I found myself at this other end of the spectrum: from the world of my great-grandfather where a man’s duty is to transmit tradition, protecting it from the subversive effect of time, to one where tradition disappears completely and the only plausible raison-d’être of living is change that often sees itself as progressive per se.

If you can’t see them any more, then I think I must really be dead. Record in the case notes which of my conjectures you can confirm or dismiss. Draw what you can; measure what you can. But first and foremost: sharpen your scalpels, gentlemen, so that you don’t make a mess of it.

I put up my umbrella. Nothing else happens. I hold it above my head. I do this because it is raining. It is raining.

Avoid doughnuts. Doughnuts sprinkle your lap with sugar. / Avoid, for the first day of travel, all right turns. Travel light. / Wear one of the five new sweaters you bought for the trip.

Fish can all turn and flit in absolute synchrony, iron filings will point to the pole, well we’re all arranged like that in a focus on the door, something has signalled to the herd that this is what we will do and we do it, we do not move even though the rain begins again and satins darken, shirts cling and faces mercifully run rivulets.

Through all the months of chemotherapy, what Rachel focussed on was reclaiming herself. Her hair came off in soft and strangely frightening clumps in the shower as if it had no anchor. Nothing whatsoever kept it where it was supposed to be, where it had always been. Her hair said more clearly than anything else that Rachel’s world had come unhinged, that her own personal physics had cut loose and was headed for parts unknown.

This is an essay about the gigantic – women who seem permanently pitched skyward, whose articulations overpower, and have the capacity to rupture and then obliterate. It’s about the enormity and hot terror of self-expression, where words do not formulate slowly in mouths but instead ‘leap from lips’. This isn’t the stuff of sensible ambition – it’s loftiness and extravagance and total grandeur!

I worked them, sharpened hooks / for high-rollers, sewing my special rigs. / Bridles for bonito, live bait that / trailed the barbed viridian in our wake.

When [Charles Wright] calls poetry ‘this business I waste my heart on’ (WTTT, 38), he is not merely making an elegant bow to an eminent rhetorical figure but acknowledging having followed a seductive and fatal path in life. And it is with this thought in mind that we notice that his relations with spiritual masters are not always ironised.

The literary world prefers its daytime rose, / sweet and thorny, seasonal, blown. / You open only at night, on the ledge, / stepping from your continent’s shelf / like Houdini on a tightrope, flesh tensed, / gazing in all directions at once / like Titian’s triple portrait beasts, / or your own words, pointing and warning.