After Dante
we fell out of the station groping for our shades
well not so much groping as reaching out beyond
our ken & locals more towards an understanding
of the absence of a future in the present situation
we stood engulfed by one of those unending nights
where nobody’s remembering the music
but everyone’s still surfing it into the night
which you’ll recall is just a koan of shadows
cast by planet Earth on space as Shelley pointed out
we’d left so many unknown bones
perhaps related to the inner ear or momentary
BBQs in temporary carparks to which we had no ticket
& in which we had no car just another unbearable Tuscan
summer don’t talk to me about the coalition chainsaw
sculptures of deities from kids’ TV back in the 70s
talking back to those lavender cum-shot lava lamps
but these days everyone’s got the munchies and mood lighting
a bottle of Apollo & then skin up you drop a glowing butt
& the best part of Provence goes up in flames again
we sprinkle fairy dust upon our seafood cannelloni
you comment on my hennaed mullet I never planned
to sing or do the dance about white lightning
but the weather’s going on in this vein
far right on the rise with more scum surfacing across
the top of the imagined it’s not the best time
to look up & back & in the good old days
when our jaws were always resting on the ground
we couldn’t hear a thing we were so happy
to wallow in a damp concavity of common sense
fascists to the left of them fascists to the right
fascists in front volleyed & thundered
onwards & upwards says the bogus manifesto
I find it hard to focus when in flight they still
want thirteen euros & a kidney for the sandwich
Ant
here’s an ant
traversing the remains
of an ancient Greek theatre
in all the brilliance
of a Sicilian spring
April sun & shadows
rephrase the vivid choruses
of each astonishing wild flower
throughout this poem
it magnificently transports
a tall & curving sail of leaf
back to the workshop
On the Plain of the Fairies
the disembodied signage in the mountains
south of Cefalù has managed to entice us
up & out onto the verdant & encrypted
Plain of the Fairies it’s so spongy underfoot
& truffle scented somewhere tucked away
between Collesano & Castelbuono
so many little orange flowers so many devastating
asphodels whose beauty always seems to pose
big questions to small mortals such as how is it to live
your life upon a soft & outstretched palm of weeks &
months between a heartwarming messiness of birth
& the cold-hearted drain & fiasco of death without
your own language or homeland — well the earth is all bobbly
& you’re standing still but getting nudged in all directions
by the reflexology of stale nomenclature pop in name
of campsite here among the geomorphological
millennia in the history of film studies it’s taken
to pose itself the question - & did those feet
but now let’s take a closer look in possibly another stanza
what with the pompous intro & the whole hand-held simile
parenthesis / set of affectations which we still pat & like
yet smirk about we are so pleased to be temporarily located
in our raspberry Converse sneakers charcoal jeans & new improved
sinus irrigation kits for the guests on a swamp-raft
which is broken down & who have everything
the human era ends & it’s a shame there were no fairies
Peter Hughes is currently based in north Wales where he runs Oystercatcher Press. His own most recent book is A Berlin Entrainment, from Shearsman.
