Morning Prayer

(after Rimbaud)

I spend my life sitting, like an angel at the barber's,
with a mug in one hand, fag in the other,
my froth-slabbered face in the gantry mirror
while the smoke towels me down, warm and white.

On the midden of desire, the old dreams
still hold their heat, ferment, gently ignite—
once, my heart had thrown its weight behind them
but it saps itself now, stews in its own juice.

Having stomached my thoughts like a horrible linctus
—swilled down with, oh, fifteen, twenty pints—
I am roused only by the most bitter necessities:

then, the air high with the smell of opened cedar,
I pish gloriously into the dawn skies
while below me the spattered ferns nod their assent.


Bedfellows

An inch or so above the bed
the yellow blindspot hovers
where the last incumbent's greasy head
has worn away the flowers

Every night I have to rest
my head in his dead halo;
I feel his heart tick in my wrist;
then, below the pillow,

his suffocated voice resumes
its dreary innuendo:
there are other ways to leave the room
than the door and window


Poetry

In the same way that the mindless diamond keeps
one spark of the planet's early fires
trapped forever in its net of ice,
it's not love's later heat that poetry holds,
but the atom of the love that drew it forth
from the silence: so if the bright coal of his love
begins to smoulder, the poet hears his voice
suddenly forced, like a bar-room singer's—boastful
with his own huge feeling, or drowned by violins;
but if it yields a steadier light, he knows
the pure verse, when it finally comes, will sound
like a mountain spring, anonymous and serene.

Beneath the blue oblivious sky, the water
sings of nothing, not your name, not mine.

Copyright © 2001 by Don Paterson. All rights reserved.