The Real Skirting the Unreal

This was the real skirting the unreal
an ox-bow river on a boiling plain
water-buffalo knee deep in its leaden swirl
and me twelve-feet high surveying it,
swaying on an elephant’s back, its
sure-footed ponderous grace
the rhythm of a lost world.
 
The sun a greasy gold webbing the plain
– hot as chip fat in the sky, and
crazy peasants picnicking yards from
the clenched jungle’s clannish gloom
where rhinos lumber, wild boar start
and the rainbow-muscled tiger lurks:
fantastic people who dwell –
how the artist in me envies them! –
– in the imagination not the reason,
fatalistic but fantastic as
children of some migraine dream.
 
Late morning under jacarandas toiling
and spoiling words in the head,
the safari lodge crouched colonially behind.
At a coffee-coloured wicker table
I contemplate in sun-whittled shade
a two-inch-wide cockroach’s endless attempts
to climb the flaky-chocolate tree trunk,
forever falling back, never giving up.
 
Then the safari lodge at night licked by storm lamps
and stars, the blue mosquitoes of heaven;
and a banquet on the lawn interrupted
by a pony and cart in the lumbering dark,
there none knew why.
Mystery! Mystery! like that dry plain
enlarged in the now-dark below
its riddling river forever on the go.


          Tiger Mountain Tharu Safari Lodge, Nepal

William Oxley

in collection, Namaste: Poems of Nepal, 2004, Hearing Eye,
ISBN 1-870841-98-0;
and in collection, Reclaiming the Lyre: New and selected Poems, 2001,
Rockingham Press, ISBN 1-873468-81-4

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Dancing in the Jungle

Dancing in the jungle
with a tiny Nepali –
not entirely sober me –
– and she a purple flame
flickering across the floor.
 
It was then and there
in that hot safari night
where lamps burned gingerly
and strange music wailed
beat-filtered tunes
 
I could believe she was
the child Kumari, only living goddess
in the non-believing world,
our smoothly rational globe
that still awaits its smash.
 
Could hear the nearby rustle
in moth-mad undergrowth;
the padding amber tiger
and crash of grey Behemoth
swayed by mythic loads.
 
Dancing in the jungle
drinking to the stars,
I watched my body move
through all its ebbing years
but still felt everything
like a hand without a glove.

William Oxley

in collection, Namaste: Poems of Nepal, 2004, Hearing Eye,
ISBN 1-870841-98-0

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Somehow Comforting

Quiet November day, tugging wind
sporting with lost leaves of lost seasons,
was to him like a return to true England.

Quiet purposeful sound of it: a day
of rivers somewhere, a bird or two,
and sawing and hammering in the distance.

Distance not great to the eye like shut grey.
Mud, too, was everywhere he saw,
in the bottom of woods, paths, and

churned-about, turned-over fields.
Rain fell and smoked and was cold,
pools grew blind and very still.

Landscape ached with dead time,
but it was only the settling
of vast decay. And something resisted.

A wild life under all that goes on
bedraggled as a rat in wet sedge
or a late flower gulping a moment of thin sun.

After the city with its grinding and sitting
this countryman’s England, potato-dull
in November, was somehow comforting,
like a walking away that was towards.

William Oxley

published in The Spectator, January 2004

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An Orange Tree

An orange tree breathes over a wall
breathes out silence
ignoring the gabble of street voices
and sky-stitching violence

of jets, needles of pain above.
A fertile orange tree
solemn-sunned and seeding away
beneath this balcony.

Tree heart of a time-chewed town
it gathers to itself birds,
insects, shadows, mystery
and these slow loving words.

William Oxley

in collection, Poems Antibes, 2006, Rockingham Press,
ISBN 1-90485-15-0

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