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In this podcast, Nick Fabbri and Dr. Paul Monk discuss and read from two major collections of love poetry written for Paul’s muse, Rachael: Red Ochre For The Moon Goddess and Wine On The Flames. These 600+ poems document their extraordinary, long-distance relationship, which Monk calls the "culminating experience" of his life.
Key Discussion Points include:
Poetry as Self-Expression: Monk asserts that poetry is self-expression, contrasting it with his objective writings on geopolitics and history. He views poetry as being "for the real world".
The Catalytic Muse (Claudia): The initial "efflorescence" of his poetry was encouraged by his partner Claudia, who told him he was "a writer and a poet" and helped transition his identity away from a businessman and bureaucrat.
The Neruda Variations: The initial cycle of poetry, The Neruda Variations, was written as a catharsis for his grief after Claudia's departure in 2007.
The Advent of Rachael: His later love and muse, Rachael, initiated the relationship by asking for poetry, leading to a long-distance intimacy established using modern technologies.
Metaphors of Competition: Poems often use metaphors of rivalry and risk, positioning the poet as a disadvantaged competitor (a retiarius fighting a murmillo in "Gladiator") or a daring figure (Alex Honnold free-soloing El Capitan in "Mastered Beauty").
Myth and Muse: Classical and literary figures are invoked to frame the romance, such as Odysseus and Circe ("In the House of the Goddess"), the exiled poet Ovid ("Your Ovid"), and the lovers of Marilyn Monroe ("Marilyn's Men").
Philosophical Poetics: Monk discusses the technical and emotional blend of his writing, as demonstrated by the feeling of being the piano played by Martha Argerich during a Rachmaninoff performance ("Martha Argerich").
The Book's Meaning: The title Red Ochre For The Moon Goddess signifies Rachael as a seductive, primordial muse, while Wine On The Flames references the cremation of Hector in the Iliad, reflecting the heroic, yet late-life nature of the endeavour.
Art and Reality: Poems like "Nook and Book" grapple with the fundamental question of whether their "transcendent" poetic relationship can ever be translated into a conventional cohabitational reality.
Dr Paul Monk is a poet, polymath and highly regarded Australian public intellectual. He has written an extraordinary range of books, from Sonnets to a Promiscuous Beauty (which resides in former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s library), to reflective essays on the riches of Western civilization in The West in a Nutshell, to a prescient 2005 treatise on the rise of China in Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China.
Dr. Paul Monk on Poetry (Part 1): ‘Red Ochre For The Moon Goddess’ and ‘Wine On The Flames’
Recorded in Melbourne, 11 November 2025
[Nick Fabbri] (0:00 - 0:51)
Welcome to Bloom. My name is Nick and I'm delighted to be joined again today by Dr. Paul Monk, a writer and poet based here in Melbourne, Australia. In the most recent podcast we've recorded on the subject of The Lord of the Rings, Paul concluded the interview by speaking about the poetry which he has written for his great muse and love in recent years.
This enormous amount of poetry - over 600 poems as I understand it, Paul - has culminated in two remarkable works of verse called Red Ochre for the Moon Goddess and Wine on the Flames. I've invited Paul here today to speak a bit more about these two works of poetry, what they mean for him, the significance of his muse and love in his life, and ultimately to share with the listener 22 of these poems in full. Paul, thank you for being here today.
[Dr. Paul Monk] (0:51 - 3:31)
Thanks Nick. It's always very enjoyable having these conversations with you but I feel particularly delighted to be able to talk about my poetry, because although I do, as you know and your listeners will know, a lot of writing and to a lesser extent speaking about world affairs, about history, etc., that's the objective world. That's to a great extent when writing and speaking in that vein one has to be very disciplined in terms of what you say, how you say it, what's true, how would you know.
Poetry is self-expression and in our prior conversation about Tolkien I remarked that one of the many things I took away from listening to that story and reading it was poetry is for the real world. These people, albeit in this imaginary world, but they live and breathe poetry. They get on with their lives but they remember poems, they write poems, they recite poems. And I thought, way back, I want my life to be like that. But it actually wasn't. There was no poetry in that sense in my life as I grew up.
It took me a long time, as I remarked in one of our other conversations, Poetry, Science and the Classics, to find my voice as a poet. That began, over a period, of encounters with different women from out of which I wrote poetry. It took a step forward when I lived for a few years with Claudia, whom I'm still legally married to, but who lives on the other side of the world.
She was a great life coach in the sense that she recognised that this was somewhat pent up in me. And she said to me, well, I think I've told this story before, one day I was working as a consultant at the time and I met her after coming out of the office and I had a suit and tie on, I was carrying a briefcase and she said to me as if she was surprised by my appearance, “You look like a businessman!” I said, “Well, I am a businessman!” She said, “No, you're a writer and a poet!”
In the memoir that I plan to write very soon, to which I referred again in the Tolkien interview, where I said that the first volume I'm intending to call Dreaming of Elrond, the third volume, the culminating volume, I intend to call A Writer and a Poet. And I have, in the years since Claudia and I parted, when she went back to Venezuela in 2007, I really have become a writer and a poet. I've written a dozen books, I've written hundreds of poems. And that is me now.
[Nick Fabbri] (3:32 - 3:44)
Yeah. Well, it always was in a way, but how beautiful and significant to have had a partner like Claudia call that out in you and give you permission and encouragement to step into your fullest self as a writer and a poet.
[Dr. Paul Monk] (3:44 - 7:27)
Well, yes. And in fact, her departure was a catalyst, because I was grief stricken by the fact that we were parting and she was going away and I didn't think she would be coming back. And I got very emotional about it. I wrote then a cycle of poems called The Neruda Variations.
She had given me as a gift a bilingual edition of Pablo Neruda's book, 20 Love Poems and a Song of Despair. So I wrote 21 poems, which were personal variations on his, addressed to Claudia, who is from Latin America.
Yes, she's from Venezuela and he was from Chile. And that now is, of course, a long time ago and a lot of water has passed under the bridge. And I should emphasise that subsequent to that, years passed, I was very supportive of her getting re-established in Venezuela and we travelled the world together.
We've been to every continent except Antarctica. We were in the United States, Boston, Washington, and then Rome, then we flew to Morocco, in early 2019. As I was about to leave Morocco to fly back to Australia, I had for the first time in my life the sense that it was as if poetry had been dammed up in me for decades and the dam was about to burst. And it did. Over the following year or so, I wrote something like 130 poems, which ended up going into the book The Three Graces, which was for her and two other women.
And those poems gave expression to all sorts of things, going back to early in my life, to my education, my personal travels, my relationship with Claudia, the travels we'd undertaken, the things we'd seen, being with her in Rome, in Panama, and all sorts of things. And so that was, you might say, my coming out as a poet.
But then two things happened in rapid succession that I never anticipated. The first was that whereas, and you know, we're now talking by 2019, I was 53, 63, and Claus and I had a non-cohabitational but very warm relationship. And I wasn't expecting to ever fall in love again. But within about a year from early 2021, well less than a year, I fell in love twice.
The first was with a woman whom I met at a conference to which she'd invited me. And she followed up, called me, we spoke very warmly. And I found my head swimming with dopamine. I thought, well, I'm smitten!
Then as quickly as it started to fell apart, because when I indicated an interest in getting to know her better, I invited her out for dinner, she ran for the hills. And in order to cope with the vertiginous feelings this triggered in me, I wrote a cycle of poems, none of which I sent to her, because it seemed inappropriate to send them.
But they were good poems, just dealing with the whole experience of unexpected smittenness.
[Nick Fabbri] (7:28 - 7:29)
Infatuation.
[Dr. Paul Monk] (7:29 - 10:09)
Infatuation, right. And then as a mature man, grappling with the ironies and pain of being repudiated by a woman who would not even explain herself. I completed that cycle of poetry, and I found that it worked as catharsis. I was over the infatuation, I moved on.
Then I got a call out of the blue. And I'll never forget this. It was from a woman whom I'd met a couple of times, briefly, by chance, and knew because she'd given me her business card when we met in 2019 in Honolulu on my way back from Latin America, that she was living in France. And she calls from Paris. And she says, these are just breathtaking words:
“Why are you neglecting me, you delicious, esoteric, polymath thing?”
And I thought, wow. And she indicated that she wanted poetry from me. So this was almost the antithesis of the immediate past situation, where I'd written poetry, but wouldn't send it because it would embarrass me and the woman, it would be inappropriate.
Now I had this beautiful woman, whom I’d briefly met a couple of times, ringing up from Paris, asking for poetry. In order to gauge whether she was serious, I sent her the poetry I'd just written for the other woman, to see what she thought of it. And she responded a few days later,
“These poems moved me so deeply that they reduced me to tears…You must know that this work in each and every part is beautiful.”
At that point I thought, okay, I can write poetry, I think, for this one. Well, I had no idea, and I'm sure she can't have had any idea, where that would lead, because over the following months, this became the most extraordinary relationship.
She's living on the other side of the world, as, of course, Claudia was. But we became very intimate, and I started to write real love poetry. This was not a game anymore.
And then it became complicated because it turned out she was living in Paris as the mistress of a financier, and he got to learn that I was writing poetry. He was not at all happy about this. And so the poetry started to reflect the complexities of the situation.
And without going through the whole story, what the poems do, the ones that I'll recite today, is they give you some indication of the flavour of that story as it unfolded and developed.
[Nick Fabbri] (10:10 - 10:14)
Of the third romance in particular, obviously, exclusively, rather.
[Dr. Paul Monk] (10:14 - 10:54)
So this third romance, absolutely, yes, yes. And it did become, for me as an emotional being, for me as a poet, for me as a male, the culminating experience I've had in my life. It just was altogether remarkable.
I really had to extend myself to understand the situation I was in, the nature of a muse, because I knew the idea, in the abstract, of a muse. And in some respects, having written poetry for other women, you could have said they were muses. But this was something on a whole other level, right?
And this was somebody who seemed to live and breathe poetry and the uses of language, who was amazingly articulate.
[Nick Fabbri] (10:54 - 11:00)
Actively brought it out of you, almost co-designed and co-created the poetry. Gave you prompts and things.
[Dr. Paul Monk] (11:00 - 14:51)
Exactly so. And like any passionate affair, of course, and not least because by her own account, she's living out there as the mistress of a man who had means to entertain her and keep her, that I certainly don't have. There was a considerable fluctuation in mood, and this is reflected in the poetry, as we'll see.
But then, as I explain in the Foreword to the second of these two books, and they are a chronological sequence, so the first book covers the first couple of years and Wine of the Flames, the last couple of years, I arranged to meet him. Right? And it resulted in the most extraordinary conversation.
I was, you know, I am a member, as you're aware, of an unusual body in the United States and London, England, called the Institute for Law and Strategy. And when I can, I go to their meetings in London or New York. And in early 2023, I learned through a confidential source that the said financier, whose name I won't use in this recording, if only for his privacy, you know, was going to be in New York at the same time as me.
And I would be staying, as I often do when I visit New York at the River Club, as the guest of Philip Bobbitt, who's the convener of the Institute. And what I realised is that he would be staying on Park Avenue within a relatively easy walk from the River Club, which is in Midtown. So I met him.
And the bottom line, without going into all the detail, of course, of a very private conversation, was that instead of treating me as an enemy, though we both knew we were rivals for her love, he wanted to see the situation as one where we had a problem to solve together. And to put it in the simplest possible terms, I confessed to him that I couldn't keep her in the manner to which she was accustomed. He was not the first, you know, such man to keep her, as it were.
But I confessed in turn, that I didn't have the means to do that. I was not that kind of man, right? But he confessed, and this was stunning, that it was very clear that she craved love poetry. It meant a lot to her, that I could write poems that touched her more deeply than anything he could say to her, give to her, do for her. And he felt stranded and frustrated by this. And he said:
“My problem is that I cannot write love poetry to save myself!”
So I didn't have the means, he couldn't write the poetry, but we both loved the same woman. It was a remarkable conversation. And so we struck a kind of agreement that given neither of us is a kid, and we weren't setting out to have children with her, build a home, he'd got plenty of homes, and I was nearly 70, and I just enjoyed writing the poetry for her.
And so as of now, that's what happens. The only difference being that when I met her in 2019, and she gave me her calling card, she was domiciled in Nice, because she hadn't yet met this fellow. She was somebody else's mistress.
And after the concordat with him, I mean, he had an office in Luxembourg, but houses in a couple of places and kept her in Paris. She moved back to Nice. But I stayed right where I was, and I kept writing poetry. And the situation now is less tense than it was. And that's reflected in the final poems that I'll share today.
[Nick Fabbri] (14:52 - 15:47)
It really is a remarkable and dramatic love story between you and your great muse in recent years. And I think it culminates from that point of Claudia calling your poeticism into existence, and giving you licence to be your full creative self, which really catalysed almost like a later in life efflorescence as both a poet, but also a romantic, and as a lover, and as a man. I think that's really special.
So just to briefly recap for our listeners, and for me as well, you had a series of three muses and three loves, which were in a way crystallised in one work of poetry called The Three Graces. And then that was subtitled for each of the muses, Companionship, Passion, and Discretion?
[Dr. Paul Monk] (15:47 - 16:34)
No, the other way around, Companionship, Discretion, Passion. So Companionship is Claudia. We married, but the marriage has become a friendship. You know, and it's worth remarking that regard when I visited her in 2019 in Venezuela, she's a professor at the business school in Caracas. And she invited me to sit in on a class she runs for the MBA programme there. And in introducing me to her students, she didn't say “Paul is my husband.”
She said:
“Paul is my best friend in the whole world and my mentor”.
That tells you a lot about how the relationship has evolved. I mean, how many people who have tried romance, tried marriage and cohabitation, and then decided this isn't working, have ended up in a situation where that kind of thing can happen?
[Nick Fabbri] (16:35 - 16:37)
Well, it's more often acrimony and bitterness.
[Dr. Paul Monk] (16:37 - 18:37)
It is. And I, when she left, I was grief stricken, to be honest. I felt that I had failed, but I felt I had to let her go. And that's why, as I said later, I wrote The Neruda Variations to try and exorcise my grief. But I was committed, assuming that we would dissolve the marriage, I was committed that it would not be done on the basis of unresolved acrimony or grief or anything else. It would be done intelligently and sensitively.
And so I was very supportive of her getting on her feet again back in Venezuela. And she's so proactive, so energised, so purposeful that she did it magnificently. I'm very proud of her. And she's immensely grateful to me for being supportive, instead of being distant or indifferent. And so it's really worked. I think that relationship is among my great achievements in life, actually.
And of course, at that point, this is between 2007 and 2021, I didn't expect to fall in love again, as I said, much less twice in one year. And I had no prevision of what was about to happen. I actually remark on that in the preface to The Three Graces.
I summarise the prior history. And then I say, I really had no prevision of what was about to unfold. And there's a life lesson in that, it seems to me, in itself.
I didn't name the muse, but since these two big books of poetry are dedicated to her by name, I might as well name her. Her name is Rachael. She took the initiative and in most respects, held the initiative throughout this. She is a very self-possessed, extraordinarily articulate woman who is very literate and imaginative. And she wanted to be a muse in the grand style, I think.
And I didn't see that at first.
[Nick Fabbri] (18:37 - 18:47)
Did you set out yourself or together to produce these two works, Red Ochre for the Moon Goddess and then Wine on the Flames? And if so, what did each signify?
[Dr. Paul Monk] (18:47 - 22:17)
No, no, neither book was planned as a book. It was just that I began writing poems for her. And I began to realise how intelligent she was, how much she loved poetry, how alluring she was. She speaks just beautifully. I love the sound of her voice. As much as anything, that's what I fell in love with.
And bear in mind, she's in Paris. This is a very 21st century relationship taking place using modern technologies. We're not living together. We're not going out for dinner together. And I wouldn't have believed, before this experience, that a relationship of the quality we've gradually established was even possible. But having said that, I’d spent years working with Claudia from a distance, albeit the emotional character that was very different.
And she wasn't asking me to write poetry, much less love poetry. She was asking for help with critical thinking skills and philosophy from a distance. Very different.
But yeah, I just found Rachael an altogether extraordinary woman. And the poetry reflects that. And so gradually as the quantity of poetry increased, I thought, well, there's a book in this.
And The Three Graces was the first step, where the last 75 poems out of 300 in the book are poems written for her. And then it just kept going. And through all of them, as we'll see with the poems I'm about to share, through all of the poems, there were so many amazing twists and turns and provocations and moods and reconciliations and passions and inspirations and laughter.
She would ask me to read her stories. This was another magical thing. It was as if she was a little girl and I was an uncle or something.
She would say, would I read her stories? She asked me to read her The Wind in the Willows, for example. And I thoroughly enjoyed that.
And Around the World in 80 Days. But this is a woman who, at the same time will, you know, when I was about to go to New York to give a speech for the Institute for Law and Strategy in late 2023, first of all, I sent her my draft speech and she wrote a really insightful, incisive critique of it. When I reread my paper, I thought, she's right, you know.
And then when I showed her the finished draft, she said, yeah, that's more like it. Now I'd like you to write me a poem called ‘Spartan Music’ about war. It's not a love poem she was asking for.
And I wrote the poem, and I sent it to her and she came back and she said, yes, that's pure and decisive. And I read it in New York at the opening of my address. And I told Philip who knew of Rachael that she had requested this poem and he said, “You're a very lucky man”.
He loves poetry, knows poetry, particularly American poetry very well. So anyway, that's the sort of general background in answering your questions. And initially I thought Red Ochre would be the book.
You know, at one point I thought, well, it's going to end with us going our separate ways because she's still in France and she's still got this financier and I'm not sure where I can go with this. But nevertheless, I’ve indicated, this has been developing for a while, right? And I thought it was a very enriching experience.
[Nick Fabbri] (22:17 - 22:24)
And what do the titles of each work mean? Do they sort of summarise an ethic or a theme or a purpose behind each of the collections?
[Dr. Paul Monk] (22:24 - 24:26)
So Red Ochre for the Moon Goddess is a title, ultimately rooted in Robert Graves's book, The White Goddess, which he wrote in the 1940s, arguing that the muse of poetry is the White Goddess, the Moon Goddess and that this has been true since the Palaeolithic. It's an eccentric book and one can readily disagree with his argument, but it's an evocative idea. And so I made that idea my own.
And red ochre, of course, since the Palaeolithic has been a pigment which human beings have used to do drawings. And it's of course, you know, the primordial form of what we think of as lipstick, you know, or lip gloss and so on. So the title really means no more than that she's the sexy Moon goddess, right? And these poems are there.
Wine on the Flames, on the other hand, is taken from the final stanzas of the Iliad where Hector, the great Trojan hero, has been killed in battle of Achilles. His father, King Priam, has been able to retrieve his body and the Trojans cremate him on a pyre inside Troy.
After the flames have consumed his body and reduced it to ash, they put out with wine, with glistening wine, as he says, and then they bury Hector. And I chose that title because, you know, I have not been in robust health in recent years. I'm getting close to three score years and ten, and I'm thinking, well, I'm really enjoying my poetry, but let's not kid ourselves, I'm not a young man. This is not the kind of youthful romance that lives in the hope of fulfilment and, you know, fertility and so on. That's simply not going to happen.
But it's kind of heroic endeavour, and I've lived life to the full. And so I drew on that metaphor. And therefore, in a sense, these poems are the glistening wine on Hector's pyre.
[Nick Fabbri] (24:26 - 24:31)
Beautifully said. Well, let's dive into the poetry, first with some from Red Ochre.
[Dr. Paul Monk] (24:32 - 1:10:26)
So we've talked about the background to the two books, and made the point that the two of them are sister books, as it were, or brother books. They're meant to form a set, and between them, they tell the story of this extraordinary, stormy, intimate romance, which has taken place over about four years, and roughly two years to each volume. So what I'm going to do is read ten poems from Red Ochre to the Moon Goddess, varying in length and mood, and then follow up with a similar number from Wine on the Flames.
Between them, these poems will pretty much convey the overall story, at least so far, and the range, the considerable range in mood and subject matter. So let's start with Red Ochre for the Moon Goddess. The first poem I'll read is called ‘Pink Silk Dress’, and it's more or less the transcription of a phone conversation, from when she rang me. She's a remarkable woman, very beautifully spoken, highly articulate, sensual, sexually candid, as you'll gather from the poem. And I just had to write this poem to capture the experience. It goes as follows.
You surely knew, when murmuring to me
Of your luncheon in a pink silk dress,
And talk of what you thought you'd wear beneath it,
There in your contemporary Paris,
Among big men, ensconced in your sex haven,
The feelings your alluring hints would stir.
With that soft stroke, run like a poet's hand
Over your still firm and nubile breasts,
You plunged my primal brain into a frenzy.
With that, this poet's hand was seized upon
By tropes remembered from Anais Nin,
And drawn towards your light diaphanous dress.
How did you accomplish this in innocence?
As with the sending of erotic songs
Like ‘Leave Your Hat On’, meaning it would seem,
Never mind the rest except stilettos,
While earlier, with ‘Betty Davis Eyes’,
You seemed to be declaring, you are mine?
We'd only just been talking Oliver Sacks,
And how your deft chameleon evasions
Tantalised the analyst in me.
You'd just exclaimed, in your so ravishing voice,
How very much you actually love his work,
When there alighted on my unsuspecting brain,
Like one of Nin's disarming little birds,
Those murmured words so delicately spoken.
‘I'm wondering what colour pants and bra
To put on underneath my pink silk dress?
Should I perhaps wear none at all?
Oh, instantly I was your sexual slave.
The second poem is a short one. Most of the poems in Red Ochre are short. They're twelve lines. I think of them as quasi-sonnets, but they're a freer form than sonnets. They don't stick rigidly to the rhyme and metrical pattern of, say, Shakespearean sonnets. They're a bit more modernist.
This one's called ‘Oxyrhynchus Fragments’ - Oxyrhynchus being a place in Egypt, where archaeologists have found great troves of fragments of documents that were thrown away, as far as 2,000 years ago, but which have now, once picked up and pieced together and deciphered, helped to literally piece together bits of ancient history that were otherwise obscure or lost. And I've used that as a metaphor for the nature of a relationship between a muse and a poet. It goes as follows:
No one in their tidy mind believes
that any set of poems tells the story,
accurately or completely, of
the lives and thoughts of poets or their muses.
That's why scholars write biographies,
though even then there's stuff that's unrecorded.
In fact, the felt life of such pairs
as you and I have recently become
will vanish, without fail, in desert sands
of desiccated time and long neglect.
My poems for you, therefore, must soon become
like Oxyrhynchus fragments found in Egypt.
The third poem is another short one, twelve-liner, called ‘Gladiator’, which reflects a very different mood from ‘Oxyrhynchus Fragments’. It was written in a mood of competitiveness because I felt I'm at a disadvantage here. You know, I've got a rival for the love of this woman, for Rachael, and I don't know whether I can win this fight, because he's got weapons I don't have. But I have some weapons maybe he doesn't have.
And, as I remarked earlier, when we finally met in New York, we each confessed to our weakness, and we reached an understanding. But this poem was written back in the middle of all of that, before the meeting, and it goes as follows.
The sun is setting over the arena.
I'm moribund, et moriturus sum.
But in the Emperor's box your golden lotus
Flutters in your fingers, signalling
That even now this bloodied veteran
Must chance his arm and blade against the beast.
He's younger, larger, bucklered, helmeted,
Financed by the upper set in Rome.
Against all that, I've net and rapier
A retiarius who takes his stand.
I'll aim to tangle up the big murmillo
And leave him sprawling in the purple sand.
The fourth poem, another twelve-liner, is called ‘The Pearl Fishers’, and it's written in a very different mood to ‘Gladiator’, but it's clearly still grounded in this sense of rivalry for the love of a woman. It takes its metaphors from Bizet's famous, very romantic opera The Pearl Fishers. It goes as follows.
This morning, in my customary bath,
I listened to Bizet, instead of Verdi.
Les Pêcheurs de Perles, in point of fact,
To contemplate the ruined Hindu temple
Upon a bluff that overlooks the sea,
Where Zurgo vows to keep you veiled and chaste.
But I, Nadir, still long for you, my Leila.
Whatever fury this incites in him,
I cherish, even on our funeral pyre,
The hope that since you saved him from his weakness
He'll relent and set our passion free.
Ah, opera, if only it could be.
The fifth poem is a longer one, called ‘Son of the Right Hand’, and it's worth mentioning at this point that Rachael and I had long agreed, because her name is Rachael [as in the wife of Jacob, in the Bible], that the poetry that was emerging and growing into a book was our offspring. [We called it Benjamin]. I said to her that as a muse she'd played the role to the poet, almost a male role, of inseminating the poet.
I was bringing to birth our offspring, this book of poetry. But at the point when I was writing this poem, I'd been agonised because I was frustrated, I was angry, I couldn't have her with me, I couldn't caress her and sleep with her and so on. And so I thought of destroying the whole cycle of poetry, you know, of just wiping the slate clean.
But then I realised I couldn't do that. There was too much of me now committed to this, to her, to the poetry. And so I wrote this poem as a reflection on the feeling as it were of being pregnant with Red Ochre for the Moon Goddess. It goes as follows.
If I count my blessings, you're among them. Enigmatic though you surely are, richly complex, full of contradictions, glorious in your poetic temper, sensual and deeply literate.
Looking back, with diverse input now,
With some corroboration of my view,
I'm struck with simple wonderment at how
From where I was, from whom you are, I drew
Such interest and passion out of you.
I lay in bed this morning quite exhausted,
Plotting to announce that I'd deleted
All the notes I've kept and all the poems
Crafted for you since your first phone call.
That there would never be this book, Red Ochre.
Imagine that. Annihilating vengeance,
Eviscerating our strange love affair,
Aborting Benjamin, our little darling,
Out of spite and heartbreak and despair.
But how could I do that? For you are there.
You are there in every line and verse.
You are twinned in his genetic code.
You are present in his beating heart.
Your longings nourished him since his conception.
Given birth, he'll reproduce your beauty.
And I, if I aborted this, our son,
Would never after that conceive again.
Your poet's womb, sans Benjamin, would shrivel,
Void of making, desolate I'd be.
Revenge on you would thus recoil on me.
Besides, were there no Benjamin, could Joseph
Live his legend life and council pharaoh?
Could Jacob count his blessings in old age?
Or Rachael be acclaimed in Genesis?
Oh no, our younger offspring must survive.
Between the two of them, our books, our boys,
Will fend off famine, generate a tribe,
Be honoured hence among the patriarchs,
And read with love and awe by many women.
The more, because we're unconventional.
You've blessed me, Rachael of contradictions.
Blessed me with abundance and with wit.
Blessed me in your coming and your going.
Blessed me in both truth and counterfeit.
So thank you for your love and all your fictions.
Benjamin was promised long ago.
He shall be born of us, beloved muse.
You're far away, beyond my reach, I know.
But he is here. He kicks. I can't refuse
To give him birth. Amen. That's how I choose.
The sixth poem is called ‘Martha Argerich’. This poem occurred to me - and it's self-explanatory, it relates to this – when I was sitting on Lygon Street, not far from where I live, at dusk, having a meal. But with the earphones on, listening to Martha Argerich playing or performing Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3, a famously complex and demanding piece of work.
As I listened to it, it gradually struck me that it was as if she was sitting, Rachael was sitting opposite me, listening to the same music. And then this really started to take off as an impression or a feeling. And instead of it being Rachael sitting opposite me, Martha Argerich herself was sitting there and playing the piano. I was right there in the concert. And then the culminating feeling was, I'm the piano, and Martha Argerich's playing the Rach on me, you know. And it was Rachael, actually. Rachael was playing me. And as I walked home, this poem occurred to me. And so when I got home, I wrote it down.
I dined at dusk, not far from Père Lachaise,
Or so I've thought of it since I was young,
And reading Balzac as a Rastignac,
A student contemplating sixty-eight,
Or Flaubert, feeling I was Frederic.
The dusk was grey and wintery, the trees
largely bare of foliage and birds.
I sat alone, my earphones sheltering
My consciousness from circumambient
Chatter and insouciance alike.
Then, having kept the beat to Billy Joel,
Sharing with you his old song, ‘Stiletto’,
I chanced upon a singular recording
Of Martha Argerich in decades past,
Still the young brunette at her piano,
Performing with her legendary passion
The dazzling Rach 3, supreme concerto,
With such élan that I was swept along,
Electrified as much by her as it
Within the genius of Rachmaninoff.
Isn't this the pinnacle, my love,
Of all his compositions for piano -
Conceived in peace at Ivanovka, dated
Moscow, 23 September, 1909,
And premiered thereafter in New York?
Her unexampled virtuosity
Took me further than does Ashkenazy.
She made me feel my very senses were
The keyboard swept by her electric hands.
It was as if my brain was her piano.
There I was, on that familiar street,
Where I have been so often in my life,
But finding it, a flow of deep emotion
Transmuting latent memories of love,
Triggering synaptic revolutions.
For as she played, I felt your animation
Seated with me and embodying
The transcendental music she enacted.
As if I was on speed or LSD,
My psyche drenched in you and ecstasy.
I arose before the third and final movement.
I danced upon the homeward boulevard.
No longer Rastignac or young Moreau,
But waltzing with you, psyche, as the sun
Hespered pink behind the leaden clouds.
Then I felt that you were Argerich,
Who have with peerless subtlety and verve
Breathed new life and possibility
Into the very keys of who I am.
Oh, play on, Martha, play the full Rach 3.
This next poem is called ‘Mastered Beauty’, and it it's in the same general category as, say, ‘Son of the Right Hand’, because it came at a crisis point in our relationship where I felt, again, angry, frustrated. I felt I was being toyed with, and I wasn't sure that I was really being loved. But I was confident by this stage that the poetry I was writing was good poetry, and I was therefore perversely, you might say, grateful to Rachael for stimulating and provoking me in such a way that I was writing this poetry.
I think this poem, as much as any of them, captures that paradox. I should explain briefly before reading it that it takes its reference point from the ‘free solo’ climbing of Alex Honnold, who famously was the first person to climb El Capitan, this huge sheer cliff, without harness - free solo. I use that as a metaphor.
I have climbed, like Honnold, without harness,
Free solo, the El Capitan of love.
Such climbing means a single ill-timed move,
Especially from high upon the face,
Entails a fatal plunge, oblivion.
You drew me, siren of the sheerest bluff,
A nanoman of daring, filmed by drones,
Nerveless and intent to all appearances,
Up towards the pinnacle of joy
That mastering your beauty promised me.
But did you long, in fact, to see me fall?
Were all the finger-holds that you incited,
Each a poem in this book of Rachael,
Mocked at every point by your intent
To whisper to me at three thousand feet?
‘He takes me at a masterful allegro,
Or even quite prestissimo, you know,
Who is my only lover, poor sweet poet,
Leaving me quite sore but adulant
Of his thrusting cock and how it's used.’
If words like that can't make a climber fall,
What's the use of calculated malice?
Nor did they. I have scaled the looming height.
My fingers haven't faltered, lost their grip.
My eyes have kept their sharpness in the light.
I stand now, fickle spirit of the void,
Upon the final stretch of Existenz,
My breathing calm, my toe-holds undistracted
By your taunting laughter from above,
Your mastered beauty, my unique creation.
The ninth poem from Red Ochre is another short one, a twelve-liner, called ‘Your Ovid’. And for those otherwise unacquainted with Ovid, he was one of the greatest of the Latin poets two thousand years ago, who, because he wrote a racy book on the art of love, was exiled by the Emperor Augustus to the Black Sea, and there he lived out his life. Rachael took to calling me her Ovid, ‘my Ovid’, she would say, which was a great compliment, but it has this reality that she was there in Europe and I was, if not on the Black Sea, even further away, you know, in Australia.
And so I wrote this poem to, shall we say, rise to the occasion, and it goes as follows:
I'm certainly your P. Ovidius,
At least as far as exile amour goes.
Exiled, note, from your sweet Aventine,
Where I'm politically on the nose.
What do they say, my love, in Palatine
Parties, or in Circus conversation
Concerning your poor poet? I suppose
They snigger at his long humiliation,
Remarking drily, ‘After all, he chose
The wrong side in the court of great Augustus.
That was a fatal error, heaven knows!’
But living on the Euxine? How invidious!
To finish off the selection from Red Ochre, there's a, it's almost a haiku, it's a four-line poem called ‘Marilyn's Men’. The Marilyn in question, of course, being Marilyn Monroe, who famously was married to a series of men and had love affairs with others. And, you know, was regarded as the greatest sex symbol of her time.
The poem's fairly self-explanatory. For those who, to whom the names might be unfamiliar, let me explain that she was married at one point to Joe DiMaggio, who was a brilliant sportsman, a baseball batter; to Arthur Miller, a great and successful playwright; and, then, she had affairs with both John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy.
And they were, of course, respectively, president and attorney general at that time in the early 60s. So this is a pretty select set of lovers, you know. And I was trying to position myself, as it were, among her lovers.
The poem goes as follows:
Marilyn had Joe DiMaggio,
Arthur Miller,
Both the Kennedys.
I guess I'm Miller -
In your case.
That poem, ‘Marilyn's Men’, is only about halfway through Red Ochre for the Moon Goddess. But one can't read everything. You can buy the book and do so, of course.
We switch now to a selection of poems from Wine on the Flames. And as I read these, it's worth bearing in mind that these poems were all written after the meeting with Douphol, in New York. So the, as it were, strategic situation has changed a bit.
We pick up with a poem called ‘Crossing the River’, which refers back to a poem that had been written a couple of years before. And in that earlier poem, which is in Red Ochre for the Moon Goddess, I'm feeling strategic and bolshie, as it were. I'm saying in that poem, I'm Julius Caesar and I'm setting out to conquer Gaul; primarily because there's this beautiful woman in Paris that I want for myself. And here there's a different take on that situation.
Do you still remember the poem I wrote
Some three years ago, in the fall,
About me being Caesar and you, maid of note,
My motive for conquering Gaul?
I have but one aim in this war, I declared,
Just to capture old Paris and you,
Who for beauty and wit could not be compared
With anyone else that I knew.
I wrote an account of my romantic war
In the third person as history,
But you are a fable and, oh, so much more,
An enchantress, a muse and a mystery.
I've been in Lutetia, old Paris, again,
For talks with empowered Parisii,
And such is my love that for you I refrain
From intercourse, though it be easy,
With trollops or courtesans, they can't compete
With your beauty, your wit, or your charm.
You’re my glory, my rapture, you make me complete.
To all that I'll never risk harm.
But now come reports, from my sources in Rome,
That cabals are formed to withdraw
My Gallic command and to summon me home.
Defiance will mean civil war.
You're with me in camp, my lover, my muse.
What would you have your Caesar do?
Should I opt for strife, roll the die?
Should I choose to tilt for the known world with you?
Great Pompey, they say, will pull back to Greece,
Should I cross the famed Rubicon.
So give me the signal and let us release
The dread dogs of war, Amazon.
The second poem is titled ‘Any Given Morning’. It's a quiet address, as it were, to the muse, to Rachael, asking how she feels about herself when she wakes in the morning, on her own.
Do you feel you're beautiful,
On any given morning,
Or do you wake up dutiful
To wear and want and warning?
Do you look back upon your years
And still see them aborning,
The muse in you transcending fears
Despite your life's long turning?
For every egg you've shed, you know,
For every moon that's passed,
I have inscribed in ochre now
A poem that will last.
Is that quick accounting right
Of almost two score years?
Does it matter, in the light
Of our impassioned tears?
Ah, waken hence, enlivened by
The meaning of each dawning,
Thou star at which all lovers sigh
On any given morning.
The third poem is called ‘Do You Understand?’ It's a kind of challenge to the muse to understand the position of the poet:
Do you understand that there are times
Like this when I have had no sleep,
When you have backed away and gone obscure,
That everything you are and all I love
Comes to seem the merest chimera?
Do you understand that when you say,
‘I love you, monkeybum!’ and send me songs,
I long so to believe you're in good faith,
And will at last, as promised, come to me,
Only for you then to play the ghost?
Do you understand that, when I write
Abundant, flowing poetry for you,
It isn't written as an artifice,
But to the person I take you to be,
Who's truly in the Catalogue of Women?
The beauty of your literate response,
The wonder of your soft, exquisite voice,
The music that you send to civilise
The poet, whom you dazzle from a distance,
Overwhelm me. Do you understand?
You stated that you felt electrified
By my Zarathustran offering,
A lyric that extolled you as transcendent,
Then baffled me by fleeing conversation.
That wounds your poet. Do you understand?
‘I'm not so calculating, monkeybum’,
You murmured when I queried whether
Your persistent, enigmatic secrecy
Is a muse's artful strategy.
I'm vexed to breaking. Do you understand?
The fourth poem is quite a long one. It's called ‘In the House of the Goddess’, and it uses as a metaphor the encounter between Odysseus and Circe in Homer's Odyssey:
Are you, in truth, the sister of Aeetes,
The daughter of Apollo, Ocean's child?
Have I, fresh from Laistrygonians
Destruction of my ships and of my men,
Stumbled on the palace of the goddess?
Are you Circe of the lovely braids,
Whose magic drugs have tamed the wolves and lions,
Whose high, spellbinding voice sings from within,
Whose wondrous loom weaves shimmerings of glory?
Is this your house my men have come upon?
How am I, Odysseus himself,
To compass what you do with Pramnian wine,
With potions only goddesses distil,
Or with that wand of yours, which all have turned
A score or more of my incautious men
Into bristling swine, all grunts and snouts,
Though their embodied minds, to their dismay,
Remain themselves to whom, in high disdain,
You fling now fodder fit for snuffling hogs,
That squeal and root and roll about in mud?
Told the tale by poor Eurylochus,
I've taken all my wits on mountain paths,
But just as I approached your rumoured halls,
Hermes of the golden wand appeared,
To warn me of your guile and subtle craft.
He proffered your Ulysses magic herbs,
Black-rooted moly, with its milk-white flowers,
And molyvalent reed, into the bargain,
Sending me then, full of apprehension,
To your gleaming doors, whence you stepped forth.
Isn't it the case that your fine drugs,
Which have made mere pigs of many men,
Prompted me, at Hermes' scient bidding,
To rush at you with unsheathed, glinting blade,
Causing you to scream and hug my knees?
Never, you confessed, had any other
Withstood your potion, once it passed his lips.
You saw in me a mind no common spell
Could drug, a man of many twists and turns,
Prophesied to you by golden Hermes.
‘Come, sheath your sword, let's go to bed together,
Thrust away your fear in my embrace,
Let's breed deep trust between us’, so you urged.
Had I not been Odysseus, I might have
Lapsed in judgement, fallen for your charms.
But I pushed back, rebuking you at once.
How dare you, Circe, who have turned to swine
All my hapless manly Achaeans,
Try to fool the very architect
Of that vaunted trick, the Trojan Horse,
To have me mount your hyper-magic bed,
Only to unman me, empty me,
Render me besotted with your beauty,
Unable or unwilling to depart.
What sorcery is this, what lying art?
No, goddess, not for all the wider world
Shall I be your lover till you vow,
And with a binding oath before Olympus,
That you will never plot a new intrigue
To bind me here, on your enchanted island.
But two, of course, can play at verbal jousts,
The give and take of passionate avowals,
And you, to serve your purpose, readily
Swore you'd never ever do me harm,
And thus I mounted your unrivalled bed.
Or so I’ve brooded, when I've sat alone,
In the silver chair, ornately carved,
Bathed against my spirit-numbed exhaustion,
Contemplating bread and ewered wine,
Wander-minded, full of grim foreboding.
Yet, when I pressed you to redeem the pigs,
Or rather to confer upon my words
The richness and the lasting resonance
Of poetry that you have loomed and sung,
O Circe, you conferred there in your halls
Such magical anointing of the hogs,
The burned-out husks of ageing wanderers,
That I, Ulysses, feasted with them all,
Until a timeless year had run its course,
Your guest, your lover, and your bard.
But then, at last, those flattered refugees
Prevailed upon their leader, Circe's man,
To set a course again for Ithaca,
Prevailed upon me even in my love,
To hug your knees in humble supplication.
‘Royal son of Laertes’, you responded,
‘Stay no more in the house on Circe's Isle,
If lingering be now against your will.
But you must first go on another journey,
Down to the house of death, there to consult
The ghost of old Tiresias of Thebes,
To whom alone Persephone has granted
everlasting wisdom, where the dead
Are otherwise mere empty, flitting shades.
He, blind prophet, will direct you home.’
Shall I then proceed to Book Eleven,
And venture to the kingdom of the dead?
O Circe, let my black ship leave your shores,
But not with me, Odysseus, on board,
For your high bed is now where I belong.
The fifth poem is called ‘Nook and book’, and, as will become readily apparent, it centres on the question of whether this poetic kind of relationship, from a distance, where there's so much freedom for each party, could ever really be translated into a conventional cohabitational relationship:
Rachael, Rachael, come to me,
Let us act as if we're real,
Let us share our poetry
As if it's what we truly feel.
Rachael, Rachael, you're the song
My inner being listens to,
Your company's where I belong,
My love of life is love for you.
Rachael, Rachael, you must know,
There's longing and reality.
Which will it be for me and you,
Intangible sublimity?
Rachael, what we are is rare,
As diamonds found along the shore
That Providence has planted there,
The gleaming coast of Evermore.
Diamonds are a metaphor,
What's rare in us is not mere stone,
We'd each be somewhat better
For a life together, not alone.
Oh, Rachael, isn't that the dream
That each of us must bring to book?
Mustn't we create downstream
A shared abode, a blissful nook?
Perhaps, but what the masters teach,
And what we must not misconstrue,
Is that such nooks are out of reach
For venturers like me and you.
The paradox of human life
That we must live with day by day,
Is that a muse is not a wife,
And that there is no place to stay.
Rachael, we could not remain
In such a place for very long,
We probably cannot attain
That state at all except in song.
Rachael, Rachael, in our hearts
We live the worlds of prosody,
Of music and of all the arts,
We dance with possibility.
Rachael, Rachael, whom I love,
this dance as such, its mystic flow,
which elevates our minds above
the commonplace, the world below,
Rachael, Rachael, we both know,
Cannot be cabined in a nook.
Yet how we dance, my love, and – Lo!
Our stunning, our transcendent book.
The sixth poem is called ‘Mandelstam and the Bottle’. Osip Mandelstam was a great Russian poet in the first half of the 20th century who died an untimely death at Stalin's hands during the Great Terror. But he once remarked that writing a poem is like putting a message in a bottle and casting it overboard at sea, leaving entirely to chance where it might land, on what island or coast, and who might pick it up, and what they'll make of the message. I've addressed that kind of idea in the following poem:
Osip Mandelstam was so ill-fated.
How can I compare myself with him?
Well, he loved the classics, as do I,
Judaic, Christian, Hellenistic, all;
And modern Russian literature as well.
Was sceptical of progress, hated clocks.
He clearly wasn't meant for Bolshevism.
He tried to get along with other poets,
However Acmeist, or wilfully obscure.
He wrote, somewhere, that any given poem
Was like a message corked up in a bottle,
Then thrown overboard from out at sea.
I used to think that this applied to me,
Or rather to my private poetry.
So though I had a public for my prose,
Which kept my readers on their twinkle toes,
The formalism of my prosody
Was counterrevolution, seemingly.
Do you know his story? Or Nadezhda’s?
The way the writers' union shut him down?
Expelled from the St. Petersburg of Pushkin,
He became a vagabond romantic,
In Moscow, under Stalin, with its horrors,
Or wandering around the Caucasus.
I've long admired his ‘Stalin Epigram’ -
A poem in defiance of the Vozhd,
For which they exiled him to Voronezh,
And, after that, hard labour in the GULAG.
his heart gave out, not far from Vladivostok,
In a transit camp. His work was bottled.
But why would I identify with Osip?
Am I not free and comfortably housed?
Do I not have a peerless, stunning muse?
Do I not get to write just as I choose?
Do you not keep me stirred, inspired, aroused?
Don't our conversations transcend gossip?
Yes, yes, yes! The sum of that is true.
Yet even on the mildest winter day,
Denied your wit, your warmth, your voice,
Longing for a snuggle up with you,
For stroking you in countless loving ways,
I brood in transit camp, deprived of choice.
Poem seven is called ‘Lindon’. For those who do not know the world of J. R. R. Tolkien, Lindon is the northwestern coast of Middle-earth, where the remnant of the High Elves still live, presided over by Cirdan of the Havens. It figures only the margin of the story, but those immersed in the mythology of Middle-earth will know it well enough. And here we have a sonnet that uses Lindon as a metaphor in the relationship between the muse and the poet.
Though east, in Middle-earth, there may be war,
Long strife between the Dark Lord and the Elves.
Though evil may beset Eriador,
We two remain enhamed unto ourselves.
Being, dwelling, in the Haven towers,
Whence the grey ships of our legends sail,
We stroll the Harlond strand with Elfin powers,
Like kin of Cirdan in the famous tale.
We sing to one another more than lays
Of Beleriand or Númenor.
For we've become the bards of our own days,
Have shaped our timescape into lyric lore.
We need not sail into the West, to flee,
For we are Aman in our prosody.
Poem 8 is called ‘Diomedes’. Diomedes was one of the great heroes on the Greek side in the Trojan War, at least as described by Homer in the Iliad. Rachael asked me to write her a poem about Diomedes without quite specifying why. The poem from that point is pretty self-explanatory.
You wrote me of Diomedes,
It seems, upon a whim,
Requesting, would I write you, please,
A poem lauding him.
I vacillated, I confess,
For I had work to do.
But thinking then, my muse, doth press,
Cast work aside for you.
For, after all, it's eventide,
A time to rest the heart.
And where, pray, does my own abide,
But in the charming art
Of writing my romantic verse
For Rachael the most fair,
And in such fantasies rehearse
A love beyond compare.
Possessed by this impassioned thought,
I hastened to my shelves.
You may picture me disport
Among the Greeks themselves,
As searching out, in classic tomes,
In Homer, Dante, Shakespeare,
The famous warrior who roams
The canon's atmosphere.
You're well acquainted, I feel sure,
With all his daring deeds
Upon that Iliadic shore
The bright Scamander feeds.
But of his deeds, what should I tell,
In prosody for one
Who's far from circle eight in Hell,
From battles lost or won?
One of two upon my life,
Perhaps his wounding Venus,
Or his stealing Troilus' wife.
How's my guess, between us?
If I am Diomed, I say,
Come, Cressida, with me,
Oh, let me raid and kill by day,
I'll spend my nights with thee.
The ninth poem is called ‘Pink Granite’. Again, it's fairly self-explanatory, but it pivots on the archaeological discovery of a tomb in ancient Egypt from the third millennium BCE. And it's quite a remarkable tomb. But then it's turned, the tomb itself is turned, into a metaphor for the relationship, again, between the poet and the muse:
They found the tomb of an Egyptian prince,
Dated to the late Fifth Dynasty, it seems,
Belonging to one Waser-If-Re, son
Of Pharaoh Userkaf, who ruled the Nile
Four and a half millennia ago.
The grave of this forgotten prince, who was
An hereditary lord, a judge,
A minister, a governor, a priest,
Contains, we're told, by Ronald Leprohon,
Egyptologist emeritus,
A false door, of a quite enormous size,
Cut from granite by Old Kingdom masons,
Almost fifteen feet in height and four across.
The granite, pink, and quarried in Aswan,
Then brought north to Saqqara for the tomb.
Before the door, an offering table stood,
Carved of fine red granite from the south.
But when the tomb was opened, none could find
The place where Waser-If-Re lies at rest,
Though artefacts were found and ancient sculptures.
But think, my love, upon that granite door,
That false door built, by long-established custom,
That the prince's soul might make its way,
At will, from Underworld to starlit skies.
There's a myth that our two souls may breathe!
For, given you have passed behind the door,
Your own pink granite of perversity,
Abandoning your poet to the Nile,
the flow of time, the lees of his laments,
that enigmatic door shall stand for much.
Beyond it, future antiquaries shall
Look in vain for your interred remains.
But via that pink portal they'll surmise,
Placed there by your poet in his grief.
His many hymns of love and praise could move,
Millennia from now, like ghostly sighs,
From where your memory was laid to rest,
Recited in a long-forgotten tongue,
As worn in time as Latin is to us,
Yet mystical and sacred in their sense.
These thoughts occurred to me just after dawn,
When I awoke to this romantic tale.
Not least, perhaps, because you've turned away
From your prince, your judge, your priest, your poet,
For reasons which will never be deciphered.
Perhaps some other record will survive
To animate the meanings of our door -
Perhaps your secret garden, unconcealed?
Perhaps my books of poetry, so kenned,
Will seem the truth, long buried but revealed.
Yet, as I pen these lines, as judge, as priest,
Knowing that you are not yet deceased,
All I can feel, perceive, imagine, think,
Is that you lie behind this portal pink,
And there you shall repose until released.
That cannot be the case, though, I protest.
This isn't your demise, it's your retreat.
You're not Ophelia being laid to rest.
You're my very soul, my long defeat,
My access to the star by which I'm blessed.
The tenth poem is called ‘A Poet's Lot’, and it's a simple reflection, really, on the role of being a poet, writing poetry for a muse, as distinct from living, you know, a conventional household parenting life.
I live, let me confess, in kingly comfort.
Far more so than old Diogenes,
Who bade the would-be generous Alexander
To get out of his sunlight, if he please.
I have this book-lined space in which to dwell.
Fresh croissants with honey in the morning,
Privacy and sound utilities,
The City Baths and Market near at hand.
I am esteemed, both here and overseas,
For how and what I write on world affairs.
I've cocked a snook at Putin and at Xi,
Mocking their immense stupidity.
For now, it seems, I'm well beyond the reach
Of their malign revenge, their toxic servants.
I talk with those that they condemn as traitors.
I'm honoured to be sanctioned by the Kremlin.
But more than all of this, I've had a muse
More beautiful, mysterious and sexy
Than any woman in the tides of time
Who's longed for verse in my iambic rhyme.
The second last poem is called ‘Our Poetry’, so it's in a similar vein to the preceding one:
In many ways, our poetry is private.
What others make of it is their affair.
If, after we are gone, it's ever published
As curio or as exotica.
It's giving form and dignity
To all the many nuances we breathe
In dialogue concerning trust and love,
Concerning wonder, honesty, delight.
Our great advantage, rooted in our pasts,
Is to no longer be impassioned striplings,
But to be read into the world, the canon,
The Proustian resources of the few,
The rare, the rarest few, as you attest,
Who are yourself so modestly elect,
Yet skippingly so free of pedantry,
As if the canon was our secret garden.
As if? But it has been precisely that.
And is it not the case that its perfumes,
Its blooms, are ours, for just this reason
That we have kissed among its beds and arbours?
We conclude with a sonnet titled ‘Presence’, which is in fact the final poem in Wine on the Flames, sort of a sign-off note:
Your presence in the world is so exquisite,
Enunciating what it means to be.
I can't encompass you or make explicit
What your voice and bearing mean to me.
That you've reached out and challenged me to write
Expressive verse for you, in many modes,
Has cast upon my bookish life a light
Illuminating all its dimmest roads.
Astonished by your personality,
Overwhelmed with love for who you are,
I lust intensely for your subtlety;
Approach that Temple door, you hold ajar.
Holderlin extolled Diotima,
But you surpass his idol. Oh, by far!
So I've recited a total of 22 poems there, long and short.
The first ten from Red Ochre for the Moon Goddess, which were poems written between 2021 and 2023. And then twelve from Wine on the Flames, which is 250-odd poems which have been written since then, in late 2023, 2024, and into 2025. And they are complementary volumes. They, between them, tell this long story of a most unusual relationship, a poet-muse relationship, and its ups and downs.
So that's 22 out of pretty much 600 poems. That's a very small selection. But I'd like to think that that selection conveys the variety, the mood, dare I say it, the richness, of the two volumes. In due course, in the wake of this recording, this podcast, we hope in 2026 to see both those volumes published, including wonderful illustrations by my artist friend, Ingrida Rocis.
Thanks for listening, and I hope you look forward now to seeing the poetry in print.