Ode in April

Ode in April

Ode in April

    Moments of connection,
of intimate attention to the nooks and crevices
  of how mind and body fit together,  
of the melting and blending of imaginary and actual flesh,
of sensation, impulse and dreaming all caught in the same mode,
of broadness and the long sweep of emotion
  out into the air
in a gasp

    of true surprised pleasure
plus some level of bemusement at what is happening
  while your mind acts automatically
in supposing vistas, inclines, plains stretching towards lakes,
both real ones and instant ghosts of wideness, spaciousness, outstretch,
and every nerve achieves a precise quantum
  of intensity’s
needle points

    are moments when events
happen for themselves thoughtlessly, intuitively, with
  that in-the-mind, out-of-the-mind energy
of kicking a ball, wheeling a trolley, greeting someone on the street,
or of touching, holding, kissing, playing with nipple or ear,
getting closer in love: all and any actions
  which instantly
out of the

    blue are just now what you
feel like doing.  Sure, they’re impelled differently when they
  are everyday behaviour on the street
from when they’re the urge for love-making, drawn from deepest wells:
but both are instinctive behaving and, if free, are sincere-
ly part of the repertoire of what’s best in
  human nature, what
makes it (so

    to speak) “tick” effortless-  
ly without stressing the pursuit of a shared well-being
  which is also requisite in well-run
worlds where the natural movement is towards what’s fine, towards the light.
So when thinking that the fridge needs re-stacking, that it gets so
quickly messed up, or, seconds later, that the
  sprinkler should be turned
on the tired-

        looking mock-orange by
the gate or that the eaves need repainting (some boards broken,)
  these thoughts (gliding black swans on shining water)  
are like some quick desire for you, your body and what together  
we can do by way of love and energy, pulsing, throbbing
with it.  More than just “sex in everything”  
  this wholeness which comes
from what con-  

    nects is the moment’s
life, its refused dark.  Each individual breathes this daylight
  of the self’s own breathing.  Each place is like
a glance of brightness.  Someone sees it, someone touches that moment.
And war?  War’s for sellers of war, breeding apology
for the way each moment’s bombed, bruised, torn apart
  while the body shrieks
out its pain

    as it’s dismembered, cut
to shreds by machine-guns, or carved into body parts  
  by mortars which turn people into flesh:  
mangle of bleeding viscera, torsos chopped out, headless remnants  
scattered among those still conscious who grope amongst the blood  
like rocks exposed in surf, or like blinded ones  
  struggling in a marsh
which drowns them.

    On a bridge at Nasa-
riyah, a group of women and children caught in crossfire,
  cars burning (one with a corpse inside it
which, the report says, gave off  “a hissing sound”), are pulled aside on
the road: these blanketed hummocks are the firefight’s rubbish.
Later, after a truck carrying soldiers
  suffers a direct hit,
one Marine

    carries a “huge chunk of flesh,”
a friend’s remains so maimed he could not be identified.
  Consciousness is obliterated in
a wall of fire and blood.  No-one, alive and well, can imagine it.
No-one who loves another forgives what’s let loose here.  Whether
gas-haze strewing people to the ground or this
  bridge’s dreamlike scene
of death and

        disintegration, mind
and body fight off the day-lit, subconscious nightmare.  It
  skews seeing like an hallucinogen:
now a toddler, moaning, proffers a bandaged twig which was his hand, while
the next image shows a young woman, seemingly, bleeding to
death under a sheet.  These close-ups wither you.
  Anger, prayer, aren’t
sufficient:

    we dream of a future
where waging war’s illegal, where there are means to linger
  by that woman’s, that child’s bed.  Connections
span the gap.  I ask you: re-live an Easter car-crash, a street fight:
how much must heal, knit, grow back, like wilderness after fire.    
But those bland faces (Bush, Blair, Howard) on our
  television screens?
They blaze truth.