Listening To Joan Baez

I sat with rum and Joan Baez the other day Writing up three poems in Bombay One short another crooked Yet not quite a disaster The other long and sad Not very bad but still not much more Than a chinchilla whore In her teens, plump, with baby fat Still around her cheekbones, shoulders, waistflesh Trellised eaves A tooting car on Cadell Road Dusk falling, friends out on a binge, I alone in the darkening flat Joan Baez on my knee her voice from the cassette recorder Blurring the border between voice and flesh And letting them enmesh Wafting out over lonely streets Climbing the Pali Hills Sidling in stealth by private yew hedges To caress like silk the legs of a party Falling to pieces at only six-thirty Prosaic, proselytizing like Diogenes in the bin Beard straggling all over an obdurate chin Breathe in the voice let the pictures go by Looking for a conjuror in the sky And confused, return Dreams back to ashes, ashes to the urn Quiet in the knowledge that ashes don’t burn. They say some poetry Is coming out of me Juice wrung out by iron teeth From the tender heart of a slender tree.