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.