*****
Anthony Howell is, in Peter Reading’s words, ‘an eclectic original’, a poet, artist and novelist whose first collection of poems Inside the Castle was brought out in 1969. In the tradition of Robert Browning and Andre Gide, he often explores ‘immoralism’ in his writings via personae. From Inside, published by the High Window Press in 2017 contains poems relating to prisons and poems of political satire. A former member of the Royal Ballet, his novel In the Company of Others was published by Marion Boyars in 1986. Today, he dances the tango. His most recent book of poetry is Invention of Reality, published by the High Window in 2022.
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As if it were a Bow: Poems and Pictures from Thailand
The following poems were written in Thailand in the early months of 2023. Their author is excited to find himself in South East Asia – beyond the pale of the West. He meets tigers close up, gets to know elephants, experiences jungle. Hosted by a Thai family, he is an outsider getting a sense of the country from the inside. His bewilderment increases with each new encounter. At the same time, the vicissitudes of international politics cannot be forgotten, and Thailand offers the writer an opportunity to view the world, and to view himself, from a different perspective to that afforded by his home in London. The result is a collection driven by the heat of the tropics and by a sense of astonishment that alerts him to each unexpected detail of this golden land.
For Bhorani Nissaisorakarn
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THE GOOD RAT
One Buddha’s seven-headed cobra parasol
Also offers coils for his throne. The Princess and the Pea
Came to mind for somebody, one dry afternoon
When the long, refreshingly cool trunk of a python
Got wrapped around my shoulders as it tried to nose away,
As probably did the black snake of which I have no memory,
The snake my mum brought back, draped around me
When I was less than a year. Protestant faiths
Only have people to emulate while Shiva balances
On the Demon of Ignorance. Vishnu has his bull.
Out of Parvati, possibly sired by her lesser half, let’s say,
Ganesh’s super-stable howdah rides upon a rat.
Imagine plump Ganesha seated on his rat sideways
Like those nifty girls in tight skirts hitching a ride to Bangkok,
Except that he sits open wide, cementing together
The soles of his feet, fluid in his hips for all his weight.
Here though in the Land of Gold it’s rare to see him riding,
For Ganesh wears the Buddha’s cap, but do I want to direct my trek
To the rat temple that Andrea went to in Rajasthan?
The one you have to enter barefoot – as is the form for wats –
But rat-shit everywhere. What pests they are. The Western mind
Celebrates its terriers, and shudders at – for all that, the good rat
Can boast its swag-bag share of beady attributes.
Once, on the roof of one of Notre-dame’s engargoyled towers,
There was a girl leant out, her pet rat peering from a shoulder.
In our village many rats in miniature are scattered near
Ganesh’s feet. From a poet’s point-of-view, you get a lot of rhymes.
***
MILKY STORKS
A white flight in formation
Between our steepest hill and our veranda
Flashes darkness, wings of pearl
Catching the last of the light,
But flashing darkness with each beat,
Migrating more or less South East,
South East, I suppose it is,
On the last evening of the smoke.
This burn-off blurs our prospect of Siam,
While below, the ‘few and far bushes’
As they call the Bougainvillea
Paint me a nocturne by Childe Hassam
Because their blended flourishes might be
Mere afterimage floating on the eye
This evening, as their day-to-day splendour
Ends in the glow of an ember.
It’s an evening to remember
As the dusk turns ridges into ghosts
And even the flower free from sorrow
Loses its exuberance to indigo.
***
THE LOGS
They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears
Into pruning hooks, sure. But what tank can do more
Than go crunching on its treads in the company of missiles
Parading with the ranks down some metropolitan avenue?
Nevertheless our dealer can supply the Go-box version,
Having prudently removed the depleted uranium
Armour 10,000 times more protective than steel.
He’ll issue you the lighter-skinned edition of our tower on the move.
You’ll still get its munitions though, made of the same material.
Of that, do rest assured. After all, it’s been condemned.
This ammo is a knock-off. Merchandise
On offer from any force flogs the superannuated batch.
Vets have a hard time, natch. Maybe an Austrian doctor,
After the war, went on his mountainous rounds in a duck,
But that duck got lucky. How does one turn a tank
Into a ploughshare? A tank that primes its reinforced trunk
With shells of depleted atomic number 92. No use using your bees
Only to harvest the honey, or rely on an offer from some billionaire
Browsing the military gift shop for a souvenir.
Today you’re in luck if you’re on display behind its counter.
Your precedents, Asia’s Goliaths, went to work in the forests,
Well, at least it was a job. And these are the remains
Of forests possessed by the ghosts of industrial elephants.
Could your cloggy treads have done their slog?
Modernised, mechanized logging is more brutal to the bush
As it shears indiscriminate swathes. Perhaps your tank is just
Too purpose-specific? Several thousand elephants were finally
Put out of work when replaced by machinery. More recently
Howdah rides are being viewed with frowns, despite the fact
That once a King expressed a wish to ride upon an elephant.
A military specimen was singled out and brought to him.
The King then asked his court to comment on its characteristics.
Yes-men, the lot of them, the courtiers, with the exception
Of one, were raucous in their commendation. Chiang Miang observed
That while the elephant was large its eyes were very small,
And that, according to Chiang, was proportionately wrong
– As in all your combatants equipped with meanish eye-slits.
Whatever. Mouths were agape at the gift of Portugal’s King Manuel,
Hanno, who duly arrived in Rome just before he was scheduled
To perform before an elected Pope, back in the days of Henry VIII.
In his first appearance, Hanno made an impression,
Breezing through the streets of Rome adorned with handsome vestment
And with a silver tower on his back. Hanno dropped
To his knee and bowed his head upon reaching the Pope
Before lifting back to trumpet once, then twice, then thrice!
Next he sucked up water into his extraordinary pipe
To spray it over all assembled—not excluding the Pope,
Who declared the entire show a miracle, really quite exceptionally nice.
***
CONFLUENCE IN TIGER LAND
They do not differentiate
Between the sublime and the ridiculous.
A faded portrait of their gormless king
Suitably framed in what is supposed to be gold
Indicates the site of a heaven-reaching tree
While pseudo cherry blossom blooms
On a brace of fake sakuras springing from a skywalk.
It’s just for effect – but no one seems to care
Whether your golden carp is actually
A species of balloon, or whether you venture
Close to the border with Myanmar
To haggle in the market for a bum-enhancer.
While there well may be more monasteries than hospitals,
There are now more super-stores than stupas here.
Though faith seems to be the order of the day,
Luck is more urgently sought by the guy
Tossing coins at a pot-bellied navel.
More luck is bought if you walk beneath
The belly of an elephant, but those shopaholic monks
Have to be here on a spree from over there.
Ours dust the insects out of harm’s way.
Or so they maintain, the people
Who garland their nagas and bunnies and Bambis
And play for high stakes in Laos casinos
So that they can blow their tax-free rewards where
High-fashion malls host designer labels.
Then the punters reembark to cross the mile wide
Mekong that is just as old as their mist-enveloped hills.
Tiger Woods is part Thai, and was once refused admission to a golf course here, on account of his colour!
***
ACCORDING TO PLINY
The dragon, ever at war with the elephant,
Is itself of so enormous a size,
As easily to overwhelm the elephant,
Seize it in its clutches and encircle
Its legs in its coils.
The contest is equally
Fatal to both, for the elephant,
Vanquished, falls to the earth,
And by its weight, crushes the dragon
Doggedly knotted around it.
***
HOMAGE TO PO CHU-I
It looks risky to me, this bridge of ribbons woven together
To bear me up as I try inching forward over a cascade
After having negotiated rungs of hollow tubes
Serving as a ladder to this spot where it is rewarding
To look up at an angle that can crick a neck, as with a moon
When directly above, as with a tree when just as
Tall as a waterfall can be; a spate that plummets down,
Showing as much as it hides what bulges behind it,
Feathered in spray, bouncing off rocks and slamming into
Alternative channels, where trees can be tall as the moon
That shines through these vertiginous clumps from
Which there is so much to learn – so much to be used –
From the woven strips that bear my weight to the ladder
Of poles to the proverbs of poets and seers and
Independent sources who say of fake news in the press,
It’s like bamboo – once it gets started you can’t
Kill it off. Whereas, when you want to be accurate
In your aim, think of its arrow-shaped leaf, how it bends
Under the pressure of snow. Suddenly the snow
Slips to the ground without the leaf having stirred.
So take your string to the pitch of tension, then
Just let the shot fall from you like the snow. It flies
Without a thought. Emptiness is form, form is emptiness.
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