Some of the poems can be found online. Here are a few locations:
www.saltpublishing.com/books/smp/1844710149.htm
http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2006/12/intercapillary-editions.html
www.signalsmagazine.co.uk/4/hughes.htm
www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2007/hughes.html
www.beardofbees.com/hughes.html
http://pippoetry.blogspot.com/2008/12/peter-hughes.html
www.greatworks.org.uk/poems/ph.htmlThe Pistol Tree Poems: 3
edging the lawn with worn long-handled shears
just above sea
level
it’s hard to understand why maps don’t
tally
with what we’re walking up & down on
or why what’s in the papers doesn’t chime
with anyone we know
& why of two rhubarb plants
the first should unfurl & rise like a magic Arabian tent
all high red poles & voluminous masses of cool green
shade
whispering
spices
while the second is barely alive
should we dig it up & replace it with ginger & a few
ears of wheat?
measuring the garden for new fencing
the figures change strangely depending
on which end I start from -
it’s impossible to get your
bearings futile &
indispensible to try
I wonder if Heine’s last note ever got to Camille?
a perfect fix will give only an impossible point
to dance upon: a cocked hat at least gives a small
badly-prepared triangle to cultivate & live in
where a robin flits through a white poplar
& an arpeggio of goldfinches veers into the birches
as for courses to steer
what with all these uncertainties of tidal stream & weather
boat speed &
appetite
cross track error
horizontal dilution of
precision
still
steer we do
I’d even choose rope not for its qualities of
strength
knot &
give
but with reference to our shared cack-handedness:
polypropylene makes a poor enough rope
but at least it floats when you misjudge & drop it
down the crack between some country or other
& the side of your dilapidated boat -
& it’ll still stop the goat going off-piste for a go
at
the
artichokes
herb
garden
or other goat
tonight I’d rather navigate like the Polynesians once
did
imagining position from the sway
& underlying tendency of the waves
while assembling lyric maps which trace the shapes
made by the clearest of these clear stars
the
Plough upended on the Wash
Scorpius gradually wheeling past the back garden
using bits of
driftwood
seaweed
flotsam finger marks
reflecting on a change in the weather & unusual sea level
Robert Schumann on the radio paints in some extra sand-banks
for the oystercatchers &
seals
& Heine’s Fly
I often put in yellow instead of blue
& recall Buy Ballot’s Law:
the low pressure area should be on your left
if you stand with your back to the wind
the house martins fussed & keened & banked all evening
till the light slid off the edges of the sea & land
in the
hours after dark you can feel them
tucked up under the eaves of the house
you can feel them breathing
as the tide quietly rocks towards the moon they’re
watching
The Pistol Tree Poems: 17
I sat with Blake’s Thel
which messed up my decasyllabics
& recalled a gentle modal grope on
E
[Dorian]
I reversed through the gloaming with Zoot Sims’ Doggin
Around
redolent of the last local outdoor festivities
a rusty Christmas
tree flat on its back in the lay-by
her
beds were unpicked brillo pads of twisted thorn & briar:
a waist-high summer wilderness of green curved air & wire
the pillow slips she stitched by hand throughout the month of
May
now hanging in the Lowestoft
branch of Help the
Aged
Berlioz said that for the revolution you needed
four brass bands: one to cover every exit from the church
when you finally
get the boat back into the water
the wood should swell & close
the gaps below the
waterline
but this will only happen if you believe that it will
it’s easy to see
you’re still feeling muff-
led
the old romantic jammer
with a bent & tarnished
tube
full of ancient pains & trains
a Yamaha Silent Brass System
stuffed up your bell
end
partly
but not exclusively
for the sake of the neighbours
one lead from the
trumpet-mute
to the black box on my belt
the other flows from the holes in my head to your box babe
you might play out your heart for years with no-one listening
sitting
with a lapful of warm chips in a dirty Vauxhall
cheap malt vinegar two fingers deep in the
see-through bag
remember when you reached beneath and cupped it in your hand?
who
would have thought that guitar bridges could span such distance?
now I
know that Blake’s fourteener wasn’t just a conker
I can listen to Tom
Waits’ Orphans
go with the flow without
counting
but dreams still scrape my
stubble
the harsh translation issues
stir with a big knob of mascarpone & grated nuts
woke me in simmered sweat at three in the frozen morning
also known as physics
Régine Crespin
sang the six summer songs by Berlioz
hours or years before we all become the
ghosts of roses
tell me where you want to
go
the unknown island
it’s a turning off the
A14
some charts are just a broad expanse of
blue with meticulous
legends
depths are in metres & all bearings are true
the Krewe of Endymion wasted hours
throwing sugar at the folk of New Orleans
before ducking out of the rain for soul
food:
a piece written over
the chord changes of another
is still a
contrafact
many of the networks evolved
in the brain are late music the colour of dark red wine
The Pistol Tree Poems: 27
Aphrodite, riding on a goat
keeps me here, anchored in song
I’m still removing
yellow
hopes & memories from the loft
finding
things I
thought
were only in my head:
the mask & snorkel Lynn
used when chopping onions
a video of Frankie Howerd’s
1973 sitcom Whoops Baghdad
(followed by the shadow
cabinet apparently
making seasonal treats for dogs
from sieved liver &
advocaat)
my old croomstick scorched by
Jenny Burntarse
the pickled dick of some
Venetian saint
2 boxes of almost-fossilized fishing
tackle a derelict French horn
what does Byron think said Shelley
about the Sudan goat wife
death scandal?
well Charlie seemed to really love his goat Rose
to the extent that a bunch
of Sudanese elders
had to force him to do the right
thing make
her
an honest goat
& pay a dowry of 15,000
dinars
(£25)
the marriage didn’t
last Rose
seems to have died
after swallowing plastic wrappers on the mean
streets
of Juba
Byron with
a fragrant Italian countess sat on his face
was neglecting to think about it at all
but when pressed
suggested
oh Charles thou art sick
in a
deep sweet muff-
led growl
there are too many texts in my face
today: The Secrets
of East Anglian Magic / Welcome to Tehran / Mastering Mullet
/
Norfolk ‘n good: an anthology of Norfolk Modernist
Poetry/
How to Really Sell Your
House/
check out
thenationalmulletclub.org
advised the Omniscient Mussel
fresh in from Kropotkin Seamount
before drawing back a curtain of
snot-green seaweed to show Poseidon
picking up his prong & suitcase
full of
Rilke
& walking away from the last blue room of all
even ignoring the cast of Stingray
except to ask the fish-arsed blonde
are you the Brighton Marina?
[where I got my pirk & muppet rig]
Some god! she
mouthed he doesn’t
know about the 3 billion acres
of American ocean to
go with their 2.3 of dry land
he thinks he still has some control
I found my flounder spoon
& a red German
jellyworm on
a 12 inch Ziplock whisker boom
a small chemical
nightlight
known as starlight
that
trembles
on the tip of my rod in the dark
as the night river moves out to
sea
when nobody is watching
we do what the scissor sisters say
whispered the O.M.
the world is your limpet
in the witching hour before
high-tide
I go &
try to read the water
The Pistol Tree Poems: 31
Attended by two fallen angels
and an evolving mollusc
in the absence of a nozzle for the old green garden hose
I once again succumb to wrinkled pink thumb cramp
fanning ghostly rainbows at the beans & rhubarb
turning through glistening arcs of soft wet light
towards the disused lighthouse & the
west
swooping swags of mist
slowly settle on the
seedlings
& the midweek nymphs
depart:
diverse birds emerge with expressions like mad
pirates
seeking beakable earth after the dry
spell
we regard each other sideways
as the sky turns farfetched Catholic
mauve
filled with aching Bruckner endlessness
the spacious clarifying dusk sung by the first few evening stars
daily vastation after
tea a dry fly cast into the
silence
where any weight there is is in the line
it’s been a funny
month
I swapped that tarnished tenor sax
for a scuffed black ocean-going canoe
& we found out how much is
closed
with the help of new maps including OS Explorer 250
constructed on Transverse Mercato Projection
Airy Spheroid OSGB (1936)
Datum
a deer & her fawn at TF670283
so we stood
motionless
gently watching each other
breathing like in a nature poem
but not the one I wrote yesterday:
alpen/alpen/digraph cluster/I felt sadder/after lunch
maybe I’ll change it today as we had bacon
the Omniscient Mussel is
relaxin’
in a
creased slate-coloured shell
suit:
wassup purrs the
benign bivalve
hi OM I say why
have they barricaded Gipsy Green? [TF691424]
the local suits heard the
goat-girl was coming replied the
mollusc
the lost & visionary goat-girl
with her unsponsored songs of tomorrow
at the end of our walk
we saw the road from the other side