William Oxley
We regret to report that William died on 4th February 2020.
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William Oxley, co-founder of the Torbay Poetry Festival, and a regular at Teignmouth Poetry events. His poems have been published in magazines and journals as diverse as The New York Times, The Observer, The Spectator, The Independent, Agenda, Acumen, The London Magazine and Poetry Ireland Review. A study of his poetry, The Romantic Imagination appeared in 2005 from Poetry Salzburg. His most recent volumes are ISCA – Exeter Moments (Ember Press 2013) and Poems from the Divan of Hafez (translated from the Persian with Parvin Loloi)(Acumen Publications, 2013). His Collected and New Poems came from Rockingham Press in 2014, and Walking Sequence & Other Poems (Indigo Dreams Publishing in 2015). He has given readings throughout the UK, as well as abroad in Nepal, Antibes and elsewhere. A book of anecdotes, On and Off Parnassus, was published in 2018 by Rockingham Press.
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AND THE LEAVES FALL IN SILENCE
And the leaves fall in silence
doses of shadow with them,
beyond fear and the tribulations of living
they dissolve underfoot like
small boats of dust the tiger sun
has beached forever on the farthest
shores of human perception.
And the leaves fall in silence
out of the harmless lives of great trees
brief companions of briefer fruits:
theirs is an honourable, useful existence
shrouding wild birds and making air –
being close patterns of recognizible mystery
humans feel but cannot solve.
Small things of silence, notes
of no music, words of no sound,
the only interpreters of capricious winds
their gestures are of hands, their form
like that of stones, and the sad
witnessing of their silent, perpetual fall
disturbs the heart here in Nepal.
Garden of British Embassy, Kathmandu
And the leaves fall in silence
doses of shadow with them,
beyond fear and the tribulations of living
they dissolve underfoot like
small boats of dust the tiger sun
has beached forever on the farthest
shores of human perception.
And the leaves fall in silence
out of the harmless lives of great trees
brief companions of briefer fruits:
theirs is an honourable, useful existence
shrouding wild birds and making air –
being close patterns of recognizible mystery
humans feel but cannot solve.
Small things of silence, notes
of no music, words of no sound,
the only interpreters of capricious winds
their gestures are of hands, their form
like that of stones, and the sad
witnessing of their silent, perpetual fall
disturbs the heart here in Nepal.
Garden of British Embassy, Kathmandu
THE PECULIAR TASTE OF WILD OLIVES
(i.m. Robert Graves)
Wild olives out of red earth
(Blood of past praise and death)
first tasted in a crooked orchard
that clung on crumbling terraces –
the peculiar taste of wild olives
all the green of the world
in their green smooth skins.
High above that valley
where the roofs of Soller
swam in incalculable light
it was a taste
bitter as Spain's history
yet simple as poetry.
All of our long climb
through the small sierras
we savoured it
the peculiar taste of wild olives.
It was like having tasted civilisation
for the very first time.
Published in In The Drift of Words
Rockingham Press 1992
(i.m. Robert Graves)
Wild olives out of red earth
(Blood of past praise and death)
first tasted in a crooked orchard
that clung on crumbling terraces –
the peculiar taste of wild olives
all the green of the world
in their green smooth skins.
High above that valley
where the roofs of Soller
swam in incalculable light
it was a taste
bitter as Spain's history
yet simple as poetry.
All of our long climb
through the small sierras
we savoured it
the peculiar taste of wild olives.
It was like having tasted civilisation
for the very first time.
Published in In The Drift of Words
Rockingham Press 1992
THE WHITE TABLE, 4 am.
You are asleep my hope-and-all
in the guest room above the night wind
while I, at the white table,
ponder nervous sounds of yet another night,
a wakeful speck of metropolitan thought.
It is the hour of the burglar
and the anxious father, of late lovers
and tragic drinkers – and we
who shuffle the endless pack of words
share the fever and fret of them all.
There is no silence outside the mind
but revealing noise: the bitty tick of clock
scratching the wall, the wailing
identity of police cars pursuing
their morality through suburban dreams,
and, if I listen hard enough,
beyond the screams of insecurity – no,
not the scrunching of death's heel
on gravel! – but something more: always
the murmur of impossible truth, blank
and white as this table on which I write.
Golders Green, 22.10.94
WALKING WITH WORDS
In Paris, somewhere dawn’s dumb pavements,
water hydrants gurgling a fresh day,
and a young woman is a caul of words
as yet unuttered, coming secretly her way.
She’s walking, walking with words.
Further off, where leaf-litter blows about
biscuit-coloured banks of the Seine,
an old man shuffles and snuffles along,
in his head last years of joy and pain.
He’s walking, walking with words.
O she’s a delight that girl, elegant!
He, sadly, could be taken for a tramp.
But for both memory urgent, argent
lights each inner void like a lamp.
They’re walking, walking with words.
And it’s enough for a poet at his guesswork
to share their hidden, forbidden lives:
a pensive quiver of red lipstick,
an incontinent cough, those wild dropped leaves!
And I’m walking, walking with words.
Published in Timbuktu
You are asleep my hope-and-all
in the guest room above the night wind
while I, at the white table,
ponder nervous sounds of yet another night,
a wakeful speck of metropolitan thought.
It is the hour of the burglar
and the anxious father, of late lovers
and tragic drinkers – and we
who shuffle the endless pack of words
share the fever and fret of them all.
There is no silence outside the mind
but revealing noise: the bitty tick of clock
scratching the wall, the wailing
identity of police cars pursuing
their morality through suburban dreams,
and, if I listen hard enough,
beyond the screams of insecurity – no,
not the scrunching of death's heel
on gravel! – but something more: always
the murmur of impossible truth, blank
and white as this table on which I write.
Golders Green, 22.10.94
WALKING WITH WORDS
In Paris, somewhere dawn’s dumb pavements,
water hydrants gurgling a fresh day,
and a young woman is a caul of words
as yet unuttered, coming secretly her way.
She’s walking, walking with words.
Further off, where leaf-litter blows about
biscuit-coloured banks of the Seine,
an old man shuffles and snuffles along,
in his head last years of joy and pain.
He’s walking, walking with words.
O she’s a delight that girl, elegant!
He, sadly, could be taken for a tramp.
But for both memory urgent, argent
lights each inner void like a lamp.
They’re walking, walking with words.
And it’s enough for a poet at his guesswork
to share their hidden, forbidden lives:
a pensive quiver of red lipstick,
an incontinent cough, those wild dropped leaves!
And I’m walking, walking with words.
Published in Timbuktu