Refuge
OTHER BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR
Verse booklets
Learning Not To Touch (Redbeck Press, 1998)
Reaching for a Stranger (Shoestring Press, 1999)
Verse Collections
Outstripping Gravity (Redbeck Press, 2000)
Exposures (Redbeck Press, 2003)
Taking Cover (Redbeck Press, 2005)
No Time for Roses (Salzburg Press, 2009)
Narrative verse fantasy for younger readers
Wish* (Author-House, 2010)
(Due for republication by Thames River, autumn 2012)
Rainbow* (Due for publication By Thames River, autumn 2012)
*See also: author’s website: www.michaeltolkien.com
Published by New Generation Publishing in 2012
Copyright © Michael Tolkien 2012
First Edition
The author asserts the moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior consent of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
www.newgeneration-publishing.com
eISBN 9781909395206
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author would like to thank the recently-formed local Rutland Poets, a group with whom several problematic poems have been workshopped and ‘rescued’.
Thanks are due also to Gordon Braddy, whose patient and perceptive reading and listening have guaranteed that many poems were profitably reworked.
For the last six years the personal and professional support of Darin Jewell (Inspira Group Literary Agency) has provided me with indispensable encouragement in face of many odds.
COVER ILLUSTRATION
Rutland Landscape by Rosemary Tolkien.
For Rosemary
...salted was my food and my repose
Salted and sobered, too, by the bird’s voice
Speaking for all who lay under the stars,
Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.
Edward Thomas: from The Owl (1916)
CONTENTS
I IN TOUCH
No Game Plan
In Touch
Rooted
The Years in 2006
Outside the Rain
Lost
Unsung
Village Black Spot
Hardened
Fuchsias
Sacrilege
Stasis
II CLOISTER AND PROMENADE
Mrs Primley’s Literary Young Men
Mr Busy and Mrs
‘That you, George?’
Cloister and Promenade
Hallowed Ground
Our Man in the Oberland
Dining
Spent
Ego
Together
In the Café of Your Choice
Gold and Silver
Poet Broadcasts
Divinity That Shapes
A Level Fantasy
Technodoc
Caring Profession (1.Mentors)
(2.Nudge from Hesse)
(3.Retreat)
Sounds from a Shell
III REFUGE
Enlightenment (1. Fusion)
(2. Glimpses)
(3.Festival)
(4. Beyond)
Oslo to Bergen Express
Taking a Cut
Processional
Ages
Waifs
Refuge 1.
Refuge 2.
All
IV BELONGING
Lost Among Pines
Between Lives
Flight
Resort
Belonging I & II
Mountain Sundown
After the Singing
The Assumption
The Kiss
Living Son
Psalm
A Lighter Touch (1. Ascent)
(2.Embroidery)
(3. Illumination)
I. IN TOUCH
NO GAME PLAN
Sweet Williams in a brown jug
you happened to find. Your dab of décor
for that sudden party, bright dice scattered
for a quick score. They wilt over
my unsorted mail, your rucked-up
half-read Tom Sharpe and a card
you once scribbled from breezy Margate.
Leaves curl to straw. Crimsons, maroons,
ivories fray like sun-worn curtains.
As I clutch and bin these stale virgins
in their washed-out gear and underwater
stench, I feel your gesture take its chance,
recall those whims that took a slap at time,
and turned my well-laid plans into a game.
IN TOUCH
When August tints and chills to autumn,
I notice how you cling to your clothes at nightfall,
complain that drafty spaces multiply in bed.
But look at the misty golden edge
round evenings closing in, vapours curling up
in hollow places. Remember fire nights,
the primal hiss and crackle, how embers shift and wink.
Be glad to batten down against a threat
that summons the snail in you, backing away and in
to womb, cradle, a first room’s embrace.
My fingers sift again through crumbled red earth
after roots and spuds have done their work,
lie stacked and clamped. I sniff the final
burning of a year’s husks and straws,
walk from its passing blaze and smoke into
your warmth, at ease with my autumnal need
to cover a space that makes me shiver.
ROOTED
Meandering funeral aftermath
finds us side by side
below the comforting splash
of tall, new-leaved limes.
Beliefs and sects creep
into our talk: how some suppose
no breeze can make them totter,
and most don’t need to make a stand.
‘So what are you now?’ I ask.
‘Nothing,’ you say: assured,
precisely you, leaning a moment
on the chiselled hide of a lime
that knows where it stands,
as you do, gazing clear-eyed
past a blackened tower
to where you stood
and buried two parents,
not two springs apart.
THE YEARS IN 2006
Ibsen has been dead a hundred years.
How many years ago
was Lise Fjeldstad filmed as Torvald’s Nora?
Lively, throttled wife who walked
out of their Doll’s House and away
from her stifling century.
In Oslo the hype blows over.
Loading a complimentary DVD
Lise sits down to watch herself
make history in Technicolor,
and finds she’s glancing at a mirror.
Expecting to greet her face
with its familiar lines and cares
she confronts a lithe chameleon,
coaxing, devious, lovingly defiant
in her tormented rôle. Some youngster
moves, laughs and weeps like her,
yet makes her scowl in envy at a fraud
who sheds those intervening years.
TYPING OUTSIDE THE RAIN
On this cold, grey day, though tapping out
fretful messages on unceasing keys,
were
you watching the deluge increase
over stone walls, scarcely breathing, anxious about
nothing much? As we who lack something of ourselves can be.
Perhaps thick rain adds a shade more doubt.
Did this amorphous day that cloaked you cling
to your mind with wet lips and discontented breath?
Coffee, cigarettes, a few polite shows of teeth
and drenching walks were its gifts to your willing
body; yet you had to tread the only path
there was,
dimly curious about what premature night would bring.
Did one unguarded moment in this cold rain suggest
you might be too pliant
towards that seminar of bells and cant?
Perhaps as you filed another flat request
damp ends of hair brushed chilled fingers bent
on being
deft; and you paused at the edge of empty trust.
LOST
Safe as houses was her favourite tag
but at over ninety she was lost
in that steep-pitched, pebble-rendered semi,
floundering, too, since her husband died
trying to start his turquoise Cortina banger.
Slim, slick-haired, tight-suited, eighty-nine,
they called him Tear-Arse Eddie, terror
of the local roads. Police found
half a grand stitched inside his jacket.
High time to move her to a home,
her daughter told me, as if that was that.
Neighbours, who should mind their business
liked her pluck in carrying on regardless,
her backyard rites of broom and shovel,
the way she scraped and scrabbled for coal
from ramshackle bunker, poked up weeds and litter,
clattered out plates and cups for daughter,
who shouted in daily at four, and out at five.
In the small hours she’d come alive
and pace about with a swansong, racked
and cheerless as draughts moaning through a crack.
When rain dribbled down her bay window
she sat with opaque under-water stare,
watching her life trickle back. I’d wave,
and to wake her from that lonely deluge,
call in, brew a pot of strong, loose tea.
Yet her vacant eyes like blue-yoked eggs
gazed right through me and my chatter
at splashing traffic and bent, wet heads.
‘Anything you need, Molly?’ ‘Larder’s stuffed,’
her stock answer, waiting for me to leave
before she lurched off with giant strides,
jaw and stick thrust out, for odds and ends
or bargain Scotch for Eddie’s safe return,
her silvered head with its skull-tight skin
so frail and intent, her frame that yawed
like a rudderless yacht, and left me helpless,
watching and praying from a distant shore.
UNSUNG
First met Bill delivering by van and bike
for a greengrocer. Needed to keep busy.
Newly retired from top management
in a firm tied up with North Sea Oil.
But why the collared neck? ‘Cricked on the fairway,’
he said. Rumour was he’d mucked in
on the factory floor to dispatch a contract.
He’d nursed his wife into Alzheimer’s,
resolved to keep her home at all costs.
When they caravanned in places coloured
with best memories, she’d wander off.
Police returned her wrapped in a blanket over
muddy pyjamas she’d fought to keep on
with snarls, bared teeth and clawing hands.
‘Day Beth was taken in we’d been married
53 years. She scored 2 from a 30
aggregate of memory and response.’
Straight talk in a street encounter
while he looked beyond me as if to say
the broader picture must be seen, and added:
‘Sense of humour’s seen me through the worst.’
He’s just over a heart valve transplant
and a ward infection that walled him in
for two months. Twice weekly he tees off
at 8 a.m. on the toughest local course.
And he’s bought a compact caravan
to tour the coast of Scotland solo:
Stranraer, Durness, John O’Groats, Berwick.
I’m in open fields to lift the spirit
above self-created fret, and there he is,
striding out like a prospector,
his wilful little Scottie on a long leash.
Always one to seize the moment, this is
his bird day, delighting in rare flickers
of pairs and flocks in their spring passage.
VILLAGE BLACK SPOT
Double Z and nearly home, loaded
with seasonal gifts and looking forward.
Blind juggernaut like a crazed rhino
slews across and dumps its concrete pipes
on your one life in its egg-box shell.
What made you whole and loveable
cannot be prised from lacerated steel.
They couldn’t even move you into
the sun like Owen’s soldier with thoughts
of how its gentle touch once woke you.
Front page news between white on black
tributes to performance tires we need at speed,
your smile shy and modest above a catalogue
of family troubles that leave us at a loss.
Who were you? What lit up your days?
Then, full-spread, buckled, upended vehicles
as if some convoy had suffered a direct hit.
No hint of what is permanently shattered
and cannot be grassed over like bad bends
by-passed with three-lane dodgems.
NOTE: Wilfred Owen’s poem Futility mourns a young soldier felled by a bullet but apparently intact and unscathed:
‘Move him into the sun-/Gently its touch awoke him once...’
HARDENED
Pine: young head
on bleached, spindly torso,
bending up from burned-out,
greening slope, your feet stood
firm and defied the flames.
Now you split my wide
sky and, like it or not, unzip
my acquisitive camera.
So what will you do beside
this washed-out track?
Mark a lurking hunter’s path
that scurries into thorny scrub?
Let the odd passer-by pin
recurring hopes and fears
on your stooping trunk?
Look at me squinting up
at you, almost prayerfully,
my miniscule lens
capturing nothing much,
asking you to lose
no more plumage,
keep something back for
the next wave of lunatic fires.
FUSCHIAS
I fell for exotics like ‘Mrs Popple’
who drapes her puce pagoda over
purple belly through which she hangs
her luminous fluted stamens.
Then I heard Norwegian Saeverud
paint her diverse tribe in piano notes.
His ‘Drops of Christ-Blood’ dripped
coral fire, aery pendants, fallen heads.
Now even Popple’s plainer sisters
make me flirt. They’re inverted,
shrunk crocuses, violently pink;
ruminating bells rung by
monologues of serious bees;
seamstress heads poised over
delicate stitches, at one
with their needles, at ease
with every cut-throat breeze.
Below their danc
ing show
springs a girth that thickens
into hedge. They bud relentlessly,
bear berries hard as ebony.
SACRILEGE AT THÉATRE DES CHAMPS ELYSÉES
Paris, Spring 1913
The Rite of Spring rouses berserk rival
ballet whose cultivated sneers, fistfuls of loathing,
Gadarene rush for exits, leave Stravinski
fuming over empty stalls. A thwarted god
ready to turn these deaf and blinkered
imbeciles to a herd of rooting swine.
Fine tuning and experimental sweat
have fashioned the clay’s true guise
till nothing jars or niggles. Patterns
he wove to make the untuned hear
and taste the living earth, they tear
to shreds, piece by hated piece, shy
away from freaks and jackanapeses
writhing in mottled tights, birdsong
that scrapes like a rusty winch, cruel
thudding drum, jungle of fissured
string-play stampeding from the pit..
STASIS
Guitar held against long, white dress
you thread reluctant womanhood through
chords that waver in a question.
When time and tiredness beat you down
play back this moment. Listen for Song
that lives inside you.
Across your few furnishings and comforts
July sun throngs its last. Skylights brim
blue eyes wide. Your very breath’s alert.
Fingers absently on strings whisper
over birdsong, flower, maze, water-
fall, ghosting in mind’s own garden.
A zone of innocence swathes you,
holds this instant pressed in leaves
of sunlight, fading into attic beams.
Up here clock and weariness will
beat you down. Turn aside,
let Woman in you sing.
II. CLOISTER AND PROMENADE
MRS PRIMLEY’S LITERARY YOUNG MEN
(...Comfortable accommodation for male students in the Arts Faculty...)
Trunk and bags look lonely squeezed between
outsized bed and coffee-tinted wall
matched by threadbare floral counterpane,
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