3. CHAT AND CIAO
A poem’s like a boiling. Lid off too soon
or simmer too long, and it’s fit for the bin.
A poet’s Tweedledum self-communing under
an umbrella open for a theoretical shower.
Thanks for listening in...
NOTES PROVIDED FOR THE BROADCAST
1.) One of many tales about the legendary Thracian king, Orpheus is how he lost his young wife, Eurydice, to a snake who bit her as she ran from a man intent on raping her. Orpheus, a spell-binding musician, descended to the Underworld, charmed its fearful monsters and got permission from its king, Hades, to take his wife back to the upper air, provided that he did not look back at her before they returned to the light.
2.) In Through the Looking Glass when Alice asks Tweedledum if it’s going to rain, he opens an umbrella over him and his brother (Tweedledee) and declares it won’t be raining under their cover. Carroll suggests that their world is subjective, a matter of playing with ideas. Tangible facts are of no concern.
DIVINITY THAT SHAPES
Commoditas quaevis sua fert incommoda secum.
Qunitillian
No wonder there was turmoil in Olympus
and the gods decided to nail Prometheus
for the theft of fire. By wielding fire
we flicker for a moment into gods.
Land, water, trade seem so much clutter
if history’s a squabble for a share of fire.
Eating out our hearts for fire,
we’ve suffered the Titan’s endless torture.
Now so few hoard such quantities of fire
the gods seem amateurs, and we who shivered
in caves cower from holocausts of fire,
naked to the bolts of nameless gods.
NOTE
Epigraph: Every advantage has its drawbacks.
Prometheus (of the giant race of Titans) was chained to a rock for ever. An eagle devoured his liver each day after it had grown back overnight.
A LEVEL FANTASY
‘...tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here...’
Alice in Wonderland
She’d been one to peck up every fact,
and he’d encouraged her in measured doses,
ticked margins and given way to Good!
Life-lines thrown out before she joined
the long roll of faceless names and numbers.
He’d fixed a grin to unwrap her gift:
Tenniel’s Cheshire Cat framed and inscribed
It’s been great! Nailing it up he feels
one grafter’s respect for another.
She knew her Alice inside out.
Then after results a card of Alice
amazed by her golden crown, and thanks
that raised him to the angels. He replied
like some uncle puffing advice through pipe-smoke,
unseating every icon so she’d call it quits.
His reward was seven sides, close-written.
An essay he hadn’t set... and so heartfelt.
TECHNODOC
O doctor, was there ever a time before
your trim cumulus curls massed daily
in menace over indigo-grey stripy tie
locked behind perennial hazy herringbone?
Countless formulae are noted, experiments
written up under your stony glint, distaste
honed on it, your barbed comments brushed off,
your nit-picking mimicked to a tee:
no buttons undone, no chewing, no yawns.
If you know what’s best for you, don’t gawp
or giggle, and learn to wipe that grin off your face.
Ginger, you’re programmed with textbook cheek...
The only kids you’ll father sneer behind your back,
plot to make boffin supreme blow a fuse,
while you engender gadgets and gismos,
checking dials and gauges with loving care.
All that laughter in eyes, brimming pools
truculently bright, eyes so ready
to sparkle, go cold in censure. Caught
in such precision sites, don’t you cower?
Years clocking up hours and misdemeanours
with bitter smile over licensed after-duty moan,
a lemonade but No crisps, thanks. Must go!
Exit on cue to show we’re lazy bums.
*
When you retire to fine-tune trouble-free engines,
sit behind New Scientist and net curtains,
won’t the years’ undercurrents ache back
like a lost pulse? They say you used to bend
iron bars like plastic cable. Hollow cheeks, doc !
Won’t the years begin to bend you?
CARING PROFESSION
1. MENTORS
To you we’re objects of fun or hate,
makers of pointless rules
who wield blades of sarcasm
at your defenceless ears,
fob you off with reasons
clean as forged notes.
You sense a hoax beneath the gloss,
an odour you can’t define, and yet
your censure scatters like spread-shot.
Should we marvel at your deference?
It’s the perfectly acceptable face
of the product we’re paid to produce.
What eludes us is indifference
hardening like bone below the surface.
2. NUDGE FROM HESSE
Late October sun hallows heads
bent over books.
Don’t be taken in.
This is not Castalia,
and you’re not Joseph Knecht.
Nothing they read or write
touches their marrows
more than tomorrow’s
foggy breath.
You dream of a Glass Bead Game
and this is just a gamble.
Odds on for grades or passes.
Come July, year in year out,
you’ll pack away dice and cards
to clear the tables for another game.
NOTE In Hesse’s futuristic novel, The Glass Bead Game (1943) Castalian society disintegrates while an elite intelligentsia play an esoteric game in a quest for perfection. When Knecht is appointed Master of the Game he tries and fails to redirect his country’s dwindling energies to practical questions and applications.
3. RETREAT
Late sleep. Shallow dreams
smother me in Welcome Back!
A gaunt-faced adolescent, one
in a hundred ( boy or girl?)
agonises with dog-like faith
over the bones of an epic plot.
I shuffle through needs and queries
in files of scribbled notes (mine or theirs?)
stagger below them on familiar stairs.
But my bag of tricks is upside-down,
its jumbled conflicts strewn about,
churning round a river in spate.
I wade out, wrestle with the current
and wake up on the other bank.
No flattery will drag me back.
Let neglect howl over the waters
like famine. My flag is furled.
SOUNDS FROM A SHELL
White horsemen ride innocently
over the green sea.
What if you try to disobey?
Only men like you
drown innocently.
White horsemen ride
over the innocent green sea.
What if they decide
to dismount?
Only such men drown innocently.
III. REFUGE
ENLIGHTENMENT
1. FUSION
Rage, rage against the dying of the light ... Dylan Thomas
Reading yet more print
into my bone-head to the near tick
of wooden clock
and dark roar of heavy jet
lumbering to defy gravity
, lamplight
trembling in its filter, I burn
ever lower life’s wick
vainly to ransack,
defying ignorance, others’ worn
words from bone-heads that yearn
to bridge air’s void with wooden
phrase or roar of ticking rhetoric
trumped up from trick
in brain’s dark burden
burning to be said and heard in sudden
answer to clock and profane
roar of doom from pilot’s stick,
defying fitful crack
of light rubbed up by bone on brain,
my dynamo dying as I strain
to read yet more print, defiant,
feeling heavy jet
smash the air, and set
my hand to trim the wick and hold my light.
2. GLIMPSES
Sometimes a lantern moves along the night
That interests our eyes...G.M. Hopkins
A light flickers
near or distant,
beckons towards a meaning:
someone taken away;
a lone window swept
by restless pines;
drunks biking hell-for-leather
down a rutted track.
No end to ruminations
on lights that flash persuasions,
threats, welcome; and then the stars
hoisting us up on chill, clear nights.
And, out of the blue, streetwise squibs
or inadvertent mirrors open cracks
that slap us where it hurts.
At full beam lights
bore in like blaring brass fanfare right
down the spine.
Nerve yourself along that frail
knife-edge path with a pale
torch that whimpers out..
But there are always lights
near or far, refracting out the chance
that distance
won’t fail...
3. FESTIVAL
Something white that glitters,
prismatically tinted,
littered with greetings, the odd
star, spire or holly leaf stuck
to its wadded mystique
A sentiment that rushes out
for the last one
six weeks before, then droops
penuriously gorged
when the avalanche stops
and goes grey.
4. BEYOND
They are all gone into a world of light...Henry Vaughan
It’s not the closing down,
or fabled darkness and its worms,
insistent no-mores and last times
that make me ache and palpitate.
It’s being the one to snap strings that tie,
and others left to pick up snagged threads
dangling in a heedless wind.
Now fading sight blurs what’s beyond reach,
I savour at last the little within my clutch.
Yet new fissures
hint at worlds of light
nothing or no-one assures
me shine beyond sight.
OSLO TO BERGEN EXPRESS
Torrents recede to a faint hiss,
clinging birches mutter crisply,
a trapped gnat whinges in my beard
as I scramble up splintered rock
to a ballasted shelf hung
between rough-hewn cavern mouths.
Strung pylons crouch like alert reptiles
over sleek uncoiling tracks. Steely silence
defies breathing, makes the ears sing.
A beam’s trace searches one tunnel wall,
bursts into a white eye blasting light
from aloof streamlined face that bears down,
screams by, antenna snapping blue flashes.
Skirl of steel biting steel curve, sucking draught
and sighing music of carriage after carriage,
rows of lights and heads, one surprised stare,
the last vehicle almost holding back before
the far portal swallows its red lamp.
Was this all I’d sweated here to see?
Or does watching an assured passage
that links lives with lives free me
from just letting another remote day
sink into dense tent-flapping night?
TAKING A CUT
New Year should mark a kind of survival.
It’s just another day on this sodden pasture
creased with rounded strips. Stagnant pools
and mantled sludge fill the troughs between.
Ewes nose and fret among tarpaulined hay.
Spring will shoot wiry and tousled like the heifers-
in-calf and white-faced bullocks put out to browse.
Brothers hold the lease but seldom work in tandem.
On a bleak crown put to plough I watch Ivor
hitch shares and turn from three-furrow plod.
He’s welded to his open-top, orange Nuffield
under torn cap and gaberdine so greased
they’re wind-and-water-proof. Ready to chat
he notches back the throttle and scans ripples
he’s sliced from this mat of bristling stubble. “Dry
underneath, just like powder. Look at it!
All that rain overnight! Where’d it go, eh?”
Scouring the ground with yardstick glance
he makes the cussed way of things worth a thought.
“Glad you’re holding on to all your hedges,” I say.
“We’re stockmen. Beeves and ewes like a storm break.”
I meet brown eyes used to sizing up beasts.
“Big farmer, Glooston way, ripped the lot out.
Gales scattered his top-soil after a March drought.
Harrow and drill again? Not likely. Too late!
Laid that hedge myself ten years back.
See how it’s come on, except where my brother
made holes in it burning straw and stubble.”
Chill January rain cuts us short.
He’ll face it, grabbing up the iron crust,
firm behind wayward wheel and belching pipe,
though the yearly survival of stock is on his mind.
PROCESSIONAL
The year’s moved house overnight
and left a dismantled vault.
Trees are inscrutable, etched into
basket-weave hedgerows.
A few sheep scattered over bald fields
have stripped every green blade,
and latch on to roots. This high up
birds of passage probe no loopholes
in a polar wind but dart from bush to bush.
Northward one chalky cloud swells
like chimney-stack smoke against a zinc sky.
Icy gusts make up-hill work
for a man and two youngsters
plodding across land knotted with sedge and tussocks.
In shiny, warm, sensible clothes,
they might be nomads from any history:
cloaked heroes claiming domains,
homeless fugitives in filched or borrowed dress.
The children startle a lone crow,
watch it driven downwind; explore a hollow,
pick up dead leaves. Their father
bends to listen and explain; but earth’s parings,
its stalk and bone, mean little.
They need to point and ask. He has to cast
the spell of theory: rationale
of wire fence, pylon, cratered field, property.
And they all hold hands
to make reassuring headway
against the wind’s senseless push and shove.
Sky’s armoured grey is battered by gulls
wheeling in cross-wind forays.
That one teeming cloud to the north has massed
and flattened into drifting skeins.
AGES
Power lines whi
p round poles,
road and pavement run in spate,
hedges sag and swell, feeble as cress.
Business as usual, we trust,
yet we’re primaevally old,
unfledged, shrink inside,
then into ourselves for shelter,
only to find fitful sparks
where a will once blazed.
Is our race about to lose
its feebly tightening hold ?
Look at those drenched kids
who dance and scream as if
to-day’s deluge needs no tomorrow.
WAIFS
‘What the devil can I do!’ Hipcroft groaned
(Thomas Hardy: The Fiddler of the Reels)
Festival of Eighteen-Fifty-One.
Enterprise and optimism glisten
in Hyde Park’s glass cathedral, while London
sucks in the lost and undone.
Under Waterloo’s iron awning,
jostled along a paved waste, mother
and child, unloaded from open, rattling
voyage like cattle, cling to each other.
Only a faceless surge of arrivals
and departures. Will he be there?
What with lean years corroding her
and this pinched offspring not his, he feels
their supplication too sodden to bear.
“How about something to stop the shivers?”
REFUGE
1. MUNICIPAL PARK
Triangular park railed between
converging lanes of heavy traffic.
Endless families alight on green
benches and parched grass, munch
picnics with far-away looks, wrangle
over ice cream or where to go next,
sidle off in loose gaggles,
while old mum and dad sit and sip
from thermos tops, doze, puzzle
over dried-up flower beds,
wait to be collected.
Crisp leaves rattle in circles,
a long summer’s dust tangos
over gravel. Not so distant
cloud has whipped itself up
into a host of cobras.
Three women identically smart
dodge cars, vans, topless double-deckers
and take a break to show off the flimsy
contents of their logo bags.
Designer-clad covens and fully-padded
Refuge Page 3