As with the first pages of novel I have decided to have a rolling-on first few pages here from my collections published and unpublished.
Starting with my latest collection, Mirror, Mirror: in the geography of the head.
Followed by some poems my as yet uncollected Mock Sonnets.
Followed by poems fromthe published collections Speculations & Changes, Local Colour, A New Acmeism, Canoe, Dialogues, Skin&Bones, apostrophe combe, John the Explorer, An Atheist’s Alphabetical Approach to Death and Rooms.
Then I am going to put up poems from the various sections of my huge, and as yet unpublished, Scenes from a Country Life. Starting with the South Devon section. Then a few from Somerset, then North Devon, Cumbria, and Wales.
Because Mirror, Mirror is such a huge book, covering a large part of my working life, rather than show only the first 10 pages I have included here every [approx.] tenth poem.
Common Denominators
Those who cannot trust
their senses
depend on others
to order their
existence.
But here
in this place of last resort
every ward is the epitome
of existentialism:
patients and staff
change continuously,
so too priorities
and personalities.
Here philosophies
become real questions.
Do I exist?
You?
All fall back
on routines.
£3.89 an hour
Some days I feel like I’ll never get clean.
Not so much the faeces,
though the smell leaves
an oyster aftertaste sitting
in the back of the throat;
and the shit itself sticks
to every surface, including skin.
Nor so much the urine,
though that seeps and stinks;
and I can never be sure I haven’t
sat in a chair so tainted.
No,
it’s the putrefaction,
death’s bad breath,
the open ulcered wound
exhaling into my face;
the rotting flesh on a living body,
both image and smell that clings.
Nor can I escape my fear
of close quarters contagion,
horror of my becoming
just such another vacancy.
Some days I feel like I’ll never get clean.
In This World
In this world of shared illusions, to those excluded
because their senses cannot make sense of the everyday,
the very illogicality of religion appeals. Intuition
can be truth; invisible deities and miracles nothing
out of the ordinary. (Cults thrive on the fringes
of sense. Some actually target such susceptibility.)
This, however, has an innocence. Because, come
Sunday morning, bodies go from dormitory to dormitory,
ward to ward, rousing latesleepers and making
their own procession through the corridors
some of the women hatted and begloved, some men
for once straightbacked, some even brylcreemed.
(This is how it is, is what I’ve seen; is not
my intention to patronize. Immunity there is none,
as well smile pityingly on myself.) At the chapel door
fags are properly topped and stubbed.
Humanism Is On The Ebb
“The history of psychiatry is essentially the history of humanism. Every time humanism has diminished or degenerated into mere philanthropic sentimentality, psychiatry has entered a new ebb. Every time the spirit of humanism has arisen, a new contribution to psychiatry has been made.” Gregory Zilboorge.
Humanism is on the ebb.
The asylums are closing and the police cells are full.
Humanism is on the ebb.
A condition is again a crime, treatment’s unavailable.
Humanism is on the ebb.
The institutionalised have gone
from walking the asylum corridors
to walking the corridors of the streets.
Round and about,
up and down,
there and back.
Round and about,
up and down,
there and back
inhabiting realms and prisons inside themselves,
inside themselves.
Both feared
and victims of fear:
there are no secular havens,
nowhere else to go.
Humanism is on the ebb.
Humanism is on the ebb.
Where The Sense In This?
In 1982
on a warship off the Falklands
six men sat in the Petty Officers Mess.
A seventh man, leaning in the doorway,
was talking with the others when
an Exocet missile came through the wall
and removed his head on its way
to the torpedo room.
Six Petty Officers survived the explosion
to tell this story over and over again.
Incipients All
Madness is everyone’s experience:
from a single word clue
thinking “You too.” You too
have known this – this state of mind:
psychotic lapses like vivid dreams,
drunken adventures that stay forever
just beyond complete recall.
Or is this playing mad?
The imagination made singular? Imitating
in public the parts most only dare play
in front of mirrors? And, out of
new habit, acting on the singleminded
impulses of a toper; forgetting one,
pursuing another..?
Here
some nurses and doctors,
intimates of death and nakedness,
become engrossed in the dissection
of thought, analysis of the thinking
process (or they become filing clerks
looking for labels), who nonetheless
assume themselves to be
superior to their patients, because
they have not lately looked below
the surface of human actions and watched their own
selves behave. They too
repeat their mistakes. Incipients all.
Male Nurse
As soon as you become a psychiatric nurse
all of your extended family will start having
nervous breakdowns. They will either
get put on beta-blockers, or anti-depressants,
and they will want you to let them know
the side-effects of their medication.
And every other person you now meet will want
to tell you, at length, about their ex
who hung, gassed or, in some novel way,
otherwise killed themself. Or, watching
for your reactions, they will confide how they
themselves were sexually abused, are still
having therapy. Even your new colleagues
will seem to court disaster in their affairs
and marriages. On top of all that, after a year
you will be going to work in second-hand shirts
and be buying your shoes and trousers in
the sales. The puzzle of people, yourself included,
is what will keep you in the job.
Case Study
movement is a search her legs make
nothing purposeful small
compulsive steps she moves
cannot stop finish any task
even a bath
walks around
inside a comet trail
of her own stink her life
is going to pieces
around her
she can’t find things she put down
a minute ago
let alone herself if
briefly sat she moves rather than
let another lean into the column
of her rising smell
entering a room
she notes the increase in volume knows
that they were talking about her
before she came in (when she came in
one, loudly, changed the topic; another,
loudly, responded) she doesn’t like them
either walks in a circle
and leaves
she lives now
among people who don’t put the lids
back on things she goes
from room to room putting the lids
back on things
forgets
moves
Beyond Here
Beyond here it is the voices of
unknowns become familiars,
or of neighbours, old enemies,
or the muffled plotting of
heads-together children
that day-in day-out bother him.
It is only the neighbours,
though, a constant distraction,
who come in with him: cannot
be heard exactly what they are saying,
but he can hear them outside
every door here, mumbling
beyond every of the four
walls, deriding him in
whispers at the end of
every corridor, lying on
the floor of every ceiling
to wheezing-wheezing laugh at him;
or to tut.
Cameras in keyholes, in
ceiling corners, microphones
buried in the plaster of walls
record his dismissive
gestures, his defiant
mutterings. Beds extract
his resentful thoughts.
All wires are aerials,
radiators double as receiving grills.
They know. They know.
Won’t let him go.
Jangled
“Wasn’t me,
was the ghost in me
made me do
those things.”
Hiccups in internal communication,
thought processes impaired:
a mind unhinged is unable
to close itself
to unwanted thoughts.
“The ghost in the machine
messes up the works.”
Whether it’s labelled disassociation
or flight-of-ideas
all can still unify
to make a sort-of rationale.
“On the street
I feel the eyes
peeling skin from me
layer by layer.”
https://erbacce-press.co.uk/blank-page
_____________________________________
Mock Sonnet 1
The leaves of war — oak, ash and sycamore —
have vascular tissues drawn a darker red.
Spiked leaf of holly’s cannot be seen; although
on its glossy curve is a gleam of smoke. Neither
can grass be defined singly; rather it is like hair
around a scalp wound, glued flat. On grey roads
the red diamond prints of tyres end in smudged
streaks. Ribbed prints of shoes do not reach
the inner edge of the canvas; or, inset, leather
uppers are photographed grey and are heaped
in sheds. Blood itself sits in rounded puddles,
blackening; or is smeared thin, yellowing.
The lactic acid in white milk — this is curious —
will also have it leave a black stain.
Mock Sonnet 2
Forget the areca nuts. When Ceylon
was the only supplier of cinnamon,
grown then in Negombo and Galle,
the cinnamon cut from the shoots of the tree,
order Laurineae, its dusky pink bark
dried into tubes or quills, one Admiral
Sebald de Weert, in his cups, became
offensive to king Vimala Dharma Surya.
Said Admiral was subsequently killed.
(Small town malice and spite give
each other bad advice.) Cinnamic acid
is cystalline white and is used in perfumes.
While cinnamon camphora (guess what?)
gives us camphor. Forget the areca nuts.
Mock Sonnet 3
We are not yet autogamic: communication
continues to be a fundamental necessity,
but rarely achieved. The inarticulate, upon
failing, become the most apoplectic. Or, if
capable of some self-expression, they still
come up against those who cannot, or who
will not, understand. The frustration born
of this unaccustomed inability can lead to
extraordinary acts. “Let’s see what happens if,”
he will say. The woman, standing partially
behind, will pretend to hold her breath. He
will indecisively turn the radio off. The music
will continue in another room, another house.
Click on. Click off. The woman will pull a face.
Mock Sonnet 4
You — hunkered down in the cave of your body —
look out through your mouth — at your old selves
grown whimsical and strange, at the leached
colours of your pasts (not at the bright dark present).
One half of a couple, clinging onto the other
in the wreckage of your mid-lives, every bridge
to the future is guarded and every movement suspect.
Reorganising this chaos, fiction can simplify;
but still you will carry your cocoon of personal space
about with you, your own contradictions too. You
also come more to exist externally in bits of paper
with your name on. For this self your one ambition
is to have your portrait in oils on the company walls.
Mock Sonnet 5
You first sought significance to your existence
in the words and actions of others. But all were
flat-faced buddhas, blank of expression. So you
waited for the accidents of history to fall around
you. But you were, when not on the periphery,
more often elsewhere. And you wondered why
you were created with an ego the size of St Pauls
when you are so very very small, and with no luck
nor talent. Now where you are, just by you being
there, becomes commonplace. What you do, by
your doing it, becomes ordinary. Habits and gestures
of affection have outlived any love felt. An inner and
estranged observer, you now, with a glum satisfaction,
note the biological processes of life ending you.
Mock Sonnet 6
Slavery, of itself, must always be evil. Castles,
misinterpreted as settings for romantic tales,
are symbols of oppression. Size alone says
that cathedrals and mosques must serve
a similar purpose. Although the insidious
concern of all religions is, not sex, but breeding.
‘….Shem begat Arphaxad, Arphaxad begat
Shelah, Shelah begat Eber….’ Thus of prime
importance is the self-disciplining family that
priest and mullah — with pained expressions
of self-denial — can govern. Puppets controlled by
puppets. And, in their bringing of order, there will
inevitably be those parents who will collude with
any authority in the brutalisation of their own child.
Mock Sonnet 7
To be free of off-hand malice we follow the semi-
floating flight of a long-tailed magpie, occasional
whistle of a collar dove’s wings, break step at sight
of bottle and dented cans tossed among pathside
nettles; which have us feeling pursued even here
by the same careless malevolence. So we make
ourselves look to the tree-top church of unseen
birds, listen to their vocabulary of tweets and
cheeps, note a bush-hidden robin trickling out
its watery song; and somewhere way above
the repetitive mewl of a circling buzzard
and the rumbling croak of a raven still seeking
the wished-for corpses of the vindictive and
neglectful who have brought us to this end.
Mock Sonnet 8
Camp-site early, a chilled stillness, tent-folds
dew-heavy and loosely patterned with slug and
snail trails, grassblades releasing their gathered wet
around flip-flopped feet. Thin towel shouldered,
toilet bag in hand; whispered rustles and snores
are passed, a cough; and from the hill across the way
two loud bleats from a momentarily lost lamb.
Returning from the intimate echoes and splashes
of the washroom, now the gas hiss and caught
smell of the day’s first kettles; and more campers
emerging pyjamaed and blinking, hair askew.
Under blue skies time now to consider what this
life, day-in day-out, must be like for the hundred
thousands of the world’s war-fled refugees.
First published A Taste of Foreign
Mock Sonnet 9
In the synthesis of my past and ongoing ambition
there came a time when I no longer knew what
was meant by insanity. The inability to see
the world as seen by others? To not act like them?
My work then had me believe that people could
take refuge in madness; a madness defined as, say,
agitated depression, mania, anxiety, even outdated
hysteria. Because, and for whatever reason,
the individual had chosen to let go control.
Doubt also had me know that it is only ever
prohibition that gives an impulse importance.
Just say that one of us now comes upon a truth,
and needs to tell that truth; and we aren’t believed?
Still that truth will have to be spoken, shouted even.
Mock Sonnet 10
Here attention-seeking old people, untaught,
know how to throw themselves to the floor.
Here attention-seeking young people, untaught,
know how to cut into their own arms and legs.
Hard to believe, here, that there was ever a time
when people were happy in themselves and
with one another. In this place are women whose
sole defence as they enter a room, any gathering,
is a seemingly permanent and placating smile.
In this place are tales so black and white simple,
are beliefs so right-wrong, good-bad, that few
opinions can be accepted as anything other than
one-sided. Here an about-to-be-a-statistic
considers ways and means of killing himself.
10 pages from the Changes section of Speculations & Changes
A bird calls You You You
A month passes and
a morning arrives when
in the blink of a mind’s eye
time has become a substance
Then – like green aspic
starred with yellow flowers
Now – the white of an overnight frost
has spiked ice crystals growing furlike
on blades of grass
Trapped though
in the going-forwardness of life
and picking at the scab
of once-was
oxygen in : carbon dioxide out
food in : faeces out
skin shedding flakes without
the pulsating elegance of a snake
knowing that there are
600 species of moss
some like forests in miniature
and every people
to be a people
needs to see themselves
in some way wronged
so do the persecuted
become the persecutors
A bird calls You You You
A is for Abscission
In this anatomy of failure note how one man
comes up with one good idea and spends
the rest of his existence guarding it; note
how this woman is jealous of the history
she has made for herself; note how
the emotionally stupid let one hurt rule
their entire life; note how the writer
despises the puritan in himself and tries
to quell the man with the message,
to shut up the prophet of doom; note
how some mothers seek the spurious
security of continuity; note the sinister
effect of all alkaloids upon their children;
note how humanity’s capacity for creation is
matched only by its propensity for destruction.
A Simple Act, Complex Antecedents
If we do not fill time, time will fill us.
Sofa-dwelling stay-at-homes are fat with time.
Famine is not oh-what-a-pity misfortune. Famine has economic causes, usually the exploitation of resources by those who have the power. The famines in Ireland and Sweden were a direct consequence of the wealthy taking more of what they didn’t need. As with the clearances in Scotland, the enclosures in England. Much as the couldn’t-care-less corporate policies of nowadays result in desertification.
There is also brain famine. Because this has been a time of thin thinking, name-check information passed on by multiple choice and screen symbol; a period when books have been thought to be hard work, old hat. But intellect too has a hunger and books are coming back. Oh yes, books are coming back. Thicker and deeper than ever, concept coiled about paradox.
“Thanks,” I said to Aristotle.
“Was no trouble,” he said. “No trouble at all.”
A too-loved child
Bereavement may well have been
the starting point for
your lasting depression.
That loss though
was only the detonation.
Cause is not necessarily
linear consequence.
Once smoke and tears cleared
what you were looking at
was your own life,
the passive waste
you have made of it, the pit
you have dug for yourself,
and you can see no way out.
Addlebrain Addlepate
The TV/radio trickle-tickle of stimulus that doesn’t allow for sustained thought gets switched off. In its absence, silence expanding, thoughts are soggy as twice-cooked cabbage. as unfocussed as sea-distance, as still drifting as clouds. . . . But comes the sudden squirrel chase of an idea. Which disappears around the trunk of commonsense. Filament whiskers are glimpsed, a flicked tail. Attention caught, the head goes forward. Claws can be heard scrabbling. Guesses now to which way the squirrel will go. Need is to see the squirrel whole. Stopped. By a machine’s imperative bleep – beep – that demands – beep – to be looked into – beep – to be answered – beep
Adeona
Night’s one bat finds dark, folds
the translucent leather of its wings
into soft black purse pleats. Pollen
gold of early morning sunlight
finds holes to shine through. From
here, now, this wall-less space,
to dream in, will have eight rooks
seeming to be sat the day long
on the oak’s died-back branches.
While wasps, back-and-forth,
will rebuild the paper dome of their
badger-clawed home. Paddock
sheep, conditioned to respond to
sight of man with bucket, will,
bleating, stampede. Man, finding
another route, will have his curiosity
attracted by the roadside red of
newly gnawed bones. A fatally
damaged butterfly will also have
this power ….. And, out of its
twitching sleep, piece by piece,
and part by part, cave’s furry bat
will unfold, let go its wing-strung
feet. And again, in this our age
of silent despair (the crying-out-loud,
the gulping sobs, belong to
a moment, require an audience),
night’s boneheaded insects will come
rattling against the lit black glass.
Alive!
His very first utterance
the doctor’s shocked step backwards
tripping over the dropped blue-roll
has him scrambling back up
to take notes. Waaaaaa!
The sweat-basted mother, blooded
screamwords, anger at a whole half
the human race, peradventure
recorded in the doc’s little book,
the baby still going Waaaaaa!
Multiply a positive Waaaaaa!
by the mother’s negatives
and that one assertive lost
the boy child is prepared to be
loathed all his adult life
for the world he, slimed and shouting,
was born into. Waaaaaa!
Anomy1
To escape the smothering love of a poorly mothered girl,
the slavish keephold of her sexual favours and demands,
hers the arrogance and resentful servility
of an untipped waiter,
make your plans keycold and
with the head-bowed precision
of a poisoning apothecary, read the syntax
of her every facial tic and smile softly
only into her jealous and guarded eye.
Although you have aped affection, made mutual plans,
used the word ‘love’, a deceit plain every single utterance
to your own ears, still you are surprised that she
and her needy friends – if what they say is true –
believe you.
Await the one day she is away
and absent yourself. You will leave behind your name
as curse, but knowing that that name was never you.
1 ’Anomy’ is the psychological term for the feeling of isolation and disconnection
Another Eden
Behind the mountains
is a land of green velvet lawns
bile ducts to bigotry
a people to be feared
in tree-shaded gardens all is
fair leaves and bitter fruit
soldier boys making bangs
Balance
problem
illusion countered by delusion
the balanced are stationary
(this is a precarious
and unsatisfactory state)
unbalanced by a single truth
they will hold hands with it
be tugged this way
that
and because they cannot
make sense of their own
some will seek power
to order the lives of others
a few will end their own confusion
the rest go chasing after passions
solution
find two truths
– the certainty of death
necessity of breathing
hold hands with each
and proceed slowly
Below the blue-black of a swallow’s back
An almost breathless ache within us when, of a sudden, we recognise the ordinary – the intricacy of soft grassheads, say – as beautiful; and to know that it – that moment of awareness, of acuity – cannot be held, be possessed, repeated, even recalled with any accuracy. All is transient; and there the single grasshead is, every particle of its fibrous, furry delicacy, perfect.
Onward!
With neither wealth nor connections
he is bent to his bootstraps and pulling, pulling
Ambition is a self-imposed, unfelt burden
he has no need of other creeds – pulling, pulling
Points of rest are few: he knows
the price of all pleasures – pulling, pulling
A solitary obstinacy obedient only
to the dictates of intuition – pulling, pulling
A fighter bunched over his fists,
body clenched around the effort,
his long face twisted sideways
and showing the strain – pulling, pulling
Waiting
Holding onto the open door’s edge
he points his toe into his boot. She yells,
Hang on!
Night’s sleeplessness is a lead weight
hanging between his ears. Cotton-mist
presses down every outside sound.
A red geranium beside the down-curved step
has one round leaf cupping last evening’s rain.
She comes busily from inside
full of new-mother-importance
(she, her own self, has given life)
and, with the glow of a lover renewed,
she grips onto his arm
and pecks his cheek.
Her relaxing smile watches his slow tread
up between the creosoted dark
half-doors of the calf sheds and
the stone walls of the old barn.
She waits.
At the cough-grunt of the tractor starting
she turns.
The Prosthetics Fitting Suite
With faces of burdened perplexity
they wait,
the fathers of the crippled children.
Some children loll at odd angles
in their wheelchairs,
have more hair than brain and smell
of onion sweat, of filling incontinence pads
and the false
sweetness of cleansing lotions. The fathers,
unable to help themselves, stroke the back
of their child’s
head, or shoulder, or forearm, whatever
comes to hand, the repetition as
soothing
to their own selves as the watching
of waves rolling into shore,
or
the involvement in any ritual;
like coming here to wait, be measured,
the assiduous
maintenance of an orderly existence.
Only Natural
Smooth carapace cooling his tongue
imbecilic farmboy licks and turns
a white egg,
swaps it for another from the dairy fridge,
licks and turns.
In the newly-seeded vegetable patch
a hen blackbird,
nest to build,
gobbles up grains of soil.
Imbecilic farmboy licks and turns.
The narrow lane beside the barn
has wing-flicker martins
gathering mud from wet tractor ruts.
In the square green meadow
round orange hens
wander among the legs
of brown cows, pausing
now and then
to scratch and peck,
scratch and peck.
Imbecilic farmboy licks and turns.
From an inner room
comes mother’s screech.
Egg is quickly returned to tray,
fridge door bumped to a close.
Contrast
Contrast the smugness
of village adulterers
smooth with semen,
superior co-owners
of secrets, sharers
of crevissed smells
with
the cheated wife’s
screwed-up features,
suspicions tamped
down, mouth
compressed, house
tidied; ordering
what she can,
hourly wiping away
her worries.
Mood
Lunar clock of her body turns the tide in her womb. No child. In foxlight doublechinned Christians drive stately home.
On a rubbish heap in a dark and green graveyard glows a pale crosshatching of naked flower stalks. On thin wobbly legs one old man, made stupid by anxiety, drops his doorkey and, suspecting bittersaid names, he seeks in improbable and gloomy places. In neglected sheds spiders’ legs crackle as they run across corner webs. Earthworms too respond to changes in humidity, barometric pressure and the phases of the moon.
Thirst
Constant sough of a full-grown poplar
is an ocean in itself.
In the same dry wind a wide willow
flounces green flamenco skirts.
Between the two a thin boy climbs slowly
to the round top of a yellow grass hill.
Aware of, glad of, his loneness
he drinks in the wind.
Letter to a Lost Love
Wanting only for my eyes to be full
of the obsessed-about, mind’s
sulphur dust made halos around
the object of my infatuation.
A splinter-sharp intelligence
blinking from behind her fringe,
snobbery just about contained,
she held us all in contempt,
smiled like she was about to bite,
and walked with a starling’s strut.
Heightened emotion had me see
significance in her mundane,
symbolism even
in a cast-aside tissue.
Her touch had me hold my breath.
Yours didn’t.
Alethia (the inability to forget)
Seeing rope ends as snakes,
even among the loud laughter
of a people anxiously determined
to enjoy themselves, he wants to believe
the scars of his childhood — white
and shiny on his inner skin — all sealed
and healed. Until
presented with the unforeseen
as in this semi-formal situation:
“Am I doing
Am I saying
the right thing?”
gets asked of himself, eyes hungry
for company and quick to the next
voice. Flicks on an appeasing smile
while he watches for,
waits for, the sting.
Incipience
In a twilit cavern
finger-smeared glasses,
chrome light-smudged
a wet-eyed beer drinker
claps a tune and the bar’s
puff-faced regulars
look askance at a newcomer
fail to notice the set
of prison muscles.
“It’s so nice outside”
Back from the fields in a bottom-stained boilersuit,
and with the tractor, quiet now,
parked in the newly-concreted yard by the barn,
as he follows his wife around the trimmed and edged garden
his farmer’s sausage fingers
obediently bend a bloom to within nose’s reach.
He himself smells of diesel and dung. She has him sit
in the sun on a hardwood bench
brings him his glistening lunch on a plastic tray;
along with a glossy magazine
that advertises just about
every mechanical device
the modern farmer could need.
Mocked By Windows
in orange-grey streets of night
a city’s self-creating damp
all cars a street away
moving slowly
traffic lights undisturbed
red sinking through amber to green
green rising amber rising red
wind-dusted pavements belonging to
a labouring drunk
between shift worker
cleaners and the homeless keeping warm
mocked by windows
divisions of glass
A Stilled Life
Above sea-surge, rock-froth,
wind-pressed, moon-drawn;
within the triangle of his rod
and line, a rock-ledge angler,
hook in hand, prays
with cold fingers over wet bait.
Beyond him a blue-squiggled sea
and a false horizon of flat clouds.
The last tune he heard
when leaving the house
plays on through his head,
is seeking to shape his mouth.
The Henbane Eater
Credulous
wide-eyed on atropine
the reds and greens of solar winds
colour imposed on form
blow down the neural pathways
snow-sheen shining the light back up
and way beyond
the star-pricked sea
along the flat horizon
a wall of blue-iceberg cloud
She Waits
Wrinkle weave of neck skin as
his smooth pate is part
screwed around to a footfall….
….stands a girl who has practised
being pretty since small, is now all
glimpsed lace and soft allure.
Her presence registered, his neck re-aligns
and he tells himself that he is glad to be old
and bald and looked beyond, that it is not
his blank windows that her round eyes are
fixated upon. His own experience knows that
— in refusing to believe that her repertoire of
pretty expressions, pretty gestures, can be
turned aside from — her child’s anger
will be at the entire landscape, at its every
fold and contour; to be seen ever again
only with face-tight loathing….
She looks.
She waits.
In this still bright light, for a single hour
after a day of rain, over the other side
of the tide-ruffled channel, blue cliffs
and clouds are carved out of
a soft-stone sky.
Corporate Woman Steals
with a predator’s eye for the odd
she tells a colourful tale
(uses her own crayons)
dispensed with the padded shoulders
heels sharp as daggers
is practised now in power plays
authority’s cool appraisals
(a bully like all who overtly belong
her extra weaponry
is a stylised concern
— female hand on forearm)
role-rebellion long left behind
the rest of us are confused as
corporate woman steals our words
in her continuing use
abuse of the vocabulary
of aspirants
of outsiders
The Undermining of Quiet
At the head of a steepsided estuary creek is a low dam
of round-ended stones. The dam holds back a long marsh
clogged with tall reeds. The reeds are yellow still in the
deepening dusk.
A twelve year old boy sits in the crown of a tall willow
toppled out into the marsh. His shivering dog lies, jaw on
paws, part way along the bark-flattened trunk. The boy is
waiting for the barn owl to again come ghosting over the
feathery tops of the reeds.
From the dog’s narrow muzzle, from the two wet slots of
its black nose, comes the first low whine.
Spider Patience
On a narrow beach of flat grey stones a boy stands with
his back to the long bend in the river estuary. A black
rod and its forked rest, cut from a hazel outgrowth,
form a right-angled triangle. The boy is watching a
small white and gold spider at work. The spider has
anchored its web to the sides of a crack in the low grey
cliff.
The cliff rock is dull and pitted, not gleaming like
the banks of mud yet to be covered by the incoming
tide. Coiling lines of brown scum pattern the filling
river’s surface, warp what reflections there are of sky,
trees and fields. Gulls call upstream. Shelducks patrol
the mudbanks on the headland opposite. The spider
pauses, and spins; pauses, and spins.
Inside his turned-down rubber boots the boy’s feet are
cold. Behind and below him the first of the teak-black
seaweed is being lifted from its anchor stones. The boy
directs his breath away from the web that now funnels
back into the crack.
‘At the Twilight of the Gods
the serpent will devour the earth and the wolf the sun.’
Norse cosmology
Roadside cottage
built of stone quarried from
the elm-topped cliff behind
has its front door and lower window
moulded with mud spatter.
Coconut mat
at the deep back door
is green with moss.
In the dusk of indoors
the slow tick
tick
tick
tick
of a seven day clock
on the mantelpiece
is sending small vibrations
across the room
to disturb the dappled ends
of the windowsill’s maidenhair fern.
Not that far away
The large dressed stones of the landing wharf and the
curving away ditch of the never completed canal
are what remains. Ash saplings grow along
the uneven embankment and what might have been
intended as a bridge now has a blue
tarpaulin draped across.
Darkening trees have grown all around,
serpentine roots seeking down the joints between
the stone blocks. A van, tyres sunk among old leaves,
has its thin bonnet raised and one back door open.
Deep tractor tracks lead away from two oil drums.
Bottom of the tarpaulin is mud-splashed, its folds
green with algae. A cock pheasant flaps and croaks
not that far away.
path through cherry wood:
chunks of nougat quartz
laid as hardcore
Considerations
A single swallow jinks and jiggers into a wind not felt
within the fern-grown walls of this abandoned graveyard.
Part-sunk into the uneven ground are tilted headstones, a
lopsided table-like sarcophogi and rusted railings. In one
corner three straight foxgloves grow at different heights.
A thin girl is sitting on the weather-greyed bench, her
long-haired dog perched on the slatted seat beside her,
her hand on his neck, two fingers under his leather collar.
The lower ends of the dog’s hair are wet-matted. On the
hill crest a single line of pines. Away over the hill the
occasional lilt of a curlew. In the eye of the sun a lark
singing.
A New Acmeism(attempt 1)
This cliff-living day all is misted greys and silvers, with
great smears of white rearing towards the far below
shore. Flattened back against the granite cliff are blue
scabious and bright ox-eye daisies, pale pink orchid and
foxglove.
Other summer days thus far have had muted earth
colours, washed out shades of green and brown; with
the sea, like the sky, palely beyond. Or the sea has been
one large, one hard – all the way to the horizon – slab of
indigo.
Not this day.
This unrelenting gale is a force of such physicality that
the old man, even on the cliff edge, can lean his back
against the cushion of the wind and watch at his feet
a plump bumble bee go crawling from ground-close
blooms of yellow vetch to spider-legged thrift. Until the
wind coming around the sides of his face starts to blow
tears from his eyes; and, having made of the wind an
enemy, to not face it feels like cowardice. He has come
to the seaside, he will look at the sea. In order to breathe
though he again has to turn his face inland.
Poetry Day 2012
Wind-driven waves come curling and scrolling brown
over Solway’s sandbanks and, this side, break and
foam over centuries of seaweed-covered rubble.
In among flat-topped rocks mounds of khaki spume
lie like trembling beasts. Ragged chevrons of pink-foots,
heading for the marshes below Dumfries, trail north
over this full tide, which has a skittish flock of plovers,
beach-deprived, in search of a resting place. Their roundended
wings float them down to a quarry-top sheep pasture
to settle but a moment, take off again. Red-legged gulls
line the railings, all mascara-smudged heads bowed
to the same wind. In the scrubland behind the prom
leaves of low-growing sycamore are singed brown.
Charcoal dense clouds connect themselves to
a blue-black Scotland and the darker distant sea.
Moon-drawn
slow waves from a calm sea
flop over
one a breath after the other
pushing a rolled line
of brown weed
up this almost flat shore
and into this between life
where dried out and drying
sand grains
become tiny creatures
that make quick
corner-of-eye movements
and where
beneath rock lips
lone whelks and winkles
have retreated from the air
into their inner spirals
slow waves fold themselves
onto the almost flat shore
one a breath after the other
‘As a canoe slides by on one strong stroke….’
John Berryman: Homage to Mistress Bradstreet
Important Information For Canoeists
Water exists in two planes,
the horizontal and the approximately vertical.
Umbrellas are ineffective
and interfere with the wielding of paddles.
Alligators will not be found,
although both can swim, in the same
climatic zone as elks.
Panic is started by a sudden
loss of balance. Remain seated.
Light is a commodity
and an instrument of ageing.
Jellyfish have no function
in freshwater. Neither goose nor grebe eat them.
Solitudes expands the consciousness.
Loneliness makes transparent the skin.
Here you can be your identical twin.
Beaver have flat tails
and are incapable of rational conversation.
Canoes can be treacherous.
Place no reliance on shined talismans,
make sure your lifejacket is securely strapped
and trust in your own judgement.
Not to be recommended,
while afloat, under starlight or dense cloud,
is the cooking of macaroni.
Also the fermentation of blueberries
and distillation thereof, even if apricot-flavoured,
is strictly speaking illegal.
For warmth a fire of fir cones
can be built at the water’s edge.
(Take care not to let the parent tree
witness the incineration of its progeny.)
Coition, of whatever variety,
is best conjoined on ungiving ground.
When following waterpaths of moorhen
and coot, be wary of contamination by crayfish.
Be patient; and ignore
the panic-stricken flight of waterfowl.
You are the cause.
In Skåne
Forest hands cup a cloudformed sky,
drink up the light.
Growl of jets, gravel surge of traffic:
in the pauses
wind rustles the lake’s edges,
silverlines the steep reflections of trees.
Snarl of another jet
is pierced by
urgent calling of two ospreys.
Amid rippled chrome a pair
of blackthroated divers float
darkly upon their reflections.
Vertically too
each facing each
one mirrors the other.
All sounds that come here
stay here.
Bowl of lake,
forest and flat water,
raincircled,
absorbs both
shriek of fowl and child
and stays waiting.
In childhood’s many eternities
blue is the one colour of sunlit air
wind whips water back up
from a waterfall’s lip
cold feet wading, silt clouds
roll away from every step
In among soft feminine curves
of water-shaped rock
and the brown-black
of bubbled bladderwrack….
— on shined sand further along
a smattering of feather-fat gulls
sitting out the tide; and a line,
between two dark rocks, of ghost-white
sanderlings, like a beached wave —
….here, now, bending and
reaching down, wet sand grains
wiped off and a smile as at
a new possession, is a piece
of mellow gold, amber from
an extinct species of pine,
contains maybe a trapped
gnat and succinic acid.
another version
on the shining beach the hollow bones of birds
and a banded pebble
out of black seaweed oystercatcher’s bubbling call:
a sky ribboned with plovers
a confusion of waders move a flight away
from every single beach walker
heron stands long-legged upon its own reflection:
gull sits dead centre of its own ripples
Taking Ownership Only By Observation & Print
Own social group, species survival, of prime
consideration, rooks and gannets disdain
humanity, will not be tamed by any man, nor
indolent boy. Jays, jackdaws, magpies,
even ravens can be trained to come to hand, accept
a shoulder perch. Not a rook. A cormorant
can be led on a leash, a herring gull to expect
dinner at a door. Dunlin and turnstone stay
out of reach. Gannets keep to ocean and rock,
look after their own.
Lull
gulls circling gulls circling
wingtips etch cliff’s strata
verticals are of white guano
slant-trees windrazored
flat horizon curve/
wave hypnosis
green water rise/
white water fall
cliff bowl gull echo
sea egg boulders
lichen spiders rock
feeble tentacled thrift
fulmar’s black eye glances back
measuring change measuring change
form & formless
ripped gold clouds reflected
in rectangular windowpanes
dark-speckled swarms
of city birds wheel
and swirl through
geometric airways
of a moment
claim a roofcrest
rise again
chimneystack
hunchbacked
fledgling gull
glass-squeaks
at this world
moving
all around
All! All!
…stored within cumbrian basalt
are furnace colours from clinker blue
to bruised orange
exposed in fissures
frost-crazed
ice-chipped
penetrated by lowering cloud
and deepened by
rain’s soft persistence
where moist vegetable dross
from fern and moss gather
so too spores
bird-dropped berries
and air-floated seeds
roots press ever further into cracks
swell and on
the swooping expanse
of a mountain flank
grey-green with lichen
and with its one wind-bent thorn
whereon sits a black raven
looking out for the dying and
for the soon-to-be-dead…
All! All!
Dialogue 1
The Counsellor
She asked him
his opinion
only in order
that she
could tell him hers.
He spoke.
She began nodding,
waiting
her turn to speak.
Dialogue 2
Mondo No.4,569
He said,
“I failed at promiscuity
because I liked to get
into their minds
as well as their knickers.
Does that make me a better person?”
She said,
“I had a conversation piece once:
couldn’t get a word out of it.”
Dialogue 3
Not Only The British
On the high white wall are green shadows.
The school chair is made of rounded wood.
A man is sat upon it,
his knees high.
He addresses the wall thus:
“For 30 years I have experienced the deceit
which lies at the heart of every British institution.
This deceit has become so ingrained in the public character
that honest people, or those people who ask for honesty,
are regarded instantly as fools. So is all
critical self-examination, both public and private,
avoided, all logic flawed. This doubled dishonesty
will lead to the destruction of not only the British.”
On the white wall are green shadows.
Dialogue 4
On Asking The Printer For A Price
First let me tell you this.
I’m an artist. Printer I may be
but I’ve got a painter’s eye.
And I was stood
in a Fort Williams doorway.
Rain was sheeting down,
lightening breaking apart the sky.
Dramatic eh?
No, let me finish.
Looking across at Nevis I knew
the mind of at least one other
watercolourist. But my wife,
ex-now, wasn’t interested,
wanted only to get in out of the wet.
I ask you
how could I have stayed
married to a woman like that?
Dialogue 5
Projection
all the sheet-creased night
impaled on his erection
his whole being turns on
the engorged piece of gristle
like on a spit
teenage girl
making passing imitations
of what she hopes to become
recoils from her mother’s
vulgar indiscretions
an isolated man’s fantasy
is for a wholly sensual woman
with no social needs
avoiding eye contact
mockery of precincts
self-contained as a bubble
she dresses to impress
her closed circle of friends
his erection is the root
the rest of him grows out of
Dialogue 6
One Orange Streetlamp
comes a woman clattering
“…accident”
she says
the policeman is weeping
“…someone dead”
she says
the policeman stands
erect against the wall
and weeps
“…don’t suppose?”
she sits on the low chair
“There’s no…”
the policeman weeps
Dialogue 7
To Be Right
You young people own an arrogance
which at my age I find irritating,
see it simply as a lack
of consideration,
tactless in word and deed,
a failure to be wise.
Wrong. You find our hauteur
attractive. You see in it
purity of purpose. And you too
want to be as overflowing full
of opinions and certainties.
I’ll admit there were times
I admiringly told my mirror
I was a right arrogant bastard.
And you were always pleased
when you found, even
in the pages of the long deceased,
another who shared your opinion,
another who voiced your doubt.
True.
Where it mattered most
I didn’t have the confidence
to publicly proclaim myself
and so mingle with my peers.
Quietly I went, watching.
Now, deservedly unknown, unnoticed,
you ask yourself, again timidly, if
you could have been right in your bathroom youth,
if youth now could be right.
Dialogue 8
Neighbours
In the echoing yard outside
are the loud concerns slap
the loud pleasures slap
glottal-clicking laughter of anger
the self-willed stupid snap
Growl
Rhino-footed woman upstairs
has a nasal puppy whinge.
Male voice is brown and impatient:
she hasn’t kept
her side
of his bargain?
anger whistles out
through teeth.
Dialogue 9
The Page
Formless
as an actor’s face,
blank as death
the page awaits.
At each small reminder of death’s certain approach
deep
deep
within
is the singular gong of a great brass bell.
In the daily doing I confine
life’s possibilities, work to
self-imposed deadlines.
That last word
swings the bell,
just the once,
rings it like a hurt.
Strung out and twitchy I push on
through the treacle of tiredness,
feel I’m being worn away by emotions
from the outside in, inside out.
I look at this old person’s hand
shiny and creased on the fingers
with all my young sensations inside.
At death I know
chime,
go on
chime
all that we will take with us
from this world
is the pain of it.
I bequeath you the battle and only the battle.
You will not win.
Formless
the page awaits.
Dialogue 10
Meat In The Sandwich
So young so smug.
Age doesn’t equal wisdom.
In life are many processes
as necessary and as futile as
arguing politics with our parents.
When we can listen
and learn from ourselves.
But one can forgive the young
and desirable
their mistaken selfish politics.
Not the bitter old.
And some parents
live in terror
of their large children.
So smug so young.
Skin&Bones
Rhinog Fawr
Among bracken green or ginger
black rocks whiten dry. Earth’s bones
breaking through – shoulderblade escarpments,
knuckled outcrops and vertebrae ridges
piled one atop the other,
the lower painted with heather.
Here houses built of mountain rock,
blisters with angles they hunker
free of outside ornament
ducking the clutching wind.
Within clouds, imprisoned by the weather,
only their habits for company,
here grow the gentle madnesses
that come from mountain solitude.
Mouths that do not open between meals,
or only to chirp endearments to a pet,
maybe make sarcastic riposte to a mantel photo,
come to be surprised by an answer,
astounded by an interruption.
Here where the moss grows
and the wind blows cold or wet,
but always blows;
here innocent foibles are formed,
a nation’s character shaped.
Skeleton
Soft tissue
of muscle
is attached
to bone
as words are
to experience.
Ideas may soften
the shape
of what happened,
like muscles
can be changed
through exercise.
Acts though
are durable.
Cranium, skull,
is cushioned
by hair.
Tibia, shin,
is closest
to surface,
hurts when hit.
So we protect
that part
quick as we can.
The fact of us
must
not be damaged.
Forceful Impact
Issuing the two of us with truncheons of his own manufacture – short sections of underwater cable – a veteran of Palestine and Malaya, small moustache and meaty shoulders, he tutors us in crowd control.
“Twitch of a camel stick, on a landed crowd, can send them skittering back. But here, on the ship, we’re working within definite limits, have to make a quick impression, show we mean business.”
Migrant workers are locked onto the open decks, each assigned only a bedroll space.
“Any riot will endanger all lives aboard the ship. They will be a disorganised crowd. All they will share is anger, is excitement. They will be led by the loudest. We will know what we are doing. They won’t.”
He has shown us how to use our truncheons.
“The plastic insulation will provide sufficient padding not to break the skin. Wooden truncheons are both too light and too hard. These people are paying passengers, so the idea is not to kill anyone, nor to permanently disable. We don’t, therefore, hit the head nor the face. We hit them where the bone is nearest the surface – shoulder, elbow, wrist, hip, knee, and shin. Any forceful impact on bone causes such intense pain that it renders the assailant giddy and incapable of further attack.”
Unlocking the iron gate, into the shouting mob we go, our two shoulders to his broad back. Any arm, body, that comes too close we hit, do not see its effect, move on to the next threat, next target.
The mob’s spokesman knows that we are coming for him, cannot get away though for the press of curious people behind him, is held there too by his own brave words. Thrust towards us he is hit, grabbed. We turn; and we fight our way back, threats to us fewer but more determined. Quick hits now to shoulder and hip. Howls and limping. The gate is opened. We are through!
The crowd’s voice is taken away to be locked up and talked to in his own tongue. He will complain about his bruises.
Back out on the hot iron decks is confusion. Brassnozzled canvas hosepipes are at the ready; but are unlikely to be used – any soaking with saltwater will cause unbearable itching. The ship’s wake rucks the flat sea. My partner and I pace off the last of the adrenalin, tell of near misses, crack jokes.
National Instrument
Cables from gantries go
singing through mountain gorges.
Resonant bog and cliff-face sounding board
make of the land one vast aeolian harp..
Inside the low cloud
all airs
are underscored by
a monochromatic buzz.
Unsafe
North of Reykjavik
on the edge of extinction
(death is essential to life)
mammals of the sea get stripped
of protein and fat, skin used
for kayak, rib and tooth
for harpoon and needle.
Under snow’s thousand sibilants
a static crackle, a boom,
bellow, wail,
a howling and a grinding.
Here, from cracks in Earth’s azoic scab
seeps the red pus of once-stellar dust.
Vein fissures within the ice
are of gas
condensed and solidified.
Explosion is imminent.
Songs
Within the soft marrow of long bones
red blood cells (erythrocytes) are produced.
Dried
bones become hollow.
Ignore
the knocking
of dum-dum percussion.
Instead
file an embrasure;
and a tibia blown
becomes
a syrupy flute.
(For the sharper notes
of a pipe
drill holes only.)
Strombus alive
is a marine gastropod
whose usually orange flesh
has the consistency
of a cold eye.
Dried
its one bone
becomes a conch,
blown
sounds round.
Living insects
scrape
parts of their carapace,
make dry air
modulations.
Weight of Time
From ice-box glacier and preservative bog
leathery cadavers of mammoth and man
can be disgorged intact.
Mud and stone though talk in bones;
in either cemented exoskeletons
of marine crustaceans,
or in the ectoplasmic shape
of a compressed carapace.
A pteradactyl’s x-ray
is printed in blue liassic clay;
spread bones of a single wing
like a flat hand held
to a strong light.
Skin and flesh melds
from yellow to red,
finger bones felt
& guessed at,
knobbled shadows.
Gravity’s mutants:
these stunted and featherless flaps
have denied us the shrieking sky.
Left Blank For Message
Rhythms of
this cosmos
abhors chaos.
The sea off
Chesil Beach
takes pebbles and
sorts them
according to size
– large at Portland end,
sand at Seatown.
Colour immaterial;
although most pebbles
are grey, some
opaque chalcedony;
and the sand ends up
with a reddish tinge.
Ovoid pebbles,
like planets
and moons,
are but giant
grains of sand;
the orbits of worlds
the concrete of atoms.
Cells of living tissue
too are rounded,
assists diffusion –
osmosis –
ease of meiosis.
Life is movement.
The drip drip
on a cave stalagmite
leaves it
a rounded and
stunted phallus.
Insides are
angular crystalline
pythagorean structures,
like all
silicate matter
taking upon itself
the same shapes,
icicle
or stalactite,
sugar
or snow.
Waiting
Dawn whitens line
upon line of silver badges
across a grey city square.
Helmets are black.
(Armoured water cannon
and a white ambulance
wait out of sight.)
Nearby streets too
have cordons of black and
silver lines, the policemen
nervously weighing their batons.
Bones will be broken this day
to win minds. This Planet Earth
is an idea imposed upon
a hydro-carbon sphere which is
itself an idea. Doesn’t matter
to the land nor to the sea
what it is, nor how each bit
is named nor
divided,
nor who shall be
allowed
to cross which line.
But, owned by opposing ideas,
people will die this day
crossing lines.
Dog’s Disease
hunger
is a corruption
that chews through
to the backbone
snakes up to the brain
burns there
without mercy
murderous & biting mad
at any who have eaten
apostrophe combe
Here
To belong here,
but not to be owned,
we deny
the false identities of place
and history.
We, here, are not
where we came from.
Nor are we, here,
where we have arrived.
We, here, don’t believe
what this local council says,
let alone
government mouthpieces.
Here,
not of a nation,
not of a people,
uncertain even
of here’s name, here’s spelling,
we call here
‘apostrophe combe.’
Apostrophe Combe
Slant-stacked, unquarried, these slate cliffs are a wafered ice cake that has been snapped, then pushed together, refrozen and snapped again. Within stratas of slate are stratas of slate where water can penetrate. Through other stratas of black slate white and pink quartz has been dribbled and veined. On beach stumps this quartz is last to be eroded, becomes a globular warty mass, a dirty icing, no more picturesque than fire-melted plastic.
Above the lustrous blue
of a shale-silted sea,
over path-scarred heathland,
goes the flame-flicker rotation
of three brown butterflies.
Could as easily hate this place as love it. Arrive on a wet day, gusts from every which way flicking rain into your face, walk over/through drain surge and gurgle; and it will feel relentless, this ever-blowing wind, the wet that gets into everything. All that you will see of the grey sea is it roiling white around black rocks, misshapen balls of its khaki spume flying over the gulls sitting out the storm on the putting green. A sustained blast of wind will seem to hold down any house you are in. Only, on its cessation, for the house to balloon out as if to explode. Except that this time it doesn’t. And you await the next blast.
To Here
Slate beds got folded, thrust upward by tectonic drift and grind, folded and thrust again. Water and ice then cut a trough miles wide, left the folded strata exposed on cliffs’ sides. Along one plate’s edge a granite obtrusion bubbled up through the sea, became a mica-flecked island at the channel’s mouth, on today’s horizon a thickened charcoal line.
At the base of a bracken cleft, summer-green
winter-brown,on a shrapnel beach of frost-
exploded shale, sits a forty ton block
of Scottish rock, that floated here within
the pale blue light
of a frozen ocean’s moving ice.
In straight-backed ranks, front rows kneeling, triangular rocks await the sea’s attack. And fail. The cliff’s warped ply of slate and shale shows always fresh signs of collapse. This day gobs of spume come flying up and go rolling on over green pastures. Massed thorns rattle back at these insistent Westerlies, allow one-stemmed foxgloves a little height in their lee.
Spirit of No-Place
Made remote by the bleak uplands of Exmoor behind, tide race of the Bristol Channel before, these conjunctions and disjunctions of land and sea are difficult to reach, rather than inaccessible. Most of other men’s history, nevertheless, has passed us by. The Romans rowed on past to Wales, square-rigged slavers sailed on up to Bristol, Athelstan’s men marched south of here against the Cornish; and from here, outside air-raid shelters, we watched Swansea burn.
In this no-place of misfits and miscreants
men passed in summer’s street smell of stale
armpit sweat. Wet winter queues are rank
with unwashed clothes. All-weather drunks
sit in pairs on corner benches,
a single bottle between them.
The Dumnonii were ‘people of the land.’ Here, on this north-facing coast, they were not quite, being also of the sea and thus having as much in common with Celtic harbour folk. Here Irish legend, Welsh and Dumnonii myth wind about each other like belt buckles. Even now the clearest radio stations are Welsh.
‘combe haiku
calm day sea shimmer:
one wet black pebble, hand-turned,
parcel-tied with quartz
Negatives
Not a scene,
nor a portion; not a puzzling
perspective of a part
of a moment:
recorded with a camera flash,
it becomes not
the memory of the moment,
(may not even resemble the moment:)
the photograph instead
becomes an image,
an event in itself
every time that (fading)
it is shown.
‘combe haiku
on clifftops, above
a fluffed, wind-teased sea, crickets
persist in their noise
History 1
Feral pigeons keep low, out of the falcon’s line of sight. We Dumnonii never were a fighting force. A tribe that doubts itself, each part distrustful and contemptuous of all its other parts, our hatred for each other is greater than for any of our alleged enemies. Truth be told we’re more likely to do a deal with an ‘enemy’ just to do a neighbour down. So we traded with Egyptians, Byzantines and Turks; watched Romans make a landing beyond Great Hangman. Further south every hilltop had a fort. What did we have here? Hills aplenty, but few of us to rule, and fewer to be afeared of. Most we feared was a plague of fairies and elves. Even when church first came with its charity and its stories, and we said yes, we still made our offerings into the earth and into the rock. Only when church demanded tithes did we of the Dumnonii say no. Then we went briefly back to a lore beyond true recall, a sense of something meaningful further on, that took the curious up to the stones. But church, once started, wouldn’t stop, had fighting Norsemen to disprove. And very soon, selling each other out, we of the Dumnonii had our thoughts locked to the ground, bound to hamlet and village by the round of our toils, minds dead-ended by gospels, spirits gripped by new superstitions, like pebbles by the holdfast roots of oarweed.
History 2
Us pagan Pardoes, late of the Dumnonii, paid no mind to incomers. Even when they took our old spirits and called them saint this and saint that. Them that could be bothered still went up the stones. And twas the same we asked favours of, prayed to – for good fortune, good health, good crops, good catch and safe journeys. And, sometimes, it worked. When they built a church they let us hold market there. Brought troubles with them too, mind you. Norsemen took against the new. Hard, though, with a westerly of any strength, to make harbour here. And it blows more often than it don’t. Most coasters got to be warped in. So the Norsemen made softer landings further on up, stayed there years and more. When wind and tide allowed, they paid us a crafty visit or two, took a few stock. Got blamed anyway. We had our own feuds of course, brawled once good’n proper at market. That got us kicked out of churchyard. Norsemen got kicked out too. All got serious after that. Though, seemed to more than a few of us, clergy was keener on raising tithes than holding services. They’m still here. Just. Harbour chapel, which wasn’t a chapel, and is a chapel no more, was named after Nicholas, patron saint of sailors and scholars. Scholars here…. there’s a thought.
‘combe tanka
O giver of salt!
Before this mineral & metal mix,
cross-hatching of ripples
the shore is a jaggedly barren
science fiction rockscape.
‘Combe Pardoes
Head down Pardoes,
we never did touch
forelocks, but nor
do we fight, make
angry gestures. We live
inside our own lives, have
no sense of industry,
just of getting by.
We avoid taxes like
the plague. Wages
miss us too, though
we pay our dues
in other ways.
Bird shadow over
bald green hillsides,
one sail coasters
with their crew of two:
most the world
passes by us Pardoes,
late of the Dumnonii,
misfits and
miscreants all.
Church poor Pardoes,
pick oakum
from old ropes,
get paid in tobacco.
Histories we’ve got, if not
names. But we’re not
local, nor are we
characters, just
uncouth. You wouldn’t
want some of our breed
for neighbours.
Expectation of big profits
got too many houses
built here. Now it’s only
us halophyte Pardoes,
with our lumpy
red potato faces,
who can live on little,
who stay.
And us Pardoes,
used to gullmockery,
take no offence
at what stops off:
Pardoe women
have always been
obliging. And still we
find our way here,
Pardoes new, for who
the odd makes sense
and the even
doesn’t add up.
John the Explorer
John the Explorer Ventures
….into Mental States
Stones and pages
must be turned over:
John has a need to know.
The face of all worlds
must be questioned,
bland
electric wires
must be touched. Once.
The green-black ivy berry tasted.
Once.
The woman’s smiling invitation
accepted. Once.
The man’s challenge…
Once.
John has to know
what lays beyond
the blue shield of day,
behind the few words
that are spoken.
John has to be more than
bumped-about victim
of his circumstance:
John has to know
why he needs to know:
John has to explore.
John the Explorer Ventures
….into Bodily States
The sky is in his stomach
is a high high blue today
scraped clean by fast
scratched-thin clouds.
Arch-ribbed
this cave mouth
is populated by
flocks of bell-calling jackdaws
and tumble-gaming rooks.
White frost fits inside
his fingertips, but
grey rain is swamping his head
and his feet have become
their own brown puddles.
John, thus, has come quickly
to teeter over
the inner chasm of uncertainty.
One solution –
Opening his mouth double
double wide
he stretches back his neck
and swallows down
the obliterating sun,
blows out his cheeks in a burp,
and goes on.
John the Explorer Ventures
….into Spiritual States
Having so read
John has decided that
his fate too is predetermined.
His compass points
to iceberg North.
Following,
covered only by
dogma, John
turns his back
to the sun.
The skin gets scorched,
blisters away in continents.
Frost bites
blackly into his fingers
and into his toes.
His heels pull
a white skin shadow
after him. But still,
through the hiss of snow pellets
and over the creak and crack of
packed ice, John goes on.
Because to change his mind now
is to deny himself. Only when
he arrives at North,
all magnetised needles
pointing to him,
only then can John decide
what’s next.
He will cry out
that he is lost.
John the Explorer Ventures
…..into Bodily States
Rising
the tiger reaches out inside his arms,
stretches sickle claws,
bends back neck and
widens mouth
in a spittle-string yawn.
Day, though, over-stimulates
over-demands, so
hidden in a stair-well corner
spider nerve-ends grow
from his fingertips,
twitch strands…
John, dry-eyed predator, lunges,
catches a husk of the past/future,
retreats to stair-well funnel web.
Contemplates.
Waits.
Makes escape
from building.
Horse gallops in his legs.
But
nudged about by
the moving crowd
back of John’s face
a wolf cub yelps.
Horse
swaying impervious
on the bus.
Bear-walk home
through corridors
of night, an owl
hoots fear
out his mouth.
Alone at home the hyena
speedily clears his plate.
(In company the ape chatters
and grimaces, picks and pats)
Bedroom lair sees the angled tip
of a glistening red cock
protruding from soft belly fur:
John wears a pet dog’s silly grin
and his thickened tongue slips
to the side of his mouth.
John the Explorer Ventures
……into Bodily States
Inertia has made John passive
as the soil. Thighs and knees
are steppes receding to
an horizon of rounded toes.
Foreground
his penis erect can be
as spring-whippy as a sapling
or solid as an oaken stump. Limp
it is a silly smiling fungoid.
Out of his glub-gurgling abdomen
grows a bile-yellow speckling
of mustard flowers; from his navel
the spiked orange dahlia
of indigestion. While
over his chest
are daisies
bright as single ideas.
(For communication
butterfly visitors may alight
kiss with their black proboscis;
or slugs may leave trails.
All of which
can be ignored.)
A briar, however, takes root
over the whole of John’s face,
becomes a complex contradictory idea
of thorns and overlapping petals.
(A rose, any rose, stimulates
more than one sense.)
His back cold and damp,
uncomfortable,
John moves.
John the Explorer Ventures
…..into Bodily States
His mouth set in
numb acceptance,
a pillar of sponge,
John has stood so long
in the rain
that the drops beating in
through his scalp
are dribbling out through
his fingertips.
Bilious,
John’s insides are liquid,
from the watery back of his tongue
to the open pipe of his rectum.
Cold as wet rock
John has lain so long
in the stream
that one crystal block
has moulded itself
to his shoulder,
another – tightening – has enwrapped
his waist and thighs.
(An inpouring
between his knees
ends in bubbled lace.)
Numb as a pond,
mouth set in
grim acceptance,
John stares into himself.
John the Explorer Ventures
…. into Emotional States
The stout woman stands and looks down
on the smashed car. Windscreen
and roof have been squashed onto
the grey buckled seats. White metal
shows. Paint flakes circle the car
like sharp snow. Glass has become gravel.
The body of her son has been covered
in an orange blanket
and taken away.
The woman stands and looks.
A noise escapes John and his front dissolves.
He melts into the woman through her back.
Inside all is dark and a crying-out pain,
nothing to hold on to, no up, no down.
Bewildered, John flees
back to his own face;
looks out at
the woman standing
and looking down on
the flattened car.
John the Explorer Ventures
…. into Bodily States
John knows that he must
investigate the mess,
but the closer he gets
his neck twists
his head away.
His body stays,
torso leant backwards.
The stink has his
nostrils
try to close – they though
have lost this ability.
Inside the voice of duty
commands him to
overcome his disgust.
A hand moves out from
the fortress of himself,
flinches back
the moment
before touch.
Engorged neck muscles
disfiguring his face
John forces himself to look.
And gags.
Stumbling away
he stooping
retches
recalls
last sight of it
and retches again.
John the Explorer Ventures
…..into Emotional States
She is gone.
In John grief burns
slow and bright as
gunpowder, its mass
lilac and uncritical.
Remembering that
she is gone
the black powder is
replenished,
burns metal-melt hot again.
She is gone.
In John grief wells
to just below
his swollen throat,
gets swallowed.
Wells again.
She is gone.
In John grief freezes
him awake. Every
long night he knows
he will never
sleep warm again.
She is gone.
John the Explorer Ventures
….into Spiritual States
Forehead pressed into
the cold soft flesh
of the dead one’s breast
John tries to push himself
inside where the booming
drum of life had declared
each second past, each second
to come.
Nose to nose
John now stares into eyes
that will not look away,
that will not blink,
will not dilate.
With a finger,
and thinking to do it,
John taps the forehead.
Sound of meat.
John pinches and shakes
an arm. Slack gristle
lets the arm flop, the hand
limply slap.
“No.” John steps away. “Not that.” His own hand is before his face. He flexes the fist open like a flower, curls the fingertips back in. “Life requires tension.” he tells himself; and he watches the hand – a hand that knows it is a hand – rise above his head. John makes his other arm lighter than air, brings both arms out like wings. “Life requires movement.” He flatfooted runs, leaps. Life is defiance.
An Atheist’s Alphabetical Approach to Death
An Atheist Approaches Death
The young teach adults worth.
We, with unfilled skin, tell ourselves
that we have learnt to live with death.
The unblinking young, though, can espy
such falsity at a mile. My denial now,
for instance, that a place in posterity
is not my aim — then why my concern
with my coming death, with my certain
passing into oblivion? Why write this?
Just this? Save on the off-chance of it
getting me, its author, remembered?
The absolute of nothingness awaits me,
total and forever unawareness, the negative
of all negatives, non-being. I will not be.
Instinct
rails against the very notion.
Survive, don’t die.
Accept? A lie.
“Heartbreak is harder to look on than death sometimes.”
Nelson Algren
As Here
Contemptuous of all engineered excitements my life experience
is no stream of consciousness, more an enclosing mist. But how
to convey that state of partial awareness, voices off
not quite heard? I want to keep on saying, “I don’t know,”
than to pretend that I do. How can I know? There’s too much of it.
Just too much. All that I truly know is negatives. I don’t feel quite
like that, don’t wholly agree with…
When you live among junkies and alkies and you want only
to get on with your own life, while all around you are trying
to get rid of theirs, each one of those chemically-controlled
human forms glimpsed out the window, passed in the street,
provokes a dismissive grunt…
As to beauty. Beauty? We recognise something from somewhere
unremembered — a cloud shape? a sunset? — and we exclaim
that it is beautiful. But in truth the sunset, the cloud,
hasn’t moved us,
aside from to speak, it is only something we have recognised from
a painting, or a photograph, which just by its having been put up
on a wall, or included in a magazine, was saying that it was
worth looking at.…
Here then is the shallow truth of me; and shallow though it may be,
no matter how often I say it, rephrase it, as soon as it is in words
it too becomes false, becomes artificial. Same for all our limited
capacity for absorbing experience: science and religion go seeking,
in the step-by-step logic of madness, contemporary explanations
for both new and ancient phenomena. While most new art now
defeats its purpose in drawing attention only to itself. As here.
Awaiting the thump and bee-sting of a bullet….
….inured to atrocity, the past telescoping into itself; from this huge pity that each of us has for our species, seeing all these cruel repetitions, generation upon generation, barbarity rising in marginally different (if again ignored) forms, while yet others clothe themselves in a new vocabulary (and, literally, in the flags and football shirts of tribalism); and each speak always a language of hate and belonging; the whole of humanity but a bacilli infesting the skin of earth, creating inflammations and pus-centred eruptions….
“Every day was like every other day, and living was just a way of passing time until he died.” Isaac Asimov
Beware of Heroes
All futures are imagined. Not all that is lost will be found. The aged artefacts we live among, and some revere for their antiquity, owned comedies all their own. Hadrianus, for instance, builder of a wall, died of dysentery. He, concerned for his reputation, did not know his future. In this, the season of your youth, therefore, make it your one ambition only to live long enough to be able, one day distant, to remark on the year-by-year increasing girth and height of trees. For there will come — do not doubt it — metamorphoses starting from shapes and forms as yet unguessed at, with your own time unremembered. Or laughed at.
“Soon it will die, / Yet no trace of this / In the cicada’s screech.” Matsuo Bashö
Could I Be The Man Who Put The Ast Into Bard?
The explicable is passé. Time has become
a commodity (of variable quality)
to be weighed, or counted out,
like boxers and carrots.
I remember, therefore I was.
I dreamt, therefore I am.
I was what I imagine I remember.
I am what is, the confines
of my circumstance, affected always
by events elsewhere. I am
my uncertain memories, my unadmitted desires.
Women,
principally, although there are some men,
rushing from one to the next, only believe
they exist if they are desired, bodies
like cats
arching themselves up to be touched.
As any bookie knows
erratic responses reinforce habits.
Language is not
not the key to being:
being is subjective, asks nothing.
Action though, any action, becomes
a contrivance, theft of
the yet unwritten future.
I,
most certainly,
won’t be.
“… waking is the only way / she knows of dying in a dream”
Mike Bartholomew-Biggs
“The dearness of common things…”
(Ivor Gurney)
Death close escaped, death nearby anticipated, puts a value on those things that pass through this one life to the next. And then we want to say, yes, we too have been witness to this, we too are a part of the great communion. We too have noted the shoulder-sleeping shape of English hills. And, yes, we too have seen the leaves of domed trees, wind-pressed, all showing underside silver; and seen too the rippling fur of uncut hay. Yes, we too have heard, and squinted to find, the lark singing high, challenging the sky. And yes, we have lingered to watch this lark flutter to earth, then scurry head down through the every-way grass. And yes, we too have remarked upon the stone-chink chime of jackdaws, the rasping-out call of the black crow. And we too have scuffed through copper-bedded woods of beech. And, yes, we have both seen and heard the squirrel, aquiver on a slender branch, croak-barking out its territory. And, yes, we have leant close to inhale the subtle scent of daffodils. And often we have turned from the ever-corrupt world of men to plant our feet on high moorland, to breathe there the clear air; and, alone, to pretend to talk back, in a bubbling growl, to the pair of ravens come to inspect us. And yes, dazed with sun stupor, we have gazed up at cliff-bank dollops of mauve thrift and yellow vetch, watched the languid flight of a crooked flock of gulls. And, yes, we too have held between thumb and forefinger the waxy lustre of a single chunk of chalcedony, and we too have looked into autumn glowing through the worn soap of that stone. Yes, we want to tell those who may follow, yes I too was once alive. I too touched, felt, knew this. Welcome.
“A gilded mediocrity lacking ambition and passion, aimless days indefinitely repeated, life that slips away gently towards death without questioning its purpose — that is what is meant by ‘happiness’.” Simone de Beauvoir
Do The Dead Remember Their Dreams?
In these eschatological portraits of darkness,
these maunderings on Death, let me state that,
as with many a questing thought, I’d rather
go on living with the possibility than
the accomplishment. See me as a frantic
skylark, one small dot, piping out
its battling-to-stay-airborne song;
as I too feel the need to keep on saying
I’m here. I’m here. I’m here. I’m…
“… feeling again with the far-off shrill of a train in the dark morning the loneliness of being on earth.” Christy Brown
Envying Crows
Envying crows
their enjoyment of gales,
enchanted by
willowtree orchestras of bees:
the worm
through whom
all life is passing
I leave
lopsided casts
of unevenly shaped verses.
I halt at a noise:
a moment’s equipoise,
balanced between in and out breathing,
all senses keen,
watching
the bitten white of an apple
turn edges brown.
“Death means nothing to a man like me. It’s the event that proves them right.” Albert Camus
Every Day Begins Bravely
When daybreak’s cold light
lies behind trees and hedges
behind houses
and roadside verges are dewsilvered
a wren flies up to a thin ridge of roof
or topmost cable
and in his hard little voice
shouts his defiance at all predators
calls alive
the colours of the day
Rumpled
floating above the gravity of sleep
I tell myself to get up
try again
“… moved like a young man, tall, extremely handsome / the joy of being immortal in his eyes.” C. P. Cavafy
Every Positive Action Requires A Victim
A people sidelined by linear history they live lives important only to themselves, while of their own life’s value they’re not too sure; moving on, never to belong anywhere, except in their childhood, with maybe its attic scent of crisp newspaper and softly ripening apples; or, maybe, to the secret path through a small forest, obliterated now by hooligan nature, or built on by vandal man; and that before they ever left the parental home, before they abandoned the sacred graves of their once-pets. Then the parents sell house and garden, and all are adrift, moving away from themselves; to make new pasts in new places and call all of those, events and locations, their identity; while knowing that they’re in motion so much only to make themselves more important than the place they are now; because each of their new addresses turns out to be beyond their control, changes around them, and so they move on; the decision to leave made while their second son is hiding behind a garage wall, his frown wholly concentrated on a found magnifying glass and sunlight’s golden exclamation mark.
“Posterity merely consists of the opinion of a series of publics. And just look at today’s!” Nicholas-Sebastien Roch de Chamfort
Experientially Acquired
knowledge beyond knowledge beyond knowledge/ is the pity the poor/ the outcasts/ the estranged have/ for those who still believe/ they belong/ belong to something/ worth belonging to// We listen/ to the suits/ explaining the already explained/ and the thought is/ with each/ and with all of us/ strangers/ Am I the only one/ sees it’s a lie?/ knowing beyond knowing beyond knowing
“… totalitarian systems — including religious ones — generally involve dogmatic subjugation of human will.” Ignazio Corsaro
Rooms
Foreword (to Rooms for the first 2012 Bluechrome/boho edition)
As our world has become segregated, separated; as our daily lives have become fragmented, subdivided into a variety of subcontexts, so have our thoughts and thought processes. Now, much as political cartoons bring together two topical events for wry humour’s sake, so does poetry (a school of) bring together two, or more, unrelated and apparently disparate images, or ideas, in the attempt to make a single whole poem.
This method has been the self-confessed modus operandi of the psychologist-poet Tomas Tranströmer. Part of the pleasure in reading him, for me, has been to try to separate out the two foundation ideas/images, then to see how he crafted them together to make something other. Using this working method Tomas Tranströmer is usually successful (or he only publishes his successful attempts.)
All too often, however, when other poets try to forge connections where there are none it leads only to non-sequitor poetry; which may be of great creative delight to their author, but can be as meaninglessly tedious as any other list for their reader. Because, although the world’s images may come to us piecemeal, fragmented, still we have a sense of where we are in relation to those images; and we, each of us, imposes our own order-perception upon them. Which is why fractal poetry has a false causa loci – it is not how we perceive.
My intention with the ‘Room’ poems, with each poem and with the series as a whole, was to emphasise the insularity of each our lives and each part of our lives, and to do it transparently, having within each poem’s frame distinctly separate and different images and concepts, the contents/activities described within the room set against the ‘notes for reading’ at their end. My hope was that some synergistic other would emerge out of this pairing.
That didn’t happen. Instead it led to something else, which can best be described by referring to Damien Hirst’s use of titles for some of his works. One looks at the object he has made for display, then down to the title that Hirst has given it, then back to the object to see what he could have meant by applying such a title to such a work.
Something similar seems to happen with the reading of the ‘Room’ poems. One reads the description of the room’s contents/activities, then the ‘notes for reading’; and, the mind wanting to make sense of the pairing, one’s eye is almost forced back up the page to re-read.
So much for the creative process and outcome.
Regards the process of publication….
The Room poems have been widely published in magazines. Although some editors didn’t understand that the 2 parts formed a whole and insisted on publishing only the room part, while one wanted to publish only a batch of the ‘notes for reading’. While yet others enthusiastically published batches of the whole poems; and the late, and much missed, Ian Robinson, put out an Oasis broadsheet of 11 Rooms.
Before that, however, Stuart Rosamond had invited me to give a talk on the Room poems (and others) to Fine Art students at the Somerset College of Arts and Technology. The students then mounted an exhibition of the work of theirs that had grown out of the talk/reading. Which led, these several years later, to Sarah Ward, now studying print at Cardiff University, to contact me through another publisher seeking my permission to use some of the Room poems as a basis for some of her final year work.
It didn’t stop there of course. The collaboration once begun led to other poems being considered for other of her projects, a touring exhibition/reading… And, given the stimulus provided by Sarah’s interest, I began writing more Room poems. I also decided that it was about time all the Room poems were gathered together in a collection. Being [then] blessed with the publisher, Anthony Delgrado, this too I was able to realise.
Sam Smith 2012
-*-
Room 1
All who come into this room
will be changed.
Nakedness
is not necessary. You
are vulnerable in other ways.
Your hands
are not
over your ears.
Your eyes
are not shut. You
are here.
(notes for reading:- Stand, in heavy shoes, on a round tidal rock and at the end of each line kick off, with downward heel, a limpet. Thus demonstrating impermanence, unpredictability.)
-*-
Room 2
Walls of this room
are of four inch brick
doubled.
Each brick is laid over
half of the two bricks below.
Sounds come through.
A man shouts;
and the show-off laugh of a woman,
an engine whining,
gabble of a radio
all meet
and coalesce
in the room’s centre.
A separate being forms.
It is threatening.
(notes for reading:- To the accompaniment of a forty two string zither artlessly played. If no accompanist use hand not holding page and pick blindly at strings. Avoid a programmatic beat.)
-*-
Room 3
In the room
a television,
two armchairs.
(Sofas are for sitcoms.)
He rubs
his socks
together.
She rustles
crisp packets.
(notes for reading: Point dramatically, as if declaiming, at various members of audience. Nod vigorously at end of each sentence. If no audience point to objects within room.)
-*-
Room 4
The young woman
lies naked on the bed
and masturbates.
Confident
that she cannot be seen
she stretches out
her free arm, raises
her hips,
imagines herself
being watched.
(notes for reading:- Through a battery-operated megaphone in a municipal car park. Best to background of silver light rising off a river and to the squabbling of ducks.)
-*-
Room 5
In the room
is a table,two chairs.
The woman
walks past the table,
says “Tell me.”
Back again.
“Tell me.”
The man stares down
at his empty plate,
feels pain because
he cannot let himself
say
what she wants to hear.
(notes for reading:- as if a translated text. Imagine fir trees weighted with snow.)
-*-
Room 6
In the room
a woman sits among cushions,
legs curled under her,
a book in her lap.
A wall opens.
She turns a page.
(notes for reading:- Expect the knock on the door. Fear arrest, rumours of torture. Then, not being here, you will cease to exist here.)
-*-
Room 7
These walls are mirrors.
Oiled man
stands
to masturbate,
chin defiant,
self multiplied.
(notes for reading:- Strike a triangle, or gong, before beginning reading. Finish reading before note has died. Strike once again.)
-*-
Room 8
A round white moon
diffuses through
the paper walls.
Young
and careless of her limbs
the woman
moves about the bed
the better to study
the baby asleep.
Every fingernail is examined,
every eyelash curve measured.
Even I
– before I was grown and despised –
even I
was once looked upon
with such
breath-held tenderness.
(notes for reading:- In order to counter sentimentality inherent in subject, using the hand not holding the page, place thumb over ear flap and finger on one nostril. Listen to own voice, not to what it is saying.)
-*-
Room 9
Under the bright white lights
of this room is green foliage.
Scissors and can in hand
the man moves
from plant
to plant,
each shuffling step
shadowed by
his anxious
half-blind dog.
(notes for reading:- Stand on a mustard-coloured loose pile carpet in a closed-sound acoustic. At end of poem, after a moment’s pause, sing wordlessly falsetto.)
-*-
Room 10
In the tiled room a bath.
In the bath hot water.
In the hot water a body.
In the head a funnel.
Into the funnel
is being poured
other pasts,
other futures.
(notes for reading:- Inflexion on second syllable of each line, rest of line flat. At end of poem lay down page and slowly applaud any listeners.)
Scenes from a Country Life
South Devon
England Once
Any farming village is a map of territory:
all know who is responsible for what wall,
which side of which hedge. To not be
shouted at, keeping to public paths, England
once was a line of tide-stranded yachts
each tipped onto its white-bellied side.
The creek’s grey glistening mudbanks
were sectioned by saturated ropes – tied to
shoreline branches or through hooped roots.
Behind the overflowing stone-curved dam
England once was a red church tower floating
in light above a green receding millpond.
And up the steep hill, flicking stick in hand,
England once was a walking slowly behind
rust-matted Devon cows, their fly switch
of tail, slap and splatter
of green-black dung. Invited in
to the wet-floored shippen – to be lulled
by the zing-zing of warm milk into
a galvanised pail; startled by
an angle-squirted teat; and ducking and
giggling away – because that was what
was expected of me. England once.
The Naming
Sunday afternoon walks – out along
Clay Park, on the ‘subsiding’ road above
the green Mill Pond, looking down through oaks
to a huge swans’ nest in the marsh – she told
(mostly for the benefit of my ‘foreigner’
father) who lived in which house above
the road, who had lived there before,
who owned which bit of wood. Untidy gardens,
airs and graces, got scoffed at. Stories
were told of what had happened around which
corner of which lane, of where she had helped
her grandfather poach rabbits. My brother
and I ran ahead to be first to bounce
on the broken rail; were told to be
careful; and the name of this flower,
that bush, that bird. At Portbridge Cottages,
tadpole ponds over the wall opposite,
we turned back.
Some family walks took us out along
the muddy shore of Mill Creek; and, if
the tide was out, along to Stoke’n Pool
with its beech trees and ‘shaky’ grass. From
there we could get home via Duncannon.
Another walk was down Hoyle Lane and
up to the ‘hamlet’ of Aish. Other Sunday
strollers were walking stick saluted, their
children – hair water-slicked like ours – also
ran on ahead, or scuffed moodily behind.
A discreet distance past, their name was
whispered, village histories sniffed at. And,
each time, the same field reminded her
of a comic incident with a tractor,
got laughed at again. On reaching the dark
under the fir trees of Aish, if dry, we came
back across the fields, each with a name.
Chores
In any wire-fenced chicken run the yellow claws
will soon flatten and scratch out every green, living
thing; until all that is left will be packed earth,
rat burrows and a black creosoted shed balanced
on old bricks. Under there is where the bait cage is
– flour is flavour of the year here and,
when remembered,
replenished. The red hens, regardless, cluck and strut.
Weekends,
cuffs and collar tightly buttoned, wellies to my knees,
less than four feet tall, I bend to shovel-scrape compacted
chickenshit from the boards below the three
mud-nobbled perches. Face squeezed, I try not to breathe in
the ammonia reeking from the broken crust. Finished,
I shake out grey lice powder and yellow straw.
Mornings,
throwing dusty corn to the fluffed-out flock, I collect
eggs from the straw-padded laying boxes, always hold
onto the one newly laid, still warm. And there,
bristling in its trapped circle, tail following it around,
is a grey-brown rat. Fetching a fork, I lift the cage
by its mesh, carry it to the rainwater tub, drop it in
and push it under, wait for the bubbles to stop rising
through the green water, breathe again. The cage is left
beside the fence – for my father or brother to
empty. I take the eggs to the kitchen, count them
into the larder’s egg tray, tell of the rat, go to school.
Village Thin Skin
Crossing any field from A to B
I felt the farmer’s eyes on me
jealous of his territory.
Farmhands watched too, chins lifted out of curled collars,
leather boots and thick belts shaped to their nicknames.
“I seen you.” The power was theirs,
they had watched me unawares.
To see is to know.
To linger watching is to possess the secret of their being.
To be watched is to be found out.
Houses were watchers, windows were eyes:
not wanting to advertise
my heel-dragging loneliness, I hurried to stiles.
“I seen you.” The power was theirs,
they had watched me unawares.
To see is to know.
To know without the watched knowing
is to gain in importance over them.
I didn’t want my solitude broken,
spent afternoons intently alone. Going home
I’d see across a valley a couple squinting,
know-alls with narrow minds, hear the words spoken.
“I seen you.” The power was theirs,
they had watched me unawares.
Dog Day
The brown dog found us at the stone stile. My own dog was a round-bellied black and white terrier who had a big silly grin and a stiff white tail always erect – above a pair of swaggering balls like hairy pink cherries. We spent a childhood together in fields and woods by a saltwater river. Usually my dog fought or shagged any dog that came close. Had a reputation for it. (In the road outside the village pub he and a black spaniel got the bite on the other’s back and rotated in a slow snarling circle. Men from the pub threw cider dregs over them and laughed at their yelping. Weeping I had washed the blood and vinegar stink off him in the river.) This day, though, the brown dog ran down the field with mine laughing into his face, turned and ran back with him. I took off with them, every wolfboy’s dream, a member of the pack. We leapt the stile at the bottom of the field, splashed through a thin stream, loped along foxtrails by a long marsh of yellow reeds, went panting and scrabbling up the diagonal path in the steep woods above the creek, left our claw marks in the soft red mud. Emerging into light at the top of a big sloping field I took a breath, bared my throat and howled my happiness. We bounded down to the river shore. I threw sticks. My dog swam after them. The brown dog paddled yapping in the shallows. The tide ebbed, left too much grey mud between us and the water. Wearily, heads nodding, we climbed the hills to home. The brown dog tried to come into our gate, wouldn’t go away. My dog, seeing me throw stones at it, attacked the brown dog. Tail curved between its legs the brown dog left slowly, looking back at us.
Somerset
Rooks
They organise themselves differently to us,
send out scouts and boundary markers,
stand in trees and shout across fields.
Then from out the ancient wood,
calling to one another,
come flotillas to set out demarcation lines on
the day’s feeding fields.
Three latestarters, sky’s clowns, play games,
dive and tumble one over the other.
On a winter’s day
on a frosted field sloping up
to a sky of translucent blue
a flock of pink sheep has, overnight,
trampled a patch of green.
As if the sheep’s black faces have fallen off
the flock of rooks goes walking in among
the pink sheep on the patch of green.
(This is not for our benefit.
To amuse us, I believe, is not their intent.)
On a flat triangular field
on a breezy day the lift and descent
of the flock is like the black notes of a piano taken wing,
a visible melody.
(Windier days see torn blackpaper acrobatics.)
Rooks
on single flight paths,
or in staggered pairs,
proceed on errands.
(This is surmise.)
Five rooks in floating conversation
come together, collide, and drift apart.
On occasion,
in small stands of trees,
subgroups of rooks try to take charge,
flap about and shout.
Single rooks go off grumbling,
doing as they are told.
(This also is surmise.)
They return later,
drop to the feeding ground with
a stately glide and a single flap,
glide and flap.
Rooks indisputably enjoy the air,
take soaring pleasure in any wind,
turn cartwheels through the sky.
And it’s a scientific fact that leatherjackets
(larvae of the cranefly)
form the mainstay of their diet.
Come early evening
and the inside of an autumnal oak
is a-swarm with a society of rooks
whose excited cawing is like the clacking
of a piano’s unstrung notes.
This is but one meeting place
prior to the rookery’s dusk congregation.
They organise themselves differently to us.
Into The Dawn
Into the dawn,
evolving out of flight,
wings whistling with the strain of keeping,
yet, airborne,
long necks stretched forward
in panic and trepidation,
with effortful elegance
come two pink swans
crossing the acred concrete
of a six lane motorway.
morning
In the cleavage of a twilit valley
a white mist lies like light itself.
Ferns bareknuckle up through the musky earth.
day
A buzzard’s falling cry
lifts a white face to the wide open sky.
evening
In a single garden the light is cancelling itself,
photon by photon.
A slim woman with grey curls stoops
to the face of a white rose
her head tilted as if for a kiss.
She ducks from a half-seen bat,
its flight erratic as an insect’s.
night
Shooting stars are sudden white scratches
on a black enamel bowl.
Somerset
Advancing into sunlight is a cloud cliff
seven miles high
of golden hamstone
streaked diagonally with misty grey.
Before, and under, this precipice
is a small bright green place
astonished at its own existence.
Out of another day,
one of indeterminate greys,
comes an engine-voiced gale to ripple slates,
send them whirling to the ungiving concrete.
Mere storms though can’t shift us,
not property developers, nor lack of prospects
(our windows are yard-bounded):
car and motorway occasionally tempt us away;
but here we stay
stubborn as roots.
This is a flat land of flat fields
separated by steepsided hills,
often wooded,
with more flat fields on top,
or yellow moors.
The two altitudes make double the seasons.
Clouds can stream up the hills
to thousands of feet above the hilltops
and there they too level out,
soggy replicas of the hills below.
Or, on the dry vale floor,
waiting for buses,
we watch sallow clouds
drizzle along the runnelled hills.
Pylon cables go looping through overlooked valleys.
Most valleys though are mere creases among fields
secret as snowdrops.
Deep in their woods
twisted oaks and tumbled rocks
are covered in dense green moss
soft and moist.
Halse Water Encounter
On a sharp stone stream bed,
silted red,
I come wading
– through the yellow-pennied shade
of alder, beech and ash.
A coot water-runs
from the cover of a ripple-trailing
bramble thicket
to the iron bar bolt-hole
of underwashed roots.
Surprised,
a heron springs into air
grey neck and yellow beak
aimed at sky
wings angled to press
beat upon beat
up between the high trees,
feet trailing drips….
Gone.
Comes,
shape-changing on the water,
a smear of white faeces.
July Showers
Cold drops break
on bare legs,
burst into dark dots
on thin fabrics.
Instantly wet paths
flick grittily back up
off loose heels.
Martins wheel,
feeding in the lee wall
of wind-fluffed trees,
go swooping up to
the eaves-brown idiot grins
of their mud-knobbled nests.
Rainbows tremble
along the underside
of leaf-hanging drips.
A sky-fish flock of doves
goes
flickering
this way, that.
Sheltered, watching
– from the safety of time:
death
a billion heartbeats away
we wait out
the showers
aware of
our breathing.
Pressure On The Skull
under dark clouds this flat land
offers itself up to a storm
which doesn’t come
on this steamy wet day
chestnut tree domes
have traffic cone blooms
and the song of the dove goes
slow
slow
double slow
summertime raggedy crow
lets slip flat black notes
fat grey pigeons flounder
on whiskery seas
of half-fattened ears
inert water in a tank
tastes of earth and blue sky
and fails to refresh
Screens
…the traffic,
behind the birdsong and the buzz of insects
always the summer hum and rumble of traffic;
here,
before pointless onrushing journeys,
below ceiling of larktwitter, it is
the myriad smallnesses that amaze
– the astonishing ordinariness
of a dragonfly’s compound eye,
or a fat strawberry,
wasp-cratered apple,
husk of a spider-sucked bluebottle.
Another Drought
Church spire stretches to a high sky. Two tussling sparrows become suspended mid-fight above a ragged hedge. The few soft clouds along the horizon mimic ice cream mountains. Pronged hoofs of panicked sheep make muted thunder on the baked earth.
Red dust settles.
A bee’s wings rattle inside a drooping foxglove. Privet bush sits in a pool of perfume. In the newly turned earth pink worms have become knotted into little balls. Wasps peck at the hot dry wood of the shed – for particles to repair their dug open paper nest.
A bullfinch’s call gets confused with the wheelbarrow’s squeaking wheel. With mute patience a black cat waits under limp bushes, its ears leaf-pointed shadows. A grey and white pigeon flies across the far corner of the yellow field, and goes into the green/black woodland.
The dairy parlour brickwork has been cowhide polished.
In the cool dark of indoors I can feel the throb of my own existence. A mosquito sounds its warning siren.
The Thoughtless, The Peace Breakers
Purple heather and yellow gorse commingled
make a discoloured bruise of the Quantocks.
Hounds and horses with cleft behinds go
rumps and breath steaming up a combe.
Beside mud-spattered landrovers farmers,
in belted raincoats, blue eyes exploding
from faces of raw liver watch for
the white bob of a panicked deer, quick
bracken ginger of a fox frightened
out of cover.
(What does one death more
matter to a mass-murderer?)
Cumbria
Wordsworth Country
faraway mountains and hills
all of a singular blue
the air as soft and dry
as a child’s dutiful kiss
in this
the every year miracle of spring
sprays of white blackthorn
and gorse spears of yellow
on the edge of birch woods
twig ends en masse
a purplish haze of new buds and
the smoky glow of ribbed grey trunks
amongst the unmannerly growth
of creepers and vines
in their greed and fight
for the uppermost light
settled gulls are white right-angled
triangles in a sloping field and
in the track behind the farm’s
concrete panelled sides
ground-feeding sparrows
display the same rapid this-way-that look
of old folk trying to cross a busy road
with doves already collared and paired
in parks and gardens green shoots are
forcing their way from pruned branches
all is affirmative
even the insipid daffodils beside
the too-green bowling green and more
below every village road sign
daffodil overkill
In Wordsworth’s Footsteps
Expecting inspiration from mountain walking
what I got mostly
was wet feet.
The Factory Floor
On the far side of a flat
and overcropped field
– part pattern of islanded molehills
among thread-veined sheeptracks –
is the languid white-grey
against an ivy-dark column
of a single woodpigeon’s wings.
In the adjacent field, hoof-pitted,
the thin rear shanks of holstein calves,
– up to their hocks in cocoa mud,
box heads sunk in damp hay –
encircle a galvanised carousel.
Clatter of a half-dozen
woodpigeons taking fright
scatter out the ivy tower.
ling drip and moss dribble
becomes a gravel-twisted
silver thread
add side trickle and
drip from ragged peat
and stone will shape the stream
as stream will shape the stone
steeper and deeper
will quicken the flow
and stone will shape the stream
while stream shapes the stone
and pours in song
over water-smoothed rock
as stone shapes the stream
and stream shapes the stone
to fall in whoosh and whispers
into the edges of tea-dark pools
spilling over and taken on
by contour and gravity
as stone shapes the stream
and stream shapes the stone
Prior to the Gathering
Above the white-roofed summer camp
of the County Show an early flight
to Malaga traces a bubbling crease
across the blue sky and,
from further down the broad valley,
a farmer shouts in his cattle.
Along the main road a shift-worker’s car
comes, and goes. And, as a glaring sun rises
above the smudge-dark hills, white midges,
warmed,
begin to lift from the glistening bracken.
The sharp-beaked brethren – warbler,
chiff-chaff, tit and wren – start to thread
their day’s way through trees and hedgerow,
picking the tiniest of insects from the matt
underside of leaves. One young round rabbit
looks out through an arch of wet grass.
This Morning
A new day green and fresh
has white turbine blades
neatly chopping the air,
briefly sectioning
the blue-grey sky behind.
But the vacancy
of an unremembered dream
haunts this morning,
and the greenhouse
smells of cooked earth.
Are Human Beings Perfectible?
cause: his is born of both
exasperation and concern
A charity family from the holiday flats
pinched white city face
of the failure-to-thrive child,
young mother and father’s thin limbs
in ill-fitting synthetic fabrics
get yelled at by the farmer,
redder than usual in the face,
for walking through the young crop
recently sprayed.
consequence: theirs, again, born of
not knowing, is the sullen
resentment of victimhood
Beginnings
In the sloping field beside the three-year weeds,
buddliea and brambles
of the part-occupied Business Park
the dark double tracks
of a muck-spreader are
spotted with white gulls.
A hill along are weaned fresians
equally spaced, and seeming to stand,
nose-to-ground, statue still.
While lower down a single black crow
haunts the linked sheepfields
on the lookout for fresh afterbirth.
Between Lakes
A totem of the past, on one green bank
the stone pier of an old railway bridge
now a pile of pale grey boulders that supports
only grass tufts, ferns and clumps of moss;
also over there, behind some trees, a once farmhouse
freshly painted white; while this side, from holes
in the low clay cliff, brown sand martins slip out
across the flat wide river that runs clear and
deep here, just a few upswelling ripples, light
curved on its surface with, in the dark below,
weed tresses mimicking the river’s flow.
The insect-feeding martins soar, dip and skim;
and a practising warplane drives a tight arc,
enforcing and enclosing all in its raucous bowl.
Near Isel
The Derwent flows fast and straight here, a long trough of a river. On the slope to the farmtrack above is an almost square hayfield. Having started along this top hedge the tractor is mowing in squares, each almost-square smaller than the last. The mown field is pale and marked off with frames of dark mounded lines, each frame smaller than the last. The remaining uncut almost-square is a deeper mottled green. Swallows and sand martins are swooping to the midges that have been driven up, with gulls and crows flying in to feast on the bigger, mower-chewed beetles. A curlew’s nest has been exposed. The parent curlews, mewling, dive again and again in an attempt to drive the crows away from their (still alive?) chicks. The crows, intent on their meal, don’t even duck. The curlews, seeing their chicks carried off, leave crying before the tractor has completed another square.
North Devon
“The dearness of common things…”
(Ivor Gurney)
Death close escaped, death nearby anticipated, puts a value on those things that pass through this one life to the next. And then we want to say, yes, we too have been witness to this, we too are a part of the great communion. We too have noted the shoulder-sleeping shape of English hills. And, yes, we too have seen the leaves of domed trees, wind-pressed, all showing underside silver; and seen too the rippling fur of uncut hay. Yes, we too have heard, and squinted to find, the lark singing high, challenging the sky. And yes, we have lingered to watch this lark flutter to earth, then scurry head down through the every-way grass. And yes, we too have remarked upon the stone-chink chime of jackdaws, the rasping-out call of the black crow. And we too have scuffed through copper-bedded woods of beech. And, yes, we have both seen and heard the squirrel, aquiver on a slender branch, croak-barking out its territory. And, yes, we have leant close to inhale the subtle scent of daffodils. And often we have turned from the ever-corrupt world of men to plant our feet on high moorland, to breathe there the clear air; and, alone, to pretend to talk back, in a bubbling growl, to the pair of ravens come to inspect us. And yes, dazed with sun stupor, we have gazed up at cliff-bank dollops of mauve thrift and yellow vetch, watched the languid flight of a crooked flock of gulls. And, yes, we too have held between thumb and forefinger the waxy lustre of a single chunk of chalcedony, and we too have looked into autumn glowing through the worn soap of that stone. Yes, we want to tell those who may follow, yes I too was once alive. I too touched, felt, knew this. Welcome.
One Day in Four Numbered Paragraphs
1) A grey lilac-scented morning in May – no wind, just the waiting heaviness of rain – and, in this pre-rain, 3D clarity, two magpies are quarrelling, like scholars, over the pink and red of some squashed roadkill.
2) Between squalls both magpies – bottle-green sheen on their black wings – fly across the deep combe at precisely the same altitude. Beside a steep pasture one perches white-breasted on a wind-slanted, compacted hawthorne, goes from branch to branch to keep at the same height as its mate; who, hopping in among four clumps of gorse, pauses to heed the rattle of the lookout’s commentary – now on a slouch-bellied ewe plodding to her extinction.
3) Afternoon sees three soaring buzzards slotted into a cloud-formed sky, with – down here – a gusting wind. One magpie fluffs out the skirt of herself to settle on the lee perch of a churchyard cypress. Her mate, walking the path of gravestone slabs, has his long black tail blown elegantly askew. Feral cats dwell in among these stone houses of the dead.
4) Still of evening has the pair of magpies sat side by side, two commas on a phone line. By her weatherboard nest a hen sparrow uses a plastic gutter as a beak wipe. The dense blue twilight of a deepening room holds the brown-gold glow of a single candle and, seated, a black-haired woman in a ruby dress.
Pulse-Taker Out Of Touch
To movement we assume life, to life
reason of a kind, at least
a rationale. The push of waves to
shore, though, is patently mindless.
Yet each breaking wave does
ask a question of the shore.
Beneath this clifftop perch
the grey-backed falcon flies
a straight line. A pair of ravens
meanders by,
their languid conversation
seeming to query the past.
A sudden chirruping flock
of finches passes comment
only on the present.
All achievements disregarded, we stare
into the void: this is a slow life,
watching the tides, and
forgetting them.
Towards Dust
Moisture is essential to organic life. Even within the dry carapace of a wasp or a fly, their shells as brittle and thin as onion skin, molecular wet is required for internal transmission. Web-trapped and bound, that goo is the life that spiders extract.
Old people, in their diminution of possibilities, own a desire to repair and re-invent their storied pasts. Even to revisit the settings. But all, all is changed. And they lament the passing of the once taken-for-granted familiar – houses now where there were farms and barns, roads where there were fields and flowers. And they sigh over another childhood, imagined and more recent than their own, now also gone.
Rocked on the bus the child sits back in the grandparent’s lap, full porous skin alongside a netted weave of parchment.
Here
The adventurous seek out their places to die,
the climber his cliff-face, the biker his bend.
In this high terrain, where broken cloud-base
hangs over a mountain flank, black granite
sheer to green valley bottom with no horizon;
on this one path the past saw only men
about some errand; stockman or shepherd,
pilgrim or merchant, a messenger even,
or a straggle of soldiers…
It needed an urgent mission for any
to be out in such weather; wind flattening
around corners, wet hitting rock
and man; necks shortened, round-shouldered,
closed into themselves, single will given
to going forward…
Not someone here for recreation, for
the exhilaration of being here, of being able
to say, later, they were here.
See also 1st 10 pages ‘apostrophe combe’ https://samsmithbooks.weebly.com/first-few-poetry-pages.html
Wales
National Instrument
Cables from gantries go
singing through mountain gorges.
Resonant bog and cliff-face sounding board
make of the land one vast aeolian harp..
Inside the low cloud
all airs
are underscored by
a monochromatic buzz.
Rhinog Fawr
Among bracken green or ginger
black rocks whiten dry. Earth’s bones
breaking through – shoulderblade escarpments,
knuckled outcrops and vertebrae ridges
piled one atop the other,
the lower painted with heather.
Here houses built of mountain rock,
blisters with angles they hunker
free of outside ornament
ducking the clutching wind.
Within clouds, imprisoned by the weather,
only their habits for company,
here grow the gentle madnesses
that come from mountain solitude.
Mouths that do not open between meals,
or only to chirp endearments to a pet,
maybe make sarcastic riposte to a mantel photo,
come to be surprised by an answer,
astounded by an interruption.
Here where the moss grows
and the wind blows cold or wet,
but always blows;
here innocentfoibles are formed,
a nation’s character shaped.
Sand and Grass
Below the sky-perforated castle,
even after the day’s storm,
still there is the susurating
whisper of silica; a blinding
sting of blown sand that pricks
into rain-softened faces.
This cloud-formed evening
flat grass and cliff castle wall
are enclosed by a landward
horizon of purple-humped mountains
and a long beach lined with
thrown-back rubbish.
Sharp grass tufts, like an idiot’s
uncombed crown, cling on to
sand-whisped dune crests.
On compacted pathways,
back among the grass wet dunes,
glistening black slugs come foraging.
In hollows
campers cough
through the walls
of their tents
which are
crystal-silvered
with criss-cross trails.
Sea Change
Tar is oil emulsified, khaki-coloured,
makes soft round boulders and
caked dung rivers among rubble
defences. Terns, folded paper birds,
nest on a grey pebble drift
off Prestatyn, feed on silver fish
from a sea of scudding cocoa. Winds
wet and cold bend sharp grasses. Salt
pricks into pores. Skull houses
get seen into and blown through. No
future here. Pasts of our own
are precious few.
Grass
the cleverness of grass
to grow where it does
slabs of stone
can be slapped flat
on naked soil
and grass will grow
from under
spread over
singlebladed leaves
will colonise ledge
and wall crevice
soften every crack
stood on
it bends
bitten
it comes again
oh the cleverness of grass
to grow how it does
Impacts
Out of the crossed wires of dislocated lives,
misconnections of my being, I can remember
every place I’ve seen a fox and every pool
I’ve swum naked in. At close of my eyes too
a meadowbrown butterfly sits
astride an orange marigold and,
to its own metabolic pulse,
I watch it wink its wings.
Latifolia : looking for answers
In this land among clouds I am my own dog
take myself for walks among drop-jewelled sedge
pause on deep forest tracks
under tall lodgepole pines
white mist gathering around and among
the tubular trunks
their grey-scabbed bark
Moss-quiet
I peer – nose forward – into spaces between
Soft-stepping…
…on pythagorean patterns
in pine needle drifts and
the trodden down fronds
of brown bracken
to the sides mist-held grasses
above
silver drops
slowly undersliding black power lines
and just audible
the mushy purr
of the alder-hidden river
shushing over rock
after rock…
Sam Smith books & blog, plus The Journal 