from Blackwater Quartet, selection 63

Mapping the River

Tell me how the days went down.

I remember the chimes at home— in those days

we lived nearly under the steeple of St. Paul’s.

I remember a bell that could be heard for miles,

and it shook the earth.

That diva note drifts through the new Jerusalem,

serenades our present state.

Grime degrades the sculpted stone sprawled

lionlike on the pedestal, ash of lost causes,

pretty patterns in a sari-whorl of sky.

The past is far enough. It is yesterday and now,

the rocking-horse rhythm of the day,

cornflower blue for the sparrow as it spires,

sprung from invisible fashionings of air

rent with that rocketing.

How shall half a century answer? A driven life

without tomorrows, the spill of sacrifice through time,

every Jesus needs a Judas, every Judas

a knotted rope: how else coax April

from the chilly coverts?

I am mindful of the weather. The boil of clouds

invites events into our lives— rain, arrow winds

off German Bite, the gales

succulent with sea salt and storm tides’

greedy scoop of beach and cliff.

Near Clacton, a Junkers dumping bombs

against dwindling fuel, the near-miss

then a parade of quiet shops unlucky—

the Hurricanes scramble to the radar,

riddle tail-fin swastikas above cold green seas.

A fishing smack hauls up the bodies,

the pilot, twenty-two, from Hamburg,

in the wreckage the snapshot blonde

dragged down with the others: whose girl,

whose wife commiserates with corpses?

That same beach now— trippers wade and paddle,

windbreak canes and cardigans; perhaps we won.

We note in the margins the brassplate rigour,

our finest hour replete with carpark passes.

Is it really fifty years and now tomorrow?

The flyers are buried in yew shade, easy

with the English dead, among limestone slips

with Georgian dates of death and birth,

hand in hand with parish saints

to serve and suffer without complaint.

When we were children, time slipped away

in the cricket dark, under heavy scent of earth,

summer, and late to bed.

The plane tree sloughed its curl of bark

for ships that sailed the mill pond lanes.

Time the river, sentiment of perspective,

time the failed foothold, peacock plans

disappearing on the current—

how shall we serve, and what defend

when knaves are shuffled with suited kings?

Zigzag gables connect the houses.

The Thames is matted in our hair, Ganges

a cupped palm, China’s gold-weight bangle

and the Mississippi’s tangle of upstream life

stream down, a psalm of ooze, a tune less debonair.

I row into the wreckage, through the scum of oil

a face, a boy’s face and the body rolls and sinks,

coy to meet the grapnels. It is my own face.

This fisher life is charged, cast

along a coveted anonymity.

All those years, balanced on my own reflection,

a reality poised on briefest light, sky

painted on water and firefly stars

dripping from the oars, time we teased

from nothing, remains unknown.

Again the hook, the catch-net keep

where broad trees overhang the banks:

tell me how the days went down. The anchor’s pull

on painted planks proves the limit of the deep,

a satin deadcalm stuttering with rain.

Thirteen

Thirteen people enter a room; after three days only twelve come out alive, and the room itself is empty.

Fundamental applications of law and religion would suggest that either the remaining twelve persons have killed and devoured the thirteenth, e.g., murder and cannibalism, or conversely that the thirteenth was the Christ, e.g., death and resurrection.

Hindu gods are not gods in the Graeco-Roman tradition, or like those of the Norse for example. Rather, instead of God, as a deity, they seek to demonstrate a sense of metaphysical speculation through principles represented by deities who are in turn philosophical concepts behind the great happenings and processes of nature.

In Bhutan, there are prayer wheels the size of Volkswagens rotating steadily, their inscribed prayers spooling heavenwards. And too,  there are enormous feather flags, also so-inscribed, and as they flutter in the clear mountain air, the messages drift smoke-like along the high peaks of the world.

Thirteen people enter a room; after three days only twelve come out alive, and the room itself is empty.  

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 62

Engaging Venus

Oboes quail-cry. The music leans into a risen ether.

Low notes rupture, a softness

of flesh on razor wire. Are you listening?

The shape of your pulse is made and handled.

It supports the roof. The lawnmower chugs with it.

The universe spills across the table.

I suggest blue to match your eyes, blue paler

than the late sky’s crust of blue, a lateness of blue

engaging Venus: a held breath and then the night.

Money counted into stacks, wobbly coin chimneys

anticipate the city where I died. I lose count

of the cities, conquer karma, goldfish suns.

We ride up-country. The map is in my head.

The snow swirls. Which way now? Each shadow

longs for a name, hangs hawkish in the wind.

The mind is changed, courted. I confess, the stars

in my care have disappeared; nothing else of interest.

Pinwheel galaxies trail ghostly light, bright bangles snuffed.

Fields burn, smoking stubble stinking as it blackens.

Field-hands man the firebreaks. One man, asleep,

sinks in an ocean, hears no blazing birds.

Suitcase on the landing, the house folded with the shirts,

life is full of such extravagance. A house not there

and still these rarefied excursions: whatever next?

Wanderer

It was reported recently that a giant planet was observed in interstellar space, that is, outside or beyond any attendant galaxy. Further, it's postulated that there are likely to be many others which, in the colossal violence of solar system formations, have been ejected either through direct collision with other early planets, or as a result of gravitational upheaval where several planets swing wildly through a system,  in much the same way that Jupiter once occupied a place nearer the sun in our own system before orbiting to the farther reaches of the Milky Way, disrupting all before it.

It's odd to think of these wanderers (the original meaning of the word, planet) without sunrise or sunset, with rotations de-synchronized if they occur at all, perhaps not unlike a leaf blown away from the tree, aimless, settling, unsettling.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 61

Mother and Son

For thirty years

the two returned to summer on the lakes.

The road from Florence was the same,

and the villages little changed.

Across the old town to the shore,

views from favourite rooms remained

true to sunny postcard photographs.

August warmed Isola Bella.

A tulle of peacock terraces frilled the pink palazzo,

but already the azaleas faded north to Switzerland.

On the garden table, a book of English poems

reread until the spine’s weave parted

and the pages fell in random patterns,

metred stanzas shuffled with vers libre;

they spoke the poems aloud, from memory.

The ritual of the weeks continued

with languid lunches in the copper light,

the letters to the friends they shared

offering insights of their time away together,

but the news they posted mirrored each to each

in careful, looping signatures.

In the last week they travelled to Milan,

window-shopping in the Quadrilatero.

They admired the triumph of Versace’s lines,

the noise of colour tailored to the human form.

In the courtyard of the Palazzo di Brera,

the shadow lengthened from the sundial bronze

and disappeared beneath the colonnade.

They drifted through museum art

from Baroque to the metaphysical.

At closing, an attendant coughed discreetly.

They left discussing Carlo Carrà,

his figures and objects bathed in light

somehow remote from the pictured room,

frozen postures where faces should have been.

The mannequin reticence empowered the canvas

with a fuse of expectation, a sense of urgency

they found difficult to describe.

Obit

A old friend of mine wrote recently that his biggest fear was that when he died his wife would sell all his guitars for what her told her he had paid for them.

The same concerns could be applied to poems. One's own writing, for all its qualms and second-guessing of subject and technique 'at orgin', has value. The issue isn't disputed, but the extent of value is subjective, and one over which the writer has no control. One may as well be dead, for all the influence one might exert upon a reader as to one's preferences or intent.

From this afterlife, upon the floorboards of the room above, a ghost, pacing.

 

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 60

Machine in a Landscape

(the Magnox Station at Bradwell, from Mersea Island)

The shore recedes in mist

and rocky crenulations.

The low meadow slips soundlessly beneath the tide,

disturbing our sense of distance.

Skies slide seaward

without explanation. A flight of wildfowl shuns

the margins, uncertain of direction.

We stand perfectly still.

The fogbank thins.

A tissue of weakened light undulates

to footfall on shingle, the eyelid’s movement

where compasses stall.

The siren insouciance of the undertow remains.

The dogs run ahead, barking at nothing—

bedraggled later, walking to heel,

soon wary of the waves.

The rococo sea-slap wets terrier fringes.

The shutters of the beach hut hang hingeless,

the hinges illusory, a cobweb of choke wire,

cut net, all the sea saves

for later usage, our presence here

our only offering.

The day is discovered in pools the dawn pinks,

in shattered spars at ebb tide,

the vegetable universe

triumphant,

totem shadows strutting clockwise with the sun.

Out on the flats a whelker spades.

The figure sinks into the lees,

digging down, down.

The island turns and turns again, but cannot run.

From the centre of the world,

we look up and wave,

tireless in our manner, diggers of the well or grave

prefiguring nirvana.

This half-life outlives us.

The thug of time is barking down a hole. Shadows

melt and run.

At the centre of the world, X-ray figures shrug.

Between the Sea and the Sky

I used to live on an island on the Essex coast. I wrote all of the book cycles Blackwater Quartet and Relic Environments Trilogy while living there. I would walk along the beach and look out across the mud flats and dull landscape, considering poems or lines of poems (The cold winds and mist have a direct effect on a poetic mind.).

Just across the inlet stands, near Bradwell village, a Magnox power station. It's presence, even in its decommissioned phase, looms against the lowering sky. Built in the 1950s, it was one of a generation of its type salted along the shore around the British coast.

We islanders were pleased when it was announced a few years ago that the station was to be taken out of the National Grid. Although it would take years to decommission, returning the shore to its original condition sans reactor was seen as the way forward environmentally.

Last year, the British Government announced that it was devolving the construction of a new generation of reactors to the Chinese. The site near Bradwell was one of the areas marked for re-development.

Also near Bradwell is the ruin of an ancient Christian church - a chapel - dating from around the sixth century. It was probably built on the site of an earlier Roman shrine. The building is spare in dimension, with just the small stonework perimeter still to be seen, and roofless. It was founded by St Cedd, who came from another island far to the north, to convert the heathen here.

The presence of the ruin is as significant as that of the reactor, not in size certainly, or in measurable energy or data, but by the fact that it represents Time, Time folded and folded in on itself until it begins to pulse and to radiate along the dull shore and the dull clouds, through the air that hangs motionless between, like a name we once knew but now can't quite recall.