OMBRES
de nous-mêmes
ANCIENS

April in Paris
John Donne has indigestion
pines for words from the Isle of Wight

"...whether I be
increased by a child or
diminished by the loss of a wife..."

his baby is born
dead
his wife lives

words...words
these creatures
made of ink

he begins his Anniversaries
Elizabeth Drury becomes a symbol
for the death of youth and beauty

Ben Johnson scorns
such
extreme lamentation

"If it had been written of
the ****** Mary
...it had been something!"

"...she, she is dead; she's dead:
how wan a ghost
this our world is..."

"the imputation of having said
so much
...to say as well as I could...

an Emperor is
about to be
elected

the busy old sun
rests for a moment in
an empty room

*

Being in Paris and like Mr. Donne suffering from a cold....only hundreds of years apart...so that he( and his life )entered my thoughts as I flâneur'd about the Paris of now and then so that the now and then and the then and now came together in my slightly out-of-kiltered mind.

INVISIBLE BLUE PLAQUES
(for Janice)

Someone or other
lived & died here.

Some other someone
wrote their most

famous work
there.

Every so often
a blue plaque informs us

as we journey
through town

(rain falling down)    

of Blah Blah
who blah’d & blah’d here

or was
blah’d there

... who cares?

In my mind
I ***** invisible
blue plaques

to commemorate
us.

Here: we kissed
(did we not?)    
...a mere minute ago.

Here: we turned
& laughed

on the corner of this everyday
road.

Here: we laughed
& hugged

on a pedestrian crossing

(a pedestrian
crossing)    

whistling at our
ardour

a taxi honking
at our armour.

All over London
our invisible
blue plaques

commemorate
us

&
that

we once
passed this way

so deeply
in love.

AND SO

a latch
shuts the night
out

a turn of key
puts the town
to rest whilst

outside a cat
and a milk bottle
gaze at the moon

yellow and overblown
and now Mr. Cat
with swish of tail

vanishes into the shadows
as the milk bottle
falls and rolls away

its note left
on the pavement.
Inside a clock has run out

of tick-tocks
until it is wound up
by a sleepy eyed man

so that
it speaks of
time again

the house dozes
the lawn yawns
everything is

just so
and so
....goodnight

MR. DADDY SOFT SOFT

Always her fascination with me
shaving.

This her early morning ritual
observing each action

as if it were holy.

I hide my face in foam.

“Santa Claus! Santa Claus!”
she chants

winces with delight as the razor
(she gulps)          

goes over my bump without
(gasp)slicing it off.

The shaving uncovers the me she knows.

“Soft…soft. . .Mr. Daddy Soft Soft!”
she gurgles in a lather of laughter.

“Me now…now me!” she pleads with me.


I take the brush…coat her reflection with foam.
I shave her…with the tip of my little finger.

Her reflection sniggers & she sniggers too.

Later, in the early evening
she appears  

bearded in fresh  cream.

She shaves herself with a lollipop stick.
“Me... Daddy now...see!”

I cha cha cha her on the tips of my toes
as she clings to my fingertips

the living room dances around us

One delighted half shaved little girl.

One delighted soft soft Mr. Daddy.

THE WIND WALKS AMONGST THE CHANDELIER

a chandelier
hung from a tree
the sunlight in love with it

"No room for it
in my little house
I thought I'd give it to the tree!"

"Well, have you ever
seen a chandelier hung from a tree?
No, well...there ya go!"

the tree looked happy
wearing its chandelier
as if it had grown it itself

a bird alights
on the tree's chandelier
a sunset caught up in it

*

It was strictly for the birds and the bees( and the tree)who seemed to love it...it was only a broken plastic thingy but the idea of hanging it on the tree was what made it work...it was very surreal like coming across a Dali painting but after a while you just accepted that...well...there it was...the wind liked playing with it too. All it takes is one man with one novel idea and there...ya go!

A friend has sent me a picture of a chandelier in a tree! Ha ha I thought this only existed in my memory of Ted in Cornwall! I hadn't a camera then and didn't write poetry so it just sort of languished there in my mind until it got jogged into recollection! We used to drink Mint Juleps under it and talk into the sunset. He used to have bottle trees as well so I thought the chandelier tree was just an extension of this. At night he would run an extension to it and it would just exist in the sky like a rather large firefly. I liked its daylight incarnation best as then it was strictly the tree's. Once electricity was added it became more ours...albeit a rather strange "ours' but still ours to drink mint juleps under until dawn lit a fire under it and it was time to go to bed.

"O, HOW SHALL SUMMER'S HONEY BREATH HOLD OUT""

each hive
a tiny planet
inhabited by bees

the beekeeper
looking for all the world
like a medieval astronaut

"God..." think the bees
coming in a puff of smoke
they fall silent

God takes off his face
throws down his gauntlets
becomes our father

"Good.." grins God
our father
"...that should do the trick!"

we watch the honeycomb
floating in its jar
fantastic as an alien being

the comb hangs above me
most of it drizzles into my mouth
the rest in eyes and hair

when father isn't looking
I put the cage on my face
pretend I'm a fencer

far away in a field
a bee
chatting up a flower

the bees and we all asleep
God's hand and face
a still life on the table

*
I wanted to get it from all perspectives...this simple job of work...from the bee's point of view to the kids to the dad and then the scene when all are tucked up in their beds...even God.

The title of course is stolen from Shakes's Sonnet 65

And of course...the bees...the dad..the kids...this particular summer whose "whose action is no stronger than a flower?" are saved from the might of time by....

O! none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

Alas I am not a beekeeper...this was told to me by a friend remembering growing up with her beekeeper dad as we flicked through her photo album after he was gone...the poem is a bric a brac hodge podge of the things she told me...the things I could see...you might have notice that one of God's hands is missing in the final verse...but that's another story. They were playing boats with the gauntlets in the river by the house and one of God's gloves just got...carried away! Daddy didn't know 'til the next day that one of his beekeeper gloves had gone to heaven and boy there was hell to pay!
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea
But sad mortality o’er-sways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O, how shall summer’s honey breath hold out
Against the wrackful siege of batt’ring days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong, but time decays?
O fearful meditation! where, alack,
Shall time’s best jewel from time’s chest lie hid?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
O, none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

Sonnet 65:
BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

THE KIND OF THINGS POETS THINK/DO

all its little life
the triangle longed to be
a circle

"I want to get around!"
it piped up
in its little Isosceles voice

"It's...it's preposterous!"
screamed his mother Scalenely
"...whoever heard of such a thing!"

"You should be proud of your lines!"
scolded its grandpa
Equilaterally

"A triangle can not be..."
said his Papa in a right angled kind of way
"...anything other than a triangle!"

"I always felt I was a circle
trapped inside
a triangle's body!"

one day a passing poet
eavesdropped in an idle moment
on what the lines were saying

"Why ever not...why
ever not" said the poet
poet chaps tend to think like that

so he erased the brave
little Isosceles
drew him again as a circle

"Wheee!"
laughed the former Isosceles triangle
delighting in its circle-ness

this is the kind of things
poets think of...

. . .poets do.



‘Art is nothing but this slow trek to discover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence [your] heart first opened.’

So said Camus...I never forgot my first circle and triangle and dodecahedron . I was sad I couldn't get the dodecahedron into the poem but then a poet is a person of many faces and facets so I guess it gets represented in this symbolic way.

A poet I guess, to be more precise, would more likely be a pyritohedron because it has an irregular pentagonal dodecahedron, having the same topology as the regular one but pyritohedral symmetry while the tetartoid has tetrahedral symmetry.

When one thinks that there are 6,384,634 topologically distinct convex dodecahedra, excluding mirror images—the number of vertices ranges from 8 to 20. (Two polyhedra are "topologically distinct" if they have intrinsically different arrangements of faces and vertices, such that it is impossible to distort one into the other simply by changing the lengths of edges or the angles between edges or faces)one can see the vistas that loom large in the eye of the poet and the choices constructed as stellations of the convex form. It's a kind of...I don't know... geometric degree of freedom with limiting cases ...ahhh you have to do it to understand it really. Now to get back to that Camus feeling about writing and the utter simplicity of the circle and how a triangle forms in the mind...it's a long slow trek.

But then as Nietzsche always was telling me, "Donal..."  he'd be forever saying:

"We have art so as not to die of reality!" or was it "We have art lest we perish from the truth." It was hard to make out his mumblings from under that grand moustache.

"Are you a moustache or a man?" I'd joke back at him.



How lots of things get written...trying to make it interesting for my little girl by "story-ing" so she could take it on board in an imaginative way. Just the simple task of teaching her how to draw circles and triangles by hand and without thought...just the pleasure of Klee's "taking a line for a walk." Not an explanation of mathematical thought...she was only five but a fun way to get her to know how these things form when a pencil wants to draw them...bonky or with a ruler. The story helped push her into knowledge slowly and with ease.