It was only in death that Brian became my little brother again. He was able to make his way in the world easier than I and became the solid, dependable honest fellow so that he was able to deal with anything the world could throw at him so that in fact he became the "big brother." I on the other hand became a PIP( a poor Irish poet )stumbling from one thing to another trying to keep up with the world that was fast outpacing me. He was going to go for early retirement and move back home to look after our Da when he suddenly died. This planned retirement made him more open to the leisures and pleasures of poetry and he began to want to know how a poem happens and where it can come from. I told him ya know in frosty air ya can see your breath writing your words upon the air as if your soul was leaving your body and dancing with the stars upon a midnight...well it's a bit like that...an organic becoming rather than any planned thing. Like a human spiderweb spun from your self. I said do you remember running away from me when you were a little boy and I called you back by putting the idea into your head that you might hit your head on a cloud? I  recited Ivor Gurney's IF I WERE TO WALK STRAIGHT SLAP and he so how it was so that you could grow the most ordinary little moment in a life into a bunch of words that hung together to capture in sound a time that was gone and would never come again in exactly the same way or that a poem was the best time machine a chap could have.

After a while he could recite Gurney back to me and so started to keep poems in his head like a little room he could go into and treasure a moment again.

IF I WERE TO WALK STRAIGHT SLAP

If I were to walk straight slap
Headlong down the road
Toward the two-wood gap
Should I - hit that cloud.

He also came to love Raymond Carver's LATE FRAGMENT. It always made him cry. This was the one and only thing he said he wanted. One night we waited in the dark for a fox that would invariably come to the glass door and stare if at us as if the other foxes dared him to...to see what humans do in their little boxes. And Brian asked it....

"And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth."

I wasn't to know that friend fox was a psychopomp come to carry his soul away.


Later much later he became a card carrying member of some Cloud Association! Once when he was only his tiny self he asked me if "You die will there be weather?" I didn't know how to answer him and asked "How do you mean?" "Like...will there be clouds." Knowing no better I assured him that there would be! I still know nothing and he possibly knows everything.
I only hitting my head upon the clouds...talking to the skies.



I hope my little brother knew that he was beloved on this earth.

It was the trope of Heaven as was expected...White bearded Big Guy etc., that didn't materialise. He survived his dying so to speak and this was his experience.

My own experience was one of the pain that passeth all understanding and at the instant where no more pain could fit into my tiny mind...the pain transformed into absolute bliss...the world simply fell away into nothingness.

But many there stood still
To face the stark, blank sky beyond the ridge,
Knowing their feet had come to the end of the world.
Marvelling they stood, and watched the long grass swirled
By the May breeze, murmurous with wasp and midge,
For though the summer oozed into their veins
Like the injected drug for their bones’ pains,
Sharp on their souls hung the imminent line of grass,
Fearfully flashed the sky’s mysterious glass.

Spring Offensive

BY WILFRED OWEN

And this is the follow up poem to HOSPITAL VISIT written because many were surprised that Death like Luck was a Lady. I thought I better describe her more in detail but it was hard to capture an entity that is not seen until one HAS TO see her.

Having had a heart attack and survived I thought I could make a go at least of describing her as surviving a heart attack is like a dry run for the real thing. A practice run so to speak.

From a wonderful workshop  from the very wonderful Anna Saunders she of Cheltenham Poetry Festival fame. This prompt about a place you didn't like which you then meet in a lift and the place/country makes you fall in love with it for some reason or other. It weren't half funny Mum and the prompt took me by the scruff of the imagination and gave my mind a Chinese burn and this poem...eh...happened.

The workshop was so much fun and laughter with a bevy of giggling poets all having a ball and enjoying themselves like mad. Way to go!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The meal afterwards was equally joyful and entertaining and daringly delightful. And sure didn't the poet's mother...one Sheila McEvoy steal my heart away. A fine company of poets we were enjoying our own company. Great fun and ourselves having it as they say in my part of the country.

https://youtu.be/U3MwdWPYqC8

https://youtu.be/8t2K_AovpAI

"Each element able to move, to stir, to oscillate, to come and go in its relationships with the other elements in its universe. It must not be just a fleeting "moment" but a physical bond between the varying event in life."

Alexander "Sandy" Calder, Comment réaliser l'art?", Abstraction-Création, Art-non Figuratif. 1932.

She nicknamed the tree "Sandy" and was her wont treating it as a living being. "I must go out and talk to Sandy!" she would say and leave us humans for conversation with a tree. I thought it was a good idea to introduce her to Art naturally and throw in mother nature herself for good measure.

("What shall I love if not the enigma?")


"beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella".

Comte de Lautréamont

Always fascinated with Stanley Spencer so I was enthralled to find myself in his village of Cookham...see his encrusted pallette...the dried up paint waiting patiently to be made into paintings...the old battered pram he pushed his paints and canvases along. Here was Stanley everywhere and nowhere...in the wind and the rain...the sudden sunshine.

"When I see a man putting up a bivouac beautifully...I want to do it ;myself. When I read of Christ raising the dead...I want to raise the dead myself. What a glorious thing to be an artist...to perform miracles...I am on the side of the angels and dirt”

I was at a garden party dahling and an actor was amazed that I would know Coward's Sail Away and be able to sing it. He then told a story of Stephen Sondheim chastising him for destroying his leading lady's(the actor's wife ) composure on first night by having an affair with some less than leading lady. So I guess it goes for the big guy's too....all the world's a stage I guess.

*

The EMPTY FIELD haiku sequence came about with my efforts to translate(rather badly I fear)**** Wei’s famous DEER PARK.

The failure of this(nothing goes to waste...it being all being grist to the mill)then provoked me to write my tanka about the grazing clouds and the invisible sheep which then propelled me into writing haiku about an empty field where nothing is apparently happening...or it would appear so.

And so by indirections I found directions out as Mr. Shakes so succinctly puts it.

LU ZHÁI  -  **** Wei(c.700-761)       Tang Dynasty

These little lines(over 1200 years old)enduring the transformation of translations through time after time until finally arriving in my mind and using my words much as a hermit crab would take up residence in an old shell or broken *** on the seabed of my mind. My words may not be a perfect home but it is enough that these lines have agreed to take up residence in my mind if even for the briefest time illuminating words of mine.

*******

LU SHÁI

Kong shan bu jian rén
Dan wén rén yo xiang
Fan jing(ying) ru shen lín
Fu shao qing tái shang

CHARACTER BY CHARACTER TRANSLATION

Empty           mountain            (negative)                  to see                     people

But                to hear                  people                  words                      sound

To return      bright(ness)            to enter                 deep                       forest

To return      to shine                green                    lichen                       above
Again          to reflect               blue/black             moss                       on top

*******

**** Wei was a fervent Buddhist and in the Mahayana texts the Western Paradise(being the domain of the Amida Buddha)      crops up every now and then..it being the place of the setting sun where one desires to be reborn.

Hence the brightness or sunlight in the original I have translated as Buddha’s rays.

I also stand the mountain in its own magnificence and have it empty of people.

I had the most trouble with the returning/shining aspect and have taken the liberty to express it as greener again as if it were already green but made even more so by this dying light. And of course we along with the lichen are...illuminated.

I couldn't help but stick it into a future where it is nothing but a tourist trap...come and see where the Buddha gave his first sermon. Roll up!

A translation is an agreeing to live with the imperfections of your perfections or the perfections of your imperfections.

Riffing on the Hughes. THE THOUGHT FOX.... when my brother introduced me to his very own private fox who would without fail come to the window and gaze in at him. We would sit with the lights out and await his presence. When my brother died I'm sure the fox continued to come and gaze at the now silent window. Fox as psychopomp. When the fox came it would gaze at us for about five minutes and we would sit still in the darkened room and gaze back and try to commune.

My brother always loved Raymond Carver's Late Fragment...

"And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth."

He said this was what the fox was saying....the ultimate question you have to answer when death comes calling.

***

Watching my little girl play with her conkers and marbles in a way different to her cousin( she always called him her `'brother" 'cos she always wanted one so she just made him one with words.

Conkers of course would be "buckeyes" in America. As kids we were bonkers about conkers even if all we did was collect them and have as stash of them. Put a fresh conker behind furniture or near windows to keep the spider population low!

Around Worcestershire it was known as ‘oblionker’ (****. obly-onker) and play was accompanied by such rhymes as ‘Obli, obli, onker, my first conker (conquer)’. The word oblionker apparently being a meaningless invention to rhyme with the word conquer, which has by degrees become applied to the nut itself.

***
The title comes from a Jean Cocteau quote. I fell in love with his movies when I was 12 and still adore them....poetry in motion

***

"Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently."

JEAN COCTEAU