In memory of
Patric Standford
1939 - 2014

It looks so insubstantial this score,
its opening notes and rhythms
surrounded by a weight of silences,
empty bars where the players rest,
in anticipation, in limbo, rest,
while their colleagues bow and blow
‘in serene cheerfulnesss’,
or so I imagine Hanslick will write
after the premiere. He will say
it is ‘manly but gentle,
animated by good humour
and reflected seriousness’.
What tosh!

And I will say, when I write
to Fritz my publisher,
- and I shall be ironic of course -
‘It is a work of a darker hue,
meditative rather than tragic,
but full of grace and charm.’

Walking the lakeside
at Pörtschach by the Wörthersee
I think all these words and more,
ahead of the notes I shall write here
in my simple room in the Hauptstraße
where today my piano arrived,
to be miraculously tuned
by Herr Grabner’s daughter,
a shy girl, barely sixteen he says
and blind, to my gruff presence
certainly, her small hands,
barely able to stretch the octave,
play at her father’s behest,
my Wiegenlied.

. . .
Schlaf nun selig und süß,

schau im Traum′s Paradies.*

Ah, that this, indeed, might be so.

From the woodlands of Madagascar
To the highlands of Ethiopia
Dwell nine species of lovebirds.
Their genus name is Agapornis,
From the Greek agape (love) and ornis (birds).
The French call them Les inséperables

While affection between compatible pairs
Can be a joy to behold,
Lovebirds can be quite territorial
And will defend their nest.

Sexually dimorphic they mate for life.
Like all parrots they need to be well
Socialized and taken care of.
They  are very vocal, making loud
High-pitched noises, especially
In the early morning time.

Stocky little birds
With short blunt tails
You can hold them
In the palms of your hands.
They love to snuggle,
They love to preen.
Happy birds: together.

He felt devoid of words, after being surrounded by them for the past 48 hours. As a writer there was this constant itch that one should be in thrall to the urge to write. It was what writers did, when they were not talking, or listening to others talk, as you do, sitting on the train, listening to the talk of others.

He was so easily seduced by the roll and pace of words spoken with intent. The voice reading on the radio, that book at bedtime, that well-scripted introduction. He felt this might be part of the reason he liked to start the public day by attending the Morning Office in his city’s cathedral, just a short walk from his studio; this elevation of the written to word to the spoken, deliberate utterance that lifted those yards of printed text in the book on the lectern he occasionally had the privilege to read out loud. It had been the book of Amos this week. Not a text he knew, and yet he had been surprised. He had meant to look up the chapters read when he returned to his desk – but hadn’t. Only now, early this morning as the streets below were swept in the city, and the night’s young revellers were returning home in the waiting white taxis, he read the words of Amos, of his 8th Century (BCE) vision and prophesy. It was dark stuff, warnings of doom, disaster couched in language that whilst poetic had a hard edge; not the poetry of the Psalms . . . but some verses had caught him:

Behold, I am pressed under you, as a cart is pressed that is full of sheaves. Therefore the flight shall perish from the swift, and the strong shall not strengthen his force, neither shall the mighty deliver himself:  Neither shall he stand that handleth the bow; and he that is swift of foot shall not deliver himself: neither shall he that rideth the horse deliver himself.  And he that is courageous among the mighty shall flee away naked in that day, saith the LORD.

He had walked away into the morning city, the city preparing itself for a weekday of shopping and business, and found himself saying under his breath the flight shall perish from the swift. It was such a powerful image: he saw in his mind’s eye the swifts quartering the field below his cottage on that Welsh mountain as they sought food for their young nested in a dark corner of the barn, their nest a marvel of nature’s engineering hanging high from the wall. He saw their flight perish, saw these miracle birds fall from the sky. He felt the silence of the empty field. He was suddenly overwhelmed by the thought of a silencing of birds, their flights stilled, perished in some Armageddon.

And later that week two hundred and fifty miles south under the lush greenness of the tree canopies on that Devon road to Buckfastleigh, these words had reappeared as though in some recurring litany. He had looked from the speeding car into the early morning, and, following the river running beside the road, had remembered a morning past. Beside that very river he had crouched close in wonder at it all, and that he had almost slept the night through in her arms, by her side, alive to her every movement and breath, and to wake, and find it all true and not dreamt.

He had had no poetry for that morning past. He was sure he had found something later, of their days together there. Her passionate kiss in the gardens at Hestercombe, the rub and touch of her leg under a restaurant table, her beauty a shining star beside him at that gallery opening, lying together amongst daisies in the garden he had recited the poetry of Alice Oswald, and the blue skies, and the distant moorland glimpsed, and his heart pounding with love and passion for this gentle figure who he couldn’t help himself touch and kiss, whose hand he would seek and hold at every turn . . .

How could he not be a poet when he had known such things he had only previously imagined? And now he had become a person whose words others listened to and read. Because? If pressed, he might say he had been woken into a world he had only previously glimpsed, occasional revelations had come fleetingly, but now they were ever present. It was as if when he looked into her face he would step into a place where she belonged, a place she was still fashioning for herself, where she dreamed herself to be, and he would be, possibly, and possibly always. It was always too much to think of when he was alone.

He missed her terribly as he walked the gardens he had once walked with her, had sat and sketched with her, had stood at slight distances from her to savour her still beauty. But there was no escaping the words, the needs of words, the talk, the idle talk he couldn’t do. And now, home at his desk and the backlit screen, the persistent noise of this city he inhabited reluctantly, he was devoid of words and yet, and yet. At five o’clock this morning he had filled his favourite china cup with his favoured blend of tea, his morning tea cup decorated with its traditional Chinese blue on white pattern of temples, bridges and trees and given himself time with book. It was Farwell Song by Rabindranath Tagore, that great Indian writer who he remembered had walked those gardens with Leonard and Dorothy, those Elmhirsts who had made the gardens what they are today. Tagore, a writer courted for his wisdom and passion for rural reconstruction, a friend of Gandhi, Einstein, W.B. Yeats. Such people, he thought, and I have walked amongst their ghosts, in this place that twenty five years earlier had laid its spell on him, and he had loved, and come to love with even more devotion because he could not think of the peace and loveliness of it all without her presence there. And yet they were apart, and she had her life, and he had his life, but through the poetry of their respective endeavors, their art making, their creative energy, they came together in what he felt was a similar spirit.

In the hour before his train had left for the South West a letter had arrived with two cards. On one card, sewn into the card, a eucalyptus leaf, sewn with eucalyptus-dyed thread, and with it a blank card for ‘something in return; something personal, gentle, tentative, appropriate to our lives’.

He had carried both cards with him, these cards of papier aquarelle (300gsm) that had graced her touch, been held by her deft fingers. He had placed them between the leaves of his poetry book, a book he used exclusively for his written words. He had placed the card with the leaf resting against a vase of Lathyrsu odoratus. Vase and card placed on the pine desk in a guest room in a friend’s house they had remained in place, together, those two nights, and he recalled holding the leafed card briefly before he turned out the light to lay down to sleep, thinking only of her as he waited for sleep to embrace him.

I was asked today
after the reading,
(you know that time
for question and comment
poets either love or dread)
‘If you had only read
one poem, what would it be
I wonder, what would it be?’
‘Now?' I said,
‘Yes, now,’ she said,
being a tall woman,
in a silk-blue frock,
glasses pushed well back
into golden hair flecked grey.

I didn’t think.
I knew, and
as it was one
I knew by heart,
I dived right in.

I was ill
convalescing in fact
when I read this book
On Poetry
. . .

Does that surprise you?

I had no qualms,
no fears at all,
it was only when
those final words began
to disappear across the hall,
that hall of banners floating
in a fan-fuelled breeze,
I knew no right way
to say those final
italicised words:

Poetry forms in the face of time
you master form you master time

You see that couplet
wasn’t mine.
I’d only borrowed it
to make a point,
a point I could not make
in my poor words.

‘Nice to be quoted,’ he said later
as he brought his tea to my table.
‘I know exactly what you mean:
Christmas cake, penquins and the moon . . .
Hmm, just so,’ he said, and smiled.
‘Oh, I did like your poem
about the parrot on the beach.
I’ll read it to my girls when I get home.’

Who lives a still life? he asked.
It was the end of the day,
he was alone.
He could think of a few souls
living quietly, not doing much,
letting the days go by.
They would say they were busy
exercising their minds,
reading sporadically,
worrying a little about distant children,
noisy neighbours, absent friends,
the state of the house.
But they espoused stillness,
enjoyed the afternoon light
as it fell across the windowed sill
illuminating that Venetian vase.
They were not anxious about making tea,
just yet. It was good, this being still.

She often wondered about the still life,
the artists’ ultimate challenge, duty even
to that most particular of genres;
the attempt to catch the moment,
the fleeting moment, it could only be
a moment when light fell
sharp or diffused on objects chosen
or arranged, a never to be recovered
moment, except by the painter’s hand.

Here was a chair,
a red armchair in a room
almost certainly in Gordon Square,
Bloomsbury, a Vanessa Bell, she said,
painted in, well, 1934 or 5,
and very characteristic then,
its dark blue cushion
plumped for a soon-to-be sitter.
It stands in front of her painted screen,
obscuring the lower part of the window
open to the morning, yesterday’s flowers
in a vase nearby, on a table with books.

And above the chair,
a small painting hangs,
an intimate scene,
left of the window where
the long curtains fall
to a still pool of fabric
gathered on the wooden floor.

One another’s best
we two sat by a bank
where the wild violet grew,
holding hands, holding
each other’s gaze,
we thread a double skein
of pictures propagated
by our eyes
whilst inner thoughts
(our souls perhaps?)
negotiate, as we like statues
still, say nothing.

If someone standing near
could hear our silent speech
a pure concoction they would
take away, of you and I,
of ecstasy unperplexed
telling how we love, (not ***)
but all that makes both one,
each this and that.
Just as the violet redoubles still
and multiplies, our love with
one another interanimates;
we know of what we’re made:
we are intelligences,
and our bodies simply spheres.
We owe them thanks because
they thus did us, to us
at first convey.

And so we sit
our fingers knitted
into that subtle knot
which makes us man
and woman, but one to all
who look upon our love revealed.
Love's mysteries grow in our thoughts
but the body is where it lives.
We’ve heard this dialogue of one
and know it belongs in our bodies too.

I want to say:
good morning
in words newly-minted
bright, sharp-edged
with shadows, alight
this June morning.

At my desk
I sit before a still-life
of small things
treasured, some made
by your quiet hands,
others evidence
of our journeying:
precious times of  
smiles and gestures,
delicate long exchanges,
photographs of course.
And in the foreground:
a trio of felted vessels
lined with thread,
my daughter’s tile
of blackbirds on a bough,
and this book in miniature,
rich in marks made
by the tides’ turnings.

A suite of fourteen poems

for Alice, always

I

Cutting for Silage

Seen
on the path close to the field edge
a swathe of green grass cut,
Left
in the wake of the machine
to dry in the hopeful sun,
Rich
in a profusion of grasses,
glimmers of wind flowers,
weeds and tares.

Seen from afar
the cut fields partition this landscape
with stripped overlays
packaging the valley,
dark green rows revealing
the camber and roll of
a naked field shorn,
Dark upon light.

II

Walk to Porth Oer

Where the sand whistles
and windy enough today
for the tinnitus to set in,
we’ll walk the curve of its dry fineness
left untouched by the tide’s daily passage
up and back

before
and along cliff paths,
from the mountain
past secret coves
whose steep descents
put the brake on all
but the determined,
beside shoulders of grasses
bluebelled still in almost June
now hiding under the rising bracken
up and down

we’ll walk to a broad view
of this whispering bay
where below on the sandy shore
dots of children
tempt the slight waves.


III

Cold Mountain

Whether  a large hill
or officially a mountain
it’s cold on this higher place
wrapped in a land-mist,
the sea waiting in breathless calm
where the horizon has no line,
no edge to mark the sky.

Any warmness illusory,
in sight of sun brightening a field
far distant, but not here,
where waiting is the order of the day,
waiting for grass to shine and sparkle,
for bare feet to be comforted
by sweet airs.

Meanwhile the sheep chomp,
the lambs bleat and plead,
the choughs throaty laugh
a shrill punctation, an insistence
that all this is how it is.


IV


China in Wales

In my hermitage
on this sea-slung place,
a full-stop of an island
back-lit illuminated always,
I view the distant mountains,
a chain of three peaks
holding mist to their flanks,
guarding beyond their heights
a gate to a teaming world
I do not care to know.


V


Wales in China

O fy nuw, I thought
my valley only owned such rain,
but here it teams torrential
taking out the paths on this steep
mountain side. Mud
everywhere it shouldn’t be.
Everything I touch damp and dripping.
No promise of pandas here.
And there’s this language like the chatter of birds,
whilst mine is the harsh sibilants of sheep
on the hill, the rasp of rooks on the cliffs.


VI


Boy on the Beach

Heard before seen
the boy on the beach,
a relentless cry
of agrievement, of
being badly done to.
This boy on the beach

following his mother
at a distance
then no further.
‘I hate you, ‘ he screams,
and stops,
turning his back on the sea,
folding his arms,
miserableness unqualified,
no help or comfort
on the horizon he cannot see.
It is attrition by neglect.
He becomes silent, and called
from a distance, relents
and turns.


VII


The Poet

Austere, his mouth
moved so little when he spoke,
you felt his words
were always made in advance,
scripted first
and placed on the auto-cue.
Ask a question: and there’s a long pause

as though there lies
the possibility of multiple answers
and he’s running through the list
before he speaks, his antenna
trained on the human spirit,
full of doubt, doubting even
belief itself.


VIII


A Gathering

Thirty, maybe forty
and not in a lecture room
but a clubhouse for the sailing
look you. And we did,
out of the patio doors
to the sun-flecked sea below us,
here to honour a poet’s life and work
in this village of the parish he served
at the end of the pilgrim’s path .

Pilgrims too, of a kind, we listened  
to the authoritative words
of scholarship where ironing
the rough draft found in the bin,
explaining the portrait above the bed,
balancing the anecdotal against the interview,
reading the books he read
become the tools of understanding.

But the poems, the poems
silence us all, invading the space,
holding our breath like a fist.



IX


In the Garden

He came alone to sit in the garden
and remember the day
when, with the intimacy of his camera,
he took her, deep into himself;
her look of self-possession,
of calmness and confidence,
augmented by butterflies
motionless on the wall-flowers,
and the soft breath of the blue sea,
her soft breath, her dear face,
freckled so, his hand trembling
to hold the focus still.


X


The Couple from Coventry

Young beyond their years
and the house they had acquired
but only to visit at weekends for now,
they drove four hours to open the gate
on a different life, a second home
requiring repairs on the roof
and replastering throughout.

With their dog they were walking
the mountain paths, checking out the views,
returning to the quiet space
their bed filled in an upstairs room
echoing of birth and death:
to experiment further with loving
before the noise and distraction
of children swallowed up their lives.


XI


On Not Going to Meeting

There was an excuse:
a fifteen mile drive
and a wet morning.
He had a book, a journal
that might focus his thoughts
towards that communion of souls:
a silence the meeting of Friends
sought and sometimes gathered.

These experimental words
of a man who felt he knew
‘I had nothing outward
to help me,’ who then, oh then,
heard a voice which said,
‘There is one, even Christ Jesus,
that can speak to my condition
. . .  who has the pre-eminence,
who enlightens and gives grace
and faith and power.’


XII


New Life

From behind its mother
the calf appeared
tottering towards the gate,
but after a second thought,
deeming curiosity inappropriate,
turned back to that source
of nourishment and life.


XIII


A Walk on Treath Pellech

Good to stride out.
Good to feel unencumbered
by the unconfining space
of beach and sea, a shoreline
littered with rocks and shallow pools,
sea birds flocking at the tide’s edge.

Alone he sought her small hand
and wished her there over time and space
so to observe what lay at his feet,
that he might continue to look
into the distance with a far-flung gaze.


XIV


The Owl Box

James put it there.
One of forty
all told but
empty yet.
‘We live in hope,’
he said.

Slung from a bough,
bent and bowed,
on a wind-shaped tree,
a hawthorn blossoming still,
(inhabited by choughs a’nesting)
the box hangs waiting
for its owl, her eggs,
her fledgling young
who are not hatched together
but are staggered as though
to give the mother owl some
pause for thought.

Meanwhile the nesting choughs
tear the air with tiresome croaks,
a bit of rough these black characters,
neighbours soon to the delicate mew,
the cool, downy white of the Athene noctua.

There on the path
she stands,
the evening sun
sculpting her face
with light and shade.

An on-shore wind
has dressed the curls
in her hair and
between expressions
she’s composed,
in charge of herself,

hand on her camera,
almost a smile
on those petalled lips
he loves to brush
and rest his tongue
between and kiss,

and there behind her
a backdrop:
a river
on the ebb,
a shoreline path
of Maytime green,
and a sky of floating
*cumulus mediocris.

Turbulence

As he sat watching the shadows
flicker across the beige carpet
the morning air explored
the room, caressed his unsocked feet.
She appeared, briefly:
to walk to the window
to be reminded of the view.
Turning purposefully,
she sent him a wave of turbulence
out of the folds of her long
patterned-blue skirt.


Wild Swim

Evening,
but not yet dark in the Slad Valley.
Beyond the village they left the road,
and down, down a woodland way walked
into a gentle polyphony of birdsong
that is the evening chorus;
a more considered singing,
an equal music and exchange of song
far from the wild chorusing at dawn.

High above, the delicate traceries
of ash leaves;
at their feet, the chocolate-brown fall
of beech flowers.

His hand sheltered her fingers
lightly placed into his folded palm,
but ready to unslip: to observe, to touch
to wonder at the trackside vegetation.

Down, and further down into the valley,
the setting sun illuminating golden
corridors between the tall trees,
they came upon a presence of water
in the air and before the water seen;
a lake, a rhomboid reflection of sky
and still, sun-stricken pines.

Feeling his body wish the caress
of its earth-coloured water
he walked the lake’s line
gazing down into the opaque stillness
seeking to judge its depth.

He might swim; he would swim;
he would feel the water
kiss his body, his feet discover
a hidden floor of mud,
of stones, of vegetation.
Yes, he would lower his naked self
into that cool texture of fresh,
untroubled water.

He undressed before her,
placing his glasses into her care,
each garment into her arms.
Removing his sandals he stepped
into the water until its cloudy surface
covered his thighs, his ***.
He lowered his body and swam,
a few strokes at a time, stopping
then to test the depth,
for his feet to feel the tangled
floor of the underlake.

He turned,
and still in his depth walked back:
to see her standing bemused on the bank.
Out, and in the evening air, he stroked
his hands over naked flanks,
stomach, arms and ****,
brushing the wet away from his body
until a sense of being dry prevailed.

It had not been cold, he thought;
it had been gently invigorating.
A full freshness enveloped his body.
It would stay this passionate longing
he so often felt when alone in her presence,
and in the unconfining space
of the natural world she loved.
It remained with him until hours later
when, regaining the presence of his body
as it stretched itself in their generous bed,
he slept, dreaming of water’s kiss and touch.


Newark Park*

Turning into the drive
a lake of  buttercups
floated in the blue morning
on islands of grass green
between parkland trees
where peacocks called.

Entering the shallow house
barely two rooms wide
light flooded and warmed
the cold stone flags
of this hunting lodge
saved from ruin
by an itinerant American
who searching on a motorbike
for a manored home found his domain
high on the brink of a limestone
escarpment. With a view to die for,
most certainly to live for,
he was captured, captivated
and later confirmed
to all its Englishness,
its history, and despite
its cold, cold comforts.

Most certainly a man’s abode,
long-ago ladies but not wives
would gather for a grandstand view  
from behind its rooftop balustrades,
there to observe the hunting
in the forest far below
and then to entertain,
be entertained
far away from prying eyes
and wagging tongues.

He had the voice you see,
the timing and the just pause.
He knew how to colour and stretch
a word, just so.
He wrote quiet rhymes:
I’m a winder
(he wrote,
writing as a river).
I love to wander.
Every day I’m different
with stories to tell
of wild otter huntings
and crisp frozen winters.

To hear you had not slept;
to imagine you awake at three am.
followed me around all day.
To feel I could have been the cause;
to think my absence from your bed
might hold you sleepless through the night,

‘till dawn that is,
when the first birds
in the still-dark make
tentative noises-off,

a pre-dawn refrain
before some semblance of day
brings forth the ripieno choir.
Only then you slept.

This companionship we keep
relies on sleep-filled nights
and settled days, stress-free meals,
gentle evenings with our books,
and the occasional walking out
under the Spring moon.

She opened the door of the gallery and there it was, there it lay, before her, nearly perfect: her exhibition. The opening was an hour or so away and there were, naturally, a few adjustments to make, but in essence it was right, and as she walked to the middle of the rectangular space (to survey the full effect ) she felt held by the quiet wonder of it all; that she had made all this and with ‘the quality control of nature’s accidents’. He’d written those words some years previous when a solo show was but a dream she would enter between sleep and wakefulness, when she would think of the west coast of Scotland and the poetry of its seashore, the infinite variety in the seashore strand between sand and sea. It was such natural accidents of form and transformation by nature’s hand that had guided her imagination into rightness and towards this exhibition.

At breakfast that morning she had come to the table dressed to greet her audience, and for the first time as a featured artist in a festival of some repute. She had felt the quiet joy of choosing the right combination of clothes to be the public person she had now become. He had loved the new dress she had bought to clothe her gallery persona. She had been conscious of his eyes following the lines this frock so generously drew around her body’s shape and form, the way the material fell across her *******, lay smoothly on her thighs.  It was a very grownup frock and with the jacket and scarf made her look purposeful, confident. His looking made such confidence possible, his admiration and what she could tell was that coming together of love and passion that, her being dressed in this formal way, so often evoked.

In the gallery she had worried over the lighting, climbed up the metal ladder with the fluffy green glove thoughtfully provided to enable those small adjustments of direction to be made on a hot spotlight. There were four large pieces flanking a corner that had embossed lines running across their surfaces, lines that needed oblique light to reveal the shadowing of this effect of swirls and marks of a retreating tide on sand.  Two smaller pieces needed rearranging; she’d placed them, late the evening before, in the wrong sequence. Poster boards were to be filled with her poster and put outside on the pavement by the gallery entrance. She opened the main door, a very green door with its top and bottom bolts and black-painted handle ring. The street outside was a welcoming mix of 18th and 19th C buildings, hardly one the same, the sort of three storey buildings that had simple plaques prominently placed into the brickwork from a distant past when proud builders would describe a structure’s use or ownership with a title and date. By ten o'clock this one-way street was lined with parked cars, but now there was little traffic. It was a quiet sunny morning in a market town.

‘Don’t mind the dog, ‘ he said. ‘He’s used to coming in here.’ It was a long-haired verging on the side of scruffy sort of dog, used to keeping its own counsel, probably used to being taken to exhibitions. ‘Just popping in,’ he said, this man who, and she couldn’t help noticing this, seemed to hold much in common with his dog; the long, but retreating on the forehead, hair, slightly scruffy from the want of a comb or a good brush (like his dog), he had dressed without much thought (because who dressed thoughtfully to walk a dog?), and that’s what he was doing, walking the dog and, seeing the Gallery open, thought he ought to look in.

Giving him her brightest smile, she embarked on performing the artist’s music of conversation, that score holding gentle melodies and welcoming harmonies. Although she had become quite practised in talking to her audience there was always the challenging inquiry that would catch her off guard.

‘Well, are you finished with the seashore now?’ said the man with the look-alike dog. For a moment a half dozen possible answers seemed possible. ‘Could one ever finish with something so extraordinary and various as that hinterland between land and sea?’ No, that was seemed a mite critical and clever. ‘Oh, I’ve hardly started’ was tempting, but rather smug and too confident by half. ‘I just love the seaside’ would probably do, as no one else was listening. ‘Merleau-Ponty says the complexity of the seashore is a metaphor in the search for self-identity’. She did wonder what he’d make of that, but finally decided on ‘It’s such a rich source of ideas and images I’m sure there’s a lot more I want to do with the subject.’

”It’s all the same colour”. She’d had that one a few times. ‘When I’m on the beach I’m fascinated as much by the texture and shape of what I see  and feel than the colour. I like the subtlety of the colours in the sand. I think my pieces – and she waved her hand towards what she had titled her Sand Marks pieces – show so many of the different shades of colours you find on the seashore.’

Those Sand Marks, a collection of variously dyed and marked two metre plus linen-lengths, dominated one wall of the gallery. They floated a few centimetres from the white wall, and when people moved past them the slight shadows cast by the linen lengths seemed to ripple in the human-made breeze. She could never look at them without thinking how their very accidental making – binding a linen cloth with inner placed objects and using the natural dye of tea – could create such absorbing results. She would follow with her gaze one of the linen-lengths from bottom to top (or top to bottom) and find herself walking on the wet sand of a Scottish beach, overwhelmed by the clear light and space with only the sea sound surrounding. He would tell her, had told her often, how moved, how affected he had been when he first saw them hung. To him, these ‘marks’ carried an essence of this aesthetic she now owned and for which had become recognised.

Even on this, her first day, she had been visited by a small number of admirers and supporters, some travelling distances to see her work with the aura of the original, a truer view than that possible on the back-lit screen of their computer monitors. Ladies who loved textiles, the containment and privacy to sew and stitch secured in their busy lives. These friendly and smiley women (the comfortable side of sixty) understood something of what she was doing here, and perhaps imagined themselves as thirty-somethings walking Scottish beaches free from children and the relentless list-making of house and home and occupation, able to create imaginary worlds of marks and folds, pleats and textures. Full of enthusiasm for the medium, what they perhaps didn’t have was the skill of seeing, a skill she had grown up with, had always owned to some degree: found, fostered, honed, developed into a second-nature activity of always looking.

There would be the occasional brief lull when the gallery was empty or close to empty, as though needing the space to come up for breath after being occupied by people and their movement. She would then walk slowly around the long well-lit room viewing her pieces and her arrangements of pieces from different angles. She would look at his poems placed antiphonally between her work, commissioned for her catalogue, her book of images of the sea shore paired with, incorporating even, her made pieces. She’d chosen a favoured few she’d felt caught the essence of being in the sea’s company, in the sand and shore’s domain. Like everything he did it had been undertaken with the utmost intensity of purpose. She saw him now in her mind’s eye with his notebook sitting against rocks, paddling in the great shallow pools, walking head down along the tide line, those bright days on a Scottish island and before, before on that ellipse of beach by the fishing station.

He would tease out an idea formed from a little motif of words, perhaps like the very music that was his private territory: here, alone, apart we are marked by the tide’s turn. Yes, we are marked by being solitary in such unconfining space, the marks at our feet become the lines, the mounts, the fingers, those interruptions, breaks and blockages found in the tridents, chains and crosses of the art of palmistry. We read the seashore as a psychic oracle reads the hand, hoping, as Kathleen Jamie so rightly says, for the marvellous. And marvellous it so often is.

Standing in this gallery was like being gathered about by the seashore. It was a short jump in the imagination’s miracle to hear the soft breathing of the sea, the wind caressing the face, the warmth of the afternoon sun on the freckled cheek.

See how those we love are transformed
when the sea is their only boundary

a figure stands before a sand bar
in a crescent of water left by the tide
an affecting geometry of solitude
. . .

These words had always stopped her in her perambulating tracks. She thought of her son, far distant on the beach, at rest for once, still, motionless within the confluence of the elements of the beach, at the epicentre of her gaze, all things flowing to and from his tiny, far-away figure.

The light has already cast itself into the dark corners
of this shameful story: a man who was despised
and fell towards death, only for his presence to remain.

Is it such a hard lesson to learn that it is over,
and two millennia past? And yet we mortify ourselves
with holy guilt when we could enjoy these spring days

bursting with the budding leaf, the floating blossom.
Is there really a need for this re-enactment of selfishness
and death?  Are we such poor dumb souls that we observe

a Friday to remind us how it was? There is a presence
in our midst: the Eternal Christ who lives among us,
an incarnate being continually blessing us with love.

Its perspective skewed,
the lie of this land
is all tilts and angles.
Black-thorned hedges
rise in white clouds
to the hilltop farm.
On this Damson Day
it is a damp-mist morning,
the horizon a grey smudge.

Up forest trail and fell-ward,
on the left, a winter-laid hedge,
to the right, a mossy wall.
A riot of new growth lies
at the feet, by the hand:
wild garlic, wilder strawberry,
fresh ferns, and the tiniest violets
hiding on this old path.
Steep steps climb
to a four-acre orchard
primrosed under the pint-sized
trunks of its wiry trees.

There’s the blossom, white as snow.

Hard to imagine
five months hence,
fully plummed and picked,
Bullace and Damascene
driven by the cartload
to Kendal market.
250 tons they’d reckoned
once, taken by train
to the Preston canners.
Nearer home the fruit
was gined and beered,
cheesed and chucknied.

Then into the forest,
a plantation girdled
by a dry stone wall
tall on the moorland edge
where beyond
the grey limestone shards
have broken through what
little grass is left  
for absent cattle.

Wild with wind
up here today,
so down to reclaim
the forest’s shelter,
and down through fields
to a farm en fête
all cars and crowds.

This, a damson day of best-judged jam,
with artisan breads, Morris with swords,
fiddling folk, agility dogs, St Kilda sheep,
blue eggs and tents of crafts galore.

In the mist and drizzle
homeward and facing west,
there across the valley lie
outposts of blossoming,
fields embroidered,
and the farms necklaced.

Grey slivers of water,
turn blue as the lake appears

and being just spring
the still-leafless trees
at the water’s edge
allow sight of wind-filled
sails, a boat tacks too and fro
in the silent distance.

From the Professor’s Garden,
from the shared bench
within earshot of a stream
falling in chaotic music
of water on stone,
a further view takes hold:

of woodland’s gathered green
rising to a moor stained with rocks,
and higher still the rust-brown fell.
Beyond and above all becomes sky,
its processions of clouds
shadowing this laked land.

When the leaves fall
and cover the concrete
with their daring script,
we pause to read their asemic form,
a kind of language universal lodged
deep in our unconscious minds.

With curve and line,
join and stem,
these nothing words reform
again with each gust of wind.

Or pinioned by grass and rain
these natural letters
in the language of leaves
remain - in situ -

and slowly curl and colour,
shimmer with dew,
glisten in sunlight, revealing
their inscription, thus:

*O friend whoe’er you are
I feel through every leaf
The pressure of your hand,
Which I return,
And thus upon our journey
Linked together, let us go.

How is it that one man can work
on one brushstroke (and a few spots)
for almost two years?
I thought about
the oriental calligraphers
who spent a lifetime perfecting
that one brushstroke.
Suddenly,
the silence and loneliness
of the painter’s profession
pierce through my heart.

Leaf shows a simple fold
of translucent green paint
that appears as a gesture
of concealment, of implication,
as if the smallest mystery of nature,
the greenness of a leaf,
was being held and protected
within a fold of pigment.

Small reservoirs of oil and Liquin leak
from the top edge of the mark,
and where the green stroke has carried over
to the frame, the paint shows
as a dark varnish, barely perceptible.

With consummate economy,
Leaf draws together nature and art
and shows how natural things live
within and despite history.

Leaf is about the ‘time of plants’
but also about the long durée
which the single brushstroke spills.
The painted wooden frame was added later.

IV

Dear Frank,

My father, who was the wisest man I ever knew,
thought it the duty of every man, young & old,
to keep an account of his money;
& I very unwillingly obeyed him;
for I was not always so bothersome
an old fellow as I daresay I appear to you. . . .

My dear Father,

I have sent cheque to a repeated bill from Griffin.
A thermometer has come from Kew,
For which I have also paid.

I go on maundering about the pulvinus,
& from what I have seen roughly
in the petioles of the Cotyledons of oxalis,
I conclude that a pulvinus
must be developed from ordinary cells.

I have tried watering Porliera out of doors,
I gave four small cans full in the day
& next morning it was wide open
though for several days before it had been shut.
The ***-plant is very unhealthy I am afraid
As its leaves are dropping off at the stalk.

I was very glad to find that Sachs is dead
against all the people that find
the Descendenz theory in
Ray, Lamarck, Goethe &c.;
Sachs says that he believes some ferns
of the family Marratiaceae sleep . . .

Dear F,

I have finished the long chapter on Sleeping Plants
& sent it to Mr Norman to copy & diagrams to Mr
Cooper.

I am now looking over piles of notes on Heliotropism.
I am more perplexed than ever about life of Dr. D:
Hen thinks it very dull, & wants it much shortened &
otherwise arranged. Erasmus likes it.
Your mother wants parts shortened.
I shall take it on Aug. 1st to the Lakes
& finish it there.

I am tired— Ever yours
C. Darwin

The mist had remained all day.
Curious for April this should be so.
At dawn the garden had appeared
as an undersea world
blue-tinged though
swimming in Palma Gray.
Later the town hall clock
would all but disappear from view.

My heart is so heavy he thought
despite my resolve my good intentions
How will I lift myself above this cold mist
into the sunlight I know lies so near
in the blue sky above?

At the end of the long day
so tired he could barely speak
her name on the telephone
as she bright with good fortune
caressed the ether with her words
her present laughter and her beauty
hidden by distance yet visible
in his memory’s last sight of her
hair on the pillow asleep
as he placed the glass
by her bed and crept
down the steep stairs

This board is not on the wall. It rests on a worktable against a wall. It’s almost the length of the table, perhaps a foot short. On top of the board its wooden frame makes a shelf ideal for photographs or cards to balance precariously, photographs and cards too precious to pin. Today there are five, yes they change from day to day, and today (from left to right) there’s an original drawing in walnut ink of a winter field, a photo of two children looking from a cliff top towards a peninsula’s end, a card called Autumn Spey from a lithograph by Angie Lewin, an invitation to a gallery opening, and a What’s On brochure – from another gallery – showing some unusual tapestry.

The Notice Board is 100 x 60 cm. The wooden frame is slight, probably home-made, but well-made, with a dark brown hessian surface. Not that you can see much of the surface as it is covered with stuff: photographs, images, poems, pictures, cards, quotations, a prayer, an origami bird, a doctor’s prescription, a piece of tapestry, an invitation, an address, lists galore, a cheque or two, a diagram (of a knot), a concert program. Not everything can be seen directly as many items are shared by a single pin and hidden four, even six, notices deep. Every so often the items are unpinned and consigned to a folder and filed, and so the process of choosing and pinning starts over again. This can happen after a holiday, returning uncluttered by days walking the cliff paths with only the quiet sea to gaze at and the cottage blissfully free of things known, things owned.  So when back at the desk, in front of the notice board, it seems right to be beginning again.

Mozart’s Linz Symphony is playing quietly in the background. It’s that time of day when music is sometimes allowed to frame work at this desk and blot out the going home noise of buses in the city street moving away from the stop three floors below. Linz, the capital of Upper Austria and now a large industrial city straddling the banks of the Danube, once gave its name to Linzertorte, a cake of jam, cloves, cinnamon, and almonds, and this remarkable symphony by Mozart. The composer had only just married his Constanza and wrote to his long suffering father:

When we reached the gates of Linz . . . , we found a servant waiting there to drive us to Count Thun's, at whose house we are now staying. I really cannot tell you what kindnesses the family are showering on us. On Tuesday, November 4, I am giving a concert in the theatre here and, as I have not a single symphony with me, I am writing a new one at break-neck speed, which must be finished by that time. Well, I must close, because I really must set to work.

And set to work he did. He had just 4 days to compose, write the parts (though Constanza helped), and rehearse an orchestra. Such is life for the working composer, even today. Maybe not a summons from a beneficent Count, but a phone-call from a producer with a deadline. It is the film or TV score to be composed at break-neck speed. And it can be done, believe me. It may not be sublime as Mozart, but it gets done: there are ways and means.

But this is today’s background, and as these words are written the gracious siciliano of the Symphony No.36 plays away. Such a tender confection.

Looking up at the notice board where does one start? Each pinned piece is a divertissement, an aide memoire to times, events, places, and people. It is a mixture of the colourful, the curious, the necessary, the unusual, the nostalgic, and the personally precious. These things are the qualifications required to occupy a place on this board.

But now Haydn takes over the musical background, Symphony No.88. No descriptive name here, just his wonderful music: his first symphony to score trumpets and timpani, and with more than a touch of Turkish in the Minuetto and Finale.

So close your eyes now (let’s listen to Haydn for a while), then slowly open them and choose from the notice board what first catches your attention.

It’s a coloured sketch of flowers on an A5 sheet of cartridge paper. It is outlined delicately in pen, coloured variously with pastels, green, orange, purple, red. The vase is a glass bowl. It’s set on a window-sill and there’s the frame of a window faintly rendered. There’s no artifice in the arrangement. These are flowers from a garden, picked and now firmly ****** into the bowl. Immediately the long, quiet east-facing room comes alive to colour. It’s in shade now the sun has moved since midday when the flowers arrived after a journey of 40 miles in a hot car wrapped in moist newspaper and silver foil. It is a special gift and its beauty remains vivid for days. When visitors visited gentle comments are made on their fresh colours.

At night when the room is only lit by a standard lamp standing by a pale yellow settee the flowers sleep in the darkness, holding a vivid memory of a day of colour and light. A recording of the Schumann quartets plays passionately during the ‘close to the end of summer’ evenings. Hands are held, and between movements there is an occasional exploratory kiss. Such was their collective fear of passion overcoming other endeavours . . .

In the early morning time when she slept in the room next door oblivious to his wakefulness he would enter the long studio room with its four windows to find the first sunlight patterning the floor. The flowers were wide-awake, their perfume rich in the still morningtime. He would stand entranced to see such beauty brought from her city garden; the first of many gifts he would come to treasure. His sketch was an amateur’s, but four summers past it continued to give much joy and dear memories. It had something of the solemnity of Mozart’s siciliano, and if an image could be said to have a right tempo, it had a right tempo, a gracefulness roughly hewn perhaps, but full of grace.

It is quiet and secretive, not telling out its message from the first, but from later on, later in the day. The afternoon was where it usually began, the morningtime being far too bright, except on an autumn day of mist and mellow fruitfulness. Keats knew it, looked out of windows for it, wrote letters full of it for the girl he loved, who was, quite naturally, quite taken by it. Has it to be it? Are we afraid to say this word too regularly in case its quality dilutes?

If one is of a sensitive disposition it can be so easily achieved, this state of grace. He would say it was watching her cross that sun-filled room, early autumn sunlight filtered through damson leaves bathed her quiet figure with shadows falling across a full grey skirt with its deep pockets and camphored hem. She held a bowl of figs in both hands, to place on the blue tablecloth. Better not go there he thought, the touch of fig on the lips, then its open fruit beset with seed. The rest is beyond and far away.

Is there such a music? A composer I know who believes so, and says for him composition consists of the enchantment of the audience through sound. There’s a little song I wrote when hardly out of my teens that conjures up this very state. Carousel it’s called and carousel it does.

A green table,
on it a fan.
Black plays white,
big versus little.
Each with green
gripped by delicate fingers.
Laughing both
the little one wins.
J’ai une maladie.
Yes –the world is for little people.
For children it opens its petals,
for the old they crumple.

Oh yes, for children the world opens its petals. My daughters being cats hiding in boxes, my son his eyes full of stars on a Welsh mountain under a winter’s sky – the memory so quickly fills with the enchantments of children.

And for lovers this word displaces the ordinary and surfaces with the barely credible. Not the first kiss, but on the thousandth brush of lips so light their bodies shuddered, their breath quickened, and there in that moment the perfume of passion enveloped them. In the silent bedroom they emptied themselves into love’s soft shadows and could hardly open their eyes to make sure they were really there and not elsewhere: they had walked from the slow curve of the sheltering beach to the flower-filled pasture, past indifferent cattle and through a tenderness of kissing gates where every embrace of lips gathered momentum towards, finally, that deepest kiss of all; enchantment, more than any loving, wholly and unforgettable.

Orange in spring,
pinkish-brown,
yellow into deep green
through summer,
and finally to crimson
in autumn when they fall,
these leaves of the acer griseum,
the Chinese paperbark maple.

On the tree its leaves are opposite,
not alternate, two leafstalks arising
from the same point on the twig.
This is how it must be, she thought.

She had waited for the first frost
and, gathered in a fold of her cloak,
let seven leaves fall
to scatter on her desk.
One leaf holds her gaze;
her fingers touch,
and turning it over
she places it ready
in the hand’s left palm,

Picking up her finest brush,
with sad and slight but heavy
emphasis required, she inscribes
the subtle downward strokes of
the kanji characters for crimson -
makka, the blood’s red,
the true essence of life.

crimson leaves
fallen now scattered
one is chosen.
my heart longs for love

So to the garden stream
she goes, and kneeling
beside its moving water
launches this leaf
from her cupped hand.

His mind’s eye saw her
wander the garden, still
the moon faintly distant
in the morning sky
above the trees.

She was folding the past
into a small linen cloth
to place in her wooden box
of treasures kept from
teenage years, and after.

So she might know
he shared this loss,
yet far away
he held her firm
in love’s embrace.

Though new life stirred
in every corner bright
she would not sketch
its birth, or paint its fruit,
nor print its leaves.

But she would let
this green shade
gather under her gaze
for just one more day.
Only then, farewell.

This is a place that brings out the best in people, she said with confidence born of practice in convening such gatherings. It is a place apart, he thought, certainly. It was difficult not to look out of the window where the unleafed trees swayed and swayed in the wind. He had felt very solitary all day. Throughout his journey here he’d been on another journey, a little in the past, and its images had enveloped him. He had often returned to a moment during a stop on that journey in the beautiful gardens of Hestercombe where, in the seclusion of a tall shrubbery she had suddenly turned to him and kissed him with a need and a passion that was beyond anything he had ever known. And it had coloured everything that came to pass ever after.

Later, when he had brought her to this place apart they had lain on the spring grass amongst the daisies and read poetry about the river not half a mile away in the valley below them. It was all and more than he could ever have imagined.

But now there was the business of creativity to attend to, that relentless business of finding the right tone and subject for the reading public. He was amongst writers, people for whom words dominated thoughts and generated incomes and reputation. There was a confidence here, not only in those directing this seminar, but in the participants. It was written all over their body language and the way they dressed. The casual jacket, the well-cut blue jeans, the open-necked (but striped) shirt, a lot of black, bright tights (there was a striking turquoise set against a short black dress printed with white hearts), the women’s clothes mostly loose, the men’s clothes tighter fitting and more confining. And those all-important accessories, the bags, the tablets, the so-large diaries and notebooks, a bewilderment of scarves servings as emblems of their colourful selves. He had worn a simple black suit and dark green shirt and felt in such colourful company suitably anonymous.

Introductions were unnecessary (as everybody seemed to know everyone else) but the unnecessarily long CVs where prizes and awards, publishers and broadcast work, current projects and commissions were rolled out, variously. He was thankful that he was introduced as a new voice, a discovery from last summer’s festival and was here because his work embraced other creative journeys than those with words. He was here to share with these confident and successful writers a different viewpoint on the creative process where things rather than abstractions led narrative.

Although the directors of this seminar had their own agenda it was suggested that the assembled company might begin with an open discussion about the writing life. It was proposed that we should share not so much our own experiences at first, but what we considered was a necessary state from which to write. Inevitably and rightly this led to the role of reading, the necessity of reading, but reading in the new climate of the media storm, the instant access through technology, the over-saturation and stimulation of culture, the back-slapping banality of social media. Personal contact with one’s audience through readings and talks was a lively issue. The assembled were all proven writers, they all knew how to do it, but the publishing world and the media were changing the goal posts, rethinking the playing field and the game itself. There was a distinct feeling of unease about personal and financial futures. Just how does one sustain the creative way of things after the third book when the landscapes of literature seemed to change as for a traveller watching the scenery from a railway carriage? The romance of writing was being undermined and some writers felt soiled by the demand for public visibility. Some wanted to write books and be left in peace to do it.

Throughout all this open-ended discussion he had stayed silent, observing, word gathering, filling pages of his notebook with word-bites from these wordsmiths.  It was interesting how the assembled represented several common styles within new writing: poetry, but not as we know it poetry, the performance stuff; science fiction (those taking part were careful to use the Attwood distinction of possible SF and completely impossible SF); new nature was in attendance; fiction-verité, the stuff of raw truth and seemingly possible lives; the fictional biography was popular, regarded as a useful fall-back (there’s usually one hiding amongst most authors’ oeuvres); teenage fiction seemed a flourishing and free from angst genre (I don’t think very hard about what I write, said a 20-something with a four book contract, I read what’s out there already, and search the internet ).  

This definitely wasn’t in any sense of the word an academic seminar. Aesthetics and technical jargon were gently ridiculed by the directors who had had plenty of practice in sending up the stuff of creative writing courses. Hanif Kureishi’s recent declarations on such university degrees being ‘a waste of time’ were largely welcomed, though there was some defence evident (probably from those who had benefitted from such programmed and often supportive study).

Talk generally, not personally was the message. What are the general observations we can gather? You’re out there working in this volatile world of the written word, where are we at, and where are we going? Is there a developing vision? It was time to get off the fence, he thought, and bring something to bear on the discussion, which he could tell was reaching a necessary conclusion – time for a break. He suggested we might be mindful of those books and writing in any medium, which had and did enrich us. Imagine, he said, you’re about to leave home for this seminar and before the taxi arrives to take you to the railway station you have 3 minutes to find a book (and maybe it is of your own making) that you hold like you hold in your heart the imagined life of a dear friend you seldom if ever see. What comes into your mind right this minute? This book you choose you’ll hide from us all. You’ll put it at the bottom of the bag. It’s a secret word-gift, wherever it came from. It’s not there to impress us but to keep its owner warm at night when sleep is difficult (as he admitted he did not sleep well the previous night). I see writers, he said, as part of a community of the imagination, and this community through our various abilities and experiences fashions word-gifts. We do the best we can to make them well and good, to have a reality albeit an imagined reality, and if we think of our work as gifts containing the lives and experiences of even partially imagined others, no matter what we craft will have a right quality and purpose, and maybe a true presence.

Because her eyes were always
glancing downward
to see what lay at her feet
between strides or before the next step
it was inevitable that leaves would
one day summon her attention
Autumn time and the colour and curl
the drift and crackle under foot
their sculptured forms
so well curated against the drab
gallery grey-wet pavements she trod
But their very delicacy wore her down
until one day she saw a leaf
with a print mark the pattern of a boot’s
press and sole against the fallen foliage
of a Populus tremula
(or so she thought)

Taken then to her mantelpiece to dry
it slowly curled like a rug
to show only the weaver’s side
plain but variegated with nature’s stitch
ready to be carried on a merchant’s horse
this fine kilim of autumn
with its footprint signature
hidden from view from harm
on its journey over the mountains

Like Kathleen
I have a poem
Coming on
Yet to be born
Waiting in darkness
For a moment of truth

Like Kathleen
I 've swept the floor
But haven’t darned the socks
Yet I made a cake instead
And cooked two meals
For the one I love

Like Kathleen
I'm hopelessly hopeless
In life in love and only
Survive each day
By welcoming
Blue green golden red

(so forgetting what the angel said)
I  sing
Like Kathleen
Words that in my blood
Stream over rocks
To the sea.

Four Poems on the Tapestry Art of Jilly Edwards*

Yellow is the New Blue

From the train window
that yellow of summer
****-bright, and almost aromatic,
not a field colour in a fifties childhood
so we grew up without it you and I,
first curious at its occasional occurrence,
then somewhat overwhelmed
by its presence where pasture green
or golden wheat once was, and now this,
more than lemon and lemon-sharp too,
wonderfully colliding with any blue day
when the sky rests against a wolding sweep
of this crop the colour of daffodil.


Follow the Path to the Heart

Altar piece? But no, too small,
and there’s no God hiding there
under the table: this is on the wall.

Anyway, look at the panels here,
blue at the far end, surprising
but necessary, a clear

sea depth folding into itself a bare
surrounding whiteness of peace,
of supplication, a contemplative sampler

free from improving verse
or repetitious decoration.
It is all it is, even less.


Woolly Pictures and Plastic Boxes

I don’t do woolly pictures on the wall,
She said, and her son had smiled
in agreement. Long narrow strips instead,
She continued, rolled up to fit in a box
with tail-like braids sneaking out
and around and across and down
falling from a shelf or a window sill.

And those plastic (partitioned) boxes,
oohh! – I bought fifty wholesale from
Muji,  she exclaimed. I fill them
with moments, with evidence
of my journeying: always a railway ticket,
sometimes a torn wrapper stitched to mend,
then a tiny tapestry woven to fill one frame,
inevitably, a large-lettered cautionary word.

Standing on their sides my boxes
become rows of open windows,
a transparent gathering of memory,
a railway carriage of memorabilia.  
You can take them out, she said,
and put them back in a different way.
Memory is like that, the same trip
but the ordering altered:
there and back, back and there.


Ma

It’s a state of mind
Agnes talks about
and draws without a ruler,
a grid empty of everything
except the line, except a colour
all across and down
on *washi paper.

It’s space, you know,
a gap, a pause, an interval
or a consciousness of place,
a simultaneous awareness
of form and non-form,
an intensification of vision.

There it is on the wall.
This one, she points,
more blues than a lonely blue
ma gives shape to the whole,
my tapestry of negative space.

When I look at the sea
it’s all ma out there,
in the sparkle of reflections
on the cut-glass water,

where there is too much form
to hold against the heart,
where space is substance.

I think of you as a model
and I a painter I am not.
For you, my love,
carry stillness
I only wonder at.

I paint you naked on our bed,
imagine how I’d take this line of thigh,
that curve of breast, those dark shadows
of the lower back, a perfect ear,
a curl of hair, all and more
and because, and only when . . .

And after, then
we sit together
formally, at a concert:
there you are
all dressed in stillness.
Motionless your skirt
falls across a quiet knee
to a booted leg, you so rich
in graciousness and charm
that only the flow of a woman’s
costume holds for the painter’s eye.
Oh, and that warm confidence
born of a body, loved, admired,
always wondered at;
but whose senses so alive
to  syllables’ speech,
to movements’ play.

Therefore with my restless hand
I, for whom stillness is a foreign land,
hold this pen and scratch this page
to write you into each and every phrase,
all and every word and line.

It was just after four and he had been at his desk since early morning. He would stop every so often, turn away from his desk and think of her. They had spoken, as so often, before the day had got properly underway. It seemed necessary to know what each other had planned on their respective lists or calendars. But he had hidden from her an unexpected weariness, a fatigue that had already plagued the day. He felt beaten down by it, and had struggled to keep his concentration and application on the editing that he had decided to tackle today, so he was clear from it for tomorrow.

Tomorrow was to be a different day, a day away, a day of being visible as the composer whose persona he now felt increasingly uncomfortable in maintaining. He would take the train to Birmingham and it would be a short walk to the Conservatoire.  He would stop at the City Art Gallery and view the Penguins – or Dominicans in Feathers by Alfred Stacey Marks , and then upstairs to the small but exquisite collection of ukiyo-e. He would avoid lunch at the Conservatoire offered by a former colleague who he felt had only made the gesture out of politeness. They had never had anything significant to say to one another. He had admired her scholarship and the intensity of her musicianship: she was a fine singer. But she was a person who had shown no interest in his music, only his knowledge and relationship with composers in her research area, composers he had worked with and for. He doubted she would attend the workshop on his music during the afternoon.

He was often full of sadness that he could share so little with the young woman spoken with on the phone that morning, and who he loved beyond any reason he felt in control of. Last night he had gone to sleep, he knew, with her name on his lips, as so often. He would imagine her with him in that particular embrace, an arrangement of limbs that marked the lovingness and intimacy of their friendship, that companionship of affection that, just occasionally and wonderfully, turned itself in a passion that still startled him: that she could be so transformed by his kiss and touch.

He was afraid he might be becoming unwell, his head did not feel entirely right. He was a little cold though his room was warm enough. It had been such a struggle today to deal with being needfully critical, and maintaining accuracy with his decisions and final edits. He had had to stand his ground over the modern interpretation of ornaments knowing that there existed such confusion here, the mordent being the arch-culprit.

He stopped twice for a break, and during these 20-minute periods had turned his attention to gratefully to his latest writing project: The Language of Leaves. He had already written a short introduction, a poem about the way leaves dance to and in the wind of different seasons. At the weekend he had spent time over a book of images of leaves from across the world. He had read the final chapter of Darwin’s book The Powerful Movement of Plants, the final chapter because after publication Darwin suggested to a friend that this chapter was really the only worthwhile part of the book! He had then read an academic paper about the history of botanical thought in regard to the personification of plants, starting with Aristotle and ending with the generation after Darwin.

But his thoughts today were on writing a poem, if he could, and would once his editing task for the day had reached a realistic full stop. After leaves dancing he could only think of their stillness, and that was just a short jump to thoughts of the conservatory. Should he ever gain an extravagance of riches he would acquire a house with a veranda (for the woman he loved), outbuildings (for her studios – he reckoned she’d need more than one before long) and a conservatory (for them both to enjoy as the sun set in the North Norfolk skies below which he imagined his imagined house would be). And suddenly, at half past four, after his thinking time with this lovely young woman who occupied far more than his dreams ever could, he turned to his note book and wrote:  while leaves may dance . . .  And he was away, as so often the first line begetting a train of thought, of association, a fluency of one word following another word, and often effortlessly. A whole verse appeared, which he then took apart and rearranged, but the essence was there.

And so he thought of a conservatory, a place of a very particular stillness where the leaves of plants and ornamental trees were just as still as can be. Where only the leaves of mimosa pudica would move if touched, or the temperature or light changed. It was a magical plant whose leaves would fold in such extraordinary ways, and so find sleep. His imagined conservatory was Victorian, and in the time-slip that poetry affords it was time for tea and Lucy the maid would open the door and carry her tray to the table beside the chair in which his beautiful wife sat, who ahead of the fashion of the time wore her artist’s smock like a child’s pinafore, an indigo-dyed linen smock with deep pockets. She had joined him after a day in her studio (and he in his study), to drink the Jasmine tea her brother had brought back from his expedition to Nepal. She would then retire to her bedroom to write the numerous letters that each day required of her. And later, she would dress for dinner in her simple, but lovely way her husband so admired.

While leaves may dance
as the wind visits, passing by
on its way from there to here,
there can be a stillness too
that comes upon itself, falls,
descends even, alighting on
plant or tree and settles, stays
for a moment or maybe a while,
restlessness resting.

In the conservatory
it is time for tea
and the finches flit about
as Lucy opens the door,
brings the tray forward
to the table by the Citrus Sinensis.
A plain girl whose face lights up
as the little birds flutter to her side,
and suddenly bright-eyed,
with grace she kneels
to wait the required moments
for the Lapsang to enfuse
before pouring, before filling
my bone china cup painted
with the quaking aspen leaves
of the Populous Tremuloides
shimmering and fluttering,
quivering like butterflies.

When all is said and done
with the day we lie
as one form splayed on our bed:
poetry’s slaves here shackled
fast to the word.
Now beaten, now caressed,
perplexed and often
moved by rhythm’s rhyme
to tears and more -
if there’s a sweeter gift this side
of love’s kiss it waits upon another page,
which we may turn one night,
and finding fall into pleasure’s pain.

it was as if every day
might be the last
he would wake in the night
with help me on his lips
but too late he thought
too late

I am beyond help
because I have selfishly ignored
both reason and right
and now I must take this life
apart

he was surprised at the calm
this realisation engendered
he would carry on from day to day
attempting small acts of kindness
being patient with his wife
his children his few friends

to the woman he loved
out of all mind he had only
admiration felt only tenderness
and hoped she would know this
to be true despite what he knew
he had to do

We could say the obvious
about a leaf,
typically flat and thin,
terminologically rich:
an angiosperm
with petiole, lamina
and stipules (lots of these).

But enough for now
because I want to be
poetic about the leaf
and its collective:
leaves.

As the haiku goes
Leaves lose trees
And trees lose leaves
Who can walk without
Dancing on windfalls
As crisp as these.

It is their dance,
their dancing,
(these veined forms),
that bring me
gentle reader,
to the page.
It is the wind’s doing:
rustling and rubbing in
summer airs,
turning and falling
in September’s gales,
path-bound then
leaves leap and glide,
twist and scatter
in the winter winds.
In spring they are like
babes in the womb,
attached, full of life,
hidden in the bud.

As I cooked our lunch
before we were to part
you sat at the kitchen table
busy with cutting and sticking

just like a wet-afternoon child
waiting for her drink and biscuit.
Only it was Curried Cauliflower
and with those crispy rolls you like.

I stood in my apron behind
a pretence of minding the pan
rapt at the loveliness of your tilted head,
the intricate movements of your hands,

the concentrated purse of your lips
I so wanted to place against my own:
to draw you into the longest kiss,
the longest, deepest, barely imaginable kiss.

I

I learnt this week
that time and distance
can be friends to memory
their respective lengths
only wet and sharpen
the edge of love

but for us dear friend
we hold hard to hope
that we may
one day soon
share the present
and live each moment
in each other's heart.

II

Hearing you on Holkham beach
- whose soul is greater than the ocean
whose spirit stronger than the sea -
did I doubt for a moment
that you, though buffeted
by a cold east wind
would never age for me,
nor fade, nor die.
Nor you for me (she said)
Goodbye, my love,
a thousand times goodbye.
Write me well (she said)
and turned and ran.

III

The Reedham ferry was but a river's width
and yet I stood at the water's brink
and watched the reeds quiver in the wind,
watched the rain splatter on the puddled path.

All around to the human eye
this valley, a plain of grassland
broken only by reed-fringed pools,
was a gentle, unpeopled, easy place.

The absence of relief left
no fixed frame of reference.
Places apart from one another
would concertina and merge.

Tempted to cross I waved a no
to the ferryman in his quayside hut
then turned and walked quickly
back down the long, low road.

Today has been a difficult day he thought, as there on his desk, finally, lay some evidence of his struggle with the music he was writing. Since early this morning he’d been backtracking, remembering the steps that had enabled him to write the entirely successful first movement. He was going over the traces, examining the clues that were there (somewhere) in his sketches and diary jottings. They always seem so disorganised these marks and words and graphics, but eventually a little clarity was revealed and he could hear and see the music for what it was. But what was it to become? He had a firm idea, but he didn’t know how to go about getting it onto the page. The second slow movement seemed as elusive today as ever it had been.

There was something intrinsically difficult about slow music, particularly slow music for strings. The instruments’ ability to sustain and make pitches and chords flow seamlessly into one another magnified every inconsistency of his part-writing technique and harmonic justification. Faster music, music that constantly moved and changed, was just so much easier. The errors disappeared before the ear could catch them.

Writing music that was slow in tempo, whose harmonic rhythm was measured and took its time, required a level of sustained thought that only silence and intense concentration made properly possible. His studio was far from silent (outside the traffic spat and roared) and today his concentration seemed at a particularly low ebb. He was modelling this music on a Vivaldi Concerto, No.6 from L’Estro Armonico. That collective title meant Harmonic Inspiration, and inspiring this collection of 12 concerti for strings certainly was. Bach reworked six of these concertos in a variety of ways.

He could imagine the affect of this music from that magical city of the sea, Venice, La Serenissima, appearing as a warm but fresh wind of harmony and invention across those early, usually handwritten scores. Bach’s predecessors, Schutz and Schein had travelled to Venice and studied under the Gabrielis and later the maestro himself, Claudio Monteverdi. But for Bach the limitations of his situation, without such patronage enjoyed by earlier generations, made such journeying impossible. At twenty he did travel on foot from Arnstadt to Lubeck, some 250 miles, to experience the ***** improvisations of Dietriche Buxtehude, and stayed some three months to copy Buxtehude’s scores, managing to avoid the temptation of his daughter who, it was said, ‘went with the post’ on the Kapelmeister’s retirement. Handel’s visit to Buxtehude lasted twenty-four hours. To go to Italy? No. For Bach it was not to be.

But for this present day composer he had been to Italy, and his piece was to be his memory of Venice in the dark, sea-damp days of November when the acqua alta pursued its inhabitants (and all those tourists) about the city calles. No matter if the weather had been bad, it had been an arresting experience, and he enjoyed recovering the differing qualities of it in unguarded moments, usually when walking, because in Venice one walked, because that was how the city revealed itself despite the advice of John Ruskin and later Jan Morris who reckoned you had to have your own boat to properly experience this almost floating city.

As he chipped away at this unforgiving rock of a second movement he suddenly recalled that today was the first day of Epiphany, and in Venice the peculiar festival of La Befana. A strange tale this, where according to the legend, the night before the Wise Men arrived at the manger they stopped at the shack of an old woman to ask directions. They invited her to come along but she replied that she was too busy. Then a shepherd asked her to join him but again she refused. Later that night, she saw a great light in the sky and decided to join the Wise Men and the shepherd bearing gifts that had belonged to her child who had died. She got lost and never found the manger. Now La Befana flies around on her broomstick each year on the 11th night, bringing gifts to children in hopes that she might find the Baby Jesus. Children hang their stockings on the evening of January 5 awaiting the visit of La Befana. Hmm, he thought, and today the gondoliers take part in a race dressed as old women, and with a broomstick stuck vertically as a mast from each boat. Ah, L’Epiphania.

Here in this English Cathedral city where our composer lived Epiphany was celebrated only by the presence of a crib of contemporary sculptured forms that for many years had never ceased to beguile him, had made him stop and wonder. And this morning on his way out from Morning Office he had stopped and knelt by the figures he had so often meditated upon, and noticed three gifts, a golden box, a glass dish of incense and a tiny carved cabinet of myrrh,  laid in front of the Christ Child.

Yes, he would think of his second movement as ‘L’Epiphania’. It would be full of quiet  and slow wonder, but like the tale of La Befana a searching piece with no conclusion except a seque into the final fast and spirited conclusion to the piece. His second movement would be a night piece, an interlude that spoke of the mystery of the Incarnation, of God becoming Man. That seemed rather ambitious, but he felt it was a worthy ambition nevertheless.

This year we were not alone.
In convoy by car,
and now on a lower path,
past the ruined cottages
with their sagging brickwork
past redemption,
we had formed a line
******* a hedged path
towards a distant wood.

And all the while a child,
a child we loved and cared for,
savaged anything in reach
with a pair of sticks.

As a delicate rain fell,
the aggressive shout
of wood on wood.
numbed the senses.
There seemed no end
to this wanton litany of
violence and aggressive hurt.

For an hour or more this child,
this child we loved and cared for,
had been denied the living world
of the backlit screen.

Was there really nothing worthy
of attention here? So dull and damp
and dreary were these empty fields,
this persistent woodland.

So the year ends
With a blaze
Of sun’s gold
And amber fire
Lit in the western sky
To guide
December home
Throughout a dark night
Towards the dawn’s light,
A fresh day,
A new year.

So the clock strikes
With a chime
Of twelve strokes
And then the year
Has passed away for good
And said
Goodbye, farewell
Throughout a dark night
Towards the dawn’s light,
A fresh day,
A new year.

Alone but together
over the Christmas days
time was not running out
for once the kitchen clock
had stopped looking at him
meaningfully and she

today a thing of beauty
of gathered curves
flowing in and from
that special frock
bought for an opening
(and perhaps worn once?)
she was lovelier then
than any woman
he had known or seen.

Earlier that morning in place of falling
ever falling towards passion’s state
he had lain peacefully beside her
and from his pillowed space in bed
had gazed . . . instead

They did the usual things
but with an unusual care
taking time with presents’ paper
savouring wine between sips of water
cutting into that well-iced cake
and sensing from a distant room
the scent of candles glimmering

On St Stephen’s Day  
they’d upped and offed
into the glen that rose above the town
that held her world of work
of children house and home
walking up through bare winter trees
where far below a stream rushed valley-ward
undrowned for once by the traffic’s noise
and the sudden rush of the railway's train.

About to turn for home
he saw her stoop
to look to gather to pocket
Some sixth sense told him then
an idea had formed itself
when as between her fingers
she held five acorns from the path
not squirreled-perfect shiny ones
but damaged and in need of care
these cups and fruit garnered about
with slivers of broken oaken bark

Later she left them lying
on a sheet of card
their winter colours
true but hard
in the kitchen’s light
objects suddenly
removed from all disorder
of a woodland way.

An hour or so perhaps later
still with her small fingers
she had stitched until . .
no not stitched she said
darned with blue and red
and silk-golden thread
in between and then around
these fractured acorn shells
picked from the path with
the cracked and shattered
broken bark now made
good as new and mended well

Her smile expressed a triumph
and a joy of a doing done
and from laughing eyes
and heightened voice
he sensed something
stretch into time’s distance
something wholly private
she would guard
and hold and own
to be only hers
and only hers alone.

A Tale for the Mid-Winter Season after the Mural by Carl Larrson

On the shortest day I wake before our maids from the surrounding farms have converged on Sundborn. Greta lives with us so she will be asleep in that deep slumber only girls of her age seem to own. Her tiny room has barely more than a bed and a chest for her clothes. There is my first painting of her on the wall, little more a sketch, but she was entranced, at seeing herself so. To the household she is a maid who looks after me and my studio,  though she is a literate, intelligent girl, city-bred from Gamla Stan but from a poor home, a widowed mother, her late father a drunkard.  These were my roots, my beginning, exactly. But her eyes already see a world beyond Sundborn. She covets postcards from my distant friends: in Paris, London, Jean in South America, and will arrange them on my writing desk, sometimes take them to her room at night to dream in the candlelight. I think this summer I shall paint her, at my desk, reading my cards, or perhaps writing her own. The window will be open and a morning breeze will make the flowers on the desk tremble.

Karin sleeps too, a desperate sleep born of too much work and thought and interruption. These days before Christmas put a strain on her usually calm disposition. The responsibilities of our home, our life, the constant visitors, they weigh upon her, and dispel her private time. Time in her studio seems impossible. I often catch her poised to disappear from a family coming-together. She is here, and then gone, as if by magic. With the older children home from their distant schools, and Suzanne arrived from England just yesterday morning, they all cannot do without lengthy conferences. They know better than disturb me. Why do you think there is a window set into my studio door? So, if I am at my easel there should be no knock to disturb. There is another reason, but that is between Karin and I.

This was once a summer-only house, but over the years we have made it our whole-year home. There was much attention given to making it snug and warm. My architect replaced all the windows and all the doors and there is this straw insulation between the walls. Now, as I open the curtains around my bed, I can see my breath float out into the cool air. When, later, I descend to my studio, the stove, damped down against the night, when opened and raddled will soon warm the space. I shall draw back the heavy drapes and open the wooden shutters onto the dark land outside. Only then I will stand before my current painting: *Brita and the Sleigh.

Current!? I have been working on this painting intermittently for five years, and Brita is no longer the Brita of this picture, though I remember her then as yesterday. It is a picture of a winter journey for a six-year-old, only that journey is just across the yard to the washhouse. Snow, frost, birds gathered in the leafless trees, a sun dog in the sky, Brita pushing her empty sledge, wearing fur boots, Lisbeth’s old coat, and that black knitted hat made by old Anna. It is the nearest I have come to suggesting the outer landscape of this place. I bring it out every year at this time so I can check the light and the shadows against what I see now, not what I remember seeing then. But there will be a more pressing concern for me today, this shortest day.

Since my first thoughts for the final mural in my cycle for the Nationalmuseum I have always put this day aside, whatever I might be doing, wherever I may be. I pull out my first sketches, that book of imaginary tableaux filled in a day and a night in my tiny garden studio in Grez, thinking of home, of snow, the mid-winter, feeling the extraordinary power and shake of Adam of Bremen’s description of 10th C pre-Christian Uppsala, written to describe how barbaric and immoral were the practices and religion of the pagans, to defend the fragile position of the Christian church in Sweden at the time. But as I gaze at these rough beginnings made during those strange winter days in my rooms at the Hotel Chevilon, I feel myself that twenty-five year old discovering my artistic vision, abandoning oils for the flow and smudge of watercolour, and then, of course, Karin. We were part of the Swedish colony at Grez-sur-Loing. Karin lived with the ladies in Pension Laurent, but was every minute beside me until we found our own place, to be alone and be together, in a cupboard of a house by the river, in Marlotte.

Everyone who painted en-plein-air, writers, composers, they all flocked to Grez just south of Fontainebleau, to visit, sometimes to stay. I recall Strindberg writing to Karin after his first visit: It was as if there were no pronounced shadows, no hard lines, the air with its violet complexion is almost always misty; and I painting constantly, and against the style and medium of the time. How the French scoffed at my watercolours, but my work sold immediately in Stockholm. . . and Karin, tall, slim, Karin, my muse, my lover, my model, her boy-like figure lying naked (but for a hat) in the long grass outside my studio. We learned each other there, the technique of bodies in intimate closeness, the way of no words, the sharing of silent thoughts, together on those soft, damp winter days when our thoughts were of home, of Karin’s childhood home at Sundborn. I had no childhood thoughts I wanted to return to, but Karin, yes. That is why we are here now.

In Grez-sur-Loing, on a sullen December day, mist lying on the river, our garden dead to winter, we received a visitor, a Swedish writer and journalist travelling with a very young Italian, Mariano Fortuny, a painter living in Paris, and his mentor the Spaniard Egusquiza. There was a woman too who Karin took away, a Parisienne seamstress I think, Fortuny’s lover. Bayreuth and Wagner, Wagner, Wagner was all they could talk about. Of course Sweden has its own Nordic Mythology I ventured. But where is it? What is it? they cried, and there was laughter and more mulled wine, and then talk again of Wagner.

When the party left I realized there was something deep in my soul that had been woken by talk of the grandeur and scale of Wagner’s cocktail of German and Scandinavian myths and folk tales. For a day and night I sketched relentlessly, ransacking my memory for those old tales, drawing strong men and stalwart, flaxen-haired women in Nordic dress and ornament. But as a new day presented itself I closed my sketch book and let the matter drop until, years later, in a Stockholm bookshop I chanced upon a volume in Latin by Adam of Bremen, his Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum, the most famous source to pagan ritual practice in Sweden. That cold winter afternoon in Grez returned to me and I felt, as I had then, something stir within me, something missing from my comfortable world of images of home and farm, family and the country life.

Back in Sundborn this little volume printed in the 18th C lay on my desk like a question mark without a sentence. My Latin was only sufficient to get a gist, but the gist was enough. Here was the story of the palace of Uppsala, the great centre of the pre-Christian pagan cults that brought us Odin and Freyr. I sought out our village priest Dag Sandahl, a good Lutheran but who regularly tagged Latin in his sermons. Yes, he knew the book, and from his study bookshelf brought down an even earlier copy than my own. And there and then we sat down together and read. After an hour I was impatient to be back in my studio and draw, draw these extraordinary images this text brought to life unbidden in my imagination. But I did not leave until I had persuaded Pastor Sandahl to agree to translate the Uppsala section of the Adam of Bremen’s book, and just before Christmas that year, on the day before the Shortest Day, he delivered his translation to my studio. He would not stay, but said I should read the passages about King Domalde and his sacrifice at the Winter Solstice. And so, on the day of the Winter Solstice, I did.

This people have a widely renowned sanctuary called Uppsala.

By this temple is a very large tree with extending branches. It is always green, both in winter and in summer. No one knows what kind of tree this is. There is also a spring there, where the heathens usually perform their sacrificial rites. They throw a live human being into the spring. If he does not resurface, the wishes of the people will come true.

The Temple is girdled by a chain of gold that hangs above the roof of the building and shines from afar, so that people may see it from a distance when they approach there. The sanctuary itself is situated on a plain, surrounded by mountains, so that the form a theatre.

It is not far from the town of Sigtuna. This sanctuary is completely covered with golden ornaments. There, people worship the carved idols of three gods: Thor, the most powerful of them, has his throne in the middle of the hall, on either side of him, Odin and Freyr have their seats. They have these functions: “Thor,” they say, “rules the air, he rules thunder and lightning, wind and rain, good weather and harvests. The other, Odin, he who rages, he rules the war and give courage to people in their battle against enemies. The third is Freyr, he offers to mortals lust and peace and happiness.” And his image they make with a very large phallus. Odin they present armed, the way we usually present Mars, while Thor with the scepter seems to resemble Jupiter. As gods they also worship some that have earlier been human. They give them immortality for the sake of their great deeds, as we may read in Vita sancti Ansgarii that they did with King Eirik.

For all these gods have particular persons who are to bring forward the sacrificial gifts of the people. If plague and famine threatens, they offer to the image of Thor, if the matter is about war, they offer to Odin, but if a wedding is to be celebrated, they offer to Freyr. And every ninth year in Uppsala a great religious ceremony is held that is common to people from all parts of Sweden.”
Snorri also relates how human sacrifice began in Uppsala, with the sacrifice of a king.

Domalde took the heritage after his father Visbur, and ruled over the land. As in his time there was great famine and distress, the Swedes made great offerings of sacrifice at Upsal. The first autumn they sacrificed oxen, but the succeeding season was not improved thereby. The following autumn they sacrificed men, but the succeeding year was rather worse. The third autumn, when the offer of sacrifices should begin, a great multitude of Swedes came to Upsal; and now the chiefs held consultations with each other, and all agreed that the times of scarcity were on account of their king Domalde, and they resolved to offer him for good seasons, and to assault and **** him, and sprinkle the stall of the gods with his blood. And they did so.

There it was, at the end of Adam of Bremen’s description of Uppsala, this description of King Domalde upon which my mural would be based. It is not difficult to imagine, or rather the event itself can be richly embroidered, as I have over the years made my painting so. Karin and I have the books of William Morris on our shelves and I see little difference between his fixation on the legends of the Arthur and the Grail. We are on the cusp here between the pagan and the Christian.  What was Christ’s Crucifixion but a self sacrifice: as God in man he could have saved himself but chose to die for Redemption’s sake. His blood was not scattered to the fields as was Domalde’s, but his body and blood remains a continuing symbol in our right of Communion.

I unroll the latest watercolour cartoon of my mural. It is almost the length of this studio. Later I will ask Greta to collect the other easels we have in the house and barn and then I shall view it properly. But for now, as it unrolls, my drama of the Winter Solstice comes alive. It begins on from the right with body of warriors, bronze shields and helmets, long shafted spears, all set against the side of Uppsala Temple and more distant frost-hoared trees. Then we see the King himself, standing on a sled hauled by temple slaves. He is naked as he removes the furs in which he has travelled, a circuit of the temple to display himself to his starving people. In the centre, back to the viewer, a priest-like figure in a red cloak, a dagger held for us to see behind his back. Facing him, in druidic white, a high priest holds above his head a gold pagan monstrance. To his left there are white cloaked players of long, straight horns, blue cloaked players of the curled horns, and guiding the shaft of the sled a grizzled shaman dressed in the skins and furs of animals. The final quarter of my one- day-to-be-a-mural unfolds to show the women of temple and palace writhing in gestures of grief and hysteria whilst their queen kneels prostate on the ground, her head to the earth, her ladies ***** behind her. Above them all stands the forever-green tree whose origin no one knows.

Greta has entered the studio in her practiced, silent way carrying coffee and rolls from the kitchen. She has seen Midvinterblot many times, but I sense her gaze of fascination, yet again, at the figure of the naked king. She remembers the model, the sailor who came to stay at Kartbacken three summers ago. He was like the harpooner Queequeg in Moby ****. A tattooed man who was to be seen swimming in Toftan Lake and walking bare-chested in our woods. A tall, well-muscled, almost silent man, whom I patiently courted to be my model for King Dolmade. I have a book of sketches of him striding purposefully through the trees, the tattooed lines on his shoulders and chest like deep cuts into his body. This striding figure I hid from the children for some time, but from Greta that was impossible. She whispered to me once that when she could not have my substantial chest against her she would imagine the sailor’s, imagine touching and following his tattooed lines. This way, she said, helped her have respite from those stirrings she would so often feel for me. My painting, she knew, had stirred her fellow maids Clara and Solveig. Surely you know this, she had said, in her resolute and direct city manner. I have to remember she is the age of my eldest, who too must hold such thoughts and feelings. Karin dislikes my sailor king and wishes I would not hide the face of his distraught queen.

Today the sunrise is at 9.0, just a half hour away, and it will set before 3.0pm. So, after this coffee I will put on my boots and fur coat, be well scarfed and hatted (as my son Pontus would say) and walk out onto my estate. I will walk east across the fields towards Spardasvvägen. The sky is already waiting for the sun, but waits without colour, hardly even a tinge of red one might expect.

I have given Greta her orders to collect every easel she can find so we can take Midvinterblot off the floor and see it in all its vivid colour and form. In February I shall begin again to persuade the Nationalmuseum to accept this work. We have a moratorium just now. I will not accept their reasoning that there is no historical premise for such a subject, that such a scene has no place in a public gallery. A suggestion has been made that the Historiska museet might house it. But I shall not think of this today.

Karin is here, her face at the studio window beckons entry. My Darling, yes, it is midwinter’s day and I am dressing to greet the solstice. I will dress, she says, to see Edgar who will be here in half an hour to discuss my designs for this new furniture. We will be lunching at noon. Know you are welcome. Suzanne is talking constantly of England, England, and of course Oxford, this place of dreaming spires and good looking boys. We touch hands and kiss. I sense the perfume of sleep, of her bed.

Outside I must walk quickly to be quite alone, quite apart from the house, in the fields, alone. It is on its way: this light that will bathe the snowed-over land and will be my promise of the year’s turn towards new life.

As I walk the drama of Midvinterblot unfolds in a confusion of noise, the weeping of women, the physical exertions of the temple slaves, the priests’ incantations, the riot of horns, and then suddenly, as I stand in this frozen field, there is silence. The sun rises. It stagge

Love has come Again

At a halt on our path
a field-scape lies.
The sky downcasts
a beige blankness
tucked into the horizon.
It is a scene, still of movement.

Then in an abrupt cloak of berries
the sudden plumage of a pheasant
erupts from its hedgerow covert,
a most vivid proclamation
of the season’s palette.

In these silent wolds winter’s wheat
has already sprung its green blade
from the buried grain . . .
only now to wait,
to wait in the cold earth
at our feet, to wait, then flower.

Love is Come Again  the carol sings.

This is nature’s promise,
and yet hidden from sight
the story tells itself
again. And yet again
we pause and wonder
at its telling . . .
even as the light fails us
and a darkness falls
against this frigid land.




La Serenissima*

There it was, high on an outer wall
of *San Giovanni Battista in Bragora;
the church where Vivaldi was baptised.

Ruskin would surely have brought
suo scala a pioli to come close
and so sketch this tableau in relief
of Mary, her son and the Magi three.

But with il telebiettivo
its detail becomes forever mine,
and so is pinned during Advent
to my studio notice-board:

a ****** purissimo,
un bambino divine,
my Christmas gift
from La Serenissima.

Fox Fidelis

for Hazel

So, she said,
what do you want?
Somewhere warm
to sleep inside,
said the fox in the snow.
There’s only the bike shed,
she said, and only at night.
Right,
said the fox in the snow
If you let me in,
and you let me out,
I’ll be a good fox.
You’d better be, she said,
No squatters here,
even at Christmas.
Verstehen Sie?
Etiam,
said the fox in the snow,
Semper ergo sum
vulpes fidelis.


Fox in a blizzard*

For Joe*

Looks serious
this blizzard of snowflakes.
A proper ice storm perhaps?
All the same yet different
the microscope shows.
Who knows?
Just hearsay it’s said,
and cold on the nose,
said the fox in a blizzard.

Oil on canvas c.1926*

I suppose the catalogue tells all
about this painting on the wall.
It had pride of place
in some private collection.
Now, shielded by an electronic guard,
deemed precious, it’s unusual and large;
an early work, when (she said)  ‘I was
full of painting those around me’.

Here they are, my Warwicks:
Joe, Enid, baby Paul
and just in the corner
Auntie Liz.

They are substantial folk
these Warwicks, and have
eaten here a substantial tea.
The firelight’s purple shadows
make a mask of Joe’s wind-scoured face,
and next to the milk jug, look,
his great wedge of fingers lie at rest.
Enid, softly centred in woollen cream,
a wide-eyed Paul on her wifely knee,
seems to gaze beyond her motherhood,
to Northrigg Hill and a setting sun.
There is a general daze of repose;
the meal is over and we are replete with tea.
Lizzie contemplates the washing up.

The artist sits across the table,
rests her sketchbook
on the starched, white cloth,
and with a few firm strokes
collects this family’s shapes and forms
as I do now across the electronic guard
to secure a memory sketch  as
no photography's allowed.

In Venice walking takes on
a whole new meaning:
the abruptness of the right turn,
the obliqueness in the left,
the straight on for a bit,
the step up, the step down,
and that always glance
for the prospect of a view.

Water, suddenly interrupts; the cool,
placid, rolling drunkenly in the canals
green water, where on this November day
there is somewhat more than necessary.
So you climb aboard the passarelle
to take a walk above the acqua alta.  

But you have your wellingtons
per fortuna, and are happy
to stand in a flooded passage
to eat that picniced lunch
fresh from the supermercato.
Alas, no seat, no bench to recline on
anywhere, absent from public places,
to ward off I vagabondi.

You stand or move, walk and turn,
then at the lagoon’s edge:
go back and back and back
again - by another way.

This Boyhood’s End
was mine too, but
through its music’s dance,
not just Hudson’s farewell to a natural world
of exotic flowers and flocks of birds
on the great plains of the pampas.

In Tippett’s suite of songs I first found
that ecstasy of word-rhythm wedded
to melodic contour held in place
by a singer’s voice, and a pianist’s touch
of harmony grafted from a play of parts.

Sitting on my bedroom floor
ear close to the gramophone,
thirteen and already enamored,
I listened over and again to this cantata
that has for so long held the key
to the very door of music . . .

Music may be a notion like ‘God’ or ‘love’.
Everyone identifies with it,
but it is composers who live to fathom
its depths and sound out its mystery.

Good afternoon, she said, it’s me.
I thought I might phone today
because . . .
I was wondering you see
how your voice would sound,
how you might speak to me
(if you would speak to me at all
that is).  

It’s probably an intrusion,
but I’m curious to know if
what you write is how you are,
and how you are . . . she paused,
then said, I meant to say . . .
but she didn't.
She’d not prepared herself
for silence at the other end.

The most wonderful
of December days,
the distant cliffs had glowed
as afternoon had slowly
wound down into dusk.
The tide had turned,
and turning itself about,
was going out.

Picking up her mobile phone
from an ever-cluttered table
(where she watched the sea
and sometimes wrote)
now spurred by the moment
said aloud - I can. I shall.

Oh and this imagining
they were out with the dogs
on the sand, these two writers
talking seamlessly about this
writing life, their poetry please.

Are you there? , she said, knowing,
though his number dialled,
she hadn’t really placed the call.
A rehearsal, she told herself firmly,
that was only a rehearsal after all.

for Alice*

How light shapes and surprises
​what we fix upon to view
when we stop to look
​and rest our thoughts anew.
We claim nature’s space,
​ if momentarily, as our own.

As when light reflects
​ upon water calm and deep
there is this never quite
​stillness there, that keeps
flickering in restless intent
​to break and change.

This you own and hold
​to all you are and do,
you who foster slow time,
​quietness, silence too,
bringing beauty’s truth
​to all you find and form.

Think of an imagined orchestra. But there is no resonance hereabouts, so the imagination gives next to nothing for your efforts, and even in surround-sound there’s so little to reflect the dimensions of the space your walking inhabits. Sea hardly counts, having its constant companionship with wind, and sand hills absorb the footfall. A shout dies here before the breath has left the lungs.

Listen, there is a vague twittering of wading birds flocked far out on the sand. The sea rolls and breaks a rhythmic swell into surf. There’s a little wind to rustle the ammophila and only the slight undefined noise of our bodies moving in this strip between land and sea. Nowhere here can sound be enclosed except within the self. There’s a kind of breathing going on, and much like our own, it has to be listened for with a keen attention.

There is such a confusion of shapes making detail difficult to gather in, even to focus upon, and to attempt an imagined orchestration – impossible. We’ll have to wait for the camera’s catch, its cargo to be brought to the back-lit screen. Once there it seems hardly a glimmer of what we thought we saw, what we ‘snapped’ in an instant. It’s too detached, too flat. So thankfully you sketch, and I feel the pen draw shapes into your fingers and their moving, willing hand. On your sketchbook’s page the image breathes and lives.

You can’t sketch music this way because the mark made buries itself in a network that seems to defy with its complexity any image set before you. Time’s like that. You end up with a long low pitch, pulsating; a grumbling sound rich in sliding harmonics. You see, landscape does not beget melody or even structure and form, only tiny, pebbled pockets of random sound. Here, there is no belonging of music. Only the built space can adequately house music’s home. We might ****** a few seconds of the sea’s turn and wash, a bird’s cry, the rub and clatter of boot on stone, and later bring it back to a timeline of digital audio and be ‘musical’ with it, or not.

Where we hold music to landscape is something we are told just happens to be so; it is the interpretation’s (and the interpreter’s) will and whim. It is an illusion. The Lark Ascends in a Norfolk field. We hear, but rarely see, this almost stationary bird high in the morning air. We can only imagine the lark’s eye view, but we know the story, the poem, the context, so our imagination learns to supply the rest.

What is taken then to be taken back? On this November beach, on this mild, windless afternoon,. Am I collecting, preparing, and easing the mind, un-complicating mental space, or unravelling past thoughts and former plans? I can then imagine sitting at a table, a table before a window, a window before a garden, and beyond the garden (through the window) there’s a distant vista of the sea where the sun glistens (it is early morning), and there too in the bright sky remains a vestige of a night’s drama of clouds. But today we shall not put music to picture from a camera’s contents, from any flat and lifeless image.

Instead there seem to be present thoughts alive in this ancient coastline, abandoned here the necessary industry of living, the once ceaseless business of daily life. Instead of the hand to mouth existence governed by the herring, the course strip farming below the castle, the herds of dark cattle, the possible pigs, some wandering sheep, seabirds and their eggs for the ***, the gathering of seaweed, the foraging for fuel: there is a closing down for winter because the visitors are few. We need the rest they say, to regroup, paint the ceilings, freshen up the shop, strengthen the fences, have time away from the relentlessness of accommodating and being accommodating. Only the smell of smoking the herring remains from the distant past – but now such kippering is for Fortnums.

We step out across and down and up the coastal strip: an afternoon and its following morning;  a few miles walking, nothing serious, but moving here and there, taking it in, as much as we can. We fill ourselves to the brim with what’s here and now. The past is never far away: in just living memory there was a subsistence life of the herring fishers and the itinerant fisher folk who followed the herring from Aberdeen to Plymouth. Now there are empty holiday lets, retirement properties and most who live here service the visitors. Prime cattle graze, birds are reserved, caravans park next to a floodlit hotel and its gourmet restaurant. There’s even a poet here somewhere - sitting on a rock like a siren with a lovely smile.

Colours: dull greens now, wind-washed-out browns, out and above the sea confusions of grey and black stone, floating skeins of orange sands and the haunting, restless skies. Far distant into the west hills are sculpted by low-flying clouds resting in the mild air. Wind turbines step out across the middle distance, but today their sails are stationary. As the bay curves a settlement of wooden huts, painted chalets then the grey steep roofed houses of stone, grey and hard against the sea.

Does music come out of all this? What appears? What sounds? What is sounding in me? There is nothing stationary here to hang on to because even on this mild day there is constant change. Look up, around, adjust the viewpoint. There’s another highlight from the sky’s palette reflecting in the estuary water, always too various and complex to remember.

Music comes out of nothing but what you build it upon. It holds the potential for going beyond arrangements of notes. Pieces become buildings, layers in thought. My only landscape music to date begins with a formal processional, a march, and a gradually broadening out of tonality the close-knit chromatic to the open-eared pentatonic. There’s a steady stream of pitches that do not repeat or recur or return on themselves, as so much music needs to do to appease our memory.

In this landscape there seem only sharp points of dissonance. I hear lonely, disembodied pitches, uncomfortable sounds that are pinned to the past. The land, its topography as a score grasping the exterior, lies in multi-dimensional space, sound in being, a joining of points where there is no correlation. There’s a map and directions and a flow of time: it starts here and ends there, and so little remains for the memory.

Yet, this location remains. We walked it and saw it fortunately for a brief time in an uninhabited state. We were alone with it. We looked at this land as it meets the sea, and I saw it as a map on which to place complexes of sound, intensities even,. But how to meet the musical utterance that claims connection? It is a layering of complexes between silences, between the steady step, the stop and view. There is perhaps a hierarchy of landscape objects: the curve of the bay, the sandhills’ sweep, the layerings of sand, and in the pools and channels of this slight river that divides this beach flocks of birds.

Music is such an intense structure, so bound together, invested with proportions so exact and yet weighed down by tone, the sounding, vibrating string, the column of air broken by the valve and key, the attack and release of the hammered string. But there is also the voice, and voices are able to sound and carry their own resonance . . .

. . . and he realised that was where these long drawn out thoughts, this short diary of reflection, had been leading. He would sit quietly in contemplation of it all and work towards a web of words. He would let their rhythms and sounds come together in a map, as a map of their precious, shared time moving between the land and the sea, the sea and the land.