January Colours

In the winter garden
of the Villa del Parma
by the artist’s studio
green grass turns vert de terre
and the stone walls
a wet mouse’s back
grounding neutral – but calm,
soothing like calamine
in today’s mizzle,
a permanent dimpsey,
fine drenching drizzle,
almost invisible, yet
saturating skylights
with evidence of rain.

February Colours

In the kitchen’s borrowed light,
dear Grace makes bread  
on the mahogany table,
her palma gray dress
bringing the outside in.

Whilst next door, inside
Vanessa’s garden room
the French windows
firmly shut out this
season’s bitter weather.

There, in the stone jar
beside her desk,
branches of heather;
Erica for winter’s retreat,
Calluna for spring’s expectation.

Tea awaits in Duncan’s domain.
Set amongst the books and murals,
Spode’s best bone china  
turning a porcelain pink
as the hearth’s fire burns bright..

Today
in this house
a very Bloomsbury tone,
a truly Charleston Gray.

March Colours

Not quite daffodil
Not yet spring
Lancaster Yellow
Was Nancy’s shade

For the drawing room
Walls of Kelmarsh Hall
And its high plastered ceiling
Of blue ground blue.

Playing cat’s paw
Like the monkey she was
Two drab husbands paid
For the gardens she made,
For haphazard luxuriance.

Society decorator, partner
In paper and paint,
She’d walk the grounds
Of her Palladian gem
Conjuring for the catalogue
Such ingenious labels:

Brassica and Cooking Apple
Green to be seen
In gardens and orchards
Grown to be greens.

April Colours

It would be churlish
to expect, a folly to believe,
that green leaves would  
cover the trees just yet.

But blossom will:
clusters of flowers,
Damson white,
Cherry red,
Middleton pink,

And at the fields’ edge
Primroses dayroom yellow,
a convalescent colour
healing the hedgerows
of winter’s afflictions.

Clouds storm Salisbury Plain,
and as a skimming stone
on water, touch, rise, touch
and fall behind horizon’s rim.
Where it goes - no one knows.

Far (far) from the Madding Crowd
Hardy’s concordant cove at Lulworth
blue by the cold sea, clear in the crystal air,
still taut with spring.

May Colours

A spring day
In Suffield Green,
The sky is cook’s blue,
The clouds pointing white.

In this village near Norwich
Lives Marcel Manouna
Thawbed and babouched
With lemurs and llamas,
Leopards and duck,
And more . . .

This small menagerie
Is Marcel’s only luxury
A curious curiosity
In a Norfolk village
Near to Norwich.

So, on this
Blossoming
Spring day
Marcel’s blue grey
Parrot James
Perched on a gate
Squawks the refrain

Sumer is icumen in
Lhude sing cuccu!
Groweþ sed and bloweþ med
And springþ þe wde nu,
Sing cuccu!

June

Thrownware
earth red
thrown off the ****
the Japanese way.
Inside hand does the work,
keeps it alive.
Outside hand holds the clay
and critically tweaks.
Touch, press, hold, release
Scooting, patting, spin!
Centering: the act
precedes all others
on the potter’s wheel.
Centering: the day
the sun climbs highest
in our hemisphere.
And then affix the glaze
in colours of summer:
Stone blue
Cabbage white
Print-room yellow
Saxon green
Rectory red
And fire!

July Colours

I see you
by the dix blue
asters in the Grey Walk
via the Pear Pond,
a circuit of surprises
past the Witches House,
the Radicchio View,
to the beautifully manicured
Orangery lawns, then the
East and West Rills of
Gertrude’s Great Plat.

And under that pea green hat
you wear, my mistress dear,
though your face may be April
there’s July in your eyes of such grace.

I see you wander at will
down the cinder rose path
‘neath the drawing-room blue sky.

August Colours

Out on the wet sand
Mark and Sarah
take their morning stroll.
He, barefoot in a blazer,
She, linen-light in a wide-brimmed straw,
Together they survey
their (very) elegant home,
Colonial British,
Classic traditional,
a retreat in Olive County, Florida:
white sandy beaches,
playful porpoises,
gentle manatees.

It’s an everfine August day
humid and hot
in the hurricane season.
But later they’ll picnic on
Brinjal Baigan Bharta
in the Chinese Blue sea-view
dining room fashioned
by doyen designer
Leta Austin Foster
who ‘loves to bring the ocean inside.
I adore the colour blue,’ she says,
‘though gray is my favourite.’

September

A perfect day
at the Castle of Mey
beckons.
Watching the rising sun
disperse the morning mists,
the Duchess sits
by the window
in the Breakfast Room.
Green leaves have yet to give way
to autumn colours but the air
is seasonably cool, September fresh.

William is fishing the Warriner’s Pool,
curling casts with a Highlander fly.
She waits; dressed in Power Blue
silk, Citron tights,
a shawl of India Yellow
draped over her shoulders.
But there he is, crossing the home beat,
Lucy, her pale hound at his heels,
a dead salmon in his bag.

October Colours

At Berrington
blue, clear skies,
chill mornings
before the first frosts
and the apples ripe for picking
(place a cupped hand under the fruit
and gently ‘clunch’).

Henry Holland’s hall -
just ‘the perfect place to live’.
From the Picture Gallery
redolent in portraits
and naval scenes,
the view looks beyond
Capability’s parkland
to Brecon’s Beacons.

At the fourteen-acre pool
trees, cane and reed
mirror in the still water
where Common Kingfishers,
blue green with fowler pink feet
vie with Grey Herons,
funereal grey,
to ruffle this autumn scene.

November Colours

In pigeon light
this damp day
settles itself
into lamp-room grey.

The trees intone
farewell farewell:
An autumnal valedictory
to reluctant leaves.

Yet a few remain
bold coloured

Porphry Pink
Fox Red
Fowler
Sudbury Yellow

hanging by a thread
they turn in the stillest air.

Then fall
Then fall

December Colours*

Green smoke* from damp leaves
float from gardens’ bonfires,
rise in the silver Blackened sky.

Close by the tall railings,
fast to lichened walls
we walk cold winter streets

to the warm world of home, where
shadows thrown by the parlour fire
dance on the wainscot, flicker from the hearth.

Hanging from our welcome door
see how incarnadine the berries are
on this hollyed wreath of polished leaves.

He had declared previously
that he would only write
the shortest poems of love,
his affections, of her beauty
and loveliness in all things.
But here, as he watched the shadows
cast the late afternoon across
this still and textured dale,
he had second thoughts.
There was really still so much to say -
as every hour she came closer
and dearer and more precious
to what he knew to be his
consciousness, that being alive
to the wonder of it all.

this small lake where only the breeze is present on
the water’s surface where only the ducks and moorhens
chatter about us silent hills and the shadows of clouds
passing  passing dark shapes passing over the snow streaks

horses suddenly four dark cobs sturdy travellers’ beasts
grazing a golf course gentle souls quietly padding
moving close by inspecting us for food I touch a coat
black as black as short as the sheep-clipped grass

distance everywhere spreading out into a haze of a lowering
sun fold upon fold of field and pasture walled tree-lined
disturbed by dwellings grey stone white-walled even
red-roofed disappearing into trees nestled next to barns

flow of the hill the hills flow long stretches of stunted grass
upwards to nearly snowlines where fissures of white fingers
reach down towards the sheeped grass a few tops nearly
mountains brilliant white

suddenly finding troubled thoughts are nowhere gone away
left somewhere perhaps on the train journey north passing
out of the windowed view and now just the present present
resting in the cool to breathe cool air

strange that so many images now mind-snapshots conjure
past-thoughts sharp memories your blue figure almost
motionless sketching with charcoal and finger ends
kneeding texture into the paper so still still

the track beyond this farm is an unrolled pattern towards
the higher hills across the meadows winter has almost
drained of colour to disappear the once green becoming
nearly neutral but going further before a surprise in store

a valley revealed after reaching the hill’s brow there a
river’s part-song flows across a tree-accompanied edgeland
before a sleight village there’s a road one vehicle
passing in the half hour you sit and draw

there is colour here autumnal shades though nearly spring
the earth sandstone-red bracken fit to be burnt and there
very distant a line of smoke following a crease in  the
southern hills rising and spreading horizon-ward

every time birds crows starlings gulls lift from a field
a wood a hillside my heart lifts with them to glide with
unexpected joy that this should be so that such movement
should make this landscape sing

walking westward sunward into the sun’s setting haze
distant Lakeland distant Ullswater somewhere in the
gathering purple corrugated sheets of rising hills in the
almost empty sky promising a cold night

and later in the warmth of resting as the sky reddens
and dusk falls the snowdrop rich woodland from our
window captures the westward light and birds roost
as we roost on our bed we might not sleep in tonight

but we are to stay and later walking the night-dark road
leaving the small town behind the stars bend down to the
very edge of nearer horizons the cusp of close fields so
sharply bright bold alarums of once-worlds everywhere

to see you sew is to witness peace I often imagine dream
of close my eyes to see those quiet fingers press and touch
and move so later I bring my own fingers into a play of  
unclothing to stroke and press and bring close

and morning there is frost fielded to a curve of a pasture
edged with what seem to be trees but are distance-belied
falsely distant felt too close extraordinary I pull the curtain
just a little to gaze that I see it so

my darling there is more and it is more than I know how
to place on the page my notes now run to not-quite sense
but I discern to be full of walking’s pleasure to grasp a
freedom paced together to tread to be under the soft sky still

Love’s Lexicon
 
I must make a new vocabulary.
My dear, the words I’ve used in those
Over and over descriptions, signifying all you are,
Are well and past their sell-by-date, should
End their shelf-life here and now. No longer can I
Form their letters truly without knowing well
I test love’s patience . . . and your own.
 
So in desperation’s way
I adopt a different lexicon
Offer you, my love,
a fresh taxonomy.
 
concave the slapp
pressure inbuilt
evenly glassed
held held holdingnow
but ambulatory
moons at full stretch
figuration tempering
notonce twicemore
pressure wieghedupon
beyond breath’s exhale
membraneous goldening
frecklation the hands’ fastness
eyerich sightedkeen here
gone awaygone away
bodystretched senticle
smoooth
  
A Proper Poem
 
Poised to conjure music
from the nothing air, and
with only some frivolous
verse to guide me,
I rest momentarily
to watch the screen of my mind
show your dear self to me:
the sweet flow of your body
uncovered in the shower;
that dance of choosing clothes
and dressing. I have sometimes
watched and wondered,
wondered that you could be
quite as you are.
So precious in my sight,
so very precious.

Water’s Kiss**
 
I shall only write you
very short poems of love
so you can taste them
in one gulp as you might
from a Highland stream
unpolluted, soft,
peat -filtered, cold,
and bubbled with air
from falling across stones
into your cupped hand.
My love, bring now
this water’s kiss
to your waiting lips.

Prince Niou had removed himself from Kaoru’s company and the warmth of the wood-burning stove. Under the shelter of the steep karawa eaves he stood to watch the snow, to watch it fall, fall relentlessly, relentlessly. But for the biting cold he might have been watching the blossoms fall and scatter, those intricate, delicate flowers that, as you looked up at them in the trees, were in tessellation with the sky. It was Kisaragi (late February) when winter shows little sign that spring might appear. So now the time of deep snows in the mountain fastness where Kaoru’s family estates straddled part of the necessary journey from Edo to Kyoto.
 
The snowfall mesmerized Niou. It held such a purity of disordered motion, He stretched out his arm to feel the soft touch of the flakes on his embroidered sleeve. He imagined Ukifune’s touch would be like that of this falling snow, a pattering of fingers, a sweep of her long, long hair. She, Kaoru’s mistress, had left earlier in the afternoon to journey safely across the mountain passes to her lakeside home before the heavy snow fall set in. He had been close witness to Kaoru’s passion for this delicate flower picked from across the mountains to grace his country house his wife would never visit in winter. And now Prince Niou had, in just two days of polite proximity, lost his heart and all reason to this girl-woman, this woman-girl. She seemed beyond conventional description such was her beauty and her graceful manner. When her eyes rose to his he lost the composure he knew his station demanded. But Kaoru in his own infatuation and glowing with the pleasuring he and Ukifune enjoyed seemed oblivious to the Prince’s covert gaze.
 
This evening Kaoru had already drunk more than was sensible. But darkness was drawing in, and the duties, what little he allowed himself, were over for the day, except to entertain his eminent friend. He had allowed himself to be carefully boastful of Ukifune’s charms and beauty. His words made frequent veiled suggestions of their moments of pleasure together in this winter world of silence where lovers would part the screens and stand folded in each other’s arms to witness the white world of snowfall decorate the mountain landscape.
 
Prince Niou had already decided that as his friend fell into stupor then sleep, and that would be soon, he would set out across the snows to seek Ukifune’s path, to capture her for himself, to declare his love and passion. As she left he had passed a note to her maid telling her not to be surprised by a night-time visitation. He knew that a journey in falling snow would take many hours and it would probably be dawn before he could approach her mountain retreat, a small house by a lake. There, it seemed, she withdrew from the complexities of court life to find the peace and balance necessary to sustain her beauty. She had described the joy of witnessing the intricate twilights and blood red dawns of winter, of watching the birds rise from and return to the oft-frozen lake. She and her maid would drift idly in her boat watching the black, dense water lap too and fro, until the cold required a return to warmth and comfort.
 
It was to be a hard journey. Niou, though prepared with stout boots, an extra cloak and shawl, knew he would flounder into drifts along way. Only his long staff would save him from ignominy. His saw his path blessed by the light of a half moon and together with a myriad of stars arching across the heavens, he would triumph. He had borrowed items of Kaoru’s clothing, his hat and staff, his bag and winter cloak. To all intents and purposes as he approached Ukifune’s home he would appear as his soon to be cuckolded friend. His thoughts remained fixed on  Ukifune. He longed for the moment when she would raise her eyes to him from her pillow, in surprise, in wonder he hoped. He considered how his cold body would join with her warm body in the infinite caress of love’s first passionate meeting. He would then carry her wrapped in her bed coverings to her boat and, having secured her comfort, pole out into the lake and there join with her as the moon looked down from the dawn sky.
 
Later they would exchange poems:
 
Niou
​Snow upon hill, ice along frozen rivers:
​​There for you I trod, yet for all that never lost
​​The way to be lost in you.
 
Ukifune​
*Quicker than the snow, swirling down at last
​​To lie by a frozen lake, I think I shall
​​Melt away while aloft yet in mid sky.

You visit this place
You do not stay long
There’s nothing here
that speaks of settlement
Everything you do has an edge
of intensity wet by the weather
sharpened by the clock

If you try to be still
in what passes for shelter
the wind will find you
seek you out

So with the camera your primary tool
begin to collect - image after image after image
Point and click : view and share

Eventually the mark-making begins
though fraught with difficulty
it seems just hopeless this testing out
of the body’s response to what passes
before the scanning eye
Blink
and the image shifts

There is this fierce and on-going campaign
between the near : between the far
What lies at your feet :  what decorates the horizon.

After a few hours wrapped round in nature’s vortex
the eye and brain are exhausted by the profusion of it all
wearied by the press of wind, the touch of rain, the glare of sun

Always the problem of what you do
with what you’ve seen
and touched with cold hands
pulling out metal objects from the sand
whose rusted and distressed forms
will lie exposed on the studio table

The place marks you Rain and wind on the face
raise new freckles there’s a salty veneer to the skin
the rub of sand  :  a wash of seawater
the grasp of pebbles : wood’s chiromatic grain
The lexicon of texture expands under your fingers
changes of temperature : degrees of saturation
and further uncompromising perspectives
unimaginable yet in two dimensions
Beyond beachcombing this is seacoast surgery

Away from it all (and out of the wind)
your memory stretches to the corners of recall
Wandering through a home-centred day
as in a waking dream
knowing you’ve already gathered
all manner of sensory matter
held and stored in the pineal gland
flowing free in Meissner’s corpuscles

Even absorbed in conversation’s company
as you turn away to fill the kettle
you are on the beach back in the wind
scanning the memory tin : priming the future.

09/09/10 13.26
Just eaten the last of your figs x
End
 
There is just so much to know about the fig.
Andre Gidé, D.H.Lawrence,
Gabriela Mistral
Poets all
Have tried
To decode
Its secret enclosed form.
 
Since nothing escapes
the smell becomes succulence and taste.
A blossom without beauty, yet a fruit of delights...
 
A year ago
When I brought autumn to your table
I tried to explain
The fig’s ****** nature . . .
and failed.
I was too shy
And mumbled something about
Its gynaecological aspect.
 
Now I know you better
And your hand has cupped
My testicles
Can you not
Appreciate the similarity?
The size and shape is
. . .  similar
 
It seems male
This secretive fruit
But when you come to know it better,
You’ll agree with Catullus,
It is female.
 
Oh fig, fruit of female mystery where everything happens  invisible flowering and fertilization,and fruiting in the inwardsness of your you that eye will never see till its finished and you’re over-ripe and you burst to give up your ghost.
 
Yesterday
(After we had eaten figs
From the blue bowl
Bathing in the golden light
Of your September garden)
I felt that ripe and secret cleft
Open to my ***** touch
And kiss and kiss
Kiss and kiss
 
*Touch me: it is softness of good satin, and when you open me, what an unexpected rose! Poets have not known the colour of night, nor the figs of Palestine. We are both the most ancient blue, a passionate blue, richly concentrating itself because of its ardor. I spill my pressed flowers into your hand. I create a deaf meadow for your pleasure. I shower you with the meadow's bouquet until covering your feet.

If only you knew
Just how upset I get
When these differences occur
 
How I wish right now
For a child or two
To demand my attention
 
Then I would stop thinking
how much and how much
I’ve upset you and myself
 
There should not be this unsettling
When I know what fields of love
Have been sown by the outward throw
 
Of our own hands to germinate
Bring forth nod and bend
In summer’s warm breeze
 
Taking the rain taking the wind
turning through green into gold
Ripe ready for harvest home
 
If only you knew
Just how upset I get
When these differences occur

After the well-know,
charismatic,
extremely photogenic,
wonderfully articulate,
jeweller-turned-gardener,
your mother dotes on,
this cat is named.
 
He is none of the above
I should say
but I like him.
He reminds me of my late cat
Poppy, a more gauche pusscat
you’d be hard to find.
 
Poppy was a farm cat
of uncertain progeny.
Monty is certainly better bred
but (as we say in West Yorkshire)
‘daft as a brush’.
 
And now for the T.S.Eliot bit . . .
(in the style of
​Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats)
 
Curled up upon the green chair
With his head against his paws
You can see his body breathing
Up and down
 
He’s been busy all day long
Doing absolutely nothing
Save a bit of this a bit of that
And washing clean his paws.
 
Life’s so hard
For such a busy cat,
When you’re asleep in bed
He’s about and out
 
Networking the side streets
Monty likes to know the scene.
These cats could teach us all
A thing or two.
 
In the morning he may be dozy
But you should see him after dark
Sharp and bright and really
On his toes.

I wonder why you want to row
When there are just so many terms to know
Before you get in the boat and place an oar in the water,
Before you take a single stroke don’t think you ought to
Remind yourself of what they are, these parts and pieces,
Actions and orders that rowers use (but poets don’t)
So forgive me if I leave some out.
 
Let’s take a look at the boat (or rather the shell):
The seat you sit on,
​slides, backstop, shoes and riggers.
 
The skeg that stabilizes the shell,
​shoulder, saxboard, and pogies.
The top-nut that keeps the rowlock in place,
​swivel, stretcher and rollers.
 
Now for the oar (or rather the scull):
There’s the Spoon blade, the Macon blade,
​Smoothie or Tulip.
 
Ready (or not) for the stroke you take ?
An Airstroke (in the air) ,
​backsplash, backwater, or body stroke,
 
Go on bury the blade, check the cover,
​ but don’t catch a crab!
Mind out for the drunken spider,
​watch the feather and the finish,
 
Inside hand, outside hand,
​hands away, miss the water,
Leg back, lie back,
​pause the paddling, watch the pitch,
 
Release and recover,
​don’t shoot your slide,
Swing the stroke rate,
​and space those puddles.
 
Careful there’s no skying,
​and absolutely no washing out.
 
Ready for a repecharge?
Or perhaps you’d prefer an egg-beater?
Ask the *** to call a flutter.
 
Easy oars
​Hold her hard
Ship oars
​One foot up & out
Waist, ready, up
​Shoulders, ready, up
​Way enough!

Takes ages to get there,
Hours in the car
You wonder what all the fuss is
Going so far.
 
But
​just look at the sea
​and then across the sea
to an almost ring of mountains
you will one day be able to name,
one by one,
​they’ll trip off your tongue
​as they do off your mother's
​who’s been coming here
​since I don’t when,
 
and that’s
​maybe why
​it feels so good,
​it's in your blood,
 
the air so clean and fresh,
the sea so cold but clear,
ok, there are midges,
and it might rain a lot,
and you definitely won’t see any otters . . .
 
But this can be a place of miracles!
 
If the wind is right – no midges.
If you sit still long enough – an otter appears.
If you’re really lucky – it won’t rain (too much).
 
I know. I’ve been there too,
And lost my heart to it all.
Just like you.

It is seven this crisp April morning. In woods before the rising path reveals the heath, there, no there, just there are the first bluebells. Most still hide their pendulous bells in sheath-like petals. When open into a bell the end flounces, splits, curls back on itself. Then the petals reveal their delicate shades of light-thriven lavender. The stout purposeful stem meanwhile allows a gathering of bells, no, a necklace of bells, bells laced around the neck.
 
I cannot look at this flower without knowing it is the colour that so often graces your purposeful frame, arrayed in the simplest clothes, so often in layered friendly shades; so often falling, loose, quiet, light-enhancing as your blue with grey with green eyes that hold my gaze in pillow-closeness, in that magnification of those intimate moments when one can only whisper.
 
The common bluebell is the first whisper of summer. It is Endymion, of the bower, a 'bower quiet for us and a sleep full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing'. In that mornings’ moment I am John and you *****. May we this vernal evening sit together as the dusk gathers darkness 'and with full happiness. . . trace the story of Endymion. . . the very music of its name gone into my being'.

Is there anything more lonely than the sound of boy playing a banjo on a spring afternoon? Oh yes, yes, it’s the sound of girl playing a banjo on a spring afternoon. A boy would lean back on the porch chair and let the instrument fall and rest on his chest to feel the raindrop-plucked vibrations, one by one. This girl, she sits on a kitchen chair, but not in the kitchen, and folds herself over her Daddy’s 5-string. The banjo rests on her blue-cottoned thigh, the lower metal edge firm against her stomach, her slight ******* pressed against the upper wooden rim. If you were standing in the doorway of the workshop you’d see her blond hair falling, falling over her face. There would be that dead-centre parting and just visible the edge of her wire-rimmed glasses.  Then, the denim jacket worn over the kind of summer-blue flowered frock pulled from her Mummy’s clothes that with her passing have now migrated into her bedroom. The thought of clothes is what there is close to hand at the break of day.

When Kath woke this morning, when the morning woke Kath, the valley air was already as sweet, as fresh as any April morning could possibly be in this green hollow of her home. She had lain there feeling the air caress her forehead. The window, always open beside her tangled bed, let in the ringing song of the waterthrush. Newly returned this handsome brown migrant warbler, his whitish breast streaked with brown, more thrush than warbler, she’d watched in the stream yesterday wading on his long, pink legs bobbing his tail like a spotted sandpiper. Soon there would be a nest somewhere in the beech and hemlock hollow along by the stream in the interstices of some fallen tree.

Ellen was due home this morning. She’d hear the Toyota from way up the track, driven overnight from Philadelphia she’d have stopped and stopped. Tired and so tired, she’d go from truck stop to truck stop, the radio her only company and the thought of Joel between her legs arching into her to keep her warm. But she’d drive with the windows down swallowing the night air as the ***** brown car swallowed the miles. Kath would have the coffee waiting, potato cakes on the stove, she’d have a fresh towel placed on her bed, underwear warm from the dryer, spring flowers bunched in mug on the window sill.

Ellen would never come right in when she arrived home, but sit down with the dogs on the porch step and gather herself, watch the mist rise down in the valley, drink in the bird-ringing silence. Kath would steal open the door and crouch beside her with Mummy’s coffee cup thrown, glazed and fired at Plummer’s Fold. Head resting against the porch supports Ellen would allow the cup to be placed between her hands, her fingers uncurled then curled by Kath around its rough circumference. There would be a kiss on the back of the neck and she’d be gone back upstairs to sit with her notebook, those new lyrics she’d been fashioning, her Plummer’s Fold diary – yesterday had been a rich day as she’d walked the bounds of Brush Mountain on the Big Tree Trail singing and plucking an invisible banjo all the while. Those songs of her great-great uncle she’d discovered in a pile of Library of Congress recordings just echoed through her, had become part of her. They were as much a part of the hinterland of Brush Mountain as the stones on the trail. Garth Watson’s voice, well she knew every turn and breath. She’d been listening to them since she was thirteen. She saw herself at the old Victrola blowing off the dust, placing the forgotten disk on the central spindle, scratching the needle with her finger to test the machine, gauge its volume. Then, that voice surrounding her, entering her, as lonesome as the scrawny girl just out of junior high that she had been, the dumb silent girl from the backwoods with that cute clever sister who played guitar and was everybody’s friend, who the boys rushed to fill the empty seat next to her on the school bus.

They’d recorded this song on their Lonesome Pine album. Kath had it all arranged, had it all imagined, brought it to that session at One-Two Records. She had been so scared Ellen would smile gently and say ‘Kath, not this ol’ thing surely. Why I remember Daddy singing this song into the night over and over.’ But no. When Kath had sung it through, looking into the bowl of her denim skirt, she’d raise her eyes to see tears running down Ellen's face. Everything between them changed at that moment. The location studio in The Farm House disappeared and they were girls on their home porch. In an hour they had it down and Larry had said. ‘My God, Holy Jesus, where did that come from’. So they went straight home and listened to those old records all night and most of the next day. They rewrote the album they’d spent a year planning (and saving for).

So now when they came together on those country fair stages, in the cafes in Baltimore or Philly it was that haunting Appalachian music that ran through their songs. Kath still shy as a blushing bean, hiding in the hair and glasses, reluctantly singing harmony vocals, Ellen– well, that girl had only to look wistfully into the audience and they were hers.  

And so they were living this life holed up in their family place, keeping faith with Plummer’s Fold. Daddy was in a home in Lewis now. He’d taken himself there before his dementia had taken him. He played his girls’ CDs all day long on his Walkman, had their pictures in his near to empty room – just a rocker, a table, a pile of books by his bed with Dora’s wedding quilt.

This music, this oh so heart-breaking music, the loping banjo, the tinkling, springing, glancing accidental guitar and their innocent valley voices. They’d exhausted the old records now and, their education in the old ways done, were back with new songs and Kath’s ideas to only record in the Fold and build songs with soundtracks of the world around them. She’d been laying down tracks day after day whilst Ellen was on the road with the Williams Band and often solo, support for the Minna Peel as ‘an outsider folk artist from deepest Appalachia.’

Kath wouldn’t travel more than a day away from the farm. Every show was an agony, except for the time they were performing. She couldn’t bear all that stuff that surrounded it – all that waiting, the sound check, more waiting, that networking **** One-Two constantly wanted her to be part of. She’d ***** off as the guys gathered around Ellen. She’d take a book and sit in the Toyota. She couldn’t do people, though she loved her folks, she loved her sister like she loved the trees and stones, the birds and flowers on Brush Mountain. Always shy, always afraid of herself ‘Too sensitive for your own good, Kathy girl’, her Daddy had said. Never been kissed in passion, never allowed herself to fall for love, though her body drove her to feelings she had read about, and thus fuelled had succumbed to. There was a boy she’d see in Lewis just from time to time who she thought about, and thought about. She imagined him kissing her and holding her gently in the night . . .

this poem is based on an essay by the modernist sculptor Barbara Hepworth*

The present moment is the only real time.
Tradition no longer a day-dream
and things that have been made
seem like the unfolding of one idea,
the growth of some great tree.

Relationship and mystery make loveliness,
such loveliness to project into sculpture -
not words not paint nor sound:
because it cannot be a complete thought
unless it could have been done in no other way.
It must be stone shape and no other shape.

I do not want to make a stone horse
that is trying to and cannot smell the air:
the sensitive nose, the moving ears, the deep eyes;
these are not stone forms.
I want to make a living thing in stone,
to express my awareness
and thought of these things.

To carve is not enough
there must be a living and moving
towards an ideal.

In the contemplation of nature
we are perpetually renewed,
mystery and imagination kept alive,
rightly understood,
gives us power to project
our abstract vision of beauty.

After the painting by Fritz Von Uhde (1848 – 1911)*
 
Sophie is twelve
Hanna thirteen
dear pinafored girls both
home from school
this summer afternoon
they sit knee to knee
but far enough away
from mothers’ chatter
at tea on the terrace.
 
The girls have gossip of their own
to share and talk is ten
to the dozen (and more)
whilst Hanna turns the pages
of a story book (with pictures):
a woodcutter’s daughter
a handsome young squire
ensnared with love
by a magiced white owl
there’s a castle by a lake
an endless forest  dark
a mountainous domain
so far away so long ago.
 
Poised in the doorway
of their teenaged years
our girls imagine
the courteous attentions
of uniformed cadets
who one day soon
may very well sit
at the garden table
in the dappled shade
and silently gaze with longing
on their oh so delicate charms.

I so like you in purple.
It gives me a lift to see
how carefully you've
mixed and matched
chosen these tones
and textures to suit
yourself and make
a pleasing picture
purple-themed
for those that share
you when I'm not about.
 
 . . . and not being there
I often think of what you wear,
think of times and seasons
patterned by your choice of clothes
that give me so much pleasure still
like well remembered friends;
a certain skirt that falls and swings,
a dress that holds your body, clings
to your long thighs, and seems
to make you taller than you are.
 
Such simple pleasure clothes afford
When chosen well and worn with care
for colour, fit and flow
              with style and sense
and understanding (which you have
you know) of your dear body's
form and grace, and movement
as you cross a room,
        stand still in thought, or drive a car.
So much to love and to admire.

Last night
By your side
Transfixed
By the curve
Of your right breast
By the curve
Of its sweet shape

I gently
Stroked your left arm
Meaning to touch
In passing
For a second
This curve of your dear body

That I so often wonder at
That it should affect me so
That I should be transfixed

And last night a little later still
My hand sought under your night shirt
your firm back
Stroking the length
of its strength and wholeness
Did I pass through fingertips
a message of happiness and delight
that all this can be
as it seems?

It had been snowing all night
light slight white
almost invisible flakes
falling on the garden below

While you slept I lay awake
between startling dreams
adventures (with my children)
amongst pinnacled peaks

Should sleep in an unfamiliar room
so effect the unconscious mind?
Here you became a young adult
‘I lost my virginity’ (you said)
‘and it was messy’

I didn’t want to know this
but told you how it was
for me a beach at night
in Devon Tarka country

And so a tracery
emerges from the past
It emanates it draws together
intersects conjoins segments
a tessellation  map-rich

by and through and which
(bathed in the snow-light
of an uncurtained morning)
together we move now too and fro
in this still-experimental  passion

Heartstone is a reflection in music on a ‘lost’ poem. The poem described in its two short verses a summer’s day, a landscape, a fossil found and placed in the palm of a child’s hand. The poem inspired a seven-movement work for wind, brass and percussion with solo piano. Here is its poetic programme note.

Chert

The piano draws an arc of rhythm
rising then falling.
Above
two choirs of wind and brass
exclaim, fanfare, mark out
shorter, determined
gestures of sound.

The procession, almost a march,
becomes a dance.
Alone
Two choirs of wind and brass
become four couples
whose music weaves
from complexity a simplicity:
Chromatic to Pentatonic
twelve becoming five.

Prase

Four stopped horns,
five extended tonalities.
Together they wander
a maze of Pentatonic paths;
alone, and in pairs, as a quartet
they discover within
a measured harmonic rhythm.
Tension: resolution

. . . and surrounding
their every move
the piano
insists an obligato,
a continuum of phrases,
absorbing into itself
the warp and weft of horn tone.

Sard

Oscillating
in perpetual motion
the full ensemble
occupies a frame
of time and space.

Flutes, reeds,
double-reeds
brass, piano,
percussion
mirror-fold on mirror-fold
layer upon layer
overlapping.

Yarns of threaded sound.

Tuff

Without a break
the mirrored oscillations
patter pentatonics
on tuned percussion
of marimba and vibraphone

whilst
a *batterie of drums
lays down
shards of beaten rhythm
against this onward
folding of tonality change.

In the background
a choir of winds
flutes and single reeds
waymark this recursive journey
gathering together
cadential moments and the
necessary pause for breath.

Marl

Relentlessly, the motion is sustained,
piano-driven,
a syncopated continuo,
rhythm-sectioned
amidst layers of percussion.

Adding edge,
a choir of brass and double reeds
amplify the piano’s jagged rhythms
providing impetus for
phrases to become longer and longer,
ratching up the tension,
ever-denying closure
until the batterie
delivers
a conclusive flourish.

Paramoudra

Pulse-figures of winds.
Motific cells of brass.
Both
negotiate a stream of
fractal-shaped tonality
expanding: contracting.
A blossom of fanfares

folding into
pulsating layers
of tuned percussion,
flutes and reeds.
A dance-like episode

absorbs a chorale.
Four horns in close harmony
against the continuing dance.
A duet of differences

flows into a cascade of chords
in closed and open forms.
The piano supports
brass-flourishing figures
before a final stillness.

Heartstone

In gentle reflection
the solitary piano –
a figure in a landscape
of collapsed harmonic forms -
presents in slow procession
the essence of previous music.

after the writings of Joan Mary Fry*

For each and all.
We need silence and stillness.
For each for all,
that atmosphere of waiting souls;
this is not the hush before the storm,
when no twig moves
no leaf dares to stir.

Think of the high noon of summer,
Think of the stillness of snow,
how heat or lightness
everywhere
give that sense of abounding life,
making a quietness of rapture

As mind, as soul,
as even the body grows still,
sinking deeper and deeper into the life of God,
the pettiness, the tangles,
the failures of the outer life
begin to be seen in their true proportions,
and the sense of infilling, uplifting
Divine Redeeming Love
becomes real.
Not quiescence, the soul is alive,
yet so still,
it hardly knows
its own
intensity.

after the words of Isaac Penington 1659*

And Oh, How sweet
and pleasant to the
truly spiritual eye
to see several forms in the School of Christ.
Everyone learning their own lesson,
and knowing, owning, loving
one another in their several places.
 
To feel the same spirit and life,
To walk in our own order.
Knowing what it is to receive truth.
 
For this is the true ground
of love and unity.
 
Beware haste,
not pressing knowledge and practice,
but waiting patiently
till the Lord fits such to be received.
 
Leave conscience to its full liberty.
Preserve it single and entire,
Seek unity in the Light
Walking together.

After the words of William Penn 1682*

I will begin  . . .
with the morning
(with the beginning of time)
 
As you wake,
retire your mind
into a pure silence,
from all thoughts
of worldly things,
. . . and wait upon God,
to feel his good presence,
to commit your whole self,
into his blessed care.
 
Then rise . . . (if well)
Immediately,
ever remembering
that God is present,
the overseer
of your thoughts,
your words,
your actions . . .
 
If you have intervals
from those lawful occasions
delight to step home
(within yourself I mean).
Commune with your heart
and be still.
 
I will end . . .
with the evening,
(with the ending of time)
 
The evening comes . . .
Read again the Holy Scripture,
and have your time of retirement
before you close your eyes.
 
(So the Lord may be
the Alpha and Omega
of your life)

When it comes to you
I can hardly help myself:
this not-thinking,
this avoidance of thought
because sense says so,
and all the rest say no,
let it be,
let it be this way
no matter what.
But, of course, reason
must prevail
and I am left alone
with only a last glimpse of you;
before the door slams,
before the train leaves.

(after a watercolour by Mary Fedden OBE RA)
 
It is early morning, a Tuesday in June. It is May’s birthday. She likes to get up early on her birthday and join her husband on the beach. He has been up since five, fiddling about, making tea, reading a little, avoiding his desk. May thinks, when she watches him dress with a half an eye open feigning sleep, he looks so distinguished with his silver, nearly white hair and that beard (her suggestion). And today I am forty-five and he is . . . old enough to be my father. But he is my companion, my love, my watcher who stalks me still with his gaze of admiration, which I never tire of when we are alone, but I am sometimes embarrassed by when we are in company. He knows this, but he can’t help himself. He says he loves to watch me cross a room, stand still against a window, reach for a vase on a shelf, sit at my work table, intent.
 
May sees him far down the beach as she walks with purpose through the dunes that separate their cottage from the beach. Her short boots glisten with the heavy dew. She has pulled on her work dress over her striped nightshirt, a dress she wove in a grey Jura their first long winter. There he is in his stupid cap his grandson gave him when he acquired the boat. He’s carrying a fishing net to collect creatures from the rock pools further down the beach. She remembers when this ‘interest’ began. He had read to her one night a long extract from *Father and Son by Edmund Gosse. It was a kind of threnody to a state that once existed, a veritable Garden of Eden, destroyed in two generations by a mid-Victorian passion for sea-shore collecting. ‘These rock-basins’ Gosse had written, ’fringed by corallines, filled with still water almost as pellucid as the upper air itself, thronged with beautiful sensitive forms of life, - they exist no longer, they are all profaned, and emptied and vulgarized. The fairy paradise has been violated, the exquisite product of the centuries of natural selection has been crushed under the rough paw of well-meaning curiosity.'
 
She loved to hear him read, knowing that he loved to read to her. The joy on his face sometimes; it was worth enduring all the strange things he found to read (she fell asleep so often as he read) just for those occasions when she felt pinned to her seat, grappled to her bed like Gulliver, wishing it would never stop, such words, his dear voice. How long had it been now?
 
He didn’t walk to meet her. He let her walk to him. He stood there waiting. When she drew close he stretched out his arms and arranged her body in front of him, walked back a little and smiled his admiring smile. There were almost tears in his eyes, as there so often were when he had no words. She knew on his desk there would be a poem, and like the poet Ted Hughes (who neither of them could deal with), a birthday letter waiting to be given to her at breakfast, with gifts she knew he had worried over.
 
She stood quite still and let the fresh September wind gather her now quite long hair and turning away from him, let it stream behind her. He had turned too, realising in saying nothing he had said too much. He remembered another birthday on a different shore, a day when she had surrounded him, captured him, loved him with a passion that had now tempered, was the stuff of his writing that now had found its way into a 100 Love Poems to Read before you Die. He had long since refused to speak these out loud, refused to be visible anymore, would not be interviewed; it was now the novel, the long, long journey of a novel, the months, years even (In Praise of Rust took three agonising years).
 
And now, standing in this sun-glinting bay, ignoring the lighthouse, May thought of Mrs Ramsey and that summer party on Skye, those earnest young men, those artistic young women, and her commanding husband who would not look at the lighthouse, who would not countenance a visit.
 
Her husband, strange to think this because she never felt herself his wife, never commanded anything. He made decisions, and then laid things gently aside. It was enough for him to have been decisive. What she did with that was up to her. He wanted her to be free, always free from any command. When they married, to him it was like the silent grace they ‘said’ at each meal. She knew it had meant so much to him: the silence of that moment. He had read to her the morning of their marriage a text from William Penn – she had remembered one phrase  ‘Between a man and his wife nothing ought to rule but love . . .’ And he yet had never commanded her. He seemed to admire her being her own self. She was not his. They were the dearest friends, weren’t they? He expected nothing from her (he had said this so often), no commitment, no promise; just gentleness, a peaceful nature, an understanding that he loved her with a passion she would never understand because she knew he did not understand it himself.

Carstairs  had been waiting for the boat for three days and there it was, suddenly appeared. He had dozed and it had appeared. He trained his binoculars on it, but it was too far away to be clearly recognisable. It seemed motionless, becalmed in a sheet of unruffled water.
 
He had dug himself into a bank in the sandhills. He still had a little water, some raisins; there was a final cube of chocolate carefully wrapped in the whole of its paper. It was the thought of this hidden pleasure that had sustained him during the hours of darkness when the slight rain and the chill of inactivity had forced him to exercise, to move about, though always afraid he would lose his burrow.
 
From the earliest light of dawn the day had been clear and still. The sea birds had muted calls, the sea itself more a presence than a sound. The tide had steadily retreated beyond his expectations. He knew he had to wait for the arranged signal.
 
Turning on his back he looked at the sky. A few clouds floated hesitantly in the glazed blue. He remembered suddenly a moment from his childhood,       above the beach at Red Point. He had escaped his parents, his adored sisters, and hidden himself in the marran grass. He had lain on his back and felt himself levitate into the clouds. He had looked down on the whole scene, a waking dream. Those moments floating above the long Highland beach had never left him. Sitting in the examination hall for his Tripos that memory had come upon him; he had been paralyzed by it, unable to write or think. He had closed his eyes and strange geometrical shapes had ensnared him. He had felt extremely sick . . .and then very calm. He had returned to the task in hand, a translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, that opening passage describing Eurus, Zephyr, Auster and Boreas: the four winds.
 
. . . he felt something wet nuzzle his hand. A dog, a black shape no more. As he struggled to move himself a larger shape obliterated the sun and shot him.

This brown buff speckled throstle of a bird sits in the higher most branches of a yet to be leafed poplar tree . . . and sings. Such a song in the April morning air it greets the day, celebrates the rising sun. Above a suburban street the bird’s song catches the reverberation of a double row of houses, their windows bouncing sonic reflections of unaccompanied melismata.
 
Olivier Messiaen loved this bird for its répétition égale. Walking the mountain woods around his summer home he would wonder that the grive musicienne could make so exactly repetition after repetition of a complex phrase. A proto-minimalist perhaps? The male mistle thrush appears in several ***** works but most prominently in Saint Francois d'Assis singing luminously on the clarinet.
 
Although this is the ungregarious male singing away on this spring morning his name carries a female designation Turdus Philomelos. Poor Philomel, whose name means one who loved song, she was a princess of Athens lusted after by King Tereus who took her to a cottage in distant woods and ***** her. Then, he cut out her tongue.
 
Vengeful Philomel alone in the woods, but a most resourceful and artistic young woman, she set about weaving a tapestry that told all.
 
‘She set up a Tracian loom
And wove on a white fabric scarlet symbols
That told in detail what had happened to her.’
 
She sent the finished piece to Tereus who promptly ordered Philomel's death and that of her sisters (one of whom he was married to). As the girls were about to be slain they were changed magically into three birds . .
 
Joanna Laurens play The Three Birds takes the only fragment we have of Sophocles telling of this strange tale. Laurens is both musician and linguist and the text is a marvel of strange sounds and rhythms as the sisters communicate with each other in their personal private language akin, it is said, to Jersiese, an ancient Breton dialect.
 
So thank you dear song thrush for this morning's wonder: a song *sans pariel.

I’m thinking about you today. Hard not to, the specialness of it all. Today you’re putting up of an exhibition. Some artists call it a show, but you’re quite consistent in not calling it that. I admire that of you, being consistent.
 
I was thinking today about your kindness. You phoned me as soon as the children had gone to school, making time to call before you left. I know you were drinking your start-of-the-day coffee, but it was a kind thought all the same, phoning me. You knew I was upset. Upset with myself, as I often am. It’s this being alone. Not so much as a cat to keep me company. Just my work, the reading I do, my thoughts of you, those letters I write, and my attempts at poetry.
 
During the last few days I’ve tried to write directly of what I’ve observed, not felt, observed. Like those wonderful Chinese poets of old describing in just a few characters the wonder of the seen rather than the speculation of the felt, avoiding all emotion and fantasy. I try to write in a way that holds to the ambiguity and spread of meanings the poems those ancient Chinese composed.
 
It’s winter-time. Yesterday we were expecting the first snowfall of winter, and it arrived late in the night making the morning darkness mysteriously different, changing the indistinctness of distant trees to become a web of silver lines, in the no-wind snow resting on branches, clinging to boughs and trunks.  I stood in the pre-dawn park in wonder at it all, holding each moment to myself, in the cold breath-stopping air. I thought of one of the Chinese snow poems I know and some of those different ways it has been translated. Here are three:
 
A thousand mountains without a bird
Ten thousand miles with no trace of man.
A boat. An old man in a straw raincoat.
Alone in the snow, fishing in the freezing river.
 
A thousand peaks: no more birds in flight.
Ten thousand paths: all trace of people gone.
In a lone boat, rain cloak and a hat of reeds
An old man’s fishing the cold river snow.
 
Sur mille montagnes, aucun vol d’oiseau
Sure dix mille sentiers, nulle trace d’homme
Barque solitaire: sous son manteaux de paille
Un vielliard pêche, du figé, la neige.
 
So beautiful, arresting, different. It holds the title River Snow and the poet is the Tang Dynasty philosopher and essayist Lui Zongyuan.  My snow poem First Fall, written last night as the snow fell on the wet street outside, as you were falling through my thoughts, softly, but not onto a wet street, but a distant garden we know and love, but have yet to see in winter’s whiteness.
 
And now today you’re driving to a distant location to hang your work of paper, silk and linen, full of expectation, every contingency and plan in place to enable the work to make its mark in a location you know, where people may recognize your name and will come to say warm words of encouragement, maybe a little praise. And at the end of the week when the exhibition opens I’ll be there, trying to be invisible, taking photographs if I can of you and your admirers and supporters, and thinking (myself) how wonderful you are, your lovely smile lighting up the gallery, being welcoming, beautiful always.
 
Only today you’re further away from me than ever. Around coffee time I miss your quiet explorative ‘it’s me , like a mouse on the telephone. The inflections of those words questioning the appropriateness of the call, meaning ‘Are you busy? Am I interrupting?’ It may take me a little while to ‘come to’, but interruption? Never, just the sheer joy that it’s you colouring the moment.
 
I think of the landscape you’ll be driving through. I’m imagining the snow-sky clearing and becoming a faint blue with the sun’s brightness clarifying those wold lands, those gentle folds of fields between parallelograms of woodland standing stark under the large skies and promulgating the long views gradually, gradually stretching towards the sea coast.
 
I like to imagine you are singing your way through the choruses of Bach’s B Minor Mass, but in reality it’s probably the Be Good Tanyas or Billy Joel playing on the CD player. Such a relief probably after those silent journeys with me. I usually relent on the homeward leg, but I crave silence when I’m a passenger, and I’m now always a passenger, so I crave silence for my thoughts, such as they are.
 
While you are being the emerging artist – but probably on your way homeward - I have taken myself down to my city’s gallery and to an exhibition I’ve already seen. I have a task I’ve been promising myself to undertake: copying an exhibit. I arrive an hour before the gallery closes. I leave my bicycle behind the foyer desk. There are more staff about than visitors. It’s gloriously empty, but the young twenty-somethings invigilating the spaces group themselves strategically near adjoining rooms so they can talk (loudly) to each other. It’s Facebook chat, barely Twitter nonsense. I have to block it all out to focus on the four pages and a P.S of a sculptor’s letter to a critical friend. The sculptor is writing from springtime Cornwall on 6 March 1951. The critical friend will open the letter the next day (when there were 3 deliveries a day) and the Royal Mail invariably arrived on time. He’ll pick it up from his doormat before breakfast in grimy Leeds, though the leafy part near Roundhay Park. The sculptor begins by saying:
 
It is so difficult to find words to convey ideas!
 
In this so efficient Cambria typeface that introductory sentence loses so much of the muscle and flow of the human hand. Written boldly in black ink, and so full of purpose, I read it a month ago, a photocopy in a display case, and knew I had to capture it. And it’s here entire in my note book, on my desk, carefully copied, to share with you my darling, my kind friend, the young woman I hold dear, admire so much, become faint with longing for when, as she crosses that gallery where she has been hanging her work (in my imagination), I am caught as so often by her graceful steps and turn.
 
I don’t feel any difference of intent in or of mood when I paint (or carve) realistically, or when I make abstract carvings. It all feels the same – the same happiness and pain, the same joy in a line, a form, a colour – the same feeling at the end, The two ways of working flow into each other without effort  . . .
 
Outside my warm studio the snow has retreated east and I’ve opened the window to hear the Cathedral bells practising away, the city on a Tuesday night free of revellers, the clubs closed, the pubs quiet. In this building everyone has gone home except this obsessive musician who stays late to write to the woman he adores, who thinks a day is not a day lived without a letter to her at least, a poem if possible.
 
I’d quietly hoped to be with you tonight, but you must have something arranged as I suggested twice I might come, and you said it wasn’t necessary. But I have this letter, and something to write about. Alas, no poem. My muse is having the evening off and I am gently reconciled to the possibility of a few words on the telephone before bed.

Inversion of twilight
before-dawnness
a lightening of sky
giving shape and substance
to the guessed-at
in the dark

Snow
this morning
though

so the chestnut trees
curving across the hillside

usually opaque
in the park pre-dawn

now magically revealed
by still precipitous air

a first fall on silver
drawings of branches

A silence too
of sorts: a deadening
the tentative movement of cars
where a hiss of the tyre
is now compressed
to a thuck of the wheel

Two dark dogs paw-deep
slalom down the hillside
sending up the snow-spray
like puppies they are not

One day I will give my full attention
to the twilight
I will discover exactly when it begins
and attend to its each second’s state
they’ll be no single degree of change
I’ll miss

Impossible, I know

This afternoon I saw it
far-distant
travelling south east
a soft gloom
a far-away gloaming
I thought I’d stand at my third floor eyrie
and watch it advance
with all the concentration
I could muster.

I couldn’t – muster the concentration

such was its imperceptibly changing light
triggering memory’s way with things
I was compassed about with thoughts
of her tenderness

with her gentle voice just sounding
as the dusk deepened
she bade me share love’s deepest kiss

I know how much this means to you she said
I did know then
and as twilight falls into night
I do know now I do

I came home in the middle of the day,
nobody home but me.
The snowdrops in the back yard
were a surpliced choir
bowing their heads in prayer,
the camellia flowering still
like crazy.
Spring in the soft soft air
I turned my face skyward
to peg the washing
and thought  
this is our home.
Quiet now,
as we were quiet
last night silently reading,
gently letting our anxious words
fall away, and later
I played, for your ears alone,
in the next room
a Venezuelan dance,
caressing the strings
of the instrument that still
holds my heart
as I know you hold mine

The sun rises tentatively through the forest heights behind the palace. In the pre-dawn light Jia Li has secured water and fuel for her visitors and despite the attentions of the pack horse men, who have returned from an evening at her village the worse for drink, she settles to feed her infant child. Meng Ning enters to seek her counsel. She already guesses his intentions and answers his brief questions with confidence. She knows the route to the Red Slate Path, perhaps four li distant. The path is clear, though little used. It is not a place those of her village visit, though she has learnt that the path itself defies nature’s attempts to cover its existence.
    Zuo Fen is standing on the terrace as Meng Ning returns to the Emperor’s Hall. She has slept deeply, is refreshed after a period of meditation and, despite the cold, has been washed and massaged by her maid. She appears dressed for walking, her boots, fur cloak and hat in purposeful combination. As she surveys the lake flocks of wild geese and duck chatter and squabble as they float on the surface. There are some experimental flights, pairs of duck taking off to fly in wide arcs only to return to the same stretch of water from where they rose in tandem. Soon the geese will leave to fly across the forests and moorland for distant harvested fields where they will spend the day foraging. Meng Ning points to a distant peninsula jutting out from the northern shore of the lake. Behind it, he says, lies the cove of the Red Slate Path. Perhaps there they will be able to understand more keenly the why of this mystery.

‘At such a distance,’ says Zuo Fen, ‘the detail of a boat would be quite lost. I imagine the peninsula acting like a pointing finger to its floating form. There is already fashioning within me a possible story that might explain this mystery.’

She smiles warmly at Meng Ning who bows his head rather than stare into her jade green eyes. She moves closer to his standing posture, taking his left hand secure but tense against the balustrade of the veranda. Lowering one leg before the other she slowly kneels, removing her hat, loosening her fur cloak that now spreads itself of its own accord beside and behind her. With both hands behind her neck she lifts her long hair found to parted and tied in simple peasant fashion. Raising her hands to full-stretch her sleeping hair warm from the bare skin of her back slowly cascades forward and across each of her ******* to curl like two cats in the bowl of her robe.

‘Mei Lim is with Jia Li’, Zuo Fen says curiously and with a voice Meng Ning has not encountered before. ‘I fell to sleep dreaming of your kind presence and the joy of being touched and kissed.’ He cannot see her face as she speaks, only the quivering fall of her hair across her kneeling body. ‘I awoke feeling your breath on my cheek and so brought your limbs to entwine with my own.’ He now senses the delicate unguents of her body; they compass him about, his hand falls from the balustrade to touch her hair.

Finding her right ear his fingers describe its shape, its sculptured relief of folded forms and crevices. He is becoming faint with something outside passion that requires him to go beyond her ear and flow of hair about his fingers. He unties his cloak, letting it drop behind him. He removes his boots and outer garments. She follows his example. He moves to her side, adopts the position of the swallow resting on the wind. They face one another.  To the accompaniment of their breathing, her hands begin a dance in the space between their lower limbs as though they are birds turning and falling in flight. Unlike the courtesans he sees at court her nails are short, her fingers long. Then, it is as though her hand holds a brush forming characters and she begins to write on his body with short deft movements this way that way describing her flight of passion. Some intuition tells him to allow this, and not to seek repricocity, as it seems from her breathing that these very actions give her the greatest delight, bring her to the edge of the first coitus. Eyes closed, he moves his nose into a glancing embrace with her own, feeling there a semblance of perspiration, that tell-tale sign of a woman’s readiness for the deeper embrace. She responds to this with sighs and swift movements of rapture that envelope him, and now, as she quickly brings her limbs into a right conjunction, he places one hand beneath her, the other to recline her body gently to the floor, her cloak becoming a pillow for her head.
    He now looks directly at her, her face expressionless as though all thought and feeling has entered her body in preparation to receive his own. She does not blink. There is a moment of great stillness, a great wave of calm breaks, moves forward and pulls back – and again, again. In an instant he will enter her Jade Gate to caress and kiss and move where only his Lord has visited. He knows that once there he will seal his own fate . . .
     It is the talk of poets that women are often at their most sensitive to love’s attention in the morning hours, and that this was, for so many reasons, the most impractical of times for men. Zuo Fen herself had written fu poems that took the reader to the most intimate moments of a concubine’s experience in the morning hours, those times when alone the body gathers to itself its essential nature, and is often caressed with the woman’s own hand and thoughts. To understand such circumstance, to hold its sweetness as an abiding taste during the formalities of the day, only to release its flavour in the pleasure hours of the night, was a manly attribute, said to be treasured, indeed honoured by women.
      When Meng Ning withdrew Zuo Fen lay for some while letting the unaccustomed circumstance and its location only gradually allow a return to conscious and present thoughts. She pictured now her journey to the Red Slate Path, Jia Li, her baby on her back, striding beside Meng Ning, then herself and finally Mei Lim - who would have entreated her mistress to be allowed to accompany her. There was the glade, a small bowl in the hillside where it was just possible to see a small cave from which, glistening, the broken patterns of the slate path fell after half a li into the lake. She would investigate the cave. She would walk to the water’s edge, where the trees stepped into and reached over the lake to lay a carpet of fallen leaves. Then to see the path gradually, gradually disappear into the depths.
    Whilst Zuo Fen, with her eyes closed, projected her thoughts forward in time, with accustomed tact Mei Lim left those accouterments a woman needs after the attentions of a lover. She feared for the young man, though she knew her Lord prized too much his Lady of The Purple Chamber to effect jealousy or display anger.
    As the sun cleared away the thin cloud and approached its zenith the company broached the crest of the hill above the glade. It was, Zuo Fen had to admit, just as she had imagined lying prone and in disarray in the Emperor’s hall. In silence, and in the company of her imagination, she now paced from cave to path to water, and standing at the very edge of the lake’s bank focused her mind to envisage the events of twenty years past.
     It was as though a rhapsody was already formed. She found herself recounting the tale in her world of characters where there is only present time. She felt her hand describe them with the flow of her brush, heard the sound of its movement across the thick parchment. She was slow to notice that Meng Ning had disrobed and was entering the water. Without a word she watched him move through the carpet of floating leaves, some sticking to his nakedness, and onwards, slowly, following the submerged path until his torso then only his shoulders were visible. She then knew what he hoped to find, even after the passage of so many years.

She saw it all, suddenly. The sorcerer Yang Mo and the Emperor’s second wife descending the Red Slate Path as a cavalcade of fire and smoke, loud flashes of light, noises of brass and clashing metal enveloped the glade and the boat itself. The watching company witnessed for a moment the couple disappear under the waters only for their collective sight to be shrouded in a climaxed confusion of the sorcerer’s devices and effects.

When, finally the smoke cleared, the boat and the lovers had vanished.

Zuo Fen watched Meng Ning disappear from view. She imagined him, as the pearl fishers she had heard tell of, diving down to the depths, holding his breath to seek what might remain of the illusory boat. But time passed beyond the possibility of what she knew could be endured by human-kind. The surface of the water remained unbroken. The division of open water made by Meng Ning in breaking apart the carpet of floating leaves was already reforming itself.
   Removing her cloak and her boots, and unpinning her hair, Zuo Fen stepped into the water. A memory floated towards her of bathing in the lake near to her summer retreat. Water held no fear for her, only now the cold consumed her. Her loosed hair, and her elaborate untied robe settled on the water’s surface: to surround her like a lily pad, she the budding flower at its centre. She felt her feet still firmly on the Red Slate Path, her chin now resting on the water’s surface. Whatever had happened to Meng Ning she knew her action to be compliant. She had immersed herself with the very element that had brought him either death or, as she knew in her heart, a most honorable escape.

Gradually as darkness fell the wind that had beset the travellers all day subsided and the particular silence of the lakeside clearing assumed a presence. It was a silence of the discrete movements of animals and sporadic calls of birds, the settling now into stillness of trees wind-tossed for a night and day, the breathing to and fro movement of a large body of water that already held the night sky’s reflections and would soon be enveloped in moonlight. Zou Fen rose and beckoned Meng Ning to accompany her to the Emperor’s Hall. There, they stood together on the long veranda and looked down through the sporadic trees onto the lake.

‘It is said that the Master did not discuss anomalies, feats of strength, civil disorder, or the spirits,’ said Zuo Fen quoting Confucius. ‘It is for you and I to disregard sorcery as nothing but illusion and cunning. We must bend our thoughts to seeking explanations from circumstance.’

‘We know, my Lady, that Yang Mo had already seduced the Emperor and his guests with his many and infamous illusions. To achieve these feats of the miraculous would have required a sizable retinue and the most careful preparation. It is unlikely that the Emperor would have countenanced such sorcery in daylight hours, so we might imagine how with the play of lanterns, fire and smoke Yang Mo was able to make the impossible seem possible. Like the actor he undoubtedly was, he was probably a man of commanding presence - all eyes would have been upon his person, all ears tuned to his words. And round about the harsh clangorous sounds and shouts of his assistants would be sustained as his illusions began to unfold.’

‘Wisely spoken Meng Ning,’ says Zuo Fen, ‘a most convincing exposition. So we must imagine how after a long presentation of illusory wonders, the imbibing of much wine and other intoxigents inhaled or consumed, the first presage of dawn comes upon the company. Guests and their consorts seek the privacy of their quarters, lights are dimmed, only the meditative music of the zither sounds in the Emperor’s hall as new confections of poetry continue to vie with the ancient verses. Then, as the Emperor rises to seek his chamber there, half hidden amongst the wraiths of mist floating on the lake, lies a sailing vessel, its single sail empty of wind, a spectre at once marvelous and shocking.’

‘But an illusionary boat, possibly a vessel that could not and need not run with the wind, something constructed, a shell no more, made out of the lightest wood or taut cloth that in the blue dawn would seem more substantial than it is, fashioned and placed in position by Yang Mo’s assistants at a right distance to evoke the illusion of reality.’

‘The Emperor summons his court and its guests, summons Yang Mo, regarding this as a step taken beyond what protocol allows, a violation of the ancient spirit traditions of the lake. Yang Mo stands his ground suggesting that this is his greatest illusion yet, that there is no harm done, and should the Emperor decline to sail on the ****** waters he will take himself away from his presence boat and all.’

‘At this Xie Jui, the second wife, lets it be known that she regards with some contempt the prohibition of a vessel’s presence on the lake. She wishes passage on the boat and if the Emperor will not accompany her she will go alone with Yang Mo. At this the Emperor is incensed but challenges Yang Mo to explain how he will deliver Xie Jui to the vessel.’

‘This is where, My Lady, we will need to seek the Red Slate Path that, it is said, Yang Mo prepared to take himself and his passenger to the waiting boat - only to disappear from view in front of the very eyes of the assembly. Our task for tomorrow perhaps?  Jia Li can be our guide as she surely knows its location.’

And so, as the three quarter moon rises over Eryi-lou and the chamberlain takes his leave of the courtesan, Mei Lim appears from the near darkness to escort her mistress to the small chamber where they will pass the night. Zuo Fen remains in a trance-like state but allows the ministrations of her maid to prepare her for the business of sleep.
      Meanwhile Meng Ning, intoxicated by Zuo Fen’s presence, does not return to his quarters but takes the terrace steps down, down to the lakeshore. He allows his official skills as a poet to fashion an array of characters he will first commit to memory, only later write out in his fine calligraphic script, and then destroy. Whereas Zuo Fen commutes between dream and reality he has no such pleasure. This is a stark, cold place at autumn’s end. But this condition only seems to excite and fuel his passion for this woman, this gracious, mysterious woman with whom he has spent the recent hours in close proximity. Her face floats before his eyes; her precise lips and still perfect teeth, gentle chin and youthful neck, the beauty and grace of her bearing seated cross-legged like a sage before him.  He imagines for a brief moment her long nakedness revealed in the bright moonlight under which he now stands. Holding this momentary image close to his physical self he makes his way up the many terraces to the small wooden chamber in which he will sleep.
       Despite her journeying and the revelations of the day Zuo Fen lies awake. She is savouring a very different quality of the night in this remote place. For many years she has remained wakeful in the hours of the Rat and the Ox to welcome her Lord Wu should his goat cart find its way to her court. She would like to rise and reflect on the images that hold sleep from her – but fears to wake her maid without whose close attention she might falter. This natural world beyond her court and the Emperor’s gardens are of an almost constant wonder. She reflects that as she gets older each season seems to become more vivid than its predecessor. This autumn, with its vivid dreams and visions, she likens to flowers picked from her garden, their colours and textures continuing to hold true and firm. Between such thoughts the intimacy of her time with Meng Ning remind her of the delight of human association. Aside from her dear brother Zuo-Si she has rarely known that keen intimacy of another man - other than her Lord. Though she has, she reflects further, in the writing of The Pale Girl, allowed her mind to explore the variousness of the body’s pleasure. To school Meng Ning in the arts of passion would be pleasurable indeed, and she considers he would be a most willing and attentive student. She imagines, for a moment, guiding him towards the exacting refinements of touch and stroke a woman requires to achieve the deepest coitus. Her body stirs as this thought takes hold and caresses her towards necessary sleep.

(to be continued)

Zuo Fen meets Jia Li and her child Hui Ying. The temporary guardian of the palace speaks with the help of one of the pack-horse men who understands something of the dialect this young woman owns. Zuo Fen would rather envelope Jia Li with her eyes than communicate in three-way speech. And so when Jia Li begins haltingly to tell the same tale told to Meng Ning the previous night Zuo Fen halts her translator with a gesture until the story – and this is what it appears to be – is told.

(Here Zuo Fen assumes the persona of Jia Li as part of her rhapsody titled The Sorcerer of Eryi-lou)

Alone in this crumbling palace
I guard my father’s charge,
He has been ill since late Spring
And I have disgraced my family
With a child whose father stayed
but a week trading horses.
Hui Ying was born here
And here we hope to stay.

I have now come to recognize
Many spirits of the past.
Mostly invisible I take them by surprise
In their mortal form; meeting a lady
And her maid on the hall terrace;
Seeing two men bent over
A game of go in a lesser chamber.
Music and the sound of poetry float
Variously through the many rooms.
The aroma of food comes and goes.
The burning of incense is ever present.

For many seasons my village supported
Palace life during the Emperor’s summer visits.
We provisioned and provided animals
For food and transport. Our young men,
Our women too were propositioned
For the more elaborate practices of the court.
Twenty summers long the palace secured for us
a livelihood beyond expectation.

Over time the events of the Emperor’s
Last sojourn in the palace became
For us the stuff of legend, though we do not
Embroider its story and have remained silent
Out of respect for the Emperor’s memory.
We know his son has rarely ventured here.

Let me only tell what has come from
my father’s lips, what he as a young man
Witnessed and through his guardianship
Has protected and honoured. He was chosen
By officials of the Emperor as a trusted servant,
A man who would oversee what had been precious,
What had been valued here, and is still deemed to be.

My father has spoken to me of the disappearance
Of the Emperor’s second wife with the sorcerer Yang Mo,
A disappearance witnessed by the whole company of visitors,
By the Emperor himself, and his son. I am charged to tell
Of this only to those bearing Emperor Wu’s seal.  Know I speak
With all truth and honesty in lieu of my father’s presence.

Amongst the many guests honoured by the Emperor
The sorcerer Yang Mo arrived by invitation
To spend part of the third season at Eryi-lou.
Already well-known to the court he had come
At the express wish of second wife Xie Jiu.
It is said that he created many remarkable illusions.
Unusual objects and rare animals were summoned to appear,
Rain fell and winds blew inside the Emperor’s hall,
There were piercings of flesh and limbs seemingly severed.
One morning it is said Yang Mo caused a boat
To appear on the lake, thereby at odds with the legend
That no vessel should ever touch its surface. Forthwith,
The Emperor decreed that such sorcery should
cease. But he was discouraged by second wife Xie Jiu
Who wished to visit the boat and sail on the lake.
Yang Mo offered to escort her across the waters
And led the assembled company to a small beach where
A path of red slate had been laid.  This appeared from
within a cave in the hillside. From thence it travelled
to the water’s edge and beyond, under the water
in the direction of the magical boat. Yang Mo is said
to have brought wind and fire and smoke
To play upon the company, finally inviting Xie Jiu to step
On the Red Slate Path and accompany him across the waters.
The couple walked slowly down the path into the lake
Gradually divesting themselves of their garments
As the waters consumed them. Then, before their very eyes
The Emperor’s guests and entourage saw the boat
Enveloped in a pall of smoke and disappear from view.
Yang Mo and Xie Jui were never seen again.

The Emperor was enraged, realizing suddenly
he had been tricked and made to look a cuckold
in front of his own court. In such a remote region
He had the slenderest of means available
to search for the missing couple. He resolved
to leave Eryi-lou immediately. Neither He or
His son nor his court has ever returned.

Allowing Jia Li to tell this tale without interruption had proved a right and wise decision. No sooner had the young woman realized her story had grasped the undivided attention of this celebrated courtesan than her words of description seemed to take on a rough poetry. Zuo Fen felt herself summoning unbidden images of the sorcerer’s illusions, moments of secret and forbidden congress between Yang Mo and Xie Jiu, the appearance of the sailing vessel from the early morning mists, the lovers slowly processing down the Red Slate Path, the disbelief and then fury of the Emperor.
      When Jia Li had taken leave to comfort her infant child Zuo Fen called Mei Lim to summon Meng Ning. She was clearly troubled by how her autumn visions from the west had brought her to this place and its unforeseen legacy of magic and deceit. The illusion of the sailing vessel and the walk into the lake on the Red Slate Path, both were elaborate and well-contrived artifices. They required skilled assistants and collaborators and the most careful planning. Sitting in silence opposite one another the courtesan and the chamberlain set their minds to consider the possible and elaborate trickery that might have been brought to bear on the complicit theft of the Emperor’s second wife. It seemed clear that all official record of what had passed had been expunged, and the Emperor had decided to abandon not only his summer sojourn but also his palace - immediately and forever.
        Zuo Fen wondered at the fate of the lovers. There could be no future for them within the known territories of the Empire. Their lives would have to begin again far distant. The province of Yunnan perhaps? But she laid that thought aside.

(to be continued)

In the morning the wind is vicious, tossing vigorously the woodland on the heights above the village. The sky is a hanging of grey and charcoal black bands of cloud. On horseback and in her male attire Zuo Fen is led by the village guide up the steep forest path. She is already questioning the past, the accounts she’s read of the annual transhumance to this remote spot that give no answer to its sudden abandonment. It seems the Emperor made himself incommunicado for the latter part of the third season. The palace inventory shows local provisioning, and the most carefully chosen companions. They also describe how season-by-season the habitation was enlarged in order to accommodate further and different visitors. Poets and musicians were particularly favoured and would accompany the Emperor to select locations to add a delicate resonance of word and sound to the natural world.
​         As the travellers came out of the forest a wilderness of rock and moorland stretched before them, relentlessly upward. The path was now vague and Meng Ning was perplexed at how his guide had brought him across this terrain in the near darkness of the previous afternoon. The ponies often stumbled here and in the high wind he had to stop himself from looking behind to check his Lady’s progress. Eventually the ascent became less precipitous and a clearer path asserted itself, and in the near distance a pile of stones marked the summit. There, Meng Ning alighted to see Zuo Fen walking purposefully beside her horse leading her maid for whom this was an unaccustomed adventure. Together they approached him as he surveyed the panorama that to the west revealed Lake Psumano, a silver thread of water curled between the thick forests.
​        In silence Zuo Fen handed the reins of her pony to Meng Ning and with a signal to the village guide strode off on the descent to Eryi-lou.
 
‘We are to wait here until my Lady is out of sight,’ said Mei Lim’s smiling voice. ‘Then we may go forward.’
 
Mei Lim sat firmly in the saddle, as though assuming command of this small party. This now comprised herself, Meng,Ning and two rough-spoken men from the village each leading a pack-horse of luggage and provisions.  
 
‘You know I travelled as far as Stone Village on my Lady’s visit to the Tai Mountains. I would have gone further but she required me to stay. She is a woman who is in love with the wilderness, who will walk out in any weather to greet it lovingly. You should have no fear for her. She is a strong woman.’
​          Meng Ning nodded, declining to speak, afraid to disturb the rough music of the winds that seemed to press on them from all directions. Such is the journeying spirit, he thought, and looking into the distance realized Zuo Fen and her guide had disappeared from view.
          ​Soon the autumn forest had been regained and Zuo Fen and her guide began the descent to Eryi-lou. The path here was well made and marked at regularly distances with small stone columns. The whirlwind, that had buffeted the travellers since their departure, was now being played out in the highest treetops leaving ground level to echo like a large hall as the trees above swayed, groaned and cracked sharply in the heights. Soon vistas of the lake began to appear. They were still high above, the path frequently winding in steep loops across the hillside. Suddenly they found themselves looking down almost precipitously onto rooftops, a maze of buildings falling in tiers, joined together with walkways and terraces, many invaded now by trees and undergrowth: the Emperor’s summer palace of Eryi-lou.
​          Here, Zuo Fen bade her guide turn back. She would now imagine reclaiming this place of her waking dream, alone. When she felt confident her guide had retreated up the path she removed the pins from her hair, loosened her cloak, took off her stout boots of Yak leather. There would be more later.
 
​Barefoot, she began her descent to the palace eventually finding a staircase to one of the terraces from which she began to survey the palace. She found many of the rooms as she had dreamed them, small guest apartments with open spaces where doors and windows might have been, and hangings of the richest almost translucent silks, torn, faded, some covering the ground. The detritus of twenty autumns had blown through these spaces: plant material had taken root in between the planks of the raised wooden floors. Miraculously, there were rooms almost untouched by nature, just piles of leaves providing a matted covering.
         ​In one room somewhat larger than its surrounding structures Zuo Fen feels a special and continuing presence. A veranda-like structure occupied its lake-facing wall. This room, almost a hall, had been recently swept. There is a faint memory of incense as she comes close to the wooden walls. She paces the area until she feels guided to a spot where perhaps a formal chair has long ago been positioned. From there she can see the leaves but not the trunks of the trees as they swirl about in the continuing wind. A long vista of the silver lake spreads itself across the hall’s panorama. But the space enjoys shelter from the prevailing wind and has a stillness and silence all its own. Here, after removing her cloak, her thick riding trousers, the woolen garments that bound warmth to her, she kneels in her shift, closing her eyes to feel the room, the palace, its surroundings, come close to her all but naked body in its repose.
       ​Losing all sense of time it is only the gentle covering of her shoulders by Mei Lim that wakes her from her reverie.
 
‘Gracious Lady, we are installed in rooms kept for the use of official visitors. The guardian here is a young woman with a small child. She would like to welcome you when you are dressed and have eaten.’
 
And so, being led by her maid, Zuo Fen is taken to a distant suite of rooms suited to the autumn weather. There are recently lit braziers, and fitted doors and windows provide a little protection against the relentless wind and the damp cold. Mei Lim reassembles her lady’s wardrobe, and having dressed her, places a hot infusion into her cold hands. The afternoon light has barely a few hours left, but already the cold deepens. This will be a hard place to spend the night, a palace built for the third season – the summer of the solstice, a time of laughter and of fire, and the phoenix red.
 
Meng Ning is also imagining the palace in its summer dress when to wake at dawn would be witness to the sun flooding the partially cleared forest from its heights. The palace is lit up by vibrant reflections off the lake and the very roofs of the many buildings pulsate and shimmer with the heat of a cloudless day. The women of the palace are deep in slumber, their maids with silent tread reclaiming their ladies’ dignity after a night which may have seen much experimental congress of men and women amidst the subtle music of the qujin, the drinking of local wine, the close inspection and divination of the heavens reflected in the still lake, and the elaborate trading between memories of poetry and folk tale.  Even without such imaginings, to be here, and in the company of the illustrious Zuo Fen is the richest gift in a life otherwise stunted by ceremony and courtly intrigue. Zuo Fen has clearly taken Emperor Wu beyond custom and, though briefly, fashioned moments of love and friendship. To witness this woman at close quarters, this artist of the brush whose selection of characters holds both charm and innocence is wondrous. Even in these cold quarters he is warmed by the thought of her presence and the journey they will make tomorrow along the lake shore – to the Red Slate Path.

( to be continued )

Thus reconfigured the party covered the first two days of the journey with speed and ease. As evening approached on the second day it was clear that a village resthouse was to be favoured as its owner had ridden out to greet his illustrious guests. He assured the party of complete secrecy, their valuable horses to be his special concern.
​   Away from the palace Zuo Fen set herself to enjoy the rural pleasures of an autumn evening. This time of freedom from the palace duties, from her Lord’s often-indiscriminate attention, she valued as a most generous gift. She composed swiftly a fu poem in gratitude to her Lord’s trust and favour.
 
How fortunate to dip this hand
In a flowing stream whose water
Is already touched by the first snows
Know that I shall bring its caress
to the mouthpiece of my Lord’s  jade flute
holding its body with spread fingers
to press to open to close to open
 
The stream bisected the village, a village of stone and wattle buildings, though the rest house was stone through and through. She had ventured on her arrival up onto its flat roof covered as it was with harvest produce laid out in abundance. The colours and textures of peppers, yams, marrows, eggplant, and such curious mushrooms as she had never before seen, all this she gathered with joy into her imagination’s memory.
​      With Mei Ling’s help she then transformed herself back into a woman, though with the simplest of robes over the Mongolian garments of wool she favoured to fend off the cold. Then, after alarming the resthouse keeper’s wife and servants by entering the kitchen, she planned a meal to her liking, sought the herb garden and enquired about the storing of vegetables for the long winter ahead.
      ​As the evening progressed she was surprised to discover Meng Ning had gone on ahead to Eryi-lou. It was a capricious decision born of his wariness of Zuo Fen. He felt intimidated by the persona she had assumed. Here was a woman of infinite grace yet simple charm who in the time it took to travel 6 li had become unrecognizable. Even her voice she dropped into a lower register and gained louder amplitude. When they reached the village he had moved purposefully to provide assistance as she prepared to dismount, only to see her grip the high pommel and swing her leg confidently across her pony and her body slide down the pony’s flanks to a standing position. So as the late afternoon light failed he had driven his horse up and up the mountain path, forcing himself to think only of the route and task ahead. He had acquired the company of a local guide who, on foot, out-paced his horse, but would see him safe down the path in the coming darkness. There would be a moon, but it had yet to rise.
        ​To his surprise the caretaker of Eryi-lou was a young woman, a daughter perhaps of its official guardian Gao Cheng, a daughter Meng Ning considered banished to this remote spot: she carried a small child on her back. He would enquire later. For now, he sought in her company to reconnoiter the decaying web of wooden pavilions, some already invaded by nature. It was then he realized his mistake. He thought himself into Zuo Fen’s mind. Surely she would wish to come upon this place untouched and unprepared by his offices. He motioned to the young woman to come outside, and standing on one of the many terraces explained his error, asked her not to speak of his inappropriate visit, but made to suggest that there was a room ‘always kept for an official’s visit’, that it be swept and suitably provisioned. Her voice responded in a dialect he could hardly decipher. It had the edge of a lone bird’s roosting call. He knew she was trying to explain something of importance to him, but he quickly lost the thread. He could see the faint gleam of the lake reflected in her eyes, hear the snuffle of her baby carried against on her back, and in the near distance he was aware of the village guide admonishing his horse. He bowed and left.
 
‘You are a most considerate companion, Meng Ning,’ Zou Fen said, as summoned to her presence, the chamberlain prostrated himself before the woman he was charged to serve and protect.
‘My lady, you already know I am a fool.’
‘Yes, but an honest fool with a kind heart. You sought my well-being at Eryi-lou, but I think you rightly imagined I might wish to experience this dream habitation in an inviolate state. Let us say you made a dream journey there. No harm done.’
     ​He explained about the caretaker and that a suite of rooms was always kept ready for an official. That was all he would say. He was about to retreat from the guest room now vivid with firelight and rich with the scent of cinnamon, when she lifted her hand to stay his going.
 
‘You are a brave young man to accept charge of my company. I am sure you know how my Lord is likely to remove you from his circle on our return. I feel unworthy of such sacrifice. I did not expect my Lord’s favour in this enterprise, but my words, my application, were clearly persuasive. I feel we are bound together you and I, and we must see our enterprise be the making of a fine poetic rhapsody for the autumn season – something you might share one day with your children and their children. You must understand that I am already moving towards a meeting of reality and the world of dreams and visions. Do not be afraid should I seek your intimate council. I know already you dream a little of my person. You may even imagine our conjunction as lovers. Women know these things, and, as you may have heard, I have tutored your Emperor in the ways of the Pale Girl.’
 
‘My lady . . .
 
Zou Fen reaches out for paper and brush Mei Lim had placed to her right hand. Kneeling on the roughly swept floor, her long limbs hidden under her cloak, she deftly paints seven lines of characters:
 
The autumn air is clear,
The autumn moon is bright.
Fallen leaves gather and scatter,
The jackdaw perches and starts anew.
We think of each other- when will we meet?
This hour, this night, my feelings are . . .
 
‘I wonder how we are to cast the final character?’
‘Not yet, and not here my Lady’. And with that Meng Ning takes his leave.
 
(to be continued)

It was the eve of the mid-autumn festival. Day had followed day of clear skies but ever-lower temperatures had brought crisp and chill mornings. Zuo Fen began to fear that a first frost would damage her late flowering plants, the delicate tea flowers of the osmanthus. She was already aware of the seven grasses of autumn now present in her garden and would recite standing amongst them the traditional seasonal poem:
 
Flowers blossoming

in autumn fields - 

when I count them on my fingers

they then number seven.

The flowers of bush clover,

eulalia, arrowroot, 

pink, patrinia, 

also, mistflower 

and morning faces flower.
 
Oh the whiteness of Autumn, the season of courage and sadness, a time for the lighting of white candles against the dying of the day. Upon rising Zuo Fen would stand in meditation facing west, the seasonal direction of dreams and visions. Again and again her mind state visited a habitation in the distant mountains, a sprawling summer palace seemingly empty but for the slightest echoes of recent occupation or maybe a caretaker’s attention. In her recurring vision she would walk from room to room, each kaleidoscopic in colour of hanging silks and elaborate murals. Eventually she would find her way outside into a neglected garden that dropped in gentle terraces to a lake where she would observe the ‘thousand colours of water, brilliances and blues.’
 
One morning a young chamberlain sent from her Lord visited her court. He had remained rapt at the sight of the courtesan of the Purple Chamber standing trance-like in her garden. Meng Ning had often positioned himself in the undertaking of the Emperor’s duties to communicate with Zuo Fen, whom Meng Ning admired and was secretly enamored. A few well-chosen words of respect and critical admiration for the poetess had been all it took for Emperor Wu to summon Meng Ning as courier of his express command to his most favoured concubine. Unfailingly gracious towards the formal attentions of the young man Zuo Fen had come to feel at ease with this respectful figure who had succeeded in charming both her cats and Mei Ling her maid.
​       As she stood motionless, attired in her gardening robe and clogs, she became aware of Meng Ning’s presence and, before turning to acknowledge him with a greeting, allowed a thought to form in herself. She would seek his help to identify the summer palace of her waking dreams.
       ​Yes, he knew of such a place, sixty li distant, a hard path it was said, but ladies of the court had once graced its many linked pavilions in the third season. The lake held a restless spirit and it was said no boat had ever sailed its surface. How did he know this, she had asked. A petition from a recluse, a former minister of the treasury, had been received at court requesting its occupation for the winter months. It had been refused, indeed dismissed without further consideration. Meng Ning had been curious as he had once viewed the lake from its western end, but from which the habitation was entirely hidden. Did the Honoured Lady know of the mysterious Red Slate Path said to appear briefly from out of a cave in the steep wooded hillside, cross a bowl-like glade and disappear into the lake depths? The Honoured Lady did not, but was nevertheless caught by Meng Ning’s description which, when he had delivered his message from Emperor Wu and retired, she fell to placing inside her already rich vision of property, lake, and precipitous woodland whose trees and bushes she was busy mind-painting with autumn leaves and berries.
 
After a day of thought and planning Zuo Fen developed an intricate strategy to visit the palace and environs of Eryi-lou. She told herself that she was searching for inspiration to compose an autumn sequence for her Lord that would recall the days of his esteemed father. She had discovered in the palace archives that in his declining years he had summered in this remote place, had filled its pavilions with only his most favoured concubines, its guest apartments with poets and musicians. She asked for Meng Ning’s services as guide and protector.
​      She had expected a blunt refusal, but to her astonishment, her request was granted, but only during the twelve days surrounding her monthly courses. She had smiled at this condition having been almost entirely free from her natural cycle for several years, something not unknown for a woman who had never been with child. Mei Ling dutifully made apparent false evidence of this charade.
​       It was a small party that left the Eastern Gate on a day that promised rain and high wind; seven in all, four to carry Zou Fen’s sedan. But this was to be understood as a matter of protocol rather than necessity, as within 6 li of the palace a pair of ponies for Zou Fen appeared in the road. Drawing back the curtains of her sedan she stepped out dressed as a male traveller, her movements and manner in such a disguise confidently rendered from her months searching for her brother Zuo Si in the wilderness of the Tai Mountains. Meng Ning was both astonished and alarmed as he had not been forewarned of this way of things. It seemed that Zuo Si had probably made all the necessary arrangements.

(to be continued)

​1​
 
In the year Victoria
came to the throne,​
on 9 acres by a river’s bend,
(bought for £490)
Joseph Dover built his mill.
 
yarn
to weave,
wool to knit,
the raw fleece
washed, carded,
scribbled, tentered, dyed,
spun and woven
(back parlour or
mill shed)
finished,
sold.
 
Today the fleeces are
burnt at the farm,
and the sheds and lofts
display colourful crafts.
The past is collected in
sepia photographs,
strange heritaged tools.
The present hides in
figures on the footfall,  
those costings for the café.
 
In an August
of grey cloud
and persistent rain,
the sun on occasion
shakes the building into life;
it filters through the tall riverside trees,
makes swathes of coloured light
swim across the wooden floors.
 
2
​
The studio, cool
on the hottest day,
is graced with garden flowers,
and the business of making everywhere.
Days fold work into the pleasure
of small gestures of care,
Satie’s tenderest song
a litany under the breath.
 
When toes meet
beneath a table shared,
this touch registers
the slow wonder of it all;
that ‘being here’
in this expansive place
of stone and wood,
textured always
with the white noised
rush of water.
 
At night we steal back in
to sit together by a single lamp:
to decipher Henry’s mimetic prose
of estuary, moor and river;
ponder Robert’s quartets in A,
every phrase singing Clara, Clara . . .
 
Later, lights extinguished
we move in the pitch of darkness
through the long galleries,
carefully down the invisible stairs.
 
Outside, in the
coloured silence
of the river’s run,
the hills carry the sky
cloud-haunted, star-strewn.
moon-lit.

1

Late afternoon
leaving the city
the bus route intersects
the terraced houses,
row upon row:
right to the valley floor,
left to wooded heights.

In a bay-windowed room
a child sits at a table
beachcombing the net.
Tea is past
and there is gentle talk of
volcanoes , the Verungas,
and gorillas in the midst.
Outside, and a floor below,
a garden nestles into the dusk,
a blackbird settles itself with song.

Later, at the same table.
there is a silent grace.
A shy five year old
in scary pyjamas
comes to say goodnight.
For supper: a goat’s cheese flan,
a simple salad,
pink wine,
strong coffee.

On the mantelpiece:
the familiar jumble of cards and photos,
a collage of family faces distant shores.
On the walls:
grandmother’s woven rug,
her grand-daughter’s textiled strata,
an embroidered geology.

2

The next day,
so bright and clear,
the garden bench is warm by ten.
We sit surrounded
by the evidence
of this growing season:
emergent plants, the possibility of fruit,
even declarations of vegetables.

As ideas flow
across cake and coffee
so the shadows move,
shaping depths, enriching tones
on greys, within greens.

In the midday sun,
the garden becomes
a wild tracery of lines
as perspectives
distort, corrupt, thicken . . .
and space opens everywhere:
foliage as yet transparent
no shelter to stalk and stem.
Their very arteries revealed,
plants bask in the fragile heat
of ‘just’ Spring.

It is so measured that rising arpeggio, only to fall and rise again in quicker values, through the dominant seventh to the heartache moment of that minor ninth, a very apogee of dissonance. Then it goes higher still to the fifth, holding to that Phrygian harmony before returning to the tonic minor and a measured fall in the bass. This is a deliberate descent to the sub-mediant, and Bach’s touch of magic, the equivalence with the dominant minor ninth. But then he gives us hope: an extended and joyful play through sequences that rise and fall within each bar, to rest finally on the mediant’s echo of that opening, that measured rise and the quickening fall. We have hardly smiled with relief when Bach pulls us back into the insecurity of the dominant of the subdominant, that V of IV acting like a bridge to a long, long discourse in the dominant, a pedal E holding firmly to itself whilst rising arpeggios and falling decorations and sequences pull and pull through innocently related keys. Longer and longer play the rising passages until short motives of imitation interrupt, treble to bass, tenor to alto, until:  a first inversion arpeggio of the dominant seventh measures out the opening rhythm. This happens twice in short succession, as though holding the progress of the music to account. A questioning perhaps before a four-fold sequence asserts the dominant and a chorded caesura. There is a pregnant, though faintly resonant silence as Bach spins the dice of tonality and chooses the subdominant to bring the music towards a waiting Allemande. The music moves through a play of subdominant to dominant, minor to major, the mix of flattened fifth and flattened ninth. It is those intervals that determine Bach as the father of ambiguity in the 20C school of jazz harmony, Arpeggio then a falling scale, and repeat and repeat again, but moving ever higher by sequence. At last five chords – merely a shorthand for closure via the expectation of a right display of the performer’s improvisatory prowess. They prepare us reverently for the tonic minor before the stately Allemande leads the music into the elegant steps of its walking dance.

For Madison Grace
 
So nice to know
you play the cello,
such a fine upstanding
instrument this.
It holds itself so
firm to the floor,
but needs the knees
to keep it still.
 
That resonant rich
bottom C, it never fails
to move me. So when
at the end of Bach’s
Fifth Suite, the music
dances its gigueing way
to that low tessitura, it’s
an open string end *san pareil.

'No painting is possible without poetry'
Po Kin Yi (9th C)*
 
Eyes in the feet
Wherever, whenever,
Pocketed, brought home,
Shaped under tea's chemistry
Left on paper sketchbook thin
Enough to register on both sides
Where the roller has marked,
Capriciously, a backdrop
Always different, pavement grey,
Mottled, complex as storm clouds
on a winter sky. Then, the stitch.
Marks of a bird's foot
Perfectly pricked
On the footpath's mud,
We crouched close to view
In the last light of this fading year.

Years now pass our friendship by
and still I am weakened when
I see you stitch and sew a surface,
the poise of the needled hand
entering so finely, passing through
and out, and all . . .
. . . and in such silence that only
a shallow quickness of breath
and fabric’s shift and turn about
disturbs.
 
Oh the rapt expression on your face;
intent-full, a mask of stillness;
as though your body draws into itself
and centres all toward the quiet movement
of your small hands.
 
Now I pause to wonder.
Should I force a halt, intervene,
and lay that needled hand aside?
I could then perhaps traverse
the lines of your body’s pattern
and, kissing you the while, my hands
lay claim to your form and fabric.
 
Searching its seams, *******
its folds its curves its corners,
I would ply myself into the very thread
of your sewing self.

IV

Pizzicato pianissimo
its sound gestured into resonance
a slight plosive of winds sustained
Arco – a lament in falling thirds
whispering towards an upward leap and a hold
crescendo  decrescendo
Imagine his imagining in nature’s realm
(that patient catalyst for the solitary maker’s mind)
now guarding here its assembly in a sounding out
Adagio – in a three-fold telling
A measured preliminary to the music’s soon-to-dance theme
before rising scales and emphatic chords – Allegro Vivace

V

Words on the rise
bricks on the going
then in the hall on the wall
A poem you simply have to read so
crouch close to the Suffolk brick
don’t mind those  descending shoes
The verse is laced with words of sound
breaker march cry rumble clap
cueing memory into remembrance
And why why here
where formal musicking lives and rules
are we noised down steps by a boiling kettle?

VI

As the water holds its breath
so a dense cloudscape
forms and floats
Inverted
mirrored
wholly still
it replaces the water
with horizonless sky
and extended reflections of grass
But as water exhales
clouds coalesce
a right perspective restores

I

Tired
the long road ends
by a sea wall
The engine dies
to cries of estuary birds
to halyards’ **** and tinge
A lake of light set in night’s cloudscape
brims over the western marshland
to seaward a dense darkness
On the ferry’s step
ear close to the brown water
a part-song sings the ebb tide’s flow

II

Threading into the marshland
a braid of cloud-reflected water
of oval sedge and common reed
In amongst the brown canes perspective vanishes
only by mind’s foreshortening or body’s levitation
is there sight beyond the creeping rootstock
By the river path a leaf
pearled with glazed dew glistening
dew grabbing the photographic eye
Standing backs to the horizon
a sculpted triad of bronzed ancestors
watch over the summer rites of music

III

This ****** field
moves clamorously under the feet
waiting waiting for the sea’s kiss
Proud-coloured the boats here
resting poised on railway sleepers
beside their tractored guardians
How to know which way to turn
which view to hold for memory’s stamp
this patient sky this slow exhaling sea
This foreground flow of white-grey-brown pebbles
each sensibly-sized for the hand in the pocket
yet substantially-singular on the window’s sill

Once,
before our hands first held,
we sat and muffined here
(we shared a cake,
two forks, one plate).
Then, as now,
surrounded:
by your sweet self,
this so gentle spirit,
an all-embracing gift
unwrapped and sometimes held
just as sleep calls us to its own,
descending now as slow rain
on a damp day, clouds low
in the valleys, greyness,
greyness everywhere,
except in your eyes' promise.

These images ask you to forget everything that might be construed as ‘of landscape’, because they are not. They are of the mind’s reflection: that closing of the eyes which brings something often unseen, certainly unrecognisable, to the back of the retina. It’s illusory, dreamlike - even though one is awake. The images defy formal categorization. They are not ‘like’ anything, and even if one makes an attempt at describing a mark, a fold, a ridge, a texture, a colour as ‘like’, it is wholly unsatisfactory. What you see carries with it emptiness of association, probably because things that you might describe won’t connect. So don’t. Let them lie there on painted linen cloth. Uneasy. The six cloths hang from two nails apiece, no fancy frame or fitting, two silvered nails, bang! hard into the wall. Watching very acutely they move so slightly under the air conditioning’s breath. A infinity of sadness lies upon their surfaces. Once sewn there could be no unsewing those marks made; and all that painting over and over, but the trace of a needle there always there. The full form, the total image scours the memory. These pieces seem to deny the sun, the action of weather; they have been removed from the continuum of nature and become preserved. The process of making and creating has entombed them. They absorb and reflect nothing except a waste of loneliness.

Oh this miracle of movement, the bird in flight, its bright all-seeing 180 degree eye, black brown bird against autumn’s revelatory colours, you can feel you’re outside in an October wind, but the leaves are hanging on still, and even a cobweb laces through this morning image (it can only be morning with such clarity of colour). This collaged picture lithographed full to the brim with autumnal shades and that rising up of things despite nature’s time of fall. The bird backlit by a cloud-feathered sun, circled in movement. Berries bright red against the black brown bird and such shades of green, impossible colours though they are everywhere in Bawden, Piper, Nash, those English colourists who remind us how light amplifies what our country’s weather reveals. Not a picture to live in the imagination and ponder at, but to look at, marvel at, and then go outside and look and look at those symmetries and repeats, and such colours that even on the darkest winter’s day are there in a corner of the sky, the crack in a wall, a leaf speckled with frost, a white flash of the magpie. And by all accounts this artist is one himself, magpie by nature, collecting the not properly beautiful but when surprisingly placed becoming more than its sole self could possibly be. Unsophisticated. Playing with tensions of different material. Collage. Improbable museums. Lumber rooms even. No mystery, just things collected as they are, for the sheer joy of it all.

The Child**
 
After five of these miracles
you’d think
you were prepared for that moment
the child greets your waiting arms.
 
For some months
you’ve slept together,
even come
so really close
in the act of love.
 
Now her eyes look up for food
you cannot give.
You place her next the gentle curve
of the waiting breast.
 
Her presence dominates your waking self
and now it’s your turn to carry her.
This gift from God,
this wonder of innocence and truth,
she will become everything you are not,
and much more besides.
 
 
©  Nigel Morgan 2010

Cattle**

In the photo
she’s striding across the yard
following Blossom and her procession of cows,
from the stack yard to the Home Field
twice a day
after we fed them from bales of hay
untied and thrown in chunks to the manger.
 
They wheeze and munch,
shuffle and ****,
never to be hurried,
their patience exemplary.

The Family**
 
When we were three
(there was a fourth on the way)
he discovered this summer place
in mid-September.
 
(there were brambles in the hedgerows
and it was windy and cold)
 
Later when we were four
and then (an accident) five,
we returned (regularly)
to remind ourselves
who we were,
who we are.