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

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

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

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

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

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

I heard this woman speak
from Derek Jarman's desk,
she spoke and half asleep
I woke to feel her rhythmic
words oblique to all I knew
as poetry.

This place a poem
I can’t write, she said, I’ll
listen to the wind instead
and turn my thoughts to
that poor badger on the road.

I stopped the car I was alone,
I snapped it three times
with my phone and now
it lies here on his desk,
three shots of this dead thing,
its dark blue pool of blood
that spills half on the road
half on the grass, from deep
inside its side it’s dead,
and really still,
and still
it has a such beauty,
still.

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?

He had been living in a trance of indecision. All his adult life he had sought to be inventive, to imagine something made that could be sounded out, something that could be seen and touched as a score, heard and played as music. Composing was like map-making. It had boundaries. It was contained, always contained:  in the bar, in the bars on a stave, in the staves on a page. It was always a joy to see the page covered. More black than white, although the white space was important, and he realised was becoming more and more necessary as he grew older and more sensitive to music’s often relentless clutter and noise. He wanted to observe the space and spaces between notes, phrases, between trajectories of musical action. That was a good and right term. Musical action: symbols and words that ignited the fire of a musician’s movement, gesture sounded out. He could do that. His scores were full of distinct musical actions, gestures, imagined or observed physical movement: a child’s smile, her graceful movement across a room, an inclination of a head, a gentle stroke of the hand on the arm. That’s how a score often seemed to him: a map of actions. Do this and this follows. Do this and at the same time do this, and when this  finishes, pause, then do this again only in a different way, with a softer touch, a gentler mind, a fresh spirit, a brighter smile. You could build a piece of music on such descriptions – of actions. Such a piece made of musical actions could carry within it a rich poetry. Do this as you view the yellow vase on the window sill flickering with late afternoon shadows and when the distant laughter of children disturbs this scene this follows, whilst a door closes and a woman’s footsteps disappear slowly down a flight of stairs. Do this, as though remembering the reflections in the still water of a lake in early morning, and do this intermittently but simultaneously and with longing for a past memory, and when there is a right moment heralded by the sound of a single bird, pause. Recall your very last action before the bird heralded your pause and let it be repeated in a different way, a way which suggests, almost, indifference, something cast adrift from the flow of thought: to lighten, to unthicken, to reveal the hidden, open the closed, unmuted, towards a radiance.

‘There’s definitely a story here’, she said that evening over the telephone. They’d been sitting in Trevelyan Square in Leeds. He’d brought a picnic lunch so they could sit in the sun. When he arrived at the station she wasn’t wearing her glasses and he thought, I only see her like this in bed or . . . and he stopped that thought immediately because she looked so very lovely and he knew he would only have a couple of hours as her companion before work and children reclaimed them both. They’d sat on a bench eating his salad confection, apricots and nectarines. They forgot about the rock buns he’d baked the night before. Just in front of them sat four hounds, four stone hounds with staring eyes and  very large paws sitting in a circle, four Talbot Hounds with water gushing from their mouths, four just larger than life-size handsome hounds commissioned by Joseph Edwards for the courtyard of his mansion at Castle Carr and, when the house was demolished in the 1940s, had disappeared. The hounds turned up in the 1970s in a stone-mason’s yard and an enterprising architect – building the Open University’s northern HQ - bought them for Trevelyan Square. As he sat there, with the water-spouting dogs, it was only her gracious, lovely self that occupied his attention. Why does she captivate me so ?, he thought. Why do I always feel with her like I did as a teenager, so unsure of myself, so overwhelmed by the female presence (he thought as he wrote this how often that word overwhelm came to mind when he wrote of her, and so checked the Thesaurus . . . hmm. Besieged, snowed-under, inundated, beleaguered, weighed down, beset? No, overwhelm was the only word he decided – she whelmed him over as a wave rises up and cresting falls and turns and rolls the swimmer beneath it.). It was, he considered, her femininity that was so particular and just embodied everything he’d ever dreamed and fantasized a woman might be, could be for him. He knew he’d thought and written of this aspect so often, and yet today, here with the sandstone dogs, there was a intensity, a vividness enlivening his senses. Without her glasses he could see the lines, indeed a shadow of fatigue, under her eyes, simply too much time with the computer perhaps. So she looked older, always wiser, and oh the joy of her freckles, the faint down on her cheek. And when, later, saying goodbye, he didn’t just kiss her gently as a good friend would do in a very public place, but brought her to him in an embrace that something outside of his usual careful manner required. He had hugged her with a passion and a joy and sadness all in one. On the train, a text, and he had suddenly to hide his tears that it could be so. He would write about those hounds . . .

For Jonathan on his 70th birthday*

Even at 70
I can’t imagine
one stops wondering

at those wonders
surrounding
each day and hour

clearly etched
recorded
in the growth of trees

where future states
are no more certain
than an April wind.

No bad thing then
to review
his life and work

to question again
where we think we are
in this world’s plan.

A life lived
between experiment
and pain

He teaches us
still to look
and look again

at nature’s fragile
patterning
and its chaotic hand.

‘Oh the mystery of
what lies between the
body and the mind.'

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I

Before the sea the sound of sea, before the wind a mask of wind placed on the face, before the rain the touch of rain on the cheek. The lee shore of this finger of land is a gathered turbulence of tea-coloured, leaf-curling wave upon wave, wholly irregular, turning, folding, falling. No steady crash and withdrawal hiss, but a chaos of breaking and turning over, no rhyme or reason, and far, far up the beached misted shore. There, do you see? - suddenly appearing in the waves’ turmoil a raft of concrete, metalled, appearing to disappear, the foreshore’s strategic sixty year old litter shifting and decaying slowly under the toss of water and wind.
 
II
 
From the lighthouse steps to the sea fifty yards no more: the path, a brief facing of the wind and spit of rain, then turning the back to it see the complexity of low vegetation holding its own on the shallow earth-invading sand and rolled leaves of marram grass. Sea Buckthorn is the dominant plant, not yet berried with its clustered inedible oil-rich orange fruits. The leaves, slight, barely 5cm long, but in profusion, clustering upward, splaying out and upward on thin branches, hiding the wind in its density, never more than chest high, so the eye looks down, sees the plane of the leaves, long, thin, suddenly tapered, dense, stiff, thorny.
 
III
 
You said, ‘look the door is curved.’ And it was. In the late afternoon light filtering through the oblong window 150’ into the grey sky the panelled wood was honeyed. Covered with a well-varnished frottage of swirled marks, some of the wood itself, some of gathering age and infestation, the single window’s light blazed a small white rectangle on the larger rectangle of the door. The passage outside the door too narrow for the eye to take in the whole door straight on, one has to move past and catch its form obliquely.
 
IV
 
The curve, the long four-mile curve of the finger into the afternoon mist and sea cloud. From the road: only seen the smooth ebbing tide waters retreating from the archipelagos of mud and sand and slight vegetation of rusted grass.  From the road: only heard over the marramed banks the sea’s sound of waves’ confusion and winds’ turmoil. Follow the fade of the curve’s progress in the echo of distance. It paints itself from the brush of the eye, the sea a grey resist. This spreading away is a long breath taken . . . then expelled from the lungs of looking. You can’t quite hold it all in one view so you’ll build the image in sections, assembling and projecting across two adjoining landscape sheets as if the spiral binding isn’t there. The resulting image when digitally joined will describe the negative space of sea of sky, silent and uncluttered by marks. Only the curve of the land will collect the drawn, a vertical stroke here for a lighthouse, a slight smudge for the lifeboat station.
 
V
 
From the road looking south to an invisible North Shore, the mist hiding the true horizon, there is layer upon layer of horizontal bands: of grass, of mud, of nested water around mud, wet sand, layered water, mud-black, water-grey, a dull sky-reflected white of a sheltered sea, and patterning everywhere, dots of birds near and distant. Then, in the very centre, a curlew in profile, its long downward curving bill dipping for worms into the wet sand and mud. Breeding on summer moorland, wading winter estuaries, this somewhat larger than other waders here, so distinctive with its heavy, calm stance.

She had hung it up from the mantelpiece in her bedroom, so when he entered the room there it was. It was suddenly lovely and he immediately imagined her body flowing into it, flowing from it. Standing close to the dress he brought his fingers to the fabric, touched gently, stroking then, as though it already held her form and substance.
 
Stepping past thoughts of her that so stirred his body he entered the pattern of the dress. It was a meadow in southern Ontario. July, when already the sun had bleached the profusion of grasses: water chestnut and papyrus sedge. He had stepped from the untidy veranda, past the pond, and down the rough track between the fields unmown, uncut, left fallow. As he entered the breaks of woodland between these swathes of grassland, deciduous leaves, dry and brittle from the summer's heat, were strewn on the path, and between the trees clumps of bramble bushes with berries of red and blue, black and purple.
 
There was no wind. The only sounds an underlay of crickets, his footfall, and the sharp mournful cries of geese on the now distant pond.
 
He saw her like an apparition standing motionless at the woodland’s  boundary; her dress at one with all that surrounded her. When he came close and placed his hand on her shoulder he could smell the sweet dry earth mingling with her body's sweat, a hint of her *** as he placed his cheek against the shower of printed pollen amongst the leaves on her back.
 
Back in the late afternoon bedroom he heard her move about in the kitchen, and the spell broken, he turned away and went downstairs.
 
Several days later, as they prepared for bed, she slipped the dress on. As she stood in the lamplight smoothing it against her flanks, adjusting its fall across her *******, he felt himself faint that such a thing of beauty could be a joy forever . . . and beyond.

He explained to me he was a ghost,
for, as a composer, he had died years before.
He then described something of the trauma of his death.
 
It was good to discover I was not alone,
that it could happen and one might really die
​to this creative life.
 
Shall I describe something of the trauma of my dying?
I don’t think you’ll want to hear this, but I’ll tell you.
 
It’s been six months this dying;
I’m not quite dead.
I am still affected by music,
though it’s no longer my own.
If I think about this dying too much
I become distressed.
I can’t believe it’s happened.
 
The point is - if I try to compose
I am overcome with fatigue.
I can’t keep focused
on the problem of a piece
before fatigue sets in,
interrupts.
 
I should
place a line under what I’ve done.
It’s no little achievement this body of work.
Some days I like to imagine a monograph:
Nigel Morgan 
Metanoia to Sounding the Deep
(1988 – 2013).*
And what is there to say?
What aspect of musical invention
will the writer investigate and critically present?
I was once told I had
an experimental edge.
Well, what does it mean?
I’ve mined that seam;
I’ve been convinced; I’ve held the faith,
believed in what I did, the way I did it.
But faith has run its course
and every day that passes
the future retreats.
There is no music waiting in the wings.
I am tired, tired of it, tired with it all.

for my Sidcot Friends

Two poems on Encouragement

I

She rose to her feet,
and sitting a few rows behind
I could not see her tears
as they coloured every word she spoke.

‘I have been thinking,’ she said,
‘of my dear sister dead
this fortnight past.
Loved by all whose lives
she touched, home and abroad.’

With some courage this woman
then described the memorial service,
the church alive and packed to honour
her sister’s life, a life of encouragement
always given with the kindest words,
and her wonderful smile, always.

II

His delivery was achingly slow
every word measured right
on the cusp between sense
and no sense, but ******* the memory.
Fitting somehow because his subject
was the movie ‘The King’s Speech’,
how he and friends had focused
during their Lenten study
on Bertie, the stammering monarch,
discouraged and made fun of
at every turn.

But,
befriended by a commoner
this future king was encouraged
to know that he might speak one day,
words of hope, of resolution, of courage;
encouragement no less - in a difficult time.

(to be read with aching slowness . . .)


At Meeting


‘For each and all
we need silence and stillness.’
So she had written . . .
and we were certainly
silent. Still is a harder
state when sitting
on those wooden forms,
benches well-bottomed
and the floor at our feet
creaking like planks
on a ship’s deck
in a stiff breeze.


Presence in the Midst


I hope for His presence.
It comforts me to know
He had been here before,
sitting close by, waiting.

But, lately, I am removed
from the Promise and the Gift,
and not fully awake, the silence
droops my shoulders,
bends my back so the daughter
of my friend (and partner)
wonders, ‘Is he asleep?’
No, I say when confronted
later. Not I.
Resting perhaps, and
just relieved from the sentry-go
of imagination’s so
persistent commands.



Heels Together


In spring sunshine
on a wooden bench
by the circular pond
I sit to listen
to water’s spray
and play from
the diver’s fountain.
Here a pair of sculptured feet,
body and limbs immersed,
and into the lilies disappeared.
But with the heels so neatly together:
to make a smaller splash.


Seven Hills


I’m surrounded here
by the Seven Hills –
Callow, Blackdown, Dolebury Warren,
Sandford, Banwell, Crook Peak
and Wavering Down and up
again and back to Callow.
These carboniferous limestone heights,
Mendips all, are home to the peregrine falcon,
geranium purpuleum, the long-eared owl,
and *dianthus gratianopoltanus.


Sunset


Sitting alone,
with only the sunset
for company,
I watch an orange globe
fall, fall behind a distant
hill hiding the Severn and the sea,
a spring evening and the birds
in song before the approaching dark,
the rising moon, the solitary stars.



Four Yurts in a Field


‘Speaking truth to power,’
The Guardian said,
‘Questioning authority,
Challenging the status quo’
and so  . . .

Four yurts in a field
make for a centre of
simplicity, truth, peace
and equanimity all
quite inescapable here.




Singing Easter Sunday


We sang as we do here
on Easter Day this joyful
noise together all and sundry
to bless the day with music’s
Concord and Time, rhythm
enlivened by the Sweetest Charity,
flipping the wings, tingling the feet.

When every empty bar did give me leave
I caught her singing smile, her sensible
shoe-standing stance, her grace,
her peerless beauty in that grey
frock falling just to stockinged knees.
She was all and more and ever
I could wish her ever to be. Amen.

When the engine rattled itself to a stop he opened the driver’s door letting the damp afternoon displace the snug of travel. He was home after a long day watching the half hours pass and his students come and go. And now they had gone until next year leaving cards and little gifts.
 
The cats appeared. The pigeons flapped woodenly. A dog barked down the lane. The post van passed.
 
The house from the yard was gaunt and cold in its terracotta red. Only the adjacent cottage with its backdoor, bottles filling the window ledges, and tiled roof, seemed to invite him in. It was not his house, but temporarily his home. He loved to wander into the garden and approach the house from the front, purposefully. He would then take in the disordered flowerbeds and the encroaching apple trees where his cats played tag falling in spectacular fashion through the branches. He liked to stand back from the house and see it entire, its fine chimneys, the 16C brickwork, the grey-shuttered living room, and his bedroom studio from whose window he could stretch out and touch the elderberries.
 
Inside, the storage heaters giving out a provisional warmth, he left the lights be and placed the kettle on the stove, laid out on the scrubbed table a tea ***, milk jug, a china mug, a cake tin, On the wall, above the vast fireplace, hung a painting of the fields beyond the house dusty in a harvest sunset, the stubble crackling under foot, under his sockless sandals, walking, walking as he so often felt compelled to do, criss-crossing the unploughed fields of the chalk escarpment.
 
Now a week before St Lucy’s Day he sat in Tim’s chair and watched the night unmask itself, the twilight owl glimmer past the window, a cat on his knee, a cat on the window ledge, porcelain-still.
 
He let his thoughts steal themselves across the table to an empty chair, imagining her holding a mug in both hands, her long graceful legs crossed under her flowing skirt. When she lay in bed she crossed her legs, lying on her back like the pre-Raphaelite model she had shown him once, Ruskin’s ****** wife, Effie. ‘I was in a pub with some friends and I looked out of the window and there he was, painting the church walls’, she said musingly, ‘I knew I would marry him’. He was older of course; with a warm voice that brought forth a childhood in the 1930s spent at a private schools, a wartime naval career (still in his teens), then Oxford and the Slade. He owned nothing except a bag of necessary clothes, his paints of course and an ever-present portfolio of sketches. Tim lived simply and could (and did) work anywhere. Then there was Alison, then a passion that nearly drowned him before her Quaker family took him to themselves, adoring his quiet grace, his love of music, his ability to cook, to make and mend, to garden like a God.
 
Sitting in her husband’s chair he constantly replayed his first meeting with her. Out in the yard, they had arrived together, it was Palm Sunday and returning from Mass he gave her his palm as a greeting. He loved her smile, her awkwardness, her passion for the violin, and her beautiful children. He felt he had always known her, known her in another life . . . then she had touched his hand as he ascended the kitchen stairs in her London home, and he was lost in guilt.
 
Tonight he would eat mackerel with vicious mustard and a colcannon of vegetables. He would imagine he was Tim alone after a day in his studio, take himself upstairs to his bedroom space where on his drawing board lay this work for solo violin, his Tapisserie, seven studies and Chaconne. For her of course; of the previous summer in Pembrokeshire; of a moment in the early morning sailing gently across Dale sound, the water glass-like and the reflections, the intense mirroring of light on water  . . . so these studies became mirrors too, palindromes in fact.
 
The cats slept on his sagging quilted bed where he knew she had often slept, where he often felt her presence as he woke in the early hours to sit at his desk with tea to drag his music little by little into sense and reason.
 
When Jenny came she slept fitfully, in this bed, in his arms, always worried by her fear of rejection, always hoping he would never let her go, envelope her with love she had never had, leave his music be, be with her totally, rest with her, own her, take her outside into the night and make love to her under the apple trees. She had suggested it once and he had looked at her curiously, as though he couldn’t fathom why bed was not sufficient unto itself, why the gentleness he always felt with her had to become hurt and discomfort.
 
He had acquired a drawing board because Elizabeth Lutyens had one in her studio, a very large one, at which she stood to compose. He liked pushing sketches and manuscript paper around into different configurations. He would write the same passage in different rhythmical values, different transpositions, and compare and contrast. After a few hours his hearing became so acute that he rarely had to go downstairs to check a phrase at the piano.
 
Later, when he was too tired to stand he would go into the cold sitting room, light some candles, wrap himself in a blanket and read. He would make coffee and write to Jenny, telling her the minutiae of the place she loved to come to but didn’t understand. She loved the natural world of this remote corner of Essex. Even in winter he would find her walking the field paths in skirt and t-shirt insensible of the cold, in sandals, even bare feet, oblivious of the mud. He would guide her home and wash her with a gentleness that first would arouse her, then send her to sleep. He knew she was still repairing herself.
 
One evening, after a concert he had conducted, Jenny and Alison found themselves at the same table in the bar. Jenny had grasped his hand, drawing it onto her lap, suddenly knowing that in Alison’s presence he was not hers. And that night, after phoning her sister to say she would not be home, she had pulled herself to him, her mass of chestnut hair flowing across her shoulders and down his chest as she kissed his hands and his arms, those moving appendages she had watched as he had stood in front of this student orchestra playing the score she had played, once, before this passion had taken hold. At those first rehearsals she had blushed deeply whenever he spoke to her, always encouraging, gentle with her, wondering at her gauche but wondrous beauty, her pear-shaped green eyes, her small hands.
 
He threw the cats out into the chill December air. He closed the door, extinguished the lights and climbed the stairs to his bedroom. In bed, in the sheer darkness of this Ember night, the house creaked like an old sailing ship moored in a tide race. For a few moments he lay examining the soundscape, listening for anything new and different. With the nearest occupied house a good mile away there had been scares, heart-thumping moments when at three in the morning a knock at the door and people in the yard shouting. He carried Tim’s shotgun downstairs turning on every light he could find on the way, shouting bravely ‘Who’s there?’. Flinging open the door, there was nothing, no one. A disorientated blackbird sang from the lower garden . . .

He turned his head into the pillow and settled into mind-images of an afternoon in Dr Marling’s house in Booth Bay. In his little bedroom he had listened to the bell buoy clanging too and fro out in the sea mist, the steady swish, swash of the tide turning above the mussled beach.

He stood on the beach.
The sun climbed from a clouded horizon.
Incongruously, his phone beckoned:
A vibration in the pocket.

Hello, he said,
How are you?
Not good, she said,
Sad and poor.

She told her tale
While he said,
Yes . . . yes . . .
Yes . . .

She said,
You’re all right,
You have . . .
I know, he said.

You have
An emotional focus,
She said.

Just so, he said.
Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

She sent it to me as a text message, that is an image of a quote in situ, a piece of interpretation in a gallery. Saturday morning and I was driving home from a week in a remote cottage on a mountain. I had stopped to take one last look at the sea, where I usually take one last look, and the phone bleeped. A text message, but no text.  Just a photo of some words. It made me smile, the impossibility of it. Epic poems and tapestry weaving. Of course there are connections, in that for centuries the epic subject has so often been the stuff of the tapestry weaver’s art. I say this glibly, but cannot name a particular tapestry where this might be so. Those vast Arthurian pieces by William Morris to pictures by Burne-Jones have an epic quality both in scale and in subject, but, to my shame, I can’t put a name to one.

These days the tapestry can be epic once more - in size and intention - thanks to the successful, moneyed contemporary artist and those communities of weavers at West Dean and at Edinburgh’s Dovecot. Think of Grayson Perry’s The Walthamstowe Tapestry, a vast 3 x 15 metres executed by Ghentian weavers, a veritable apocalyptic vision where ‘Everyman, spat out at birth in a pool of blood, is doomed and predestined to spend his life navigating a chaotic yet banal landscape of brands and consumerism’.  Gosh! Doesn’t that sound epic!

I was at the Dovecot a little while ago, but the public gallery was closed. The weavers were too busy finishing Victoria Crowe’s Large Tree Group to cope with visitors. You see, I do know a little about this world even though my tapestry weaving is the sum total of three weekends tuition, even though I have a very large loom once owned by Marta Rogoyska. It languishes next door in the room that was going to be where I was to weave, where I was going to become someone other than I am. This is what I feel - just sometimes - when I’m at my floor loom, if only for those brief spells when life languishes sufficiently for me be slow and calm enough to pick up the shuttles and find the right coloured yarns. But I digress. In fact putting together tapestry and epic poetry is a digression from the intention of the quote on the image from that text - (it was from a letter to Janey written in Iceland). Her husband, William Morris, reckoned one could (indeed should) be able to compose an epic poem and weave a tapestry.  

This notion, this idea that such a thing as being actively poetic and throwing a pick or two should go hand in hand, and, in Morris’ words, be a required skill (or ‘he’d better shut up’), seemed (and still does a day later) an absurdity. Would such a man (must be a man I suppose) ‘never do any good at all’ because he can’t weave and compose epic poetry simultaneously?  Clearly so.  But then Morris wove his tapestries very early in the morning - often on a loom in his bedroom. Janey, I imagine, as with ladies of her day - she wasn’t one, being a stableman’s daughter, but she became one reading fluently in French and Italian and playing Beethoven on the piano- she had her own bedroom.

Do you know there are nights when I wish for my own room, even when sleeping with the one I love, as so often I wake in the night, and I lie there afraid (because I love her dearly and care for her precious rest) to disturb her sleep with reading or making notes, both of which I do when I’m alone.
Yet how very seductive is the idea of joining my loved one in her own space, amongst her fallen clothes, her books and treasures, her archives and precious things, those many letters folded into her bedside bookcase, and the little black books full of tender poems and attempts at sketches her admirer has bequeathed her when distant and apart. Equally seductive is the possibility of the knock on the bedroom / workroom door, and there she’ll be there like the woman in Michael Donaghy’s poem, a poem I find every time I search for it in his Collected Works one of the most arousing and ravishing pieces of verse I know: it makes me smile and imagine.  . .  Her personal vanishing point, she said, came when she leant against his study door all warm and wet and whispered 'Paolo’. Only she’ll say something in a barely audible voice like ‘Can I disturb you?’ and with her sparkling smile come in, and bring with her two cats and the hint of a naked breast nestling in the gap of the fold of her yellow Chinese gown she holds close to herself - so when she kneels on my single bed this gown opens and her beauty falls before her, and I am wholly, utterly lost that such loveliness is and can be so . . .

When I see a beautiful house, as I did last Thursday, far in the distance by an estuary-side, sheltering beneath wooded hills, and moor and rock-coloured mountains, with its long veranda, painted white, I imagine. I imagine our imaginary home where, when our many children are not staying in the summer months and work is impossible, we will live our ‘together yet apart’ lives. And there will be the joy of work. I will be like Ben Nicholson in that Italian villa his father-in-law bought, and have my workroom / bedroom facing a stark hillside with nothing but a carpenter’s table to lay out my scores. Whilst she, like Winifred, will work at a tidy table in her bedroom, a vase of spring flowers against the window with the estuary and the mountains beyond. Yes, her bedroom, not his, though their bed, their wonderful wooden 19C Swiss bed of oak, occupies this room and yes, in his room there is just a single affair, but robust, that he would sleep on when lunch had been late and friends had called, or they had been out calling and he wanted to give her the premise of having to go back to work – to be alone - when in fact he was going to sleep and dream, but she? She would work into the warm afternoons with the barest breeze tickling her bare feet, her body moving with the remembrance of his caresses as she woke him that morning from his deep, dark slumber. ‘Your brown eyes’, he would whisper, ‘your dear brown eyes the colour of an autumn leaf damp with dew’. And she would surround him with kisses and touch of her firm, long body and (before she cut her plaits) let her course long hair flow back and forward across his chest. And she did this because she knew he would later need the loneliness of his own space, need to put her aside, whereas she loved the scent of him in the room in which she worked, with his discarded clothes, the neck-tie on the door hanger he only reluctantly wore.

Back to epic poetry and its possibility. Even on its own, as a single, focused activity it seems to me, unadventurous poet that I am, an impossibility. But then, had I lived in the 1860s, it would probably not have seemed so difficult. There was no Radio 4 blathering on, no bleeb of arriving texts on the mobile. There were servants to see to supper, a nanny to keep the children at bay. At Kelmscott there was glorious Gloucestershire silence - only the roll and squeak of the wagon in the road and the rooks roosting. So, in the early mornings Morris could kneel at his vertical loom and, with a Burne-Jones cartoon to follow set behind the warp. With his yarns ready to hand, it would be like a modern child’s painting by numbers, his mind would be free to explore the fairy domain, the Icelandic sagas, the Welsh Mabinogion, the Kalevara from Finland, and write (in his head) an epic poem. These were often elaborations and retellings in his epic verse style of Norse and Icelandic sagas with titles like Sigurd the Volsung. Paul Thompson once said of Morris  ‘his method was to think out a poem in his head while he was busy at some other work.  He would sit at an easel, charcoal or brush in hand, working away at a design while he muttered to himself, 'bumble-beeing' as his family called it; then, when he thought he had got the lines, he would get up from the easel, prowl round the room still muttering, returning occasionally to add a touch to the design; then suddenly he would dash to the table and write out twenty or so lines.  As his pen slowed down, he would be looking around, and in a moment would be at work on another design.  Later, Morris would look at what he had written, and if he did not like it he would put it aside and try again.  But this way of working meant that he never submitted a draft to the painful evaluation which poetry requires’.

Let’s try a little of Sigurd

There was a dwelling of Kings ere the world was waxen old;
Dukes were the door-wards there, and the roofs were thatched with gold;
Earls were the wrights that wrought it, and silver nailed its doors;
Earls' wives were the weaving-women, queens' daughters strewed its floors,

And the masters of its song-craft were the mightiest men that cast
The sails of the storm of battle down the bickering blast.
There dwelt men merry-hearted, and in hope exceeding great
Met the good days and the evil as they went the way of fate:
There the Gods were unforgotten, yea whiles they walked with men,

Though e'en in that world's beginning rose a murmur now and again
Of the midward time and the fading and the last of the latter days,
And the entering in of the terror, and the death of the People's Praise.

Oh dear. And to think he sustained such poetry for another 340 lines, and that’s just book 1 of 4. So what dear reader, dear sender of that text image encouraging me to weave and write, just what would epic poetry be now? Where must one go for inspiration? Somewhere in the realms of sci-fi, something after Star-Wars or Ninja Warriors. It could be post-apocalyptic, a tale of mutants and a world damaged by chemicals or economic melt-down. Maybe a rich adventure of travel on a distant planet (with Sigourney Weaver of course), featuring brave deeds and the selfless heroism of saving companions from deadly encounters with amazing animals, monsters even. Or is ‘epic’ something else, something altogether beyond the Pixar Studios or James Cameron’s imagination? Is the  ‘epic’ now the province of AI boldly generating the computer game in 4D?  

And the epic poem? People once bought and read such published romances as they now buy and engage with on-line games. This is where the epic now belongs. On the tablet, PlayStation3, the X-Box. But, but . . . Poetry is so alive and well as a performance phenomenon, and with that oh so vigorous and relentless beat. Hell, look who won the T.S.Eliot prize this year! Story-telling lives and there are tales to be told, even if they are set in housing estates and not the ice caves of the frozen planet Golp. Just think of children’s literature, so rich and often so wild. This is word invention that revisits unashamedly those myths and sagas Morris loved, but in a different guise, with different names, in worlds that still bring together the incredible geographies of mountains and deserts and wilderness places, with fortresses and walled cities, and the startling, still unknown, yet to be discovered ocean depths.

                                    And so let my tale begin . . . My epic poem.

                                                 THE SEAGASP OF ENNLI.
       A TALE IN VERSE OF EARTHQUAKE, ISLAND FASTNESS, MALEVOLENT SPIRITS,
                                                AND REDEMPTIVE LOVE.

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

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

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

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

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

She said over the ether: ‘I’m eating a perfectly ripe fig. So nice, I’m going to have another’.

We’ve been here before he thought as he read her text. In a memory’s moment he was back at her dining room table with five figs in a small bowl. The table wore a blue cloth, and she a Scandinavian skirt with pockets. It was that time of year when the midday light can be so golden, so wonderful. He remembered her delight that he had ‘brought figs to her table’. He was so full to the brim with love for her on that autumn day that those figs had seemed so very right, more than appropriate; a perfect addition to their developing intimacy. She had not been wooed by figs before. He wasn’t sure she understood their significance, their ****** stance.  She hadn’t read The White Goddess. When pressed to explain he was tempted to tell her exactly what he understood a fig might suggest between lovers, and lovers they certainly were. She had cried out under his touch, had opened her mouth, her beautiful eyes, had cried out like no woman he had even begun to know. She was so extraordinarily passionate as he touched her. She moved with him and their bodies would kiss and stroke as though unbidden, of their own volition, ungovernable even. So when he touched the closest fig in the blue bowl on the lunchtime table it was a little like being touched by her in the greatest intimacy. The skin of the fig has this rub, it feels like the ******* of his passion, that she had so generously touched, had stroked, had known, had brought between the valley of her dear ******* that now, these several years gone and past, he still wondered at, that such a curve and fall and sensation in the hand and fingers could remain so wondrous, so magically beautiful.

He had responded in a text by writing: you sensuous woman . . .  And she in reply had said:  ‘Just pecking’. Does one really peck at figs? Surely not, he thought. She wrote: I meant peckish! Stupid predictive text. And he said: Surely one doesn’t eat figs because one is peckish. That’s what digestive biscuits are for.

And so it went on a little, this conversation over the ether. But all the while he was back in that sunlit room quite alone with her, before he should have been alone with her and feeling such passion, such a passion that its imprint still remained on his consciousness. He wondered if she really understood about this passion of his. It was beyond any possible fig known to man or woman. They were never figgish, only once and she had said it was not for her, and he had understood, and loved her all the more for such frankness in the face of passion. He was still feeling his way, hardly knowing how to deal with such passionate closeness, such desire to be close. How he loved her, he thought this again and again, again and now. He seemed to hold a whole litany of love inside him that he longed to sing out to her.

He was so grateful that she had interrupted those afternoon labours at his desk with her teasing words, and wondered whether she really did eat that second fig.

If I can’t tell you of your beauty,
I can only tell this page I type.

And so I write
of gazing at you
in the summer evening light,
in that room we shared,
a room where you sat
beside a three-panelled window
of small glass panes,
letting in the presence
of a tree-surrounded garden.
And beyond, beyond
a steep rising of moorland.

The room was heavy
with accumulated light,
a light that lay sculpting
the features of your face
and sitting self. It carved
the very fall of your dress
over your thighs. It caressed
your forearms and your hands
to become a texture like stone,
covering the freckles
close to my gaze when we lie
in love’s tenderness.

I cannot tell you of your beauty
without that shrugging off
you make, as with a comforting shawl
that I might place on your shoulders
with paltry words, uncertain speech.

I hold to that sight of you
in the night time listening
to the rain falling
like a benediction forsaken,
a blessing denied.
We are apart you and I.
And so waking, waking
throughout the long damp night,
to differing degrees of darkness
then the light, and to
the car in the road,
the bird on the roof,
I lie still,
holding memory’s picture,
a photograph brought from
the darkroom’s dull red
light into a bright white day,
and marked by the line of
your loveliness stilled into form.

If I can’t tell you of your beauty,
I can only tell this page I type.

Yesterday I walked to the end of Filey Brigg
The sea was brown to landward blue to seaward
The tide was coming in as I reached the end
The two seas sloshed at each other across the limestone slabs
 
Yesterday I walked on a long curving stretch of beach
The sand was almost dry under my walking boots
The tide had left a golden arc for kite-running children
The sea was a patchwork of shadows flecked white in the wind
 
Yesterday I sat in the sun and briefly sketched
The sky was a vast armada of clouds sailing the troposphere
The sun primed their canvas sails every shade of white
The wind rose and fell in waves of moor-scented air    
 
Yesterday I brought my lover here through time and space
The woldland was every green in Hockney's paint box
The trees stood in distant lines still waiting for their leaves
The breeze ruffled her delicate hair kissed her freckled cheek

This morning is quite thoroughly golden. The light against the avenue of trees I pass day in day out has flattened any perspective of leaf and branch. Each tree stands like a cut-out from a magazine. The still rising sun is low in the sky and shadows are only slowly retracting, slowly firming up. It’s the first school day in the city and there’s a change of tone in sound from the streets. It’s as though that gentle getting up time since late July has become a must be getting up time. All those electric kettles turned on at seven rather than nine must add something to this settling cloud of noise. On my desk a photo: my once little children outside the home front door have posed for the annual start of the school year snapshot; my youngest in a summer dress, long hair brushed, standing tall with a bright smile; the boys bright-eyed, impatient to be off. That first day when all of them walked together through the park, under the lime trees, carefully across the busy main road, under the railway bridge, down to the end of the cul de sac and their school. The saying goodbyes, the hug in the playground, then away into the school day they run. And now I walk back a longer way around, into the park, but a circuit past the tennis courts, to the lake with its still fledgling geese, up the steep hill to the college by the golf course, to the little wood at the top from where one inevitably stops to take breath, and if you stand on this bench can see two miles away the traffic’s relentless movement on the motorway and a horizon of distant hills. The sky is summer blue and the leaves still a vivid green, but there is a presage of autumn in the air. With it comes the possibility of alone-time, time to think and plan and do what’s been curtailed - for what seemed an eternity of keeping busy: to make each day a holiday, a time to grow and rest, a time to rest and grow.

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

I

Walking à trois on Crosby Sands
He left us talking two to the dozen
and went for paddle
in Wellington boots.
The tide was coming in,
and before we could say,
‘hey, you’ll get wet’,
he’d removed all his clothes
(and the Wellington boots)
and stood buff naked
in the incoming sea.

The water swirled about his legs
caressed the hairs, the golden hairs
that still stood on his still trim calves,
his freckled thighs, and all the way up
to his bottom.

I felt I knew his bottom well,
and well enough to have placed
my hand between its cheeks.
But for Gloria . . .
If she was embarrassed
I’d never have known.
I suppose she’s seen rather
more male bottoms than me.

‘He’s just larking’,
she said, and laughed.
But as the tide came in
he was too far out . . .
to be larking.


II

A Water Polo team
5 Aside
winter training
in the autumn cold
good for the muscle tone

Malcolm threw the ball too far
it’s just a dot in the distance now
floating out to the shipping lane
past the windmills down the Welsh coast
next stop the Irish Sea


III

Oh the seductive tide
rolling across the shallow beach
hiding the creased and puckered sand.

Shadows and reflective light
flowed about him,
a mesmeric display of lateral forms,

as his reflection shimmered black
on the grey, brown, grey-white water.
He’d shaved his head

as if in benediction for the sea’s coming kiss
that would surely embrace him, take him
naked into its cold, cold clasp.


IV

Sketchbook in hand
she willed this standing ****
back into her imagination.

So long ago now
on that distant shore
in the opposite hemisphere,
by a blue blue sea,
And so very aroused
by the thought of that stony
wet nakedness beside her,
let her hand tremble
on the ****** page

as she saw his fingers
stretch out and touch
the incoming tide.

V

I watched him
time and again, time and forever,
too far out for me to touch.

His bold shoulders,
his well-muscled back,
from dawn to dusk
he was ever before me,

letting the water lap and kiss,
fold and flow between his legs;
up, up then over his hips:
to cover his spine, to stroke his neck.

I had to imagine his face of course,
being turned away from my outward gaze.
So I sent him my eyes, my ears,
my nose, my mouth and then
a cry from my heart:
‘I love you so, I love you so.’

Four Poems on the Tapestry Art of Jilly Edwards*

Yellow is the New Blue

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


Follow the Path to the Heart

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

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

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

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


Woolly Pictures and Plastic Boxes

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

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

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


Ma

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

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

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

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

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

Invocation

this call to peace
does not use words we know
it is beyond language

we launch it
into the thin air of hope
where no echo lives

this invocation issues from our lips
our hands our movements
it is wholly transactional
this call to peace


Conflict and Resolution

it starts with uncertainty
continues with doubt
Can black be white
is day night?
We can make it so
and so it is
we say we write until
it becomes our faith
our truth our right

and so resolved
that black is white
and day is night
we soon forget
that others might
see it
differently

so to live in some accord
we have to temper
our resolve
(that day is night
that black is white)
and live within a twilight zone
a chiaroscuro world.


The Instrument of Peace

plucked from silence
the note of the guitar
resonates round its body
brought so close to the heart

held as a lover in our arms
the hands make harmony
sound out chords
for the singer’s song

Oh instrument of peace
hanging on the wall
of our simple home
play for us now


The Peaceful Mind**

a template of fingers
intersect each sounding string
and with every change of shape
fresh possibility ensues

those re-entrant tones held above
the resonance of open strings below
set up rich suspensions
peculiar with dissonance

gently struck arpeggios
revolve in patterned repetition
this loom-made garment of sound
to clothe the peaceful mind

To Antonia

Different things:
a book read,
this flower picked,
one kiss taken.

And things that delight:
in the library,
amidst a garden,
caught in love’s embrace.

And *my delight:
to keep control
and hold a sense
of rightness ruling
every action,
every thought,
every instance
met or made.

Let me look at all I see
that comes my way,
and with my eyes
make welcome;
no discrimination,
no diversion left
(or right) to comfort’s zone.

May all I touch, acquire, retain,
be honoured, rightly valued,
rightly owned, and used
well, and again.

1
 
Grey sky greyer sea
a litter of rocks balance
coat bright hat blue mittens striped
as on these November steps
you collect the gifts of the ebb tide
 
2
Glint green this living tapestry echoes
Jilly’s field with tractor not Devon
but salt-flats rocky revetments moorland rising
a map crossed by a chiromatic line
our destiny marked out on this concrete wall?
 
3
Beached clinkered double-ender
a bay-courser sjekte strand-crunched
fit once for Viking raiders two abreast
now daubed with tin ends of patriotic paint
a sea-steed hobbled ******* the shore
 
4
Bow faced a sea helmet thrice rope strapped
slow moulded over the boat builder’s ribbanded jig
a spanglehelm of wood
curved sheer straked plank bilged a tuck stern
raising its proud head seaward
 
5
Viewed from the air a map rolls out
north to the tilted curve of the horizon’s rim
cloud scattered mountained red
betwixt seas sun chalked wine-stained a volcanic isthmus
provokes desert the western waste land of  a brooding city
 
6
Oh face of ropes knot eyed!
you blue cheeked wide smiler
wild wild your  head of hair
beachcombed and splayed
wrapped on the sternest post
 
7
She sewed sugar kelp on the sea shore
a sporophyte with sheltered frond​
strap-like stem stiff and smooth
of the species saccharina a spring-tide
stalk set among substrates shells and stones
 
8
I the camera turned and caressed
by her slight fingers (the pinky raised)
my viewfinder close to her blue grey eye / I
focus on this kelp-needled novelty feel her breath
wait for the thumb press the electronic click
 
9
Here is the beach walked in darkness
the fishermen shadows against the moonstruck ebb
fingers laced the sea’s breath in our ears
wave upon wave un-folding on the sand and  later
we unfold then draw back in love’s relentlessness

'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.

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

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

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

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

He had read to her in bed.

Ted Hughes and Dylan Thomas.

With the lights out he turned
to find her for once facing him,
curled into herself, her knees
drawn up to meet his embrace.  

It was so dark.

He said
          I haven’t made a poem for a while.
She reminded him that he had, several.

But not one that says I love you.
I do love you, he said.

And I you, she said,
kissing him
sweetly on the lips.

Goodnight.

He suddenly felt a sadness that only a letter might lighten. Thoughts of her he carried variously in and from the spaces and places this hot day had taken him. The morning had been warmer than in previous days, and even at 6.0am there was a heaviness present carrying a threat of thunder and rain.

He knew she was not at her best in the leaden heat of this hemisphere, whilst enjoying the dry, brittle heat of Africa and beyond. He remembered a hot train journey and a busy day moving boxes into a studio space. They were fond memories because in such heat she took on a delicacy about her. He would perceive her features and movement to be finely drawn, and that perception revealed her profound beauty. Such recollections were foundations in his love for her.

Today he had decided to avoid that daily confrontation with the project that lay invisibly on his desk, locked up in his computer, though unsorted sheets of graph paper, populated with planning, were evident on his drawing board. This project was a ‘book’ of studies for an ensemble in Chicago whose performances were marked by such energy and virtuosity; the music was growing steadily, but he felt suspicious that it had been contrived. He hoped his precise positioning of pitch and rhythm would have brought forth a surface colouring and texture. It had not. He would often imagine symbols and words he could not yet define lying on a transparent sheet over the rather bland matter-of-fact notation of his scores. He had known only occasional moments of such graphic invention, and when they appear ‘right’, they enlivened and enhanced his work.

He had put aside today as a listening day, an opportunity to listen carefully to a group of new compositions presented in a series of broadcast concerts and available to re-audition over the Internet. Didn’t Van Gogh write to his brother about the need to rest during a period of intense creativity and spend a day copying another’s work? This was an equivalent to his ‘active listening’, listening with a pencil and paper, taking a shorthand of the music’s action and journey.

The first piece on his listening list was a four-minute composition for chorus and orchestra. He had been intrigued that the composer had set words by Richard Jeffries, a 19C author who had written children’s adventures about a parochial natural world and had become admired by today’s new nature writers. It was said Jeffries had instigated Henry Williamson’s closely observed prose. He had set about finding the words – hardly discernable in the rich sonic accumulation of voices and instruments in the broadcast performance. Eventually, thanks to a brief comment by the composer in his introduction and a line that leapt with clarity from the music (the butterfly floats in the light-laden air), found a passage in a book called A Study of My Heart.

Recognising my own inner consciousness, the psyche, so clearly, I cannot understand time. It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine; I am in it, as the butterfly floats in the light-laden air. Nothing has to come; it is now. Now is eternity; now is the immortal life. Here this moment, by this tumulus, on earth, now; I exist in it. The years, the centuries, the cycles are absolutely nothing; it is only a moment since this tumulus was raised; in a thousand years it will still be only a moment. To the soul there is no past and no future; all is and will be ever, in now. For artificial purposes time is mutually agreed on, but is really no such thing. The shadow goes on upon the dial, the index moves round upon the clock, and what is the difference? None whatever. If the clock had never been set going, what would have been the difference? There may be time for the clock, the clock may make time for itself; there is none for me. . . . There is no separation-no past; eternity, the Now, is continuous. When all the stars have revolved they only produce Now again. The continuity of Now is for ever. So that it appears to me purely natural, and not super natural, that the soul whose temporary frame was interred in this mound should be existing as I sit on the sward. How infinitely deeper is thought than the million miles of the firmament!

The text chosen by the composer did not appear to follow the author’s words only weave a way in and around the paragraph, pulling out key words and phrases, creating a poem from the images. He could imagine doing this himself, making a poem of the text.

This business of time, and how it was to this author,  ‘all about me in the sunshine’, was the same for him. As he read it, he would think of the warm early morning light on the stone façade of the building across the road. He could turn away from his desk and see a quality of glowness that all but stopped his own thoughts of time. This quality of and in things that nature could bestow, even to the inanimate, held a wonder all its own.

And so he had listened several times to this bright, newly fashioned work, enjoying the sustained and acoustic beating of more than eighty voices (he thought) singing in close clusters. And with and against those clusters, were flurries and cascades of high woodwind, as though such figures were birds flocking into the sun on a summer’s sky. This music seemed to be about immanence, existing in the everything of itself, but unlike Jeffries’ reverie music was governed by time, and when finished, with an inconclusiveness that surprised him, would rarely, he felt, ever be performed again.

1

At Lunch

West Midlands Wendy
dining out, alone
at St Peter’s on
their Saturday special
of salad and quiche.
Just a few hours
from the hotel weekend
(with a show), and you have to go
in half an hour’s time.
Page-boy cut
your hair once fair now grey,
you're slim, but slight
though pleasantly breasted,
pigeon-feet on the upper lip,
a thick gold band on those
careful hands steering knife and fork
to clean the plate of coleslaw.
Then, with darting eyes,
a few experimental words,
you’re gone. Oh, Wendy.
Such a solitary soul;
your shy smile haunts me still.

2

A Montepelier Moment

After tea at Betty’s
this woman of my heart,
fresh from a talk
to embroidery ladies,
and now replete
on jasmine tea
and a chocolate bombe,
braves the shop
with clothes of her dreams
hanging on rails  - a SALE no less.
Her eyes alight with possibility:
‘. . . there might be something.’

There is . . .

Gingerly from the curtained cubicle
this grey frock appears
wearing her beauty. Exactly.
Before the full-length mirror
we saw this slight miracle of linen,
scooped neck, gathered waist,
storm grey (with those necessary pockets
for phone and hanky). Perfect.
Just as she was then, as she is now;
this woman of my heart.


3

Before a Watercolour by Arthur Rackham

As individual as trees . . .
Perhaps we are
anthropomorphic -
as in Rackham’s painting
here on the gallery wall
two stand, proud and tall
against a fair-weather sky,
lately autumned in a
London park.
Leaves present,
but on the fall.

Mother and school-child,
he capped, she cloched, they
hurry below these trees
as others, be-pramed, dog-led,
unlingering, cross and pass
homeward; to spear a crumpet
or two ‘next an open fire,
a time before television’s
constant noise and flicker
took away the tick
from the parlour clock.


4

Before a Portrait of Suki by Tom Wood

There you were
as I remember
short red hair,
the forward-falling mop
over brow, not gaunt
like that unclothed self,
but rich in line of living
for the next word,
the better phrase,
an almost sentence
nearly right, a stanza
just just so, but . . .
without nakedness
(her daily dress)
this model shows
an arresting face,
deep eyes,
bold cheeks,
firm mouth.
A portrait stilled into life.

Alone at my desk all day
but for voices on the phone
and the persistent one-sided conversation
with myself, I miss that easy intimacy
we have when, as darkness falls and
afternoon welcomes evening,
you call and say 'I'm making tea'.
 
Being but a short cycle-ride away
I leave my work just as it is,
though not before measuring my progress
in thought and deed with one last look
and that delicious standing back from it all.
 
In the kitchen you are pouring tea.
As I pass through to remove my coat.
I rub your back, a gentle greeting
(a single up and down
with right hand fingers brought together).
Then, holding your dear body briefly to me,
we kiss.
 
Our conversation smiles
and I delight to watch your face
and hear the to and fro of your regional voice.
I delight in such accustomed intimacy
so many years of tea together
in late afternoons has forged.
 
As different as the yin and yang
there is a chemistry
that acts upon us both;
I think we pass the litmus test of love.
Do you love me? Do I love you?
You - the friend I turn to first;
You - a companion true in this life of shadows.
 
Once we would stand together at a mirror,
stand with smiling pleasure
and see the 'fit', a very noticeable joy;
the two of us a corporate one.
You in my arms: I in yours;
A mutual hug caught in our reflection.
And the wonder that this should be as it is.

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.

Hello you poets
Gentle readers
Friends on the web
And from (mostly)
Across the pond
Yes POND.
My poem Pond.
Is it really that poor
This pond poem
That only 29 readers have
Read it so far?
That nobody likes it
That I can cope with
Though I felt
I’d caught something
Both special and good
even (perhaps) worthy
Of a little more attention
Than it got.
Obviously not!

for Jennie in gratitude*

For days afterwards he was preoccupied by what he’d collected into himself from the gallery viewing. He could say it was just painting, but there was a variety of media present in the many surrounding images and artefacts. Certainly there were all kinds of objects: found and gathered, captured and brought into a frame, some filling transparent boxes on a window ledge or simply hung frameless on the wall; sand, fixed foam, paper sea-water stained, a beaten sheet of aluminium; a significant stone standing on a mantelpiece, strange warped pieces of metal with no clue to what they were or had been, a sketchbook with brooding pencilled drawings made fast and thick, filling the page, colour like an echo, and yes, paintings.
 
Three paintings had surprised him; they did not seem to fit until (and this was sometime later) their form and content, their working, had very gradually begun to make a sort of sense.  Possible interpretations – though tenuous – surreptitiously intervened. There were words scrawled across each canvas summoning the viewer into emotional space, a space where suggestions of marks and colour floated on a white surface. These scrawled words were like writing in seaside sand with a finger: the following bird and hiraeth. He couldn’t remember the third exactly. He had a feeling about it – a date or description. But he had forgotten. And this following bird? One of Coleridge’s birds of the Ancient Mariner perhaps? Hiraeth he knew was a difficult Welsh word similar to saudade. It meant variously longing, sometimes passionate (was longing ever not passionate?), a home-sickness, the physical pain of nostalgia. It was said that a well-loved location in conjunction with a point in time could cause such feelings. This small exhibition seemed full of longing, full of something beyond the place and the time and the variousness of colour and texture, of elements captured, collected and represented. And as the distance in time and memory from his experience of the show in a small provincial gallery increased, so did his own thoughts of and about the nature of longing become more acute.
 
He knew he was fortunate to have had the special experience of being alone with ‘the work’ just prior to the gallery opening. His partner was also showing and he had accompanied her as a friendly presence, someone to talk to when the throng of viewers might deplete. But he knew he was surplus to requirements as she’d also brought along a girlfriend making a short film on this emerging, soon to be successful artist. So he’d wandered into the adjoining spaces and without expectation had come upon this very different show: just the title Four Tides to guide him in and around the small white space in which the art work had been distributed. Even the striking miniature catalogue, solely photographs, no text, did little to betray the hand and eye that had brought together what was being shown. Beyond the artist’s name there were only faint traces – a phone number and an email address, no voluminous self-congratulatory CV, no list of previous exhibitions, awards or academic provenance. A light blue bicycle figured in some of her catalogue photographs and on her contact card. One photo in particular had caught the artist very distant, cycling along the curve of a beach. It was this photo that helped him to identify the location – because for twenty years he had passed across this meeting of land and water on a railway journey. This place she had chosen for the coming and going of four tides he had viewed from a train window. The aspect down the estuary guarded by mountains had been a highpoint of a six-hour journey he had once taken several times a year, occasionally and gratefully with his children for whom crossing the long, low wooden bridge across the estuary remained into their teens an adventure, always something telling.
 
He found himself wishing this work into a studio setting, the artist’s studio. It seemed too stark placed on white walls, above the stripped pine floor and the punctuation of reflective glass of two windows facing onto a wet street. Yes, a studio would be good because the pictures, the paintings, the assemblages might relate to what daily surrounded the artist and thus describe her. He had thought at first he was looking at the work of a young woman, perhaps mid-thirties at most. The self-curation was not wholly assured: it held a temporary nature. It was as if she hadn’t finished with the subject and or done with its experience. It was either on-going and promised more, or represented a stage she would put aside (but with love and affection) on her journey as an artist. She wouldn’t milk it for more than it was. And it was full of longing.
 
There was a heaviness, a weight, an inconclusiveness, an echo of reverence about what had been brought together ‘to show’. Had he thought about these aspects more closely, he would not have been so surprised to discovered the artist was closer to his own age, in her fifties. She in turn had been surprised by his attention, by his carefully written comment in her guest book. She seemed pleased to talk intimately and openly, to tell her story of the work. She didn’t need to do this because it was there in the room to be read. It was apparent; it was not oblique or difficult, but caught the viewer in a questioning loop. Was this estuary location somehow at the core of her longing-centred self?  She had admitted that, working in her home or studio, she would find herself facing westward and into the distance both in place and time?
 
On the following day he made time to write, to look through this artist’s window on a creative engagement with a place he was familiar. The experience of viewing her work had affected him. He was not sure yet whether it was the representation of the place or the artist’s engagement with it. In writing about it he might find out. It seemed so deeply personal. It was perhaps better not to know but to imagine. So he imagined her making the journey, possibly by train, finding a place to stay the night – a cheerful B & B - and cycling early in the morning across the long bridge to her previously chosen spot on the estuary: to catch the first of the tides. He already understood from his own experience how an artist can enter trance-like into an environment, absorb its particularness, respond to the uncertainty of its weather, feel surrounded by its elements and textures, and most of all be governed by the continuous and ever-complex play of light.
 
He knew all about longing for a place. For nearly twenty years a similar longing had grown and all but consumed him: his cottage on a mountain overlooking the sea. It had become a place where he had regularly faced up to his created and invented thoughts, his soon-to-be-music and more recently possible poetry and prose. He had done so in silence and solitude.
 
But now he was experiencing a different longing, a longing born from an intensity of love for a young woman, an intensity that circled him about. Her physical self had become a rich landscape to explore and celebrate in gaze, and stroke and caress. It seemed extraordinary that a single person could hold to herself such a habitat of wonder, a rich geography of desire to know and understand. For so many years his longing was bound to the memory of walking cliff paths and empty beaches, the hypnotic viewing of seascaped horizons and the persistent chaos of the sea and wild weather. But gradually this longing for a coming together of land, sea and sky had migrated to settle on a woman who graced his daily, hourly thoughts; who was able to touch and caress him as rain and wind and sun can act upon the body in ever-changing ways. So when he was apart from her it was with such a longing that he found himself weighed down, filled brimfull.
 
In writing, in attempting to consider longing as a something the creative spirit might address, he felt profoundly grateful to the artist on the light blue bicycle whose her observations and invention had kept open a door he felt was closing on him. She had faced her own longing by bringing it into form, and through form into colour and texture, and then into a very particular play: an arrangement of objects and images for the mind to engage with – or not. He dared to feel an affinity with this artist because, like his own work, it did not seem wholly confident. It contained flaws of a most subtle kind, flaws that lent it a conviction and strength that he warmed to. It had not been massaged into correctness. The images and the textures, the directness of it, flowed through him back and forward just like the tides she had come far to observe on just a single day. He remembered then, when looking closely at the unprotected pieces on the walls, how his hand had moved to just touch its surfaces in exactly the way he would bring his fingers close to the body of the woman he loved so much, adored beyond any poetry, and longed for with all his heart and mind.

I wake and the light of this fine day edges round the curtain.
The birds have chorused and my left foot lies cold outside the sheets.
Standing in my nightgown I draw the curtains and look out at my garden.

Let me pad downstairs, open the front door and walk brief steps
to the arbour of ferns and shells. From a cane chair
I shall view my private corner with its tiny pool and privet hedge:

whilst there is still a little dew; whilst the cobwebs still glisten;
whilst there is no wind, just a grumble of the surf at Porth Neigwl,
the sound my father makes dozing over his paper.

Miniature, enclosed, protected I will place my thoughts
in this dolls’ house garden, amongst the dank, dark shadows
of its many rooms, its parterred spaces.

You don’t walk in this garden; you take a step . . .
and you are elsewhere. Take three steps and you are quite lost.

I hear the kitchen door bang in the manor house,
Meriel is taking breakfast to my sisters.
I think I shall stay here a moment longer.

I
 
You surprised me.
I was expecting the train
to appear on a different platform
(there were only two),
but there you were
walking towards me
and I was still drawing the view.
 
You were so full
of delight at ‘being here’.
And I had myriad thoughts
gathered like the flowers
I’d picked in welcome
that suddenly seemed so sad
as I placed them in your hands,
already wilting, already
past their best.
 
How stupid to think
such a gesture
could mean anything
true. I love you, I’d said.
But you were already
thinking of the orchids
you’d seen over the station fence
and the photograph
you had to take.
 
II
 
Fields of blown grass
too wet to haymake
now too tall
too thick to cut
full of foreigners
tares Biblical
a morning’s work of
investigation with a
reference book: grasses.
Such tones tints and textures
such plenitudes of stalk
directions nodding
swaying a circular motion
a field of movement
against the hills
against the sky

III
 
Evening: still light
Door open: soft breeze
Beethoven on the radio:
A heroic symphony.
Indomitable.
You are kneading dough,
I am reading by the door.
Both restless, both unable
To surrender to the day.
 
IV
 
You sit in front of me
exactly where you sat
last year (but in the spring)
when there was a different light
and the colours of the garden
were gathering their brightness
for summer.
 
I have a photo of that time:
your quiet gaze (of love I like to think).
 
Today we hold each other’s gaze
as in its morning’s air
a river little distant
claims sounds’ space
enclosing us
 
in its embrace.
  
V
 
This garden
touches me
like no other.
 
It haunts
my dreams
with its
still rich
forms and colours.
 
Sun light is
playing patterns
on the dewed grass.
The nearby river,
the echoing birds,
the braying cattle,
my slight breath,
this pen’s touch,
such wonders
of stillness.
 
VI
 
You are my dearest, my love,
my companion of the hearth,
the woman who guards my keys,
the girl who holds my hand,
the artist who with delight
entrances me in what she reveals
of a world within a world.
I am so in love with her.
 
But I am full of sadness,
full of dread that this loving
amour will fade and end.
 
Already on the cusp of summer
and I sense autumn in the air -
when leaves will fail and float and fall.
 
VII
 
As I left you
I broke a long-held rule
and turned to look back,
and through
the windowed door,
saw you rise
from the table and walk
with such grace
and confidence
across the room
and out of sight.

for David on his birthday*

Above the noise and rush
of water in the gorge
this still pool
holds an expectation
of its river’s descent
down limestone-speckled
stone down-tumbling
to fill dark narrow space
with a commentary of turbulence

. . . and all the while
the arc of September’s sun
spotlights fern and stone
green grey pale-power white
water a mineral-brown
reflections everywhere:
our hard shadows sharp
against the sedimentary rock
skeletal fragments of life
from an oceanic past

The courtesan and poet Zuo Fen had two cats Xe Ming and Xi Ming. Living in her distant court with only her maid Hu Yin, her cats were often her closest companions and, like herself, of a crepuscular nature.
      It was the very depths of winter and the first moon of the Solstice had risen. The old year had nearly passed.
      The day itself was almost over. Most of the inner courts retired before the new day began (at about 11.0pm), but not Zuo Fen. She summoned her maid to dress her in her winter furs, gathered her cats on a long chain leash, and walked out into the Haulin Gardens.
      These large and semi-wild gardens were adjacent to the walls of her personal court. The father of the present Emperor had created there a forest once stocked with game, a lake to the brim with carp and rich in waterfowl, and a series of tall structures surrounded by a moat from which astronomers were able to observe the firmament.
      Emperor Wu liked to think of Zuo Fen walking at night in his father’s park, though he rarely saw her there. He knew that she valued that time alone to prepare herself for his visits, visits that rarely occurred until the Tiger hours between 3.0am and 6.0am when his goat-drawn carriage would find its way to her court unbidden. She herself would welcome him with steaming chai and sometimes a new rhapsody. They would recline on her bed and discuss the content and significance of certain writings they knew and loved. Discussion sometimes became an elaborate game when a favoured Classical text would be taken as the starting point for an exchange of quotation. Gradually quotation would be displaced by subtle invention and Zuo Fen would find the Emperor manoeuvring her into making declarations of a passionate or ****** nature.
       It seemed her very voice captivated him and despite herself and her inclinations they would join as lovers with an intensity of purpose, a great tenderness, and deep joy. He would rest his head inside her cloak and allow her lips to caress his ears with tales of river and mountain, descriptions of the flights of birds and the opening of flowers. He spoke to her ******* of the rising moon, its myriad reflections on the waters of Ling Lake, and of its trees whose winter branches caressed the cold surface.

Whilst Zuo Fen walked in the midnight park with her cats she reflected on an afternoon of frustration. She had attempted to assemble a new poem for her Lord.  Despite being himself an accomplished poet and having an extraordinary memory for Classical verse, the Emperor retained a penchant for stories about Mei-Lim, a young Suchan girl dragged from her family to serve as a courtesan at his court.
      Zuo Fen had invented this girl to articulate some of her own expressions of homesickness, despair, periods of constant tearfulness, and abject loneliness. Such things seemed to touch something in the Emperor. It was as though he enjoyed wallowing in these descriptions and his favourite A Rhapsody on Being far from Home he loved to hear from the poet’s own lips, again and again. Zuo Fen felt she was tempting providence not to compose something new, before being ordered to do so.
      As she struggled through the afternoon to inject some fresh and meaningful content into a story already milked dry Zuo Fen became aware of her cats. Xi Ming lay languorously across her folded feet. Xe Ming perched like an immutable porcelain figure on a stool beside her low writing table.
Zuo Fen often consulted her cats. ‘Xi Ming, will my Lord like this stanza?’

“The stones that ring out from your pony’s hooves
announce your path through the cloud forest”

She would always wait patiently for Xi Ming’s reply, playing a game with her imagination to extract an answer from the cinnamon scented air of her winter chamber.
      ‘He will think his pony’s hooves will flash with sparks kindling the fire of his passion as he prepares to meet his beloved’.
      ‘Oh such a wise cat, Xi Ming’, and she would press his warm body further into her lap. But today, as she imagined this dialogue, a second voice appeared in her thoughts.
      ‘Gracious Lady, your Xe Ming knows his under-standing is poor, his education weak, but surely this image, taken as it is from the poet Lu Ji, suggests how unlikely it would be for the spark of love and passion to take hold without nurture and care, impossible on a hard journey’.
       This was unprecedented. What had brought such a response from her imagination? And before she could elicit an answer it was as though Xe Ming spoke with these words of Confucius.

“Do not be concerned about others not appreciating you, be concerned about you not appreciating others”

Being the very sensible woman she was, Zuo Fen dismissed such admonition (from a cat) and called for tea.

Later as she walked her beauties by the frozen lake, the golden carp nosing around just beneath the ice, she recalled the moment and wondered. A thought came to her  . . .
       She would petition Xe Ming’s help to write a new rhapsody, perhaps titled Rhapsody on the Thought of Separation.

Both Zuo Fen’s cats came from her parental home in Lingzhi. They were large, big-***** mountain cats; strong animals with bear-like paws, short whiskered and big eared. Their coats were a glassy grey, the hairs tipped with a sprinkling of white giving the fur an impression of being wet with dew or caught by a brief shower.
       When she thought of her esteemed father, the Imperial Archivist, there was always a cat somewhere; in his study at home, in the official archives where he worked. There was always a cat close at hand, listening?
       What texts did her father know by heart that she did not know? What about the Lu Yu – the Confucian text book of advice and etiquette for court officials. She had never bothered to learn it, even read it seemed unnecessary, but through her brother Zuo Si she knew something of its contents and purpose.

Confucius was once asked what were the qualifications of public office. ‘Revere the five forms of goodness and abandon the four vices and you can qualify for public office’.
       For the life of her Zuo Fen could not remember these five forms of goodness (although she could make a stab at guessing them). As for those vices? No, she was without an idea. If she had ever known, their detail had totally passed from her memory.
       Settled once again in her chamber she called Hu Yin and asked her to remove Xi Ming for the night. She had three hours or so before the Emperor might appear. There was time.
        Xe Ming was by nature a distant cat, aloof, never seeking affection. He would look the other way if regarded, pace to the corner of a room if spoken to. In summer he would hide himself in the deep undergrowth of Zuo Fen’s garden.
       Tonight Zuo Fen picked him up and placed him on her left shoulder. She walked around her room stroking him gently with her small strong fingers, so different from the manicured talons of her colleagues in the Purple Palace. Embroidery, of which she was an accomplished exponent, was impossible with long nails.
       From her scroll cupboard she selected her brother’s annotated copy of the Lun Yu, placing it unrolled on her desk. It would be those questions from the disciple Tzu Chang, she thought, so the final chapters perhaps. She sat down carefully on the thick fleece and Mongolian rug in front of her desk letting Xe Ming spill over her arms into a space beside her.
       This was strange indeed. As she sat beside Xe Ming in the light of the butter lamps holding his flickering gaze it was as though a veil began to lift between them.
       ‘At last you understand’, a voice appeared to whisper,’ after all this time you have realised . . .’
      Zuo Fen lost track of time. The cat was completely motionless. She could hear Hu Yin snoring lightly next door, no doubt glad to have Xi Ming beside her on her mat.
      ‘Xe Ming’, she said softly, ‘today I heard you quote from Confucius’.
      The cat remained inscrutable, completely still.
      ‘I think you may be able to help me write a new poem for my Lord. Heaven knows I need something or he will tire of me and this court will cease to enjoy his favour’.
      ‘Xe Ming, I have to test you. I think you can ‘speak’ to me, but I need to learn to talk to you’.
      ‘Tzu Chang once asked Confucius what were the qualifications needed for public office? Confucius said, I believe, that there were five forms of goodness to revere, and four vices to abandon’.
       ‘Can you tell me what they are?’
      Xe Ming turned his back on Zuo Fen and stepped gently away from the table and into a dark and distant corner of the chamber.
      ‘The gentle man is generous but not extravagant, works without complaint, has desires without being greedy, is at peace, but not arrogant, and commands respect but not fear’.
      Zuo Fen felt her breathing come short and fast. This voice inside her; richly-texture, male, so close it could be from a lover at the epicentre of a passionate entanglement; it caressed her.
      She heard herself say aloud, ‘and the four vices’.
      ‘To cause a death or imprisonment without teaching can be called cruelty; to judge results without prerequisites can be called tyranny; to impose deadlines on improper orders can be thievery; and when giving in the procedure of receipt and disbursement, to stint can be called officious’.
       Xe Ming then appeared out of the darkness and came and sat in the folds of her night cloak, between her legs. She stroked his glistening fur.
       Zuo Fen didn’t need to consult the Lu Yu on her desk. She knew this was unnecessary. She got to her feet and stepped through the curtains into an antechamber to relieve herself.
       When she returned Xe Ming had assumed his porcelain figure pose. So she gathered a fresh scroll, her writing brushes, her inks, her wax stamps, and wrote:

‘I was born in a humble, isolated, thatched house,
and was never well versed in writing.
I never saw the marvellous pictures of books,
nor had I heard of the classics of earlier sages.
I am dimwitted, humble and ignorant . . ‘

As she stopped to consider the next chain of characters she saw in her mind’s eye the Purple Palace, the palace of the concubines of the Emperor. Sitting next to the Purple Chamber there was a large grey cat, its fur sprinkled with tiny flecks of white looking as though the animal had been caught in a shower of rain.
       Zuo Fen turned from her script to see where Xe Ming had got to, but he had gone. She knew however that he would always be there. Wherever her imagination took her, she could seek out this cat and the words would flow.

Before returning to her new text Zuo Fen thought she might remind herself of Liu Xie’s words on the form of the Rhapsody. If Emperor Wu appeared later she would quote it (to his astonishment) from The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons.

*The rhapsody derives from poetry,
A fork in the road, a different line of development;
It describes objects, pictures and their appearance,
With a brilliance akin to sculpture and painting.
What is clogged and confined it invariably opens up;
It depicts the commonplace with unbounded charm;
But the goal of the form is of beauty well ordered,
Words retained for their loveliness when weeds have been cut away.

one single sound
one chosen image
one  memory forever
one infinite tenderness
one kindness to cherish
one taste to remember
one unforgettable touch
one necessary word*
 
your sleeping breath
the porcelain cobweb
lunch at the Garden Museum
your gentle hand
that kiss to quell tears
the salad from your garden
fingers brushing against my arm
thank-you

On the radio
Bach celebrating
the Epiphany of Our Lord
(such grace and purpose
my music is yet to know),
I hear your sad voice
on the telephone
with the ‘blues so bad’,
friendless and alone.
I am ashamed; that for me
there should remain so many questions
yet to answer, and that this loneliness
you feel I rarely know,
so caught up in life am I.

For so long
I’ve had your photo framed.
Though black and white
I always see the colours:
the brown lustre of your careful hair,
your eyes of almost jade-like green,
the Guernsey red of your sweater
and that particular check of the shirt
I once unbuttoned all the way
to place my hands against your *******
that imperceptibly rose to kiss my fingers,
and when uncovered touched each palm
as if a benediction on this love we own.

Please know you are my dearest friend;
that you may reach out your hand to me
and I will grasp it with love and care
and much affection, passionate still
despite and even though
I am at sea myself
and drowning slowly
in my shame,
frightened by despair
that it should be so.

I know what it was before
it became what it is
I’m at a disadvantage perhaps
and must forget its ****** state
its absolute condition of whiteness
the purity of snow untrodden
unmarked except for the lines
woven in warp and weft

I don’t know how to look at this piece
if I had it in my hands I’d turn it about
this way that way upside down
even to lie on its diagonals perhaps
otherwise it appears like newsprint
smudged but I think for me its best
on its side so there are columns
not stories floors horizontal separators

There - now it has something of that
Annie Albers City Skyline
a tapestry seen together
on a January day you
blue-skirted with winter boots
grey-cloaked with stripy tights
a sketching bag on the shoulder
a camera in hand and I entranced
by every move you made

As though seeking an image
in a cloudscape I view a quintet
of panels on a painted screen
a Chinese landscape Han dynasty
stark trees slow fields low hills
rising to a darkening horizon then
a river flows a valley forms and I am
smitten by the accident of invention
as always my love as always
gathering myself into the pleasure
of it all dear artist of weave and print

It is morningtime in the hour that the day’s light shows its hem in the East. It is that time when dream and memory are replaced by invention and desire. Desire to invent, to feel the words form on the page: messages from the heart, an imagined landscape, a different time freshly peopled.
 
The mind’s eye, as though a flying sprite, enters the privacy of home, alights on a child’s pillow, marvels at the untroubled face, the easy limbs still resting in half-sleep before rising. In an adjoining room his parents, aware of night’s echo, stretch and touch, delighting in the comfort of those known places where love and desire visit, made precious through stroke and caress. Her dear head fast into the pillow, his right arm resting lightly across her body, his left folded into her back. He inhales her as though a most delicate incense slowly burning on the mantle shelf, on the altar of this gathered home; beside his glasses, her simple jewellery, the once jasmined vase, cards ascribed with the love of friends and family, endearments, a child’s gay picture, a photograph of a cottage in silhouette against sea and distant mountains, and five stones from different shores, each a talisman, a gateway to a memoried story.
 
Still this still time, this fragile cushioning of quiet before the necessity of movement, the need of thought to plan the must of the day, the have to in this hour or that, the when and then, the care to this and there. Another day beckons in a sharp noise from the street, a car starts, a door slams, away in the vallied distance the hoot of a train.
 
It is warm for a late December day, but against the possibility of damp and cold he takes the necessary gloves and scarf, though wears a lighter coat. He will walk purposefully, though unbreakfasted, through the grey streets, past houses where the lit opaque windows of bathrooms shine, onto the heath land and then into the woods of oak and birch and alder. The trees therein are pilloried hands stretching their gaunt fingers to the whitening sky, still in the still air, almost silent but for the change of the air’s resonance, that particular quality in a wooded space where sounds’ reflections have a confused trajectory: a bird rising at your footfall, its wingbeats echoing a cascade of almost touched finger strokes on a wooden drum.
 
Here in this dank wood the mind is restless; it moves ungraciously between what the senses tell of the now and the interventions of imagination and memory. Her fatigue at the dinner table, the dull green of unberried holly, the description of a woodshed its contents delightfully named, and that short paragraph about the similarity between books and trees (he makes a mental note to learn this: to keep this warm thought close in times of stress). This is why we read he thinks: to gather to ourselves a temporary safety, the consolation of another’s voice, an antidote to loneliness. She is waking he thinks. He can ‘see’ inwardly her movement as she shakes off sleep, raises her eyebrows before opening her eyes, sitting on the bed now (eyes still closed), she stretches her right hand for the juice he brought silently to her bedside, that little action of love borne up two flights of stairs, every footfall carefully tiptoed, to place very slowly, silently next the clock, her bedtime book, a pile of his letters, a scribbled address on a notebook’s torn out page. She will never be so tenderly beautiful as in that moment he so rarely sees but knows and thus imagines. This image reverberates over his moving body and he stops to calm himself, to enjoy for a few seconds this almost-presence of her in an imagined touch of skin to skin, his fingers stroking her naked back as she gathers herself to move.

When you visit this Nativity
you pass through room after room;
five centuries of painting
ablaze with colour
and the human form.

When it’s as far as you can go
from the melee of the constant crowd,
that Saturday we were rewarded
by a space empty, but for three paintings
and our silent selves.

Silenced by its wonder
my son caught its breath:
the smell of the studio in Arezzo
and perhaps the shadow of the artist
barely sighted, blind at the end.

The painter, so the Polish poet says,
who hid so thoroughly behind
his work that one cannot invent
a private life, his loves or friendships,
passion and grief. His being was his ouevre.

And these faces (from the street perhaps?)
marked in the mind’s memory
with the miracle before them.
And for me: the silent music of the angels,
a choir with lutes haunts and haunting

always.

I

after a bath
and the window open
I was touched
by an air of autumn
against my body
not quite towelled
hardly dry but ready
nonetheless to feel
something of the season’s
change against my fragile self

(an autumn air)


II

so very green
and multitudinous shades
holding the late afternoon
in greenness
only the towpath
measured out in sunlight
and the seat of a bench distant
providing a goal
a sensible place to aim for

we set out with her guiding hand
clasping my weakness
when a dragonfly
intricate in full sunlight
moves against a backdrop
of dark-shadowed trees
poising at eye-level
to look us over
and is off away

on our return
(from that distant bench
our goal our aim)
there a kingfisher
flashes past
and into a canal-side bush
we wait and wait hoping
to catch again the trajectory
of its miraculous flight

(canal side)

III

to whom it may concern

presumptuous I think to wish for anything
beyond one has and holds - anything
in regard to property or possessions
I have no wish to consider further
Who has what of me I disdain
and whatever it might be can only be
in my gift and surely that must be freely given
Should there be the slightest hint of dispute
I hope some Almighty Hand will
remove all and everything
to the very darkest depths

in friendship


(a letter of wishes)




IV

begun as joyous celebrations
of musical art bright and lively
on the page welcome
to the ear as to the eye

so often full of dance gentle
reflections sonorously sounding
out in playfulness
and reasoned movement


(Beethoven’s Op.18 string quartets)




V

with only the bare essentials
the most limited of means
this music grips and stirs
springing out of unisons
octaves bare chords of the fifth
and a play of rhythms
straight and straight-forward
four-square angular tight
against the beat within the bar
a simple subtlety and space
between two instruments:
the legato violin tempering
the insistent piano - always
movement no repose a constant
unwinding thread
of perilous invention
hardly a breath taken
a pause made

(on hearing Shostakovich’s Sonata for Violin and Piano)



VI

he types:

the post-box is too far way
as I must (e)mail this note today

so with no maker’s mark
this message will forego
the papered page
ink’s curved line and flow
the fold the sticky edge
the stamp well placed
the stroll with the dog
to the box along the lanes
in evening’s light
sounds of roosting birds
and flittering squeaks of bats

(an email from a former student)



VII

aware of my fragility
his gracious manner
moves me to tears
In speaking
he places every word
with infinite care
in practiced deliberation
. . . and I am crying
at his understanding
that he knows my loneliness
in dying and how I wish
to rise above
this momentary upset
to assure him I can
and will cope
that I am in his hands
He just has to say . . .


(visit to the doctor



VIII


Daily I curate the contents
of this window sill
a changing exhibition
backdrop to a sedentary life

Today: Japanese wallpaper c.1925.
Mead Cloth by Matthew Harris,
Hokusai – Mount Fuji and six cranes ( two flying)
Post card from the Pyréneées
An earthenware blackbird and thrush in a cherry tree
David Hockney, April 25 from The Arrival of Spring
Un passé plat empiétant tapestry from Madagascar.


(exhibition on a window sill)



IX

being twenty-one
seems no great age
but I remember it dimly
when adrift in my life
it came and went –
a spring and sunny day
a watch from my parents
a few cards . . .

but for you
a family day at Kew
a meal with relatives and friends
altogether a good time to remember
I so hope you will . . .


(at twenty-one)


X

To members of the London Symphony Orchestra
Ralph Vaughan-Williams is reported to have said:
‘Gentlemen, let me introduce you to the man
who writes my music.’

Unfortunate this, as his copyist Roy Douglas
had the job of deciphering the composer’s appalling
handwriting, the result of a natural
left-handedness being corrected as a child.

For me, the person who has written my music
so faithfully for fourteen years rarely dealt with
illegibility but had instead to cope with conflicts
of musical spelling.
Is this a sharp? Should this be a flat?
Do we need a cautionary accidental here?

Fortunately, he and I were not espoused as Stravinsky and
Elgar were to their long-suffering copyists, who often berated
their husbands for their inability to spell chromatic pitches
correctly. Stravinsky had an excuse: the vagaries of the octatonic scale
he often used and loved. Elgar was just ******-minded! Poor Alice . . .


(saying a warm goodbye to my copyist)


XI


to talk about yourself when
dead and gone How strange!
This need - to put in place
to sort the detail now
and so avoid confusion
What then?


An indeterminate wait
until the moment comes
the eyes won’t open
on a woken world
ears not hear
the sound of traffic
from a nearby road


there will be
an emptiness sublime
a finishing of tasks
and all those earthly
mysteries solved
and deemed complete


So this is what
we recommend
It could be this?
It could be that?

and every which way
it’s yours to choose
for rightness sake
Amen


*(the interview)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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