******* a Boat

Not everyone’s idea of bliss
Emptying the toilet every week.
If you are the kind of person
Who likes creature comforts
It is definitely not for you . .

They say it’s where you go
When things go wrong,
The close friend dies,
The relationship comes apart
And living alone in a shoebox
in Hoxton at £800 a week
Just can’t be faced.

On your daily run beside the canal
You suddenly thought:
Why not? It’s peaceful here
By the water, away from the streets,
Cold in winter, damp in spring,
But summer and autumn will be a joy!

You have to downsize of course:
Most of those books will have to go,
Just one guitar and be sensible
About those shoes and clothes,
A good pair of boots and Rohan frock,
Lots of warm tights, a wok,
And you can leave the Internet at work,
Come home on your bicycle to a novel
and your cat, put the wok on the stove,
and hear the sound of your breath,
as the boat trembles under your feet.



Night Thoughts by Li Bo (16C)


So bright on our bed this moon,
just like frost its light is spread.
If I raise my head to see it shine,
when I turn away I'll think of home.


Reading Variously

How patterns and connections emerged during the progress a letter, a letter in this case begun with only the slightest plan, whose intention was partly to hold his daughter in his thoughts for an hour. It was a one-way conversation, and he would imagine her patiently listening to him. She was an attentive listener with a ferocious memory.

The book on his lap halted this reverie. It was a collection of essays by a woman writer known for a severe collection of novels, creative writing in which one realised how essential and rich the imagination can be in this form. In one essay she had been forthright in defence of the novel, that form that has to accept the ‘nuts and bolts of temporal reality’, that ‘from time to time a character has to walk through a door and close it behind him, the creatures of imagination have to eat and sleep, as all other creatures do.’  He had been whelmed over with such writing, and this book had travelled with him during the week so he could read and reread, opening on train journeys, in the minutes before a meal. It had been a gift he had so nearly lost. He remembered first opening the book and thinking this is all too difficult and intense just now, and then realising it was, in fact, just what was required by the ebb and flow of circumstance. He was troubled in so many things, but he knew he needed to remain hopeful. He had completed a composition during the week, the result of a fortnight’s intense thought, preparation and the teasing out of note to note, which is the stuff of writing for voices. He had been stretched by his own creativity, and now was being stretched by someone else’s, a woman of deep faith (in hope) and understanding of that small world so many of us live in, but perhaps so seldom are able to acknowledge its various riches.

This writer had also charmed him with words about music. ‘I tell my students,’ she had written, ‘language is music. Written words are musical notation. The music of a piece of fiction establishes the way in which it is to be read, and in the largest sense, what it means. It is essential to remember that characters have a music as well, a pitch and tempo, just as real people do. To make them believable, you must always be aware of what they would or would not say, where stresses would or would not fall.’ And he thought about his summer school students to whom he had said ‘music is language, the saying and meaning of words, the lift and fall of their inflection, the flow and rhythm of phrase and sentence. You have to read books and to listen to books being read, and poetry of course, the dear sister of music’.

There was more of course. Much history and philosophy sitting alongside spiritual meditation and the homespun observation of an academic, who wrote novels and taught ‘writing novels’, of a mother of four sons, of someone in love with small town life in Iowa and the possibilities of living a good and true life.

And so, the sun rose and lit up the barks of the chestnut trees across the road, in the park beyond. And as the camellia in the garden continued to explode with pink flowers, and the daffodils swayed and nodded, he picked up this vital book and opened its pages to the chapter titled Wondrous Love. Here the author writes about the importance of ‘elderly and old American hymns’. ‘They can move me so deeply’, she writes, ‘that I have difficulty even speaking about them.’ Yes, he knew the way such things moved him. Just the night previously he’d listened to a piano piece by Charles Ives, The Alcotts, with its haunting hymn-like melody and distant echoes of Beethoven’s Fifth, and thought of holding her hand in that university concert hall where he had shared with her this extraordinary work, music that had taken him him to America as a teenager, even to Concord Massachusetts where it had been composed, that he would listen to over and over and wonder at, a music so distant from his roots in the English Choral tradition, but so close to the heart, a music bound to a simplicity of culture that existed once on a different shore, and to which he continued to feel a deep association and love.


Lochan

a poem after  Bai Juyi  (772 -846)



There should be a temple here,

a pavilion on the eastern shore.

Easy to imagine oneself in Jiating, 

but this is Wester Ross.

Instead of orioles fighting in the warm trees, 

crows pick over the summer mud.

Disordered flowers confuse the eye,

bright grass hides the fisherman’s footprints.

I love this lochan,

but cannot stay for long by its bank.

One tree grows out of a reflection, 

on its island home.


Portrait**

You sat for my camera
just the once
in a Mediterranean garden.
It was a haven of green
above a sunned-blue bay.

Unplanned it was.
We’d eaten lunch
watching butterflies
flicker-perch and hover.

You’d tied your hair with a scarf
to keep the midday heat from your head,
a sun that brought your freckles to the fore
on bare arms, on your golden cheek.

Then, for a little while
you left your public self elsewhere,
and my zoomed lens travelled close
as a lover’s kiss when waking.

And as you gazed at the daisied grass
a gentleness and grace descended
on your sun-shadowed face.
I took two pictures, only two.

These portraits I’ve kept
far apart  from other ‘snaps’,
as they seem close
to a painter’s art
as I will ever get.

The portrait-call goes out
and I hesitate, I’m reticent, afraid
to share them with the public gaze.
They say so much, you see,  

of what I know you now to be:
the woman I’m privileged
to touch, to hold dear and close
to this unmanageable heart.