In the clear light of morning, an October morning, at the beginning of this properly autumn month, he had felt sad: that he’d broken a promise to himself the afternoon before. It was her voice on the phone, and then that text. He had promised he would no longer write intimately, about their intimacy, remembering what has passed between them, which had so marked him. All it took was this flavour of her voice, a slowness in her diction, and he could not help himself: such a rush of images, of moments, sensations. He knew it was unwise to linger over any of these things because he felt sure she did not. That was no longer her way, if it ever had been her way, and he imagined that, with her accustomed kindness and generosity, she had quietly put such things aside. So on this gentle morning, he was upset that he had once again visited that box of treasures in the white room that he kept for her in his imagination house. This was not the route to happiness. He would throw away the key.

He needed consolation. Once he had turned to her letters, to catch that flavour of her, those things that surrounded her, a kind of aura that held within it her secret self. Now, there was a print above his desk that he loved (Spurn marks: seaweed #4), her origami bird, the print of a painting of an African woman and child given to him on his birthday (when he had first kissed her, tentatively on her left cheek,) and her dear photograph, dear because he knew he looked at it more times in a day than he could possibly admit to.

It needed to be a book, a passage he could read to remind him there were so many other joys in life alongside the joy he felt at the thought of her, a joy he felt he might never consummate. He took Ronald Blythe’s Word from Wormingford off the shelf and turned to the essay for the beginning of October. Ronnie had been watching the late September clouds, those armadas sailing across the skies. In a moment he was somewhere else, in a life he recognised so acutely, those East Anglian places of his early manhood. In this present time, in North Yorkshire, he would sit and watched such clouds from a bench above Filey Bay, clouds that David Hockney celebrated in his paintings of the Wolds.

Yesterday afternoon there had been a break in the weather after a week of mist and rain. It had found him gazing at a drama in the skies above the trees in his park. He had walked to the Rose Garden with its redundant conservatory and paired Pelicans atop its gateposts, where once he’d sat with his infant children as they’d slept. There were roses still, a little tattered, but colourful. Like Ronnie he had spent time cloud watching, until the geese from the nearby lake erupted into flight. Always a marvel of movement !

Blythe’s essays were always so rich in the sheer breadth and content of their meditations. There was always some new knowledge to be had, things to Google or better still ‘go to the book.’ This was when he loved what few books now remained from his library. He had Luke Howard’s essay on The Modification of Clouds. A Quaker, Howard was admired by Goethe (they corresponded) and Shelley, John Constable and John Ruskin (who used Howard’s cloud classifications in his Modern Painters). He then went to find Shelley’s The Cloud (and in so doing uncovered several books that he’d forgotten he owned). He read the last verse that once he had learnt by heart . . .

I am the daughter of Earth and Water,
And the nursling of the Sky;
I pass through the pores, of the ocean and shores;
I change, but I cannot die --
For after the rain, when with never a stain
The pavilion of Heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams, with their convex gleams,
Build up the blue dome of Air
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, live a ghost from the tomb,
I arise, and unbuild it again.

Hmm, he thought, such rhyme and rhythm. And, via Blythe recalling the Chinese, he then pictured the official from the emperor’s counting house bringing guests home after work to gaze at the cloudscapes over the Tai Mountains from his humble balcony. Nothing was to be said, an hour of silence was the convention. In a blink he remembered the autumn poem by Lai Bai where ‘floating clouds seem to have no end.’

I climb up high and look on the four seas,
Heaven and earth spreading out so far.
Frost blankets all the stuff of autumn,
The wind blows with the great desert's cold.
The eastward-flowing water is immense,
All the ten thousand things billow.
The white sun's passing brightness fades,
Floating clouds seem to have no end.
Swallows and sparrows nest in the wutong tree,
Yuan and luan birds perch among jujube thorns.
Now it's time to head on back again,
I flick my sword and sing Taking the Hard Road.

He had to take a deep breath not to think too deeply about The Clouds and Rain, that metaphor for the arts of the bedchamber. But Ronnie’s 500 words sent him back to Wormingford and the bedbound old lady he describes who spent her days watching the clouds.

As he closed the book he felt a little better, ready to face the day, and more important ready to place his thoughts in a right place, a comfortable and secure place, quiet and respectful, however much he might seek to possess each night her Lotus pond and make those flowers of fire blossom within

I

Who would be
A mermaid fair,
Singing alone,
Combing her hair
Under the sea,
In a golden curl
With a comb of pearl,
On a throne?

II

I would be a mermaid fair;
I would sing to myself the whole of the day;
With a comb of pearl I would comb my hair;
And still as I comb'd I would sing and say,
'Who is it loves me? who loves not me?'
I would comb my hair till my ringlets would fall
                Low adown, low adown,
From under my starry sea-bud crown
                Low adown and around,
And I should look like a fountain of gold
        Springing alone
        With a shrill inner sound
                Over the throne
        In the midst of the hall;
Till that great sea-snake under the sea
From his coiled sleeps in the central deeps
Would slowly trail himself sevenfold
Round the hall where I sate, and look in at the gate
With his large calm eyes for the love of me.
And all the mermen under the sea
Would feel their immortality
Die in their hearts for the love of me.

III

But at night I would wander away, away,
        I would fling on each side my low-flowing locks,
And lightly vault from the throne and play
     With the mermen in and out of the rocks;
We would run to and fro, and hide and seek,
     On the broad sea-wolds in the crimson shells,
Whose silvery spikes are nighest the sea.
But if any came near I would call and shriek,
And adown the steep like a wave I would leap
     From the diamond-ledges that jut from the dells;
For I would not be kiss'd by all who would list
Of the bold merry mermen under the sea.
They would sue me, and woo me, and flatter me,
In the purple twilights under the sea;
But the king of them all would carry me,
Woo me, and win me, and marry me,
In the branching jaspers under the sea.
Then all the dry-pied things that be
In the hueless mosses under the sea
Would curl round my silver feet silently,
All looking up for the love of me.
And if I should carol aloud, from aloft
All things that are forked, and horned, and soft
Would lean out from the hollow sphere of the sea,
All looking down for the love of me.

Love has come Again

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

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

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

Love is Come Again  the carol sings.

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




La Serenissima*

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

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

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

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

"Which world do you prefer?"



An illusion created by one's mind

May destroy a life


For it is a disease of an irrational illness

Just another hide-a-way

To keep secretes



Separating the real world from fantasy

But, what happens if the delusions

Revealed what is underneath the lies that it be stoles?

And fantasies start to become the real world?



Are our dreams gaining so much power, that is takes full control?

Can it be true?

Humans are afraid to face the truth

So they prefer to live in a world that barely exists



The days light reveals reality

But when darkness falls

The night deeply sleeps away

As more dreams gets created

Adding more power to something that is fake

Then revealing the truth when we awake



Though our foolish minds don't dare to believe,

We would rather live in a world that we establish

When we fall asleep



So I keep running and running

Hoping to reach a stop

Wondering if I should leave behind

All I got

Here I stand,

Ready to take on everything, day by day



I once told myself never to be like my mother

And fear what life gives

Never be like my father

And drink my life away

I failed to do both

I'm not as strong as I thought I was

But I struggle to change



To find the strength and face reality

It is not as simple as most people tend to say

Now I see why others prefer

To hide-a-way

To this day I remain in confusion

Questioning how life can be so brutal



That it pushes us over the edge

To the point where we can't bare

Over time I came to realize

Life is a lesson that's needed to be learned

So be prepared to face the real world

They call a deep orange-red moon “******,”
That, somehow, she can hurt and wound like I…
How absurd! A rock can’t show tears or glee
Yet she is as joyous as stars are nigh.

Goddess Moon kissed Mother Earth in passion,
Fire consum’ng their love so time would not.
Time is a hunter they could not outrun,
As he ripped them apart, doomed them to rot.

One grew lush and strong, the other ice cold;
One circled the other in longing stares,
The other raising man in open wolds;
Memories in scars -- what a tragic pair.

Bleed, Moon, bleed as I do cry for lost love,
Alone and cold with the stars high above.

Come, silver moon, alight on troubled clouds,
Gift them thy saintly glow lifting the gloom
Levied below, with flowery haloed buds
Springing forth like the lamb from mother's womb,

Light up anew hedgerows and quilted fields
Where cattle sleep in clusters like faint stars,
Constellations huddled upon the wolds,
Breath nebulous as fogging stale cigars;

Ill omens thrive to drift in darkest times
From cloud to stony cloud above the night,
Watching for victims from high lofted climes,
Raining full pent up fury of their might:

Come, silver moon, gift troubled clouds thy lining,
Hope lives in thee as long as thou art shining!

Alone,
Above frozen hills and icy forest,
Finding definition through separation,
A dark island in a white sky,  
Coming closer.

The eyes first- burning beads of life,
Searching for death and opportunity,
Blazing terrifying focus,
Coming closer.

The sound next- quiet rush of primaries,
Hiss of bone and feather slicing frozen air,
Whisper of the wolds wild goddess,
A knife blade.

Cutting holy air like I cut myself,
Soul slicing distinctions and definitions,
Of happiness and loneliness,
And he leaves me,
Alone.

I chase numerical dreams for vocation
ever grasping for untouchable horizons,
counting sand granules
piling leaves in size order
according to shades of ochre.

Then release
to hobby with words
build castles of sentimentality,
sparkle yonder meadows with dew
wetted by inner calligraphy.

Poetry to feather my dust -
echo pain-stained syllables
resounding morosely bound verses,
liberating caved bats
flapping to rhythms
pen strokes.

Launching boulders
onto unvarnished whiteness
once rolling to and fro
on my emotive wolds,
grasslands may grow again.

Pasting tokens of lost love
shrouding texts with torment
stamping lingering wraiths,
least they not prance
for a-while.

Worlds drip-dry here
under auroral poetry
a chance to breathe;
fresh crisp air -
of expressiveness,
I arrived - stayed.