I thought about Norfolk and Norfolk folk,
And Norfolk bricks and the Norfolk coast,
I thought of winds in a hollow dune and waveless seas
Where the heat washed a breeze -
Into a summer fret!

Where hawking gulls who balance by
point towards straight roads at sunrise
Where the hillocks fall down to
The summer's edge

In the wash of the Gibraltar flats
Reflected fractions of a perfect sky
Form blue pools in the heated sand
The stuff of dreams
That Norfolk
Land

Golden sand tickling your toes
Pebbles gleaming, glistening, slushing
When the tide comes  back  to shore.
Sand dunes hiding wildlife,
Multitudes of migratory birds,
Safely returning every year to
This beautiful, marshy paradise.
Skies so orange, pink and red,
An artists palette of natural art
Greet you at sunrise and sunset.
*****, kippers, cod and plaice
Shrimps, cockles and whelks,
Mushy, minty peas and chips,
The show at the end of the pier.
The lifeboats and their hardy crew
Risking their lives to save others,
When visitors run into trouble
At the mercy of the cold North Sea.
Crumbling coastlines, cliff walks
And nature reserves full of the
Scent of wild garlic and herbs,
Norfolk lavender. Steam engines,
Fishing boats, river boats,
Paddling boats and cycles
Take you on journeys
Around the Broads or
Past the famous Castles.
Tigers and leopards peer
Through the bars of their
Zoo homes by the sea.
Easterly winds that bite your
Fingers as they whistle and
Howl through the City.
Guest houses closed for
The winter as you stroll
The lonely promenades
Breathing in the air.
Queen Bodicea,  Normans,
Vikings and Romans all
Marched through this
Historical  landscape
And yet we remain
Stalwart and strong
Proud of our heritage,
Our roots,  our birthplace
There's only one place
Better than Norfolk,
And that's the
Beautiful Ozarks.

here's how it happens
the morning after
you reach into the drawer
where the your t-shirts live
to find it austere
you'll shrug because
you're still drunk
& you can't remember
when last it was
that you had something wet
or how long it's been
since you made the floorboards blush
or why the carpet is upset
who wouldn't be
the contents to the upended ashtray
strewn around the apartment
resemble the aftermath
of the smallest war
to ever take place in norfolk
some midnight thief
must've made off with the lighter
because it isn't in
any of your favorite spots
maybe you chucked it
along with a hundred other things
that make noise when they land
in the neighbors yard
you won't remember putting
the refrigerator's belongings
in the bathtub
or scrawling a buzzard
on the bedroom door
but then again who would
you'll pretend it's spring again
before putting on your winter coat
to go out front with a cigarette
in your mouth
you'll hope for a passing stranger
to *** a light from
or drag yourself to the corner
with couch cushion change
to buy a new lighter
and on your way
you won't bother looking back
this is just another day
on eggshells for no reason
another november
choking on birthday candles
on your way home
you step over beer cans
the kind you fell in love with
and wonder who
had the last laugh last night
or if anyone said a word at all
it might've been another
moment of clarity
it might have been some idiot savant
any adjective that feels like home
anything that keeps you thirsty

There’s a film by John Schlesinger called the Go-Between in which the main character, a boy on the cusp of adolescence staying with a school friend on his family’s Norfolk estate, discovers how passion and *** become intertwined with love and desire. As an elderly man he revisits the location of this discovery and the woman, who we learn changed his emotional world forever. At the start of the film we see him on a day of grey cloud and wild wind walking towards the estate cottage where this woman now lives. He glimpses her face at a window – and the film flashes back fifty years to a summer before the First War.
 
It’s a little like that for me. Only, I’m sitting at a desk early on a spring morning about to step back nearly forty years.*
 
It was a two-hour trip from Boston to Booth Bay. We’d flown from New York on the shuttle and met Larry’s dad at St Vincent’s. We waited in his office as he put away the week with his secretary. He’d been in theatre all afternoon. He kept up a two-sided conversation.
 
‘You boys have a good week? Did you get to hear Barenboim at the Tully? I heard him as 14-year old play in Paris. He played the Tempest -  Mary, let’s fit Mrs K in for Tuesday at 5.0 - I was learning that very Beethoven sonata right then. I couldn’t believe it - that one so young could sound –there’s that myocardial infarction to review early Wednesday. I want Jim and Susan there please -  and look so  . . . old, not just mature, but old. And now – Gloria and I went to his last Carnegie – he just looks so **** young.’
 
Down in the basement garage Larry took his dad’s keys and we roared out on to Storow drive heading for the Massachusetts Turnpike. I slept. Too many early mornings copying my teacher’s latest – a concerto for two pianos – all those notes to be placed under the fingers. There was even a third piano in the orchestra. Larry and his Dad talked incessantly. I woke as Dr Benson said ‘The sea at last’. And there we were, the sea a glazed blue shimmering in the July distance. It might be lobster on the beach tonight, Gloria’s clam chowder, the coldest apple juice I’d ever tasted (never tasted apple juice until I came to Maine), settling down to a pile of art books in my bedroom, listening to the bell buoy rocking too and fro in the bay, the beach just below the house, a house over 150 years old, very old they said, in the family all that time.
 
It was a house full that weekend,  4th of July weekend and there would be fireworks over Booth Bay and lots of what Gloria called necessary visiting. I was in love with Gloria from the moment she shook my hand after that first concert when my little cummings setting got a mention in the NYT. It was called forever is now and God knows where it is – scored for tenor and small ensemble (there was certainly a vibraphone and a double bass – I was in love from afar with a bassist at J.). Oh, this being in love at seventeen. It was so difficult not to be. No English reserve here. People talked to you, were interested in you and what you thought, had heard, had read. You only had to say you’d been looking at a book of Andrew Wyeth’s paintings and you’d be whisked off to some uptown gallery to see his early watercolours. And on the way you’d hear a life story or some intimate details of friend’s affair, or a great slice of family history. Lots of eye contact. Just keep the talk going. But Gloria, well, we would meet in the hallway and she’d grasp my hand and say – ‘You know, Larry says that you work too hard. I want you to do nothing this weekend except get some sun and swim. We can go to Johnson’s for tennis you know. I haven’t forgotten you beat me last time we played!’ I suppose she was mid-thirties, a shirt, shorts and sandals woman, not Larry’s mother but Dr Benson’s third. This was all very new to me.
 
Tim was Larry’s elder brother, an intern at Felix-Med in NYC. He had a new girl with him that weekend. Anne-Marie was tall, bespectacled, and supposed to be ferociously clever. Gloria said ‘She models herself on Susan Sontag’. I remember asking who Sontag was and was told she was a feminist writer into politics. I wondered if Anne-Marie was a feminist into politics. She certainly did not dress like anyone else I’d seen as part of the Benson circle. It was July yet she wore a long-sleeved shift buttoned up to the collar and a long linen skirt down to her ankles. She was pretty but shapeless, a long straight person with long straight hair, a clip on one side she fiddled with endlessly, purposefully sometimes. She ignored me but for an introductory ‘Good evening’, when everyone else said ‘Hi’.
 
The next day it was hot. I was about the house very early. The apple juice in the refrigerator came into its own at 6.0 am. The bay was in mist. It was so still the bell buoy stirred only occasionally. I sat on the step with this icy glass of fragrant apple watching the pearls of condensation form and dissolve. I walked the shore, discovering years later that Rachel Carson had walked these paths, combed these beaches. I remember being shocked then at the concern about the environment surfacing in the late sixties. This was a huge country: so much space. The Maine woods – when I first drove up to Quebec – seemed to go on forever.
 
It was later in the day, after tennis, after trying to lie on the beach, I sought my room and took out my latest score, or what little of it there currently was. It was a piano piece, a still piece, the kind of piece I haven’t written in years, but possibly should. Now it’s all movement and complication. Then, I used to write exactly what I heard, and I’d heard Feldman’s ‘still pieces’ in his Greenwich loft with the white Rauschenbergs on the wall. I had admired his writing desk and thought one day I’ll have a desk like that in an apartment like this with very large empty paintings on the wall. But, I went elsewhere . . .
 
I lay on the bed and listened to the buoy out in the bay. I thought of a book of my childhood, We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea by Arthur Ransome. There’s a drawing of a Beach End Buoy in that book, and as the buoy I was listening to was too far out to see (sea?) I imagined it as the one Ransome drew from Lowestoft harbour. I dozed I suppose, to be woken suddenly by voices in the room next door. It was Tim and Anne-Marie. I had thought the house empty but for me. They were in Tim’s room next door. There was movement, whispering, almost speech, more movement.
 
I was curious suddenly. Anne-Marie was an enigma. Tim was a nice guy. Quiet, dedicated (Larry had said), worked hard, read a lot, came to Larry’s concerts, played the cello when he could, Bach was always on his record player. He and Anne-Marie seemed so close, just a wooden wall away. I stood by this wall to listen.
 
‘Why are we whispering’, said Anne-Marie firmly, ‘For goodness sake no one’s here. Look, you’re a doctor, you know what to do surely.’
 
‘Not yet.’
 
‘But people call you Doctor, I’ve heard them.’
 
‘Oh sure. But I’m not, I’m just a lousy intern.’
 
‘A lousy intern who doesn’t want to make love to me.’
 
Then, there was rustling, some heavy movement and Tim saying ‘Oh Anne, you mustn’t. You don’t need to do this.’
 
‘Yes I do. You’re hard and I’m wet between my legs. I want you all over me and inside me.  I wanted you last night so badly I lay on my bed quite naked and masturbated hoping you come to me. But you didn’t. I looked in on you and you were just fast asleep.’
 
‘You forget I did a 22-hour call on Thursday’.
 
“And the rest. Don’t you want me? Maybe your brother or that nice English boy next door?’
 
‘Is he next door? ‘
 
‘If he is, I don’t care. He looks at me you know. He can’t work me out. I’ve been ignoring him. But maybe I shouldn’t. He’s got beautiful eyes and lovely hands’.
 
There was almost silence for what seemed a long time. I could hear my own breathing and became very aware of my own body. I was shaking and suddenly cold. I could hear more breathing next door. There was a shaft of intense white sunlight burning across my bed. I imagined Anne-Marie sitting cross-legged on the floor next door, her hand cupping her right breast fingers touching the ******, waiting. There was a rustle of movement. And the door next door slammed.
 
Thirty seconds later Tim was striding across the garden and on to the beach and into the sea . . .
 
There was probably a naked young woman sitting on the floor next door I thought. Reading perhaps. I stayed quite still imagining she would get up, open her door and peek into my room. So I moved away from the wall and sat on the bed trying hard to look like a composer working on a score. And she did . . . but she had clothes on, though not her glasses or her hair clip, and she wore a bright smile – lovely teeth I recall.
 
‘Good afternoon’, she said. ‘You heard all that I suppose.’
 
I smiled my nicest English smile and said nothing.
 
‘Tell me about your girlfriend in England.’
 
She sat on the bed, cross-legged. I was suddenly overcome by her scent, something complex and earthy.
 
‘My girlfriend in England is called Anne’.
 
‘Really! Is she pretty? ‘
 
I didn’t answer, but looked at my hands, and her feet, her uncovered calves and knees. I could see the shape of her slight ******* beneath her shirt, now partly unbuttoned. I felt very uncomfortable.
 
‘Tell me. Have you been with this Anne in England?’
 
‘No.’ I said, ‘I ‘d like to, but she’s very shy.’
 
‘OK. I’m an Anne who’s not shy.’
 
‘I’ve yet to meet a shy American.’
 
‘They exist. I could find you a nice shy girl you could get to know.’
 
‘I’d quite like to know you, but you’re a good bit older than me.’
 
‘Oh that doesn’t matter. You’re quite a mature guy I think. I’d go out with you.’
 
‘Oh I doubt that.’
 
‘Would you go out with me?’
 
‘You’re interesting.  Gloria says you’re a bit like Susan Sontag. Yes, I would.’
 
‘Wow! did she really? Ok then, that’s a deal. You better read some Simone de Beauvoir pretty quick,’  and she bounced off the bed.
 
After supper  - lobster on the beach - Gloria cornered me and said. ‘I gather you heard all this afternoon.’
 
I remembered mumbling a ‘yes’.
 
‘It’s OK,’ she said, ‘Anne-Marie told me all. Girls do this you know – talk about what goes on in other people’s bedrooms. What could you do? I would have done the same. Tim’s not ready for an Anne-Marie just yet, and I’m not sure you are either. Not my business of course, but gentle advice from one who’s been there. ‘
 
‘Been where?’
 
‘Been with someone older and supposedly wiser. And remembering that wondering-what-to-do-about-those-feelings-around-*** and all that. There’s a right time and you’ll know it when it comes. ‘
 
She kissed me very lightly on my right ear, then got up and walked across the beach back to the house.

school starts soon
smoking joints on the weekday afternoon

in a sidelined shady
freight car, property of
Norfolk Southern

debating if this car will be
northbound or southbound
and master-bating our fantasy
where we want to be taken

knowing full well maybe one of us -
(and they all looking at me)

will get out of this car and live to
see foreign places without having to
return in a body bag

we argue lazy who should go get the beer,
collect the quarters and sweaty dollar bills
and **** if I am not reappointed
leader of the beer fetching

besides it’s my
tan lab panting needing water so it’s my
responsibility and the nasty liquor store owner don’t hate me that much as the others so he’ll sell me beer without too much **** talk (some for sure)

asking where I’m laying low on a **** hot day like this one

tell him i’m getting on a train getting out of this two bit town which makes him reminisce and ask which direction

could be northbound could be southbound
hell could be west
but for sure won’t be
going eastbound

cause I seen the Atlantic and didn’t like it

too **** big and too **** cold,
too **** mean

i dreamed a rattlesnake was loose in the closet i heard it rattling i was afraid to open the door



a man suffering a toothache goes to see his dentist the dentist administers laughing gas when the man comes to his numb tongue swooshes around his mouth he asks how long was i under the dentist answers hours i needed to pull them all out



he imagines when he grows old there will be a pencil grown into one hand and a paintbrush grown into the other they will look like extra fingers grown out from the palms extensions of his personal evolution little children will be horrified when they see mommy mommy look at that man’s hands!



what if we are each presented with a complete picture of a puzzle from the very start then as our lives proceed the pieces begin showing up out of context sometimes recognizable other times a mystery some people are smarter more intuitive than others and are able to piece together the bigger picture some people never figure it out



i wasn’t thinking i didn’t know to think nobody taught me to think maybe my teachers tried but i didn’t get it i wasn’t thinking i was running reacting doing whatever i needed to survive when you’re trying to survive you move fast by instinct you don’t think you just act



many children are relieved when their parents die then they no longer need to explain prove themselves live up to their parent’s expectations yet all children need parents to approve foster mentor teach love



she was missing especially when her children needed her most she was busy lunching with girlfriends dinner dates beauty shop manicure masseuse appointments shopping seamstress fittings constant telephone gossiping criticizing she was too busy to notice she was missing more than anything she wanted to party show off her beauty to be the adored one the hostess with the mostest



i dreamed i was condemned to die by guillotine the executioner wore black and wielded an axe just in case the device failed in the dream the guillotine sliced shallow then the executioner went to work but he kept chopping unsuccessfully severing my head this went on for a long time



1954 Max Schwartzpilgrim sits at table in coffee shop on 5th floor of Maller’s Building elevated train loudly passes as he glances out window it is typical gloomy gray Chicago day he worries how he will find the money to pay off all his mounting debts he is over his head in debit thinks about taking out a hefty life insurance policy then cleverly killing himself but he cherishes his lovely wife Jenny his young children and social life sitting across table Ernie Cohen cracks crass joke Max laughs politely yet is in no mood to encourage his fingers work nervously mutely drumming on Formica table then stubbing out cigarette in glass ashtray lighting another with gold Dunhill lighter bitter tastes of coffee and cigarettes turns his stomach sour he raises his hand calling over Millie the waitress he flirtatiously smiles orders bowl of matzo ball soup with extra matzo ball Ernie says you can’t have enough big ***** for this world Max thinks about his son Odysseus



when Odysseus is very young Dad occasionally brings him to Schwartzpilgrim’s Jewelers Store on Saturday mornings Dad shows off his firstborn son like a prize possession lifting Odysseus in the air Dad takes him to golf range golf is not an interest for Odysseus Dad pushes him to learn proper swing Odysseus fumbles golf club and ***** he loves going anyway because he appreciates spending time with Dad once Dad and Odysseus take shower together Dad is so life-size muscular hairy Odysseus is so little Dad reaches touches Odysseus’s ******* feeling lone ******* Dad says we’ll correct that make it right Odysseus does not understand what Dad is talking about at finish Dad turns up cold water and shields Odysseus with his body he watches Dad dressing in mornings Dad is persnickety to last details of French cuff links silk handkerchief in breast pocket even Dad’s fingernails toenails are manicured buffed shiny clear



Odysseus’s left ******* does not descend into his ******* the adults in extended family routinely want to inspect the abnormality Mom shows them sometimes Dad grows agitated and leaves room it is embarrassing for Odysseus Daddy Lou’s brother Uncle Maury wants to check it out too often like he thinks he is a doctor Uncle Maury is an optometrist the pediatrician theorizes the tangled ******* is possibly the result of a hormone fertility drug Mom took to get pregnant the doctor injects Odysseus with a hormone shot then prescribes several medications to induce the ****** to drop nothing works eventually an inguinal hernia is diagnosed around the age of 9 Odysseus is operated on for a hernia and the ******* surgically moved down into his ******* the doctor says ******* is dead warning of propensity to cancer later in life his left ball is smaller than his right but it is more sensitive and needy he does not understand what the doctor means by “dead” Odysseus fears he will be made fun of he is self-conscious in locker room he does not comprehend for the rest of his life he will carry a diminutive *****



spokin alloud by readar in caulkknee axescent ello we’re Biggie an Smally tha 2 testicles whoooh liv in tha ******* of this felloh Odys Biggie is the soyze of a elthy chicken aegg and Smally is the size of a modest Bing cheery



one breast ****** points northeast the other smaller breast ****** points southwest she is frightened to reveal them to any man frightened to be exposed in woman’s locker room she is the most beautiful girl/woman he will ever know



Bayli Moutray is French/Irish 5’8” lean elongated with bowed legs knobby knees runner’s calves slim hips boy’s shoulders sleepy blue eyes light brown hair a barely discernable freckled birthmark on back of neck and small unequal ******* with puffy ******* pointing in different directions Laura an ex-girlfriend of Odysseus’s describes Bayli’s appearance as “a gangly bird screeching to be fed” Laura can be mean Odysseus thinks Bayli is the coolest girl in the world he is genuinely in love with her they have been sleeping together for nearly a year it is March 11 1974 Bayli’s birthday she turns 22 today Bayli is away with her family in Southeast Asia Odysseus understands what a great opportunity this is for her to learn about another culture he knows Bayli plans to meet up again with him in late summer or autumn in Chicago Dad wants Odysseus to follow in his footsteps and become a successful jewelry salesman he offers Odysseus a well-paying job driving leased Camaro across the Midwest servicing Dad’s established costume jewelry accounts Odysseus reasons it is a chance to squirrel away some cash until Bayli returns it is lonely on the road and awkward adjustment to be back in Chicago Odysseus made other plans after graduating from Hartford Art School he is going to be an important painter after numerous months and many Midwestern cities he begins to feel depressed he questions how Bayli can stay away for so long when he needs her so bad the Moutray’s send Mom and Dad a gift of elegant pewter candleholders made in Indonesia Mom accustomed to silver and gold excludes pewter to be put on display she instructs Teresa to place the candleholders away in a cabinet Mom also neglects to write a thank you note which is quite out of character for Mom Bayli’s father is a Navy Captain in the Pacific he is summoned to Norfolk Naval Station in Virginia the Moutray’s flight has a stopover in Chicago Bayli writes her parents want to meet Odysseus and his family Odysseus asks Dad to arrange his traveling itinerary around the Moutray’s visit Dad schedules Odysseus to service the Detroit and Michigan territory against Odysseus’s pleas Odysseus is living with his sister Penelope on Briar Street it is the only address Bayli’s parents know Odysseus has no way to reach them when the Moutray’s arrive at the door Penelope does not know what to tell them Mom and Dad are not interested in meeting Bayli’s parents it is not the first sign of dissatisfaction or disinterest Mom and Dad convey regarding Bayli Odysseus does not understand why his parents do not like her is it because Bayli is not Jewish is that the sole reason Mom and Dad do not approve of her Odysseus believes he needs his parent’s support he knows he is not like them and will likely never adopt their standards yet he values their consent they are his parents and he honors Mom and Dad let’s take a step back for a moment to get a different perspective a more serious matter is Odysseus’s financial dependency on his parents does a commitment to Bayli threaten the sheltered world his parent’s provide him is it merely money binding him to them why else is he so powerless to his parent’s control outwardly he appears a wild child yet inwardly he is somewhat timid is he cowardly is he unsure of Bayli’s strength and sustainability is that why he let’s Bayli go whatever the reason Dad’s and Mom’s pressure and influence are strong enough to sway his judgment he goes along with their authority losing Bayli is the greatest mistake of Odysseus’s life



he dreams Bayli and he are at a Bob Dylan concert they are hidden in the back of the theater in a dark hall they can hear the band playing Dylan’s voice singing and the echoes of the mesmerized audience Odysseus is ******* Bayli’s body against a wall she is quietly moaning his hand is inside her jeans feeling her wetness rubbing fingers between her legs after the show they hang around an empty lot filled with broken bottles loose bricks they run into Dylan all 3 are laughing and dancing down the sidewalk Dylan is incredibly playful and engaging he says he needs to run an errand not wanting to leave his company Odysseus and Bayli follow along they arrive at an old hospital building it is dark and dingy inside there is a large room filled with medical beds and water tanks housing unspeakably disfigured people swarming intravenous tubes attach the patients to oxygen equipment feed bags and monitoring machines Dylan moves between each victim like a compassionate ambassador Odysseus is freaking out the infirmary is too horrible to imagine he shields his eyes wanders away losing Bayli searching running frantically for a way out he wakes shivering and sweating the pillow is wet sheets twisted he gets up from the bed stares out window into the dark night he wonders where he lost Bayli



these winds of change let them come sailor home from sea hunter home from hill he who can create the worst terror is the greatest warrior

I

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

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

II

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

III

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

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

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

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

It was their first time, their first time ever. Of course neither would admit to it, and neither knew, about the other that is, that they had never done this before. Life had sheltered them, and they had sheltered from life.

Their biographies put them in their sixties. Never mind the Guardian magazine proclaiming sixty to be the new fifty. Albert and Sally were resolutely sixty – ish. To be fair, neither looked their age, but then they had led such sheltered lives, hadn’t they. He had a mother, she had a father, and that pretty much wrapped it up. They had spent respective lives being their parents’ companions, then carers, and now, suddenly this. This intimacy, and it being their first time.

When their contemporaries were befriending and marrying and procreating, and home-making and care-giving and child-minding, and developing their first career, being forced to start a second, overseeing teenagers and suddenly being parents again, but grandparents this time – with evenings and some weekends allowed – Albert and Sally had spent their time writing. They wrote poetry in their respective spaces, at respective tables, in almost solitude, Sally against the onslaught of TV noise as her father became deaf. Albert had the refuge of his childhood bedroom and the table he’d studied at – O levels, A levels, a degree and a further degree, and a little later on that PhD. Poetry had been his friend, his constant companion, rarely fickle, always there when needed. If Albert met a nice-looking woman in the library and lost his heart to her, he would write verse to quench not so much desire of a physical nature, but a desire to meet and to know and to love, and to live the dream of being a published poet.

Oh Sally, such a treasure; a kind heart, a sweet nature, a lovely disposition. Confused at just seventeen when suddenly she seemed to mature, properly, when school friends had been through all that at thirteen. She was passed over, and then suddenly, her body became something she could hardly deal with, and shyness enveloped her because her mother would say such things . . . but, but she had her bookshelf, her grandfather’s, and his books (Keats and Wordsworth saved from the skip) and then her books. Ted Hughes, Dylan Thomas (oh to have been Kaitlin, so wild and free and uninhibited and whose mother didn’t care), Stevie Smith, U.E. Fanthorpe, and then, having taken her OU degree, the lure of the small presses and the feminist canon, the subversive and the down-right weird.

Albert and Sally knew the comfort of settling ageing parents for the night and opening (and firmly closing) the respective doors of their own rooms, in Albert’s case his bedroom, with Sally, a box room in which her mother had once kept her sewing machine. Sally resolutely did not sew, nor did she knit. She wrote, constantly, in notebook after notebook, in old diaries, on discarded paper from the office of the charity she worked for. Always in conversation with herself as she moulded the poem, draft after draft after draft. And then? She went once to writers’ workshop at the local library, but never again. Who were these strange people who wrote only about themselves? Confessional poets. And she? Did she never write about herself? Well, occasionally, out of frustration sometimes, to remind herself she was a woman, who had not married, had not borne children, had only her father’s friends (who tried to force their unmarried sons on her). She did write a long sequence of poems (in bouts-rimés) about the man she imagined she would meet one day and how life might be, and of course would never be. No, Sally, mostly wrote about things, the mystery and beauty and wonder of things you could touch, see or hear, not imagine or feel for. She wrote about poppies in a field, penguins in a painting (Birmingham Art Gallery), the seashore (one glorious week in North Norfolk twenty years ago – and she could still close her eyes and be there on Holkham beach).  Publication? Her first collection went the rounds and was returned, or not, as is the wont of publishers. There was one comment: keep writing. She had kept writing.

Tide Marks

The sea had given its all to the land
and retreated to a far distant curve.
I stand where the waves once broke.

Only the marks remain of its coming,
its going. The underlying sand at my feet
is a desert of dunes seen from the air.

Beyond the wet strand lies, a vast mirror
to a sky laundered full of haze, full of blue,
rinsed distances and shining clouds.


When Albert entered his bedroom he drew the curtains, even on a summer’s evening when still light. He turned on his CD player choosing Mozart, or Bach, sometimes Debussy. Those three masters of the piano were his favoured companions in the act of writing. He would and did listen to other music, but he had to listen with attention, not have music ‘on’ as a background. That Mozart Rondo in A minor K511, usually the first piece he would listen to, was a recording of Andras Schiff from a concert at the Edinburgh Festival. You could hear the atmosphere of a capacity audience, such a quietness that the music seemed to feed and enter and then surround and become wondrous.

He’d had a history teacher in his VI form years who allowed him the run of his LP collection. It had been revelation after revelation, and that had been when the poetry began. They had listened to Tristan & Isolde into the early hours. It was late June, A levels over, a small celebration with Wagner, a bottle of champagne and a bowl of cherries. As the final disc ended they had sat in silence for – he could not remember how long, only from his deeply comfortable chair he had watched the sky turn and turn lighter over the tall pine trees outside. And then, his dear teacher, his one true friend, a young man only a few years out of Cambridge, rose and went to his record collection and chose The Third Symphony by Vaughan-Williams, his Pastoral Symphony, his farewell to those fallen in the Great War  – so many friends and music-makers. As the second movement began Albert wept, and left abruptly, without the thanks his teacher deserved. He went home, to the fury of his father who imagined Albert had been propositioned and assaulted by his kind teacher – and would personally see to it that he would never teach again. Albert was so shocked at this declaration he barely ever spoke to his father again. By eight o’clock that June morning he was a poet.

For Ralph

A sea voyage in the arms of Iseult
and now the bowl of cherries
is empty and the Perrier Jouet
just a stain on the glass.

Dawn is a mottled sky
resting above the dark pines.
Late June and roses glimmer
in a deep sea of green.

In the still near darkness,
and with the volume low,
we listen to an afterword:
a Pastoral Symphony for the fallen.

From its opening I know I belong
to this music and it belongs to me.
Wholly. It whelms me over
and my face is wet with tears.


There is so much to a name, Sally thought, Albert, a name from the Victorian era. In the 1950s whoever named their first born Albert? Now Sally, that was very fifties, comfortably post-war. It was a bright and breezy, summer holiday kind of name. Saying it made you smile (try it). But Light-foot (with a hyphen) she could do without, and had hoped to be without it one day. She was not light-footed despite being slim and well proportioned. Her feet were too big and she did not move gracefully. Clothes had always been such a nuisance; an indicator of uncertainty, of indecision. Clothes said who you were, and she was? a tallish woman who hid her still firm shape and good legs in loose tops and not quite right linen trousers (from M & S). Hair? Still a colour, not yet grey, she was a shale blond with grey eyes. She had felt Albert’s ‘look’ when they met in The Barton, when they had been gathered together like show dogs by the wonderful, bubbly (I know exactly what to wear – and say) Annabel. They had arrived at Totnes by the same train and had not given each other a second glance on the platform. Too apprehensive, scared really, of what was to come. But now, like show dogs, they looked each other over.

‘This is an experiment for us,’ said the festival director, ‘New voices, but from a generation so seldom represented here as ‘emerging’, don’t you think?’

You mean, thought Albert, it’s all a bit quaint this being published and winning prizes for the first time – in your sixties. Sally was somewhere else altogether, wondering if she really could bring off the vocal character of a Palestinian woman she was to give voice to in her poem about Ramallah.

Incredibly, Albert or Sally had never read their poems to an audience, and here they were, about to enter Dartington’s Great Hall, with its banners and vast fireplace, to read their work to ‘a capacity audience’ (according to Annabel – all the tickets went weeks ago). What were Carcanet thinking about asking them to be ‘visible’ at this seriously serious event? Annabel parroted on and on about who’d stood on this stage before them in previous years, and there was such interest in their work, both winning prizes The Forward and The Eliot. Yet these fledgling authors had remained stoically silent as approaches from literary journalists took them almost daily by surprise. Wanting to know their backstory. Why so long a wait for recognition? Neither had sought it. Neither had wanted it. Or rather they’d stopped hoping for it until . . . well that was a story all of its own, and not to be told here.

Curiosity had beckoned both of them to read each other’s work. Sally remembered Taking Heart arriving in its Amazon envelope. She brought it to her writing desk and carefully opened it.  On the back cover it said Albert Loosestrife is a lecturer in History at the University of Northumberland. Inside, there was a life, and Sally had learnt to read between the lines. Albert had seen Sally’s slim volume Surface and Depth in Blackwell’s. It seemed so slight, the poems so short, but when he got on the Metro to Whitesands Bay and opened the bag he read and became mesmerised.  Instead of going home he had walked down to the front, to his favourite bench with the lighthouse on his left and read it through, twice.

Standing in the dark hallway ready to be summoned to read Albert took out his running order from his jacket pocket, flawlessly typed on his Elite portable typewriter (a 21st birthday present from his mother). He saw the titles and wondered if his voice could give voice to these intensely personal poems: the horror of his mother’s illness and demise, his loneliness, his fear of being gay, the nastiness and bullying experienced in his minor university post, his observations of acquaintances and complete strangers, train rides to distant cities to ‘gather’ material, visit to galleries and museums, homages to authors, artists and composers he loved. His voice echoed in his head. Could he manage the microphone? Would the after-reading discussion be bearable? He looked at Sally thinking for a moment he could not be in better company. Her very name cheered him. Somehow names could do that. He imagined her walking on a beach with him, in conversation. Yes, he’d like that, and right now. He reckoned they might have much to share with each other, after they’d discussed poetry of course. He felt a warm glow and smiled his best smile as she in astonishing synchronicity smiled at him. The door opened and applause beckoned.

January Colours

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

February Colours

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

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

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

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

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

March Colours

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

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

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

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

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

April Colours

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

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

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

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

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

May Colours

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

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

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

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

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

June

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

July Colours

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

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

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

August Colours

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

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

September

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

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

October Colours

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

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

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

November Colours

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

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

Yet a few remain
bold coloured

Porphry Pink
Fox Red
Fowler
Sudbury Yellow

hanging by a thread
they turn in the stillest air.

Then fall
Then fall

December Colours*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I had just graduated from high school
when we sat in the car
right outside of the
residence in norfolk
where he told me
that he wasn’t
sure if he was
my real
father
which
had plagued
him for eighteen years
and finally he had gotten it
off of his chest only to place
the burden on the shoulders of
a man who had less answers than he did

I always assume
that kids know how to be kids.
I'm sure we weren't taught the skills, were we?
No-one pointed to a tree and said,
"See that?  Climb it."
And if Craig or Chris or Jamie pointed a finger
and said, "Bang!",
no referee had to discreetly whisper
"You're supposed to fall down now."

But something as natural as breathing
is falling by the wayside.
These small humans aren't kids -
not like we were.
Company is a chore for them,
screen-seeking solipsists,
and I worry for their future, constantly.

If my six-year-old self
were to appear amongst them
he would stand, baffled,
full of useless power
Like Spiderman
on the Norfolk Broads.

.
I once was young on shores of pond,
Deep in clump grasses mossy, longed
By seasons that turned shining winds,
Older than years etched into tree rings,
I played at song in the rushes of marsh,
Danced to moon from my bedroom loft
And in the theaters of starlight shadow,
Wrote my fables after sleeping narrows,
Dreamed dreams as young boy should,
Rethinking Sophocles in hemlock wood
I named the flowers wildest within sun,
Built forts from the forest floors of ruin,
Burned in rashes of ivy, itching poison,
Swam by water snakes in mucky unison
Spring was tireless as nettles and bees,
A wide river glided into the seven seas,
Pond was lake and oceans uncharted,
Skies rolling thunder after lightenings
More gold than lots' aspirations prised,
All showers flamed, Promethean fires.

the Himalayas rise
there is snow on the peaks
I watch it from my bed
I gaze and gaze at it
in the morning
as a little village girl goes by
sniffling with cold
I too am cold
it is chilly here in Tosh in May
but a young Israeli boy
took off his shirt
and stood on the fencepost of the guesthouse dancing
down was the deep green valley
all of us watched in admiration
the next day I went down to the waterfall
which from here is a beautiful whisper in the air
there are donkeys and a path
and pretty houses on the other side of the valley
and everywhere there are people smoking hash and relaxing
in the cafes and the guesthouses
it is almost like a pilgrimage smokers keep coming
and sit around smoking talking
I pull down my woollen cap my arms and back
feel the chill despite a thick sweater
despite a blanket and a four inch thick quilt
I roll my joints and smoke them alone
sometimes smoke them with others
I look at the hills and the valleys and the wooden houses
I look at the white peaks glowing in the sun
and talk about CCR and stained glass art with Michael from Norfolk
who’s going down the valley to another village for a party tonight
with his young Spanish friend
I talk about Bombay with Puneet and Manya from Kanpur
who’ve come here on a Bullet
Hash Heaven Manya says reading my mind as the joint passes on
to the four engineering interns from Delhi
and all the time I sip on ginger lemon honey
for my sore throat until on the last day it disappears
unlike the young Israeli girl’s pink laptop in a pink cover
found by the part time caretaker in the garden on a pink chair
she left behind last night because it was too dark
come again the guesthouse boys say to me as I pay them
what a scene I think how cool as I begin to leave the village
down the dung-clotted stone steps nodding to the smokers coming in.

Friday- the most promising day of all.
The beginning of the weekend, but the one day that will spark appall.

Down on Mainstreet all the girls
In their fringed dresses, pouting their foxy lips and their hair waving in short messes.

The hags frown as the winged ladies pass by- displaying their carriages a little sly.

Oh, but Jane's favourite speakeasy was 'The Back Room' down on Norfolk Street: the place where the lost creatures meet.

Tin ceilings, velvet wallpaper, plush thrones and back in that dark corner, there is the sound of low moans.

'A whiskey, neat, please' as a shadow in a tuxedo walked towards her and he whispered 'Hi,' in a sensual purr.

'Who are you?' he stirred,
'Oh, I'm Miss Doe' and he lept into the stool with a swift flow.

And the jazz trumpets married the spontaneous harmonies and the saxophone created sublime melodies.

So they sat as idle as ghouls in the dim spotlights, until Jane asked Mr Buck:

'D'you fight in the war?' And he whined 'Cambrai, Amiens and Lys' - his lips seemed a little sore.

'I'm sorry - do I know you?' His face looked as familiar as Jay to Nick. A brief pause in time at that smile.

That was the final chord to the "lick".
He drove her down to Roslyn- to his replica of Versailles and Jane looked intensely shy.

'Oh, do come in,' the desperado soughed. And she walked into the gilded palace which Cupid's presence bowed.

'I have a favour to ask of you, Miss Doe. Would you be as kind to wash away my woe?'

And as they congressed under diamond chandeliers, his comrades gathered around the bed in amorphous silhouettes; watching disgustedly.

As for Mr Buck he was an alien, skin-to-skin with a haunted beauty and Miss Doe- a labourer on duty.

.
I once was young on shores of pond,
Deep in clump grasses mossy, longed
By seasons that turned shining winds,
Older than years etched into tree rings,
I played at song in the rushes of marsh,
Danced to moon from my bedroom loft
And in the theaters of starlight shadow,
Wrote my fables after sleeping narrows,
Dreamed dreams as young boy should,
Rethinking Sophocles in hemlock wood
I named the flowers wildest within sun,
Built forts from the forest floors of ruin,
Burned in rashes of ivy, itching poison,
Swam by water snakes in mucky unison
Spring was tireless as nettles and bees,
A wide river glided into the seven seas,
Pond was lake and oceans uncharted,
Skies rolling thunder after lightenings
More gold than lots' aspirations prised,
All showers flamed, Promethean fires.

poisonous to cats
tolerates low light levels
Norfolk Island Pine

the construction industry is filled with Englishmen... well, let's just say the management and bricklayers, and from i hear it's a ****** management, they think it's cheaper to loan a crane than to install one... as i heard, a typical construction site of has about 30 Englishmen tops, a construction site population of about 400... i might be exaggerating, but i heard it first hand, and i've seen it, well 10 years ago it was a bit different, but the cracks were already showing - how one Brit undermined another Brit, dehumanised one ethnicity using another's desperation / exaggeration of rewards: by lowering wages of the former's.

only a casual inference of the vote -
it's one thing pushing away the psychology
of the collective into the recesses of Hades -
even further into Tartarus -
well, you can see Tartarus from here -
the Titans are above us, Luna, and Helios,
Jupiter and Saturn and Mars - we rise
from this place, at least with faithful command
to whatever childish ambition -
psychology can shove collective psychology
of a populace into theory - that calm resolve
of reason, the unconscious and its archetypes -
but to concern oneself with passions,
that's also necessary - side with the "enemy"
to understand them, and then see past the fog...
in a fashion magazine... citation:
if we block free movement, and experienced
Polish or Bulgarian seamstresses cannot come
into the country, it is not obvious how they will
be replaced - "we couldn't have grown the business
without the help and support of these killed people,"
says designer *Christopher Raeburn, who
wasn't able to find similarly experienced Brits
in London (pedantic note, the dittoing of that quote
should belong to me, i'm assuming direct contact
with the designer and the writer of the article,
ditto quotation starts with third party members,
people like me, not with the person interviewed
and the interviewee - i now understand how
dittoing works in English in terms of quoting
someone - in means as above, but by another person;
but i'm sure the quote was passed as word-of-mouth,
so the person who's first to pass a quote shouldn't
immediately use " " marks, he's not a third-person
encapsulation of a newspaper article, this isn't
a novel - simple math: origin (0, on an axis of
x, y, z), person who first encounters the origin-al
notes it with precision 'the sun will come up
tomorrow' - after that a person who encounters
'the sun will come up tomorrow' will then pass
the message down as: "the sun will come up tomorrow",
and then the dittoing cascade appears - the way
gossip spreads - it's not exact - it's ~truth -
people add to it, change it, overhear it and modulate
it - only the first person from the naked origin
should be allowed to ditto the quote - i.e. use
the " " marks - the second person directly citing
the origin makes a single layered membrane encapsulation -
after that it's a repeat of two layers, with the second
layer ably fluctuating, hence not loss of the origin
but a polymer of interpretations - Odysseus said of me:
'Homer' cited the 'Trojan war', we cite "Homer" and
the "Trojan war" as 'Odysseus' said, myth making in ambiguity
or the gossip factory, but given the sequence
0, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2... nth
a, 'a', "a", "a", "a", "a", "a", "a", "a", "a"... nth we all have a
chance to cite something from the third person,
after all, isn't fiction's limit based on the third person?
the pedant in me had to mule over this to get some
alcohol frenzy from it... and hey! i did).
it wasn't immigration to be honest, the racist smears
were a smokescreen... look at it this way...
the English Civil War... a friend of mine at university
once said: 'no great nation emerges without a civil war',
i could have written something in excess of that
but then i'd be writing as a third person " " inventing it
and almost treating it as my own, which is a no-go
zone - but from scraps you get the idea - go home,
things are about to get ugly between our civil partners...
and it doesn't boil down to wages as such,
Brits love the fact that Swedish students come to
the Norfolk fields for strawberry harvests, or whoever...
you know what i think it is? London urbanity got
to the vein of countryside folk, or Manchester being
overshadowed, actually globalisation ensured that
only capitals are "representative" of each nation
(inverse the dittoing, that's insinuating a passing-on
from an abstract, like Sartre's notation of "ego" meaning:
imitate me in between each "ego" with my narrative) -
they're not, but the golden nugget in my reasoning
is primarily concerned with You-Tube Sensations -
you name them: eat a tablespoon of cinnamon
and then sniff a ***** sneaker - film it, earn a billion -
become a unit of advertisement, sell it, bin it,
record your life, people binge on it, earn a windmill -
Vlog Blog Bog Sven and Fjoorn - remember when
children were employed in Victorian England?
this isn't between a Brit and a Bulgarian - this **** is
about a Brit and a Brit, hindsight: the English Civil war...
one Brit is saying, deep in the countryside:
you know what, there are people in urban environments
that teach their children that milk comes from
supermarkets and not cows, there's a borderline between
milking a cow and ******* on a part of a woman's
body overly sexed up - this has nothing to do with migration,
well, party it does, it want labourers to understand
a master, some ******* Bulgarian who speaks one
sentence of English gives about two nanoseconds trying
to understand authority - it's not demeaning to him,
he's told what to do, and off he goes and does it and
daydreams about his family reaping the benefits back home...
but employ someone proficient in the language,
who understands it, who has leisure time in it,
and you get a different picture dear Oliver - please sir,
can i have some more? no! back to work you filthy
little Beatnik! it's the self-worth pride, the self-sustaining
pride of nations - the people are saying: did we reduce
our youth to write video biography entries that only
tell other young people to buy the stuff they're advertising,
and all of them have become so fragile as to write poetry?!
well... better think again! minus the influx of migrants...
the doctor that relocated the upper-part of my index
was Hungarian... if it weren't for him... i'd probably have
to use a door to pull it back in...
and i understand what they're saying: i'm not racist... but...
my own countrymen have become so ******* lazy
i have to disguise my racism against other ethnic races...
because if i don't... it's back to Cromwell and the
Parliamentarians of the Square Table.

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.

A group show in a city church.
Nothing religious,
but selections from an evening class
occupying otherwise vacant space:
only a tomb here, an extravagant memorial there.

These are 'advanced' painters,
and decoding their statements,
examining their work,
it's possible to imagine daily lives
where art lives in the spare room.

Lewis paints you know.
After Laura died, and with the children distant,
he did this course in Norfolk - oils I think.
That large landscape in the sitting room is his,
all sky and salt marsh.

Jayne is studying the disorder of ******* dumps,
the contents of skips, what's left after a fire.
Her photographs she prints herself you know.
She says she loves to control the image,
chemically, and you can tell.

And more and others,
their 'work' holding stories,
other worlds of imagination and
depths of looking;
the silent collecting of things,
photograph after photograph,
the tidy sketchbook
(with last week's life class experiments).
And yet and yet

at the group show the finished pieces glow
in this badly-lit corner of a city church
where few visitors venture - but you must see this.
It's good, arresting in conviction and purpose.
This is art without artifice, reticent with meaning,
intense with intention, good, affecting, good
well-chosen tutor-curated;
good enough to come back to.

Consoling? Yes, consoling.
I needed consoling.
It consoled me.
I was consoled.

Yesterday, was yesterday and yesterday makes me happy today
I can stand, I can even stand to think, long alone thoughts
when I four to compared to when I was ten more
looking over Norfolk shores building and breaking
moulding and making my time with my family and there Eternal Bliss
I have no worthy words for them

I will see them when I die because I know even then I'l still be ten
I'l still be building sand castles while the ocean creeps in on me
Then, as swift rain
I'l pour into incarnation again
to do my best to help my guest to join me on that Norfolk shore
with all that I adore and so much more

At age 45 I decided to become a sailor.  It had attracted me since I first saw a man living on his sailboat at the 77th street boat basin in New York City, back in 1978.  I was leaving on a charter boat trip with customers up the Hudson to West Point, and the image of him having coffee on the back deck of his boat that morning stayed with me for years.  It was now 1994, and I had just bought a condo on the back bay of a South Jersey beach town — and it came with a boat slip.

I started my search for a boat by first reading every sailing magazine I could get my hands on.  This was frustrating because most of the boats they featured were ‘way’ out of my price range. I knew I wanted a boat that was 25’ to 27’ in length and something with a full cabin below deck so that I could sail some overnight’s with my wife and two kids.

I then started to attend boat shows.  The used boats at the shows were more in my price range, and I traveled from Norfolk to Mystic Seaport in search of the right one.  One day, while checking the classifieds in a local Jersey Shore newspaper, I saw a boat advertised that I just had to go see …

  For Sale: 27’ Cal Sloop. Circa 1966. One owner and used very
   gently.  Price $6,500.00 (negotiable)

This boat was now almost 30 years old, but I had heard good things about the Cal’s.  Cal was short for California. It was a boat originally manufactured on the west coast and the company was now out of business.  The brand had a real ‘cult’ following, and the boat had a reputation for being extremely sea worthy with a fixed keel, and it was noted for being good in very light air.  This boat drew over 60’’ of water, which meant that I would need at least five feet of depth (and really seven) to avoid running aground.  The bay behind my condo was full of low spots, especially at low tide, and most sailors had boats with retractable centerboards rather than fixed keels.  This allowed them to retract the boards (up) during low tide and sail in less than three feet of water. This wouldn’t be an option for me if I bought the Cal.

I was most interested in ‘blue water’ ocean sailing, so the stability of the fixed keel was very attractive to me.  I decided to travel thirty miles North to the New Jersey beach town of Mystic Island to look at the boat.  I arrived in front of a white bi-level house on a sunny Monday April afternoon at about 4:30. The letters on the mailbox said Murphy, with the ‘r’ & the ‘p’ being worn almost completely away due to the heavy salt air.

I walked to the front door and rang the buzzer.  An attractive blonde woman about ten years older than me answered the door. She asked: “Are you the one that called about the boat?”  I said that I was, and she then said that her husband would be home from work in about twenty minutes.  He worked for Resorts International Casino in Atlantic City as their head of maintenance, and he knew everything there was to know about the Cal. docked out back.  

Her name was Betty and as she offered me ice tea she started to talk about the boat.  “It was my husband’s best friend’s boat. Irv and his wife Dee Dee live next door but Irv dropped dead of a heart attack last fall.  My husband and Irv used to take the boat out through the Beach Haven Inlet into the ocean almost every night.  Irv bought the boat new back in 1967, and we moved into this house in 1968.  I can’t even begin to tell you how much fun the two of them had on that old boat.  It’s sat idle, ******* to the bulkhead since last fall, and Dee Dee couldn’t even begin to deal with selling it until her kids convinced her to move to Florida and live with them.  She offered it to my husband Ed but he said the boat would never be the same without Irv on board, and he’d rather see it go to a new owner.  Looking at it every day behind the house just brought back memories of Irv and made him sad all over again every time that he did.”

Just then Ed walked through the door leading from the garage into the house.  “Is this the new sailor I’ve been hearing about,” he said in a big friendly voice.  “That’s me I said,” as we shook hands.  ‘Give me a minute to change and I’ll be right with you.”

As Ed walked me back through the stone yard to the canal behind his house, I noticed something peculiar.  There was no dock at the end of his property.  The boat was tied directly to the sea wall itself with only three yellow and black ‘bumpers’ separating the fiberglass side of the boat from the bulkhead itself.  It was low tide now and the boats keel was sitting in at least two feet of sand and mud.  Ed explained to me that Irv used to have this small channel that they lived on, which was man made, dredged out every year.  Irv also had a dock, but it had even less water underneath it than the bulkhead behind Ed’s house.

Ed said again, “no dredging’s been done this year, and the only way to get the boat out of the small back tributary to the main artery of the bay, is to wait for high tide. The tide will bring the water level up at least six feet.  That will give the boat twenty-four inches of clearance at the bottom and allow you to take it out into the deeper (30 feet) water of the main channel.”

Ed jumped on the boat and said, “C’mon, let me show you the inside.”  As he took the padlock off the slides leading to the companionway, I noticed how motley and ***** everything was. My image of sailing was pristine boats glimmering in the sun with their main sails up and the captain and crew with drinks in their hands.  This was about as far away from that as you could get.  As Ed removed the slides, the smell hit me.  MOLD! The smell of mildew was everywhere, and I could only stay below deck for a moment or two before I had to come back up topside for air.  Ed said, “It’ll all dry out (the air) in about ten minutes, and then we can go forward and look at the V-Berth and the head in the front of the cabin.”

What had I gotten myself into, I thought?  This boat looked beyond salvageable, and I was now looking for excuses to leave. Ed then said, “Look; I know it seems bad, but it’s all cosmetic.  It’s really a fine boat, and if you’re willing to clean it up, it will look almost perfect when you’re done. Before Irv died, it was one of the best looking sailboats on the island.”

In ten more minutes we went back inside.  The damp air had been replaced with fresh air from outside, and I could now get a better look at the galley and salon.  The entire cabin was finished in a reddish brown, varnished wood, with nice trim work along the edges.  It had two single sofas in the main salon that converted into beds at night, with a stainless-steel sink, refrigerator and nice carpeting and curtains.  We then went forward.  The head was about 40’’ by 40’’ and finished in the same wood as the outer cabin.  The toilet, sink, and hand-held shower looked fine, and Ed assured me that as soon as we filled up the water tank, they would all work.

The best part for me though was the v-berth beyond.  It was behind a sold wood varnished door with a beautiful brass grab-rail that helped it open and close. It was large, with a sleeping area that would easily accommodate two people. That, combined with the other two sleeping berths in the main salon, meant that my entire family could spend the night on the boat. I was starting to get really interested!

Ed then said that Irv’s wife Dee Dee was as interested in the boat going to a good home as she was in making any money off the boat.  We walked back up to the cockpit area and sat down across from each other on each side of the tiller.  Ed said, “what do you think?” I admitted to Ed that I didn’t know much about sailboats, and that this would be my first.  He told me it was Irv’s first boat too, and he loved it so much that he never looked at another.

                   Ed Was A Pretty Good Salesman

We then walked back inside the house.  Betty had prepared chicken salad sandwiches, and we all sat out on the back deck to eat.  From here you could see the boat clearly, and its thirty-five-foot mast was now silhouetted in front of the sun that was setting behind the marsh.  It was a very pretty scene indeed.

Ed said,”Dee Dee has left it up to me to sell the boat.  I’m willing to be reasonable if you say you really want it.”  I looked out at what was once a white sailboat, covered in mold and sitting in the mud.  No matter how hard the wind blew, and there was a strong offshore breeze, it was not moving an inch.  I then said to Ed, “would it be possible to come back when the tide is up and you can take me out?”  Ed said he would be glad to, and Saturday around 2:00 p.m. would be a good time to come back. The tide would be up then.  I also asked him if between now and Saturday I could try and clean the boat up a little? This would allow me to really see what I would be buying, and at the very least we’d have a cleaner boat to take out on the water.  Ed said fine.

I spent the next four days cleaning the boat. Armed with four gallons of bleach, rubber gloves, a mask, and more rags than I could count, I started to remove the mold.  It took all week to get the boat free of the mildew and back to being white again. The cushions inside the v-berth and salon were so infested with mold that I threw them up on the stones covering Ed’s back yard. I then asked Ed if he wanted to throw them out — he said that he did.

Saturday came, and Betty had said, “make sure to get here in time for lunch.”  At 11:45 a.m. I pulled up in front of the house.  By this time, we knew each other so well that Betty just yelled down through the screen door, “Let yourself in, Ed’s down by the boat fiddling with the motor.”  The only good thing that had been done since Irv passed away last fall was that Ed had removed the motor from the boat. It was a long shaft Johnson 9.9 horsepower outboard, and he had stored it in his garage.  The motor was over twelve years old, but Ed said that Irv had taken really good care of it and that it ran great.  It was also a long shaft, which meant that the propeller was deep in the water behind the keel and would give the boat more propulsion than a regular shaft outboard would.

I yelled ‘hello’ to Ed from the deck outside the kitchen.  He shouted back, “Get down here, I want you to hear this.”  I ran down the stairs and out the back door across the stones to where Ed was sitting on the boat.  He had the twist throttle in his hand, and he was revving the motor. Just like he had said —it sounded great. Being a lifelong motorcycle and sports car enthusiast, I knew what a strong motor sounded like, and this one sounded just great to me.

“Take the throttle, Ed said,” as I jumped on board.  I revved the motor half a dozen times and then almost fell over.  The boat had just moved about twenty degrees to the starboard (right) side in the strong wind and for the first time was floating freely in the canal.  Now I really felt like I was on a boat.  Ed said, “Are you hungry, or do you wanna go sailing?”  Hoping that it wouldn’t offend Betty I said, “Let’s head out now into the deeper water.” Ed said that Betty would be just fine, and that we could eat when we got back.

As I untied the bow and stern lines, I could tell right away that Ed knew what he was doing.  After traveling less than 100 yards to the main channel leading to the bay, he put the mainsail up and we sailed from that point on.  It was two miles out to the ocean, and he skillfully maneuvered the boat, using nothing but the tiller and mainsheet.  The mainsheet is the block and pulley that is attached from the deck of the cockpit to the boom.  It allows the boom to go out and come back, which controls the speed of the boat. The tiller then allows you to change direction.  With the mainsheet in one hand and the tiller in the other, the magic of sailing was hard to describe.

I was mesmerized watching Ed work the tiller and mainsheet in perfect harmony. The outboard was now tilted back up in the cockpit and out of the water.  “For many years before he bought the motor, Irv and I would take her out, and bring her back in with nothing but the sail, One summer we had very little wind, and Irv and I got stuck out in the ocean. Twice we had to be towed back in by ‘Sea Tow.’  After that Irv broke down and bought the long-shaft Johnson.”

In about thirty minutes we passed through the ‘Great Bay,’ then the Little Egg and Beach Haven Inlets, until we were finally in the ocean.  “Only about 3016 miles straight out there, due East, and you’ll be in London,” Ed said.”  Then it hit me.  From where we were now, I could sail anywhere in the world, with nothing to stop me except my lack of experience. Experience I told myself, was something that I would quickly get. Knowing the exact mileage, said to me that both Ed and Irv had thought about that trip, and maybe had fantasized about doing it together.

    With The Tenuousness Of Life, You Never Know How Much      Time You Have

For two more hours we sailed up and down the coast in front of Long Beach Island.  I could hardly sit down in the cockpit as Ed let me do most of the sailing.  It took only thirty minutes to get the hang of using the mainsheet and tiller, and after an hour I felt like I had been sailing all my life.  Then we both heard a voice come over the radio.  Ed’s wife Betty was on channel 27 of the VHF asking if we were OK and that lunch was still there but the sandwiches were getting soggy.  Ed said we were headed back because the tide had started to go out, and we needed to be back and ******* in less than ninety minutes or we would run aground in the canal.

I sailed us back through the inlets which thankfully were calm that day and back into the main channel leading out of the bay.  Ed then took it from there.  He skillfully brought us up the rest of the channel and into the canal, and in a fairly stiff wind spun the boat 180’ around and gently slid it back into position along the sea wall behind his house.  I had all 3 fenders out and quickly jumped off the boat and up on top of the bulkhead to tie off the stern line once we were safely alongside.  I then tied off the bow-line as Ed said, “Not too tight, you have to allow for the 6-8 feet of tide that we get here every day.”

After bringing down the mainsail, and folding and zippering it safely to the boom, we locked the companionway and headed for the house.  Betty was smoking a cigarette on the back deck and said, “So how did it go boys?” Without saying a word Ed looked directly at me and for one of the few times in my life, I didn’t really know where to begin.

“My God,” I said.  “My God.”  “I’ll take that as good Betty said, as she brought the sandwiches back out from the kitchen.  “You can powerboat your whole life, but sailing is different” Ed told me.  “When sailing, you have to work with the weather and not just try to power through it.  The weather tells you everything.  In these parts, when a storm kicks up you see two sure things happen.  The powerboats are all coming in, and the sailboat’s are all headed out.  What is dangerous and unpleasant for the one, is just what the other hopes for.”

I had been a surfer as a kid and understood the logic.  When the waves got so big on the beach that the lifeguard’s closed it to swimming during a storm, the surfers all headed out.  This would not be the only similarity I would find between surfing and sailing as my odyssey continued.  I finished my lunch quickly because all I wanted to do was get back on the boat.

When I returned to the bulkhead the keel had already touched bottom and the boat was again fixed and rigidly upright in the shallow water.  I spent the afternoon on the back of the boat, and even though I knew it was bad luck, in my mind I changed her name.  She would now be called the ‘Trinity,’ because of the three who would now sail her —my daughter Melissa, my son T.C. and I.  I also thought that any protection I might get from the almighty because of the name couldn’t hurt a new sailor with still so much to learn.

                                  Trinity, It Was!

I now knew I was going to buy the boat.  I went back inside and Ed was fooling around with some fishing tackle inside his garage.  “OK Ed, how much can I buy her for?” I said.  Ed looked at me squarely and said, “You tell me what you think is fair.”  “Five thousand I said,” and without even looking up Ed said “SOLD!” I wrote the check out to Irv’s wife on the spot, and in that instant it became real. I was now a boat owner, and a future deep-water sailor.  The Atlantic Ocean had better watch out, because the Captain and crew of the Trinity were headed her way.

                 SOLD, In An Instant, It Became Real!

I couldn’t wait to get home and tell the kids the news.  They hadn’t seen much of me for the last week, and they both wanted to run right back and take the boat out.  I told them we could do it tomorrow (Sunday) and called Ed to ask him if he’d accompany us one more time on a trip out through the bay.  He said gladly, and to get to his house by 3:00 p.m. tomorrow to ‘play the tide.’  The kids could hardly sleep as they fired one question after another at me about the boat. More than anything, they wanted to know how we would get it the 45 miles from where it was docked to the boat slip behind our condo in Stone Harbor.  At dinner that night at our favorite Italian restaurant, they were already talking about the boat like it was theirs.

The next morning, they were both up at dawn, and by 8:30 we were on our way North to Mystic Island.  We had decided to stop at a marine supply store and buy a laundry list of things that mariners need ‘just in case’ aboard a boat.  At 11:15 a.m. we pulled out of the parking lot of Boaters World in Somers Point, New Jersey, and headed for Ed and Betty’s. They were both sitting in lawn chairs when we got there and surprised to see us so early.  ‘The tide’s not up for another 3 hours,” Ed said, as we walked up the drive.  I told him we knew that, but the kids wanted to spend a couple of hours on the boat before we headed out into the bay.  “Glad to have you kids,” Ed said, as he went back to reading his paper.  Betty told us that anything that we might need, other than what we just bought, is most likely in the garage.

Ed, being a professional maintenance engineer (what Betty called him), had a garage that any handyman would die for.  I’m sure we could have built an entire house on the empty lot across the street just from what Ed had hanging, and piled up, in his garage.

We walked around the side of the house and when the kids got their first look at the boat, they bolted for what they thought was a dock.  When they saw it was raw bulkhead, they looked back at me unsure of what to do.  I said, ‘jump aboard,” but be careful not to fall in, smiling to myself and knowing that the water was still less than four feet deep.  With that, my 8-year old son took a flying leap and landed dead center in the middle of the cockpit — a true sailor for sure.  My daughter then pulled the bow line tight bringing the boat closer to the sea wall and gingerly stepped on board like she had done it a thousand times before. Watching them board the boat for the first time, I knew this was the start of something really good.

Ed had already unlocked the companionway, so I stayed on dry land and just watched them for a half-hour as they explored every inch of the boat from bow to stern. “You really did a great job Dad cleaning her up.  Can we start the motor, my son asked?” I told him as soon as the tide came up another foot, we would drop the motor down into the water, and he could listen to it run.  So far this was everything I could have hoped for.  My kids loved the boat as much as I did.  I had had the local marine artist come by after I left the day before and paint the name ‘Trinity’ across the outside transom on the back of the boat. Now this boat was really ours. It’s hard to explain the thrill of finally owning your first boat. To those who can remember their first Christmas when they finally got what they had been hoping for all year —the feeling was the same.

                            It Was Finally Ours

In another hour, Ed came out. We fired up the motor with my son in charge, unzipped the mainsail, untied the lines, and we were headed back out to sea.  I’m not sure what was wider that day, the blue water vista straight in front of us or the eyes of my children as the boat bit into the wind. It was keeled over to port and carved through the choppy waters of ‘The Great Bay’ like it was finally home. For the first time in a long time the kids were speechless.  They let the wind do the talking, as the channel opened wide in front of them.

Ed let both kids take a turn at the helm. They were also amazed at how much their father had learned in the short time he had been sailing.  We stayed out for a full three hours, and then Betty again called on the VHF. “Coast Guards calling for a squall, with small craft warnings from five o’clock on.  For safety’s sake, you guy’s better head back for the dock.”  Ed and I smiled at each other, each knowing what the other was secretly thinking.  If the kids hadn’t been on board, this would have been a really fun time to ride out the storm.  Discretion though, won out over valor, and we headed West back through the bay and into the canal. Once again, Ed spun the boat around and nudged it into the sea wall like the master that he was.  This time my son was in charge of grabbing and tying off the lines, and he did it in a fashion that would make any father proud.

As we tidied up the boat, Ed said, “So when are you gonna take her South?”  “Next weekend, I said.” My business partner, who lives on his 42’ Egg Harbor in Cape May all summer and his oldest son are going to help us.  His oldest son Tony had worked on an 82’ sightseeing sailboat in Fort Lauderdale for two years, and his dad said there was little about sailing that he didn’t know.  That following Saturday couldn’t come fast enough/

                          We Counted The Minutes

The week blew by (literally), as the weather deteriorated with each day.  Saturday morning came, and the only good news (to me) was that my daughter had a gymnastic’s meet and couldn’t make the maiden voyage. The crew would be all men —my partner Tommy, his son Tony, and my son T.C. and I. We checked the tides, and it was decided that 9:30 a.m. was the perfect time to start South with the Trinity.  We left for Ed and Betty’s at 7:00 a.m. and after stopping at ‘Polly’s’ in Stone Harbor for breakfast we arrived at the boat at exactly 8:45.  It was already floating freely in the narrow canal. Not having Ed’s skill level, we decided to ‘motor’ off the bulkhead, and not put the sails up until we reached the main bay.  With a kiss to Betty and a hug from Ed, we broke a bottle of ‘Castellane Brut’ on the bulkhead and headed out of the canal.

Once in the main bay we noticed something we hadn’t seen before. We couldn’t see at all!  The buoy markers were scarcely visibly that lined both sides of the channel. We decided to go South ‘inside,’ through the Intercoastal Waterway instead of sailing outside (ocean) to Townsends Inlet where we initially decided to come in.  This meant that we would have to request at least 15 bridge openings on our way south.  This was a tricky enough procedure in a powerboat, but in a sailboat it could be a disaster in the making.  The Intercoastal Waterway was the back-bay route from Maine to Florida and offered protection that the open ocean would not guarantee. It had the mainland to its West and the barrier island you were passing to its East.  If it weren’t for the number of causeway bridges along its route, it would have been the perfect sail.

When you signaled to the bridge tender with your air horn, requesting an opening, it could sometimes take 10 or 15 minutes for him to get traffic stopped on the bridge before he could then open it up and let you through.  On Saturdays, it was worse. In three cases we waited and circled for twenty minutes before being given clear passage through the bridge.  Sailboats have the right of way over powerboats but only when they’re under sail. We had decided to take the sails down to make the boat easier to control.  By using the outboard we were just like any other powerboat waiting to get through, and often had to bob and weave around the waiting ‘stinkpots’ (powerboats) until the passage under the bridge was clear.  The mast on the Trinity was higher than even the tallest bridge, so we had to stop and signal to each one requesting an opening as we traveled slowly South.

All went reasonably well until we arrived at the main bridge entering Atlantic City. The rebuilt casino skyline hovered above the bridge like a looming monster in the fog.  This was also the bridge with the most traffic coming into town with weekend gamblers risking their mortgage money to try and break the bank.  The wind had now increased to over 30 knots.  This made staying in the same place in the water impossible. We desperately criss-crossed from side to side in the canal trying to stay in position for when the bridge opened. Larger boats blew their horns at us, as we drifted back and forth in the channel looking like a crew of drunks on New Year’s Eve.  Powerboats are able to maintain their position because they have large motors with a strong reverse gear.  Our little 9.9 Johnson did have reverse, but it didn’t have nearly enough power to back us up against the tide.

On our third pass zig-zagging across the channel and waiting for the bridge to open, it happened.  Instead of hearing the bell from the bridge tender signaling ‘all clear,’ we heard a loud “SNAP.’ Tony was at the helm, and from the front of the boat where I was standing lookout I heard him shout “OH S#!T.”  The wooden tiller had just broken off in his hand.

                                         SNAP!

Tony was sitting down at the helm with over three feet of broken tiller in his left hand.  The part that still remained and was connected to the rudder was less than 12 inches long.  Tony tried with all of his might to steer the boat with the little of the tiller that was still left, but it was impossible in the strong wind.  He then tried to steer the boat by turning the outboard both left and right and gunning the motor.  This only made a small correction, and we were now headed back across the Intercoastal Waterway with the wind behind us at over thirty knots.  We were also on a collision course with the bridge.  The only question was where we would hit it, not when! We hoped and prayed it would be as far to the Eastern (Atlantic City) side as possible.  This would be away from the long line of boats that were patiently lined up and waiting for the bridge to open.

Everything on the boat now took on a different air.  Tony was screaming that he couldn’t steer, and my son came up from down below where he was staying out of the rain. With one look he knew we were in deep trouble.  It was then that my priorities completely shifted from the safety of my new (old) boat to the safety of my son and the rest of those onboard.  My partner Tommy got on the radio’s public channel and warned everyone in the area that we were out of control.  Several power boaters tried to throw us a line, but in the strong wind they couldn’t get close enough to do it safely.

We were now less than 100 feet from the bridge.  It looked like we would hit about seven pylons left of dead center in the middle of the bridge on the North side.  As we braced for impact, a small 16 ft Sea Ray with an elderly couple came close and tried to take my son off the boat.  Unfortunately, they got too close and the swirling current around the bridge piers ****** them in, and they also hit the bridge about thirty feet to our left. Thank God, they did have enough power to ‘motor’ off the twenty-foot high pier they had hit but not without doing cosmetic damage to the starboard side of their beautiful little boat. I felt terrible about this and yelled ‘THANK YOU’ across the wind and the rushing water.  They waved back, as they headed North against the tide, back up the canal.

      The Kindness Of Strangers Continues To Amaze Me!

BANG !!!  That’s the sound the boat made when it hit the bridge.  We were now sideways in the current, and the first thing to hit was not the mast but the starboard side ‘stay’ that holds the mast up.  Stays are made of very thick wire, and even though the impact was at over ten knots, the stay held secure and did not break.  We were now pinned against the North side of the bridge, with the current swirling by us, and the boat being pulled slowly through the opening between the piers.  The current was pulling the boat and forcing it to lean over with the mast pointing North. If it continued to do this, we would finally broach (turn over) and all be in the water and floating South toward the beach towns of Margate and Ventnor.  The width between the piers was over thirty feet, so there was plenty of room to **** us in and then down, as the water had now assumed command.

It was at this moment that I tied my Son to myself.  He was a good swimmer and had been on our local swim team for the past three summers, but this was no pool.  There were stories every summer of boaters who got into trouble and had to go in the water, and many times someone drowned or was never found or seen again.  The mast was now leaned over and rubbing against the inside of the bridge.  

The noise it made moving back and forth was louder than even the strong wind.  Over the noise from the mast I heard Tommy shout, “Kurt, the stay is cutting through the insulation on the main wire that is the power source to the bridge. If it gets all the way through to the inside, the whole boat will be electrified, and we’ll go up like a roman candle.”  I reluctantly looked up and he was right.  The stay looked like it was more than half-way through the heavy rubber insulation that was wrapped around the enormous cable that ran horizontally inside and under the entire span of the bridge.  I told Tommy to get on the VHF and alert the Coast Guard to what was happening.  I also considered jumping overboard with my son in my arms and tied to me hoping that someone would then pull us out of the water if we made it through the piers. I couldn’t leave though, because my partner couldn’t swim.

Even though Tommy had been a life-long boater, he had never learned to swim.  He grew up not far from the banks of the Mississippi River in Hardin Illinois and still hadn’t learned.  I couldn’t just leave him on the boat. We continued to stay trapped in between the piers as the metal wire stay worked its way back and forth across the insulated casing above.

In another fifteen minutes, two Coast Guard crews showed up in gigantic rubber boats.  Both had command towers up high and a crew of at least 8 on board.  They tried to get close enough to throw us a line but each time failed and had to motor away against the tide at full throttle to miss the bridge.  The wake from their huge twin outboards forced us even further under the bridge, and the port side rail of the Trinity was now less than a foot above the water line.

              Why Had I Changed The Name Of This Boat?

The I heard it again, BAMMM !  I looked up and saw nothing.  It all looked like it had before.  The Coast Guard boat closest to us came across on the bullhorn. “Don’t touch anything metal, you’ve cut through the insulation and are now in contact with the power source.  The boat is electrified, but if you stay still, the fiberglass and water will act as a buffer and insulation.  We can’t even touch or get near you now until the power gets turned off to the bridge.”  

We all stood in the middle of the cockpit as far away from anything metal as possible.  I reached into the left storage locker where the two plastic gas containers were and tightened the filler caps. I then threw both of them overboard.  They both floated harmlessly through the bridge where a third Coast Guard boat now retrieved them about 100 yards further down the bay.  At least now I wouldn’t have to worry about the two fifteen-gallon gas cans exploding if the electrical current ever got that far.

For a long twenty minutes we sat there huddled together as the Coast Guard kept yelling at us not to touch anything at all.  Just as I thought the boat was going under, everything seemed to go dark.  Even though it was early afternoon, the fog was so heavy that the lights on the bridge had been turned on.  Now in an instant, they were off.

                               All Lights Were Off

I saw the first Coast Guard boat turn around and then try to slowly drift our way backward. They were going to try and get us out from between the piers before we sank.  Three times they tried and three times again they failed.  Finally, two men in a large cigarette boat came flying at us. With those huge motors keeping them off the bridge, they took everyone off the Trinity, while giving me two lines to tie to both the bow and the stern. They then pulled up alongside the first large inflatable and handed the two lines to the Coast Guard crew.  After that, they backed off into the center of the channel to see what the Coast Guard would do next.

The second Coast Guard boat was now positioned beside the first with its back also facing the bridge.  They each had one of the lines tied to my boat now secured to cleats on their rear decks.  Slowly they motored forward as the Trinity emerged from its tomb inside the piers.  In less than fifteen seconds, the thirty-year boat old was free of the bridge.  With that, the Coast Guard boat holding the stern line let go and the sailboat turned around with the bow now facing the back of the first inflatable. The Captain continued to tow her until she was alongside the ‘Sea Tow’ service vessel that I hadn’t noticed until now.  The Captain on the Sea Tow rig said that he would tow the boat into Somers Point Marina.  That was the closest place he knew of that could make any sailboat repairs.

We thanked the owners of the cigarette boat and found out that they were both ex-navy seals.  ‘If they don’t die hard, some never die at all,’ and thank God for our nation’s true warriors. They dropped us off on Coast Guard Boat #1, and after spending about 10 minutes with the crew, the Captain asked me to come up on the bridge.  He had a mound of papers for me to fill out and then asked me if everyone was OK. “A little shook up,’” I said, “but we’re all basically alright.” I then asked this ‘weekend warrior’ if he had ever seen the movie ‘Top Gun.’  With his chest pushed out proudly he said that he had, and that it was one of his all-time favorites.

            ‘If They Don’t Die hard, Some Never Die At All’

I reminded him of the scene when the Coast Guard rescue team dropped into the rough waters of the Pacific to retrieve ‘Goose,’ who had just hit the canopy of his jet as he was trying to eject.  With his chest still pumped out, he said again proudly that he did. “Well, I guess that only happens in the movies, right Captain,” I said, as he turned back to his paperwork and looked away.

His crew had already told me down below that they wanted to approach the bridge broadside and take us off an hour ago but that the Captain had said no, it was too dangerous!  They also said that after his tour was over in 3 more months, no one would ever sail with him again.  He was the only one on-board without any real active-duty service, and he always shied away from doing the right thing when the weather was rough.  He had refused to go just three more miles last winter to rescue two fishermen off a sinking trawler forty miles offshore.  Both men died because he had said that the weather was just “too rough.”

                     ‘A True Weekend Only Warrior’

We all sat with the crew down below as they entertained my son and gave us hot coffee and offered medical help if needed.  Thankfully, we were all fine, but the coffee never tasted so good.  As we pulled into the marina in Somers Point, the Trinity was already there and tied to the service dock.  After all she had been through, she didn’t look any the worse for wear.  It was just then that I realized that I still hadn’t called my wife.  I could have called from the Coast Guard boat, but in the commotion of the moment, I had totally forgotten.

When I got through to her on the Marina’s pay phone, she said,  “Oh Dear God, we’ve been watching you on the news. Do you know you had the power turned off to all of Atlantic City for over an hour?”  After hanging up, I thought to myself —"I wonder what our little excursion must have cost the casino’s,” but then I thought that they probably had back up generation for something just like this, but then again —maybe not.

I asked my wife to come pick us up and noticed that my son was already down at the service dock and sitting on the back of his ‘new’ sailboat.  He said, “Dad, do you think she’ll be alright?” and I said to him, “Son, she’ll be even better than that. If she could go through what happened today and remain above water, she can go through anything — and so can you.  I’m really proud of the way you handled yourself today.”

My Son is now almost thirty years old, and we talk about that day often. The memory of hitting the bridge and surviving is something we will forever share.  As a family, we continued to sail the Trinity for many years until our interests moved to Wyoming.  We then placed the Trinity in the capable hands of our neighbor Bobby, next door, who sails her to this day.

All through those years though, and especially during the Stone Harbor Regatta over the Fourth of July weekend, there was no mistaking our crew when you saw us coming through your back basin in the ‘Parade of Ships.’  Everyone aboard was dressed in a red polo shirt, and if you happened to look at any of us from behind, you would have seen …

                               ‘The Crew Of The Trinity’  
                         FULL CONTACT SAILING ONLY!

I have written so much
****** poetry across this city;

left it in bars, under streetlights, and

In the bathrooms where people have ******
all over the toilet seats
and I had to use my poems
to clean it up.

They are on napkins
and receipts;
pieces of toilet paper,
and even a one-liner
on the carcass
of a piece of paper
that once held a straw.

The words get soggy on wet bars
and bloom like black flowers
losing all consistency and coherence.

Sometimes
I write them out of pure impetus.

To get me going,
I need a couple beers and those
Pabst-drinking, past-drunk
drunk girls that get close up to you
and put their lips on your earlobes
like they want to tell you a secret

But all you get is a present
of soft stinging breath.

Sometimes
I write them for some girl I meet,
like the one who came up and sat down
right beside me.

She said her name was
so and so.

I said my name was
so and so,

so we got to talking

And the topic finally reared its
fat, ugly head:

“Are you going to school?”

“Yea I go to State”

“Oh that’s cool, whats your major?”

“Creative writing”

Then she smiles at me
like I’ve got some broccoli
in my teeth,

and she wants to figure out a way to tell me

without breaking
this three-beer-good-buzzing mood,

finally she says:

“write me something”

And I become a dog for her.

In my doggish way
I take my tail
out of my pocket
and tuck it's wiggling self
onto a napkin.

I write
about how meeting someone new,
is like trying to figure out
if what you’re looking at is a skyscraper
or a mountain,
or just a Norfolk freight train
barreling down the tracks
with your name on it’s front grille.

It's the age range that strikes me, sitting here in the semi darkness, in Norfolk, in the Show Ground.

It's the age of the sky - the view consistent with years past, but fresh each day, each minute, ever changing and ever moving through star-scapes which shift as we speed through created space, spinning and moving on on voyages into the unknown, through brave new skys created for us to stretch our legs: us little space people, tumbling with nothing holding us up or down.

It's the age range - the trees standing for centuries,  the insects breathing their last before tea time,  and human kind, kidding ourselves that we're in control of all we survey, when the truth is quite different.

It's the age range -  the kids in their first year fascinated by all they see; school age children, waiting to be amused and vocal when parents fall short; teens fascinated by themselves and curious about boundaries;  young adults finding what lies beyond is just as amazing and just as laborious as they imagined;

and then the middle (and not so middle) aged, sporting practical footwear, factor 50, and voicing their conviction that they've moved the facilities further apart this year.

It's the age range of the new day generation - stretching from nought to mid eighties, all under canvas or luxuriating in caravans that, like their occupants, have arguably seen better days.

It's the age range and God's infinite patience with all of us, as he guides our paths, through space, through fields and through our years seeking him and through what he has prepared along the paths yet trodden - whether in practical boots, flip flops or crocks.

It's the age range that reminds me that we're all one generation as far as Father is concerned, cos we're all his children with no room for grandchildren in this family of God, in this field, under this sky that he created for weeks like this.

When we go aboating on the Norfolk Broads
Taking all our memories from the years before
As from childhood after the Second World War
Holidays were a speciality greatly to be adored
A prized commodity, a delight to be taken right
So going aboating on the Norfolk Broads was all.

Love Mary

He took up his stealth
And went to Norfolk
To where his boat was moored
Near a small hotel he rested well
And watched the sun go down.

The peace beyond all understanding
Overtook his mind and all the days
He sailed away over the Norfolk Broads.
Until it came to the crunch and he had to
Write,
Some poetry to linger in the wind.

Love Mary xxxx

He had no name to call his own
no true home either
he had been following his footsteps into unknown
for an unknown amount of time
days, weeks, months, years?
the convalescent bond he shares with his heart and his gut and his spine
meander around and through his humanity
tributaries of some God sized river
when the night comes around
he hunkers down in a suitable place
and drifts off to restless sleep
his legs twitching with excitement like an old dog’s dreams
he is a biblical figure in a non-biblical world
he drinks too much and vomits up cringe inducing truths
let’s things slip
but all in the name of honesty
all in the name of passion
all in the name of the nameless father who cast him out from Eden
he roams with the cold, the hungry, the tired, the poor
he roams through crack deals on Y street
and date rapes on Laurel
he roams and roams and roams until sneakers become slippers become bare feet
riddled with blisters turned callous
he roams with the forever sleepy drunks who murmur nothings at nobody
he has a harmonica and he plays a song called love
sleeping under the divine sanctity of cathedral steps
smelling like the James River
Norfolk salt in his hair
and a tan that only comes with those who have a pinch of Southern Soil in their blood
he roams seeking out the answers that we didn’t have the time or courage
to pursue

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                                     ­   90,000 Screaming Fans

                     There are those like Norfolk who follow me because I
                     wear the crown, there are those like Master Cromwell
                     who follow me because they are jackals with sharp
                     teeth and I'm their tiger, there's a mass that follows me
                     because it follows anything that moves. And then
                     there's you.

                  -Henry VII to Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons

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https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-college-football-dan-mullen-gainesville-football-1­e21c3bd07b05e4ea0ecd02fa9923679

‘Great big skies tumbling down to earth
it’s like that in Norfolk,’ says Barb.
‘That I understand,’ I say, ‘but where do you
stand on crying when your young dog dies?’
‘Been there and bought the tee-shirt,’ she said.
‘What about thinking of the human as a machine?’
‘I think of the human more as a ghost.’
‘And where do you stand on Easter Eggs?  Are they a travesty
of the most sacred of Christian festivals?’
‘I stand by Easter Eggs as the most glorious
statement of Pagan intent and will always eat them
naked, sat on a bed of ferns.’
‘For such is your want Barb, of that I am aware.’
Yes dear Ben, that is my want and why I like to collect
crystal owls.’
And in such ways, mysteries are solved.

If ever there were a magnificent view
Hooded by a crisp golden sky
It is the Norfolk fields of blue
A first class seat money can buy.
Rows upon rows of lavender divine
In straight lines up and then down
The performance it gives is all mine
And I have the best seat in town.