from Blackwater Water Quartet, selection 20

Afterimages

 

 

I’ve been dreaming again, in English.

 

I acted in the Carnival Theatre in St. Petersburg,

indicating in this direction the sea,

and anchored near the shore,

end fastened to pegs or roots on the bank

the boat,

Christ gazing at the assembly

whose laughter was repressed by his cool replies.

 

Waking, I found

nothing had happened, nothing’s likely to happen.

 

I thought I had already answered the question,

a stupid one, I admit, but it does in Rome,

this high summer sweat of dead emperors

bubbling up through the stones.

 

You might as well attack the bronze statues,

the portrait busts in the Palazzo Nuovo,

the grass and flowers

 

and rumour of older voices, and I confess

 

it's true, I recognise my own

first among these others, its insistence.

  

I pass my captivity writing verses, unchallenged

through falls of fluted marble, the sprigs of Julian sunlight

just so.

 

A Strange Room

I was listening to the radio recently, where a panel of writers and artists were discussing 'the creative process' as it applied to their specific vocation. One artist, who, in earlier comments had managed to subvert the simplest methodology of applied techniques into Wagnerian complexities, further offered that her Art was a subtext to the experiences of her Life. Apart from the Arts Council-speak in which many writers and artists felt compelled to engage, with its attendant posturing, it became increasingly clear that none of the panelists could demonstrate a core committment without special reference to broadsheet jargon, in the same way that hipster wine-tasters utilise peculiar descriptors, e.g. leather, leaf mulch, pork rind, to communicate to an audience the physical taste sensations one might apprehend in a glass of vintage Merlot.

These sorts of programme, with these sorts of guests, are the result of producers trawling through trendy North London 'eateries' for the Tristans and Didos brunching in that wasteland between Christmas and New Year. It's a curious time, where reflections on the passing year shoal against desires for a new beginning, a clean slate, a second chance. Where these reflections expose one's labours as shallow or wanting, one's natural defensive tendency is to shore-up the tenuous presentations of the last year with leather and leaf mulch, set them in 'distressed' frames, and offer them to Poppy for her gallery as 'something fun'.

Everyone has their own ideals of structure, whether through the application of studied techniques or through associative methods, where a few quick, bold strokes of brush or phrase may reveal a subject in its bones. Every year, between Christmas and New Year, I have established a self-protective tradition of my own. The tradition is that I read WH Auden's 1940 philosophical reflections in prose and rhyming couplets, New Year Letter - at worst a pompous book, but at its best a work of grand ambition. I like it because it makes me think of poetry without having to apply myself to the actual work ethic of writing poetry (It's hard.), and because it offers a once-removed observational platform for a world now as surely extinct as the ritual offerings of bronze and beadwork in a Neolithic grave. Further, it's a way of making myself sit still, and to listen, without pretensions or prejudice.

A friend of Shubert wrote of the composer's last hours of syphilitic delirium, "On the evening before his death, though only half-conscious, he still said to me, 'I implore you to transfer me to my room, not to leave me here in this corner under the earth. Do I, then, deserve no place above the earth?' I answered him, dear Franz, rest assured... you...lie in your bed, and Franz said, 'No, it is not true, Beethoven does not lie here...' He wanted to go out, and seemed under the impression that he was in a strange room."

Between the old year and the new, between festivals and rites, we all wait in a strange room, reflecting on what we should have said or done, the disappointments and terrors, and where, too, we rehearse what we will say and do next, hopefully to allow us to set aside the crutch of jargon, the preposterous, the inane, and find courage in the simple forms, at the window the low winter sun, its beadwork light playing along the glass.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 19

Three Descriptions of the Colour Red

Between baptism and the Outer Darkness,
an impoverishment of time and species
commits to memory
the names of angels in their atomic solitude.

Jorge Luis Borges, blind in Buenos Aires,
considers the eternity of archetypes,
the scavenger model
of the fundamental earth.

He rolls the moonlight in his mouth,
recalling childhood scenes — the gramophone,
its honeysuckle arias and melting hearts,
and beyond the parlour, outside, relentless sun,
raw pampas and, through the dust,
gauchos butchering meat.

The universe is nostalgia, for the comforts of geometry
in the portals of the poorest houses, for each lost second
sunk past red horizons.

The names drift past the fig trees of Buenos Aires,
and the skeletons beneath streetlamps,
and the smallness of the nightingale, across the sea of glass
to Patmos, comprehending alpha and omega,
the scarlet beast, and fierce birds
devouring the flesh of captains.

The Time Machine

I recently bought a record player, otherwise known as a phonograph. For those of you whose experience of music is one of digital downloads, MP3s, iPods and Beat headphones bluetoothed via your iPhone app, record players are belt-driven mechanisms on which vinyl disks rotate. The disks, also known as LPs (long players), are grooved, and these grooves, when set against a diamond-tipped stylus set within an armature, replicate the music recorded in the studio on other machines through which magnetic tapes have passed.

Interestingly, today the words "disc" and "disk" refer primarily to either CD/DVD ROM-RAM disc media, or floppy disks for computer drives. We're a long way from the Top 40 and "spinning the platters" here.

You may wonder why it is that I'm indulging myself in such pedantic detail for something that's arguably recognised by most people. I do so because such recognition cannot be taken for granted, and in this case, such recognition is vital. After all, there's a substantial minority of the population who don't know the Prime Minister's name.

Record players are time machines. My time journey began a couple of months earlier, when I opened a cupboard and rediscovered a collection of old LPs that my wife and I had been moving around with us for years, even though we hadn't owned a phonograph for decades. In a way, we kept them for the same reasons that people keep old photographs: it helps us remember something of ourselves when we were young.

A 1976 Gordon Lightfoot, a Beatles '65 and Blondie's Parallel Lines, were three albums first dusted down. The latter is a case in point with reference to the "time" theme. The album opens with the sound of a telephone ringing. It's not a retro ring, as one now finds on a list of 'rings' for a mobile phone. Nor is it ringing ironically, as though one wished to make a point about retro rings per se. It rings like a telephone because that's the way telephones rang in those distant days; a tinny, squeezed tone, that's what 1977 sounded like.

Other, still older albums were brought to the light. Tenors recorded in the 1950s, operas, popular crooners in the Sinatra style, all I think belonging first to my wife's parents, both now long dead. To play them now, my wife relives her girlhood sitting evenings in the front room of a council house in Colchester, listening with her father to Wagner's Ring Cycle, or after school to Lou Reed or Wizzard.

Time spools away as the records spin. James Taylor sings, "Nothing like a hundred miles, between me and trouble in my mind," and once again I'm sitting at an old oak table, working over drafts of poems that would in time be published in Poetry and elsewhere.

A vast encompassing arc of words and music set in time, set across time, carries us irrecovably to the world of our past selves, which somehow survives in these turning media, to remind us of our expectations, our evocations, between the grooves these slippery seconds rotating through our dreams.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 18

Ultraviolet
 
Select a life. Imagine it more than work,
semen jolt, credit transfers: my theory hangs
somewhere in the ultraviolet, just in the unseen.
 
The razor opens arm wrist to elbow, so many
bright and intricate patterns, the details,
the elasticity of tendons then sudden bone.
 
Blood vibrates at the far end of the spectrum,
bold as acetates, rigid. Blood packed stiff made you
appreciative, a frequency you escaped through.
 
The witnesses are shaky. None will testify that light
is filleted, further proof that membranes oscillate.
I remain conscious of the task ahead, scour wavelengths.

Review this Product

Recently. a poem of mine was included in an anthology whose theme was 'lost voices'. It is the case that for every theme there will be an equal number of aspirational responses, each individually interpretative.

This thread is replicated in other, more familiar scenarios, where the individual response reveals as much about the "back pages" of the writer as it does the writer's initial thematic contribution to the group.

An example of this phenomenon is in customer online reviews of products and services. The customer has received the product or service and decides to offer a product citation, whether critically positive or otherwise. Curiously, the reviewers seldom limit themselves to the cold facts of the retail experience, e.g., does it work/how well does it work. Instead, they instinctively and, I think, unwittingly, offer insights into their personal lives that in other circumstances they would be loathe to share with strangers. The process probably has its orgins in story-telling and other rituals of tribal sharing, the traits of which are as old as the communal hearth.

From an ebullient 'Mags' we have, "Got as a prezzie for my birthday from my husband. Love it. Took it on holiday to Dubai. Didn't need my phone which was just as well coz I forgot to pack it !!!!" Mags clearly believed she is sharing her experience of her husband's gift to her of a Kindle Fire HD tablet, but cannot help but give the reader an insight into the private moment where the gift is given, together with the further experience of a trip to faraway places, so much so that she confides, too, that her usual method of communication, her mobile phone, is subconsciously relegated to a more mundane fate.

And from 'Mr. A' we have the heartfelt, "At eighty one, a lot of my friends have now gone, but now I have found a new friend, my Kindle Fire HDX. Wonderful!" In this brief statement we have a portrait of a lonely man, now elderly, who clearly reflects on a life without friends of long-standing, yet accepts without hesitaton this electronic link to new and wider experiences. 

It's unlikely, if pressed, that Mr. A, or other reviewers, would admit to an actual relation-rich friendship with a Kindle Fire HD tablet, one that would eclipse former friendships with those people now gone from his life, but nonetheless he recognises the importance of connections. These, after all, help us define our own humanity, and provide the compass points by which we navigate sometimes lonely seas.

And 'Karen' offers, "Bought this for my Mum's 70th Birthday. For someone who didn't understand the world of click and download...the Kindle made it so easy for her. She has now become pro. :-)"

Perhaps in the peaks and troughs of cyber-oceans Mr. A might find himself within hailing distance of Karen's Mum.

Ahoy...ahoy there....

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 17

Witness
 
Through dust
twisting upwards in heated columns, by the salt lake a rider
…from the centre of this desperation
O Lord…. war trash of painted shields,
discarded iron weapons, a red tunic
caught in ground thorn
 
half-eaten ghosts leaning heavily against the sun
 
on a day
you are encouraged to remember
 
now every detail called into evidence—
this version of the future,
and the vowels that will not gather to make a name,
and three days of dust, a mouth, this calling to something
just beyond.

Heat

In a recent post, I mentioned a short series of new poems, “Maquettes for a Season of Fury”, without alluding too specifically to the nature of the series. In effect, they're political poems. They are, however, neither chest-thumping diatribes nor maudlin reflections on social issues per se. For the most part detached in voice, they examine real-time issues either through the actions of those people who are directly involved, or through dramatic representations of the issues at hand.

Two of the poems, with Ukraine/Russia themes, went through a number of submission rounds, not dozens, but a few nonetheless, and then an American journal accepted both, stating that they “thought the poems were wonderful and couldn't wait to publish the work”. Comments aside, it's a wry pertinence that acceptances follow the same long route as buses: you don't see one for ages, and then two show up at once.

As such, on a practical level, such writing is a hard sell. Editors tend to shy away from controversial issues, such as sex trafficking, or the 'rightness' of a war, or institutional racism, in favour of neatly turned-out, ironic, observational poems that offer insights into the Interior Life.

A similar charting occurs on the Scoville Scale, which is used to measure units of heat in chillies. Some people state happily that they like spicy food – curries or similar – but clearly there is a differential between expectations in respect of 'heat'.

A splash of Tabasco Sauce rates a respectable 2500 Heat Units on the Scoville Scale. For your poem about said Interior Life, a spice-loving editor may decide your Tabasco-rated poem is just the ticket; congratulations. Unfortunately, much of the world lives at 'the Hot Gates'. If a poem about the lives of those knee-deep in shit and blood is going to offer resonance with these lives, you will have to move up the scale somewhat.

A poem about twelve year-old girls passed around like after-dinner sweets by middle-aged men, for example, may require your writing to sharpen-up to the level of a Dorset Naga, at 923,000 SHUs. And further still, the idea of setting your verses in a torture room in a remote town in Uzbekistan may require the commitment level of a Carolina Reaper at 2,200,000 SHUs.

In the world of chillies, heat is a defence. The plant that is chewed-at and trampled responds by increasing its levels of capsaicin, a potent chemical (pure form 15,000,000 SHUs) that survives both cooking and freezing, but apart from the burning sensation it also triggers the brain to produce endorphins, natural painkillers that promote a sense of well being.

When you're hot, you're hot.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 16

The Bell

It is a language of remembered forms,
the marsh dawn lemon on emerald
and the day waiting to be named.
 
I have woven the shape of the sound
from stork tracks in tidal silt
and vertical brightness scribbled with windows,
along a path wide enough for the wind only,
and still I hear you, across the shift of thorns
and wild pear, an expectancy.

In the Ether

Recently, I had a selection of poems published in two separate reviews, the first an on-line publication, and the second a publication that has a presence both on the Internet and in print. It's probably fair to say that the latter publication is the more unusual, in that print publications per se are more difficult to fund and to maintain. The reviews in question were not chosen with any particular agenda in mind, simply that they published contemporary poetry, and that the appearance of the review looked professional.

It wasn't always the case. In 2000, I attended a writers' conference in Dorset. At the time, Interent publication, if it was discussed at all, was considered a distinctly poor relation to print-based reviews. To reinforce the fact, I had only to mention 'online submissions' to fellow attendees, and the looks of incomprehension were matched only by those of utter disdain.

Now, 'e-zines' are accepted as part of the publishing milieu, and most writers submit to these as readily as to hard-copy titles. The realisation that even a single poem published in an on-line publication would be seen instantly by tens of thousands of readers (if indeed such numbers of poetry readers actually exist!) as opposed to a few dozen print-based subscribers, provides an even greater incentive for writers to share their work through these means.

The poems mentioned formally are part of a group of poems, Maquettes for a Season of  Fury, arguably a pamphlet-length collection. To date, of the sequence, a quarter have been published individually in either Internet- or print-based combinations.

So the world turns.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 15

English Studies

In the shore tree’s angles,
acid streaks of foliage
mirror bleached, unfurled sarongs of cirrus.

Where the sea grass fades into the headland, rails fuss,
and raucous plovers punctuate the weather’s syllabus.

At the point, a forgotten strategy,
a wartime bunker the tides undermine,
the hexagon of concrete shifted
into crazypaving slabs, the rubble of geometry
an isosceles entanglement of rusting steel
still waiting for the Nazis.

On the wall, the spray-paint scrawl: John Lennon lives.

Crake song evaporates,
in winds driving low along the coast,
in brushwood juniper and the scrub of gorse, in this memory
of the same land, for others, gone now,
in diesel haze and sprays of lilac
a strangeness, courtly in the dusk.

A scratchy Sgt. Pepper plays thinly in the mews—
moonlight wedged against each pane, the room
folding and unfolding, and the barefoot bride
dancing in the flames.

Smalltown Boys

In the summer of 1968, my Mother put me on a train and sent me to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. 

There had been strain in our family following my Father's unexpected death in December the previous year, and as I was adrift somewhat both emotionally and mentally, I believe she thought that I would neglect my further education. 

Although it was inevitable in hindsight that I would attend the university local to our home, she and one of my teachers, Reva Chrisman, with whom I had developed an affinity through poetry and creative writing, agreed that a trip to the University of North Carolina might provide an incentive for me to become more involved in my own life once more, which is another way of saying, conversely, that I had become too self-absorbed.

Of the journey itself, all I recall is that it was a "sleeper" train, and that I was awoken the next morning by the noise of the station and a smartly-uniformed black conductor. Other images came back to me years later and were used in the opening lines of an unrelated poem.

Others waved goodbye.

Slow-motion, shoeshine station

a freeze frame of the '40s,

I doze in the sidings - dog-latin phantom

riding high to Dixie.

The sole purpose of my journey was to imbibe the atmosphere of the university attended by American novelist Thomas Wolfe. His first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, thinly disguised local residents of his hometown of nearby Asheville, with the result that when the novel was published the resulting uproar required him to prudently remain absent from the town for the next eight years. 

In his short life - he died just before his thirty-eighth birthday - he wrote four mammoth novels, and in the process redefined American fiction. The Web and the Rock, You Can't Go Home Again, and my personal favourite, Of Time and the River, provided autobiographical insights into my own life and writing at the time.

The visit was a failure. I think I met briefly with someone from Admissions, but nothing came of it. My overriding impression, at the fine old age of seventeen, was that the place was somehow fixed in time, rigid with Wolfe's memory, and without vitality. I found a local bar frequented by students (I think the legal age to consume alcohol must have been eighteen in North Carolina, and, well, I was 'near enough'.), and spent the rest of the day there, drinking bottles of German lager.

I can't recall reading any of Wolfe's work since my first experiences of them between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, but their "atmosphere" remains with me even now. There is, as might be expected, an academic industry around the works, treatises and tomes in support of tenured posts, orbiting around the dark star of Chapel Hill.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 14

Airs, Waters, Places

A ribbon mist off Garda, and thunder
guttering in the Dolomites, across
the lido path a snow of jasmine— toss-turn
weather, the stain of stars we’re under,
confirms the spare conformity of loss.
 
The reds of red façades recall the lake
republic long since sunk past Salò’s port,
sideshow of the Romanesque, last resort
of Mussolini and the higher stake—
steamer routes, each hotel a former fort.

A reedy baffle gates the cut stone quay
against the backwash of the hydrofoils.
‘A week of fish in aromatic oils,
a little wine…’ wrote Pound in 1920,
inviting Joyce: belle-lettres, snug gargoyles.

Heat. Antique towns, screwed down by 30C,
retreat behind a pastel semaphore
of shutters and the weight of pines, restore
a rumour of Catullus to the scree
of broken capitals above the shore.

Under cypress spears, a part-worked torso
rises from a cube of local stone, no
seamless white carrara sculpted verso
to the clouds and water, each mallet blow
a kind of breath, instead, this cold echo.

San Paulo’s shade, a twisting tracery
of bay and bougainvillea, gives way
to blue enamels. Mary floats, a sway
of gold leaf shoaling the baptistery,
apostles fading from the fresco clay.

… sopravvivere alla perdita
della reputazione… to outlive
the loss of one’s reputation— votive,
mantis profile of the hydrofoil “Goethe”
past the terraces of stunted olive…

the driftwood cavities of failing bronze
that replicate these ghosts in time, and screen
the deck chair litter on the mezzanine.
Beyond the bright piazza, doily swans,
their careless whites, engage electric green.

Cycling after Thomas and the English (Review)

My review of David Caddy's Cycling after Thomas and the English, is now available at the new Kudzu House book review site, Kudzu Vine.

 http://blog.kudzuhouse.org/

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 13 (Theme)

It occurred to me recently that in the course of several years I've written poems on the theme of flight, and, more dramatically, war in the air.

The following poems, from different books in the Blackwater Quartet series, examine the air war in the Great War and World War Two, with the final piece in this selection a reverie on the nature of manned flight itself, focusing on the Wright Brothers.



In Flanders
 
Late-century childhood
among water-colour gardens,
and accordion creases in the aprons of the maids,
lulled them dreamily to toys and comfort stories, wrens
nesting at the window,
painted lead cavalry in grand brigades.
The empire of the seaside ebbed, rain they shook
from picnic linen
now shaking them awake, airborne,
strafing infantry near Menin.
 
Death flies faster, quells
dogfight stunts, half-loops of Camels or a Spad’s chandelles.
A circus Fokker swings westerly, plummets through cumulus.
The drifting Sopwith rolls into the sights
and then away in oily smoky spirals.
The pilot burns,
tumbling deadstick through iron weather.
 
Who owns the Somme, underwrites a time whose ghost persists?
 
From the travel books of childhood,
cut-throat stories constellate.
In academy exhibits, a storm of faces
stirs beyond the State,
an inkwash of weather for the world beneath,
for cold suns the nights extinguish.


A Visitor at Madingley

You paved the shires for runways,
for Fortresses from a fortress island, rising
over corrugated fields
in apparition flights, charting Europe.
The turrets swing to track the stitch of cannon blaze,
Reich fighters falling from the sun.
 
Behind the blister dome,
your own face, and the faces of the others
you remember
where the flak has found them:
you cannot place the names of these dead. They hover
in icy miles and burning air, half a century
since their lives had crystallised.
 
Again the old dream, where the silk above you blooms
and sobbing blackout pardons your survival.
 
Tracers mark
the clockwork arc
the machine assumes without you, and you
awake where bombers stall in hammering fire, and crews
disintegrate where the landscape yaws.
 
Bleak expanse of barracks,
after weekend leave to nowhere,
after the drills and practice sorties,
why did you live?
 
Rising to the mission lost, the lives you never save
demand your witness and release.
 
The Eighth passes over.
The innocent and the guilty in their separate worlds,
presences as real as the world
your grief has made, remain in photographs
unchanged.

These graves outnumber dreams,
a peace made perfect in these sudden lanes of stone.
 
Each night, cities perish in a breath.
Each night, the firestorms cleanse.
Falling, you rise again, trading life for life,
your own for these companion dead.


Wing Geometry
(Hawker Hurricane Restoration Detail, Scheme B Camouflage)
 
Across the pane, an X of tape,
the cross repeated on each window
here in Operations—
we call it luck the bombers overshot.
 
Beyond the field, the thump 250s make
confirms ‘…not us’.
From the bell we meet the sun in minutes,
climbing through stink and brightness.
 
We kill, are met and killed, in cold
over picture-puzzle landscapes.
When wreckage
the colour of Kent marshes is recovered, you will find
I am twenty this autumn.
 
Earth and sky are muted, riveted contours
painted hawthorn and damp clay, sheared
where the Messerschmitt rolled
just faster.


Kitty Hawk
 
1. Puzzle in Bird-Soaring
Success four flights Thursday morning…
                                —Wright telegram
 
Along the roll axis, muslin,
wood, and gasoline combine in
fits of lift and pillow sand, wingwarped
twists of distance, that record
December paths this morning toward
a chain-and-sprocket reckoning.
 
The altitude is coaxed. Props, lent
horsepower’s coefficient
measured against the drag, consign
the glider tests to data, years
of improvised mechanics, gears
to prove a levelling design.
 
The ropes disturb the vertical,
the puppet winch resists the fall—
rudder, aileron, lock the flight
with pulleys. The cradled pilot
shifts, seconds knotted to the shot
that gathers in his line of sight.
 
From Nags Head on the Outer Banks,
the ocean’s easterlies fold hanks
of shore grass leeward. A relief
of machine shadow clears the hill,
across the dunes at Kill Devil
the trailing edge of disbelief.
 
The airfoils rotate. In distance
and duration, the resistance
of pressures builds and fades, the shove
of engineers to keener space
along Atlantic breakers— race
footprints they find themselves above.


2. How Things Work
Nay, you shall pardon me; none shall know my tricks.
                                    —Marlowe, Edward II, V.iiii
 
Here is the concept: new shadows above you.
We have made it so.
 
As a bird remains suspended in a calm,
the patent is clear, both suspect and curative,
using volatiles to prevent composite voids,
matrix characteristics to understand fabrications,
resin infusion, filament winding,
as a bird remains suspended in a calm,
will even soar.
 
Not devices, but the pilot balancing,
racking rudders
into airflow, strutted against the fall,
this invention, this piece of God’s mind
821393 called Flyer
others mimic, stealing mechanism thoughts
movable against tailspin, until courts prove
submission of these secrets,
in this envelope of tasks the 12-horsepower dream
of raindrops, their weight upon the wings.

 
3. Salvage and Statuary
The airplane stays up because it doesn’t have time to fall.
                                              — Orville Wright
 
The album images, archival glass plates,
reveal the way a photograph was taken—
exposure times listed, stop settings,
since September 1900 the shore
a suitable location of constant wind and privacy.
 
From a Carolina shack, from a tent on the sands,
from scratch, a likely model of intention—
pitch, roll, and yaw, from these cable-strung axes
a flying season—
three years later, that winter morning
after the last flight, a rogue gust catches the machine, turns it
over and over, over and over
toward the sea.
 
JT Daniels, from the Life-Saving Station nearby,
grabs on, falls rolling in the breaking frame,
tumbles out in wreckage: I was plumb scared.
 
‘Well, it’s done now.’
 
In the photograph, a moment rescued from the wind
rises through bronze pavilions—
today as always, the brothers leaning into weather,
considering time and its contraptions,
and who shall try first, the coin between them
hanging in the air.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 12

pH
 
Blue on blue, the damsel skims its own reflection,
braking one-eighty then away.
The weather silts this heraldry, beyond the reeds, rain’s
faint applause, cloud banks, autumn’s racked abacus,
cloud enough to make a heaven, but not here.

Gods cast no shadows, liquid equations pumping starlight
through cold space, some seedy
incandescence.

The heart is a stone. You know its round brightness, cut
to ring sets and worked gold
and the Kathmandu road to the snow fields, the white
white field that made this stone a fire in it turning.

Oily lamp smoke blackens red herds, spear-shaker sketch 2D
forty thousand years to tell you this kept fire is yours.
You and I once touching, ending white ages hence, years from
that first year of everything.

The garden is a constant thing,
bolting reds, the stamen’s yellow carousel, June
peaking to the slip of autumn,
maplewashed hours’ sumptuous decay
cropped for store and then the mission to awake, root pulse,
the air’s quickening
and sky too blue to breathe.

Amoretti tumble leafshaped, incised umbers, soundless except
memory’s stubborn gold, these words
dry in the mouth.

Ebola, Remington, and the Power of Positive Thinking

Technology is less a two-edged sword and more a Möbius strip.

Recently, to combat the Ebola virus, for passengers arriving from African countries, airport officials in Europe and elsewhere are using thermal imaging scanners, as one of the disease's first symptoms is fever. Australia is an exception, relying on 'alert staff' to recognise such signs. Australia's confidence in the observational skills of its airline staff is such that the scanners available to them are still in storage. For thermal imaging, read instead positive self-image.

On the same day, it was announced that the Terms and Conditions, which a billion Facebook users have accepted in exchange for the Facebook Messenger app to appear on their mobile devices, allow Facebook to send SMS messages from that same device. That is to say, Facebook messages their marketing strategy as and when they choose, and the customer picks up the tab. Further, the app has the ability to both override the device's camera for app use, and can copy device voice recordings. Still 'like' it?

When I was a young man, I recall sitting at a desk, writing poetry. I used a pen and ink, literally, a nibbed pen and a bottle of ink. After many drafts of a poem, I would then take the exercise to the next technological level - a Remington manual typewriter. In those days, if you made a typing error, you simply used a piece of tape with a somewhat oily chalk on the backside, inserted it chalk-side to the page, and typed over the erroneous letter a few times to recreate the white surface. After that, you resumed typing, but the correct letter this time. It wasn't perfect. When you held up the page to the light, the mistakes could easily be seen as small dark smudges, but were less apparent holding the page at reading level.

The Remington in time was consigned to that most ignominious fate: Old Technology. In its stead, a portable electric typewriter, but which required the same chalk strips to underwrite my mediocre typing ability; I never really took to it. It hummed, and when the keys were struck they responded with a distinctive CLACK that was even louder than its manual predecessor.

In the first decade of this present century, I published nearly all the pamphlets and books of poetry associated with my name, principally, the Blackwater Quartet and Relic Environments Trilogy book cycles. In writing, I used either a personal computer or a laptop. The process is relatively quiet, includes many formatting features, and could be forwarded to my publisher with ease.

However, without anti-virus protection, any work I may have secreted as a file would be available to be manipulated and forwarded to unsuspecting recepients, whereby an opened, infected file would give the hacker access to an array of personal details of the other party.

It's sensibly the case that, unlike Australia, we accept the need to utilise anti-virus software to protect us against exotic, deadly programmes that would decimate our intellectual property, our friends' bank accounts, and our own sense of control over the events in our lives.

The alternative, of course, is pen and ink, a retro version of alert staff.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 11

Writing Home
 
At the window, postcards of Paris,
dressed-slate roofscape
and groves of smoky brick in flagrante — I kissed your neck
where the timeslip of light incinerates the nape.
 
A grainy monochrome that cools
and reinvents the image, in the distance
Eiffel’s trellised spur recalled another age.
 
That May the April rains continued, boulevards
bound in steely mist, and cold
for the time of year.
 
As we walked,
grimy pigeons shoaled, scavenger eddies near the Metro
insinuating deeper rhythms, strips torn from time,
fluttering hours.
 
Sleeping rough on cold iambics, near Quatre Septembre
I kissed the white heat of your face.
 
In the dead light we drank to, mannequin vogues
embraced the void.

Dusting Down Dylan

In 1968, when I was seventeen 'and a bit', at the time when I was about to graduate from High School, my school gave me a copy of Dylan Thomas's Choice: An Anthology of Verse Spoken by Dylan Thomas (Ralph Maud and Aneirin Talfan Davies, eds), New Directions, New York 1963.

On the face of it, it was an unusual thing to do, as there was no formal reason why anything I had done should be commemerated. My father had been killed in December, 1967, and this was only a few months later, and one or two of my teachers had I think been keeping a kindly eye on me.

I had been writing poems for about eighteen months by then, and in the school Library there were booths where one could sit and, through headphones, listen to language tapes or records, and other recordings. One recording, I was delighted to find, was one of DT reading a selection of his poems to an audience. I studied his work avidly at this time, and to hear the pauses and inflections he brought to his work gave me a greater insight into the performance aspect of Thomas's work.

My High School, named Model Laboratory School, was considered to have the greatest academic standards in the area, being as it was an affiliate of a State University there. The latest teaching methods, TV training links for teachers who used us as an experimental student population, and facilities that were state of the art, meant that there was always a big waiting list to get in, made more restrictive by the fact that principal places were given to children of the university lecturers and professors.

When I was nearly fourteen, I think in the 1964 summer period before I would start High School at the big County High School on the outskirts of town, I walked into Model's reception and asked to see the Principal. The place was quiet; school was finished for the year. A bemused secretary returned and ushered me into an office where stood a man in his forties, casually dressed, and with a smart crewcut. He introduced himself as the Principal, and I explained to him why it was important that I be allowed into Model to start High School in September. I still remember that he smiled the whole time I was with him. 

In any case, a couple of weeks later, I was walking down our road, back to our house, which lay across a large meadow from the University. My Mother and Father must have been watching the road, because they came out into the yard, waving a piece of paper - a letter from Model, stating that I had been accepted to start High School there. Equal to their amazement that I could have undertaken such an action independently, was the fact that, for my Mother, it was a kind of social coup, that her son now was 'in Model.' My sister was unconcerned. Nearly four years older, she had been a straight-A student at the County school and didn't see the point.

In fact, I had been to the County school, for one year, two years previously. The place had been built in the 1930s, looked it, and was crammed full of all the people you imagine were in the film, Grease, but were the real deal: knife-carrying greasers, jocks and layabouts, and shoals of dim, pony-tailed farm girls drifting through the cavernous hallways (except my sister, of course, who was beautiful, bright, and popular), and a perfunctory little kid (me) routinely slammed into the lockers by Ronnie Horn, Donald Kelly, and Alvin Grey. A couple of years later, my friend Mike and I showed up at a baseball diamond where Ronnie Horn was practicing. I was twenty pounds heavier by then, and six inches taller. Ronnie thought we'd come to get him; we had.

That was the last year Junior School students were put in with the High School population. A new Junior School opened in the town and I spent my final JS year in new buildings with great friends, but knowing, too, that I would have to return to County to begin High School there in September. Cue my mission to Model.

And, in 1968, when I was seventeen 'and a bit', I was given the book. After my initial confusion, it was explained that because poems I had written had been published in the University literary journal that same Spring, accepted because of Model's University affiliation, the school thought it right that I should receive some recognition.

I still have the book, in its tattered slipcase. I was dusting down a bookshelf and noticed it tucked up in a corner. I hadn't looked at it for decades.

I did an Internet search on Model, and found an article from last year stating that a new £85m school was being proposed, to be sited at the heart of the University. I guess that would mean the old place (as it now must be) would be moth-balled. Their website carries a mission statement: 

To teach, to learn, to help others teach and learn.

I can live with that.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 10

Octaves in C 

In the tales of central Europe
the dead walk, and farmyard creatures
solve the riddle at the world’s heart.
In our lives, the leaves of autumn
fall irrevocably to earth,
and allegiances are buried
to the depth of memory, each
weighted with unforgiven pain.
 
In the maple woods, samaras
spin, lodged in mulch at the wood’s edge.
We walk through seedling haze, the keys
underfoot dry where filigree
roots succeed and the true leaf reigns.
Your hand’s touch on my face, seasons
passing, time cast in the soft wax
of summer air, these icons well.

Whoever we were, in the flat
in Winchester Street we became
ourselves, rehearsing a marriage.
Pimlico, in the pretty light
that burns above the London night,
folded neatly in our cases,
and away to America,
and away to invented lives.

In the loft, the box unopened
remains unopened, out of reach.
The self-portraits secreted there
and the paired whorls of fingerprints
if they exist at all, exist
in our intention to be loved.
That is our recompense, enough
that spring sun warmed perfect lanes.
 
It is probable that we lived,
and that the times were suitable.
We pretend to understanding,
in the planet’s revolutions
and the seed-cast of hours, belief
grown decorous, from wet streets
London reflected to the night,
waiting, blank with the mind’s blankness.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 9

Metaphysical Graffiti

A cold morning decades gone
models this present dawn.
My features accommodate the half-light.

The veined silver of the glass is fogged.
I shave from memory,
plundering the past for impetus
squandered in the mirror’s flux.

The dead reside beyond this alchemy.

The razor at the throat perfects the years,
time and places traded for a life.
I cannot recover my lost longueurs,
the palm tree in the garden, ocean frontage,
the constellations’ carnival cortège.
The speaking parts are taken.

§

The winter sky is tangled in the trees,
a pewter fog among the branches.

On the strand
waders anchored in the tidal lees
occupy a higher ether lost to land—
overhead, a gull’s cut-paper profile,
grey on grey, the estuary a surreal mile
where the Blackwater River forgets the sea
to assume a new identity.

Summer’s relics, smacks in drydock
display a jagged ambience.
On this coast, we cultivate an independence
mirrored in the seaward rock.

§

Remembering West Palm,
the bougainvillaea’s impossible flowers’
oceancalm of colour nestled near the courtyard mango,
the psilocybin afternoons
a sentient kingdom, even now…
ground lapis sky, the summerhouse
sheltered from the heat,
clockwork storms each afternoon reinventing Eden.

The imitation woodgrain plastic shell
pledged syncopated love— reprise of Elvis
deciphered through the crackle.
The flyscreen sieved time to a trickle,
you at the stove, singing "Heartbreak Hotel,"
stirring peas.

Down coast on the Cape
the Apollo mission flexing into upper spheres—
we flew down in the Cessna, ate lunch
in the wing shade, listening to the launch
on radio, the gallery in tears:
that distant firework trail where dreams escape.

The threaded eye anticipates the stitch;
a ratcheting glint instructs the cloth— ordered thus
the turning worlds abide.
In digital streams the satellites ride,
death codes kick and whinny,
leap ages without landing.

The martyr’s bronze, the Hanged Man’s tree
in blossom— this is the habit of desire.

§

I saw my life
in a memory of water, my lucky star
adrift in river stanzas, planet rim fading,
ragged edge of atmosphere the banking plane reveals.

Rising water-shaped blue miles,
the frictionless clouds divide
and England,
crumpledpaper fields
along the twisted ribbon of the Thames,
awakes, the world reborn in our own lives.
Stubborn beauty, this is the high ground,
there is no other.

In water meadows by the Isis, on barges
lit with pinks and roses, a foil of potted herbs
cools the eye, blurs into the margins.
Holding hands, we strolled between the bridges
conjugating Latin verbs.

From no-where towns,
the trace of accent, the provincial gait…
the mannered metre’s bric-à-brac
was Auden’s, the realpolitik
of life beyond our lives: the war in Spain,
the smiling face of Chamberlain.

Expecting Beethoven, preferring Bach,
we settled for Goering’s coelacanthine bars,
the whine of Heinkels over London —
this could be Mars, a restless future
scripted in the smoke calligraphy, sparktrace
geometry of world’s end and no memory,
the mountain of our will resolved
in animal tumulus, fire and sacrifice.

§

Late autumn, a borrowed Galaxy
coaxed to Carolina for a reading,
returning to Lake Worth
and winter sun, I constructed my nostalgia
where future tenses ripen, a burnished
mock exotica, a dusty road, a house let furnished.

Why pine and fret?

Red dust roostertails
the big Ford trails in rust of dawn
redirect the universe.

What is given is given always, yet
nothing has been changed except the unreal,
as if nothing had been changed at all,
the brittle potpourri of planets strewn
carelessly across the room,
time’s gaudy wreckage underfoot.

The speaking parts are taken.

Walking high in peyote light,
seeing what was spoken
when red day broke on lives that break,
I return it to you now, the world
as we imagined it,
and as we said it was.

On Delmore Schwartz

Delmore Schwartz was an American writer. His Jewish Romanian family made a life in Brooklyn in the early 20th century, where his father's entrepreneurial skills enabled the immigrant family to enjoy a high standard of living and quite rightly to consider that they had achieved “the American Dream.” However, the economic crash of the 1920s resulted in the collapse of Harry Schwartz's speculative property empire, and with it the family's fortunes. This rags-to-riches-to rags cycle was a sore picked-over by Delmore in his journals and later writings.

He set out to establish himself as an important writer in his own right, publishing stories and poems in many of the principal literary journals. In the late 1930s, under James Laughlin's New Directions imprint, he published a collection of poems and stories, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, and as a result of its critical success was touted as the most important writer of his generation, a burden of gold in some respects, but otherwise an impossible weight to bear at the age of twenty-five. In perspective, this was a time when his contemporaries, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Saul Bellow, had published nothing.

Although critically acclaimed, the book's sales were poor, and for several years he made an indifferent and meagre living teaching. In the late 1940s, he published a book of short stories, The World is a Wedding, again critically well received, but with the proviso that the initial great promise of his early writing was not to be fulfilled.

His personal life was unhappy, and, a chronic insomniac, he became pharmaceutically dependent on barbiturates, an addiction compounded later by alcohol abuse. His second wife, the writer Elizabeth Pollett, said, "He had about five jobs, was working his head off, and was increasingly out of touch with reality.” "Being with him,” she wrote, was "like living on the side of a volcano."

Separated from Pollett, and at one time sectioned, his later years found him renting West Village cold-water flats. He still functioned well enough to review for The New Republic, though, and in 1960 he became the youngest poet to receive the Bollingen Prize for poetry.

In 1966, he was found lying in the hallway outside his room, dead. His body lay in the morgue two days before it was claimed by friends.

F. Scott Fizgerald's observation that “there are no second acts in American lives,” was probably as true of Schwartz as of any self-promoting personality in American Life. Schwartz, however, seems to have found a way around the doom-laden epithet, albeit posthumously. His poems were regularly anthologised in American publications, and in the early years of this century a compendium of his best poems and stories was published. Robert Lowell's “For Delmore Schwartz”, from Life Studies, gave credence to a literary life and its times, while his former student at Syracuse, Lou Reed, dedicated "European Son" from the Velvet Underground's first album, to Delmore, and Saul Bellow's novel, Humboldt's Gift, offered a fictional portrait of Delmore that still resonates today.

At the beginning of his biography of Schwartz, Delmore Schwartz: the Life of an American Poet, published in the mid 70s, James Atlas lamented that there was no substantial body of letters from which to glean important and interesting biographical material, comparative that is, to the correspondence of Virginia Woolf or Henry James.

Today, the comment seems quaint. The biography in fact includes dozens, if not hundreds, of extracts from Schwartz's manuscripts and letters. The comment in retrospect places it within a cultural milieu attendant to Edwardian and early Modernist literary tradition, before computer technology, e.g. Internet, social media, Skype, email. One can imagine the difficulties of a contemporary biographer dependent solely on electronic mail to validate a Life.

Delmore's abiding passion, which shone through personal and professional enmity, was James Joyce, and in particular Finnegans Wake, a well-used, well-annotated copy of which remained in Delmore's possession to the end of his life.

In Joyce's first publication, Dubliners, a character muses on a “life of commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness.” Perhaps, after all the self-regarding, impetuous, inventive, ill-considered, and outright genius of our creative choices, we are all only standing in each other's shadows.