Asides to Walt Whitman

I learned recently that a new poem of mine was to be published by Red River Review.

Its title, "Asides to Walt Whitman, where Brooklyn Ferry Intersects the Seventh Circle of Dante's Hell," is nearly as long as the poem itself. I haven't written anything new for sometime, but recently I've drifted back into writing, with an idea for a sequence of poems that have as their basis a form of political/ecological/cultural outrage, free-wheeling writing with little self-absorbtion - archetypically, the cold, ironic eye applied to the form.

Although linked to a new poem, "Asides"as a title is forty years old. In 1974, I was living in West Palm Beach, Florida. I rented a two-bedroom apartment that, in the 1920s, served as the 'summer house' behind the main house, where wealthy residents retreated when they wanted to get away from the stifling heat of the larger residence during the hot summer days and nights.

I had the place to myself, and in part-payment of rent, I used to do chores for the lady who owned the property. This was in the time of the Arab oil embargo, and union construction work all but dried up at the time, and with it my livlihood.

With the time on my hands, I planned a series of long poems, with the energy and ambition typical of youth. For a number of years thereafter, I did in fact use section titles of the opus magnus, either as they were intended, as parts of longer poems, or in some cases as individual poem titles, but the main series of sets and sub-sets of philosophical musings never materialised as I had hoped.

Thinking back, and considering the hundreds of pages of poetry I've written and published, I've concluded that the 'golden thread' of poetic sensibility that ran through that original outline of work, had indeed found its way to the page, though perhaps in guises somewhat different to those originally intended.


 

My Friend, Charles Dance

About fifteen years ago, we took the night ferry from Harwich to the Hook of Holland, and from there a bus into Amsterdam. 

The trip was part of a week's short-haul holidays, the first to Amsterdam, spending a long day there before catching the return ferry back, then home for a day, after which we caught a short flight to Dublin, where we stayed an hour up the coast from the city, coming and going by train between the city and our accommodation.

In Amsterdam, we visited the van Gough museum, a few bars, and the usual tourist haunts. Amsterdam is well known for its graphic sex literature on view in any shop and on every street corner. A postcard stand might contain a pretty picture of Dutch flowers along canals, as well as an enormous erect penis (our oldest daughter, as we passed, covering her younger sister's eyes and shouting, "Don't look, Erin, don't look!").

On the return ferry that night, I felt a little seasick, lying there, quietly munching on a cracker to settle my stomach, and listening through tissue paper walls to a couple in the next cabin, having sex. At least I assume that's what they were doing. The woman was shouting, "Oh Ray, Ray, oh oh," with attendant grunts and voice flutings.

The beer in Amsterdam, by the way, is excellent.

The flight we took to Dublin should have been uneventful, only an hour's flying time from our local airport, but as we walked across the tamac to the plane, my wife stepped along an uneven section and twisted her foot. By the time we boarded, and then during air time, the ankle became so swollen she could hardly stand. 

From Dublin, we made our way up the coast to our accommodation, where, at the tiny local train station, my wife duly informed me she was now going to faint, and did. A young Vietnamese doctor happened to be at the little station, and the stationmaster and another man, a hapless civilian conscripted for the occasion, carried her from the platform opposite, back down the connecting pedestrain tunnel, to a small waiting room, where she revived a little, and the kind young doctor stayed with us until my wife recovered.

At our accommodation, we borrowed a cane, or walking stick, from our landlady, and my wife hobbled around the city, the colleges, the streets of James Joyce statues and Guinness pubs, so all we planned to see, we were able to see after all. 

After a couple of days, her foot was better, and we thought we'd spend our last day in Dublin visiting a couple of interesting restaurants. As we passed by a little bar, outside of which were a few tables on the pavement under an awning, I glanced across at one or two people having coffee, and noticed a man sitting on his own, reading a book. He wore a bulky jacket and a flat cap pulled down low over his forehead. It was the film actor, Charles Dance.

I said to my wife, "That's Charles Dance," which she doubted, then agreed it was indeed him. I said I thought I'd just go and say hello. Quietly, so as not to attract attention, I said, "Hello, Mr Dance. We just wanted to say how much we admire your film work," looking back towards my wife and daughters. He nodded, smiling a little, and replied, "Thank you."

Since then, whenever he appears on TV, or we see a film of his advertised at the cinema, my wife, in mock excitement, and with just an edge of sarcasm in her voice, notes, that it's my friend, Charles Dance.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 4

London Calling


The cold of this season blanks the trees.
The sap curls catlike in the roots.
On the panes, a map of ice unfurls.
I read its longitude uncertainly, a foreigner
lost in foreign spheres, breathless on my brittle axis.
 
My children prosper in this kingdom.
They swallow rage the English way, and learn
to speak the language.
 
Along the platforms underground
the Tube soot settles on the tourist,
and posters promise paradise, for postcodes in Sloane Square.
 
The Archangel of True Love queues for Blackfriars,
wings tucked ragged in a tattered mac, a self
we conjured through the twenty years of vows
we made.
 
London burns, for us a fire forever.
 
The city’s wet slate, turf
sodden with a month of rain, and shoe leather wrung dry
in daily ritual, these artefacts eclipse the tropic lightning.
Mornington Crescent’s rank, dissembling lift
disappears with one long kiss,
and watery sun fine-tunes the city’s pallor.
 
My face stares back
in standing pools of rain, a Cubist lithograph
lost in diesel percolations.
The contrails fade into the middle distance,
you looking back, again the smile, the blowing kiss full-profile,
a Serpentine vignette we trust to willowy,
Pre-Raphaelite daughters.


copyright 2004-2014 Estill Pollock

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 3

Pictures from the Moon
 
 
The booster rises, lifting stage by stage
into the starry melt, the blue dissolve
the astronauts in tumbling circuits gauge
against ascendant constellations; solve
the universe. Where catchlight lives evolve
in fiery traces, revolutions chase
a turning rock and overtake each phase.
 
Armstrong dances in Tranquillity.
He speaks into the helmet mike, space-speak
a tiny world away from our TV:
A-OK, the crimped dust bootprint, antique
resolve to sanctify the earth’s physique.
We hover here, and question what it means
to clear the gravity beyond our screens.
 
The flag’s foil galaxy unfurls, its field
a rigid fakery in solar glare,
saluted over vacuum miles of steeled
intent acknowledging the life we share.
Within the breached continuum, our flair
for physics fills the sky: the world bluewhite,
remote, yet intimate this summer night.
 
The drifting debris from the mission turns
to atmospheric haze, a random ash
of spent ignition fading as it burns.
They ride the heatshield home, a sinking trash
of expectations, parachuted cache
recovered from the hollow zone, the deep
we recognise in promises we keep.


copyright 2004-2014 Estill Pollock

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 2

VERSIONS OF SANCTUARY
 
1. Freefall
 
The night sky’s wash
of light towards morning, pale
where ornaments of weather gutter and
the blankness bleeds
to dawn, confirms the old
 
circumference.
Imposing my future
on nameless nebulae, the dead stroke of
unwinding time
that marks each starry twist,
 
I wake to clouds
and monuments of grass,
a world of my making, and you. The downs’
road ribbons south.
Off Dover’s chalky stump
 
the shore birds hack,
the white horse waves a bait
for beacon flights, gulls sunk or lifting, some
turned slowly on
the axis carved from air.
 
A broken will
makes pretty patterns in
the sand, the leap through wedding rings to clear
the edge, or changed
in mind, step back, take heart.
 
The dirty plugs
of nests deface the cliffs,
seen briefly by the suicides who pass
like random stones
dislodged, the view at last
 
a glimpse of God,
a curiosity
of embryo-bursts and shell spoil, the paths
the poets took
declining future tense.
 
The wishing star
we shared shines on, pencil-lines
of intimating light the shape of France:
to walk there now
across the water, walk
 
without regard
or expectation, yet
arrive in knowledge all the journeys teach
in time, each chance
a true chance taken once,
 
and so believe.
The road upcountry leads
by switchback miles to you, a change of mind
as Kent clouds change
and limestone contours stray
 
beyond this sweep
of local dialects.
The map is veined with subtle brightness and
a reckoning
of delicate resolve.

 
2. Signatures in Time
 
March warms the world.
The blackthorn canopy
stitched white in bursts against birdtumble blue
defies me to
ignore the season’s pledge.
 
The seedling light
capillary, revives
insistent bully breath through leafy planes
and starling din
and footfall quickening.
 
This is enough,
enough of home, the burnt
reminders and the letters whole again
with answers, years,
a kind of distance bridged—
 
the town asleep
and farmlands cool in mist,
the decades braided with expectancy
and you and I
again, again, again.
 
I drove up through
the country, north into
Ohio and the old house peeling white
and cedar roof
in mossy shakes, some slipped.
 
We waved and met,
your kiss in porch shade shook
the miles away, the somewhere habitat
of voices, friends
of friends we nearly shared.
 
The marketplace
of haberdashery
and berry stalls we wrapped in hippie shawls
and bundled back
high, kitchen table love
 
through open doors,
you shouting while the room
spun out into the Magellanic clouds,
the word in you
was yes, your mouth shaped yes.
 
The long day cooled
to quilted tangles, roughed
sheets curled in human form we recognise
where curtains twist
a cornsilk crescent moon
 
and cricket worlds
ignite. The polished grain
of steering wheel responds to lazy S
of road each bend
provides, yet cannot meet
 
the mapping’s stroke
so well as you, this tour
of sudden destinations, blowing revs
through early hours
where distant dreams preside.
 
This chance, believe
as I believed that all
things possible begin as we began,
conniving towards
an immortality.
 
Between us now
a thousand miles of road
and thirty years, the muddy waters’ sluice
of disregard
and marriages adrift,
 
the farm sold on,
the T-bird parked for spares
until the pretty chassis gleamed alone.
Returning here
was chasing empty sky.
 
The tenured life
the microchip has made
confuses software with a flintspark time
we left back where
some species faith evolved,
 
now old enough
to be remembered each
to each, as comfort to the chosen ghosts
who hover here
forgiven and apart.

 
3. Conditions of Service
 
Another age
of jangled nerves, preserved
in archive footage distant as the moon,
the warhead sheen
a rare ceramic glaze
 
from Sumer’s ruins,
the tablets of the tribes
each hammered wedge of cuneiform defaced
discovered then
in keystrokes counting down
 
to airbursts and
atomic winter: there
we wait and watch and mark the blood scent in
the evening news
of death leviathan.
 
Those siren days
of nineteen sixty-two
found fallout shelters full of children and
the cornfields drilled
with silos, Titans stoked
 
to staged alert
and overhead the noose
of contrails, space-race nuclear device
we made to mark
ground zero in each face.
 
The streets of signs
in propaganda
films, toy towns wracked by blast-wave kilotons
that vaporise
goodbyes, goodbye to that,
 
goodbye, goodbye
to dress-rehearsal scripts
of Armageddon in suburbia,
and bunkered lives
below the fiery cloud.
 
October ends
as each October ends,
the wet leaves underfoot, the planet’s tilt
towards winter and
the early dark: to live
 
as each would live,
like found survivors, saved
to sudden definitions of our pain,
a numbered space
of calculated light.
 
The launcher scrap
of decommissioned flights
conveys the second sight our lives require,
where weather rakes
abandoned circuits, bare
 
robotics and
our breath against the glass
electric where technology connects.
Imagine that
we stood in dust of worlds
 
and were content.
Imagine that these worlds
were not as we remembered, but appeared
in sunlit guise
and still were recognised
 
as perfect paths
of cleansing fire, and all
the grand machinery configured to
a signature
ignition, bright with stars.
 
A weight of breath
is all that holds us here,
a keepsake anchor for our little lives.
We stood outside
the shelter, dazed, and watched
 
the soldiers on
their rounds, and everyone
we knew was tucked in hidden rows, and some
lay dreamless in
a frozen time, or dreamed
 
of waking, ghosts
among the ghosts they were.
The waiting was an intuition borne
of calm without
a purpose, unresolved,
 
and was as though
we waited for a sign
beyond the wild birds’ crack of colour, held
each cough of air
with supplicant intent.
 
We walked into
the stormy hills, into
a season named for faults in time and space.
The tantrum thrusts
of that geology
 
continued in
our minds, a fire pronounced
as fire, an alphabet of beaks and claws
and fricative
exchanges with the sun.

 
4. Breakfast in Gomorrah
 
As we look back,
the moment met dissolved
into a clarity of dialogue
rehearsed to freak
perfection. How is it
 
the present tense
eludes us, mud-slip tick
now suddenly behind us, fresh, and still
the lemon scent
predicted by the sun?
 
If not the years’
betrayal, say, then, how
the subterfuge discovers us, the lives
we made of hours
then learned to be afraid.
 
An old motel
with peeling walls too thin
to mask the grind of springs next door, above
the entrance the
electric plum-bright EAT,
 
the radio
awash with country chords
O baby baby wails the universe.
The flickering
lamp stutters, trips the fuse.
 
We part the shade
a little, still, enough
not seen except as silhouettes each hail
of headlights nails
to roadkill attitudes.
 
You take your time
to tell me what I knew
before you came, before you came I knew
there was no time
to take, and time we knew
 
unmade us all.
The wild dogs slope across
the room dismembering the dawn, a pack
heat voltage that
conspires along the tongue.

 
5. Sailing by the Stars
 
The promised earth
sustains us with its spin
and teases life from afterlife, and drives
our creature breath
with true predictions.
 
Why else this sense
of place, this habitat
so bound in puzzlement and panther leaps
of DNA,
those acid braids of our
 
tomorrows? Street
lights cast a grainy film
of Super-8 on windows rented by
the hour. I loved
you in that bellnote dawn
 
as in a depth
of water, mountain heart
or avenues remembered in the spring.
An alphabet
in knotted neon spelled
 
Andromeda
Hotel. A German bomb
had cratered half the garden, burst the mains
to make a pond
the landlord edged with failed
 
intentions, a
choke of weeds described
as ornamental. Stone cats stalked the past:
the fuse of hours,
the rampant root and spike
 
of flower felled
revealed the lurking kitsch
and predatory stare. Revisited,
the landscape sleek,
the house upmarket now
 
in plane trees’ shade,
I thought of you as you
remain for me, that day in early May
when time shook down
and twisted skies gave way
 
in consequence
of chromosomal drift.
Who were we in that random heat of stars
conjunct or trine,
those nail-stud galaxies
 
in fair address?
The same bus passes to
the stop, a scar of red reflected from the street
that sings the song
of tyres in rain. I wait
 
for you in hours
no longer than the time
it takes to mend the world, a pressed-leaf time
familiar,
luminous at the poles.

 
6. After This
 
The hawthorn blooms
in stupid splendour at
the hedgerow tumble, dumb except in growth.
The roustabout
birds squabble to be kings:
 
an ack-ack squawk
decides the day, decides
the generations beaking at the shell
and which shall live,
and which life shall prevail.
 
The clock face marks
the sun, a temple rite
for lives like sculpted ice in summer, long
star-driven days
and streams of memory.
 
A kodachrome
of us as hostages
to time burns brightly, emerald hills and
the Moorish tiles
confederate, a red
 
in red repose
and dyed blue skies in tow.
The archway swept in shadow frames your face,
the aperture
a pinched transparency
 
resolving depth
of field. Through parted lips
your words still float invisibly beyond
the images,
still ride the cusp that zones
 
these signs into
apparent lives and drives
attendant constellations:
remember this
when rainy climates rule.
 
You whom I loved,
not first, perhaps, but best
and longest, stay with me here, love’s sweet gnarl
an easiness
between us after all.
 
A thunderhead
of waspish cloud distorts
the radio, and signal voices bend
to space and back
insinuating time,
 
a painted sky
and crockery of stars
selected for a picnic afternoon.
The blackbird’s brute
note quavers and is gone.


copyright 2004-2014 Estill Pollock

Suzanne Somers, on Vegan Heaven

The mystery of wheat germ, pale tendrils,
propaganda pulses, a yolk that binds -

this rawness grates. My preference for frills
of steak fat served in dollops, trumps the mind's

high planes, the yoga zone no match for gills
of trout grilled crisp. A buttered loin spellbinds

more perfectly than beauty - not less my own,
a blade to coax the fillet from the bone.

Walking on the Thames

One day about fifteen years ago, I took the train to London, and with me I carried a large leather case. I needed funds to support a publishing project, and I decided to contact Peter Jolliffe (d. 2007), who owned Ulysses Bookshop in Bloomsbury, to see if he might be interested in a selection of 'firsts' I had in my collection. Ulysses was a small, rambling sort of shop, famous for its shelves of signed and first editions of modern literature.

From Liverpool Street Station, I made my way by Underground to Holborn, up the High Road, past a few empty shops and small cafes, to Museum Street. I met Peter, who was as charming in person as he had been on the telephone, and we looked through the books together. Peter then asked if he could have a little time to look through the books more closely, and I said I'd wander off somewhere for an hour or so.

The British Museum is at the top of Museum Street, and a long walk under the great London plane trees was a pleasant way to spend the time. I had been to the museum itself a few times before then, and knew it wasn't worthwhile to set off into its dazzling interior in the short time I had that day, and so was content to drift around the narrow streets nearby.

When I returned to the bookshop, Peter had set aside the books that interested him. I knew he wouldn't take them all. In a capital city, particularly London, it's not unusual to find bookshops with a wide selection of quality first editions, hence the rarity value is diminished somewhat by their general availablity elsewhere.

I can't recall every last book, but I do recall selling Peter: WH Auden's Spain, Wallace Stevens' Parts of a World, Randall Jarrell's Little Friend, Little Friend, a signed first of TS Eliot's Ariel Poem, Marina, a signed first of Robert Lowell's Life Studies, with a dedication to some friends on the flyleaf, and in his hand the note 'a book I had not seen in this edition for many years (signed) Cal.' There was also a copy of Dylan Thomas's Deaths and Entrances, a tiny book, reflecting the paper shortages in England near the end of the Second World War, and two or three other volumes whose names escape me now.

I made my way back across London to the train, and on the hour's journey home, made a draft of a poem, "Walking on the Thames", which originally was pubished in Constructing the Human.



Meccano miles to London: carriages
commute in slinky combinations past
the terraced suburbs. We meet at Claridge’s,
comparing life to life within our caste
then catch the last trains home. Across precast
and corrugated scenes a sense of time
connects the sparking track to the sublime.
 
December skies are quarrelsome. The rack
of weather gullies back to Seven Dials,
Museum Street, and you behind a stack
of first editions. The dust of viols’
muted measures dignifies denials,
a century grown sullen with its ghosts.
The CD catalogues these last outposts.
 
The peacock soirée ends with Auden’s Spain;
the taxis pass in pairs or not at all
this time of night. We stand in stair-rod rain
and stamp the street’s cascades against the sprawl
of doorways. Saviours loom from lanes, and bawl
their cider sermons in the acid light
where random neon punctuates the night.

'The Best Second-Rate Dylan Thomas'

In 1969, when I was about 19 years old, American poet XJ Kennedy visited my university to give a poetry reading, and to offer tutorials to selected students who were involved in the creative writing programme.

Our poems were submitted 'blind', and we then had personal sessions with Kennedy, who by that time had taken the opportunity to read and make notes, prior to the meetings. I remember one or two of my fellow writers returned from their sessions depressed that Kennedy's evaluation of their work was at odds with their own expectations.

At that time, and probably for about three years prior, my poetry was set out in the style of Dylan Thomas, a high-energy port of call for many young writers in that era. It followed that my submission to Kennedy was a sample set of such writings. On reflection, his comments were supportive, and I hung on every one as justification for the hours and hours of writing and revision.

He ended our session, saying that, had my poems been presented to him as 'lost poems' of Dylan Thomas, he would have believed them to be so, such was the fidelity of the poems to the original in terms of style and vision. Momentarily, I was flattered. He then added, "Of course, you have to ask yourself, do you want to be the best second-rate Dylan Thomas, or yourself." The validity of his comment hit me four-square. If I continued as I had, I would indeed always be the 'best second-rate Dylan Thomas', as the only first-rate one was Thomas himself. Quod erat demonstrandum.

The realisation of the task ahead, to 'be myself' as a writer, the detail, focus, and sheer stamina required, became the goal from that moment. 

The writing associated with this process is explored more fully in the Neophyte essay here, but it was XJ Kennedy's quietly observant manner that provided the impetus.

He is 85 this year, and still writing.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 1

Blackwater Quartet, except perhaps for a few secondhand Internet copies, is out of print. In this occasional series, a poem will be selected from the book cycle, and posted here. Selections are random, and may be from any of the four books.


Emblem Heart


High in the cedars a tatter of crows
against the crushed red of October light,
our own steps sharp in frosted sequence—
who could have known all was mist
and vanished as it came, zero presaging zero?
Iron cold shakes the tangle of streets,
the broken necklace of voices scattered
and a universe of leaves upturned,
this folly of intent blown
helter-skelter in a breath, matted colours
edged beyond the fi rebreak rakes
and bare trees’ clatter.
Your touch is fire and ice, your voice
the wind’s toy, urchin, a fired-earth weather
and wilderness road—
from warm damp and the seedling’s push
a summer fixed in brightness
unravelling in the air.
 
Such memories distract.
The glassy pond is crazed and the world
swims through its own distortions,
is torn and changed as landscapes change,
climates circle, and the generations are achieved.
 
We are reconciled to cold,
to water’s suppleness suspended.
Autumn is mouth-shaped, each breath
an island of expectation vanishing as it forms.
It is a kind of belief, each voice
above the silence, each grid point in the A-Z
transcending streets of better days, promises
in rooms without memory now,
a little shelter and a grudging peace.

October sinks on dirty wings.
Bold birds poke bins with coal-chip beaks,
strut brazenly through indifferent crowds.
We become what we believe,
the nothing of everyday remade, nudged
change by change to imitate a life
as though the world still turned,
turned too, the room within the world.

copyright 2004-2014 Estill Pollock

A Whimsical Exercise in Prosody

 

Nothing rhymes with orange.
Rare, it hovers out of reach
of rhyme, and where each
consonant shoals upon a vowel
to colour and attest
to difficulties with the zest,
we know no badge from Baden-Powell
attends, for nothing rhymes with orange.

Gate

(for Paul Chapman)


The gate hinges rust.
Friends, strangers, all passing through.
Green paint flakes, creaking
metal, the mind, the world is
welcome, under rowan shade.