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.