from Blackwater Quarter, selection 23

Facing South

A journeyman’s domain,

this broken realm of miles and sky,

island clouds, the storm’s remains, archipelago nimbus

adrift in the blue... the cold summer strengthens late,

mist departing, England’s chill offering

to a foreigner at forty: expatriate weather,

bristling stencil of twisted pines sentinel at the gate.

A thread of thunder frays,

rising through heat on a dusty road,

end of the road where the road advances.

A recollection of my country, when brothers

were strangers with a stranger’s cause—

the lake face of the diary stirs,

a memory through fluted shallows

of war, the tattered field of Stars and Bars

lost when Jackson fell: hot steel and heart,

Stonewall our glory

The night goes by, the day

a servant with a silver tray, this too goes by,

time remembered in the promises we made,

in letters and the flowers pressed in books,

origami tucks of time refined in razor folds,

beneath a faded colonnade

faint fragrance of still fainter lives,

chords of music in the empty room,

sudden voices gathering, then gone.

 

The magnolia’s acid scent is with us.

By torchlight the blossom showers,

stamen trembling in the dark,

ribbons pinned to tunics marching past.

In sixty-five, our Shenandoah cause wore out,

rising from the corpses

like the damped remainder of the spinet’s airs.

 

Pale suburban features, traffic washing by,

the bright badge fades in frozen ditches

and the woods are braided with our dead,

restless strangers to the Appomattox peace.

Folding time, they shelter in the hero’s likeness:

fugitive creatures in the shade of Lee.

 

Rebels fall, yet we who enter in the fire and live

are saved from nothing, with nothing to forgive.

To Richmond on the avenues,

on paths of burning stone, bring the Jubilee.

The ghost walking with you is your own.

Dixie Dreaming

Growing up in the American South, from an early age I was accustomed to the 'Rebel' mentality. The quaint offerings of misremembered Confederate slogans fed into the subculture of small-town prejudice and violence in the name of Dixie.

The South was still segregated. Movie houses still had separate doors marked Colored which allowed the black kids access to the balcony areas only, while we went in via a large well-lit foyer. Although a small country town, it was large enough to mantain an isolated black community 'over the tracks', also known locally as 'coon town', 'buck town', and other shockingly stereotypical degrogatory epithets.

Everyday, black ladies would make their way from this area into the white community of well-maintained avenues and houses - including ours. My Mother, not long after I was born, went back home to Virginia for a while, a few weeks perhaps. I think now that she may have suffered from post-natal depression. Looking after my sister and me while my Father was at work, a large, loving, black lady came to our house every day. Although I don't remember her name, I was aware even at a young age that this secret army of 'help' was ever-present in our neighbourhoods.

Whether low-key - a Confederate flag hanging outside a store - or something more insistent and sinister - young black men beaten by a gang of whites on Saturday while police looked on, it was difficult to shrug off the sense of cyclical oppression. Even into the early 1970s, a wave of 'New South' music was popular among university students and rednecks alike. Charlie Daniels sang that "The South's gonna do it again", and although it was unclear exactly what "it" might be, there was an unspoken acceptance that the down-home, good-'ole-boy mentality was in the blood of the place.

A brittle, artificial culture allowed my Mother and her friends to treat themselves to expensive lunches at local clubs, while the reaction to clear injustice towards the black community was glossed over in silence.

Many years later, I was in Richmond, Virginia. Along one of the main avenues there stood heroic statues of Confederate leaders. Those who died during the Civil War are depicted facing North, while those who survived into the Southern peace face South.

It may be the case that allowing Northern 'carpetbaggers' and indusrialists into the Southern states post-War en masse, to strip the land and towns of their resources, contributed to the sense of disenfranchisement and a lost generation, the bitterness surrounding which then bled into the next century.

Today, such notions of race and entitlement seem oddly dated. We expect more of ourselves, hoping that we're better than the evidence allows.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 22

Waiting for My History

Prior to this poem, I made another here,

but fire took it.

It was a poem about Prometheus, fennel stalk stuffed with stolen flame, the one

Zeus sniffed out too late.

It was Prometheus, and liquid heat

beaten into breastplate bronze

tight against his body.

My word's the only proof of time before now,

of the sly theft, and this new place without gods.

 The poem fire took.

 

Prodigal Son

Professor Colin Pillinger was an English planetary scientist. He was a founding member of the Planetary and Space Sciences Research Institute at the Open University in Milton Keynes. He was also the principal investigator for the British Beagle 2 Mars lander project.

Pillinger enlisted British rock band Blur to write a song to be Beagle 2 '​s call sign back home. It was to be broadcast as soon as Beagle 2 began work on the surface of Mars. He also persuaded the artist Damien Hurst to provide a spot painting to use in calibrating the spacecraft's camera.

The Beagle 2 was deemed a failure after the craft ceased to transmit data during its descent through the Martian atmosphere in December, 2003; it was presumed destroyed upon landing.

In the years that followed, both Pillinger and the European Space Administration exchanged recriminations as to the responsibility for the failure. Pillinger died two days before his 71st birthday  on 7 May, 2014.

On 16 January, 2015, the UK Space Agency confirmed that Beagle 2 had landed successfully on Mars on 25 December 2003.

Images taken by the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) identified clear evidence for the lander and convincing evidence for key entry and descent components on the surface of Mars five kilometres from the centre of the expected landing area of Isidis Planitia (an impact basin close to the equator). The images suggested that one of the craft's solar panels failed to open, thus preventing the transmission of data signals to Earth.

A vindication of Pillinger and the science behind the Beagle 2 project, it is a lesson in moral philosophy that creates its own time line irrespective of bureaucracies and political posturing. When the next phase of Martian exploration begins, with its (compared to the diminutive Beagle 2) giant machines scouring the planet for data, perhaps it will be in the vicinity of the earlier craft, its silvery white outline glinting through the red terrain.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 21

The Tempered Sky

  

The artefact of all our futures gains

midheaven: overhead, the comet's wedge

instructs us in regret, a swordsweep flash

and frenzy of lost time, of worlds that pass.

In tribute showers years disintegrate.

The carpet-rucks of clouds relax to blue

as if the sky took root in catchfire lives

and time was not a forfeit calculus.

The truth was what we made it, personal,

without conclusions but for being made,

the atoms of the house, pepperpots

of stars, a soot of change, and that was all.

What else should trouble us, that continents

sink back into the earth, that fossil leaves

suspended by a stony petiole

recall the oak's advance, its dimpled shade?

The stone is warm, the leaf within it warm

to touch, ten million suns and not a breath

to mark our presence here, or verify

the meteor insistence that we lived.

Our voices weightless in the air, we walk

through dreams as through a calm at evening

and rake this vacuum arc for signs, our talk

a smalltalk wish for worlds that will not wake.

 

Signs

The comet C/2011 W3, known as Comet Lovejoy, was discovered by Australian Terry Lovejoy in 2011. It's the first ground-based comet discovery in forty years. The comet is probably a fragment of a 'sungrazer' that fragmented on its approach to the sun more than 600 years ago. Presently, it can be observed in the pre-dawn sky near the constellation Hercules.

We have a superstitious relationship with observable sky objects that are fast-moving and distinctive from other more recognisble stars and planets. Wars, extreme environmental phenomema, examples of great fortunes made or lost, all are associated with the passage of these hot-headed dust trails.

The fact that we choose to tag 'fateful' human events to these transient objects reinforces the subliminal fears we retain as fragile beings in the face of overwhelming and uncontrollable flash points in nature and human society. A 'lucky' bracelet, compulsive, habitual repetition of stacking dishes or setting out housekeys, the selection of the same lottery numbers based on memorable personal details, or a zombie-like stare into the face of the iPhone every few minutes, are practical examples of seeking to ward off that which is unpredictable and threatening both to our physical well-being and our sense of Self.

The last time Lovejoy came round, the Black Death was raging across Europe, the Hundred Years War was revving-up, and no doubt someone somewhere was having a Bad Day. The comet's perihelion and elliptical orbits are calculated easily enough; its orbit through our psyches is a different matter.