from Blackwater Quartet, selection 26

Pendragon

There are stars to wish upon,

and stars to keep our love songs honest,

but when the stars in the windowpane have gone

and these wilderness endeavours fade,

will nothing else remain

as rule or symbol of the world we made?

Presaging winter, masking fall,

there is a measure in things,

a nostalgia for human metaphors.

For where there is memory

there is also the bond of memory,

changes following fixed forms, teaching caution.

To such degrees, oracles at the core of stalks

devise annihilations—

the hand’s cunning, infinitely repaired.

But was it ever enough, reading of Camelot

late into the night,

or from the dark side of a turning globe

observing the centuries in their steady progress?

A shadow, a footprint

burning in the middle of the air,

shall we conjure whole countrysides, and wander there

sleighting coins from the fingers of simple men?

Considering the choice and mastery of our lives,

sweet nothings, how soldierly we stand!

Yet, the times I think of him, often now,

the features I loved him for come clearer

than gifts of arms or prophecy command.

Do we require of history

a vibrancy more human than our own,

our is it that we champion a contagion of events?

I’ve lived within the reaches of the lore

detailing the books of signs and glory,

dwelling apart from the old alarums—

the hand of the stranger and the weeping from without—

that a sovereign trust complete lost passages,

on evenings very much like this one, facing the night sky

as though that commonplace utility

might lend my forms a fitness and a perfect grace,

where fate withstands the ordering of hours,

the decay of love, and late-walking through the land.

Time’s grammar shining like a birthstone,

shall it be cut in courtly flourishes,

or do we inhabit a round morality

turning on a dream?

That seasons remain forever in their course

as neither tricks of tales nor the telling’s tools,

nor image of a sunchild engrailed in gules,

I witness this trust in species shape,

where the life lived openly by law

tables its elements to a timeless structure,

a rarity aurora-like in the symmetry of the world:

the motion of myth axial—

a shuffling of trumps, a wavelength.

Reflected in this spectrum,

a myth proves princely by example,

the legends configured into courts and clocks

like sinews of a larger presence.

Through trance or shaman song, numb with God

or clinging to the ribs of monsters,

we verge on the fabulous,

where days have retreated into days

to witness the world’s enactments,

a world engaging its own horizons

in relentless integrals of blue: decidedly human,

this providence of a steady hand

like the pages of a planet

opening to an episode of roods and stealth,

linking intrigue with enigma,

yet bound in service to the common good.

Old stars rising forever out of reach,

what was it we wanted—

sweet and easy prayers to see us through,

a house with four seasons and the grass that grew?

As maps appear, tamped with notes

marginal in effect, so should I find my footing there,

for beyond this there is nothing

save prodigy and fiction, the only inhabitants

the poet and inventor of fables.

I should do as well, imagining

what’s due the leagues, and leave land to the wind

to contend with as it will.

But the shadows lengthen with the day,

as we who are posthumous

relinquish our appetite for grandeur,

walking at dusk, west along the coast road.

Measured in acts, the world seems large,

and old enough to answer for itself.

Yet, why do I so recall

the fabric of other afternoons, the passions,

and increase of dignity termed story now?

Do we invent the past, those parallels of zero?

The days bear witness, but evidence confounds,

where the sea’s wide prospect recalls in us

a metaphor of ghosts and private goings,

kin in conditions, attending to its own affairs

as a small rain down can rain,

wash you, make you clean: time grown luminous

where waves have spooned the beach away,

time delivered of the sea, the land,

the roll and swell of the sea and the land together,

or shall the illuminated page

reverse the tidal stitch of days…

It was never the Camelot I thought to find,

as if partaking of offerings

or going up to the terraces in spring.

It’s well, perhaps, to wish upon the star that falls,

though the meteor showers of certain seasons

leave us blank with our own desires.

To soothe the stranger, the mercury within me,

I traced meridians through distant worlds

by the motion of the worlds within me,

but now have burned that page entire,

employed the keener hand of fire

to gauge that tension film of rage,

and walk now evenings in the park,

silent among swans and willows.

We may move with mystery awhile,

willing our names to the soil again

or to the lives of children, yet never find our home.

And though family silver is under the hammer

and I borrow against the darkness,

I wish without anguish now:

waiting for equinox and the Lord’s elect,

determined to winter here

washing the corpses.

Thoroughly Modern Me

One of the more striking aspects of ageing is that one feels more isolated from current affairs. The latest news of wars, stock markets, technology, or extreme weather, all have their interest, but inevitably the views expressed, and reactions to events sought, by journalists, bloggers, and gossips, are of those people who still believe such views contribute to a solution or resolution to the issues at hand.

We who are older realise that these events are cyclical, having seen them roll out across the decades; it's only the speed of transmission that changes. The fact that a live video stream of Something Nasty occurring in a far-off place can be shared on the instant with everyone everywhere, doesn't make Something Nasty less so. Nor does the immediacy of the data offer insight into the nature of the beast. It's simply more data, quite fast.

Recently, I was on a bus, a 'double decker' travelling between a nearby city and the town wherein I reside. Playing the Oldie Card here, literally, I use this mode of transport regularly, as I have a bus pass, which entitles me to free travel on the service.

At the Bus Park, an old man entered the bus - he was easily in his eighties - and proceeded unsteadily to the stairs to the upper level. I thought this was odd, as there were many vacant seats downstairs. About two minutes later, the bus set off normally, and the old man came tumbling down the stairs backwards, landing sprawled across the lower gangway, moaning.

I, and a lady sitting nearby, went to his assistance immediately, ascertaining if he could move or indeed might have broken his hip in the fall. The driver was only then aware of the incident and stopped the bus. A paramedic was called, and in the meantime we had managed to help the man to a seat nearby to recover. Because of the delay, the few passengers dismounted the bus to seek the next available service. At this point, a few facts might be useful to share.

Downstairs on the bus, with me and the lady, were two young persons, boy and girl, about 18, sitting separately, faces locked on their iPhones. At no time during the incident, at the time of the fall, the assistance, or the paramedic's arrival, did they once look up from their phones. At the point of change, they simply arose and left the bus. Further, it happened that upstairs there were two couples in early middle age, travelling together, who only at the point of change came down the stairs to exit the bus. At no time had they offered to help the man, the driver, or us, to deal with the incident.

The events describe perfectly the dilemmas, benefits, and pointlessness of certain interactions. The young people, with access to the world via their iPhones, had no immediate connection with events unfolding in their own lives, or, if they did, they chose to ignore or otherwise disregard them. The older couples displayed no particular (self-absorbed) prowess with technology, but showed no more humanitarian inclinations than had the younger people. The driver, with technology at this disposal that would have alleviated the incident, e.g., CCTV of the stairs and upper floor, ignored his cab screen and set off regardless with an unsteady, elderly man still making his way up the stairs.

Human nature, made more or less intense through technology, still reveals itself in simple acts of kindness, or ignorance. One doesn't need to be 'long in the tooth' to realise or even accept that this is the case, but as such incidents occur and re-occur across the years, it's the 'nature' aspect of the human aspect that lodges in the mind.

The incident described doesn't make anyone present any better or worse than they already were. Perhaps, some will take a lesson from it, while others may simply re-charge their  phones and walk on.

My recounting here is underwritten by experience, and given depth, or not, by the fact that we all now recognise that the difference between private reflection and public exposition, is the Publish button, pressed now.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 25

Zodiac Days

 

The sun in Virgo, and the wild wheat ripens…

wind emblem, time’s high hawk a falling flame,

the same years passing for you, for me,

always the same years passing.

Light settles earthward.

The day’s broken English calls up the ghosts.

Under lightning-stroke boughs

of pines big as planets, I walk in dust,

in thousand-year shadows, remembering rain.

On my face, roselight illumination

and salt the winds untangle from the sea—

birches pivot, flickering silver,

the sky here bigger, stretched, and the clouds

upward, infinite, a crooked circuit

constellations ride, defining dust,

this emergency of time and space, this life,

this image broken and remade

as the concentricities of love subside:

the decades drift and shimmer,

the past wells up, presently,

and the future that was lost returns.

September streams, flyfishing

in the shade of the far bank, my whipline

worrying the water’s calm, looping geometry

pops and skitters, snags a branch submerged:

a strike of bass,

against the reel and pull the running

taut silver scatters insects waterwalking,

and we, sheltering from rain in the oaken hulk,

the tumble-down of centuries

in the tilled earth texture of the tree—

carved our names below the year

to prove we were alive,

there and now in the night around us,

no sound but the night around us:

rivers of stars.
 

Who can contend with hawk wing and pine?
 

We were Americans, settled in the tidal reaches,

our fortunes in a wilder province, generations passing—

cook fires, graves, the continent we cleared,

by pole barge down the wide Ohio,

rafts stripped for shelter,

shored against the warrior tribes, the wilderness dead,

that other life: something you hear, stoneheaded cane

owl feathers steady

flying, from the undergrowth the acid yell,

the hurtling shape and hand axe, closing.

We meet in dreams, in a strange country

on paths we name as the hour of our birth is named,

our alias cut in living oak,

from muleback track to Hiroshima’s torn sun,

the hipshake and hard sell of a century on the run:

we who broke the wilderness,

we who answer in our time.

This day both distant past and future,

beneath that broken sky, working late

correcting the diaries of the masses,

I lean into a wall of rain,

past pale cafés, neon shards in silhouette.

A woman’s face, elegant, adrift in water-colour panes,

regards my own, briefly… no…

she gazes at herself: I do not exist.

Down Thunder Road, the icons fade.

Fragments of a former life,

the wind blows through the clouds’ brocade,

deconstructing Elvis.

Southern living ’sixty-six:

three-chord rock on sixstring electrics,

our gear slung out behind the stand,

those rednecks expecting a bluegrass band,

the Fender amp I hired sent tumbling

but the girls there begging autographs,

that mountain town—

sullen road gangs and the roadhouse

cool dark in yellow light

smoke and the dust of men on day-release from jail,

swollen faces and the shakes, men

walking the blade and lives burning down,

on the door the sign, whites only—

heart of Dixie in an old Thunderbird,

on hot nights with a six-pack and the girls,

we shadow our birth star in billion year orbits,

dogging luck down the back roads,

long gone daddy.

The wind blows through.

Clear, still pools and soundless:

languid, glittering sorbet scales glide by.

Our boat rocks in the flickering dark.

The dead rise up and circle the moon,

long, tree-rimmed, corpse-woven light

bright as the world, the presence beside me,

rivers of stars.

Goodbye to All That

"It is a conversation between angels now
Or between who remain when all are gone..."

So wrote Laura Riding - or Laura (Riding) Jackson as she later chose to be known - American poet, critic, lover of Robert Graves and inspiration for his The White Goddess. Her life spanned the 20th century; she died in its last decade, aged 90. She was one of the first 'Moderns' along with Eliot, Stevens, and Joyce, and was spoken of with the same respect.

About 1941, she turned away from poetry. This, not in the way one might otherwise recognise, where the poet reattunes to a finer key, but as one who recognises the depth of emotional experience within language, and poetry simply as a representative of that depth, but not exclusively so.

To that end, she gave instructions that her poems were not to be republished. For a writer who had achieved recognition in her generation, and whom with Graves had explored further, experimental tracts of language, this was decisive, and not merely a pose.

The lines above were used by me as an epigraph for Available Light, the second volume in Relic Environments Trilogy. At the time, I was unaware of the moratorium on the republication of her poems, and only became aware when I contacted representatives of her estate. In the event, they granted permission for the use of the lines.

Laura's ghost has yet to make an appearance, to chide me for my presumption. Perhaps her lines themselves serve as talisman, "between who remain when all are gone."