from Book I, Part 1, Mystery Tramp Eclogues
The Climate of Memory
The post box, a cast-iron George the Fifth
Stuffed with deadlines, expectations
Franked for last posting: I, thinking
Of ways memory compresses events, journeys
The failed mantras of blood and time
Counterpoint desire, these episodes
Of failed love filleted from back pages
The organs diseases marble, re-coded
This midsummer, remembering I wanted
To dance in moonlight the colour of wedding rings
…
The surveys fade to a singularity of light
To space, swallowing equipment moving
In the distance along housing tracts
This road of home pods sprouting bricked or rendered
Boxed porches pitched to roses, pelargonium bursts
Along tarmac, crow matins, tumbler click of postcodes
St Mary’s stood here, grubby centuries
Sooting stone, the cold walls turned
Civil War shot, kept prayers cool
For use later, cross-shaped trace underfoot, plague burials
…
By the gypsy camp, by the gas works
Rusted fences, by the bridge at the Hythe
The Colne lightship’s blank
Lantern, decks, snub bow, tied up here since the ‘80s
Knocking against the quay, stands beside patter posters
Huge faces, towering frames slab-anchored
Invitations to mews-living beneath
Pylons firing up industrial estates
The breaker’s yard, the harbour master’s crashed windows
The years we trained for, what we believed
…
The tide pulls everything with it, lays trails
Turned to meet the moon’s note high and clear
Its scabbed face neatly round above this inlet
And beach huts staked
Holding the beach against the wind
In the evening, from beneath cut-plank porches
Leverets chance the open greensward
Chased by boys from the caravans, who know
About hares killed and cooked, about girls and cars
Axles jacked, smoky glass low-rider, quick as cat-scat
…
Between Hove Path and the Monkey Steps
I wait a while at St Peter’s Well
Field glasses pulling in the gulls
Beaks testing rich mud above the tide line
In the foreground, mussel mounds
The rip of water heaped
Shells craggy ridged without, popping
The hinges reveals Precambrian hollows
Mother-of-pearl in swimming sheens, on the shoals
The sunlight watery, neither sun nor sea
…
From East Mersea Stone to Brightlingsea jetty
The river Colne wears its summer face
I should name these tributaries, muddy banks wind-polished
I know
It’s something about time
But can’t think what, waiting for the ferry here
Another passenger, soon arrived, later
The return, observing Milky Way spiral arms
With names of their own, the light from red-shift collapsing
Stars just reaching, a thousand years, ten thousand after
…
The book that is written, occasionally the diary
Every morning, every night, distributed
In the post to houses, this shuffling vagrant
This economic desire drama index briefly
Collected in pure word, in this catch copy
Not to change, every day
When it is visible, everyday life
Steadily, so it is changed with being heard
It is, thinks and answers something of today, of increase
The time such times securely devour
…
After a long time, because I speak
In these rhythms and these exchanges, the tool
Of the mail logging this et cetera
In the register of one not here before
It registers this opportunity to be completed
Time chopped up separating today
Experienced talks of that time written
Travelling from this, steady, raising the various
It asks, it increases, instructing itself, scenery
Walked to, 11th of 20 views of the mountain
…
By now you have my letters, the sea
As it was, this congregation of players
Environments, clockface betrayals
Big dream stuff before breakfast
The ash streak of remarkable distances
Across the face, and lines spoken
From memory, in packet rhythms
That drive words, stopping
Turning in the air, trusting that you
Will be saved, redeemed where language jags or slides
…
As now, anapaests in rising trim
Cometh, with the flowers on paths before them
Marigolds on waste ground near the gate
The house you dream of again and again
It tears at your eyes, this kingdom beyond solstice
Hanging from your eyes in this same dream
The lines prepared beneath wisteria
Or on glaciers in warming seas
I answer wearing animal masks, such a sequence
And then awake, naked on bent rods of sun
…
This that is forever well indicated, this daily life
The page fits, circumstances
Informed by drums from towers of renewal
Loaded fully with plum orchids
The banquet house renewals and resident pages
Thoughts, movies, only you, in the inseparable
Accident of my body, its blood
Consumed in some memory shared once
Reunited in these particles, maybe not at the last
Losing their union with the word instantly
…
With each line, the characters linking
To others more obscure, presences
In sharp relief, a summation
The object it became, and here the look
Made in that turning, the characters, too, believing
In this place, the TV burning, the scripts, but still we live
Midsummer, this is the time that’s kept
The mind holds it, here
Titania, my dear, these our brethren, all must quit, gaily
With garlands, these mechanicals, with me, exeunt
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