from Blackwater Quartet, selection 16

The Bell

It is a language of remembered forms,
the marsh dawn lemon on emerald
and the day waiting to be named.
 
I have woven the shape of the sound
from stork tracks in tidal silt
and vertical brightness scribbled with windows,
along a path wide enough for the wind only,
and still I hear you, across the shift of thorns
and wild pear, an expectancy.

In the Ether

Recently, I had a selection of poems published in two separate reviews, the first an on-line publication, and the second a publication that has a presence both on the Internet and in print. It's probably fair to say that the latter publication is the more unusual, in that print publications per se are more difficult to fund and to maintain. The reviews in question were not chosen with any particular agenda in mind, simply that they published contemporary poetry, and that the appearance of the review looked professional.

It wasn't always the case. In 2000, I attended a writers' conference in Dorset. At the time, Interent publication, if it was discussed at all, was considered a distinctly poor relation to print-based reviews. To reinforce the fact, I had only to mention 'online submissions' to fellow attendees, and the looks of incomprehension were matched only by those of utter disdain.

Now, 'e-zines' are accepted as part of the publishing milieu, and most writers submit to these as readily as to hard-copy titles. The realisation that even a single poem published in an on-line publication would be seen instantly by tens of thousands of readers (if indeed such numbers of poetry readers actually exist!) as opposed to a few dozen print-based subscribers, provides an even greater incentive for writers to share their work through these means.

The poems mentioned formally are part of a group of poems, Maquettes for a Season of  Fury, arguably a pamphlet-length collection. To date, of the sequence, a quarter have been published individually in either Internet- or print-based combinations.

So the world turns.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 15

English Studies

In the shore tree’s angles,
acid streaks of foliage
mirror bleached, unfurled sarongs of cirrus.

Where the sea grass fades into the headland, rails fuss,
and raucous plovers punctuate the weather’s syllabus.

At the point, a forgotten strategy,
a wartime bunker the tides undermine,
the hexagon of concrete shifted
into crazypaving slabs, the rubble of geometry
an isosceles entanglement of rusting steel
still waiting for the Nazis.

On the wall, the spray-paint scrawl: John Lennon lives.

Crake song evaporates,
in winds driving low along the coast,
in brushwood juniper and the scrub of gorse, in this memory
of the same land, for others, gone now,
in diesel haze and sprays of lilac
a strangeness, courtly in the dusk.

A scratchy Sgt. Pepper plays thinly in the mews—
moonlight wedged against each pane, the room
folding and unfolding, and the barefoot bride
dancing in the flames.

Smalltown Boys

In the summer of 1968, my Mother put me on a train and sent me to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. 

There had been strain in our family following my Father's unexpected death in December the previous year, and as I was adrift somewhat both emotionally and mentally, I believe she thought that I would neglect my further education. 

Although it was inevitable in hindsight that I would attend the university local to our home, she and one of my teachers, Reva Chrisman, with whom I had developed an affinity through poetry and creative writing, agreed that a trip to the University of North Carolina might provide an incentive for me to become more involved in my own life once more, which is another way of saying, conversely, that I had become too self-absorbed.

Of the journey itself, all I recall is that it was a "sleeper" train, and that I was awoken the next morning by the noise of the station and a smartly-uniformed black conductor. Other images came back to me years later and were used in the opening lines of an unrelated poem.

Others waved goodbye.

Slow-motion, shoeshine station

a freeze frame of the '40s,

I doze in the sidings - dog-latin phantom

riding high to Dixie.

The sole purpose of my journey was to imbibe the atmosphere of the university attended by American novelist Thomas Wolfe. His first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, thinly disguised local residents of his hometown of nearby Asheville, with the result that when the novel was published the resulting uproar required him to prudently remain absent from the town for the next eight years. 

In his short life - he died just before his thirty-eighth birthday - he wrote four mammoth novels, and in the process redefined American fiction. The Web and the Rock, You Can't Go Home Again, and my personal favourite, Of Time and the River, provided autobiographical insights into my own life and writing at the time.

The visit was a failure. I think I met briefly with someone from Admissions, but nothing came of it. My overriding impression, at the fine old age of seventeen, was that the place was somehow fixed in time, rigid with Wolfe's memory, and without vitality. I found a local bar frequented by students (I think the legal age to consume alcohol must have been eighteen in North Carolina, and, well, I was 'near enough'.), and spent the rest of the day there, drinking bottles of German lager.

I can't recall reading any of Wolfe's work since my first experiences of them between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, but their "atmosphere" remains with me even now. There is, as might be expected, an academic industry around the works, treatises and tomes in support of tenured posts, orbiting around the dark star of Chapel Hill.

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 14

Airs, Waters, Places

A ribbon mist off Garda, and thunder
guttering in the Dolomites, across
the lido path a snow of jasmine— toss-turn
weather, the stain of stars we’re under,
confirms the spare conformity of loss.
 
The reds of red façades recall the lake
republic long since sunk past Salò’s port,
sideshow of the Romanesque, last resort
of Mussolini and the higher stake—
steamer routes, each hotel a former fort.

A reedy baffle gates the cut stone quay
against the backwash of the hydrofoils.
‘A week of fish in aromatic oils,
a little wine…’ wrote Pound in 1920,
inviting Joyce: belle-lettres, snug gargoyles.

Heat. Antique towns, screwed down by 30C,
retreat behind a pastel semaphore
of shutters and the weight of pines, restore
a rumour of Catullus to the scree
of broken capitals above the shore.

Under cypress spears, a part-worked torso
rises from a cube of local stone, no
seamless white carrara sculpted verso
to the clouds and water, each mallet blow
a kind of breath, instead, this cold echo.

San Paulo’s shade, a twisting tracery
of bay and bougainvillea, gives way
to blue enamels. Mary floats, a sway
of gold leaf shoaling the baptistery,
apostles fading from the fresco clay.

… sopravvivere alla perdita
della reputazione… to outlive
the loss of one’s reputation— votive,
mantis profile of the hydrofoil “Goethe”
past the terraces of stunted olive…

the driftwood cavities of failing bronze
that replicate these ghosts in time, and screen
the deck chair litter on the mezzanine.
Beyond the bright piazza, doily swans,
their careless whites, engage electric green.

Cycling after Thomas and the English (Review)

My review of David Caddy's Cycling after Thomas and the English, is now available at the new Kudzu House book review site, Kudzu Vine.

 http://blog.kudzuhouse.org/

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 13 (Theme)

It occurred to me recently that in the course of several years I've written poems on the theme of flight, and, more dramatically, war in the air.

The following poems, from different books in the Blackwater Quartet series, examine the air war in the Great War and World War Two, with the final piece in this selection a reverie on the nature of manned flight itself, focusing on the Wright Brothers.



In Flanders
 
Late-century childhood
among water-colour gardens,
and accordion creases in the aprons of the maids,
lulled them dreamily to toys and comfort stories, wrens
nesting at the window,
painted lead cavalry in grand brigades.
The empire of the seaside ebbed, rain they shook
from picnic linen
now shaking them awake, airborne,
strafing infantry near Menin.
 
Death flies faster, quells
dogfight stunts, half-loops of Camels or a Spad’s chandelles.
A circus Fokker swings westerly, plummets through cumulus.
The drifting Sopwith rolls into the sights
and then away in oily smoky spirals.
The pilot burns,
tumbling deadstick through iron weather.
 
Who owns the Somme, underwrites a time whose ghost persists?
 
From the travel books of childhood,
cut-throat stories constellate.
In academy exhibits, a storm of faces
stirs beyond the State,
an inkwash of weather for the world beneath,
for cold suns the nights extinguish.


A Visitor at Madingley

You paved the shires for runways,
for Fortresses from a fortress island, rising
over corrugated fields
in apparition flights, charting Europe.
The turrets swing to track the stitch of cannon blaze,
Reich fighters falling from the sun.
 
Behind the blister dome,
your own face, and the faces of the others
you remember
where the flak has found them:
you cannot place the names of these dead. They hover
in icy miles and burning air, half a century
since their lives had crystallised.
 
Again the old dream, where the silk above you blooms
and sobbing blackout pardons your survival.
 
Tracers mark
the clockwork arc
the machine assumes without you, and you
awake where bombers stall in hammering fire, and crews
disintegrate where the landscape yaws.
 
Bleak expanse of barracks,
after weekend leave to nowhere,
after the drills and practice sorties,
why did you live?
 
Rising to the mission lost, the lives you never save
demand your witness and release.
 
The Eighth passes over.
The innocent and the guilty in their separate worlds,
presences as real as the world
your grief has made, remain in photographs
unchanged.

These graves outnumber dreams,
a peace made perfect in these sudden lanes of stone.
 
Each night, cities perish in a breath.
Each night, the firestorms cleanse.
Falling, you rise again, trading life for life,
your own for these companion dead.


Wing Geometry
(Hawker Hurricane Restoration Detail, Scheme B Camouflage)
 
Across the pane, an X of tape,
the cross repeated on each window
here in Operations—
we call it luck the bombers overshot.
 
Beyond the field, the thump 250s make
confirms ‘…not us’.
From the bell we meet the sun in minutes,
climbing through stink and brightness.
 
We kill, are met and killed, in cold
over picture-puzzle landscapes.
When wreckage
the colour of Kent marshes is recovered, you will find
I am twenty this autumn.
 
Earth and sky are muted, riveted contours
painted hawthorn and damp clay, sheared
where the Messerschmitt rolled
just faster.


Kitty Hawk
 
1. Puzzle in Bird-Soaring
Success four flights Thursday morning…
                                —Wright telegram
 
Along the roll axis, muslin,
wood, and gasoline combine in
fits of lift and pillow sand, wingwarped
twists of distance, that record
December paths this morning toward
a chain-and-sprocket reckoning.
 
The altitude is coaxed. Props, lent
horsepower’s coefficient
measured against the drag, consign
the glider tests to data, years
of improvised mechanics, gears
to prove a levelling design.
 
The ropes disturb the vertical,
the puppet winch resists the fall—
rudder, aileron, lock the flight
with pulleys. The cradled pilot
shifts, seconds knotted to the shot
that gathers in his line of sight.
 
From Nags Head on the Outer Banks,
the ocean’s easterlies fold hanks
of shore grass leeward. A relief
of machine shadow clears the hill,
across the dunes at Kill Devil
the trailing edge of disbelief.
 
The airfoils rotate. In distance
and duration, the resistance
of pressures builds and fades, the shove
of engineers to keener space
along Atlantic breakers— race
footprints they find themselves above.


2. How Things Work
Nay, you shall pardon me; none shall know my tricks.
                                    —Marlowe, Edward II, V.iiii
 
Here is the concept: new shadows above you.
We have made it so.
 
As a bird remains suspended in a calm,
the patent is clear, both suspect and curative,
using volatiles to prevent composite voids,
matrix characteristics to understand fabrications,
resin infusion, filament winding,
as a bird remains suspended in a calm,
will even soar.
 
Not devices, but the pilot balancing,
racking rudders
into airflow, strutted against the fall,
this invention, this piece of God’s mind
821393 called Flyer
others mimic, stealing mechanism thoughts
movable against tailspin, until courts prove
submission of these secrets,
in this envelope of tasks the 12-horsepower dream
of raindrops, their weight upon the wings.

 
3. Salvage and Statuary
The airplane stays up because it doesn’t have time to fall.
                                              — Orville Wright
 
The album images, archival glass plates,
reveal the way a photograph was taken—
exposure times listed, stop settings,
since September 1900 the shore
a suitable location of constant wind and privacy.
 
From a Carolina shack, from a tent on the sands,
from scratch, a likely model of intention—
pitch, roll, and yaw, from these cable-strung axes
a flying season—
three years later, that winter morning
after the last flight, a rogue gust catches the machine, turns it
over and over, over and over
toward the sea.
 
JT Daniels, from the Life-Saving Station nearby,
grabs on, falls rolling in the breaking frame,
tumbles out in wreckage: I was plumb scared.
 
‘Well, it’s done now.’
 
In the photograph, a moment rescued from the wind
rises through bronze pavilions—
today as always, the brothers leaning into weather,
considering time and its contraptions,
and who shall try first, the coin between them
hanging in the air.