from Blackwater Quartet, selection 24

Rules of Engagement

No snow now, only the memory of it,

yet April, insufficient still

except to tease each tree to leaf

then black the scent, infers a present

old enough and no older, the future stalled,

in a ditch-water sky the sun a hawk shape

faint above the cedars.

 

I came this far returning, from a cold spring

this close remembering why I came.

 

My flight to a lost world

claims back twenty years, a deep breath

held and held until I surfaced, just once,

back home, until then

a place where the dead and living stood unchanging,

all of one house in one memory,

the way memory remains

unchanged, faces and lives left standing

clear-edged in the mind

asking directions to a voice, its echoes.

 

Below the Mason-Dixon

everything and nothing changes.

The 19th century slinks by the Chevy showroom,

the lakeside condo views.

 

The maples are bigger now, vast canopies,

a tendril vastness of shade

dwarfing the old house— Mother in the yard

with the dead she counts on one hand,

on the other the living counted down

one by one to last addresses, cancer, each divorce,

a reconciliation no nearer

for the names recalled across time and these states.

 

These rebel towns are all the same:

the courthouse lawn, divot rednecks

arguing the war— the Civil War—

the shadow bronze of the Confederacy

a birdshit glaze all summer.

The past, its terrible beauty,

decorates each volunteer.

 

Where you been?

… Away.

 

The sun-break of oak along wide lanes,

in the stands pretty girls

baring midriff tans, at the field’s edge

the immaculate diamond’s early innings—

‘If I knew then…’, but what do I know

except that pretty girls are harvested,

boys now lean and quick move slower

every game, that the world itself slows

and no one can replace the day

within a field of bright days.

 

A white timber house, its shutters

closed against the heat, by the porch

the rambling reds of roses, reminds me

someone I knew lived here, in war time,

in a fragrance of pain, TV deaths less real somehow,

in a child’s throat

waves of jellied fire

burning through a million boxes

as we watched the Superfortress passing,

remote as a god.

 

Outside the town, old redoubts,

the old betrayal of armies from an older war

met in abstract time, each soldier’s soul

commended to a retrospective heaven

North or South—

I read about it in a book, the cemetery

stripped of railings for a prisoners’ stockade.

 

Salvation was sudden for civilians at their rest.

Beyond age, or childbirth, or the cholera

that set them deep in iron perimeters,

paradise came open-plan.

Maybe Jesus saves,

but in the rules of engagement

tomorrow is a land cured of memory,

where death means breathing easy

and time sanctifies and frees.

 

Here is yesterday, the secret slave,

the earth cleared grave by grave

along the path I took, the name

made for it but never shared—

in the mouth a kept coal,

its bitten heat.

Nowhere Man

I came across a Facebook posting recently. I should qualify that statement with the proviso that initially I needed to set up an organisational account for something, and a previously part-completed, unused personal profile seemed to auto-activate when the organisation account went live. At that point, a few people began to include me in their posts on my reluctantly personal account.

As such, I don't really exist on Facebook, or, if I do exist, it's only by proxy. I seem to be party to anniversaries, triumphant cake-baking displays, holiday photos of someone's toes in the sand, and pleadings to 'get right with God', and even if I remain steadfastly un-Like-able, I receive email reminders that 'someone you may know' would like to be friends.

All of which leads me to the recent posting mentioned above. Through a series of neural messaging algorithms, I found that someone whom I took to a high school prom in 1967 is now practicing law in California. I say now, but in fact she's been there decades. At seventeen, she was beautiful, with thick, blonde hair and a face of classicly beautiful proportions, flawless skin and ice-blue eyes.

Oddly, at the time, she wasn't one of the most popular girls. She had a few friends, was nice, studious, and was generally well-liked in an unobtrusive way. She was one on those people whom you see every day but take no real notice of, until one day, you happen to be looking their way and realise, "My God! She's gorgeous!"

When I asked her to the prom, she was completely unprepared for the question. I was a little bashful, calling over to her across the hallway, and then watching her face change as she realised she was being asked out, only a few days before Prom Night (I said I was bashful.). We both smiled, looked at the floor and wandered off with our friends.

I never had the wherewithall to date anyone properly - no job, no car - so prom night was my only venture into Beautiful Girl Land at the time. The next time I saw her was about three years later. I was in a bar on the Kentucky River, and she came in with an older guy, Jack, and they then went round the back of the place where he had a small rented room; he worked part-time at the bar and the room was an add-on. Through a previous arrangement, I had to stay nearby that night, and next morning the bar owner, to whom I was related through my sister's marriage, asked me to knock on Jack's door as he was late to start work.

When I knocked, she answered, "He'll be there in a minute." I don't know if she realised it was me, calling (I only said, "Jack..."), but I knew it was her, in bed with Jack, a divorced bartender living in a one-room flop behind a bar.

If I ever had occasion to meet her again, it might be because I happened to be in California, or it might be because I happened to be in California and needed a lawyer. Either way, the coin is in the air as to whether I'd remind her of our prom date way-back-when, or the morning I came knocking, a stranger beyond the door, hoping, perhaps, for a glimmer of recogntion, if she remembered me at all. 

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.