10.Theatre Piece by DuncanMcGibbon (world of reading TXT) 📖

Theatre-Piece


Poems 1991-2


Duncan McGibbon
Theatre Piece


Term

1. Chorus 1
2. Soliloquy 1
3. Love -Mimes 1
4. Soliloquy 2
5. Love-Mimes 2
6. Soliloquy 3
7. Tableau Vivant: Advent
8. Soliloquy 4
9. Tableau Vivant:Gaudete
10. Love-Mimes 3
11. Soliloquy 5
12. Priapal 1

Summer Break

13. Soliloquy 6
14. Chorus 2
15. Soliloquy 7
16. A Rubyiat for my Parents
17. Soliloquy 8
18. Priapal 2
19. Soliloquy 9
20. Love-Mimes 4
21. Soliloquy 10
22.Chorus 3
23. Soliloquy 11
24.Chorus 4
25.Soliloquy 12
26.Tableau Vivant:Fete de L’Assomption
27.Soliloquy 13

Showtime

28. Love-Mimes 5
29. Soliloquy 14
30. Chorus 5
31. Soliloquy 15.
32. Tableau Vivant:Our Lady’s Birthday.
33. Soliloquy 16
34. Final Chorus


TERM
Chorus 1: Of Parental Party Politics

His children dress and undress
for charades at neighbour’s parties.
Little Denches and Gielguds, out to impress,
in greasepaint that drools with Smarties.

Witches and gremlins, decked for the best
in cast-offs and wedding-dress gauze.
Togas that double up, done in swift zest,
a waist is a neckline knowing no pause.

Columbine and Scaramouche
play music with panache
shrill whistles a la bouche.
Recorders and tin cymbals clash.

Songs are practiced and destroyed
to fanfare in the acrobats.
Mimes and mimicry from an android,
wind-up infantas and emperor-rats.

Monster faces in orange paint
pallid lilacs, wet stage-blood.
The cut-paper dragons are quaint
He gives then a hug They think him a dud.

They leave for the stage, torn crepe flowers
crushed in their rooms, and floodlight the hall,
prima donnas of the boiled sweet shower,
while television laughter drowns out all.

Kids gone, he muses on the self
that made shift for Feste
that adulthood denies: the elf,
the princess still at large, beyond their sell-by day.

Soliloquy 1

Why do I, sad-hearted,
rest only at the refuse-hour,
under the power of animal sleep?
The hooded world is still,
this carcass- self
along with it.
Toil has taken its toll.
I am like Jerome
under canvas in Nazareth
or studied in his study
on canvas in Rome,
with a skull on his desk
in memory of mortality.

In mine the acuter memento
of children.
Remember to make a living,
you must live.
Love Mimes 1

I shall not touch you,
toccata of skin.
I shall not hold you,
tapistry of hair.
I shall not kiss you,
mouthpiece of breath.

In a time of silence,
in a time of stillness
in a time of cold,

I hold your loss.


Soliloquy 2

The old world
rediscovered by the new.
We are so used to ageing habitats,
we forget how this hovel
became our house.
Bless this interglacial,
Casa Quaternaria!
And the children,
those key Cro-Magnon
invaders
whom only
Neanderthal bluff keep down.

Beetle-browed, slow,
I guess at extinction
my wits cannot plan,
while new voices whoop
in unknown languages:
cave-paintings,
wet on the kitchen wall.

Love-Mimes 2

Lover in the night
you turn into the dark
to blind my urge’s sight.
Lover at dawn,
you turn into the light
to cast a shadow on my heart.

Soliloquy 3

I pile leaves
in the incinerator.
Autumn’s gravity
has given the garden
a sober concern.
Smoke hangs in the
bitter, After-Pentecost air.
I spill spent mast,
leathery and webbed
into the unseen
power of the flames.

While my children
dance and mime
around me.
The ins and outs
of gathering leaves
are just a dance
of earth sprites
in a Restoration
Masque of Death.
The year is an eaten meal.
that goes down
in a sudden brilliance
of tongues, blazing
the taste of new sounds
into speech.

Tableau Vivant: Advent

In an afternoon of muffled treads.
The linen mists
uncover silence.
My daughter,
white with reflections
from the ice outside,
writes Christmas lists
for friends she pictures,
bouncing about
on the trampoline
of her absent - minded smile.

Soliloquy 4

Always that shifty holding back,
“Ye have the dour on you”
a friend once said about me,
who had the knack
for a tactful phrase, though knew
enough about my scruffy
blue-baby past.
“Bad at sums.Gets huffy”
ranted the reports that last
despite the effort to renew.
To cross the gap, the grasp
is more difficult to hack
than than waiting on the on the sea
to repeat its contours back .

I think of the child who didn’t think it odd
to comment of another. “He can draw God.”

and want the same to draw one for me.
Tableau Vivant, Gaudete Sunday.

No fairy light
upon the top.
Do not believe
the midday truth,
that casts no shadow.

Light wholly from above
reveals no source.

Into the dark
truth traces
back its beam
to reach its seed,

as an infant’s hand
finds in her mother’s finger
an exacter hold.

Love Mimes 3

In lethargy after a row,
I repeated the words of our vow.
You listened unmoved to our past
that once held our loves fast.
The dead have more dignity
than the unloved in their pity.
They are only themselves who thirst
to be true to what they promised first


Soliloquy 5

Outside an Easter moon
flares above the garden
like a prison arc-lamp.
I spent the day riddling
a former dweller’s relics
from the soil. Lead paint,
glass, old fire-place tiles,
a cauldron buried by
this Tommy-eared gunner
my predecessor.
They all lie so deep
in the drawers of our dream,
our vernacular cast-offs,
gullible litter of the days
we cannot part from.
I think of a friend who died,
a man who dreamed,
and never came to see us.
I mark religion essays.
page after page
to pay the hours’ mortgage.
Through the pen
and through the trowel
we riddle the new :
I think of a lost face
and lift it from oblivion
and mark his smile.

Priapal 1

Aristotle long ago
decided it was so.
Boldness does not go
with the categoric“man”
Whether or not it can
it’s time my hair re-grew.
Don’t think it blue
to plant some privy crop
upon my public top.


Summer Break
Soliloquy 6

That the cloud bank over the carriageways,
thick as shadows, or as dust, covered
the South East over all the turn-offs
is more or less just a way that says
how we are not ourselves.

To be so, so much a right of way
across our Century, uncovers naturally:
being a wanting for the unnatured in our affairs
only naturally, as Friesian herds huddle today
for shelter under the leaves, in the rain-softened woods,
dark as moss in which water sparkles like ice.

Yet juntas have created a vogue
for taking the words from gravestones
and the rusting handcuffs
from the tell-tale corpse to prorogue
the stink of text-book judgement.

It is an inquistiveness for the unmade,
for what doesn't add up in our diaries,
or castles marked on ordinance survey maps.
Broken, old, unyielding those metaphors so laid

with fear pass by: Leeds, Hever, Allington,
Chartwell enduring precipitate invasion
from this cloudburst. Their order baffled
by tunnel execavations, lowering the baton
of undefined dread.

You drive our Citroen with an attentive hand.
Like classic, outmoded lines, we outlive
old tides for our departure from the land
while our backseat brood chant shrill invective.

Chorus 2, of Politically Apathetic Poets

A country bored with democracy
is a dangerous place
for Tory control freaks.
Though life is easy enough
for the superstitious left.
Tabloid star-charts substitute for
the dangers of repression.
There the only revolution is in the stars.
Yet the real ones,
those nebular creations,
change every day, like safe houses
for political agitators.
Like women, the stars
photograph badly,
for they were created to move,
not be fixed in the Ptolomaic grid
as Cleopatra in a still from
the Tragedie of Liz n’ Richard
Take Canis, Pope’s dog
barking mad, sick or dead.
Whatever breaks
out of that giant inside
is only a thin pencil of light.
Inside is such a Rilkean giant,
competing with a mass of angry light
from warehouses, flood-lit goods yards,
runways and security beams
that light the furnace of the liberal market.
That makes it difficult to go on
without sins against profit.
We do not survive our goodness:
the hourly stress of unambition:
the desperate refusal of suicide,
of drug-related common sense,
stress-induced generosity,
depressive courage,
the breakdown against despair,
the burnout that forbids aggression.
and other plagues of human nature
caving in on the sheer callousness
of equilibrium.
Injustice often has the better poets.
Yevtoshenko wrote better for the K. G. B.
Pound was better than Pudney,
Pendercki than Panufnic.
Listen it’s about talent,
not goodness.
Or the Keats’s Main Sequence
love flare, that drifting, stellar,
peeping- Tom corpse.
Plath and Sexton died of worse tyranny
than Tsvetayeva, or Mandelstamm.
Death is not a style, but a rhetoric
when freedom turns despot.

We do not struggle with words.
We struggle with love
and words fail only our lies.
Meanwhile the smoke rises
from a little warmth
fanned into profit
and it is a question,
Left or Right,
of reaching the window first.


Soliloquy 7

The Societe Nationale des Chemins de Fer
own all that is left of it: the Franceof British childhood,
magical land of the ‘O’Level, Dien Bien Phu,
Sartre at Les Deux Magots and the Sorbonne peur.
that kept a generation at its reflexive dreams.

Mute canals reflect pollarded elms,
while high rusted school gates
stew unhappy boarders.
White bloused orphans in realms
of chastened peace read Rostand
while, imposters from a counterweight
we rattle over the time-stilled land.

Indoors, whiskered musicians play sad quintets,
while common weeds, the abundant, blooming harebell,
willowherb and convulvulus spread in sets
untouched since Le Congres D’Aix-la-Chapelle.
A shelter to Maquis and Prussians alike,
sold out to immobilier villages and Mirage jets.

A Rubyiat For My Parents

For forty years you were as one.
Yours was the Ark, as son succeeded son.
A fight for freedom inspired your love.
At home it was love, not medals, shone.

No wilderness, no flood, no circling dove
made up your joy. Two threads one pattern wove.
Temptations were few as Dad’s devil interview
revealed Lucifer’s complex was Him above.

From the lectern you counselled our crew
on Piaget, Celtic and faults in IQ,
While mothered at home, a sister we won
and it was love that led us as we grew.


Soliloquy 8

At night Delvaux’s painted mother sleepwalks
gravid with vulnerable nutrition.
From the Bois de Vincennes
the old circus lions watch trains
unload, bulls for the abbatoirs.
In the entrepots the bales of cannabis
are bundled for burning .
In the hypermarkets under lights
of delicate gold, the red grapes glow.
and the jars of honey sweat.
Old foxglove leaves stiffened in the frost
will be burnt on the enbankments.
In post humanity, the railway will direct itself.
along the alluvial winter of the Seine.
The timetables are set by God.
Trains pass each other by and
little Monsieur Dumeznil
will be