7.Feasts of November by Duncan McGibbon (good books for high schoolers .txt) 📖

Abbey Road.
I saw him, carried off by Colonial uncles.
In Cromwell Place,
I clutched my copy of The Phenomenon of Men
and vowed that the future would be centrated
on a place that would have no time for me.
Wearing
second hand trousers, I thought about a job and sent
off to Normansfield Hospital, was interviewed and went.
The year opened its other hand then,
we were all separated:
no longer in one place.


8. Transfiguration

The banners unfolded their everlasting mystery
to the Newsmen at Uppsala,
or as Gertrude von Le Fort
would have it, “your knees are your wings”
which was
unhelpful to the prone.
We went along the M Four and turned off
at Egypt and came back that way.
Nothing fell that day.
It was the day my results came through
which I opened and told no-one of.
I put them on the mantelpiece before we left.
Mallarmés were no better.
My brother had come up from Dorking
(Was it good to be here?)
Here at Burnham Beeches
we could have carved three stone urns,
one for Mallarmé, one for Gray
and 'pour votre chère morte Second November,
eighteen seventy seven'
Mr Jeremy, the French Teacher, with the chrism of prophecy;
"all I can make of that is it’s about a dead woman”
The Missal lay on the threshold as the
wind stirred The Sacred Heart, Teddington,
in the Philadelphia Vineyard and the world.
From the dust he raises the mighty.
From misery he raises the rich to
the childless wife he gives
Djerassi’s weight of flowers.
That year was the last of childhood,
solitary, on the threshold.
It was the push off.
It was nearly autumn
and down among the dead fantastic roots, no doubt
the thinning foliage would relieve us all.
An Octet of unpretended love, fading out
so soon there was silence before applause.
The dead also lay in Mexico,
before the steps, in the Square, young men, girls,
what had they received
as they got out of bed on that last day?
What was I, but an issueless dupe of thought?
Inside, on our return, the evening light drew
the fir tree’s shape in silver point on the mantelpiece.
We were all so casual, a family ebbing into separateness.
While Baathists exported mares to France,
Your child was growing
and I attended the Vespers of my dream.


9. The Exaltation

The crows were waiting for the seeds to fruit again
The child was growing, was strong. The sunlight struck the
hallway as the my sister opened the Advent calendar.
In Derry the P.D. were struck down by the B Specials
Already the gun-men were on the streets.
A man ran through the rain
and into a pub and told a student
to put his hands up in the lavatory.
His trousers fell down and he stuttered
"I'm P.D." "OK, Boyo. Just checking.”
And I went on going to the Kingston Road
where the old men sat indoors during the rain
who had never spoken in their lives.
On my off-days, I would sift the archives
of the Teilhard Association. The Director
invited me to tea and said, before Patrick Moore
came on. "Those who have no intellect cannot
be allowed to live. What can they give to complexity consciousness?”
GI’s held a peace march in San Francesco
and I watched the crowds gather in London
from the front room in Whitton, wondering if so
many could share the same dream,
while the papers showed Yves St Laurent
beltless mini-dresses and Churchill jockeys
boycotted Penny Ann Early’s ambitions.
and the people of Hanoi spent a quiet day looking at the skies.


10. The Dedication
The month grounded over many while I tended the witless,
lost to the concerns of the Teilhardian mind.
At Burntollet trust had been shelved,
then shattered, bruited from the truncheons,
Nixon become President and the school held
its fortieth Presentation;
the choir sang L'lize Jane
and the orchestra played the Water Music.
My results were
printed in the booklet.
Chris got into Birmingham.
And I stood by in the library where
I had discovered Berenson and touched the book,
not wanting to let go.
Not having words to express
my private shame.
Later Cyril Cusack opened the school fete
and wondered , bored around the playing fields,
raising his
eyebrows to everyone he met, like a farmer
among his cattle.
Who will speak of peace to the
fearful asleep?


11. Advent

Mary and her child learn their path alone,
O Wisdom.
They will overcome the winter’s shielding days
O Lordship.
I took the train to the hillside, to San Antonio Abad
O Keys.
The crown was held up there among the old women
who came silently to church and spoke the liturgy in Spanish,
O Emmanuel.
Against
the foes who gathered since my weaning.
I took the train
on the lines that ran from Whitton to Barcelona,
via Victoria, Port Bou and Mataró.
I watched when in the
warm ochre distance a stood girl tall and slate black
by a well in Catalonia.
I flew from the aeropuerto
and watched the Island dance in its light below
me like a jewel signed by the sea
and wintered with
an Ex G.I. from Manhattan the rejected lone man and did not visit Graves,
whom I
brought with me to read,
and sought safety and help.
Then I left, in his debt for apples,
with Apollo Eight
still in its heavens.

12. Christmas

The Jews could come back to Spain
and women voted in Swiss elections.
I hoped we would all be together for Christmas.
I followed the year to the hillside as the crow
flew up to pull the thorns over a wretched font
in the ruined places of Prague, Chicago, Paris, Mexico…
Remembering the American’s dog
that found me in a ditch that morning
and guarded me until I woke
and I knew I had befriended Cerberus,
despite my feet raised from birth
by Lewis Mumford’s Antean suburb.


Feasts of November


Prelude: Hallowtide.
1. Mischief Night
Late autumn, you and I witnessed the life-loss
in gold and red and in
the impassive blue that spanned the Hampton Court sky.
We had taken charge
of each other’s bodies, unaware of their silence, for unsound clothing
dressed us too false

to find the selves life bared so naked
as raw joy struck pleasure’ s riddle.
and we had forgotten the year-end greenness, forgotten an
oak tree stood
here as worlds fell, thick,
its chain of branches unfurling
a secret tow of sap.

The tallow texts at Douai and here are flowing inwards lighting the spill of faith
to heal the spill of forced faith’s blood.

On the way home, lads push Miggy Night
to celebrate ending, perhaps a half-term,
with a thematic firework, unaware of complicity
in a past of casual hate.

We stir, young and yet fear-wise, no shock, but a chord sounds on the spinet,

we saw silent in an afternoon bedchamber.
So now we love a freer God, it’s time to reconcile the hurt
sincerity wrested from our love
that caught us lovers unawares.


2. Hallowe’en

Now I know why old ghosts.
retire on Punkie Night.
They quit tied lodgings.
Memories thrown in
with hard myths become tiresome
and flimsy spirits prefer
to wander this dirty
and quiet stretch of time,
away from the celebrity of terror.
Lingering mists, heavy dews,
schoolboy’s squibs conceal
the suspect personhood
of spectres.
When they glide to your door,
that November entrance,
the gruesome, masked and
even more endearing children,
it is a sign you are a trusted
neighbour, a focus for local tongues.
The kids are more fearful
of their tricks
and more grateful
of their treated pockets than
their faces allow.
They too will retreat, the ghosts
of their own futures.
Elsewhere,
in the stubble of burnt fields,
guided by the setting Pleiades
you learn this would be
the better time to teach
your baby children
the stars burn for them.
Sycamore, plane, the pale leathery
dun of child-raided,
tattered horse-chestnuts,
their leaves falling faster now, backdrop
the routines of repairing doors,
of home-making, the vicarious
alarm-clock and its come on
to labour and spent returns
every night and all.
This day
brings Keats and Vermeer.
A woman at the Ruckers clavecijn
weighs the gold chord
of these mind-travelled men.
One traces in heavy water:
the other has his estate
wound up by Leewenhoek,
inventing wise microscopy
to focus on the artists’ minute wealth
and on humanity’s
and Christ receive your souls.

Chapter One: Ashvin
1. All Saints

Novem-
buried again, again that earth-worn silence seeps
in with unseen gold-crests from seas grown taciturn
with news of those who have not made it back
from Coronel, Bougainville, Walcheren;
Mass is an evening obligation
in un-feasting Protestant lands,
though England once had
a thousand churches
called All Saints.

While in the bare garden, in Highbury, a wren disappears,
like a virile leaf