12 Towards A Definition of the Seasons by Duncan MCGibbon (classic reads txt) 📖

crusts I put out in the ice - crisp air. February-pale, an unseen sun warms up the gusts of young South Easterlies and its ripening glare ignites the tinderwood clouds. The rain adjusts to a finer drizzle, while my set fire begins to flare inside the cobwebbed grate. A single rabbit mistrusts my unhunting stare, so stiff at the window and beats it back up to the Churchyard where bob-tailed gravestones show his local family has worked hard to honeycomb the griefs of long ago into an earthen, furry guard and breed new life in desiccated woe. Birds on pre-spring frost-watch puff-up braver as Suffolk light downloads its hourly hue across the hedgerows. Inside, the graver voices of young singers brew a cold, clear dew that teems in the inward house, a quaver on the frosty mist, wrenching pain to view and prising up a half-sunk thought; that as life quickens in this sensible earth, subtle with shadow-shrews, unseen, uncaught, fear and self - hatred still block my mirth, while all things living are lilting of birth. Those fractured ice-limbs from a web that I had sought to fix, like a curator of self-esteem in dearth of funds, labelling away each slight. I have fought too long to force a view that had no means to earn its keep when self-assembly shrines for greed were being asked for. It's better now to learn the text of one's own history. I feel the need no longer to purgate my failure to discern the great solution, only to train each awkward weed to purify its leaf. Blue-tits chatter by a milk-churn. I throw old drafts to the back of my fiery grate. No witness is so blind its pain cannot create.

Snape, Morning

The spring birds’ call
has grown more daring
by my window.
Suffolk light changes
hour by hour.
On the radio
a girls’ choir sings
in unison,
their voices
falling and fading
in the frosted air.
Day to day
the earth grows stronger,
farms warmth
from returning sunrays.
All things living are singing now.
Broken English shape of God,
founder of friendship, hear
our life and shoulder this birth,
this co-eternal growth.
Each grain of bread I put out
has been picked clean
from the muddy grass
and You have numbered us.


The Old Schoolhouse, Snape.
There is a journey into oneself that is also a journey away, from the familiar. It is a centre we cannot touch, like childhood, lost, yet everywhere, concealed by casual delays to one's expectations, such as the lumbering tractors in front, grim with grey, thick mud, that slow me down as I take my bike downhill into the village . There is a discovery of selfhood in the clamour of others, too; an adult edge we cannot touch vanishing shadily, an encounter with awesomeness in the most routine events, as a long -silent 'cello in an attic might vibrate within at every sound in the history of the school below. Sweating back up the hill on a clear road, swaying on soaked tarmac, seeking balance, then stopping, breathless, by the kerb, I notice the blue, Suffolk light begin to thin out to an Eastern darkness, foregrounding the bare tangle of trees that grows around the Old Schoolhouse. Yet this evening could be a dawn, the dusk undeciphered by another, in a photograph, perhaps. Vision is a yield from our failing, not from the surplus of our dares.
Gromford, The Fields

It must still be light now,
though clouds and the night
confuse the view.
In the place of night,
rain runs out of time.
Like a secret grieving,
it is too private,
even for intimacy, perhaps.
Night rain strokes the gravel
and varnishes the pebbles.
In the half-light
you cannot tell a broken stone
from a diamond,
or a living heart.

Under the daylight,
our faults, like useless keys,
are easy to test and throw away.
Locked out at night,
you must look
somewhere inside
where valuables are kept.


Snape, the Schoolroom, night.

We do not belong
to our own stories.
We cannot always
see ourselves
in pictures
others make of us,
Like granite
tors, intruding
upon on the levelling fields;
metamorphic,
As laurels they become
a viewpoint
only our littleness justifies.
I remember once
making for France
after a rotten term,
I climbed aboard
the Maidstone bus.
and saw a girl's auburn hair
catch fire in the twilight
orange of the setting sun.
Yet I never spoke to her,
perhaps because I thought
I did not belong in her story,
like voices heard on this radio,
as you tune, forgetting
we are not even in our own.

Now we look for a way
of untangling each other
from each other.
To restore ourselves
entails re-writing against
the images made by others
and to read each other’s pain.
 


Histoire De L'Atalier.

1. The Toils

Opportunist love,
and yet we rise and part,
as hard cash demands.
Trying to predict
our pain,
we find we have
no time.
Just as the simulated
accident
had to be cancelled,
as all the ambulances
were on real alert...

2. A Season in the Trellis Sector

The damned have moved into a garden-centre,
to store unsown grain in sacks to dry.
and let ivy grow so the living cannot enter:
our saplings heeled in for the sun to fry.

Cuspid, heavy- bellied and ripe, a theatre
for young shoots to fail their first try
and budding groves, to acquire a greater
shade where our greasepaint bodies lie.

A trellis still careers above our heads
to descend the path where marrows stretch
and love that led us will not leave the beds

and lies in pensioned peat and funded vetch.
No wonder red hot pokers bring us dread
in plastic urns still aching though love’s dead.

3. Contours

You'd be the first to tell me fourteen years together is no great feat.
Two days ago on the beach at Cassis sunlight played on your shoulder and I noticed you had been playing court again to those artist friends of yours. Pablo Tiempo making a trip across the mountain from Vauvenargues perhaps, or Paul Mois re-touching and touching you up, in the French way, under the broad daylight. They are obsessed with you drawing and sketching under the eyes for a lifetime. An Odalisque to them, your beauty only has to think itself to one who waits. and as a resident, puts in no bill for paints.

4 Beached

Where do you want to go,
now the picnic’s over
and the children have taken the scraps,
leaving tooth-pocked
leftovers to insult our pride?

The beach is immortal with escape:
sun, sand and sex
suit blander consciences.
We need a thicker barrier to the glare
slapped on our Catholic skins.


The local party is quit of ravers,
who’ve run off for ecstasy
elsewhere in the secular city,
for which they have the only map
and the market for morality.

5. Pace Egg

The Easter-Eggs
broken into
with child-like fingers
that look for sweetness.
Light salts the dark,
that examines
the endless, bounded
universe of oblivion.
Imperfection can
nurture growth,
the frost-worn, tap-root
blazes in the flower.
What we longed for,
an endless sweetness,
is broken into
to discover
unknown life.

6.Comedy

I reason with your not being here.
when the daylight
tumbles our far, half-empty near,
like saddened, unforgiving children
after a fight.

I argue your being into elsewhere
when the edgy moon
drops a baffle for Pierrot Lunaire
and his come and go tragedienne
and I am Pantaloon.

I hear you in the static hesitation
of my radio alarm,
become a one-hand calibration,
ready as ever to set it again,
sensing the end of calm.

I tap you in against the rhythm
of the morning train,
research the culture of our schism,
a rare, yet backward strain of Zen,
dissolving in the rain.

It’s all too close to go so far,
soon night falls again,
with the sky set against my star
and clouds crowd in their dark Amen,
on remote to ease my pain.

7. Richmond, Christmas 1995. The shrouded scullers are chilled into their tidal past. A mist is massing its debris of tousled tissue, closing the front door on the riverscape. While the bridge is left to rear up into tensed nothingness on a one-strand river, a looping caterpillar with its legs, plunging, purposefully nowhere. This could be home, too, were it not for the bailiff- weight of our future, holding the bridge to a bank of oblivion.

8.Threadbare life,
my suits worn thin
until the frayed edge
flaps above a tear.

Like a splintered plank,
announcing
the cellar’s dank.

I wear out in all
the moods of tense,
hoping I can vanish
before I’m bare.


 


Wintering, Paris

1. Place Beaubourg

A young man with
a made-up face,
like a child,
or a fairground clown,
acts out a mime.

The people who are queueing
to see the pictures
do not notice.
The pigeons
claim the square back
a sardonic outburst of applause
brings them to land
on him,
who has not finished
and he leaves
the brutes
to the brutes.

2. rue Quincampoix

It does not snow
here in winter any more.

The city has its own clothes.
These are warm times
and we become heated
to consume our interests.

The arpenteuses
don’t hang up
their linen any more
to tempt passers by
with imagined nakedness.

Yet the loss of whiteness
is difficult to place.

The history
of snow-flakes eddies
into a solid mass
a wall, or a floor
of brilliant, untouched,
matronal strength

A birth muscle,
hollowed on
species-being itself,
out of a hundred
feathered instants,
a city’s soft contractions.

3.Boulevard de Sevastopol

Only a little boy,
riding a white bicycle
with a t-shirt
still belongs here,
protected by cats
and the streets
he explores every day.

4. Bar

Pale-faced, I mutter
about my son,
remembering his mother
who left our sacrament.
Presents unopened
to another on our bed.

In my son’s heart, he says
it will always be Christmas

and never again will be in mine,
both whitened,
on the sheets of loss.

5. Meudon

I have not got
the book you brought
from Tarusa.
I cannot help
you carry food
from the market.
If you sign
it will be on the page
turned down
on hunger.


 


A History of Everyday Things in England


History of Everyday Things in England.

It was all over in a minute;
after the glittering tinkle
of shattered glass,
in