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

the Guenevere mirror
a shot deconstructs
its sting of hate
through the air and he slumps,
a brown hole burnt
in the purple silk of his sash.

Smog-shrouded military cars
closed off any escape
through the Cadbury factory
and a rumoured attempt
to conceal a deadly weapon.

He was a gifted child, though,
brought up on the
Kay-Shuttleworth method.
He had perfected a new process
for smelting steel from bauxite.

He had been suspected by
the Frazerian Secret Services for
legend laundering over lengths of time,
despite laureate, monarchist support.
The sale of the Merlin plans,
to managers in Bayreuth
hidden under shallots,
his collaboration with Iseult Gonne’s
nationalism and Tristan Tzara’s anarchy
connections with the Kennedy advisers
and their flaring adultery
and his presence at round table talks
with Green Giant industries and apprentices
from Malory Towers were enough.
The shoot-to-kill anti -mythology
protocol of MI5 would have got him first,
had his criminal, but patriotic son
not taken civilian action,

Meanwhile out of the closed circuit cameras
Quixote in a Rukka-Lancelot jacket bikes off
while Gawain Giovanni enters the floodlights
to Baroque chords to make applauded
getaways by a redundant theological
trapdoor from nightly murder.


Middlesex

Old Bentleys and Fords ride the Great West Road,
while restored Art-Deco fascias glint
in the cloud- piled heights, blue as the woad,
of a summer sky. A cow’s mud footprint
dries in Pinner High Street where swains stint
and stags bellow in the re-enclosed corrals.
Boar and wolves quench their thirst as is their dint
at bull-rushed streams. Victorian high-souled morals
concealed behind the deep-green hue of azaleas and laurels.

Dryden’s portrait looks out across the lawn,
luminous with Pope, Swift and Walpole.
Model families with matching blue-skirts drawn
to calves, stroll for tea and teaching free for all
over Richmond Bridge and the Twickenham Toll
scrubbed clean of past, meritocratic grimes.
The great forest returns over the rubble of sprawl.
Barges slide past the clear river’s limes
and past re-turreted Tudor brick of former times.
Fehler! Keine gültige Verknüpfung. Lazy standards flap with authority
in a gusting, light, southern wind
Defence is vigilant. Alacrity
at Northolt, Hendon, so disciplined.
an armoured glint affirms the target’s pinned.
The U N lines in Epping and Laleham
record all violations with keen eyes skinned.
The South Mimms offensive ended at Ham
by the Middlesex Regiment, the stuff of a telegram.

Black smoke billows in a perfect arc
above true civic rows of poplar trees
that line each soaring smooth-grassed cedar park
Whitton House has been completed with its frieze
The aerial view catches Swakeleys.
Marble Hill, Osterley and Hampton rank
in the Hearth Tax rolls on fading leaves.
A museum farm stretches by Greenford bank
all the way to Southall Manor’s re-ploughed Doomsday shank

Parish Churches jab their staunch polity
to mark reception centres for wives
to be impregnated with quality
fine-balanced genes in wards behind railed drives..
The red electric train in time arrives
to bring in commuter- cloned Elaines
so few in handcuffs now as the drug contrives
to imitate consent. Now statues lose their chains
blind, white marble eyeballs stare under steady rains.


 
At Chickerell
Why come here?
The fields are harvestless
and the children poke around
unfamiliar rooms
with trashy,chrome
furniture.
In the resort town
only the redundant
hunger for purpose.

Sickles rust in the museums.
Torn clods of Dorset earth
still attached to their steel.
While at the factory whistle,
men go blundering about
on an untilled field
from a fresh-built site.

What did we look for?
the house of frugal brick
is unredeemable on its own.
My daughter cries for her toys.
Grumiaux's violin
strains with her sobs
at the G Major
adagio ma non troppo
K.516,rattling from my
battered Sony until
the meter coins run out.

I sit, obscured,
among the obscure.
In place of ourselves
at least another man
might lead us,
like an afterthought,
across the massive hillbrow
which lies opposite,
to prize this reach of the sea.

At Abbotsbury
We climb the hill to St Catherine’s Chapel.
A crow and a jackdaw soar on the wind.
Below the woods are rich with ripe apple.
and the fields spare with lynchets ploughs have thinned
from the flesh of the land. Let seas grapple
with boulders or skulls, stones or driftwood twinned
with the sky’s vague fixity, we amble
on an earthy path. Under the sun-skinned
firmament where winds thin to rubble
these vaulted shrines, let’s be undisciplined.
The shouldering hill saw no ship tumble
and so despite Reform, left stones still pinned.
We climb to be blessed by chance’s humble
hope that on faith and history, God grins.


In The Valley of the Bride

Only the lake is still alive.
The Bride is dammed
and swollen-eyed.
in a valley that has dried.

The cultivated bowers,
of wind-swept Dalhlias
and Bouganvillea towers.
fix death in flowers

We did not know
why a pathway led
to a lake’s drowned flow
fallen two fathoms below.

The great house is gutted.
the front, a still facade
where a Lordship strutted
and a scarp abutted.

The hammers were time at work,
not expecting visitors.
The floorless rooms’ dank murk
was ours in which to lurk.

History is more final than death.
We shimmer in the evening chill
It takes away more than our breath
before its voiding shibboleth.

At The Abbot’s Fish House, Meare

I can’t remember why we went there now.
At last we took the road that left that town
of Third Way wizards and seers in track suits,
the woman who believed her dogs Martians
which had to report back from the Tor
on Midsummer’s Day.
The landscape levelled
to become flatlands and late summer mists.
The vulnerable terrain brought home to me
how history’s dump shores up so little
what time unwraps and throws away.
After a turn in the road we came across
a converted Mediaeval barn.
I walked up the drive and knocked on the door
to the restless barking of unseen dogs.
A woman emerged and took us up a path.
She carried a brick in her hand, which
turned out to be a doorstop to my relief.
She handed out a heavy key, kept in a vase.

Three generations entered: my mother in law,
Clare and the three children: already ahead.
The Fisher’s House stood in open field.
a two-storied stone-built Gothic pile
with an outside staircase from the net rooms
to connect with the fisher’s living quarters.
From here the Abbot’s table was provided.
with chub, mottled pike, brown eels and white dace.
Maybe families were raised from a living
of tackle, hooks, rods, oars, nets and paternosters..
Barrels of red-tipped perch, rows of gudgeon,
lampreys, grayling and trout left daily for the monks
to obey the Rule. What we take as the stuff
of leisure was then a routine of work.

The absence of water struck old and young.
Where were the depths, the surface for the boats,
the generation of shoals, or the flood line?
Once there had been a lake here and fish-ponds,
but drainage schemes and enclosures dried the land.
Perhaps we came here to see life surprised.
Trade turned into pastime and toil upended:
a house before us now standing absurd
while others with all their sense are gone.


A Walsingham Purse
 

1.Ely

The first sight of the spire
from the winding A10
seems to be just one of the elms
in the distance,
straighter, darker,
but a part of this landscape too,
despite being older than its life
It is the Lord’s tree.

2. At Bale

Under my bedroom window,
where ragged brambles run,
hundred-year oak-trees grow
out of a hedgerow overrun
by thorns, first cut to bestow
a boundary for a Saxon's son

Beyond a field of wheat,
a coppice rings with song
warning finches to mate and eat,
in shadows, dark and long.
The darkness tells of our defeat
of gibbets that laid low the strong.

Three trees in a clear line,
resemble Golgotha's hill.
Yet which is the thief who can define
my hollow heart the Spirit tries to fill?
You I can still speak to, love of mine.
The others have gone under Your will.

Light breaks from silence
and sounds from the night.
The spirit's sheer transcendence
exposes me, a man too trite,
to hear Your Word's sheer innocence.
He fills an inner eye with unseen light,
which we bar with crosses for thirty pence.

3.The Flies

The rented cottage was infested by flies.
The bathroom was worst.
I killed as many as I could
with a clumsy towel.

Returning for a bath
I found the white tub
a snowy battlefield of fallen,
hairy corpses;
easy to purge the living:
hard to bury the even justly dead.

4.At the Tern Sanctuary, Brancaster.

The land is a stave of frugal hues,
a cloud’soaked sky merges
with a beach of buff-brown sand.
the oncoming tide raises
its lines of iris-blue and white,
littered with shells, scattered remnants
and gull-hunted sea graves.
The distant trees carry
the horizon’s scale
back to the sky’s leading note.
while the lower shore is tide-stained
and pocked with lug worm-casts.
which throw studded shadows
in the afternoon light.

Everything here accords,
with unmanned nature,
except the walking human figures
I left behind: twitchers, beachcombers,
or families out for the day:
each seeking its own ecology of happiness.

Come here to be alone,
I try to accept
I am part of this landscape.
Yet find I lack the instinct
to be properly myself.
that terns, alert among their nests,
the soap opera of the site
and oyster-catchers, perched,
or rolling in the summer air
possess in the whim of species

Yet there are habits I cannot change.
a stop-go idealism,
a faith that splutters
on the twined wick
that weaves a father,
lover, husband and son.
to a charred edge.
Yet how the other candles shine
as I hide among them;
school, church, neighbourhood,
work-mates from the tribe of light.

Not to pilfer norms,
I need that love
come from outside
and stay within
and want no other mark,
as the landscape’s originality
adapts the sun to its own style
and bird-life spawns
a radical unchanging.

5.The Seals at Blakeney Point

We had come the whole length of the spit.
Morston Quay passed by us, with masted yachts
strumming a crazy rhythm in the wind,
past the sandflats to follow the long passageway
of Corsican pines, fringing a smouldering sky
and then the Old Lifeboat Station loomed up
for us to circle past and over to the banks,
where they are lying there on their bellies,
or flopping sidewards to cast a glaucous eye
in wariness to our offshore life forms
crammed in a motorboat.

If we look the other way, past Morston Church and Wells,
that rising bank of shale and the seabirds mewing, endlessly
above the herds , it would be as if our kind had never been.
A quaternary world in symbiosis, gulls, sandpipers, seals
and shoals of saithe and sand eels under the waves:
a cloud of feathers above a landscape of fur.
We