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

have emerged from this, but we are not its part.
Even a drowned child, fallen in a current
that can tumble whole wrecks to the Wash,
is more than the whole of nature, not for her bones,
but for the call made on her life that has no end.


6.Enarratio
“And I will sing of love come down”
Martin Smith

Lord, I am tired of your lovers.
They have taken away
the treasures from your house
to restore their beds.
Their holy spite blesses
the stones they hurl through
the windows of your image.
They take the girls in their bliss
onto their celibate mattresses.
They make a fine sand
of your quiet fields
to cover your Word
with sexy worship.
Your sacred wood
lies under the rubbish dumps.

Day is as long as night.
Sleep is as restless as waking,
until you come to my door.
and tell me how I failed
to secure your house of love.
Give me the strength
to do nothing till you do.

7.The Invited Guests

Come my loved ones,
Come my lovers,
come to my feast.

A little boy running
under the apple trees
enters as myself.
A baby, suckling
at her mother’s teats
develops in the tray as you.

We can eat later
we can eat together
answer each other’s voice.
and question ourselves.

Come my chosen.
Come my choicest
Come my bread’s yeast

Young lads and girls
strike up our notes
to annoy convention,
fear to be confronted,
jib silently while testing
the oxen of work and goods.

We can eat later
We can eat together

Our subtle arts
flow between us
from room to room
seeking a balance
between history and hysteria.
as our children’s
vineyard grows.

The grave-old adults
who sit heavy by the windows
turn to read us,
a later chapter
in our book.
Grown slower
we swear by the soil
in our hands.

We can eat later
We can eat together.
We eat less now
and our company
is enough for our
wrinkled lips.

Come my slightest
come my slighted,
come the least.

8.Canticle for Pia

The grave blue sky
is tassled with unharvested grain.

Creation is
sightless on the path of creature pain.

You are baby
to the ways of dying, yet sustain

a dignity
in viewless beauty without a stain.

My heart in rage
is a zoo on fire, no longer sane.

A captive beast,
I turn on my lover at loss again.

Tender heartshape,
end my acrid fear of death’s straight plain.

Turn with me now,
into fields where wild flowers scent the rain.


Towards a History of the Seasons.
 
We cannot write in the visitor’s book.
We are unfamiliar with recent
preoccupations, such as thermostats,
or butane for our cooking.
Mornings will harden the ground
with early hoarfrosts,
or roll in mist that hides
the looming scarps.
At such times we find
the maps we consult
are bleared, their minor roads
bloodshot and seasonal rivers
swollen, purpled and meandering.
We find ourselves hesitating
over the dimensions of Romanesque,
or Gothic ruins, observing
where we could pass through
where predecessors could not stand.
we are ill at ease in the river-valleys
where the smell of moist clay
and crisply fallen poplar leaves
recall a certain longing
for involvement on river banks.
Yet we move off quickly,
but efficiently to witness relics.
The dead lie, lifelike
and wax-lidded, their limbs
dry and Autumn sepia.
The feather-like flesh,
a sign of sanctity
and great humour as they cease
to depend upon the cold,
consecrated basilicas
they have bequeathed us,
or the dry, blackened hovels
where they spent their frugal lives.
Those who stare at us
when our backs are turned,
efficacious from gold caskets
are not there at all,
but merely hiding
below the flat lands,
low in the ponds, or buried
cellars of past houses where
we cannot fit ourselves.
Being children, their work,
or their vision are functions
of vulnerability: like silk
so rare, so shy, so complex,
demanding the cost
of so much natural life
that its luxury is
marred by parallel
embarrassment, a reluctance
to cling to the flesh.
We have become experts
in the exact whereabouts
of apparitions and in
the six-figure co-ordinates
of wilder limestone
landscape descriptions.
Our joys are not immediate,
but depend on questions of balance
as atmospheres and inert gases
can rapture the coldest steel,
once the intake of murdered
breath excels the space
we have been given to live in.
Finding the Beast’s castle
took no trouble at all, as we may already
have been characters in the story,
but in a hill-village of pebble
and mortar defences,
our role became too detached
and wine-drowsy for guessing Beauty.
We stumbled into significance
in the eyes of mayors and deputies
when all grew still, except for
the beautiful figure
on a war memorial,
come alive, massive
sensuous and ulterior
in the thick night,
with a lamp in her hand
searching for someone.
to show us, lesser phantoms of light
we too have a future to remember.

 
Maps for the Dead

1. Map

Rummaging in a sideboard
for a light bulb when our gîte
in the Maçonnais was blacked out,
I found an old map
of the Dix-Neuvième.
The scenic routes were missing
and two villages
seemed to have vanished.
Others must close earlier,
or are being deserted
under a modern viaduct.
The white blanks show us
the past does not exist,
though the lines show
we were their future
that did not exist.
We cannot scale
this ambiguity,
as Geographers
stretch the hides of continents
onto a hall of mirrors.
The place seems always here,
the dead are not,
though they have a useful map.


2. Legend for Lamartine

The view from inside to outside
will always be a metaphor
for subjectivity and a perfect place
for the fiction of the self.
I look out on a landscape
of a fading vineyard
that glows with Autumn’s
hard escape from poverty.
Lamartine bickers that
the classical view is best.
Yet it was the vineyard
ruined him, whose view
I see from this Mansard.

I read him now
as I would a neighbour
who insists past roads are there.
The page is his landscape
and I meet him in his fiction.


3. Lucina

A map, she stretched out on the world’s ward,
non-existent, to dam the river mouths
on the chart of the century, to be cancelled out
as too actual for cartographers
to store in the grid of grasp, so lean for growth.

The future brute screamed, skinned, from its mother’s
girdle of logical contours that ached.
with the burden of your exact falsity.
No footnotes or handbooks let the bursting
sentence in. No sequence Ramanujan
or Russell might recall divided
the wholeness of the concept. Blasphemy
wrestled to be born. An eminence ,
you stretched out Victorian geology
in cursive or copperplate detachment,
in the Dean’s Lodge. It was your aim
to hold the natural movement in.
and have the pregnant girl turn smooth
as the body of a church, an era or a text,
closed as the face of a revised universal clock
In the bed, the clever girl’s screams grew loud.
Rolls of cambric unravelled maddened yards
and forceps borrowed from the travellers’ hut,
lay unused in the smell of sweat and fear.
Unbirth proved yours was the right to births.

Until the midwife brought in the tabloids
that risked new theories were true for pence
and rogue theologians under Papal
monitae produced necklaces of notes.
And the secret of your hireling jealousy
was out.
The smell of burnings, exile
and embalming fluid on the corpse of lore
spread into the corridor as excited voices,
shouted of a giant child sprung from a
worn-out womb and of fatal outcomes refuted
and in revenge, necessity in flight,
the offices upturned, the shredders
shuddering, the memoires out on goddesses,
you scored the wearied midwife’s back
with brutal fur, that cancelled nakedness
and more, refined her framework to fit lost holes,
forgetting that friendship rules small places.

Night Log (Translated from Walter Delamare’s Silver)


A woman, so slow so silent,
under the night. The way she went
crossed the windows mapped on the floors
with bright squares across the corridors.
She went for the dog, obsessed,
chrome paint in her hand. Then she messed
the doves, at which threw the whole can.
Then the lab-mice drowned in the pan,
one passing a silver paint stool.
She even took the tin into the pool
and the silver fish floated dead.
Her skin seethed silver, her brain with lead

The Mossbawn Man

That puzzled frown, preserved for all...
You can guess his profession from
the noun-hoard they found in his imagery;
a dated meal in a leathery crop.

Its features, as if filled up
with lore, giving the lustre of life
to a thing so dead, Homer was a child...
Ink stains tell he is of the O - Level folk.

His hooded eyes conceal the loyalty
he brooded on to the mythic Empson
and the possibly - forged White Goddess
to be found in Graves as far as Majorca.

He has only the purse of the Catholic
village he never left, which can be deduced
from the diction of the books found on him.
(Though these may be of an earlier level)

It seems he wanted to say something
about red, from the haw buds found
still gripped in his knuckled scansion,
with its Hobsbaum discontinuity.

It seems he survived alone after
the extinction of his god,
by pretending to be a better heathen
than his traceless phenotypes.

His mouth affects taciturnity.
A clever ruse, it utterly conceals
that what could not be said
was never really thought at all.

Athlètes Maudites

Secure at the hub of your little world
the athlete is born so bored,
her manager swears your innocence,
fit for profit, the concern of gossip.
And the architects of purity and health
look down on this Queen Bee of strength.
In bread and honey wanted for the lips
they mixed the filthy steroids of the damned.
Then came the day when they plucked
it from her guts and tossed them in a plastic box.
Dry, beautiful and banned under an angel’s aegis
not once, but twice your nobility became
not laudanum’s, but an Olympic fund’s indignity.


The Flight

The State grows well. The forces grow subtle.
And yet they doubt the matter of our calm.
Stories of immigrant philosophers
and not state-aided moral education
led to our inclusion on the social