9.Map of Storms by Duncan McGibbon (best free e reader TXT) 📖

/> where recovered hope is waited on,
so poorly by those who have their say
as carers and sufferers, whom others shun. .

While he lies buried in the South,
guarding a Jewish colleague in recluse
from Vichyois talk of youpins in his house.
The first and last to defend Dreyfus.

We sit here by the slow Vingeanne
lovers and dreamers in intimacy,
thinking of the Church his thought began
when we were still in infancy.

At Semur En Auxois

As if the dove I see to-day in Semur
in a place like this, a fortress town,
in the depth below the bridge,
down by the low,muddy bank;
as if where it takes flight and races
to where I stand high on the bridge,
thinking of definitions for hope,
and then this fire-light bird.
passes me by, struggles for the towers
of the town’s looming walls
but confusing my horizons
to fly, not to the turrets,
but upwards again,
as if, above the whole domain,
it drew the simple distance
between a soul
and its first breath beyond..


Isobar
The Tendering
At Castle Fogarty

Morning, the jars have spilt over,
throwing a brew of light
through thistles that crowd the window.
We gather oak logs;
the Ard-ri trumpet our clienthood
through their twisted knots.

It is a cloud of whiskery smoke
Why did we live here?
Only to live out a short summer
in the ruins of a lingering ascendancy;
whose sareting overruns with our household;
only to stay inebriate
with my family among strangeness,
prodigious with differences.

My father at peace round the wooden
cable-spool table, reads Roth,
lists odds for the Thurles dogs,
while ,above, in the musty servants quarters,
I read French Catholic metaphysics on a table
that slid through the window
as exactly as the wooden staircase
would admit no other furniture
than a straw bed.

At night, walls cave in, or ceilings
bellyflop to the floor with a thunder
of obstinate conscience that sets bats
wheeling above my torchlight,
thrust from obscurity
by that same decay that subsidised
their concealment. My little sister is content,
lighting fires to dry out centuries of
of mouldy court reports.

Paired, final, before first parenthood.
A six-month calf lodged itself
in the door of the walled garden
and I lacked the courage to pull it free,
The castle's owner,
a mild-mannered Sheffield man
emerged to lead him off
embarrassed at my qualms.


At Walditch

Anna found it
by the dogrose,
heavy with rain.
She’d sprinkled water
on the bird’s corpse,
a life- wearied redwing.
My daughter gave it sorell.
She left when it rained. I saw
flecks on the
window pane where we slept,
man and wife.
Later , we went to the beach,
under the sun’s drug.
Returned,we buried the bird
before she could find it,
and fibbed about its life.
Later, we felt guilty
when she played
in the cemetery
by the church.
She wasn’t kidded,
“God sends another birdie.
If He makes it again,
it’s the same, silly.”
We had slept,
man and wife,
unhappy.
Later, as I watched
the soot-swirled
organon
of the starlings’ moot,
I found,
I could not refute
my daughter’s argument
and wished
for sorrell, rain
and an end to the particular.


At Wells-Next-the Sea

The wild geese lumber in from across the East Hills.
and beach combing children draw back from low -tide pools
Summer's sea spills inshore where a lord once walled
away the maws of a storm's energy and hauled
back meadow grass from marram and sea spit.

He broadened and widened his ancestral view.
His Corsican pinewood grew to the sky’s limit
He wanted a Claude or a Poussin bought
from Albani to catch fire in his engineers’ hands
until at twilight his will was obeyed
in the gold ball he owned as it trailed
a line of light in homage across the creek.

Then death dangled the lord’s rings on his fingerbones.
And the pool silted up under the contradictory mud.
Day after day, less barley carts trundled to the quay,
the spillage of years from a country of golden fields.
In the cottages the wives and children of seamen
paused in the narrow lanes and by walled stairs
to consider the dictating skies, while unstable boats
trawled cold, glistening whelks from the giddy creeks.

Twice the sea hammered, masterless into the grit of the land
Then the fishing failed and the back lanes grew quiet.
The bedstead rooms of fishermen were closed
on wives and love and death and birth.
New mortar healed the breached walls
and the town took on new wariness
to shifts beyond the shore-line of the coast.

And yet the pace of men would quicken
at the sound of the gun fired in urgency.
Even in the graveyard, a coffin would be left,
unburied, while pallbearers ran for the boat
and entered the terrible water
to save any life except their own.
No pictured landscape can claim to own
the sense, or colour of that free price.

At Walsingham

i.m. T.S.Eliot
i.m. Robert Lowell

Your lady stands
on false promontaries.
Why loath the Spirit’s swynk
outside home comforts?
These wracks still drag
to the sleepy rhythms of those
who did not take off their shoes.

Grant me, tellers of dry democracy,
to sing the bitter plaint
that rues the place’s wrongs.
Let me walk barefoot
the remaining mile
and sing the sweetest hymns.

The pattern of the past is now
not in the now of easy sea-death,
not the eternal moment,
but the moment of eternity.

Where your Lady sat becomes
times’ puppet in the sea
of literary gods who feast
on the unknowable fat
of Ahab’s whalebone books.

You hurl torn vines
into the whirlpool of lore
where the flotsam
of drowned patricians
root for academic idols
that profane the Lady’s way.

Calvary's cross still stands
in the rubble of Bethlehem
to bless all blasphemies.

The canopy is large enough
to meet with my true love.

There is no beauty now
no loveliness except
in expectation, no gate
except where gates are none.

Hers is dark beauty, hidden
until the fire is durable,
on the hedgerow and the stream
from which I will not turm
as penitents without our shoes,
we walk this mile together.


At Olney

Past the ragged oaks we drive
in this pre-summer sunlight.
Each is barely green,
like a valid argument
hesitantly expressed.

The town bustles to a boot-sale,
transistors, walkmans and
a local haul of videos
are crowded, glistening
on the creaking boards.

Opposite the car-park
in a tall house
there is a room left
as the poet deserted it,
locked on Sunday.

I can only stare inside
at the still exactitude
of his private voice.
From outside the little world
is silent, deviant, strange.

Yet from within, the vision
asks for the room's text
that passes as the river
spills through the lock
and carries to the church
some craziness
brought into the stalls
to redeem its growth.


Isobar:
Tallow Testaments


Winter Prayer at Midnight, Pantasaph.

The light elves
have quitted the kitchen.
Brown bugs drop down from the shelves.

Darker than twilight,
they come to raid our rights,
then free-fall, stunned by the white

baptismal,
brilliant conti-board,
which cuts down the carapaced horde.

The crass sprites
have packed the air with fear.
Superstition works overtime on nights.

They botch
touch-down, pack the air with fear,
Hardy's doom fly, or Frost's death-watch.

A tungsten-cloak,
by the beacon-bright window
open to dispel my smoke.

which I draw, numb,
as noxious as the thrall
of Frances Thompson's laudanum.

He came here,
once, to dry out his drug
and lost himself in words always unclear.

Clare sleeps upstairs
heeding a lightness,
and a loneliness that scares

my dark-
haired daughter, who might wake
As Alice Meynell came here, to mark

a wakefulness,
as did another who did not
share her view on holiness.

Coventry Patmore,
lyrical, dapper and straight
as trim as a Colonel and as much a bore

Lean and lost,
Baron Corno raked the leaves
from the graveyard under frost.

While distantly
pine trees stack their pliant might
against a sudden gust from the lea

of St Beuno’s
and you, you and you
and you, my girls of the snows.

witness my words
and my prayer, faithful Trinity
that love’s voice still be heard.

It is time
to turn off the light.
I turn to the stair to climb

and tell church grims
to go back to their wells
where only darkness brims.


Earine's Oak, A Fantasy Dreamed by a Whitbread Heiress
Incarcerated in Normansfield Hospital for Being Pregnant.

To shift weight from the arch
to the tendon of my heel
spans the badger's lifetime.
Springs have come and winters
gone by, long since,
while I have stirred
the fibres in my grainy neck.
Time beyond growth,
each season's sap has trickled
its water-clock through my veins.
Each drop becomes a heart-beat,
moments the craving for those
who will come tomorrow.
Yet only hollow days
will come to wind me tighter
in this whitened bole.
How many autumns have shrunk me
since the day my mother
smashed the claret glass?
Whatever hope it was I brought
across the spinney
and took down lanes to Laurel
has long since warped
to dust inside my bones.
I awed to be whole
and graft life to the lustre
of my untaught shape,
yet sobbing, clung to him
in the stupor of infancy.
About my limbs, the xylem
sets apart my gowns.
Wood now shields
my stiff and horny back.
I am become a broken lock
wakened by a useless key.
I am generations of pithy blindness
shut away with simple friends
who know my comfort
in an exacting sloth
of measured loss.
When did the bark beetle stir,
or another's hand fail to rouse
an expectation in my throat?
When did I last turn the lacquered knob
that led into Papa's room?
Can I still see the varnished cases,
Latin words engraved on polished brass?
Can I still remember the names
I used to list for him?
When once I was his only friend
let in to play there.
Hour by hour, as indigo
spattered the starch in his cuffs
with the hue of money.
Then he would pick me up
with promises of milk and curds,
honey from the bees.
All my waking thoughts
which once I nurtured
through the bitter desks
and hungered parsings
of the school room.
I found their tincture,
as early hours touched
the threadbare curtains
of Laurel's lodge
with Pangbourne's dawn.
Then I told him how
my breasts had risen
and his furtive eyes untold my
of nakedness I had not guessed at.
That night I dreamed
of father's