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

Seventy Four
bound for the City. Fourteen kilometres
down, my white Honda Civic
left the road, travelled on grass and caught
a concrete culvert. It was found in a ditch,
I, slumped over behind the steering wheel
just south of Crescent. The documents
I took from the Hub Cafe with me, a brown
manila folder and a large notebook, gone.”

Whitton, light fog, the coalite found frosted in the hatch.
I carried its sugary liquorice into the kitchen.
The bent form of the Berwick swans, travelling south,
flying in across the pale sky to Ashford sandpit,
where later, that day, I fished with frozen hands.
Mallarme’s Showman came out of the jetty
and white refuse hung in the trees.
They have wings that curve more than the mute
and have flown from Russia, Olga Bergholz,
one of the pin up girls, with Sophia Parzak,
Anna Akhmatova, and Irena Odoyevtseva,
from the ravaged statues they came across in
the City called out, called Leningrad.
Their home was the Summer Park , the ringed,
the pas de quatre, the writers, the wrung, the wronged,
docile in English speaking hands, mocked
and marked and marketed now they are dead.
It is now they have gone, the dead girl poets
and now the dead girl reformer.
Le Maitre set them singing in the circus tent of literature.
The past is now a future phenomenon.
You wiggle their dead jaws to mouth words,
or give a script to Meryl Streep.
Once they lived and deserved more happiness
than printed words can give.
We cannot redeem poets, or reformers, their grief.
This is why Dante kicks us when translating.
Traduttore, traditore? in his Platonic high.
Our words are our suffering, our passion
and no theory can swop itself for the pure
tap root from the torn twig that is speech.
Does the past owe us allegiance and not we the past?
Must it answer our enquiries and not probe us?
Only a little raising up will do.
And our critics will rock on their heels.
and exclaim how each bears your mark,
the noble creature Une Femme d’autrefois.
the illusion we can get back to Eden
a theology of secular nostalgia
in the eyes that consume their singing.
starring the New Beatrices .
We will reveal the lover-poet, the wife-poet,
the widow-poet, the girl-poet to our eyes,
undressed on the platform of now.
We will tell Silkwood jokes in the shower scenes.
And the New Critic will mark her, swear to follow
and will want justice from a list of iniquities,
while the Plebeian mob intone to Juno “t’ appal the Trojans”
Ethelred’s hired killers stab at foreign Gunhilde
Bloedmonath, in Gunnersbury, when knives are to be found.
The Lord Mayor’s crowds will swear to Great Gogmagog.
Winstanley’s lighthouse swells for humanity.
The swans are marked with the City’s knives: pas de quatre.
Bogside girl, Soweto girl, Kirovskiy girl, Bow girl,
the listeners they never met.
and now the Crescent City girl, the journalist she never met.
All the bloody Sundays, bloody weekdays long,
Bloody Mondays, Bloody Wednesdays, Bloody Thursdays,
Bloody Fridays, Bloody Saturdays
and you will swear after the mardi gras brush off,
Tuesday was a good day until it turned Depression Black.
Travelling south on the Route Seventy Four
bound for the City that scrubbed her scarlet.
The swans will soon vanish at the Christmas bell
and no fish bit. At least this secret month
puts us on whisper-terms with life:
Zurndorfer’s law, November is the ghost of time.

14 Equorum Probatio

Flags unfurl for a Prince
while Jason’s brood,
the pheasant poults from Phasis,
drink dew at dawn.
The Roman horseguards march
down the monarchist alleyways.
It is winter in the Royal Park.
The flags drape the catafalque
of Justinian, his Code burying
for a millennium and a half
the roots of Christianity
in the Memra of Israel.

Would the power of the strong
had lasted and Uncle Arthur’s voice
still proclaimed news from the seventh floor
mahogany of Marconi House?
We can still obey in sleep.
Maybe we can think out of here?
Leibniz’s mills turned on themselves,
until the logician and the dreamer
argued their existenz to silence.
Napoleon rides into
Jena with a Corsican straddle.
The penniless writer beds his landlady
aufhebung to the moment of Right.
Hegel smiles, a charming man
despite his bald patch and his bags.
Dead this day of cholera,
he cringes in the philosopher’s waiting room,
Stan Laurel to Europe’s Oliver
“Well, here's another nice mess
you've gotten me into."
Maybe the heart will get us through.
Heinkel H.E. one, one, ones
dropped marker flares pinpointed
by X Gerät broadcast beams.
By eight, the Cathedral was blazing
with the city’s heart.
Hallowed by the ghosts
of Luftflotte drei incendiaries,
I prayed there as a student
under Epstein’s Michael,
Piper’s window, Sutherland’s Catholic,
prototypic Christ
and Britten’s pacific Requiem.
Germany had a new verb,
for the moment, Koventrieren.
Maybe we can have a lucid moment
when the stone thrown
by a boy from St Martin’s
in Middlesborough
didn’t hit me.
Eight hundred bodies
in the London Road cemetery,
and others weren’t sent out in boxes.
Lech Walesa’s prison cell
and the shot that raked
Ploycarpa Salvarietta’s body
were only Absolutely
historical developments.
Add days spent in torpid failure
and we reach Lyell’s layers again.
Lord dig out more folds of clay.
It is winter in the Royal Park,
a scrapbook of a wedding
for a Princess ages in the frost
of the year’s attic.

Time to get out more,
take the fingers off the piano.
Rachmaninov pockets his notebook,
Oriental sketch, unfinished
and plans his move to Helsinki.


15. Sichi Go San
i.m. Marianne Moore

Glued, thousand-year candy clutched in the hands of dressed up children at the Meiji shrines
melts away its snow and blood for the growing of hair on little boy’s shaven pates.
Kinder get the day off on the Kahlenberg for Sancti Leopoldi quem Innocentius Papae Octavus
in Sanctorum numerorum adscripserit.
Suckled on a bandage of lies, the lippy feast of liberated slaves becomes friable.
In Terracina the shaven heads of the freed, took the pileus, the ex-slaves hat
from Feronia on raw skulls. Cave a signatem.

Now the Madonnina di Monte Leano will grant you one. If you’re lucky.
Priests kept votive slaves. The proposition of the free
aged three, five, seven, whenever,
depends for its strength on correspondence with the facts. Facts are inconvenient
and liable to breakage.
Atlanta burnt, but the slaves had to free themselves. Sherman left for the sea.
Himmler marched gays and gypsies to the camps, yet IBM made his punchcards.

In Washington protesters marched against death, yet Melville’s bombs
injured nineteen, opening the hold for the Unabomber’s smoking parcel.
It is a day of the feasting kings, Rubino took aim at Leopold of the Congo,
just to prove himself an anarchist,
Brazil trumpeted a republic,
yet held fast to its slaves .

Outside in Highbury, the Victorian brick is bandaged in fog, and history sleeps in the smog of its glory.
The first day of the Russian winter fast; a liberation from the slavery to sin.
And the children at seven, her first obi, the silk sash worn
with the kimono and gentle pride.
At five he is given his first hakama with long sweets, white and red, the colours of a long life,
the little turtle and the tall crane.

A liberation from liberators;
As fact is to the lie,
so the corpse is to the fly.
-“all rawness” if you like. If by genuine you mean the truth,
then I will allow you still
to be interested in poetry

16. El Santo Nino de la Guardia

Headressed, the white bridal pride of the girls
shimmers on the benches at the front in the church.
The taste of that old melody on the tenor throats
and the mouths of the faithful, resonates
on the polished marble floor.
All is finer than my experience can tell.
The little child in the shrine of branches
has the look of a child-god, a god
of perfect love, of the violence of the question,
of the authority of torture, the racked breath
and the humiliation of ordinary truth.
white silk breathes on the floor,
bare marble throbs to the singing
of pure voices. The people
of this ordinary town
assemble to pray a lie.
the truth trembles
with the screams of Benito Garcia
the converse, confessed