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

mode of existence
They have
white-painted yachts enough,
and banana boats
to out number
either the Corinthians
or the Spartans
Even the Venetians
would be hard-pressed
with the calor-fed barbecues
of the tourist civilisation
Manfred, or the Ottomans
raiding for girls
on the night-time beaches,
fertility being the usual tactic
would be ignored in the toga-parties
and grow faint-hearted.
Imperial, gunboats
like the interests of history,
would be outran by speedboats
The Napoleonic ballroom
is doomed by sky divers,
the Fleet outstripped by wind-surfers.
Scuba-drivers playing
with torpedoes
and direct them home.
Mussolini's planes cannot
sortie with Nazis
as the hang-gliders
block their sight.
less sure a walkover
are ideological mines
still drifting in the Achanian channel.,
Macht ist recht
might still float up
in a seam of
orange, blue or yellow lilies
so sensitive to the feather light touch
of brutal infinity
as are the drowned from
H.M.S. Saumarez
sightseers only now
from the British Cemetery
what is not, could still be
that it was not proves nothing,
which is what 'might' adds up to.


8. In Roman Night


Six beds to a room we lie
To my right Cato Uticenses,
a German in fact
injured with his whole foot bound
and plastered
at nightfall, he paces himself
out of the ward
and makes a complicated international call
and leaves for Africa.

To my right on the after side,
Nero complains of a stomach ache.
He came into hospital
with suspected food-poisoning
and has been here since,
a prisoner of the drip,
a drip on a drip.
At first it was a rumour
of low red cells,
but the machine was at fault
Now, with one day left of
his tour, his songs must go unsung.
Tomorrow his flight leaves
but to-day they are offering him
his first meal in days.
Starved he eats carelessly.
While Suetonius, reading a tabloid,
waits to book his flight
To my left lies the young Strabo,
thinking Corfu a shitty place
He has done its geography
and its history.
Now the place is the pain
he suffers from.
Only the life of "Tom Jones"
and the thought of the stories
he can tell about Greek hospitals
to the second years at Lancing
have any interest at all.

Before me lies a bed
occupied by Cicero until he fled
Relying on Roman forgiveness,
he goes back to his villa
and his vines.
At the exact hour
he leaves, talking to himself
behind black, framed spectacles
(later they bring in Tiberius
with a head wound, self-inflicted
in the pleasure place)
He will need a transfusion
but there is no blood on the island.
So the tourist gather to give theirs
unscreened, but it was enough
to get back into action
until the battered head and arm give out.
On the left, across from me
lies the only soldier,
Antonius, a loser and a hero,
a blasphemer against
word of God and St Anthony
an office dictator who
has cracked three ribs
broken three bones in his leg
and his foot.

He smokes Egyptian cigarettes,
despite the warnings
in Greek, Hebrew and Latin.
Restless, he stalks
the wasted hours
in a battered
wheelchair, cursing
the scooter accident
that put him here
His girlfriend comes
from work each day
to solace him. Octavia
has a sensitive,
dark-haired weary beauty he ignores.
Until both lie up on the bed,
dreaming of Rome.

I lie in this full-throated
darkness of cicadas,
wave on wave in unison.

Pyrrhus of Epirus,
a stooge for dead Romans,
clinging to the Jupitar of Cassius
I listen to the chatter
of Roman privilege
and make a pagan
vow to he who has
sway over owls.
White Lanassa returns to Cassiope alone
thinking I have other concerns.
While in the shadows
a matron-girl, makes a bed
for a lager-lout,
with bronchial pneumonia.
She wipes his brow.
Antonius lights up,
a sulphur flame in the dark.
Frizzy haired,
dark and swallow thin,
the nurse extinguishes the light.
This is how I knew her,
Agios Kerkyra, the convent.
a brief light of pity
before Gladstone cleared out
the night-shift.

9. The Colossus of Kouloura


We sat in Durrell's garden,
under the vines of commerce
Pregnant, Helen stands before me
in profile and allows enough
of her supple figure to be seen
in her azure-blue costume
to offend the censure of fathers.
She has gone down
to bathe with the children.

At first she stayed at water's edge , next
to her husband, with a child,
Hermione between her legs,
looking down, as if raising
a domestic counter
to whatever argument
he put up for going it alone
on the dinghy, or the terrace-bar.

But his distant,
day-dream strategy
always worked
and he went off
to lie on the dinghy
lolling by the cherry tree.

So she returned with
what looked like a friend
and, of course,
the ever present American,
East Coast, Roman
they dined with them together.
She liked to gather people round
where she could preside
alertly unnoticed in the conversation.
"I know just what you mean
There used to be a very tall girl
at school - the head girl in fact
who always stooped - I suppose
it was self-confidence.
I never heard what became of her.
What?
O no, confidence is just what I need
to raise three children
That's why Manfred and I
were also able to do our
open university course.
“I think it's time
we went for a dip.
Would you like to come
with them now?"
The thin-faced
recognisably frissy hair
stepped reluctantly
off the verandah
to strip off her black dress
and pick her way
in a white swimsuit,
down to the rocky shores.
She looked at me
and I know she is an au pair,
or a servant to her
and that the woman is Helen,
daughter of Comnenos
a prisoner of her dowry.

Seated aslant a square table,
a grey-haired, blunt Midlands
entrepreneur, focuses his field glasses
on the only object of his mind
His huge white yacht,
The Philippe Eschinard
with an ugly conning tower
It should be the eve of Pentecost
“Et li jorz fu bels et desu
et li venz dolz et soes
et il laissant aler les voilis al vent.”
All to sack the cultured
in the name of
Villhardouin's mercantilism
The white launch ships anchor
and slips away to Istanbul.


9. Five Finger Study, the Villa Caterina


1.
We are naked for love
under the fixed glitter of Saturn
visible in the angle of
our half-closed jalousies.
Our eyes make out
the shapes of sex,
in the cicada darkness.
As athletes bared to minimise
resistance from the Maestros
cooling us. Runners pace in silent
dedication, a fixed attention
to the body's motions.
In the silence of this game of skin
I stir the carnal contours
of your back with a single finger.
2.
You lie frontal with your head to the window
shifting the sky to the mirror,
like a patient unclothed for a physician's
diagnostic, probing hands.
Your silence modulates to inhibition
sequences to a tense hope
of exhilaration, or its loss
a quick intake of clenched breath
which grows chromatic, staccato
heard in a speechless frame
that only fear greater than death
is the ear of the failure to love,
in naked silence too, we lie.
upon the cold white slabs of hate
and its deceptions, our limbs slackened
in the ultimate embarrassment of dolls.

3.
Today in a Xanadu of rocks
we swam, with wrasse and mullet
chafing at our cheek,
you always further out, so strong,
while I, eyes open underwater,
probe for precipices, for that
sudden shelving to forty feet,
or more that makes our effort
so puny, so endangered.
Those who cannot believe this
cannot see the depths.
Dreams too are silent. The tacit
dance of physical bodies to become
elemental, to climb out of depths
with clouds of foaming spray
that salt taste cleansed of sorrow,
having wandered on foot paths
heavy with the odour of lentisc,ilex,
Robinia, arbuteus, and olive, silver poplar,
sea-grass, cypresses and eucalyptus,
listening for the stir of
a bright lizard through the leafage,
or a rock thrush, blue and brilliant above.

4
We are hidden in the brush,
having come out of the sea.
to face our stripping.
Shame too has its silence,
an accusing finger, raised and pointed
to jab "where art thou?"
The notes slide towards the bass
despite the counterpoint of truth,
so low the piano wires vibration
stirs a dust smell, an acrid discord
that counters the perfumed day
Yet we lie, unspeaking, in the tallow dark
models, undressed, before the artist
who paints each feature anew.
Bidden not to speak and not to spoil
the truthful delineation of time,
in a self-portrait of the artist as a lover
we muscle against age and bones,
touching that word that, bare,
which we cannot bear and barely use.
We are touching touching silence itself
5.
Until those rhythms return from our beginning
a fixed tonality that every distant modulation cannot lose.
Our bodies stripped to act, we grow quick
to each other's time signature,
discovering again our wounds,
curing death by braving its reality
we moisten and dream, sighing now
with the risk, the dangerous excitement
of slaved secrecy.
Until each has opened a new door
into the others closed room,
to see the latent image
which the tactile trace lays bare
Complex, distant clouds still stir us
in the heats of love, the nudity of cure,
the melodic theme dying into a flattened
allusion, langorous, plain
rallantando to the bar line.

10. Signori

"A frank-faced man,
well attired", according to Bandiera.
He thought him a man of forty years,
though in feet he was forty seven.
"Very brown of skin with a vivacious eye
He wears a short, chestnut-coloured wig,
a bold distainful character.
He is full of the gift of the gab
and, as such, witty and learned".

You can meet him every day in Cassiope,
coming up from the port;
his undress is a little more
extreme than Venetian mores
would have allowed.

He arrived on motor-bike,
and took a room
above the fisherman's house.
She, of course, did all the talking
"Don't you remember me
I was a seven year old
girl when my mother took the room"

While the owner despaired
of finding a room at this short notice.
She puts her arm around
as if she were an old friend,
though the owner cannot remember her"
Eventually he gives in she gets
the room for them free,
bath that night and a meal
The next day he wants to move on
and chucks her, his shirt not
exactly ironed in the way
he wants. She is left alone
and almost sobs
on the waiter's shoulders,
while he, never remembering her
invents from doubt
a memory of cherishing
squeezes her shoulder
and lets her stay hating
Casanova types
until her mother sends the money.


11. Lear at Episcopis


He writes to Lady Waldegrave
from the shadow of Pantocrater
to the horse-chestnut walks of
of Strawberry Hill,

“There was an Old Man of Corfu...”
He wrote from Corfu town's Condi Terrace,
“this tittle tattle place...
We are all more or less swells as lives in it.”

“There is a man in a boat here
...who never knew what he should do...
under the window-who catches fish all
and every day with a long five-pronged fork..

Mrs Mac Farlane's female domestic
has fallen downstairs by
which precipitate act,
Mrs M's