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

Radio broke into The Chiffons
Feels so good to hold him tight.


and any barmaid can be a star made
if she dances with or without a fan.
Doris Day at one thirty six and a few seconds
broken in to by an ABC radio man

After the rubrics, the CBS feed
played Barber's Adagio at the wrong speed.
Who eee woo wee ee woo wee
After a few seconds of silence,


Jackson repeated the news:

Then Beethoven's Pastoral was used,

Bamp bamp bamp sh bam sh sh sh

Jackson repeated the news,

followed by "The Star Spangled Banner”
bam sh bam bam sh shy
When our cause isn’t just, then must we conquer?
bam sh sh bam bam sh sh shy bam

III. Scherzo

Dogory Kirke collapsed in his bedroom outside Oxford
“for a few golden moments the natural and the supernatural,
...fused into that... they would have had before the Fall “
and what would Lewis have said
about Arthur Sullivan’s hackneyed chord?

At Llano in the Mojave, far from Handel or Purcell,
unable to say words his wife could tell,
Huxley wrote "LSD, a hundred,
micrograms, intramuscular."

His wife injected him at eleven forty five
and gave another two hours later.
At five twenty one p m Aldous Huxley was at rest
“After silence, that which comes nearest
to expressing the inexpressible is music.”

On the Huxley Variations’ arithmetic

Stravinsky ;“Music is not always ‘to like’:
music is also for something
much more important than ‘to like’
and his strings sounding
like ”the sprinkling of fine glass.”

Kennedy died minutes after two, or quicker.
Stravinsky’s mezzo or baritone
fades and fires between the tritone
Mi contra fa diabolus est in musica

and the perfect fifth on three clarinets,
like witnesses to a mute forest of instruments.
Let music, speak, not words, nor wisdom too,
the seal on the Kunzite stone at a cost to rue,
the President could never give the girl he loved true.

IV.Rondo
On Cecilia’s dead body a single digit yet.
It is enough to play a silent set.

My brother was in the queue
to be With the Beatles. I thought it dim.
They’d really got a hold on him
In their new songs, I heard a strange

repetition of phrase
when pitch and tone weren’t one
Why send? Why care?
Why fuss? Did they sing or did they sigh?

The sequences were ambivalent
What they were they were,
what they were fated to become
depended on us
recording their chords
how we chose to hear
decided its meaning.

V. Finale (Uncut)

Victoria de Los Angeles, Emma Albani those St Marguerites
where are they gone, Albani whom Gounod treats;
Los Angeles, whom he draws down?

Daughters, you grow in my shadow.
I run away from your play
until you no longer need its deed
black-blazered kids as formal as the crow.

What can I say as I defray,
the heed of your feed.
The demolition site of speech
thunders to the screech

of venial cat gut on mortal wood.
Nothing ever thought could
mill, could still the heart.
That only what has never been will be in vain.


23. Nono Kalendis Decembris, Clementide.
Sonata Appassionata i.m. Paul Celan
Only the hardiest lichens still covered the trees, now sulphur dioxide wreathed from the polluted sky. From about half past ten in the evening until about half past twelve Somewhere I saw a fractured stem frozen by a raindrop. The sodium glare blurrred the road signs where I had walked. Finished rains, a stain of patina insulated the motorway’s arterial spasm. There was nowhere to go. Over this riverscape cloud banks rolled to the tow of cold fronts that seeped in to empty warmth. With inshore winds colder than usual, the rain drew over the land to Europe, over housing estates, depots, yards, town- centres, building sites, argon lit airports, sub-stations, moorlands.
Sometimes I gazed at the clouds over Twickenham and thought about my children and waited for growth, rather than diminishment. At sometime I thought of myself, exhausted, trying to find a way out of the stigma that had fixed my cravings.
This was the flooded suburb of faith that lay deep below the meniscus of weariness with the unjustly slain, who blundered into the stretches of the crazed, whose songs wavered with the grief of exile and of their friend’s betrayal. This was the Gondaropinland of wasted sensuality, of a girl called Niemand asleep and shivering dreams of her abuse on the frost of her skin. This the Cloverland of the routinised, of the air-crash dead with nowhere to go. I had come from the markets of sense, without goods of value, having sold away wonder to fill a hunger I had caught from Parties and Councils who kneaded yes into no and dissolved assent in the acid of denial.
Milton’s spectre carried the world’s copies of his Areopagitas of bigotry in a sack called night. Darwin paced the streets looking for how the sad adapt their tears in the mist called oblivion. Pascal scraped at the ashes of his fire at the God of anger, the God of power, the God of violence, not of the philosophers. Mabillon strained at coded songs in the dark called love. Clement the Unexistent trailed by sleepwalking followers stared up at a slowly fading light from a room above.
At some time the old had been chilled by dreams of authority from those who had gone. Sightless alone in a room filled with sunlight, a bomber still hears his commander order him to drop incendiaries on distant unknown cities and an old broker hears of deals that will bring back the dead. At some time in the closed factories that follow Lenz’ law and the piety of the arc lamps, the massive hollow that is still to be emptied of mastering wounded speech will only leave a brittle framework of afflicted silence.
I place it on your grave in the Thiais Cemetery. How sad it is to hope.


6.Caterntide
24. Brumalia
Pristine, I cannot find the preface Cervantes did not want to write, nor the portrait Don Juan de Jauregui did not want to give of him.
Don’t begin
with how Sterne was begot and the house clock that could never be wound without his mother’s thoughts of some other things and with the sagacious Locke.
Don’t mention
Spinoza’s unknown bodily mechanism and of the many things his somnambulists did in their sleep and the poem about spring, the overcoat, forgotten and how warmth nudges the earth.
Things that happen do not make a creed of must.
It is winter
and the wine has come for Brumalia, Brumaire c’est fini; the Beaujolais Villages from Rome and Byzantium arrives by parachute drop to the Staines Road Off-Licence.
Human time
means what can only be felt exists, a wine without bitterness that must be drunk soon with its text of mild banana and peardrop; massive silence
unbroken,

and the rain, re-fruiting the past on stems of reserve. This island place, the ‘I’, the eye-land’s muscled history fires the landscape. The ‘aye’ lies there inert, a lying fibre, scattered in the Berkshire mud.
Broken bricks
from the building site, a scaffolded waste, like an unfinished place of worship; Beaker Folk, or Corded Ware , found too late for a comeback, too urbane for mystery.
The unwritten Preface
of the present, that unknown mechanism of history that keeps us sleepwalking into the future. Most of what has happened is now as empty as a portrait of an hour. Dan Cooper, the Norjak man leaps into its freedom of nowhere.
The eye-site was built
on the place of Woodley Park. I took the track that was the old estate’s access from Earley Station when the four, six twos my brother modelled still breathed past. Rainfall always bogged me down, trying that short cut to the College. I hated the road past the Huntley and Palmer’s tin factory and the Bus Station.
It would still be a long time,
before I saw “Winchcombe” Hall of Residence and the playing fields. My trousers would be sodden with mud which I trailed to the hostel room, where I would write about what I had not lived through on sheets of tatty yellow paper my father brought from his clinic.
Elsewhere,
trainee teachers with bare midriffs and bowler hats foraged widely on sex, Newcastle Brown, Afghan black and Players Number Six to the drone of Leonard Cohen;
mud and massive silence
that night. The page of Rahner left unfinished in Whitton and before me a week of uncreation, by-passing the stares of well-debated girls. It was the year of the sweater skirt, the PE girls in micros, the humanities kids in standard minis, ‘kneesie’ young lecturers, drama students in midis and battle jackets all sleepwalking into the bare future.
Maxis were for hysteria at tedious
noisy balls, or discos and the science students wore trousers that flapped with chunky shoes. Did the lab rules make them always cover their bums?
the emptiness
of the letter-rack where you met the shy, friendly ones wanting letters and union meetings where everyone wore trench-coats, even though the heating was on.
I had left an offering
in my shoe prints on the half-built, private estate, that the God of St Edmund’s arsey ,Nelson Road , be not just a weekend eye -land. Inert, the sceptical mud got onto the maps, on Rahner’s page about being being anything not nothing, on the church across the piggery field,
next weekend:
My father in his chair cutting short my talk of the “supernatural existential” until the results of the two thirty at Lingfield trash the day’s accumulator, while my sister sings “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” to the radio.
Berkshire rain,
mild, unseen and persistent on a dimmed landscape of orchards, brick stacks and unchosen Gods, the eye-deus, the ‘I’dear, the ‘I’ deal. Surely by now, now the flares have faded, that God of the scaffolds has been built? Surely by now, the bright-skied shortcut I took is a street. In the clay, in the breath of encroached fields, in the present that is everything that is, lies the forgetfulness, the waste of ripeness, that crumbles at the poke of fingering history. Yet here up-track in icy Twickenham, a Golem ‘I’ still lumbers across that building site, a noctambulant, following a dated map for a fresher unbelief.
I cannot
find another copy of ‘The Origin of Species’ the librarian would not let me take out from the library when I was eleven.
Don’t begin
with later I read Ulrike Meinhof. It was on a postcard that fell out of a German novel I was reading.She had other thoughts then.
Don’t mention to Maldoror now black as pitch night comes you can’t breathe under water even if you’re non-insane. Each boarding soul knows, you cannot rely on Celan’s sharks.
Things that must happen still do not make a creed.
It is winter
in St Edmund’s R.C., the Priests now wear red for the Vietnam Martyrs and the wine has come for Brumalia; without bitterness, it must be drunk.

25. St Catherine’s Day

Qaddish, that earthen wheel,
a mythic saint and real prayer.
You cannot pray to the real Hypatia
whose wounds still bleed.
Les Catherinrettes vont