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

coiffer
sainte Catherine at the corner
of the Petits Carreaux and Clery,
while gales head for the Channel,
the jet stream poised
to sink the White ship
with its undertow of anarchy
drowned William and Richard, Otheur, Richard of Avanches, Geoffrey, Matilda and Lucia,
to gust
through the South coast
past the sectarian ruins
of St Catherine’s light,Ventnor,
and London at a hundred
and twenty miles per hour,
shattering lives and roof slates,
through Coringa, India, veering
a hundred and thirty degrees through time, a verdronken port and thirty thousand dead,

sending twisters through
a passage of years
at Heber Springs, Arkansas,
that killed seventy six,
freezing in the Appalachians
and West Virginia,
three hundred and
twenty three dead in the snow.
In the next room
of the chronicle,
typhoon Nina has stolen a thousand and thirty six in the Philippines.

From the silk sheets
of Gondatrophin-bedland,
young Poniatowski
wakes after the service
of the Empress’ white breeches.
Later he beds virgin Poland.
Dragged off by the treachery
of dukes, he defines a future Cloverland. Milk drowns its honey,

while off Sidi Barani, HMS Barham
rolls over and blows up
from top-heavy shells
to be kept censored
until D Day,
though birthday girl
Helen Duncan
séances the truth,
to be tried
as a witch and
banged up in Holloway.
And the dead
how they get in everywhere!
Bathhurst cudgelled. The Cheyenne
children lie in blood
that flows
until the Union
cashes in their ghost cries,
witnessed by the Dartford dead from the V 2 and the Mirabal sisters qualify too.

Trying to think back the hours in a day
brings the apple tree my younger brother
broke his arm on when a branch gave
as he swung on it.
Months later I unearthed the branch in the compost heap.
Over the winter it had grown white fleshy roots
and gripped the mulch so hard the soil hit my face
as I pulled on it.
Its kingdom claimed.


That silent energy, tree and arm,
brother and earth.
and maybe we need to finish here
as Kennedy is interred
in a graveyard of soldiers
on his son’s birthday.


Chapter Six Nativity Fast
26.Thanksgiving
Radnor Gardens,
Cortot’s fingers open the world:
it is the snow étude,
sown indoors,
flickering by the fire I set.
In the papers,
the Glenn Gould film’s review.
We would not have stayed in Thrace
with Aristophanes
had this country not been so covered with snow
and the rivers ice-bound at the time Lewis Carroll
brought out his underground tragedy here;
I read to my daughter.
It was the time I fell in with Ireton,
a bearded local Puritan Africaans,
with Rupert’s Times Wine Club-glass in hand
at my forefather’s Putney debates;
truth to tell he loved De Rure Albion
to such excess his graffiti. “Mosaic Brits are cool”
won him instant incomprehension.
Seedy Lewis, his son,
whom we made laureate,
pleaded with the establishment
to mobilise for
the defence of Madrid
while Russian tanks
of the Byelorussian
Military District from Stara
rolled in off the steamer Chicherin.
Orwell swore on his single egg
at Villa Simont there would be as many fighters as locusts.
As deadly as any war
Shall we go to the Treaty tasting?
The Roman Triumvirate smelling of greasepaint
They do not cross at Philippi, but will do so.
Then the fifty-year with a bouquet of delegates
to the Winter War from Finland,
or forty years mature with Aristophanes’
perfume of honey corked by the Hull note
from the Pearl Harbour Estate. The smell of engine oil
and a slow wake on the shore
as the carriers slip out of Hitokapu Bay.
And Dick O’Polis will have his market
a rusting reel of Casablanca, Sontag’s Aids story from the New Yorker,
one point five inches of rain from Guadalupe in one minute,
the rights to Ronald Regan’s autobiography,
the contents and the curse of Tut’s tomb,
a doorway into our times
along with the Brinks Mat gold bullion and
Ellen White’s last deception of Satan
the ladder Hauptmann did, or didn’t, use
to kidnap baby Lindbergh.
In Gondotropinland
Fur -wrapped film-stars
bring the Sacred Meal,
after the Macy temple of Dionysos
Oskhophoria parade.
Meat, bread, and
cellulose bravery brought
to the Twice-seven Children,
who will go down to Crete with Theseus.
"Eleleu! Iou! Iou!"
Ah they bene all yclad in clay
while off camera, Rachel Roberts
smashes through the kitchen window,
the sound of broken glass..
One bitter blast blewe all away


27. Christ the King
Istomin sounds out on
Tchaikowsky’s Novembr.
Shadowy bride,
after the blundering boy
with blinded eyes
thrusts the image of
some dark God ,
upon us.
We pass each other
by in sounder sleep.
We find bills daily,
or papers put in places
neither is accustomed to.
As if being two
means being neither
self nor other.
Such unawares
has depth, again,
a watchfulness refined
into blind thirsting.
I slip into ravine craving
from your snow-face
that reflection swears me to,
that winter-warmed nakedness
makes a habit of.
Apart, you tell me of
the feather kickings
of our boy of love,
(perhaps
the only one awake.)
We carry on a secret
wakefulness
all through the house
in unfamiliar places,
like this deliberate snowfall,
a hidden rule of love,
the ruler-boy,
making a hope of hollows.

28. Feast of the Miraculous Medal
November take flail,
let no ship sail.
The storm still rages, Eddystone
and Winstanley vanished,
the wind peaking
to two hundred miles an hour
in London.
The foxes were in their earths,
at peace from the hunters,
chomping hedgehog’s heads,
the catamount in its den,
chewing the bark-beetle
run from felled elms.
Novem
berried,
with the sweet Roman chestnut, bronze brown,
bramble-thorn and the beetle’s labyrinth brand-mark,
rose-hips and glowing quince.
Blackberry, dewberry
black bryony, glistening under the spider webs
spinnän, the spider vibrating to
Anton Rubinstein’s piano,
parodying Tchaikovsky.
Fenberry, crowberry
raspberry, I woke each day to take
dry books into a cold light
In the first frost the sap nodes
on the cherry tree in Constance Road froze solid
like marbles. At that time I loved the drift of movement
and the red-flecked leaves, the rain-soaked pavements
alive with water, rushing over the clogged drains
and the ice-cold sap that melted in my pocket.
How many times was I given that medal ?
It lay in the bottom of drawers,
with sacked farthings and buttons.
Its oval shape, like an insect’s single wing,
persisting, defying oblivion,
like the simple casks
in the Rue du Bac.
like the beam from a lighthouse,
the Pigeon Point Light,
still shining out to sea, despite
the Loma Prieta
tremors.


29.Noc listopadowa
With the urgency smelt of gunpowder,
Wyspiański’s costumed Gods declaim
the gallop of horse’s hooves on cobbles
and the imminence of death
in the November air: it was cold that night
in the Lazienski Park with the Sobieski Bridge
defended by Wisocki amd Schlegel.
The costumed hips poise
in the deadly air, summoned by Wadja:
betrayal is an erotic fault,
Pallas Grudzińska takes off her clothes
for Constantine, the Russian, to escape
dressed as a woman.
The Nikes’ of Samosthrace etcetera
take Emilia Plater’s costume
as a captain of the Lithuanian Infantry.
It all ends in death of course.
Gonadotropinland persists
in fetching breeches
and breech loaded rifles
that made aristocrats
into fetches of history.
And no one knows even today
on whose whim,
who betrayed whom.

To-day, pre-war, a divided heart
was mended by a surgeon
who vivisected dogs,
a deaf cardiologist and a
black carpenter, denied advancement:
the carpenter, a saint,
the surgeon, a genius
and the cardiologist,
a pioneer feminist.
Post-war, my heart
was wasting oxygen.
Because of them,
that grim-faced man,
Sir Russell Brock,
re-piped my organ
in Keats’ lazaret.

30. St Andrew’s Day
The great storms slacken
for fog and ice:
a pile up on the motor way, 1971, seven dead.
Radu Lupu opens the sound,
taught by Neuhaus,
watched by Mandelstamm.
Richter has the sound too nervous,
Beethoven: the Arietta
of the thirty-second Sonata,
half of thirty two. Diabelli’s waltz
is also thirty- two bars long
divided into fours, like the tree in Bushy Park.
Most songs fall into thirty two bars.
Bach’s thirty two are deduced from
two sixteen bar parts .
Do they measure just the tooth-holes
in our gaping skulls,
or the perfection of the crystals?
The Almavivas again,
their lovelorn music shifts to
the melancholic leisure
of brass bands.
George Lloyd, using cheap tickets
to tour English Cathedrals.
Maybe the November Cathedrals
are
a melody on the euphonium
for Columba in Iona,
Dunfermline for Margaret,
a Carol without words
on the trombone ,
Andante Grazioso in Lincoln, for Hugh
two Presto outbursts within
its progress for the apostle
in St Andrews,
his body brought from
the East on a full-sailed fishing myth.

The end, a Lloydian trumpet
like the
boys swearing
in the Eton Wall Game.
Macmillan and Orwell
should pronounce it,
“war game,”
played on Cloverland,
sign-posting the days
before the Christmas truce.


Planctus

Planctus
1.

“Everything looks so good from the windows.”Michael Horowicz

Their glory is scattered
across the high places,
lies butchered in board rooms and tower-block heights.
We hold up
heavy eyes, bleared,
to those heavier dead.
Sleep lies on our strings,
yet in the air and earth
they call us to strike up.
Our willing mouths
will launch,
the shifty
unshifting words.
Your sleep will lie against your hearts.
Your corpses lie against the edge of dust.


2.
“The poet is the most conscious point of the race at his time.”F.R. Leavis

They lie on their shields,
on Holden's memorial
preserved with all the principles. Their glory
crumbles with rust that rallying oil could not anoint.
They tell us praise their death,
that our song
rise to their corses
that it
suffer to lie.
From the blood
of Kent State,
from the fat
of Nanterre,
their weapons did not
flinch
but publish it not
in Houghton Street.


3.

“Poverty and starvation enrage us…only in a distant way, yet we are roused… to fury when … syllables like ‘fuck’…are made public.” Kenneth Tynan

How did they fall those helpers, noblest masters?
How did their weapons fail, those instruments of dissent
they trouble us too much?
But, ‘ay Lords’,
‘ain’t please you?’
we will sing, but place a dry condition
on our willing airs.
We will not
dream nor cry
when leaden maces swing
for our touching instruments.

Now you litter your titles above the lowly
from behind steel and glass, from offered lumber.
Even in death you teach us your dreams, you publish your lore.


4.

"If someone thinks that love and peace is a cliche that must have
been left behind in the Sixties, that's his problem.” John Lennon

Under a night sky, they stretch out their death.
They string out a tenuous story, form the summit heights,
from the media masts.

Our strings, my lord,
are their own condition,
a