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

salts
in your gloves in case she fainted.
They stood before the Cross.

At two o’clock you left
with her for the Palais Royal
and were not supposed
to appear at the balcony
an hour later
as the couple had lost
the cards for the banquet
and princes and sovereigns
scrambled
to identify each other.

11. Echtgenote

Named out of Wiseman
or the Martyrologium,
a pianist with
long, fine hands
she knew exile
and sudden
accidental death.
“Mother don’t talk of a man
I will live free of a hero’s love.”
You met her
at the Spanish
Queen Victoria’s house.
outside Lausanne
and you sought
on the Costa Brava
having lost her father,
she would not leave Spain.
as you sought her in Lourdes
and Bishops and fanatics chased her.
using pseudonyms
until finally she said this time
“Yes and I won’t look back.”
What wrong has he done?
Afterwards she told
John the Twenty Third
she had lost her first child
and miscarried many others,
lost her sister and her mother
and never bore
a successor for you.
expected to be a mother
with a child at her breast,
and now you had gone.
When eight hundred people
were invited on their anniversary
to celebrate twenty five
years of marriage,
she came in mourning clothes,
for her sister
and a smile that lived virtue
and the promise of a kingdom.

12. Werkingskoning

It wasn’t up to you.
Lourdes, Garabandal,
Paray le Monial,
Beauraing, Banneaux,
you, prayed at them all.
You respected fanatics
and respected the learned.
You threw an old army helmet
off the head of a statue
of our lady you had seen
desecrated.
You never joined any group.
You were
more solitary than
any monk.
This was your progress,
not the gawky, exposed,
young man with glasses
shadowed by De Gaulle,
or in the genial return
visit to Nixon
at the White House,
You made disciples of
Senghor, Camara,
Kadar, Brezniev,
Varese, Le Corbusier,
even Popes.
“When they brought a lawsuit,
Justice was done.”
You preferred
verbal reports
to reading,
a simple desk,
a familiar manner,
a sense of fun.

13. Erfenis

You left equality
Between Flemish
and Walloon
which has left
them bickering.
You left a federal structure,
which has left
the people
a new insecurity.
You left a new focus
after the loss
of Africa,
which left
a focus on Europe
and a lessening
of your own
authority,
the evil of forebears
stripped by Conan Doyle,
Twain, Casement and Conrad
seeping into your languages
like the dark blood
of the murdered
on the ironed sheets
of official histories,
despite your revenues
for the needy.

14. Begrafenis

Thousands watched
on screens
in the Grande Place,
a congress of sovereigns
reached the cathedral
while Alpha jets
flew past under
the slight-clouded sky
to see the great
“B” the flowers
made outside the palace.
Only the Royal Family
And twenty monarchs
Went with the remains
which had to be
fitted in the gangway
of the plane from Spain
to the Laeken crypt.
The people
scattered to buy
evening newspapers,
a little boy had a
pink and white bouquet
as he sat
on his father’s shoulders.
“Night came to an end.
The queen came out
of the Cathedral”
to get into the Mercedes
and the crowd was still
behind the barriers.
“Never so much silence
among so many.”


A Project on Winter


Canticle for a Peacemaker

The white world on the blue
is beginning to fade on my helmet.
The incident that started it all
took place yesterday.
I read your faxed memorandum
“That the forces insist
the town surrenders.”

Then the shelling started
a day after we told them
the people had laid down their arms.
The town was full of refugees
and yet I remember
it was a clear, sunny day
and hundreds were dead or dying
as the explosions struck the school.
A surgeon stayed thirty six hours
operating in a church hall.
He told me of a blinded boy
whose eyes he could not save.
Then we were told
to declare the town safe.
We arranged for the withdrawal
and made no protest
when the shells began to fall
on the football ground.
No trial was arranged.
No guilt assigned
As I said I am considering
resignation, or a transfer,
unless you can answer a question

We arrested one person
from the town, whom
the forces accused of
concealing arms.
He had that awesome,
passive quietness
you once said fools use
to make them brave.

The forces claimed
we had supplied him weapons
but we had to say
even in the strange heat
of blood fresh on concrete
we refused him them.
as you said they might
provoke attacks

They shot him for
provoking the whole attack,
though he was not in the town
when the shells began to fall.

You told me not to resist
as it might provoke attacks

As his cronies were putting his
bloodied copse into a body bag,
you told me you measured a tremor
on the Richter Scale,
but not to tell them
as it might provoke attacks.

I received a delegation
asking for custody of the body.

When we got back to the hotel
I found it safe. Next door
you could see through the floors
they dead lay carefully in their beds
and the living were extracting
anything with a human look.

We took away
someone’s mother who was
having visions of history
and did not explain
whose side she was on.

I include this in my report
as everything is now back to normal.
I would like you to answer my question,
every time I ask, you just laugh
and change the subject.

You say the actions of both people
are morally equivalent,
yet we have no definitions here,
like a new truth
you haven’t issued yet.

What is the truth?


In Etaples

A sky, a child’s jam-jar, a toy
filled with brilliant blue,
which paper has laced with white,
the climate that is the colour of joy
and its substance, a hue
squeezed, palpable, from a brush of sight.

At Tours

L’odeur de l’horizon de toutes parts,
Cendre, Yves Bonnefoy, La Maison Natale

The levelling river
buts its energy
against the stone bridge.

A woman crosses
the rue Nationale,
arm turned in a cowled dash.

The buildings
massed under rain,
spit memories:

where once was
reality burnt out
by incendiary fires.

A young man
without a faith
slips from the age.

in a rush to return
through crystal night
from medicine.

The city stands
for an absence,
the half-torn cloak

burnt already
in the skies
a schoolboy

ignores to dream
of resurrection
into life.

Let the city waste,
that bears these names
and does not bare them.


Candlemas, 1998

i.m. Karla Faye Tucker

In West London,
the wakening
whirr of a traffic
helicopter,
winnows
the harvest
of the clouds.

It is morning
in Texas,
while I sleep
through midnight’s
silent cycle of revenge
when nothing is left
to further shame
and whatever fell,
whatever dew of sorrow,
will never dry.


A Canticle for Job

You have come to hold on to what you can lose.
The self is a mail- order toy that cheats
on its delivery and runs to choke.
Nothing we know adds up except to zero
and even the Void, or Nirvana stales
such Academic hypotheses beguile
the text-book outlook. Nonsense costs the same.
No wonder Boddhisatva is bejewelled
to tantalise with such absurdity.
Circumstance is a cunning habitat.
It impresses only dawn-dirty sheets.
Friendship slackens like our clothes
and character is a compass needle
charged to the loadstone of social fear.
Loneliness is an allergy to trust.
Time does not come into it at all.
It ticks, or buzzes, strikes or chimes
like an insect house with a sugar spill.
The loss of time is as timely as its gain.
Once we measured growth against a wall
now full-grown we measure the way down.
Yet if the mountain-self is so impossible,
how come everyone else is up here too?
If this love of yours is difficult to grasp
why do I cling onto it for life itself?
To pray is to renew a season ticket
as I need to bring identity to buy.


The Project on Winter

Your limp school bag
is breached of paint-flecked pencils
biros without tops, frayed textbooks,
fallen open on photos of volcanoes,
chemical equations, flow-charts
of community -work , vitamins , or heat
For your winter project,
you have coloured in pictures
of woodland animals in hibernation,
deep in cut-away, crayoned havens.
which with flute tunes and diaries
are strewn across the floor.

Late-houred and stupid,
I pile them back into your bag,
but stop when I see
your winter project drawing
of swallows flecked on
exercise book lines
as telephone wires.

I regret my anger at your
bunkering the bathroom.
my fear of your elsewhere nights
and mirth at your changes.
You have turned from
fledgling to swallow
and for your project


gather for the season’s shift.

Riddle

Air- bounded water is my place,
Xenophobic to the space.
One beast of many beasts.
Life finds needs
on my feathered beads.
Tethered to evolve
lonely, I dissolve.

Homage To Jacqueline Pascal

It was not the letter from her brother,
but watching her servant cut onions.
with such attentive ease made her decide.
She put it out of mind, as the moist white pile
hoarded the sunlight. She smiled. A whim
all the better for her servant’s bemusement
that mere foliage should bring her mistress joy,
yet afterwards she re-read its fine script.
“This is a talent for which God wants no account ,
for humbleness and silence are the lot of your sex.”
Her father had died two months ago. One whom she had
protected from Richelieu through her verse and charm.
Only Blaise was stopping her from professing
the vocation she had wanted since she had heard St Cyr
on the irrresistibility of grace
and the call to perfection in the dead Lord.
whose blasphemy she knew had saved her.
Her mother was lost before she could
remember her face. It was her father and Blaise
taught her to read and write, to calculate
and compose her songs and lyrics.
Gilberte was happy in her husband’s Perier clan
It was not the letter but her heart
that made her loathe its brutal tone.
“You ought to hate this talent and the others
which is perhaps the reason why the world
holds you back for it wishes to reap what it has sown.”

Taller than Pascal,
slim, well-shaped,
she carried herself well,
graceful and un-shy,
her hair almost chestnut,
full and fashionable.
Her temples shaped like
sculpted beads, her forehead
high as a pediment:
eyebrows quick, intelligent,
arched and thin,
with her deep-set eyes
fire-bright and mobile
cheeks like the inner curve
of a gold lamp console.
Her nose, like his,
too long, but shaped enough,
a medium mouth
bemusedly full and pale.

Her brother will not let her leave
Each day the silent debate
re-opens: the time for mourning
father has come to an end
and she must go to Port Royal.
She