This is a poem
made by her hand
a poem of marks
you can read
left to right

right to left
any which way
an ascemic script
it tells a tale
late in the day

beside a river still
sunlit clouds vast
in a Maytime sky
down on the mud
and shingled shore

these found things
arrived at her feet
as they do when
waiting for her
dear hand’s touch

upon their metalled
forms rusted and
rivered by the daily
tides the diurnal
wash and dry of

weather and watered
river mud-coloured
beside boats bedded
in the river bank each
plaqued to remember

thirty wooden boats in all
that plied a river’s journey
there and back once
to and fro now
charged up high

on Pulton shore
a motorized trow
a top-sail schooner
Edith and the
New Despatch

steel and concrete
barges Severn Collier
and Mighty Monarch
lying hard into the silt
a yard at rest

a grave of vessels

I know what it was before
it became what it is
I’m at a disadvantage perhaps
and must forget its ****** state
its absolute condition of whiteness
the purity of snow untrodden
unmarked except for the lines
woven in warp and weft

I don’t know how to look at this piece
if I had it in my hands I’d turn it about
this way that way upside down
even to lie on its diagonals perhaps
otherwise it appears like newsprint
smudged but I think for me its best
on its side so there are columns
not stories floors horizontal separators

There - now it has something of that
Annie Albers City Skyline
a tapestry seen together
on a January day you
blue-skirted with winter boots
grey-cloaked with stripy tights
a sketching bag on the shoulder
a camera in hand and I entranced
by every move you made

As though seeking an image
in a cloudscape I view a quintet
of panels on a painted screen
a Chinese landscape Han dynasty
stark trees slow fields low hills
rising to a darkening horizon then
a river flows a valley forms and I am
smitten by the accident of invention
as always my love as always
gathering myself into the pleasure
of it all dear artist of weave and print

******* a Boat

Not everyone’s idea of bliss
Emptying the toilet every week.
If you are the kind of person
Who likes creature comforts
It is definitely not for you . .

They say it’s where you go
When things go wrong,
The close friend dies,
The relationship comes apart
And living alone in a shoebox
in Hoxton at £800 a week
Just can’t be faced.

On your daily run beside the canal
You suddenly thought:
Why not? It’s peaceful here
By the water, away from the streets,
Cold in winter, damp in spring,
But summer and autumn will be a joy!

You have to downsize of course:
Most of those books will have to go,
Just one guitar and be sensible
About those shoes and clothes,
A good pair of boots and Rohan frock,
Lots of warm tights, a wok,
And you can leave the Internet at work,
Come home on your bicycle to a novel
and your cat, put the wok on the stove,
and hear the sound of your breath,
as the boat trembles under your feet.



Night Thoughts by Li Bo (16C)


So bright on our bed this moon,
just like frost its light is spread.
If I raise my head to see it shine,
when I turn away I'll think of home.


Reading Variously

How patterns and connections emerged during the progress a letter, a letter in this case begun with only the slightest plan, whose intention was partly to hold his daughter in his thoughts for an hour. It was a one-way conversation, and he would imagine her patiently listening to him. She was an attentive listener with a ferocious memory.

The book on his lap halted this reverie. It was a collection of essays by a woman writer known for a severe collection of novels, creative writing in which one realised how essential and rich the imagination can be in this form. In one essay she had been forthright in defence of the novel, that form that has to accept the ‘nuts and bolts of temporal reality’, that ‘from time to time a character has to walk through a door and close it behind him, the creatures of imagination have to eat and sleep, as all other creatures do.’  He had been whelmed over with such writing, and this book had travelled with him during the week so he could read and reread, opening on train journeys, in the minutes before a meal. It had been a gift he had so nearly lost. He remembered first opening the book and thinking this is all too difficult and intense just now, and then realising it was, in fact, just what was required by the ebb and flow of circumstance. He was troubled in so many things, but he knew he needed to remain hopeful. He had completed a composition during the week, the result of a fortnight’s intense thought, preparation and the teasing out of note to note, which is the stuff of writing for voices. He had been stretched by his own creativity, and now was being stretched by someone else’s, a woman of deep faith (in hope) and understanding of that small world so many of us live in, but perhaps so seldom are able to acknowledge its various riches.

This writer had also charmed him with words about music. ‘I tell my students,’ she had written, ‘language is music. Written words are musical notation. The music of a piece of fiction establishes the way in which it is to be read, and in the largest sense, what it means. It is essential to remember that characters have a music as well, a pitch and tempo, just as real people do. To make them believable, you must always be aware of what they would or would not say, where stresses would or would not fall.’ And he thought about his summer school students to whom he had said ‘music is language, the saying and meaning of words, the lift and fall of their inflection, the flow and rhythm of phrase and sentence. You have to read books and to listen to books being read, and poetry of course, the dear sister of music’.

There was more of course. Much history and philosophy sitting alongside spiritual meditation and the homespun observation of an academic, who wrote novels and taught ‘writing novels’, of a mother of four sons, of someone in love with small town life in Iowa and the possibilities of living a good and true life.

And so, the sun rose and lit up the barks of the chestnut trees across the road, in the park beyond. And as the camellia in the garden continued to explode with pink flowers, and the daffodils swayed and nodded, he picked up this vital book and opened its pages to the chapter titled Wondrous Love. Here the author writes about the importance of ‘elderly and old American hymns’. ‘They can move me so deeply’, she writes, ‘that I have difficulty even speaking about them.’ Yes, he knew the way such things moved him. Just the night previously he’d listened to a piano piece by Charles Ives, The Alcotts, with its haunting hymn-like melody and distant echoes of Beethoven’s Fifth, and thought of holding her hand in that university concert hall where he had shared with her this extraordinary work, music that had taken him him to America as a teenager, even to Concord Massachusetts where it had been composed, that he would listen to over and over and wonder at, a music so distant from his roots in the English Choral tradition, but so close to the heart, a music bound to a simplicity of culture that existed once on a different shore, and to which he continued to feel a deep association and love.


Lochan

a poem after  Bai Juyi  (772 -846)



There should be a temple here,

a pavilion on the eastern shore.

Easy to imagine oneself in Jiating, 

but this is Wester Ross.

Instead of orioles fighting in the warm trees, 

crows pick over the summer mud.

Disordered flowers confuse the eye,

bright grass hides the fisherman’s footprints.

I love this lochan,

but cannot stay for long by its bank.

One tree grows out of a reflection, 

on its island home.


Portrait**

You sat for my camera
just the once
in a Mediterranean garden.
It was a haven of green
above a sunned-blue bay.

Unplanned it was.
We’d eaten lunch
watching butterflies
flicker-perch and hover.

You’d tied your hair with a scarf
to keep the midday heat from your head,
a sun that brought your freckles to the fore
on bare arms, on your golden cheek.

Then, for a little while
you left your public self elsewhere,
and my zoomed lens travelled close
as a lover’s kiss when waking.

And as you gazed at the daisied grass
a gentleness and grace descended
on your sun-shadowed face.
I took two pictures, only two.

These portraits I’ve kept
far apart  from other ‘snaps’,
as they seem close
to a painter’s art
as I will ever get.

The portrait-call goes out
and I hesitate, I’m reticent, afraid
to share them with the public gaze.
They say so much, you see,  

of what I know you now to be:
the woman I’m privileged
to touch, to hold dear and close
to this unmanageable heart.

The Open Studio

Usually the journey by car flattens expectation, and there’s that all-preoccupying conversation, so one only takes in the view where there’s a halt at a traffic light or at the occasional junction. A pattern on a wall, a damaged sign, a curtained window. Waiting, one looks and sometimes remembers, and what one sees later reappears in dreams or moments of disordered contemplation. A train journey is another matter: you sit and look, and when it is a trip rarely made, you put the book away and gaze beyond the ***** windows to a living landscape that scrolls past the frame of view. When you arrive there’s inevitably a walk: today through a town’s industrial hinterland, its pastness where former mill buildings have tactfully changed their use to become creative places, peopled with aspiration and strange activity. Walking reveals the despair of forlorn roadside business falling back into alleys ending in neglected and empty buildings, so much *******, silences of waste and decay.

But here’s the space, there’s a sign on a board outside, OPEN STUDIO TODAY. Entering inside it is quiet and cold, the door remaining open to let in the December air and the hoped-for visitors. But it’s bright and light: a welcoming presence of work and people and coffee and cake. And here’s the studio, a narrow space between make-shift walls where the artist works, where the work awaits, laid out on the surfaces of desks and tables, on shelves and walls, specimens of making; ‘stuff’, the soon-to-be, the collected, the in-progress-perhaps, the experimental.

Good, a heater blows noisily onto cold fingers. In the turbulent air pieces tremble slightly from their hangings on the walls. They are placed at a good height, a ‘good to be close to examine the detail’ height, the constructed, the made, the woven, the stitched, the printed, all assembled by the actions of those quiet, intent, those steady hands. There, a poem on a wall next to the window. Here, photographs of places unlabelled, unrecognised, but undoubtedly significant as a guide to the memory. Look, a dead badger lying in a road.

Next to the studio, a gallery space. Two walls covered with framed prints, well lit, a body of work captured behind glass, in limbo, waiting patiently for the attentive eye to sort the detail, that touch of the object on paper, that mark found and brought out of time and place. Perhaps these ‘things’, some known, some mysteriously foreign adrift from their natural context, have been collected by that bent form on a windswept beach, by the hand reaching out for the  gift in the gutter, struck by the foot on the track, unhidden in the grass by the riverside, what we might pass as without significance and beyond attention. This artist gives even the un-namable a new life, a collected-together form.

Moving closer let the eye enter the artist’s world of form and texture - and colour? There is a patina certainly, colour’s distant echo, what is seen on the edges, a left-behindness, more than any subtlety of language knows how to express, beyond comfortable descriptions, not excitable, where the spirit is damped down and is restful to the mind, a constancy of background, like a capturing of a cloud but bulging full of hints and suggestions, where texture is everywhere, nature’s rich patterns colliding with things once invented and made, used once, once used left and changed, thrown away, to be brought before the selecting eye and the possibility of form with meaning its patient partner.



J.M.W.Turner writes  on poetry and painting

Poetry having a more extensive power
Than our poor art, exerts its influence
Over all our passions; anxiety for our future
Reckoned the most persistent disposition.

Poetry raises our curiosity,
Engages the mind by degrees
To take an interest in the event,
And keeping that event suspended,
Overturns all we might expect.

The painter’s art is more confined,
Has nothing to equate with the poet’s power.
What is done by painting must be done at once,
And at one blow our curiosity receives
All the satisfaction it can know.

The painter can be novel, various and contrast,
Such is our pleasure and delight when put in motion.
Art, therefore, administers only to those wants,
And only to desires that exercise the mind.



Twilight

A day aside and diaried into busy lives
So to a morning walk to Turner’s View
Above the River Wharfe and Farnley Hall
Where it is said the inspiration came
For his famous oil of Hannibal,
with elephants and storm-glad Alps.

On to lunch where six around a table
Souped with salad before we homed
Mid afternoon the day in decline
We were done with words so watched
The edge-timed light flow between our hands.

Inevitably we climbed the stairs to lie
In twilight’s path beneath the skylight’s
Square a sliver-moon we couldn’t see
Gracing the remaining daylight hour
Marbled with shadows our collected
Curves and planes lay as sculptures
In the approaching dimity and dark
Each experimental stroke of touch
Holding us dumb to speech and thought
As night’s soft blanket covered us entire


Northcliffe Woods

Oh nest in the sky, empty of leaves,
Those tangled branches
Reaching out from twisted trunks
Into the sullen clouds above, when

Suddenly a crow -
‘Corvidae’, she said -
And simultaneously pulled
a hank of ivy from a nearby tree.

Hedera Helix I thought
But did not say, instead
I whispered to myself
Those ancient names I knew.

Bindwood, Lovestone
(For the way it clings
To bricks but ravages walls),
A vine with a mind of its own. But

She, in a different frame that day,
Apart, adrift and far away
From our usual walk and talk,
Fixed her gaze on the woodland floor,

Whilst skyward I sought again that
Corvid high in the branches web
Black beyond black beyond black
Against the pale white canopy above.


Franco*

Blow She Still
Ed insieme bussarono
Sweet Soft Frain
Cloche Lem Small
Spiri About Sezioni
Portrait Eco Agar
Le ruisseau sur l’escalier
Etwas ruhiger im Ausdruck
Jeux pour deux
For Grilly Fili Argor
Atem L’ultima sera
Omar Flag Ave
The Heart’s Eye*

play joy touch
code panel macro
refraction process solo
quick-change constrained
hiatus sonority colour
energy post-serial scintillating
aleatoric reuse transformation

A lonely child who imagined music
on sunday walks, he would talk about
how one lives with music as someone
would talk about how one might live
with illness or a handicap. He said,
‘You cannot write your life story in
music because words express the self
best whereas music expresses something
quite beyond words’.

I

Walking à trois on Crosby Sands
He left us talking two to the dozen
and went for paddle
in Wellington boots.
The tide was coming in,
and before we could say,
‘hey, you’ll get wet’,
he’d removed all his clothes
(and the Wellington boots)
and stood buff naked
in the incoming sea.

The water swirled about his legs
caressed the hairs, the golden hairs
that still stood on his still trim calves,
his freckled thighs, and all the way up
to his bottom.

I felt I knew his bottom well,
and well enough to have placed
my hand between its cheeks.
But for Gloria . . .
If she was embarrassed
I’d never have known.
I suppose she’s seen rather
more male bottoms than me.

‘He’s just larking’,
she said, and laughed.
But as the tide came in
he was too far out . . .
to be larking.


II

A Water Polo team
5 Aside
winter training
in the autumn cold
good for the muscle tone

Malcolm threw the ball too far
it’s just a dot in the distance now
floating out to the shipping lane
past the windmills down the Welsh coast
next stop the Irish Sea


III

Oh the seductive tide
rolling across the shallow beach
hiding the creased and puckered sand.

Shadows and reflective light
flowed about him,
a mesmeric display of lateral forms,

as his reflection shimmered black
on the grey, brown, grey-white water.
He’d shaved his head

as if in benediction for the sea’s coming kiss
that would surely embrace him, take him
naked into its cold, cold clasp.


IV

Sketchbook in hand
she willed this standing ****
back into her imagination.

So long ago now
on that distant shore
in the opposite hemisphere,
by a blue blue sea,
And so very aroused
by the thought of that stony
wet nakedness beside her,
let her hand tremble
on the ****** page

as she saw his fingers
stretch out and touch
the incoming tide.

V

I watched him
time and again, time and forever,
too far out for me to touch.

His bold shoulders,
his well-muscled back,
from dawn to dusk
he was ever before me,

letting the water lap and kiss,
fold and flow between his legs;
up, up then over his hips:
to cover his spine, to stroke his neck.

I had to imagine his face of course,
being turned away from my outward gaze.
So I sent him my eyes, my ears,
my nose, my mouth and then
a cry from my heart:
‘I love you so, I love you so.’

I heard this woman speak
from Derek Jarman's desk,
she spoke and half asleep
I woke to feel her rhythmic
words oblique to all I knew
as poetry.

This place a poem
I can’t write, she said, I’ll
listen to the wind instead
and turn my thoughts to
that poor badger on the road.

I stopped the car I was alone,
I snapped it three times
with my phone and now
it lies here on his desk,
three shots of this dead thing,
its dark blue pool of blood
that spills half on the road
half on the grass, from deep
inside its side it’s dead,
and really still,
and still
it has a such beauty,
still.

A GARLAND FOR NATIONAL POETRY DAY 2014

My Once and Only Garden

It’s no longer mine
But I pass it
Nearly every morning.
It’s untended,
Overgrown, autumned,
The camellia needs a prune,
The irises have gone;
The garden needs
A good seeing to.
A sad garden to pass
Nearly every morning.



The Chestnut Avenue

I came back to fallen chestnut
Shells, conkers, everywhere,
But the leaves are still
Thinking about falling.
No wind you see.
On other trees I pass,
The lime,the white-beam,
There’s a crinkly brownness
Scattered across the path.
So dry, no wind,
September sun.
The chestnut avenue
Has some way to go.
Wind, rain, frost perhaps
And the leaves will fall.


******* a Boat

There’s this girl,
A young woman really,
On a boat.
Not living on it yet
But plans are afoot,
Along with essential repairs.
It’s not ‘Offshore’
Like Penelope Fitzgerald’s
Boat on the Thames.
But in a quiet and placid mooring
On the River Lea instead.
I thought of sending her this book,
But it’s all about liminality,
People somewhere in between,
People who don’t belong on land or sea
. . . And the boat (eventually) sinks.


Still Waiting

We sat on the seat
Under a bower of roses
In the herb garden
And she talked in that singing
Way of talking that she does;
Such a tessitura she commands
Between the high and the low
With a falling off portamento
Glide - from the high to the low.
Her hair stills falls
Across serious freckles, auburn hair,
Gold with a touch of red
Like her mother’s only softer,
Like mine once was, and my mother’s too.
She has a slighter frame though,
and is still waiting, waiting
For a real life, a woman’s life.


Cyclamen Restored

I went away and left it
On a saucer, watered,
In a north light
Near a window sill.
Its pink flowers were *****
And nodded a little
When I moved about the room.

On my return it had drooped,
Its leaves yellowed.
There were tiny pink petals
Scattered on the floor.
I put the plant in the sink
For half an hour.
It revived,
And the next day
Seemed quite restored.


Driving South

Driving south through
Dalton, Shoreditch,
Hackney and Hoxteth,
The Hasidic community
Garnished the Sunday street.
Driving down the A10
South towards the city:
The Gleaming Gerkin,
the Walkie Talkie,
and further still,
a Misty Shard.

As a child, the buildings here
Were so much slighter
And a grimy black;
The highest then, the spires
Of Wren’s city churches.

Sundays to sing at ‘Temple’,
With lunch at the BBC,
Driving south from New Barnet
In my Great Uncle’s Morris,
Great Aunt Violet dozing in the back.


Gallery

Small but beautifully right
For her London show,
Good to see her surrounded
By tide marks from the shore,
Those neutral surfaces,
Colours of sand and stone,
Rust (of course) from the beaches
Treasured trove, metal
Waiting to become wet
And stain those marks with colour.


Ascemic Sewing

Having no semantic content
These ‘words’ appear on the back
Of a chequered cloth of leaves
Backed all black
Stitched white,
A script of a garden
Receding into
Trans-linguistical memory.


September Dreaming

Facing the morning
Above a barrier of trees,
Oaked, foxed, hardly birded,
I would  wonder while she slept
About the richness of her dreams,
Dreams she had spoken of
(Yesterday, and out of the blue)
And, for the first time, in all
These precious but frustrating
years we’d slept together,
shared together.
I had always thought her dreamless;
Too fast asleep to experience
Envisioned images,
Sounds and sensations.


Think of a Poem

She told me in a text about
Think of a Poem
On National Poetry Day
Just a week away.
That’s easy, I thought,
There’s always that poem
Safe and sure in my memory store
Once spoken nervously,
under a rose garden walk,
but there, there
for evermore . . .

Who says it’s by my desire
This separation, this living so far from you. . .


Missing Music

Today I read a poem
Called The Lute: a Rhapsody.
‘From the days of my youth
I have loved music,
So have practised it ever since,’
Says Xi Kung.

In his exquisite language
He then describes its mysterious virtues,
And all the materials from which it’s made.

How I miss my lute, its music,
And the voice that once sang to its song.


Drawing

I wonder if she’s drawn today,
And what? I wonder.
John Berger says:
Drawing goes on every day.
It is that rare thing
That gives you a chance
Of a very close identification
With something, or somebody
Who is not you.
I wonder if she’s drawn today,
And what? I wonder.