Vanitas

This is the poem just published in The Interpreter's House (45). I mention its origin below.

You would think it started with a photograph, black and white
probably, certainly dog-eared by now; but it didn’t. So I am able
to tell this as I wish; there was just a sharp sense of a wheel turned,
a ratchet cogged, a being reeled in, a floundering in shallows.

It was me and Phil Lee – mid 60s- on Friar’s Point where I stand now, watching a metallic sea scraping a thin white scar along the beach.
I think The Small Faces were Number One but it could have been
The Kinks. It would have been Summer, it would have been sunny;

perhaps a lazy Sunday afternoon or maybe just lazing on a sunny afternoon depending on which was Top of the Pops. An old man stopped – I say “old”
but he was probably much younger than I am now (everyone looked old
then being dressed since birth like smaller versions of their parents).

He was old enough though – looked like a talking skull. We would have been cutting edge – probably late Mod; just before hippy got me, electrical engineering got Phil. He said, “I was born here lads but haven’t been
back for years. I loved this place, it’s all that kept me going sometimes,

this view. Look at the wild flowers – on the wane now but they’ll be back
come Spring. It’s good to be here; nowhere else holds a candle to it”.
I think we said “fab” but that sounds as if it was already retro then so maybe we didn’t. Perhaps we shuffled, embarrassed, searched for a reason

to walk but held by the Grammar School boy politeness to elders,
we stayed, pinioned, tethered to the story, which did involve a lot
of bad luck, though I am short on detail as I didn’t really listen
and don’t want to make it up now. Anyway, the old man stopped,

looked at his watch, wandered off somewhere as we did – and ,
I guess, that, at most, we would have said “weird” or something like that,
(not “awesome” which is much too contemporary for my taste). Whatever, it would have been something which meant, you are not of the same universe,

what knowledge can you bring us; our life is immament, process and eternal;
we will carry forever this Sunday, the endless possibility of being fifteen
(or sixteen), the truth of back-combed hair, the inevitability of checked hipsters, the ability to sing obscure soul music, turning the heads of the

black boys on the fairground rides. (I think the old man would have liked Frank Sinatra, or maybe Matt Monroe if he thought himself cool – it is difficult to tell on such short acquaintance). Now I’m standing on the exact spot where it all happened forty plus years ago; dragging on this

memory like it was the last cigarette in the world - hoping for epiphany to cross the blood brain barrier; looking for someone to tell that I’m leaving for the last time . My Spanish cigarettes warn of “una muerte lenta y dolorosa”. Standing alone on Friar’s point, I can’t imagine any other kind.

Good news on the poetry front.

Heard today that I just missed the shortlist for the Cinnamon Press first collection competition. Very pleased to have got so far in the process and will have work published in the Cinnamon Press anthology Feeding The Cat which comes out in September 2011. One poem is The East Yorkshire Crematorium which won the Envoi Prize last year and the other will be Trisagion which is a triptych based on a backpacking month in Greece two years ago. The poems are largely about the island of Naxos where I stayed in Naxos City for a week.

Poem Published

Good news - my poem Vanitas has been accepted by The Interpreter's House and will be out shortly. I'll post it after it has appeared.

The poem is written after reading a lot of Paul Durcan and is influenced by him, I think. The poem derives from the sale of a house in Barry, South Wales which, effectively, ended my link to the town I grew up in. On the last day before I left I was walking on the seaside and remembered a meeting 40 years before with a man who talked about growing up in Barry. A vanitas is a style of painting in which objects such as candles, flowers, skulls are used to emphasise the inevitability of time passing and the vanity of expecting otherwise.

FALLOWFIELD

(This poem was written after a visit to pick up my daughter from her student house in Manchester - in the area of Fallowfield. The house had been refurbished for students but the back garden, which was the size of a small allotment, had been left alone. On the Sunday morning I walked about it with a mug of coffee and got to thinking about the old couple who had lived in it before developers bought it. Their love for and understanding of the garden was clear and it was quite sad that it had now become a fallow field. This poem was published in Borderlines, the journal of the Anglo-Welsh poetry society - complete with the inevitable printing error. Andrew Motion liked this one too!)

The archeology of the garden is what remains for us
To construe; we are the unexpected historians
Of your seasons.
Here are the crenellated plant pots,
Fish mouths pouting, waiting for the tamp of compost,
The exploratory squirm of root.
Packets of seeds stacked and shelved,
Half gone to past crop, rattle to me
A shaman’s dry promise of fecundity.
A broken grin of white tags scattered on the
Workbench, tallies in patient copperplate
Each row of seedlings, teased from tray to bed;
Place cards at the table of your plenty.
What I see and lift to sniff and shake,
bear your traces still;
Now these broken frames, overgrown beds,
Cloches discarded like creels in an abandoned harbour,
Must speak of your transformations in this garden alembic.

Sitting here in your shed,
Sunday coffee steaming in my hand, I think of
An old man of my village, widowed and wry,
Each day in the growing season he passed
My window in a slow progress to his lot
To coax life royally from dry seed, corm and bean.
This plod I saw as agricultural, ancient,
Calibrated back beyond slow motion;
A sleepwalking movement of earth warming and cooling,
Of infinite patience in the gain and loss of light.

Looking up I see a hieroglyph of nail heads
Driven into a cross beam;
Hanging places for the hoe, spade and rake
You stooped in here
To hone against the cling of soil, the bind of weed;
A lost script with no stone to reveal its message.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

New Anthology

This collection of writing from 51 northern writers is available from 19 Godric Drive Brinsworth Rotherham S60 5AN - enclose cheque for £4.50 payable to Northern Co-operative Writers

A very good idea!

TWO POEMS FROM NORTHERN TYPE 51

(Here are two of the poems published in Northern Type 51
which has just been published. Sandwiches at the Seaside is a reflection on growing up in South Wales. After Mass on Sunday we would go to the beach - by bus. By the time the sandwiches were made and we were ready to queue for the bus the weather would always have changed. Bungee Resurrection is the product of a Summer lunchtime sitting in St Sampson's Square York and is self explanatory. The anthology uses an earlier version of this poem - the final version is used below.

SANDWICHES AT THE SEASIDE
Rain falling like gauze
dressings, through which
sky and shore seep together,
promiscuous as unveined blood;
drizzled too are the figures,
embossed in bas-relief, against

the concrete shelter walls:
gothic in the mock doric.
Imagine father, mother, me
in pac-a-macs, blue-creased
like engineering drawings;
motionless in down-mouthed

tableau, sorbing regret.
Sandwiches, salad, slabcake,
thermos; tupperwared milk,
sugar, salt, teaspoons too.
Meticulous commissary toil
of beach–going, slowly leaching

joy from the expectation of
this day; each leaf unfurled,
each tomato sliced, each bread
square spread, a cumulation
of cloud occluding the dwarf
white sun in the foremilk sky;

Slub in the shimmer-silk rain, we
are poor people at the seaside,
wearing this day as a sodden
overcoat, watching returning
buses, replete, sluice by,
the life within forever opaque.

BUNGEE RESURRECTION
Over St Sampson’s Square bells peal into an empty sky;
a slatted steel spider rig broods above four trampolines,
floating lily pads on a yorkstone pond. From a cats-cradle
of pulleys, guys, pillars, hang bungee ropes, blue and yellow

lianas trailing across this urban jungle - the tools of translation
from earth to sky. A boy boasts to a pretty blonde girl
how high he can bounce, how he can dance easy between
pavement and tree tops. Transfigured in sunlight he walks

the air currents; he demonstrates to us all his
backflips, rolls, tucks and somersaults: doubles, triples
ringing out clear and high above the plane trees.
His clapper legs unbound kick out in joy. He sinks down

on the cave –black rubber paten, pauses an eternity, swings
up, rising, arms outspread, haloed in treetop light,
all eyes follow his ascending; the blonde girl walks away.

The Envoi Competition Winner: THE EAST YORKSHIRE CREMATORIUM (for G.R.)

(The poem derived from attendance at a friend's funeral. He was a confirmed atheist and the service at the crematorium reflected this. The opening of the poem does, though, play with the idea of the Fates who spun, measured and cut each person's thread of life - many at the funeral said GR was an atheist but then spoke of the sad fate which had befallen him. During the service I was intrigued by the activities of the crows outside in the poplar trees. Crows were considered to be able to move between this world and the next and to foretell the future. The onomatopeic call "Cras!" is, I think, Latin for tomorrow and contributed in the ancient world to the sense of crows as messengers from beyond. In engineering a clack valve is a one-way valve. The poem is here presented as a single verse. For the Envoi competition it was submitted as four quatrains)



No God brought you to this place. The weave
unraveled: spun, measured and cut. Now each
standing at the lectern thumbs a thin thread
teasing for meaning back to the entwining knot.
Outside, the west wind pipes up the escarpment,
the shielding poplar line shivers; a silver
leaf mantilla drapes the black comb of trunks.
Eloquently, a calliope wheezing an old-time hymn,
the trees lament their bending. Through stained glass
I watch a crow court squawking sky secrets;
lifting from twisted thorn nests, woven tight
to the tree scaffold, they hang, between earth and cloud,
wings stiff, waiting on a wish to be made. Cras! Cras!
They clack their hollow hope. There is no future
beyond this building; a one-way valve, the heat
plume shimmering high into empty, weightless air.

The View From The Hotel Il Nido

(This is one of my favourite poems. Some years ago not long after the death of my mother, I went to Sorrento and stayed in the hotel Il Nido - the nest - which was high above Sorrento looking across the bay to Naples. When we got there I rushed out to the balcony to photograph the view. I realised that part of the taking of images was to show my mother on my return as she had not travelled much. Of course she was no longer there and though I was at the hotel for a week I never could get the image I wanted because there was no-one who would see it. The picture above is of Vesuvius and Naples from the Hotel Il Nido taken at dawn.
This poem was published by the Blackmail Press in New Zealand along with a few others - www.blackmailpress.com/Index18.html.)

Looking from Sorrento, the bay
Flattens into a double-bladed axe
Astride my sight line to Naples;
Twin edges honed bright, shining in
The break of wave against distant beach.

Each morning the city emerges from the mist,
A grisaille: bleached and monotonous,
It is a model city;
Faking perspective and depth,
Cheating the taking and holding of a view,

Later in the sun shimmer,
An impressionist landscape,
it offers slabs of colour and shadow,
Stacked and angled defiantly against each other.
A new city appears for the day,
Teases, obscure and unknowable, before
Returning to the darkness spreading up the mountain.

And out of this art history my mother’s face suggests,
A shifting emulsion, rainbow oils on the water;
Five years dead she comes to me
In the makings of a face
Believers might con from cloud pattern to be comforted

At home I display photographs of her in rictus poses,
Suspicious, only the record of a moment in a landscape or room.
Held stiff, as if a lapse in concentration might discover her;
The picture and the person immiscible.

Each morning from the balcony
I have raised the camera and sought focus
I cannot fix these images.

New Anthology

A new anthology of poems from northern writers - entitled Northen Types - is coming out in the Spring. Around 50 contributors including me - I'll post the poems when it is published. If anyone wants copies let me know and I'll post details of how to get them.

Good News

Won a prize in the Envoi competition judged by Ann Drysdale. Will post the poem, The East Yorkshire Crematorium, after it appears in Envoi.

Vespers At Aghios Charalambos

(This poem was written at Milos in the Cyclades. Many people know of Santorini where the volcano top has created a bay but Milos has a much better "caldera" as you can see in the photo above. The poem derived from me walking to the highest point of the town - to the Church of Aghios Charalambos - the miracle worker. There was a service taking place but only the priest and me were there to participate. The poem is printed in the latest edition of Carillon magazine - many thanks to Graham the editor for choosing it but if you do read the magazine the last line should not be italicised.)



At the top of the village, at the top of the day,
The caldera below is a cooling skillet in the sinking sun.
In Agios Charalambos a white-robed priest flits
Between ikons, lighting the lamps.
Each gutter and flare of candle flame
Reveals miracles performed anew:
Hollow-eyed and churlish a corpse is raised to a second chance;
A dragon flinches before Agios Georgio’s sword.

Between lectern and ikonostasis,
Word and flesh,
The priest chants this joyful mourning of the dying day
eleison…eleison…eleison…

He looks at me, narrow-eyed and questing;
“Catholiki”,I mouth, as if this explains anything
About our shared presence here; we are
Priest, chanters and people together.
Call and response have elided, have become one
Under the painted gaze of long dead bishops and saints

A single bell chimes, the sound palpable,
A measuring–rod for the space between silences.
My steps echo its rhythm into the yard,
Down the cobbled slope to the village;

For the congregation below the day is ending
In bars and tavernas
In hopes of wonders to be worked before next day break.

The May Crownings

(This poem stems from one of my earliest memories. At age 6 I was chosen to carry Mary's crown in procession at the annual May Day celebration at my church - May was, and still is, the month of the BVM. This was 1957 and the Catholic church still did these things. Unbeknown to me I was also carrying the polio which laid me low later that Summer. So, a bittersweet recollection)



Twice chosen was I that May Day morning as we
Prepared to process, shoaling like holy minnows
In the deep green corrugated space of the church hall.
Six years old, tight buttoned into velvet and silk,
A page, hobbled in buckled patent, I stepped out
Towards consecration behind my blue virgin
Mary or Siobhan, Philomena, Fionnula -
The fading schoolyard faces which stare up,
Like evidence of a past atrocity, reject naming now.
But then, awkward and angular,
In elbows and knees that needed growing into,
The girls, sinless in their Sunday dresses,
Cardigans like damp folded wings, held tenderly
Before them baskets of spring flowers as if
They had just alighted and would soon fly on.
Innocent still before heaven I thought the world
Was in that church waiting for me. A crown,
On a cushion the colour of a hematoma,
I carried it past stations of the cross and statues,
Calipered by canyons of parishioners;
Salve Regina, they sang, Salve Regina.
At the node of the aisle crossing we paused,
Priest and altar ahead, sunlight streaming through
Stained glass behind, colouring me purple.
In me an unwanted destiny,
Howling through my bloodstream coursing
Like hounds after hare, hungry for
Neuron and nerve. Marked by chance as elect
In that congregation, no longer carrier but victim,
I raised the cushion straight-arm, achingly high;
The mayflower and thorn crown and me,
As one in the darkness pooling at my feet;
a gnomon, shadow-casting
Into each footstep I made and might ever make.