Trisagion (Thrice Holy)

1

Tiresias the seer comes towards me,
stands in sun-faded red flowered dress
transparent bag stuffed
with gleanings of street and shore.
He holds out a present of driftwood
bleached and salty, entwined like albino snakes.
Tells me what the birds have said today
in couplets I cannot understand:
reclaiming this temple mound from saint and sinner
he dances off.

2.
In the Cafe Caryatids an old man rests,
blue painted chair tilted in the doorway.
He sat there yesterday, will be there tomorrow.
Teeth and pullover holed and brown, he stares
mute at the road, a drone of tourists passing.
Bacchants and satyrs, they follow the unbrella thyrsos
snake through cafe chairs and shop front T-shirts,
short-stepping in rhythym after a guide; yellow tights,
black ankle boots, she is a queen,
finding honey in the columns and slabs
littering the temple site of Apollo; the residue,
a carved henge, faces westwards, leads nowhere
now, admits to nothing; a lizard's eye
unblinking red, through which
shutters click and cameras flash; the moment
when light folds into darkness remaining elusive.

3.
The kouros at Apollonas reclines obtuse against the hillside,
breathes out asphodels in wave froth to the edge of the cliff.
Tourists climb and slither in search of the shot
to validate memory's convivial hyperbole.
Unrealised Dionysus, a marble moraine,
a black smudge against the darker quarry wall,
suffers them; but dreams of standing free of this rock umbilical-
the headland a plinth, floating between sea and bluer sky,
his arms raised in welcome to sail and oar.

When the gods went villagers dropped hammers,
stopped chipping against the hard grain,
returned to their goats and groves - their piss-poor soil.
Those terraces, tribal scars cut into the mountain sides,
in turn, abandoned for easier fleeces each Summer boat
disgorged; a new mythology of excess is today's orthodoxy.
Dionysus, be content to lie weeping ferns into the pockmark pools

Feeding The Cat

Two of my poems have been included in the Cinnamon Press anthology Feeding The Cat which has just been published. They are The East Yorkshire Crematorium - which is mentioned in an earlier post - and a long poem in three parts caled Trisagion. In Greek that means Thrice Holy and is part of an Orthodox liturgy. The poem was written on the island of Naxos in the Cyclades and works with the idea of the ancient sites carrying a residue of the old religion which has been overlayed by Orthodox Christianity and now has a religion of sun seekers and tourists on top of that. Probably doesn't work but Naxos is a great place to sit and write ! I'll post Trisagion when I can find it on my PC !

Been away for some time and writing quite a bit so little news to report except that my poem The Ladies of Dona Sofia - written on a trip to Andalucia last December - is being published by The Seventh Quarry base din Swansea. I'm very pleased with this as it is a very good publication and I'll put the poem on this blog when it has appeared.

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.