There, there Dvořák's New World Symphony, a poem

Epiphany

On the radio, where music has been unspooling uselessly,

I recognize the pan of Dvořák’s camera across the galaxy,

Its slow zoom onto something small – it could be me.

Pushing aside the insidious connection with the Hovis advertisement

(brown bread – dead), I soar; largo: a slow, broad, dignified treatment.

There’s an elsewhere here too: Bieszczady, a prickling sentiment.

Under a night’s vast sky, the crouched, looming mass of trees

huddled; shuffling together around the lake, brought to their knees,

They whispered dark prayers, a confessional sifting of leaves.

I am old technology and my tape player whirred and stuttered

The New World Symphony, from the Proms; a candle guttered

With the breeze rising up from the shore, a promise uttered

In an inflated currency.  The wooden cabin creaked like a ship

And I gripped the handrail of the veranda, leaning against the tip

Of sky and sea, of stars and planets, feeling suddenly adrift

High above the lake, with its glittering slick of moonlight;

The music sublime.  Then there are those moments, those slight

Pauses: the meaning is in the waiting: a sudden grasp, then the slide …

I picked up my bottle and followed a path to the lake side,

Stumbling through the trees and over roots - the pauses held

Inside.  I sat on a rock close to the water’s edge, still thrilled

By the light of Armstrong’s moon, its near reflection broken into timid

Splinters, trembling just beneath the surface, the water brimming

At my feet, somniloquent and restive.  I heard the doleful lowing

Of a distant cow, the closer engine hum of a frogs’ chorus revving

In the autumnal air (though still August), the gulp of a fish surfacing.

I listened to the dark radio of the lake with its glowing

Points of stations broadcasting tinny music and frail human voices,

Snatches of songs, laughter, across its caliginous breadth, noises

Keeping loneliness at bay; still I held on tightly to the pauses:

Wide open spaces big enough to begin a whole world, a whole new world,

Yet small enough to live in, to be a part of.  In the beginning was the word …       

If I could hear it … but the pauses lengthened, became silence, emptiness, a void.

Suddenly filled with it - weightlessness: a transparency holding light.  “Here I am!”

Nothing but the echo of my voice travelling towards me, away, across space and time,

The trees lifting their heads, wringing their hands at the soft urging of the water’s solipsism.

It was a conundrum, an anagram.  In answer, a dog barked backwards across the lake.

A dog in the manger!  A dog’s dinner!  I hurled my empty bottle into the black

Water and clambered back up the hill to open another: I had a thirst to slake.

So a memory is fashioned to furnish a life, to adorn its dark corners: a threadbare

Sentimentality that makes it feel lived in, like home.  And to know now that it’s not where

Or when or if or how; and there’s no what or why to release a breath held – a pause –

In a life’s prayer:  No elsewhere, but here.

Click on the link to listen to the second movement of New World Symphony:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHyN3izk38c

Silence ... pauses ... comment?

downhill. Manuel De Falla and a poem

Jota (from Manuel de Falla’s Suite populaire espagnole)

A

dance

perhaps

a dream

so as the

music builds

begins to reel

I lift my feet from

the pedals and freewheel

down winding roads down

steepening hills through verdant

English country lanes hedge and field

farm and village my vision blurred with

speed eyes tearing yellows and greens smeared

the scenery tumbling the ripped flags rags of colour

flapping happiness escaping like bubbles streaming

from my smile-stretched mouth a flood of unbearable

joy racing though my blood bitter-sweet as a memory apocryphal

the road levels the music slows drifts fades stops silence for a moment coasting the earth

turning under my feet the clouds gliding over my head and I am still drawn forward by this

unrelenting backward movement this undertow and I cannot turn back there’s no second ride I

brake                                                                                                                                   awake.  



Click on link to listen to Jota
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26JWcuIBB5M


Thank you for reading.I would very much welcome some comments.

NB The visual effect of this poem is better seen on a computer rather than a phone.

Science and poetry, the importance of being Ernest

Stamp collecting or the importance of being Ernest

A flock of pigeons, homing pigeons, in a blue sky,

Dance across my vision - like the shoals of floaters,

The smudges, that flicker and swim on my corneas,

Locked to the movement of my eyes – swish and sigh.

In the midst of the city, released from a jerry-built loft,

Amongst the urban sprawl, a sign switched on and off

That turns black to white, pepper to salt, they climb.

Catching the sun, they shimmer and shine – sublime.

Their flight seems coded, as rigid as semaphore;

Its significance invisibly sewn into the atmosphere.

They cut sharp angles with sudden turns; they loop

And swoop, shifting shapes, like a kaleidoscope. 

The formation stretches and contracts and each bird

Keeps its place; each one a cog in the machine,

A ghost; a haunting presence on the astral plane.

They careen overhead, a soft susurration heard

As urgent as any scientist’s prayer, or laugh.

They swarm; they glide; they build the very air -

At once here there everywhere nowhere;

Now out of sight.  What position? What path?

A quantum leap brings them back into orbit,

Pulls them back to a central point from which

A new arrangement of moves begins, each

One an infinitesimal big bang, an atom split,

A universe expanding … and for this moment,

A singular moment, I am the nucleus – potent,

Omniscient … but here comes the crunch;

The birds go to roost and what is left is a hunch

That the meaning is not in the message but

In the very idea that there is a message, that

The cat’s out of the bag but locked in a box.

So were still stuck with faith – it’s all just a hoax.

Click here for Ernest Rutherford

Click here to read about Schrodinger's cat

Enter Stage Right, a poem on beginnings and endings

Genesis

There are two family trees

Growing in fields far apart,

Yet the same sun feeds

Their myriad leaves,

Nurtures each soft unfolding,

Carelessly, as every god does -

The agenda uncertain;

And who’s to choose

The fates of these?

(It’s a tragedy, of course,

Greek, written by Anemophilous.)

The trees are old, of course,

Everything reaches back,

Everything must connect –

Darwin flecked, the past

Perfects itself in the future.

Each extinction a casting

Off of the failure

To see what was to come,

A leaving behind

Of the halt and the lame;

And to come was this: Us.

Even without God,

The definite article that is,

It’s a faith built on hubris.

Some believe in a more

Accidental evolution,

A lucky dip;

Our fingers sticky with chance,

And licked with glee

As we made it up a step;

Not so much a climbing down from

More a falling out of the tree.

Ah, the fall ... there’s the rub:

Mea culpa, mea culpa,

Mea maxima culpa.

Back to God:

The apple never falls far from the tree

And there has to be suffering.

Who wouldn’t want a heaven?

Move over,

There’s room on that cross for two.

Yes, the trees are old,

Their boughs and branches

Cast long shadows,

A shading from the sun,

A simple need to protect,

To keep under cover,

To maintain the flavour

Of the soupy stock.

Heinz 57; DNA.

Yet seeds in their thousands

Are released to indifferent winds,

Scimitar the air, spin,

Are carried to distant lands;

Or fruit is eaten

And birds take wing,

Swinging out over fields,

Crossing cities and towns,

Countries and continents,

Shitting indiscriminately.

Somewhere – here -

Two saplings shoulder

Up through the humus,

Bending tenuous

Stems towards the light;

Their numb heads favour heat,

Nuzzle up to warmth -

Replete in a secular blindness.

One bears fruit

(A thin skin wrapped around

The soft pale flesh,

Easily pitted);

The other nuts (gnarled

And knotted, hard to crack).

Their branches enfold,

And they grow into each other;

They caress;

They entwine;

They marry,

Urgent with the sap they carry.

Finally, they swarm,

And they smother,

Lying one upon the other.

And a shoot,

Green tipped, trusting,

Noses up through the earth,

Exhales the thin oxygen

Of hope and of death.

[Exeunt stage left.]

Phantom limn: Amputation a poem

Amputation

The sky is bright and clear

And very pale.

A winter sun is coming up,

Blazing in the trees behind me.

There’s light but no real heat,

And my coffee’s rapidly cooling.

Nevertheless, the temperature’s up;

There’s water in the air

And the whispered trickling

Of snow dissolving,

As though something secret,

Something slow and discreet

Were at work.

And last year’s grass shows through,

Like rucks in a threadbare carpet.

Over the dividing wall,

I can see into the neighbour’s kitchen.

The wife comes in and sees me staring,

Though my thoughts are elsewhere.

She looks back at me,

And while we’re too far away for detail,

I sense the frown on her face.

We have never spoken;

Our lives run on separate tracks,

Blurred with the motion of a moving train.

I look away and then back again.

I raise my hand, as though to wave,

And she turns aside,

Busies herself with something.

                                                                  

There was tree, I remember,

Which blocked our view of their house.

One day, in summer,

From the same window

I had watched my wife carry her case to the car,

I noticed that they had cut it down.

What was left was a staggering V-sign,

With its playful ambiguity,

The bole bifurcating about a yard from the ground,

And the two trunks rising and separating

For another yard or so.

(Should I have taken offence

At something unintended, apposite,

When simply more light was allowed

To spill on our side?)

The ends blazed white, raw,

Yet seemed a soft wound, benign.

They took the axe to them too.

I tried to run a film backwards in my head,

The tree being cut together,

As if I could have recalled its solidity,

Its stature,

The elusive music of its leaves,

But I couldn’t even remember

What type of tree it was,

Or how it had looked when whole.

With its constituent parts

Laid out on the lawn –

Branches of varying thickness

Grouped in separate piles:

Logs for sawing and burning –

It looked like a self-assembly kit

Sorted from its packaging;

A tree from IKEA -

As if happiness were a lifestyle

So easily constructed -

Though finally a puzzle with too many bits,

For all the king’s horses and all the king’s men.

The snow has melted,

Has slowly unfixed its pieces

And put itself away,

And given me back the dead grass.

The wall remains, its grouting solid,

And behind it, the stump is still deeply rooted

In the damp, dark earth, still scratching

At its amputee’s itch of spring.

The past is the ocean, a poem on memory and love

Erosion

No one had told her that hell

Could come before death:

The horizon you tire of reaching,

That thin line, a shell;

The sound of your own breathing

Like the incessant waves on the beach.

A hundred miles from the sea,

Mrs Smith stands adrift,

Feels the swell buoy her up,

Her stomach shift.

Coffee spills from her coffee cup;

The fall to the floor an eternity.

Abandoned now, and stranded

Amongst the dead husband’s chattels,

She shakes the small round pills

From the smoked-glass bottle

That comes with the strained

Smiles of her doctor.  They spill

Into the cracked vessel

Of her palm.  She licks

Them up like the cat

Lapping at its milk.

Her rooms float and fill

With fog and she feels

Her way through them,

Her vision dim.

Her cat mews, rubs her legs,

Calling her from shipwreck.

When the mist swirls,

She lies upon the sofa,

Under a thin checked picnic

Blanket, in a soft cloud of coma,

Staring at nothing, staring;

The cat pads and curls

At her feet, purring, purring.

Run aground.

There’s a line-up on the mantelpiece –

Strangers with Identikit features,

Assembled into a puzzle of faces,

Who seem shifty and restless,

Peering through the dirty windows

Of their unhappiness,

Though one photo on the shelf

Holds her life in its frame -

A memory and a mirror -

And the faces seem more the same:

Each day bringing them nearer,

Pushing her from the shore of herself.

She remembers the day

As if it were yesterday;

Though yesterday has gone,

Lost in days of repetition,

Hour stacked on stale hour,

Year after year turning sour,

Until far enough back

The clouds break,

And the minutes, fresh,

Sparkle so she can count each one.

She feels the press of his flesh

On her fingers,

Senses the urgent tone,

How the seconds linger,

How each and every stone

On the beach behind shines;

The breaking of the waves

Stalled.

She recalls:

The borrowed car,

The promising early sun,

The lack of traffic,

The walk along the prom,

Shivering under the picnic blanket,

Their limbs knotting them into one.

Then the seaweed smell of decay.

Beyond that moment

She can only stumble

And then fall

Into the jumbled present;

And the waves tumble,

And sprawl.

The past is the ocean

Coming in at hide tide,

Slowly stealing years –

Her island’s inevitable erosion:

Headlands crumble and slide,

Coastline disappears.

She lifts her eyes from the picture

To the horizon’s distant glow;

Ssh, ssh the waves whisper

As the water runs over her toes.