Refuge

  Refuge

  OTHER BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR

  Verse booklets

  Learning Not To Touch (Redbeck Press, 1998)

  Reaching for a Stranger (Shoestring Press, 1999)

  Verse Collections

  Outstripping Gravity (Redbeck Press, 2000)

  Exposures (Redbeck Press, 2003)

  Taking Cover (Redbeck Press, 2005)

  No Time for Roses (Salzburg Press, 2009)

  Narrative verse fantasy for younger readers

  Wish* (Author-House, 2010)

  (Due for republication by Thames River, autumn 2012)

  Rainbow* (Due for publication By Thames River, autumn 2012)

  *See also: author’s website: www.michaeltolkien.com

  Published by New Generation Publishing in 2012

  Copyright © Michael Tolkien 2012

  First Edition

  The author asserts the moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior consent of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  www.newgeneration-publishing.com

  eISBN 9781909395206

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The author would like to thank the recently-formed local Rutland Poets, a group with whom several problematic poems have been workshopped and ‘rescued’.

  Thanks are due also to Gordon Braddy, whose patient and perceptive reading and listening have guaranteed that many poems were profitably reworked.

  For the last six years the personal and professional support of Darin Jewell (Inspira Group Literary Agency) has provided me with indispensable encouragement in face of many odds.

  COVER ILLUSTRATION

  Rutland Landscape by Rosemary Tolkien.

  For Rosemary

  ...salted was my food and my repose

  Salted and sobered, too, by the bird’s voice

  Speaking for all who lay under the stars,

  Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.

  Edward Thomas: from The Owl (1916)

  CONTENTS

  I IN TOUCH

  No Game Plan

  In Touch

  Rooted

  The Years in 2006

  Outside the Rain

  Lost

  Unsung

  Village Black Spot

  Hardened

  Fuchsias

  Sacrilege

  Stasis

  II CLOISTER AND PROMENADE

  Mrs Primley’s Literary Young Men

  Mr Busy and Mrs

  ‘That you, George?’

  Cloister and Promenade

  Hallowed Ground

  Our Man in the Oberland

  Dining

  Spent

  Ego

  Together

  In the Café of Your Choice

  Gold and Silver

  Poet Broadcasts

  Divinity That Shapes

  A Level Fantasy

  Technodoc

  Caring Profession (1.Mentors)

  (2.Nudge from Hesse)

  (3.Retreat)

  Sounds from a Shell

  III REFUGE

  Enlightenment (1. Fusion)

  (2. Glimpses)

  (3.Festival)

  (4. Beyond)

  Oslo to Bergen Express

  Taking a Cut

  Processional

  Ages

  Waifs

  Refuge 1.

  Refuge 2.

  All

  IV BELONGING

  Lost Among Pines

  Between Lives

  Flight

  Resort

  Belonging I & II

  Mountain Sundown

  After the Singing

  The Assumption

  The Kiss

  Living Son

  Psalm

  A Lighter Touch (1. Ascent)

  (2.Embroidery)

  (3. Illumination)

  I. IN TOUCH

  NO GAME PLAN

  Sweet Williams in a brown jug

  you happened to find. Your dab of décor

  for that sudden party, bright dice scattered

  for a quick score. They wilt over

  my unsorted mail, your rucked-up

  half-read Tom Sharpe and a card

  you once scribbled from breezy Margate.

  Leaves curl to straw. Crimsons, maroons,

  ivories fray like sun-worn curtains.

  As I clutch and bin these stale virgins

  in their washed-out gear and underwater

  stench, I feel your gesture take its chance,

  recall those whims that took a slap at time,

  and turned my well-laid plans into a game.

  IN TOUCH

  When August tints and chills to autumn,

  I notice how you cling to your clothes at nightfall,

  complain that drafty spaces multiply in bed.

  But look at the misty golden edge

  round evenings closing in, vapours curling up

  in hollow places. Remember fire nights,

  the primal hiss and crackle, how embers shift and wink.

  Be glad to batten down against a threat

  that summons the snail in you, backing away and in

  to womb, cradle, a first room’s embrace.

  My fingers sift again through crumbled red earth

  after roots and spuds have done their work,

  lie stacked and clamped. I sniff the final

  burning of a year’s husks and straws,

  walk from its passing blaze and smoke into

  your warmth, at ease with my autumnal need

  to cover a space that makes me shiver.

  ROOTED

  Meandering funeral aftermath

  finds us side by side

  below the comforting splash

  of tall, new-leaved limes.

  Beliefs and sects creep

  into our talk: how some suppose

  no breeze can make them totter,

  and most don’t need to make a stand.

  ‘So what are you now?’ I ask.

  ‘Nothing,’ you say: assured,

  precisely you, leaning a moment

  on the chiselled hide of a lime

  that knows where it stands,

  as you do, gazing clear-eyed

  past a blackened tower

  to where you stood

  and buried two parents,

  not two springs apart.

  THE YEARS IN 2006

  Ibsen has been dead a hundred years.

  How many years ago

  was Lise Fjeldstad filmed as Torvald’s Nora?

  Lively, throttled wife who walked

  out of their Doll’s House and away

  from her stifling century.

  In Oslo the hype blows over.

  Loading a complimentary DVD

  Lise sits down to watch herself

  make history in Technicolor,

  and finds she’s glancing at a mirror.

  Expecting to greet her face

  with its familiar lines and cares

  she confronts a lithe chameleon,

  coaxing, devious, lovingly defiant

  in her tormented rôle. Some youngster

  moves, laughs and weeps like her,

  yet makes her scowl in envy at a fraud

  who sheds those intervening years.

  TYPING OUTSIDE THE RAIN

  On this cold, grey day, though tapping out

  fretful messages on unceasing keys,

  were
you watching the deluge increase

  over stone walls, scarcely breathing, anxious about

  nothing much? As we who lack something of ourselves can be.

  Perhaps thick rain adds a shade more doubt.

  Did this amorphous day that cloaked you cling

  to your mind with wet lips and discontented breath?

  Coffee, cigarettes, a few polite shows of teeth

  and drenching walks were its gifts to your willing

  body; yet you had to tread the only path

  there was,

  dimly curious about what premature night would bring.

  Did one unguarded moment in this cold rain suggest

  you might be too pliant

  towards that seminar of bells and cant?

  Perhaps as you filed another flat request

  damp ends of hair brushed chilled fingers bent

  on being

  deft; and you paused at the edge of empty trust.

  LOST

  Safe as houses was her favourite tag

  but at over ninety she was lost

  in that steep-pitched, pebble-rendered semi,

  floundering, too, since her husband died

  trying to start his turquoise Cortina banger.

  Slim, slick-haired, tight-suited, eighty-nine,

  they called him Tear-Arse Eddie, terror

  of the local roads. Police found

  half a grand stitched inside his jacket.

  High time to move her to a home,

  her daughter told me, as if that was that.

  Neighbours, who should mind their business

  liked her pluck in carrying on regardless,

  her backyard rites of broom and shovel,

  the way she scraped and scrabbled for coal

  from ramshackle bunker, poked up weeds and litter,

  clattered out plates and cups for daughter,

  who shouted in daily at four, and out at five.

  In the small hours she’d come alive

  and pace about with a swansong, racked

  and cheerless as draughts moaning through a crack.

  When rain dribbled down her bay window

  she sat with opaque under-water stare,

  watching her life trickle back. I’d wave,

  and to wake her from that lonely deluge,

  call in, brew a pot of strong, loose tea.

  Yet her vacant eyes like blue-yoked eggs

  gazed right through me and my chatter

  at splashing traffic and bent, wet heads.

  ‘Anything you need, Molly?’ ‘Larder’s stuffed,’

  her stock answer, waiting for me to leave

  before she lurched off with giant strides,

  jaw and stick thrust out, for odds and ends

  or bargain Scotch for Eddie’s safe return,

  her silvered head with its skull-tight skin

  so frail and intent, her frame that yawed

  like a rudderless yacht, and left me helpless,

  watching and praying from a distant shore.

  UNSUNG

  First met Bill delivering by van and bike

  for a greengrocer. Needed to keep busy.

  Newly retired from top management

  in a firm tied up with North Sea Oil.

  But why the collared neck? ‘Cricked on the fairway,’

  he said. Rumour was he’d mucked in

  on the factory floor to dispatch a contract.

  He’d nursed his wife into Alzheimer’s,

  resolved to keep her home at all costs.

  When they caravanned in places coloured

  with best memories, she’d wander off.

  Police returned her wrapped in a blanket over

  muddy pyjamas she’d fought to keep on

  with snarls, bared teeth and clawing hands.

  ‘Day Beth was taken in we’d been married

  53 years. She scored 2 from a 30

  aggregate of memory and response.’

  Straight talk in a street encounter

  while he looked beyond me as if to say

  the broader picture must be seen, and added:

  ‘Sense of humour’s seen me through the worst.’

  He’s just over a heart valve transplant

  and a ward infection that walled him in

  for two months. Twice weekly he tees off

  at 8 a.m. on the toughest local course.

  And he’s bought a compact caravan

  to tour the coast of Scotland solo:

  Stranraer, Durness, John O’Groats, Berwick.

  I’m in open fields to lift the spirit

  above self-created fret, and there he is,

  striding out like a prospector,

  his wilful little Scottie on a long leash.

  Always one to seize the moment, this is

  his bird day, delighting in rare flickers

  of pairs and flocks in their spring passage.

  VILLAGE BLACK SPOT

  Double Z and nearly home, loaded

  with seasonal gifts and looking forward.

  Blind juggernaut like a crazed rhino

  slews across and dumps its concrete pipes

  on your one life in its egg-box shell.

  What made you whole and loveable

  cannot be prised from lacerated steel.

  They couldn’t even move you into

  the sun like Owen’s soldier with thoughts

  of how its gentle touch once woke you.

  Front page news between white on black

  tributes to performance tires we need at speed,

  your smile shy and modest above a catalogue

  of family troubles that leave us at a loss.

  Who were you? What lit up your days?

  Then, full-spread, buckled, upended vehicles

  as if some convoy had suffered a direct hit.

  No hint of what is permanently shattered

  and cannot be grassed over like bad bends

  by-passed with three-lane dodgems.

  NOTE: Wilfred Owen’s poem Futility mourns a young soldier felled by a bullet but apparently intact and unscathed:

  ‘Move him into the sun-/Gently its touch awoke him once...’

  HARDENED

  Pine: young head

  on bleached, spindly torso,

  bending up from burned-out,

  greening slope, your feet stood

  firm and defied the flames.

  Now you split my wide

  sky and, like it or not, unzip

  my acquisitive camera.

  So what will you do beside

  this washed-out track?

  Mark a lurking hunter’s path

  that scurries into thorny scrub?

  Let the odd passer-by pin

  recurring hopes and fears

  on your stooping trunk?

  Look at me squinting up

  at you, almost prayerfully,

  my miniscule lens

  capturing nothing much,

  asking you to lose

  no more plumage,

  keep something back for

  the next wave of lunatic fires.

  FUSCHIAS

  I fell for exotics like ‘Mrs Popple’

  who drapes her puce pagoda over

  purple belly through which she hangs

  her luminous fluted stamens.

  Then I heard Norwegian Saeverud

  paint her diverse tribe in piano notes.

  His ‘Drops of Christ-Blood’ dripped

  coral fire, aery pendants, fallen heads.

  Now even Popple’s plainer sisters

  make me flirt. They’re inverted,

  shrunk crocuses, violently pink;

  ruminating bells rung by

  monologues of serious bees;

  seamstress heads poised over

  delicate stitches, at one

  with their needles, at ease

  with every cut-throat breeze.

  Below their danc
ing show

  springs a girth that thickens

  into hedge. They bud relentlessly,

  bear berries hard as ebony.

  SACRILEGE AT THÉATRE DES CHAMPS ELYSÉES

  Paris, Spring 1913

  The Rite of Spring rouses berserk rival

  ballet whose cultivated sneers, fistfuls of loathing,

  Gadarene rush for exits, leave Stravinski

  fuming over empty stalls. A thwarted god

  ready to turn these deaf and blinkered

  imbeciles to a herd of rooting swine.

  Fine tuning and experimental sweat

  have fashioned the clay’s true guise

  till nothing jars or niggles. Patterns

  he wove to make the untuned hear

  and taste the living earth, they tear

  to shreds, piece by hated piece, shy

  away from freaks and jackanapeses

  writhing in mottled tights, birdsong

  that scrapes like a rusty winch, cruel

  thudding drum, jungle of fissured

  string-play stampeding from the pit..

  STASIS

  Guitar held against long, white dress

  you thread reluctant womanhood through

  chords that waver in a question.

  When time and tiredness beat you down

  play back this moment. Listen for Song

  that lives inside you.

  Across your few furnishings and comforts

  July sun throngs its last. Skylights brim

  blue eyes wide. Your very breath’s alert.

  Fingers absently on strings whisper

  over birdsong, flower, maze, water-

  fall, ghosting in mind’s own garden.

  A zone of innocence swathes you,

  holds this instant pressed in leaves

  of sunlight, fading into attic beams.

  Up here clock and weariness will

  beat you down. Turn aside,

  let Woman in you sing.

  II. CLOISTER AND PROMENADE

  MRS PRIMLEY’S LITERARY YOUNG MEN

  (...Comfortable accommodation for male students in the Arts Faculty...)

  Trunk and bags look lonely squeezed between

  outsized bed and coffee-tinted wall

  matched by threadbare floral counterpane,