Refuge Read online

  3. CHAT AND CIAO

  A poem’s like a boiling. Lid off too soon

  or simmer too long, and it’s fit for the bin.

  A poet’s Tweedledum self-communing under

  an umbrella open for a theoretical shower.

  Thanks for listening in...

  NOTES PROVIDED FOR THE BROADCAST

  1.) One of many tales about the legendary Thracian king, Orpheus is how he lost his young wife, Eurydice, to a snake who bit her as she ran from a man intent on raping her. Orpheus, a spell-binding musician, descended to the Underworld, charmed its fearful monsters and got permission from its king, Hades, to take his wife back to the upper air, provided that he did not look back at her before they returned to the light.

  2.) In Through the Looking Glass when Alice asks Tweedledum if it’s going to rain, he opens an umbrella over him and his brother (Tweedledee) and declares it won’t be raining under their cover. Carroll suggests that their world is subjective, a matter of playing with ideas. Tangible facts are of no concern.

  DIVINITY THAT SHAPES

  Commoditas quaevis sua fert incommoda secum.

  Qunitillian

  No wonder there was turmoil in Olympus

  and the gods decided to nail Prometheus

  for the theft of fire. By wielding fire

  we flicker for a moment into gods.

  Land, water, trade seem so much clutter

  if history’s a squabble for a share of fire.

  Eating out our hearts for fire,

  we’ve suffered the Titan’s endless torture.

  Now so few hoard such quantities of fire

  the gods seem amateurs, and we who shivered

  in caves cower from holocausts of fire,

  naked to the bolts of nameless gods.

  NOTE

  Epigraph: Every advantage has its drawbacks.

  Prometheus (of the giant race of Titans) was chained to a rock for ever. An eagle devoured his liver each day after it had grown back overnight.

  A LEVEL FANTASY

  ‘...tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here...’

  Alice in Wonderland

  She’d been one to peck up every fact,

  and he’d encouraged her in measured doses,

  ticked margins and given way to Good!

  Life-lines thrown out before she joined

  the long roll of faceless names and numbers.

  He’d fixed a grin to unwrap her gift:

  Tenniel’s Cheshire Cat framed and inscribed

  It’s been great! Nailing it up he feels

  one grafter’s respect for another.

  She knew her Alice inside out.

  Then after results a card of Alice

  amazed by her golden crown, and thanks

  that raised him to the angels. He replied

  like some uncle puffing advice through pipe-smoke,

  unseating every icon so she’d call it quits.

  His reward was seven sides, close-written.

  An essay he hadn’t set... and so heartfelt.

  TECHNODOC

  O doctor, was there ever a time before

  your trim cumulus curls massed daily

  in menace over indigo-grey stripy tie

  locked behind perennial hazy herringbone?

  Countless formulae are noted, experiments

  written up under your stony glint, distaste

  honed on it, your barbed comments brushed off,

  your nit-picking mimicked to a tee:

  no buttons undone, no chewing, no yawns.

  If you know what’s best for you, don’t gawp

  or giggle, and learn to wipe that grin off your face.

  Ginger, you’re programmed with textbook cheek...

  The only kids you’ll father sneer behind your back,

  plot to make boffin supreme blow a fuse,

  while you engender gadgets and gismos,

  checking dials and gauges with loving care.

  All that laughter in eyes, brimming pools

  truculently bright, eyes so ready

  to sparkle, go cold in censure. Caught

  in such precision sites, don’t you cower?

  Years clocking up hours and misdemeanours

  with bitter smile over licensed after-duty moan,

  a lemonade but No crisps, thanks. Must go!

  Exit on cue to show we’re lazy bums.

  *

  When you retire to fine-tune trouble-free engines,

  sit behind New Scientist and net curtains,

  won’t the years’ undercurrents ache back

  like a lost pulse? They say you used to bend

  iron bars like plastic cable. Hollow cheeks, doc !

  Won’t the years begin to bend you?

  CARING PROFESSION

  1. MENTORS

  To you we’re objects of fun or hate,

  makers of pointless rules

  who wield blades of sarcasm

  at your defenceless ears,

  fob you off with reasons

  clean as forged notes.

  You sense a hoax beneath the gloss,

  an odour you can’t define, and yet

  your censure scatters like spread-shot.

  Should we marvel at your deference?

  It’s the perfectly acceptable face

  of the product we’re paid to produce.

  What eludes us is indifference

  hardening like bone below the surface.

  2. NUDGE FROM HESSE

  Late October sun hallows heads

  bent over books.

  Don’t be taken in.

  This is not Castalia,

  and you’re not Joseph Knecht.

  Nothing they read or write

  touches their marrows

  more than tomorrow’s

  foggy breath.

  You dream of a Glass Bead Game

  and this is just a gamble.

  Odds on for grades or passes.

  Come July, year in year out,

  you’ll pack away dice and cards

  to clear the tables for another game.

  NOTE In Hesse’s futuristic novel, The Glass Bead Game (1943) Castalian society disintegrates while an elite intelligentsia play an esoteric game in a quest for perfection. When Knecht is appointed Master of the Game he tries and fails to redirect his country’s dwindling energies to practical questions and applications.

  3. RETREAT

  Late sleep. Shallow dreams

  smother me in Welcome Back!

  A gaunt-faced adolescent, one

  in a hundred ( boy or girl?)

  agonises with dog-like faith

  over the bones of an epic plot.

  I shuffle through needs and queries

  in files of scribbled notes (mine or theirs?)

  stagger below them on familiar stairs.

  But my bag of tricks is upside-down,

  its jumbled conflicts strewn about,

  churning round a river in spate.

  I wade out, wrestle with the current

  and wake up on the other bank.

  No flattery will drag me back.

  Let neglect howl over the waters

  like famine. My flag is furled.

  SOUNDS FROM A SHELL

  White horsemen ride innocently

  over the green sea.

  What if you try to disobey?

  Only men like you

  drown innocently.

  White horsemen ride

  over the innocent green sea.

  What if they decide

  to dismount?

  Only such men drown innocently.

  III. REFUGE

  ENLIGHTENMENT

  1. FUSION

  Rage, rage against the dying of the light ... Dylan Thomas

  Reading yet more print

  into my bone-head to the near tick

  of wooden clock

  and dark roar of heavy jet

  lumbering to defy gravity
, lamplight

  trembling in its filter, I burn

  ever lower life’s wick

  vainly to ransack,

  defying ignorance, others’ worn

  words from bone-heads that yearn

  to bridge air’s void with wooden

  phrase or roar of ticking rhetoric

  trumped up from trick

  in brain’s dark burden

  burning to be said and heard in sudden

  answer to clock and profane

  roar of doom from pilot’s stick,

  defying fitful crack

  of light rubbed up by bone on brain,

  my dynamo dying as I strain

  to read yet more print, defiant,

  feeling heavy jet

  smash the air, and set

  my hand to trim the wick and hold my light.

  2. GLIMPSES

  Sometimes a lantern moves along the night

  That interests our eyes...G.M. Hopkins

  A light flickers

  near or distant,

  beckons towards a meaning:

  someone taken away;

  a lone window swept

  by restless pines;

  drunks biking hell-for-leather

  down a rutted track.

  No end to ruminations

  on lights that flash persuasions,

  threats, welcome; and then the stars

  hoisting us up on chill, clear nights.

  And, out of the blue, streetwise squibs

  or inadvertent mirrors open cracks

  that slap us where it hurts.

  At full beam lights

  bore in like blaring brass fanfare right

  down the spine.

  Nerve yourself along that frail

  knife-edge path with a pale

  torch that whimpers out..

  But there are always lights

  near or far, refracting out the chance

  that distance

  won’t fail...

  3. FESTIVAL

  Something white that glitters,

  prismatically tinted,

  littered with greetings, the odd

  star, spire or holly leaf stuck

  to its wadded mystique

  A sentiment that rushes out

  for the last one

  six weeks before, then droops

  penuriously gorged

  when the avalanche stops

  and goes grey.

  4. BEYOND

  They are all gone into a world of light...Henry Vaughan

  It’s not the closing down,

  or fabled darkness and its worms,

  insistent no-mores and last times

  that make me ache and palpitate.

  It’s being the one to snap strings that tie,

  and others left to pick up snagged threads

  dangling in a heedless wind.

  Now fading sight blurs what’s beyond reach,

  I savour at last the little within my clutch.

  Yet new fissures

  hint at worlds of light

  nothing or no-one assures

  me shine beyond sight.

  OSLO TO BERGEN EXPRESS

  Torrents recede to a faint hiss,

  clinging birches mutter crisply,

  a trapped gnat whinges in my beard

  as I scramble up splintered rock

  to a ballasted shelf hung

  between rough-hewn cavern mouths.

  Strung pylons crouch like alert reptiles

  over sleek uncoiling tracks. Steely silence

  defies breathing, makes the ears sing.

  A beam’s trace searches one tunnel wall,

  bursts into a white eye blasting light

  from aloof streamlined face that bears down,

  screams by, antenna snapping blue flashes.

  Skirl of steel biting steel curve, sucking draught

  and sighing music of carriage after carriage,

  rows of lights and heads, one surprised stare,

  the last vehicle almost holding back before

  the far portal swallows its red lamp.

  Was this all I’d sweated here to see?

  Or does watching an assured passage

  that links lives with lives free me

  from just letting another remote day

  sink into dense tent-flapping night?

  TAKING A CUT

  New Year should mark a kind of survival.

  It’s just another day on this sodden pasture

  creased with rounded strips. Stagnant pools

  and mantled sludge fill the troughs between.

  Ewes nose and fret among tarpaulined hay.

  Spring will shoot wiry and tousled like the heifers-

  in-calf and white-faced bullocks put out to browse.

  Brothers hold the lease but seldom work in tandem.

  On a bleak crown put to plough I watch Ivor

  hitch shares and turn from three-furrow plod.

  He’s welded to his open-top, orange Nuffield

  under torn cap and gaberdine so greased

  they’re wind-and-water-proof. Ready to chat

  he notches back the throttle and scans ripples

  he’s sliced from this mat of bristling stubble. “Dry

  underneath, just like powder. Look at it!

  All that rain overnight! Where’d it go, eh?”

  Scouring the ground with yardstick glance

  he makes the cussed way of things worth a thought.

  “Glad you’re holding on to all your hedges,” I say.

  “We’re stockmen. Beeves and ewes like a storm break.”

  I meet brown eyes used to sizing up beasts.

  “Big farmer, Glooston way, ripped the lot out.

  Gales scattered his top-soil after a March drought.

  Harrow and drill again? Not likely. Too late!

  Laid that hedge myself ten years back.

  See how it’s come on, except where my brother

  made holes in it burning straw and stubble.”

  Chill January rain cuts us short.

  He’ll face it, grabbing up the iron crust,

  firm behind wayward wheel and belching pipe,

  though the yearly survival of stock is on his mind.

  PROCESSIONAL

  The year’s moved house overnight

  and left a dismantled vault.

  Trees are inscrutable, etched into

  basket-weave hedgerows.

  A few sheep scattered over bald fields

  have stripped every green blade,

  and latch on to roots. This high up

  birds of passage probe no loopholes

  in a polar wind but dart from bush to bush.

  Northward one chalky cloud swells

  like chimney-stack smoke against a zinc sky.

  Icy gusts make up-hill work

  for a man and two youngsters

  plodding across land knotted with sedge and tussocks.

  In shiny, warm, sensible clothes,

  they might be nomads from any history:

  cloaked heroes claiming domains,

  homeless fugitives in filched or borrowed dress.

  The children startle a lone crow,

  watch it driven downwind; explore a hollow,

  pick up dead leaves. Their father

  bends to listen and explain; but earth’s parings,

  its stalk and bone, mean little.

  They need to point and ask. He has to cast

  the spell of theory: rationale

  of wire fence, pylon, cratered field, property.

  And they all hold hands

  to make reassuring headway

  against the wind’s senseless push and shove.

  Sky’s armoured grey is battered by gulls

  wheeling in cross-wind forays.

  That one teeming cloud to the north has massed

  and flattened into drifting skeins.

  AGES

  Power lines whi
p round poles,

  road and pavement run in spate,

  hedges sag and swell, feeble as cress.

  Business as usual, we trust,

  yet we’re primaevally old,

  unfledged, shrink inside,

  then into ourselves for shelter,

  only to find fitful sparks

  where a will once blazed.

  Is our race about to lose

  its feebly tightening hold ?

  Look at those drenched kids

  who dance and scream as if

  to-day’s deluge needs no tomorrow.

  WAIFS

  ‘What the devil can I do!’ Hipcroft groaned

  (Thomas Hardy: The Fiddler of the Reels)

  Festival of Eighteen-Fifty-One.

  Enterprise and optimism glisten

  in Hyde Park’s glass cathedral, while London

  sucks in the lost and undone.

  Under Waterloo’s iron awning,

  jostled along a paved waste, mother

  and child, unloaded from open, rattling

  voyage like cattle, cling to each other.

  Only a faceless surge of arrivals

  and departures. Will he be there?

  What with lean years corroding her

  and this pinched offspring not his, he feels

  their supplication too sodden to bear.

  “How about something to stop the shivers?”

  REFUGE

  1. MUNICIPAL PARK

  Triangular park railed between

  converging lanes of heavy traffic.

  Endless families alight on green

  benches and parched grass, munch

  picnics with far-away looks, wrangle

  over ice cream or where to go next,

  sidle off in loose gaggles,

  while old mum and dad sit and sip

  from thermos tops, doze, puzzle

  over dried-up flower beds,

  wait to be collected.

  Crisp leaves rattle in circles,

  a long summer’s dust tangos

  over gravel. Not so distant

  cloud has whipped itself up

  into a host of cobras.

  Three women identically smart

  dodge cars, vans, topless double-deckers

  and take a break to show off the flimsy

  contents of their logo bags.

  Designer-clad covens and fully-padded