Two Sites of Special Scientific Interest

Water
falls into a lake,
backdrop
seen through alders
heard through rustle of leaves,
leaves
haloed in white.

My approach
expands the whiteness
in circles
towards me,
crossing the lake.

Sad that the distance
and instinct  combine
to conjure the fancy:
soap suds  pollutants
only  nearer  to find
a  mix nearly perfect
of   water  unsullied
with lightness of air
support for  two rare
mini-beasts  and  one
water weed.

                  *

All
genetic programs ticking
satisfactorily,
they cover themselves in glory -
and metal oxides -
changing
from benign virus
into living wire,
predestined to arrange themselves
in patterns laid by man
called batteries.
They pack a punch,
sparks bright enough
to replace petrol on all 
roads of this town reborn
tomorrow - when all our cities
will be lit (maybe) by living things
like Vibrio phosphorium -
or cum grano salis, as you might say -
sparkling bacteria
clinging to the outside walls
of buildings 
growing there - and every roof as white
as that pure water in the lake.

Love Song

dVerse ~ Poets Pub set several prompts for this week, all of them relating to the work of Giorgio de Chirico. I chose this painting of his: "Love Song".

Anxiety is here that builds to war.
It's in the dark and melancholy streets,
it's in the very atmosphere that sinks
into the gut, the bones, the spleen, the spunk.
No one is here, it's not for humans, this.

But wait, we see the signs of man writ large,
though muddled and confused, as in a dream:
Apollo - plaster likeness, not himself -
a rubber glove, a ball, a puffing train.
What are these things to us - and what to him?

de Chirico is out to change the world.
These are the implements he'll use, laid out
as if a surgeon is about to cut
the cord that ties the world to evil thoughts -
He's working in the deepest shafts of mind.

Apollo, god of music, song and verse
is giving birth to man's creative urge.
A midwife's glove tacked to a wall to dry,
a ball awaits the long-expected child.
Art answers to the world's anxieties.

But no, I did not quite forget the train...
the artist's father worked the railway line.
A tiny train, it's going nowhere fast -
for this is not escapist art; it's here
in every now that ever was or is.

There Should be a Bird Called a Poet

There should be a bird called a poet.
What would its plumage be?
Would it twitter away in ducktyls?
Would both sexes sing, he and she?

I ask, having read in the news
how poets have twittered on twitter
demanding an airing for views
that are growing increasingly bitter

re The Poetry Soc's upper twigs.
On Facebook, forsaking their crumbs,
they're coming together in gigs -
their harmony baffles and numbs.

They're demanding that birds that have flown
the nest in frustration and pique
should be reinstated and shown
that the board, not the poets, are weak.

So what of my bird called a poet?
It should have some teeth in its beak,
teeth it reserves for the nest -
to use them outside is not chic.

Its feathers would end disarrayed,
it would stagger around on mixed feet,
any rondo or sonnet it made
would nose dive into the street.

So you'll not find it out where it matters,
doing battle with giants or a troll,
a world grown hungry, in tatters;
but twittering tunes that lull.

(For background: see here)

Two Poems

1
Newly opened,
coral pink
and beautifully formed,
its face turned up
as if to scan the sky,
a listening ear perhaps.

Within the rose
around its tiny fins
pearl coloured beads of rain
follow one another
like insects in a maze.

2
Twelve saplings in a circle,
twelve swan necks
echoing each other
seem to have invented
the world's first ever
static dance

Theatre in the round:
the circle is enclosed
by watching shrub and scrub.

Africa

The moon inflating was a taupe balloon
she'd thought in dream,
forgetting she'd not slept.

Hallucination.

And not the moon, but
daughter Marza's, stomach.
She'd watched the dry earth swallow it, seen,
how as it slowly sank beneath a mimicry of waves,
it gently rolled as if a small boat had capsized.

No ripples broke the surface,
no bubbles from those trapped beneath.
And nothing grew,
no green shoots marked the grave.

Only the dust remembered it
where scratches in the dust were epitaph.

And then the belly reappeared,
surfaced like a corpse at sea,
as if the waves had spurned her final gift.
One corpse too many for its store.

But not the whole corpse. As before,
that empty part of her , that part
wherein her body's emptiness
had been most keenly felt, the still inflating,
slightly bouncing belly.

Emblazoned on it, clear as day:
half her daughter's face.
Deflating rapidly,
the belly
in its shrunkenness,
its creases and its crevises,
took on images
only to scrunch and then discard them.
Fleetingly she saw, but did not recognise,
a map of Africa.

Each image was to her
another stunted bush, more scrub,
more shrivelled leaves
from gum and galool tree.

Still, something stilled inside her,
clearly said it was an omen.
Good or bad, she did not know, but she was glad.
It made her daughter more significant, somehow.

Summer Reading

On Tuesday, on my first visit to the World Examining Works blog (which I arrived at via that of The Weaver of Grass I found the suggestion that we might like to post on our blogs the following from our Summer reading:-
2 non-fiction books that we have enjoyed
2 new fiction reads ditto
and 2 old favourites re-read.

Well, why not?
The two new non-fiction that I have most enjoyed (actually, am most enjoying: but there we go, veracity to fact is not the deepest truth) are:

"The Stranger's Child" by Alan Hollinghurst
and
"The Hare with Amber Eyes" by Edmund de Waal

The latter is probably the most unusual book I have read in a long while. The hare in question is a netsuke, one of those tiny Japanese wood and ivory carvings, which was left the narrator in a legacy. It is a treasure hunt-cum-family saga.

My two non-fiction choices are both technical books:-

"Language Technology and Society" by Richard Sproat, an overview from ancient hieroglyphs to the computerising of Chinese script and machine translation,
and
"The Sound of Poetry; the Poetry of Sound" co-edited by Perloff and Dworkin. It is a collection of papers from scholars, poets and translators - some of whom are all three.

Finally my two old favourites taken down and dusted are:-

"Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow" by Peter Hoeg
and
"Marabou Stork Nightmares" by Irvine Welsh

Questions on Self-Crucifixion

How did he manage it,
Graham Sutherland,
his crucifixion?

Imagine it:
a landscape artist, simply that,
resolved to paint a crucifixion -
and not just a, the most impressive,
most authentic yet.

He had a wooden cross made -
made to measure, so to speak -
and placed himself, roped, hanging there.

And thus completely incommoded,
drew himself seen in a mirror.
And there's the bit I fail to understand.
How did he manage that?

Had I been Sutherland
I think I would have had no mirror,
but with the brush held in my teeth
and wearing an effective blindfold
would have set out to mark on canvas

areas of pain.

I'll not pretend it would have looked like crucifixion:
it might have, but I doubt it. Any way,
what visual art portrays
need not be visual.
I think it would have worked for me,
but would it have been art?
Ah, there's the rub,
for that's the thing about a claim to making art...
it must communicate outside oneself.

The hope that Sutherland held dear
was perfect truth, history's
most pure and its most unadorned
view of its most significant event.

For perfect truth the self will always need
a crucifixion. Did you know
you can down-load self crucifixion ring tones
from the Internet? *

---

* by Virgin Steele

a pool and its environs

By the pool
I am the
shadow of water
thrown over grass
like a net.

Among trees
I stumble
bramble tangled -
a young boy
reborn.

Walking
the rocks
I am a stone
fashioned from stone
complete as a stone.

Crossing
an open field
I am smudged
like water paints
by dark clouds.

Someone felled
and perched
a silver birch
on a branch of
a silver birch.

Like bonsai trees
the fungi cluster
vying for size
and colour.
Each one bitten.

Sand rises
around my feet
like water.
Only the marram
grass holds me.

Flowering sedge
water-mirrored
on marshy fingers
pointing me back
to the pool.

Visit The Poetry Pantry

Interview

I'm looking for a janitor today.
The school unfinished,
unusable at present,
will soon be ready "right on cue".
A bungalow goes with the post.
No shortage then of candidates.

The clerk-of-works has volunteered
his porta-cabin for the interview.
We've all squeezed in: the governors,
the County representative,
a man from maintenance, a clerk.
The clerk reads out apologies.

First in: a youngish man from Kent.
He speaks of his experience:
both of the job and children too -
particularly "kids like these".
A school he knows in Kent,
he mentions it by name...

No, not employed, he helps out there -
his nephew's school, in fact.
(I know the boy, Jack Jones.)
The candidate is gaining confidence;
he's helped with woodwork lessons,
motor maintenance and groups on visits.

The recent deputy relied on him,
spoke of him in glowing colours.
The two of them became great friends.
He'd take a full part in school life
if he should get the job.
I don't let on: the deputy was me.

I learn much more about myself
before I break my vow of silence:
for instance how I recommended he
receive a gong. At last I speak: tell all.
He smiles. No word of explanation:
he withdraws his application.

What makes us human

Disjointed thoughts sparked by a BBC4 arts series, "British Masters".

Evolution, life's
main chance (maybe
life's only chance),
is too much stressed.

We're changing
the environment
far too quickly
for life forms
to accomodate.

Albert Schweitzer's
great insight was
to have understood
the full meaning of
his: "I am life
that wills to live
in the midst of life
that wills to live."

My father, shaping
wood, observed the
grain before he'd
start - then felt
it as he worked.

"The grain has made
the wood," he'd say,
"the grain respects
the wood - will see
it safe and sound."

All true craftsmen
work in harmony with
grain of some sort.

Is not nature
the grain that
runs through life -
all Life, that is?

Bio-diversity
and the will
to live: which
one drives? and
which is driven?

We are altering
the environment
too rapidly to
feel the grain
responsively...

Playing a great
cathedral organ
Schweitzer was
asked if he was
not afraid that
some notes might
be wrong. "No,"
he replied,"God
does not hear a
wrong note." He

was my first hero,
my first bastion
against the gloom,
and my first saint.
His writings were
pure gold and came
direct from heaven.

I read then differently
now, but still they are
as good and true, as up
to date and wonderfully
fresh as they were then.

His insight led him to
Lambarene to found and
work in a leper colony
and hospital. That was
working with the grain
all right, part of his
"Reverence for Life".

Grass

Suppose the world ran out of grass...

I've heard it said that once it did:
the end result was the giraffe.

How could the world run out of grass?
A quarter of the world's land mass
is covered with the stuff.

Which grass? All grasses?
Every grass or some?
Cocksfoot and Yorkshire fog?
Perennial rye and rough-stalked meadow?
Bamboos and cereals? Wild marsh
land plants and water chestnuts?

Most grasses thrive on being grazed.
Sheathed at base and grazed above.
We might run out of one or two...
but all of them?
How could that be? No sedge, no grain,
no beer or whiskey, paper, pasture, thatch?
The very starting point of human life, quite gone?
Creator of our top soil  to be seen no more?
Gone, the grass that cuts the mustard
like no other plant. Gone,
the grasslands either side of desert bands
that gird the earth. Gone
that fourth of all our lands:
the prairies, pampas, steppes, savannas...
I've heard it said - but is it possible?

Shift of all the desert sands
from desert lands
the wind and heat
Tohu wa-bohu
shrink of plain
the dead is buried
where it droops. In Africa
the sands are taking over.
As for grass, its days are like man,
it flourishes, a flower -
but a perennial.

Less easy than I thought it would be, Poets United's Thursday prompt was the one word "Grass".

On being 67!

(Why 67? All will be revealed here. Pop along and read the prompt, but actually I've chickened out. For "being 67" read "reaching the 60s". And make some allowances: I struggle to  remember back that far.)

I had expected fireworks,
signs in the sky,
deep rumblings from the earth,
showers of blazing meteors,
Gods vying with each other,
vortex after vortex:
something that significant
to mark the end of sex.

It was an end-of-world scenario,
the usual syndrome:
prophesied to strike at 40,
then a decade later,
then again at sixty...
but still the dragon went on breathing fire,
would not lie quietly down.

Yet signs in the sky
and vortices
did manage to appear on cue -
nowt to do with my libido, though.
The day would come, I reasoned, when the world
would roll on sadly gladly madly without me.

The idea was not new,
had been around, been kicked about,
tried on for size in idle play,
but given no attention - until then.

Then it forced itself upon me,
its features veiled in shame
to keep its nature hid.

I did not mind the sun and moon,
the big sweep of creation:
I could not visualize
not being part
of my continuing world.

Lost Muse

She always came before I'd thought to call
before I knew I'd needed her
and always as a damsel fly who'd trace
wide, rhythmic circles round my head,
their tempo and their rise and fall
a pattern for the treble line
that had been bothering me - or else
she'd sit contentedly
on my right shoulder, feeding me
the key lines for my wayward verse.

There was that one day she would never come:
the day before the winter solstice, but apart
from that, she answered every need.

And then one day, her special day in fact,
a winter solstice eve, she came. Her dance
no longer rhythmic; more demonic, I would
say, more like the way a fly goes wild and
uncontrolled approaching death by spray.
She scurried, streaked, dived, worried
me so much, I followed when she left.

She took me through the copse,
across the water meadow,
along the path beside the hammer pond
and out onto the open moor.
I hardly noticed in my effort to keep up
how dark the sky had suddenly become.
Still erratic, and by this time, ground hopping,
hardly rising from it as I climbed
the steepest rise of all towards her
and what would be my final sight of her.
She made a swoop behind it
and was gone. In that last moment,
as I closed my eyes and tried to hold
the image of her in my mind,
without my seeing it, the day
became the night. Then looking round
to get my bearings, seeing nothing
for a while, I finally was met
with one of this world's sights (or so
I've always thought): the glow worms
out in force, and not just out,
but organised, as though my damsel fly
was orchestrating them, instructing them
in dance routines she'd made her own.
They did not have the sweep and brio
her flights had: their forms were heavier,
their beetle wings less flexible, more heavy metal,
but yet their lights and motions both, were sexual,
and somehow their more sober movements
conveyed this to me in their dance.

My music changed, but later, when great fame
embraced me, I was gratified to find
her input recognised: the style I'd pioneered
became known for a while as "damsel" music.

Digging up the (ice-bound) Now

Beneath the melting permafrost,
beneath the detritus of three millennia,
beneath the blown volcanic ash
(compacted now, and granite hard),
beneath deep chalk and limestone beds,
the ruins of the ancient town,
and as we worked we stumbled on
"Cathedral Cave", the ice still hard,
the trees, cadavers, skeletons
and giant fungi sheathed in ice
as though in plaster, waiting for
the sculptor who would come to cast
them for posterity. Most strange of all,
the long lost stones: Stonehenge itself
(the cross stones long since fallen):
not seen by man in several cycles of the ice,
believed by some to have the power
to offer man his lost humanity.

We started work at once to free the stones,
to chip away the ice, but it seemed welded on
and able to renew itself. In desperation
we tried with fire, but only cracked a monolith -
and still the ice refused to budge.
The magic powers we'd heard so much about
seemed anti-man, not pro-humanity.
Then came the old man out of nowhere,
a simpleton, who seemed to have the key.
He's mumbo-jumboed over one stone now
for the past month - and partly thawed the ice.
Maybe He is "The Way"...

---

By some mismanagement I didn't see this wonder picture by Jinksy until the week was up (yesterday).  No matter, it was so brilliant that I could not let it pass. So with aplogies to her for its lateness, here is what would have been my contribution to her  prompt.

A Stellar Love Story.

We were childhood sweet hearts.
(I was a one girl-man back then - I guess
the starlight must have dimmed my eyes a tad.)
We saw each other every day:
one evening she would ride down to me,
the next  I'd cycle up to her. And that
was really something - no mistake!

Long time it took to turn us into lovers,
we never met but one of us was knackered!
One time I came a cropper way up there.
Well, on that busy roundabout outside The Plough.
The slipstream from a distant comet, took my wheel
and I was rolling in the stardust, thought I'd died.
The landlord came and fixed me up, he did,
but that was it, I didn't feel like any "How's your Father"
that night. Which discombobulated her. She had a strength
I never had, and that's a fact. Don't know
where it came from, but it had to be believed.
Some nights she'd leave me feeling like a rag doll
dragged up from a restless sea and left to dry.

That was the night of nights though, that night
of the famous puncture. Just getting on my bike I was,
to cycle home, I noticed that the tyre was  flat.
I fixed it, 'course I did, but by that time
it was too late to make it home - or so she said.
We slept together that night. First time ever.
Kept it to ourselves - well, bet yer bottom!
Then in the early hours we both woke up -
did everything together by that time. Know what?
She only sticks her finger out into the night...
and when she draws it back it was aglow.
Starlight shining from it like it was a candle in the night.
Romantic, that was. Well, I thought so, at the time.

It couldn't last of course. If only 'cause we rode
those bikes into the ground - well, into the stratosphere,
I s'pose. They don't make bikes like those these days!

---

I am obliged to Magpie Tales for the picture prompt.

The Language Train

A single tree
poetic buffer.
Here the locomotive "Language" 
stops
puffs for all it's worth
(even modern trains mean steam to me),
yet still the words can no more
get their hands around the tree
than mine encircle it
with thumbs and fingers touching.

A roughness to the bark I find
deep furrows and high ribs
and regular    a curvature
variety and subtlety,
but all the attributes combined
do not convey the tree.

A gust of wind
a flock of leaves
like birds takes off.
It seems irrelevant to treeness,

to a tree engulfed by steam
and viscerally explored
gut-felt        amorphously
approximated
trunk    branches    leaves    and ivy cladding

space turned inside-out
the steam cloud's negative.

Displacement of the steam.

The words blow loosely round the tree
clutch at it
define an absence in their midst.
They mention functions
processes
a monolithic stature
whilst all the while their centre
hides a hollowness
an ambiguity
which is a tree reduced to words.

Toothache

Ice edged wind on a tooth's frayed nerve
panic of God on a pounding tongue
hammering somewhere inside the head
the anvil flesh absorbing pain.
God is buried
though God has won,
the Devil's lost
though the devil's loose.
All the world is racked with pain.
Decay is silent in the tooth
the eyes are blind
the flesh is vain -
while a terminal nerve,
bared to the wind,
shoots sparks of ice at the sun.

The Oak and the Begonia

Why should a flower-head
(a begonia)
decaying quietly on a path
look beautiful?

Why should a tree trunk
decomposed by fungi
(and much else)
look so magnificent?

It's ethylene that does the trick
they ripen to it
(time hormone: their inner clock)
or prematurely die.

Light, heat, lack of either,
is the switch
to synthesize it for themselves.
 (Or it's in polluted air.)

Glutinous mush now,
(the begonia)
haloed mauve and brown,
red polka-dotted.

Sunshine, and it looks edible
(delicious as a pudding).
I contemplate a name for it:
Humus Delight, I say.

The old oak tree
(wind blown) is
powdery.
Like crematorial ash.

And still I need to know
what (in the brain)
makes these
look beautiful.

There must be some
convergence
(structural) between
the seeing and the seen.

Night

(A response to Poets United's prompt "Nighttime".

It is not darkness, nor a lack of light,
this substance night, this quite substantive thing.
It seeps in through the skin,
and has a body that the body craves,
a mind the mind adores -
this sable cloak the heavens wear

and wrap around to warm us inwardly.
But it is more than these:
a switch that nature throws,
a change of mode, an altered state
in which we're newly made.
We're one floor closer to ourselves,

nearer the heart of things.
The senses thrive; the eyes,
which should feel starved, rejoice.
As by the finest music or great love
we reach our dream state, pull the plug
on life, for super-charged realities.

Experiments with Temptation

1

An altar boy, but unconfirmed,
I took a sip of Holy wine
to see what God would do.

2

Early teens
female nemesis.
In my head
I made her my seductress.
Easy to resist her then.

3

Turkish Delight
my favourite sweet.
The last piece I would leave,
testing my resistance.

4

To give up smoking
I kept the baccy
always close at hand.

5

War time in the country.
Staying with my cousin:
allowed to browse his stamp collection.
Tempted by a penny black,
I wrote the story of its life,
how it was cursed,
and all its owners died
whose names were not my cousin's.

6

Teacher telling us how
D.O.G. said d-o-g, said "dog".
Me rising to it,
wondering why it should,
why should it not say "heretofore?"
("heretofore" my latest word,
having heard it on a bus.)
My turn to sound it out.
I can recall the inner conflict...
Damn it all, I can't recall
a sound of what I said.

7

A class of infants
and a decorated  urn
a prohibition against opening
or touching such a special thing.
I leave the room,
the mike records their conversation -
revealing trains of thought
on guilt and on temptation.

This last experiment was one of a series I conducted. I have posted earlier and in detail about another in the same series. You can find it here

For the inspiration for this post I am grateful to Poetry Jam. The prompt was posted by The Butler and Bagman