Figure / Ground Confusion

My friends and I
have come down to the copse to play.
We'll start by climbing trees. As I approach
I see the trees between the spaces, and I see
how spaces go much further back
and higher than the trees. I'm thinking now...
if I could climb the spaces
I could get above my friends -
it's a sort of game I often play:
a total redesign of how this old world works.

The trees get narrower as they rise higher -
the spaces therefore open out.
I stare up through the spaces,
imagining myself
above the canopy and looking down
from what were ash and rowan, but are now
enormous redwoods threatening the sky.

Now they're higher than a boy could climb
and as I look the spaces are the solids now,
the trees are open spaces, dark background
shapes that have begun to shape new thoughts.
The solid spaces and the empty trees
reverse the natural order,
but which is which depends upon my focus.
My friends are motifs on a tapestry,
motionless shapes that I will overtake.
This happened all without my thought -
now that's what I must call surreal.

Depression, Fear and Anxiety

This is a submission for Poetry Jam's prompt So How Do You Feel? It is concerned with the relationship between intangibles like an emotion and a tangible descriptor such as a colour.


When you are young
and darkness comes,
it dominates your mind.
I don't remember fear,
not real fear. Never
did I need a night light lit
or anything like that,
but I recall anxiety
which spread in time
from darkness to
the colour black.

So much that I have
undertaken since,
in terms of art,religion,
poetry must owe its birth
to trying to reverse
that state. Like blowing
on a fire to see it flare,
to see the embers, black
and burning still, fall back.
And yet I think, the close
association is intact. Black
represents anxiety - and
as for many others, speaks
of a depression. Even,
dare I say, that black dog
or the dark night of the soul.

The God Hat

Like a diver going down into the sea
the helmet seems to seal the fact.
Gold lamé. Stylish. Think of a cloche hat
but made of brass and covered like a Pearly
King's with buttons. Not a diver, though;
not going down into the sea, and not,
most definitely not, a Pearly King.
The monk goes down into a prayer,
a meditation - but the scientists
are here to map the god part of his head.
Where is the godhead in the head, they ask.

They have injected tracers in his veins.
Chemicals. Small shots of radiation.
Something for their sensors to detect.
The parietal lobes, their sensors say
are being starved of blood. The flow
drops ever lower as he dives
into his sea of prayer and contemplation.
This they know because the helmet lets in
their strong pulses of magnetic waves -
gives open sesame to his unguarded head.

The parietal lobes are known to be
the seat of mankind's sense of time and place.
Like eight in ten of others like him, he
will have sensations to report:
a presence he's encountered on the way.

Filling in the Gaps.

Charles Miller (Chazinator to his friends) at dVerse Poets Pub has come up with a fascinating angle for their Meeting the Bar : Critique and Craft prompt. Please do go and read it, for it is too long to reproduce here. It is a prompt which - in my interpretation - requires us to post a poem which, as all good poems must, stands by itself, yet gains from some sort of explanation of its background, how it came to be written, etc etc.

I have chosen a poem which I have posted before, but whose genesis might surprise. I shall therefore leave the latter until after you have read - or, as it may be, re-read the poem.

The Photograph

A Sunday Supplement, a photograph.
Cuckmere Haven. Not that we’d
have recognized it, not without the caption.
The cliffs, distinctive, might have given it away.
Taken from above. The Cuckmere
all but banished from the scene -
and much else missing from that day...
pebbles, white upon the beach; and you,
exquisite, dressed to kill, a splash of green;
the sea kale (was it?) by the stream: all tucked
away between the hills and nowhere to be seen.

And so I wondered: what if we
could see as from above, the hills
and valleys carved in us by human love?
What would be there to see?
What would there not?

That day the sun-drenched chalk and beach,
and shady woods had each unleashed
a fierce burn of increasing beauty.

Offshore, the tides and Cuckmere clashed,
Canoes capsized, and men we’d lately
followed from the bridge were stayed,
all balance lost, bare inches from the sea.

It too was like a photograph, our day,
so silent and so still,
with gulls hung poised, like birds of prey,
on tiny cirrus threads. The breakers froze,
refused to break. Creation seemed to us to take
a year to spend that day.

The sun poured champagne on the sea
as tides and Cuckmere whirled together.
One maelstrom. One tranquility.

My love, I saw this photograph
and heard, I thought, our favourite song
being sung in a foreign language.

.................................................................

I had just qualified as a canoe instructor on inland waterways, with the intention of taking on the school canoe group the following term. I had in fact had only one term and one school holiday in which to learn to swim, learn to canoe and take the instructor's test. As a celebratory gesture I had booked myself on a sea canoe introductory course, a long weekend, canoe camping on the beach at Cuckmere Haven, a pebbly foreshore under the white cliffs of the Seven Sisters, not far from Beachy Head. We slept nights under our upturned canoes.

We had launched them at Alfriston and paddled the few miles along the River Cuckmere to Cuckmere Haven. Idyllic weather and idyllic scenery. The day was hot and sunny and there were plenty of walkers and  couples on the path beside the river which was extremely meandering. We were the focus of a good deal of interest - I prefer not to speculate on why that might have been!

What we had not been told was that we would leave the river for open water at a point where three tides and the flow from the river met, where the water would churn. We all, except the leader, capsized. Which was fine, for we were able to practice our deep sea rescues and no one was drowned, exactly. I was still high in celebratory mood and wanted to mark the perfect day. I was not writing just then, had not written a poem for a few years, but I wrote a poem to remember that day. But then a strange thing happened. Not intended, it was instinctive. As I began to write I did so as from the point of view of one the walkers watching us. I imagined myself and my wife had walked along that path observing the canoeists. And then, removing it one stage further, I imagined the poem as a letter to her years later reminding her of that day.

I still find it odd that I did this, but I am still glad that I did.

Blogger still will not let me upload an image, but you can see some images and read about the area here

The Wolf by the Hole

Time is different for us
and the wolf by the hole in the ice
who in the water watches the stars
that above are circling the earth
that in the hour that he sits and stares
have turned full circle and more.

And he learns from this,
Earth's roulette wheel -
as he perceives it to be -
that Earth is a house of luck or chance
that cannot be fathomed
or quizzed to know
where or when it might stop
or who it will bankrupt
of this good life
or whether it matters a jot.

The Death of a Sculptor

For I am a Pirate King!
And it is, it is a glorious thing
To be a Pirate King! he'd sung
and had to sing so many times that week,
that week which had gone like a month -
not to mention the endless rehearsals
over the months before, or having to wear
that daft pirate costume. And it doesn't
begin to acknowledge the drain on his sang-froid
from having to feign enthusiasm for it all -
and all for nothing more than a few
equally ludicrous points for the Cock House Cup


Then skylarkingly along a moonlit path,
that final evening,
The Pirates of Penzance
behind us, crunching our way home
in utterly revolting style, the ground
beneath our feet a chain-mail carpet with
a brittle pile of giant stag beetles,
ankle deep and falling all the while
from trees above our heads.


Black snow, he cried,
to mock our squeamishness;
They feel no pain!
Remove a beetle's abdomen,
it eats on unaware!
We watched him slay
a score of demons in his head,
chopping beetles by the thousand clean in two.


End of term. End of year. End of school - and years
before we'd hear of him again.
Then on T.V. one evening. Art for All.
A new show with a new presenter, offering
The Next Big Thing in art. It opened with
A Breakfast at the Sculpture Farmstead.
He'd worked all night. We saw him finishing
his shift. A flashback to the thermal lance;
an effort on the bending bars, and then he introduced
his Bifurcated Beetles series.
After which the random touch. The piece
on which he'd laboured so much love
we saw thrown from the hayloft door
before he ran it over with the 4X4.


Over breakfast he explained.
The world is broken. Out of joint.
A photo booth that judders when we smile.
The flash explodes,
the shutter sticks,
light melts the reference points.
The brokenness is in the loss of tension, friend.
We none of us perform unless we're slightly stressed.
We see the tension or its lack in all our artefacts.
The sculptor gives the form the necessary stress
but over time the lump goes out of tune.
The hayloft door, the 4X4 - they simulate a fist,
a fractured rib, electrodes on a lifeless heart.
This moment is the dawn of a new day. From now
I'm offering this service after sales.
My punters can bring back their purchases
and I will make them good as new.


From that seed-thought his Sculpture Clinic grew.
Where came one day, one Lotte Pinkhorn,
mystic, phantast, seer, with Pterosaur
with Lateral Splits for Stress Replacement Therapy
For hours he worked with hammer, file and saw
until... The final touch, the hay loft door.
Free fall. The flying pterosaur
plunged through the narrow space of his imagination

to spread itself in pieces on the floor.
Wings flapped and buckled wildly, fragments soared
like scraps of paper from a bonfire
as the ground turned black with with beetle, crow and pterosaur.
He saw an angel with its palate cleft and cloven hoof for feet
as whores in clouds like locusts flew
with crooked mouths and broken staves
to lacerate the back of men who staggered to their graves.
His mind was broken by the sight. His body by the fall.

.......................................................................................

I am convinced that sometime in the past I posted an early version of this, but neither I nor Google have been able to track it down, so if any kind person out there in cyber space should happen to know where it is, I would be very grateful t learn.

And Now A Russian Secret Weapon*

I have submitted this to dVerse Poets' Open Link.



With the Cold War at its height,
my Gran became convinced
that the Russians had a secret weapon
primed to use on us and undetectable.
It made you mix your sentences -
or at least transpose their ends.
Russian agents made it
on the bus to Wimbledon
or they cycled round Big Ben.
Released into the atmosphere,
it played The National Anthem -
in a new arrangement
by Rachmaninov -
fifteen times a day.
Her brother said he's seen it used
sometime in World War II -
though everyone had been screwed up
about the German weapons then -
to install some broken windows
in a derelict church hall.

Such tales were rife.
Her neighbours told her many
about weapons by the score,
but this one really got to her
and whispered things in Russian
that she wouldn't tell a soul.

My Granddad called it rubbish,
said she shouldn't say such things,
it was just a load of
firewood that he'd chopped the night before.
....................................................................
 *compare with German secret weapon here

The Ghost of Our Old Selves

The world is too much with us ¹
but never quite in focus.
I wish it would sometimes stand off
and not invade my space.

When we were children and the world
pressed in on every side,
we loved it so, were part of it.
Nature and we were seamless then.

Little of us we see in nature now.²
We crave some distance, a perspective.
Soft focus would be great -
anything but this close-in confusion.

The ghost of our old selves,
the natural man, is snagged
the other side of nature.
What's seen and what is known don't match.

If we could re-explore
the nature in our face -
spilt milk and honey, smudge -
we might find ways to reconnect.

Or is it language that we lack?
Words to differentiate,
unpick a language or a home,
sift fresh air from freshener.

...................................................................
¹ The first line of a sonnet by William Wordsworth. Read it here
² Remodelled from the third line of the same sonnet.

This is a Magpie Tales prompt.
Unfortunately Blogger would not let me upload the image. You will have to follow this link to see it.
(I wonder what they won't let me do tomorrow!)

Building Site : The New Complex

Looking down into a cauldron that's coming to the boil,
imagination making bubbles in the sand. Sand bubbling
along before the diggers, 'dozers, donkey-workers and
a trail of toiling tractors. There Levels 1 through 2
to Level 3 are to be flattened, levelled out to make a plane
as level as the playing fields of politicians' dreams.

More elegant and slender yet, than garden trellises,
tall spires of steel, and cables thin as spider silk, ascend,
section upon section, past my viewpoint, past my eyes,
to partly vanish in the mist where is - but not for long -
the wonder of a sky unable to survive the final phase,
for other wonders yet are on the way. We're looking at

the modern counterpart of something like Stonehenge,
for there above the towers, the booms have made their bows.
They criss-cross just below the sky in horizontal play
where they'll whisk away the daylight with their loads.
Where yesterday was green land and a doctor's surgery,
are now the forceful signs of progress on the way.

Beyond all this, the end game signs, last days for some:
steel girders rise in 3-D matrices like one enormous puzzle
that a cruel world has set, yet knows you will not solve it, for
the biggest puzzle no one gets is what the puzzle is.
Let's guess each space is glass or grey - there must be
something we can do to win this life's life-changing prize!

1956 and 1999

For Poetics 1999 byRosemary Mint at dVerse Poets.


1956 and teacher training college. I
am here to study art,
but voices of the friends I've made
are quoting poetry,
I'm hearing snatches, lines like: The
apparition of these faces in a crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.¹


Or, even more remarkably:
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table. ²  
Or:The corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? ³  


And then I'm blown away by this and others like it:
After the funeral, mule praises, brays,
Windshake of sailshaped ears, muffle-toed tap
Tap happily of one peg in the thick
Grave's foot, blinds down the lids, the teeth in black. ⁴  
These are a gale of fresh air blowing
through those august corridors to someone
weened at school on works such as
Robert Browning's Pied Piper of Hamelin.


The voices that I'm hearing speak of Eliot and Pound,
of Dylan Thomas, Marvell and John Donne.
The very names are incantations and the poems spells.
There are images to die for and concepts still to fathom.


They have the power to replace thought
and so I do not realise for now
how much of these great works I do not understand.
Later I will understand it does not matter: it
is possible to lose yourself in poetry, enjoy 
it for itself and understand it later if need be.


I write some poems in a first enthusiasm. One or two.
The college magazine: that sort of thing. Then nothing.
Four decades. Life is happening around me, to me,
everywhere I look. But then:


in 1999 I am retired and taking up the pen again
before technology and blogging gets its hold.
.............................................................................
 ¹  Ezra Pound:Ina Station of the Metro
 ²  The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock : T.S.Eliot
 ³  The Waste Land : T.lS.Eliot
 ⁴  After the Funeral :  Dylan Thomas  

A Triptych

This is a prompt from Imaginary Garden with Real Toads - to produce the literary equivalent of the tripych.


Centre Panel

He was all Marcel Marceau;
the way he'd tap
the door's glass panel
with fingernail,
forefinger crooked...
the way he'd mouth
(we couldn't hear him)
Let me in, please let me in!...
while from his other hand,
waist high, no more,
a pile of books
steadied by his chin.

But neither door
nor boys behind it
would budge an inch
until the well-judged,
unexpected moment
when he'd stagger in.


Right Hand Panel

Top Academic at his school.
At Oxbridge
First Class Honours (twice),
he'd authored books
on mathematics, full
of his creative thoughts.

Left Hand Panel

It must be said
in all that his brain held
there was no room
for knowledge of young lads,
what made them tick.
He was adrift, a light raft
on a sea of treachery.

2 Triolets

The triolet is the form set by Gay Reiser Cannon in this week's FormForAll at dVerse Poets' Pub. Just follow the link for a full explanation of the form.

I don't remember entering this life,
I'd like to not remember exiting.
I can recall great joys and days of strife,
but don't remember entering this life.
How did I come? by birth canal or knife?
That I have lived outdoes remembering.
I don't remember entering this life,
I'd like to not remember exiting.

....................................................................

I love the shades of night for detail lost,
broad shapes replace the fussiness of day
like landscapes under snow or a thick frost.
I love the shades of night for detail lost,
they thrice repay in magic their small cost.
Some find the night delightfully risqué.
I love the shades of night for detail lost,
broad shapes replace the fussiness of day.

100-Word Play

The Royal Court Theatre is inviting ALL members of the public to submit 100-word plays for its Young Writers' Festival. The plays will not be staged, but displayed around the theatre. They are speaking of the concept of plays oozing out of the walls. It is not competitive, the aim will be to show all the plays.

Not for submission, but I thought I'd try my hand.

- Excuse me.

-Yes Sir.

-I've just taken this off your shelf.

-Yes sir.

-It says there's a special offer on it.

-Yes sir.

-With this model, the attachment comes free.

-Yes sir.

- I cannot find the attachment.

-No sir, we don't stock them.

-But you can't do that!

-No sir, we don't.

-It must be against some act or other.

-Some of our stores stock them.

-But not you.

-No sir.

-Why not?

-No call for them.

-I'm calling for it.

-Yes sir.

-Can I take the cheaper attachment instead?

-No sir.

-Why not?

-Not part of the offer, sir.

...............................................................................................................

The elephant in the room

It's the elephant in the room, he'd said,

and so it has proved. The way clothes both define

and hide a form, there is this vague, suggestive,

fungus of a shape, an elephant you saw once in a cloud

and see now at the north end of The Green State Room.

A shroud, a billowing skin,

anchored in places, somehow tracing

the contours within -

as if the decorators are expected by and by.

The ghost of an elephant out on its haunts.


Unwinding the cover

to show off the skeletal sculpture beneath -

basalt, I'm thinking - life-sized

and studded with jewels. The Indian version displayed.


Then without more ado. To the tune of:

we never discuss this, of course...

the subject's taboo!

He's winding the shroud round and round,

like the covers had slipped for a moment, that's all

and now it is back in its cloud.


Two years and a fortune in jewels? I ask,

then hidden away in.... Exactly! he says

Irresistible subject, the talk of the town.

Outside of here, it's all go.


But the funding... I try a new tack. Working that trick...

He cuts in with that grin: seduction, he says.

Her ladyship courted and... well, not just the once.

She likes to be done on the bounce.

So she kept me in all my desires for two years

and provided the diamonds and pearls.


Is there nothing, I ask, you'll not do for art?

See here, he replies, it's art doing something for me.

What we have, she and I, is a mammoth to share -

my best installation to date. We are, you might say,

the elephant most in the room.

Larger than life

A Magpie Tales Tale.

Larger than life
that's how I like 'em
women of mine
gotta be larger than life!

I wanna climb in through those eyes
splash around in them big, limpid pools
drown in the vitreous humour
of a woman larger than life.

The ultimate prize
of lost in those eyes
floundering somewhere
out of this world.

I could spin like the earth round her sun
and all the four seasons would come
each in its turn, to freeze or to burn
with a woman much larger than life.

Can't take her all in
not in one go
but that's how I like it
larger, much larger than life.

Would you look at those brows
trimmed straight as two dies
never arched in surprise
stern as they come and cool as her lies.

Larger than life

that's how I like 'em
women of mine
gotta be larger than life!

amazing what you see in car parks!

Parked to kill time,
the world's going by.
Children with mums
are walking to school.

First, Little Miss Muffet -
I guess from the fact
that she's coming complete
with spider and net.

Batman is missing
his Batcave, I think -
in a flood of
unstoppable tears.

Two skeletons now,
one big and one small,
and a fierce lioness
and a dog with a ball.

There's a fireman - no fire
Correction: comes mum
with a portable one
of cardboard and gum.

A fairy comes next -
Diminutive thing,
pink wings and blue wand
and a bag made of string.

And now an Ice Maiden,
a witch with a hood
a chocolate soldier
and one made of wood.

Then just when the show
seems over and done,
Bat Man returns
his hand holding mum's.

Next comes a dwarf
(I missed him before)
and then there's the fairy
and the small labrador.

The youngest, it seems,
(not yet recruits)
will not be left out
of sibling pursuits.

Abstract 02 (from Walter Smith's Musee D Orsay series)

A dVerse Poet's Pub prompt by Sheila.

Think what an ocean of live flowers
might do for you;
how rollers breaking not on shingle but
far out at sea
might be the venues for new villages
beyond our dreams
built not beside or under but between
those fragile waves;
how breaking surf and spray might drench the air
with fragrances
at once restorative and volatile;
how life might be
so much more transient than now;
how change becomes
a constant, gentle and organic,
obeys clear rules,
how brachts and petals lap and overlap,
close and disclose
how just the folding of a flower
could end your life,
inflorescence be the birth force to
sustain the world,
how birth, rebirth and death are painless here.
This is a world
immune to all pollution from outside
the flowers keep
the focus of the mind on what is real;
how other worlds
might visit to discover what we have
of wonder here,
might bounce upon our currents, ride our waves
and fertilise
anew this lonely world we try to run.

Shadows of You

Imagine looking down into a river,
there watching the reflections change,
the shadows creeping round towards the evening,
the sun's rays skipping purl to purl.
You begin to feel the chill, but still you stay to watch.
The people on the other bank
are puckered and inverted in the flow,
the ponies in the field will jump no more today.
But now it's really cold and you should go.
Yet still you cannot tear yourself away,
must stay a bit to watch the surface cloud.
At first you think it's semen that's been spilt,
a milky gloss or glaze, uneven at the start,
but slowly thinning as it creeps and evens out.

The images are losing clarity,
you stare but cannot grasp what they're about,
they blur beneath the ice, the movement's frozen out
as surely as the images are frozen in.
You look down at yourself, immobilised,
serene. It's you, as if you had been drawn
on blotting pads. The shapes of you are neither
there nor not. The edges that define you are erased.
The river's memory is dimming as your own.
It's throwing out some hints on what's to come.

how deep a plum was then!

My thanks to Claudia at dVerse Poetics Pub - Translucent Poetics : Writing the spoken word, for this prompt.

It was my tree.
Here, in my mind it was my tree,
for planted on the day that I was born.
I first and best remember it
when it and I were five.
My first excursion into it
(with someone holding me),
the earliest of sensual memories: 
allowed to pick the plums,
those velvet bombs of taste,
incendiaries of colour,
soft waxy reds and yellows,
purples, blues and indigoes.
Those plums, those sweet Victorias!

I found that you could spit
and rub them with your thumb,
make lines and other subtle colours rear
their lovely heads. You made a sort of map.
Inside, you'd find the prize: a golden flesh,
juice-filled, that squirted when you bit.

Later on, and maybe six, the hands
still round my waist, my head now full
of stories from the war, Atlantic
convoys and the like, I found
that if you bit the seam from end to end,
the squirting juice could easily
become a depth charge in your mouth.
Then if you gently squeezed the base,
the sharp stone surfaced like a crippled submarine.

---

This is a rewrite of part of a poem - rather too long and too opaque. One of the first I posted.

fragments

Joseph, Marie, Bryony,
each of the unholy three,
had slept, on separate occasions, with
each of the remaining two -

though not one of the three could know
that this, in point of fact, was so.
Each of their three rooms had grown
to favour one and one alone.

And so it was that Joseph's room
to Bryony would sigh Marie,
but then when Marie came to call
the room said nothing much at all.

.......................................................


When we were in the womb
if we had asked
(had there been someone there to ask)
what is the meaning of this life?

Would we have heard:
to look beyond its shallowness,
food comfort, warmth, security...
A soul is made for love.

Though sounds of love surround you, here
is only loneliness
and distant are the sounds.
Beyond the breaking of the waters lies

a journey, trauma, to a world
that could not be 
more different than
the one you've grown to know.

...................................................

You do not realise when you're small
how everything you do and say,
how everything the VIPs around you do,
how every happening of consequence
goes to build an ark for you - for which
you will be grateful some late day
when being adult falls like rain
to flood the earth, the whole terrain
of what you thought you'd got to know.