The darkness that touches you touches me too The all-embracing luminous night of summer From the halves of a broken man a whole man starts to grow – Out in the leaves of the garden a breeze loosens
I was lying tonight in the bath where you’ve often lain The spiders on the wall, the moths hammering at the window, My head in your place, my body stretched where yours has been For a while I was taken over and lived in you
And so I discovered a thing I thought I knew Though all my life’s a tentative turning-away, A tempered statement or a formal garden – but a bough Crashed through the pane, darkening the room with leaves:
Ivy was there, and honeysuckle, the rustling of oak, While half-forming shapes writhed and coiled in the twilight – Here’s a bird, a shell, a pool of water, tree-roots, a hedgehog track – With the bat-crossed twilight flooding inwards and inwards.
I can give back nothing as potent as your gift to me Except declare that the darkness in me’s a beginning And wonder how it touches, how you touch me, how I lie where you lie Bathing in your healing water, apart and together.
The midnight that touches you touches me too: With baited breath we’re watching as the hands come together And the deeper I search in myself the more of you I know Till I can’t tell where you stop and I am beginning.
A lady appears in the midst of the night-bound scene, Touching my eyes, confusing the senses of my body; One moment she seems a stranger, the next she’s you – and then I’m surrounded by the eyes of women, flooding my senses;
Tall or short, dark or fair, gazelle-like or thick peasant-limbed All of them saying “love me” with the selfsame voice; Then two eyes brood on me with the weight of a world hushed, dumbed: ”Now you’ve seen, now you’ve chosen, you’ll never come out alive” –
The midnight that comes together reaches all points But if there’s any other life than you I’ve not heard of it: One in a million you may be, or a million-in-one, while the elements Of a million new forms come streaming upwards out of you.
The morning that touches you touches me too And I can’t look at you without the joy of succeeding While love and strength, oak-sap-solid, make me branch and grow But I can’t tell where I stop and you are beginning.
Three poems to complete this Tenth Ten (Poems – tenth ten), so the end is in sight for poetic posts and perhaps by then this bitter chill that we stubbornly call springtime will have abated and we’ll be getting called outdoors for worthier tasks at all hours of the day and night….
“A drop of blood….”, which my typescript copy indicates is number 35 of “A Year of Undoing” – though where the other thirty-four (or so) have got to I don’t know – belongs more with the last grouplet I posted, but n’mind. It must date from about 1992 I think.
“My Country” is a lot more recent – written I guess following the disappointments of 2014 and thereafter. “My Country” qua love-poem puts me in mind of Paul’s dad Henry Kieniewicz, whose cousin-by-marriage (I think – though Paul says everyone in Poland is someone’s cousin) was Jan Rostworowski, a prominent poet of his time. “The trouble is”, Henry would say, his brow knitted in mystification, “I never know if his poems are about a girl, or a rose, or his native country, so I don’t really know what he’s saying”. It was only recently that it occurred to me that I had for years taken seriously what was actually a standard comedic line used by ordinary punters when describing poetry in general – and Henry was never one to miss the chance of a corny joke, the more well-used the better. So I’m still none the wiser about Jan’s poetry, which hasn’t been translated into English as far as I know, though I think he might have done some translations into Polish of Sylvia Plath, which may possibly give a clue as to his real poetic inclinations. Anyway My Country is about my country, as I don’t go in for metaphorical stuff – and there’s nothing that says you can’t write a love poem about your country.
The same issue applies in a sense to “Convenience Conveyance”, only here it’s more simile than metaphor (or the lack of it) – we used to get whipped at school if we forgot (as we generally did) that the little word “as” or “like” converted a metaphor into a simile. Convenience is definitely the oldest of the three poems here, as I believe it refers to my daily four-mile walk to Davidston House where I was working as caretaker at the time, and to the mo-ped my dear boss eventually raked out of the back of his garage and bestowed on me. I reckon it must have been a less than perfect machine, as I remember venturing with it into one of the (two, I think) garages that at the time existed on Huntly’s Duke Street, this one specialising in two-wheeled conveyances. Duke Street was a street where a lot happened back then, being not only two-way but I think also the main A96 thoroughfare through the town – God knows how everything even fitted in, let alone got to move – the Inverness-Aberdeen bus used to pause briefly for the driver to hurl various parcels through the door of the shop that housed the parcels office down at one of the narrowest points (and a great arrangement that was, the parcels delivery that the buses used to do, it must have been before they invented those wildly expensive and barely reliable courier services with their generally bewildered foreign drivers)…. Anyway “I dinna have time for newsing, loon, just leave it there” was what I got when I tried to explain what was wrong with my coughing little mount (typical Huntly rudeness, thought I, being used to the politesse and general news-hungriness of Keith). I don’t recollect how I filled the hours (days?) while I waited for it to be fixed. Anyway my “motorbike” clearly wasn’t all the unalloyed joy depicted in the poem. The picture below represents a dead rabbit, why? because my collie bitch Peggy used to run alongside me as I rode, easily keeping up with me even when I reached my bike’s giddy 40 mph maximum, and on one sublime occasion leaped into the ditch and with barely a pause emerged with a newly-killed rabbit which she gulped down as she ran and then threw up again when we got to Davidston and re-enjoyed at her leisure. I think I might actually have included that episode in another poem after she died – another, when I think of it, in A Year of Undoing.
8. A Year of Undoing Nr. 35
A drop of blood in a field of snow a single hour of our lifetime one crumb from the banquet
I grudge him even that: by fire ice and blood a curse of lifelong ill
Is the only thing I wish him that hour to be a plague-seed eating into his cortex.
Eighty hours have passed since then the one is already smaller – eighty-one hours of ill
Whittle it down, and I suppose the betrayal will be forgiven The devastation looked on indulgently
The words of friendship he spoke with you be unravelled into syllables, each wriggling like maggots back into his flesh
And I will remember Cursing is not my business and perhaps the pin-prick
That’s left by the multiplying hours will let me see how close I am to him. Of course, it’s not so simple:
The single hour joins forces with every shared intimacy – the snow is bloodsoaked
And all our early love, which time has made good, jumps back in a new and sinister light.
_ _ _
9. My Country
My country says she hates her face, I think she hates herself, though she won’t admit it she’s starved herself of mercy and pity thinks her hard edge will do for positivity
My country says she’s not creative, creativity is for the toffs and ponces she’d like to be like them but it’s not for her, and anyway someone has to sort the expenses
My country says it’s better to stay in a pack there’s laughter and strength in the herd everyone keeping their head down she’d kill a leader rather than let him break cover
My country says she’s the least important of all countries and if I say the opposite she’ll hang me up expose me to public ridicule
My country says anyone who wants to stay in her must be weak in the head she’ll happily give passes out to sunshine and ease of living
My country does not take kindly to initiative or authorship, that mug’s game if initiative’s about there’s some foreigner behind it – she’ll always take kindly to him
My country is empty except where she’s knotted into conurbations there the lights keep out the stars, she never lies now, contemplating the moon
My country has thrown out all her mythologies where she puts her feet down, that’s where it’s all at the only spirit she recognises comes from a condensing worm
My Country is a stubborn old goat I’ve pictures that tell me I liked her when we were young and fresh but now I’m too weary to remember if she was ever really dear to me – and ever-dear is saying a lot
_ _ _
10. Convenience Conveyance
As if I’d once loved a girl, as if we’d gone that road Sharing our intimacy and so come as Far as quarrels and quarrelled often Until the quarrel weighed more than the love As if then with bitterness and some relief We’d agreed to part – well, as if all that were done
Now I can pass her in the street, and though I pick her out from others, it’s not from knowing The heart welling up behind the face – and all The indignation that once provoked – but sooner For the random invitation in her graceful hips For the abstract love in her devouring eyes.
As if I used to plod this road Twice every day, grudgingly laying back The heavy all-too-familiar miles, well Now a motorbike whisks me off, and Oh, the stones no longer gather in my boots I never get hot or tired
The summer air goes floating by As sweet as water, the hills no longer Come crawling around my vision, but slide Smoothly freshly out. All is well again. Only I no longer taste the hidden yarrow’s pungence I no longer hear the silver gean-tree singing.
A bit of a delay in posting up these next 4, not so much because of removal issues, nor even the many trips to the Skip entailed, but because of wrestling with my dear old Machine, or at least its relationship with the WordPress formatting mechanism, which remains fractious – and yes, I got a bit anal about it, being determined to have the (sub)-title of the second of the “two palinodes” indented, which it doggedly refused to be. Chill, man, I tell myself…. I don’t know if there’s actually such thing as a palinode, I may just have made it up: I think it refers to the rhyme-scheme, nothing very important, but I seem to remember I was playing about with the form quite a lot at the time (’83-ish, I suppose).
As to the “love-poems” here, which continue the theme of “difficulties”, I can say that “A New Arrival” belongs to a set of “Five Poems on the Birth of a Son”, for which I got a right slagging from the kids’ auntie on account of I’d never written “five poems on the birth of a daughter”, on either of the previous Happy Occasions. Well….not quite fair, I didn’t think: it’s not like I hadn’t written poems about, or reflecting on, my previous two. This particular set just happened to present itself when I’d happened to become the father of a son. I don’t, of course, know if that’s completely ingenuous…. It may have been because the experience of the birth of a child had matured in my mind a bit by that time, whereas it was maybe too much of a shock or a novelty on the previous occasions. Besides, I would say it is different, having a child of the same sex as yourself: I don’t mean in the sense of hurrah, one for the football team or some such; but I will admit to a slight feeling that, as a man, a daughter seems to come into the world as a bit of an alien creature – fully borne out as she gets older! – whereas a son came along with more of the feeling, oh, another one like me – poor little bugger…. I would also adduce the testimony of our friend Sue, who when her second child was born a son, remarked, “oh my God, he really stinks!”
Otherwise….. I should say that I’ve always been fascinated by the Kundalini myth – far too distractible, not to say garrulous, to be any use at “spiritual exercises”, but that backbone mythical understanding of the – well, human backbone has always seemed to me highly significant, even when I’m being less than properly respectful of it, as in “Hearkening to the Serpent”. I got a picture which I’ll include because it’s bright and swirly, but otherwise doesn’t have much to do with the poems.
Yeah well …. of course, I’m in awe of it and of any who practise it, but – well, quite apart from its relationship to the staff of Hermes and other similarly loopy, staff-like symbols (not to mention the more analytical scientific approach of Jung and related psychologists) – this many-splendoured thing has become a bit, well – democratised, hasn’t it; despite the which I don’t know if the average spiritual tone of humanity has been raised much through the (apparently) growing awareness of the philosophy of the chakras in the West – but, really, what do I know, maybe we really are all heading for a Great Spiritual Awakening, in which case I’ ll be left looking pretty silly….
4. A New Arrival – sympathy for restless natives.
It is a landscape only newly tamed. The pagan in them is overlaid, deeper now It burrows away down out of the sun. The walls have sprung erect smooth blank
Faces through the heat; nets of beams Are slung between them, and over the wood the feet go; And also the pavements, and the paths between Cornfield and pasture. But here there is something
Other. It is in the Square between The City-Hall the law-court and the bank: And here the people cluster round, for here Is the marvellous flower of the Desert, that blossoms
Once in a thousand years; stunningly It thrusts aside the square-edged flags, as if Earth’s torment had become echo. But the tribes that were in the hills all wonder why
After these years of pain, as slowly They were brought under and taught gentle ways, now They are pushed back to the edges by a thing Half human and half goat that bawls for its womenfolk and
Is served by great and small in the city. Poor children, let me comfort you and take The langour from your round eyes. It is so sad To see you sucking thumbs assiduously, as if to keep
Your lips from kissing him, like Jesus, kissing him Dry, as if to keep your hands from handling him as if A carpenter his living wood before He makes his cross-cut.
_ _ _ _ _
5. Hearkening to the Serpent
I came calling by at the sweetie-shop I had walked all day, I was tired and sour I asked to come in, you said trade’s at a stop And you slammed the foot I wedged in the door.
I can scarcely believe what a niggard you are Not to give six inches, when you’ll take six miles Not to let two ounces in a ten-pound jar While your mouth shapes no between beckoning smiles….
I’ve a green-golden snake, I keep her in a box I’ve nourished her well, and I’ve given her wings I’ll lay her in the hearth while the ashes are warm
Till she flies up through the can above the fields and flocks And takes me too, to taste the higher things While you’re left asking where you lost your charm
_ _ _ _ _
6. An Interruption – two palinodes
i. A Little Under the Weather You bring that air of unreason, the balm and the honey I should be well past that; but the winter troughs pass through Their battle-zone, and the lower air is filled With giants frowning with their folded dun and black on
Strange one, I sit here under the weather, looking back on A few hours of you. I don’t know what pressure might build From having you near again…. I should plump to do No more than sit tight until days when it’s sour and sunny.
ii. Touching Base It was there, when I touched you…. What comes next? A fire maybe you’ve kindled out of my grey Embers, with that urgency you project – And look, where a club-swinging giant stamps
Whose prey is correct thoughts, whose eyes are lamps; And I am him – and you are satin-necked. He’ll take us in his stride, he’ll have his day Till our sap climbs, our friendship flowers, unsexed
_ _ _ _ _
7. Sir Thomas Peeps at the Dragon
All down the cave he sprawled Your body sprawled in his keeping Where my fingers would like to have buried His claws buried more deeply
I know I should not have looked When I looked, my look was captured His claws were fine and long His tongue was long and lapping
Love, if you were my love, Those knots as, Love, he released them They are no sight for words
He spoke, his words are teasing: Peeping Tom, peeping Tom, Sweat sweet, Tom, for our feasting!
It kind of offends my sense of proper synchronicity that I didn’t get my last two groups of poems finished and posted up on their new pages before our move back to Coldhome was effected – but there it is: here we are, and still another twenty poems to organise before I give all that a rest, at least for a while.
Ellie seems to be relishing our new quarters and is lighting fires and making meals all over the place (in case that sounds a bit wild she is only engaged in above activities where there are proper facilities ie wood-stoves or gas hobs); I’ve been slightly set back by a visitation from an old “friend” that has in the past accompanied personal upheavals, facial neuralgia – well, I don’t know if that’s what it is but it’s effing painful anyway and somewhat undermines my ability to have sensible thoughts, or silly ones for that matter. However it seems to be in remission now and I feel a bit more human and wonder if, despite its “old-friend” appearance it is in fact a Post-Covid phenomenon – if the likes of Philip McMillan, Geert Vanden Bossche and Shankara Jetty are correct (I’m a bit sceptical, as ever, but swayed by the mounting evidence), Post Covid is characterised by any one, or any combination, of a list of autoimmune disorders as long as the Magna Carta and ranging from the lethal to the merely inconvenient. Actually, I don’t know how long Magna Carta was, I just thought it sounded pretty long. If Drs McMillan and Vanden Bossche are correct, the phenomenon is going to develop into a wave of disease beside which Covid itself will look pretty Lilliputian, but I dare say whether we ordinary punters even hear about it will depend on who controls the airwaves (or are they space-waves now, I’m never sure). Most likely any concrete facts will float gently down into the great Information Silence which we are all busy relishing.
Anyway –
View from my “new” window, or: Articulation of Brain Fog. When I asked Ellie to snap this the roofs behind (those red-brown blurs) were white because gently covered with sleet, but clearly it was evanescent, and what you see here is almost colourful. The brain fog aspect is mainly a result of the window having sat out somewhere grubby for the past eight years and having not been cleaned yet. I can see (though most people wouldn’t be able to) a wiggly worm behind those honeysuckle tendrils wavering from the (palatial) toilet on left to the (leaky) kitchen porch on right which is our ethernet cable, and behind that a faint glimpse of the forest of buddleias which is now the main legacy of our Fire and which turns into a paradise of scented blossom and butterflies in late summer, and also the pokey-up tree that is one of several balsam aspens planted around the place for the refreshment of the spirit (lost on me, now that most of my sense of smell has gone). But – nuff said: at the moment the brain fog is the main thing….
back to the real world. This second group of “love” poems is characterised by the notion of “difficulties” – and I guess in the background is the notion, already mentioned, of a “three-in-the-bed” scenario (not literally, of course, no no) but where a third “presence”, possibly another person but just as likely an idea, or a dissatisfaction, or a new occurrence, or just the plain difficulty of living intimately with someone else, is in some way involved. So it’s a pretty diverse bunch, some a bit scurrilous, or so it feels after so much time has passed; they’re mostly fairly short so I’ll post up a few at a time and – actually, I’ll put in a prefatory ditty here too, not one of the ten, just on the general topic of “difficulty”, because – well, just because I feel like it….
His Black Hand
A nursery rhyme boy Leaving for a strange land But what I’m trying to glimpse Is his black hand.
A girl at the window Peering Into the gloom: Too much dust and shadows In that room
He trips and stumbles On the plain track: He can’t get on forwards For glancing back.
He puts his hand In a stream he found: The water bubbles And passes round.
He comes to a dam Made of fifty blocks of stone And the weak water Moves not one.
For many hours He squats on the sand Trying to wash clean His black hand
If I blamed myself, you’d all too readily agree: My weight’s too much on top of you, we’d be back where we started – If you just knew how I’m searching, searching night and day For one strong, simple, liberating word to say to you!
Hoelderlin tells me I must love the gods when they’re fled, Lewis that if I loved God first I would love you better, MacDonald that no-one can live who has not first died – My Masters have this endless wisdom to say to me.
Elizabethans climbed love’s tree and called it death: It’s true you climb, snakelike, flowerlike, and burst Then your limbs drag you down with a weight like lead –
But help me, Love, to release you with that greatest of words – I know how to live, my gods fly in their strength: I see them, feel them, but must flee them to say it first!
2. His Golden Hand
When I was touched, feeling his golden hand When I was touched, how I was touched, I felt The whole world spinning, burst, making me blind With light, I thought my very bones would melt.
Now I’m more used to it, I understand It was all in me, all in me, the light, The heat like axle’s friction – I could wind Brown lagging round me now, and still stay bright.
His hand’s engrained with dirt, it’s been in places To make you gag near, rough from howking weeds It does for putting virgins through their paces….
I’ve read those Islands women steeped their tweeds In piss, and smelled of fish, and washed their faces In the salt sea…. Well, these are things one reads.
3. I Met a Girl over Westward
I met a girl over westward, where the old language is heard She was light, she was seductive, as the Gulfstream breeze I’d called this my own country, but I understood not a word I spoke, she spoke – it was like the washing of seas
We learned to converse, learned universal names Names of sun, moon, star and weather, water, man and wife We courted with gifts and riddles, played children’s games Nothing darkened our days – we had not the words for strife!
Our language has grown shabby and perfunctory, lost its polish Its silken subtlety, our tongues lack zest and relish Our love snores; only words of the old language can wake it.
The young lovers dream forwards, we reflect on what’s passed They live for the next time, we mull over the last The young lovers are made by love, we must learn to make it.
AnnaScott
charlesashton
Coldhome 