12 Towards A Definition of the Seasons by Duncan MCGibbon (free e reader .TXT) 📕

Towards A History

Of The Seasons


Poems 1991-97

Quitting

My sin, my crime, my blasphemy, my joy, I ponder broken-heartedness alone.
The cat in my garden with a pine-cone toy unconscious in the sunlight, basks to the drone
of pollen - plastered bees. The dance-routines of Summer play and replay before my eyes.
I nurse a bloodied pride, as boys in their teens
go over wounds from sport, wincing at tries unmade, or catches fudged. I have chucked
an income, to moonlight with hardened
dreamers.
Though broke, I have outrun the guard dogs,bucked
the Gods of an asylum for holy conjurors
and, pen in hand, dream on to dull their murmurs.  


Winter Dark
Serving Notice

To do nothing at all was once
the biggest prize when we were kids.
Old-age rakes only wastage in its place.
The dry-leaves of illness, or unemployment
pile up, papery and futile, in a slow bonfire;
for slack-tides' hell is that you
cannot quit what's being acted;
that nerve-ache, leeching tit-for-tat
the personal 'I' must fight between
the 'you' of self-esteem and failure 'it'.
How certainly that sharp, cliff - edge falls clear,
a numbing kind of architecture.
Between my diary's flunked short-listings,
how clean my bone emerges from the buzz of flies.

It’s Too Late Now

It’s too late now.
Winter dark
has hardened the heart
and I am far from you.
The silent house
stores only the night
and emptiness.
I’ve nothing
to give you
should you come
except the emptiness of one
who sees only in the light
of a fixed beam.

The Spirit’s hour is lonely.
To keep Your appointment,
I follow rainy, suburban roads
in the shuttered dawn.
You are always ahead
at the landfill of affliction,
when I arrive too late
with all Your secrets buried away
and far from being alone.


Living Room

A burnt omelette, old sweet corn and dishes
stacked at random in the grease-rimed sink.
The children shrill about T.V. wishes.
My daughter cannot thread a needle. Each blink
upsets the thread's frayed edge sideways.
I police them to bed; “face, teeth, lights out”,
having first heard my youngest trace the lettered maze.
Patient with her at her stress, I want to shout.

I go downstairs, conscious of a sadness,
Velasquez or El Greco could not catch
in a portrait of the poet with attendant mess,
because the artists had models to match.
Each riddle made of fame spells unique,
a needle for word-threads’ deft hide and seek.


Testimonial

I type post, date and place.
I know there’s no insight
yielded by that brutal solace,
backed up against the night,
the byre of gut self-hatred
that told me not to love, took
no opportunity to shed
culpable shock, set that look
of hardened, private fear.
To be tolerant of personal
timidity and hold only dear
the chance of survival
is to see in the world a theatre of shame
and my fellows as the company of blame.


Loyalties.
I take a call I do not want. I find I'm talking to a girl with a Humberside burr. She listens, to me explain
the job wasn’t meant to last.
I'm thankful for being beyond
both my borders:
those of birth and accident.
A South Eastern man, I find she's sympathetic about my job prospects, will take a vocal pledge on credit, my credit... I visualise remembered tides
breaking on the past at Saltburn. Our voices, like waves on a pebble shore, slipping into silence around the smooth surface of money and its resistance to any dream. She scores the
sea-level of my youth,
my trade, my house...
In the strata of my speech,
I am loyal to the lias of Northern voices. They still emerge at low tide, under a darker hue of lethargy. Or maybe I just want my words to be the right ones. She slips into sympathy... as she might to a friend,
because the sea level
of trust accents the risk of hope.


Antiennes for A Brief Season

FOOL.--You say personal happiness is the sole aim of man.
PHILOSOPHER.--Then it is.
F.--But this is much disputed.
PH.--There is much personal happiness in disputation.
Ambrose Bierce, Brief Seasons of Intellectual Dissipation
 

1. St Flora's Day. Last autumn's leaves are powdered past remember. Their fresh green offspring still abound, except for yellow patches mimicking September sunlight dappled on the moistened ground. As yet this pair of migrant greys, vermin to this City parkland's fading belt have not been rumbled by those juridic strays whose local claws could tear their pelt. In such false peace one harvests plenty from the tuck-shop refuse of the schools and stores it, while the other acts as sentry. This couple's cautious, cagey entry tells me winter will not turn them into fools. Like me, fear labours that the larder be not empty.

2. Ascension

A dry, dusty day in Kensington,
the pneumatic drills were busy
with percussion and repercussions
on the shattered paving stones.
Yet there were mouths open,
to breathe, to shout.
The boys in the Vaughan Chapel
had been singing Byrd and Tallis.
The descant rose slowly
to the stationary cupboards.
Instruments take over from voices:
In nomine...

On the station platform,
those with trains to catch, or miss,
vanished or lingered
in the thirsty day:
a buff-haired mother,
too warm now in her grey coat,
despite the wet morning,
lippy at her little boy
on the platform edge,
a builder in dungarees,
licks his lips,
ending his shift,
without a pint,
two girls in minis,
black tights and square jackets,
from the Employment
do their lips.
The young man from
a sheltered workshop
walks precisely,
until he jack-knifes,
with his head to his boots.
The new-painted benches
are marked off
with plastic banners.
Without his iconed seat
he cannot rest, tries to pull
the webbing off,
yet knows he cannot
and bites his hand.

A train comes
and they are all gone.
Over windless air
a taped announcement
mouths of destinations
a Guardian Angel
to an empty platform.
Instruments take over from voices:
In nomine...

3. Ss.Peter and Paul.

Our patent leather dully treads the boards. Suspicious soles pace down the wooden floors, which grate, as morbid as the death-beetle, or the weight on an undertaker's trestle. The joists are groaning for one facing Homer, unseen, a centre-forward now offside, a dreamer. They rasp for the female lead-role, now undone, lost in the script of quadratics, wanting the sun. They creak for the scientist examined in fiction and for the poet in a maths examination, that defeats all inspiration. While from the stair, that age has shined with time, the past Heads stare in rapt enthrallment to the Renaissance all-rounder who, now a Golem, stalks these floors, as hope's confounder.
4.Our Lady of Sorrows. Here white-shirted pupils sit at desks in the humid air. The Mother of Mercy fixes a stony stare from the painted wall. Her child has taken over all her looks. He is a manly version of her solitary genes. The children write in silence, taking their existence from the question page. The Word is not their words. Their brows assume a printed look. No-one can prove they got it wrong, or guess they are alive. Yet how they want to be forgiven anonymity; but know, that only He can get full marks, for simply being who He is
unless they face the terrible complexity
of becoming who He is
and take over all from love
and so be nameless now.

5.Advent.

It is almost cold enough for snow. The Masters have gone for their statutory break. They keep to the Old Timetable and leave the place unruled. An audience, the children, lines the fence to watch the passers-by. they laugh and shout at vagrants from Shepherd's Bush and a young mother, almost due. They know there is a change in the air and wait for a new order that will send them weary, home.
6.Epiphany. Becalmed in winter the trees are still. Sunlight and cloud view and review the faded tarpauline on a garage roof, seen through a school-room window. While a distant plane scatters and re-scatters icy poison in the sky. You can tell it's a toy from how it glints. Faded sweet-wrappers shine with a patina wrought from a quitting and unquitting sun a tell-tale, fraught, farewell, from oldest, sweetest wishes and decaying roots. You can tell they're treasure, from the fact they're still in place. The soundscape suddenly stills, almost ghostly as nothing's there and the women passing and repassing so primly bare in tennis white from the private courts shiver, then seek warmth, in each others' embrace. You can tell they see us
as they choose another route.
We confer on Gospels,
look at maps of Holy Lands.
The boys trace a winter journey
from textbook photographs,
you can tell it's Bethlehem from the plastic snow.


7.Epitaphium, F.Hayek

The falling shadow of an autumn leaf
joins the precision of its shape
to its yellowed original and lies beneath
as it touches an unlit landscape.
The death of a dreaming, sceptical man,
joins with the voices in another room,
repeating history as only historians can
to make a fixed pattern of his loom.

 


Pre-Spring Frost

Winter at Snape

You rang me in this little schoolhouse
I rented in February to live a little
in the way I know I never can.
I chop spare wood and stay
with a line of writing until I’m done.
Yesterday the snow on the daffodils
broke the crocus leaves and edged
bare blackberry bushes.
The radio crackled of flooding at Aldburgh.
Over the phone you said you did not want
to disturb my pastoral peace. I said I did.
I walked to the end of the yard,
as iced worm-casts crumbled underfoot,
to stare at a field, green with young wheat.
Later, two pheasants broke from a stubble field
and peered into the blue to fix the cursor of a skylark.
The estuary shore was filling up,
like an old man’s sideburn.
On the high ground at Snape,
I saw a naked landscape and a coppice
in still-winter loveliness that hollowed
a shape to existence
and to further disturb my peace,
in the real breath of cold, I whispered
how much I missed you.


Boats on the Alde, Snape

Ash Wednesday, the buds
were pale candle flames
on the wicks of the hedges.
I rode the bike to the Maltings
and stared out at high tide.
There was nothing simpler
than those barges.
We understand them
only because of air and water.
Only because of love
and the stupid
could I understand
what I had left that morning,
a daughter with her mother.

Later, I remembered those barges
after I chopped wood
and a good fire grew
that roared of the wind and the sea.

The form of my love:
we search for what
the seeking has ignored,
nothing simpler.


At Snape

All morning starved thrushes and fieldfare have pecked at dry, stale