3 Rites of Tenure by Duncan McGibbon (web ebook reader TXT) 📕

Rites of Tenure
Poems 1965-7

1

The Walk
Their footsteps stir the ashen path.
The children walk along the avenues
and across the brooding quietness of the lawns.
Tired and confused, they slowly wander.
Their bored faces bathed in the sunlight
make all seem enclosed in a still edge of torpor.
Their voices disturb the emptiness of the park,
jarring the muteness of sculptured temples.
Their faces are speckled by flickering tesserae,
fired out of shadows from untrusting trees
against the bare, white sky. In the clear water
myriads of fishes sparkle, their traces dying and rising
but the water breaks; a splash! As they flick pebbles
at the stream and watch the fishes flit away.
The children seem entranced, as if
the pines told a mystery and left them troubled.
Then someone jeers (now what has hurt them?)
Some are silent and apart. A stillness has fallen
round the edges of the pool.
They stop to question its surface.
Against a cold edge of stone, a thousand bodies
of sticklebacks worn to death.
Their minute, twisted eyes stare into the grey void.


Four Stills from the History of Michael

1.
He sits there, a stop watch in his hands,
It could be anything
to his eyes,
where categories were never born.
He doesn’t care, yet flinches now and then
to dent its glinting, metal covers
Unnoticed,
he will destroy it piece by piece.

This, apart from tantrums,
will be all
his achievements for to-day.

And all is paralysis.
the granite born along
by glaciers,
until abandoned
by matronal ice.
He is deposited,
a foundling stone.
He sits there alone.

2.
In his body’s bastion,
a child has burnt himself
to empty skin.
Only a withered carapace is left,
a house of charred, dangling nerves.
What did the walls guard against?
Each crack is plastered up,
each fracture stuffed
with rotten matter.
The random light’s least,
grasping entry is anathema.
The adversary never came.
His still centre fears nothing
serves no-one.
There is nothing now,
behind the barriers.
Once he spoke to himself
in a mirror,
seeing the only image
he could admit.
He has sat too long
in his body’s bastion.

3.
The estate is anxious,
though poisoned,
it possesses life.
A seasonal scrub twitches
a living on its arbitrary surface.
Here, a stunted tree,
and again dry grass in dry canals,
which has twisted its tongue
to lick sporadic moisture
from the dust.

Yet the bedrock is disruptive.
Something restless,
nurses fire
to mark a death,
to keep a clutch on life.

Once he shouted “No”
and stamped his feet
and a brief shower of rain fell
as if he had made it so.
He sits in his body’s rust.
The estate is anxious.

4.
A child’s eye cannot trust.
has not learned to fear,
is seared by too vivid light.
Love burns the retinal edge.
The vibratile sphere
is shaded by penumbras,
which fear alone can cast.
He sits alone, a fearless quarry
and waits in an estate
of dry canals.
and slowly, slowly
the metallic hours
are shredded in his hands.
Before love’s light,
a child’s eye, paralysis.

Girl with a Recorder

Never the same as the others,
never keeping up,
she was merely herself alone.
Her teachers, parents, and the others
were liberally proud
that they had placed her
among her friends, her age group.

The little ones
gave a scant, urbane concern
for their stranger.
On tactical occasions,
some of them would use her
to underline
the differences, the strangeness
they had begun to realise
they envied.

Later,
it was not he same.
they did not wish to nudge
quiescent fears
and then the years threw them apart

Contained in offices, trains, marriages
they all searched for her,
found nothing,
save recurring anxieties
and images
of a limping head
playing her recorder
down all the lanes of caring,
homeward with the dying sky.


Occupiers
i.m. Dasie Ashcroft

Frozen morning;
I start to cross
the snow-thick common
with a message for
the people in the house.
The land’s face is chilled
by the thrall of the solstice
and will not relax.
Will anything move
in this soundless space?
Whatever might speak
will not do so.
I go on, treading stiff turf,
my footsteps sounding
in a shuttered world
where all is dumb
save the wind’s cut tongue
rasping in a mute mouth.
Such are the external actions
of a temporary worker
in a pre-college year.

Yet here I am,
occupying a role
I cannot grasp.
Behind me in bracken,
a brown bird stirs
exploding clouds
of powdered snow
from dead willow-herb.
Whom does it snoop for?
What scripts its flight
from these thick curtains
of sleeping, silent white?
Old houses brood
on fictional realities.
Stories told by children
haunt them in old age,
an Ethel Monticute
rears at the window,
“Her fair hair done on top
and lilac eyes.”

Have I blundered into
sheeted props
that lie unused,
their true aims masked?
An early bird
flits from a wall
to the park gates.
You, a witness
come to seek proof?
Mr Salteena,
“rather bent in the middle
but with nice, long legs.”
Well here I am,
which character am I?
or you. I have a tongue
but no part to say.
I cannot scan your
quiet line.

Come to the Edwardian lodge
I walk through
two ruined gate posts,
while birds of prey
perch under old roofs.
Do they dream of swallows
now nightingales?
This house seems cursed.
Yet I do not belong
to any history.
No small portion
flows in my veins.
Lord Clincham’s garden
lies in ruins.
Obliterated,
all has been annulled.
Winter’s white teeth
have scavenged
the sun’s carrion.
It has broken
the fountain’s rim
and has sunk the pool
deep in the mud.
Still sounds seep
through the crumbled
yellow walls and tendrils
from a ruined willow
are matted with dead
convolvulus covering
a window’s silted eye.

I walk where tawny owls
sleep under old roofs.
Burnt out, the summer house
has been abolished.
Its wooden slats
are chipped and broken.
The snow’s peacock eyes
stare sullenly through the spaces
to the window.
The air-frost broods
for the bulbs
of the bluebells.
The old king is dead.
(wearing a small and costly crown
and the queen not up to much.)
I see a bird of prey soar
above the garden wall.
Imagined fauna,
nightingale and swallow,
they guard the ruined willow.
Do you hold them, Terue
in your gamekeeper’s
gloved hands ?
Is this Ethel’s luggage?

I knock at the white double-door,
not knowing the events
I will intiate.
The sound echoes harshly
in the porch.
Two women have come
into the dawn.
My swallow and nightingale
you have them in your hand.
Together they appeal
by the door.
the first, who opens it,
does not speak.
Miss Minnit.
the other does not fear.
Viewed by the dumb bird
the swallow talks softly;
“Not a gentleman,
but it does not matter.”
They do not become you, Tereu,
the grief shall be ended,
no thief of life.
“Part of him bounces about
in hollow kettles.
part hisses on spits.
The parlour runs down with gore.”

Am I the final person
come to quieten the alarms?
I say my lines.
a more gullible Fortinbras,
deliver my
quotidian enquiries
and depart ,
gathering remaining proerties,
broken on my heels. “Blushing dark red
a Bernard Clark
in a bowler hat.
All is terminated.
I leave the women
standing on the edge of dawn
and turn back towards the common.
The wind is warmer now
and the soil slinks
in slushy pools.
High above the house
my sparrow hawk still hovers,
Tereu! Have you come to haunt
this closed up theatre
whose props are revealed
under melting moiré?
My nightingale scuds
beneath the willowherb.
The hawk did not have to come.
Chattering birds renew
their calls from far and wide
that the day’s only visiter
should fail to release
these captive hearts.
The afternoon’s tapestry is woven;
Spring will come and go
like an old school exercise book
become too impersonal out of maturity
to be worth possession.


Women Playing

Nothing seemed suspect,
neither the blaze of embankment elms
nor silver-brown chatter of river-light
gave evidence for concern.

Except the day,
poking a face in spite and whimsy
through the clouds like a forgotten god.

A bonfire burned excesses
of late suburban foliage.
The smoke trailed upwards
sole sacrament of a casual Cain.

My train passed two women, playing tennis,
unaware of public eyes,
their unsuspecting moments a kind of privilege
to my transported sight.

They faced each other
matched minds and muscles,
playing gently where the wind cannot surge,
where the sun wakes livening the eye

and seemed to roll towards them,
suspended in a timeless vacuole of seeing.
Woman to woman, caught like black-shadow birds,
twirling alone in astonished space.
ssession.

In the Snow, Man and Woman.

to Susan Berry

By the black silence
of the beech tree,
they stood alone,
in the snow-held light.

She was talking
and the man
seemed to know her
utterly.

Each muscle and hope
he observed;
her auburn hair,
lighter than the tree,

dark with the contrast
of the close, red sun.
He could not understand
this warmth; tried to speak.

He could trust the raw pain
of her kisses, as if lost in him,
but lost to himself,
he could not find her,

could not burn passion
into words.
In the logic of their silences,
they parted.


Pitysae


Xa Atalaissa

A black cloud gathered
over the bay’s green mountain.
Hannibal’s island lay still
in the blind current of the waves.

Here Semitic schemes were forged
and blood flowed downwards
in silent tresses
through seas of shattered speech.

Invaders came from this gentle land,
a little boy limping with his father’s sword.
Then came the painted boats on the tide
and the blood ran from women and men,
seeped downwards into an island womb.

Still the blood seeps,
sown into the land,
though banners decay
and marchers’ footfall fades.
This island’s soft, vernal eye
did not see the shadows
of Nazi bayonets
against Piraean walls.

Nor did the sea tranced olive trees
hear the shooting on the hills.
as dutiful hate swept and reswept
these burning rocks;
only felt the undertow,
the vicious pull and return

of waves ungentle in their depths
and stones of men resentful
of their hidden death.
The heart of the land endures,
the women in the full gold glare
of summer’s passion,
cooling to blackened age
in the waste.


Portinatx

Why does the sun not fall down from the sky?
The white sands burn
their useless anger into night.
Why does the sun not fall?
become neurotic,
be riddled with the liberal doubt
on its authority to shine?

And the yet the weak came through the storm
to the magician’s island:
Elissa who beguiled the founder of power;
Helen, a convict of her myth,
Miranda, reverent before the form of man
and Paul, a prisoner of the Word.

The women are standing
naked in the sun, onestripped,
guilty, onebare, voluptuous,
another unclothed, true,
and remain like rocks
on the night time beach,
to hear the sands whisper