8 Winderby's Last Case by Duncan McGibbon (best ereader for epub TXT) 📕

of flesh
staled in the refuse
This is the only part
freshly searched,
turn up, like a vandalised
flower bed,
dark and moist
a gash in the dust
in the shape of a dead man.

5.Ext. The Street outside. Night
Yet the voice of their petition
was crisp and clear.

“We look for the double-glazed horizons
within the broken window frame.

Understand us, take our ravings now
and use their words to tell
you cannot save yourselves
from your dreams.
Look your train is coming, run.
Leave us and live with us.”


50.Fade-Negative: a paradigm

Glass varnished,
are floors: the painted pine
is staircase ‘the’
Case this in deal, timber,
painted to clipped wiring.
Still is house, the cat
pigeon, dead
or seed .Same the’ to’ averaged
be. Can dead and pigeon
of convergence ,the for
allow to vectors added
with description.
same the two averaged be can
water of drop every
man muttering, senile
home driving
estate housing the on
raining is it soon?
Cat passing a by
strewn feather dead lying
was pigeon feral awhile
driveway stained oil an on
standing is which
Volvo glowy, larger a primly
underlining is sunlight the while
wider metre a being are.
Windows picture the
lawns oblong the driveway tarmac the corner
is the being next door.
underlined are beak red gnarled
a with offal dried from seeds dead out
picking pigeon feral the and
windows picture glow Volvo the
lawns oblong brick tessellated, the red
driveway tarmac the sunlight
prim the of variation
minor a only with
beak red, gnarled a with
offal dried from seeds dead out
picks pigeon a feral
garden front the in driveway
stained oil the and
Volvo glowing the
frames primly sunlight
windows picture and
lawns oblong brick tessellated red
the footpaths tarmac the underline
sunlight thin.
Motion slow immobile camera
Dawn, At Estate Housing’ the.’

51. Epilogue to his Intended Muse

Earmley at last, dear old Earmley,
and the chuchyard still unmowed.
We turn the corner on the green,
to the husk of a house that is our new home.

All day our flocks have strayed
by the transmitting beacons.
The sheep are grown sophisticated,
cautious about appearing too reflexive,
given the conditions
for being authentic are limited.
They fear too much and understand
better than ourselves, the non-necessity of survival.
We claim renunciation and appended
melancholy, a minority right.
The sheep are cynical about our need
for pure water welling in brooks
and feed words such as “crystalline”
into pocket computers
and cannot sympathise with our taste
for blackberries and honey from
bees that visit only myrtle.
They have negotiated
synthetic a priori rights
to basic shelter and crop grass.
but even they admit a scholarship
gets lost under the dung.
They feel we are superfluous
in wanting to bed outdoors.

What then?

They keep our child, whom they call a swain,
born from stone from playing
with the lamb, as integration
at this level has not been known
to result in successful social adjustment.

For our part, we preserve a role
as Shepherd and Shepherdess,
so lovingly restored in Chesterton,
but are barely tolerated
in matters of husbandry.
The domestic animals,
grown feral with neglect.
demand some kind of answer.
Warlock, the dog has become
a thought-werwolf.
We rise with the starry void,
but have forgotten the spheres
by midday and cultivate natural
concerns for the sake of
which even if they did not exist
would have to be invented for the patency.

At a fixed interval our
needs are meet, narrowed to a
frugal aestheticism, that will not admit
denial, or ecstasy.
We lie minimised among the plasterboards
of the new estate. Gyproc holds our
universe and fine plaster lays
a grisaille rinse to our skins,
dulling my gems, blushing her flower.
In calculated eroticism,
we lie balanced and at ease,
on foam-backed presumption.
We have all our needs.
Promises of interviews
bring on casual patronage
to accept the irony
of state aristocracy,
and the bullet in
the second chamber
of legalized roulette.
The Athanor burns with a steady
power, its bills paid weekly
from the child's allowance
while my plashing bride
is discovered, a grace
gone upstairs to clasp hands
with diligent ecstasy.
Thickening to stone, you are become clever,
and a climate of darkness
hangs in the massed houseplants of the bathroom.
The texture of our love is naive,
observed ,complete, my existence
modified in your essence to shift
to the concrete with our century.

Within, my transplant pineal,
is earthed to the door.
Abstract rhetoric, all along was our
consummate enemy, the Inquisitor of taste.
His agents, purpose and application
have made the final connections.
The enemy you feared,
mute, inglorious Attwater
is yourself. As for the Reality Machine
if there is any truth in it, I have sent
the ghouls catapulted
on a track from time zero to infinity,
while you sink into the niveau mentale.

No hand can touch the miniature
abstraction that adorns the past.
This is the final instruction
in alexandrine fastidiousness.
Each street, each city, in each region
branching out from Cythera, Brindisi,
Rome, Paris, Earmley the grid of speech
is flexed, tautening its stress
while at scheduled intervals
the sheep depart to assimilate
to an exacting depth.
The satellites beam back
the day’s symbolic yields
in Washoe's dialect.
While gold pours into our
infant’s breakfast plates in exact
Premackian proportion.
Stronger stimulus
sucks all competing desire
into the purity of natural joy.
And yet, I hear reality coming near
with Bill Empson and Ken Burke.

Homeless, we travel under
the fixed stars and sway
to the Musagetes trio.
Beauty has fixed her light
to the music of bland gazoos
and pure nature taken to the skies
is silenced on earth.
The eternal ones,
prize winners of natural
immortality have no time for us.

Systematic, micro-chip mortality
presupposes isolation.
Wimsatt and Beardsley
would blow this
Waites house pastoral
to the trees, in a blast of
orange and bloody sunsets,
their justice more keen than death.
I kiss my American bride
with lips that are raw with the pain
of rediscovered ecstasy.
as she vanishes.
I have won, Attwater,

Woken, I have quit
you, my shadow, with success
in my final case.

I can consider the pain
of the real without
the comfort of cure.
Poetry is the art of knowing
how far to go before the reader
guesses you have gone
far enough to hide conclusion.
I hope for an explosion
of the tongue.
as there is fire everywhere:
burning at its
heart, the glowing
argument of sexual ritual
converting passion
to more passionate gold.


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Publication Date: 01-19-2011

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