15 Master Virgil's Deceyte by Duncan McGibbon (e reader comics .TXT) 📕

gain.


7. Everyman’s Dragons

i) At the Seal Sancturary, Gweek

They lull in bath-tubs,
or sprawl over steps,
seen through analytic
glass below the water-line.
Here the neighbours row
over foreplay,
or wait to be hand-fed
or pretend the sprats still live
or look like taxmen
deciding on our Inland Revenue declaration.
Another spins on her own axis,
having been brain-damaged while on the rocks
another waddling prima-dona,
sags in her hundred weight’
Along the pretty cave
on her own topmost call.
The two-note ostinate
of a blind bull sea- lion
penetrates the quiet woods.
While his mate deftly
generates through the water,
a dragon in the liquid air
breathing silver fire.

ii) Truro Cathedral - An Ecclesiatical Novel

Prologue

Passive voices lumber
behind the heavy syntax
for portentious brick;
The Catholic begin this place
with a lifeless parenthesis inserted
into the living words tradition
intoned by John Robertes,
his family, Time, and Death,
a dapper student, a reliable watchmaker.

Opening Chapter

A surpliced property tycoon
sings the Pater Noster
in matchless plainchant,
while fishing for compliments
from a burly Prince of Wales,
as Pontius Pilate watched over by a hawk-like
Princess May of Teck
who guides his boozy
hand with the gold-plaited trowel
which cements all three
into a terracotta panel on which
gaudy stained-glass reflected
the light of circumstance
(a Clayton and Bell Romance)
In the beginning was Bishop Benson
who saw John Loughborough Reason
Evening came and morning came.
The first Cornish granite arrived
separating the light from darkness,
to the sound of muted pickaxes.

The Climax Chapter

The old church of St Mary's collapses.
Evening comes and morning comes
the second Person in the Trinity,
frank and fearless
rebuilds over St Mary's aisle
a fossil within a fossil's crop.
Morning comes and evening comes,
with the arrival of the Bath stone.
But then, after a hasty funeral
times change for
the South Transept, in a Spirit House,
trapping even Wesley in its web of light.
and Henry Martin’s
Hindus, Moslems and Parsees,
The Holy Wilkinson
second Bishop, glorified.
A theft finds it difficult
to hide itself, a century on, it still
hesitates; each voice ceasing,
retired to become a figment in oil-paint
a procession of Anglican divines
marches on the clouds
above the South West. peninsula.

Closing Chapter

A ray of light descends
on the Prince of Cornwall
standing on the sanctuary as
who dispenses a secular
blessing on the housing schemes
of saints and missionaries
of liberal reason
In the dark halo of cloud,
blacked out Jumbo jets of the recusant,
he rebrobate, perverts,
and invincible pagans.
stack and serially
ditch into the robust sea.

Epilogue

To leave this place,
it is enough to cough,
whisper and steal a leaflet
from the shadows built
for ghosts to brick up souls
and Arthur Quiller-Couch,
in cap and gown
leads the World War dead
in Keatsian prayer.

8. Penwith

i)

The little town
with sooted rooks
settled in the valleys,
while the moorland
and the traverse sea
widen their hunted
influence on the land
like flocks of doves
they huddled on the ground
with slate-wings spread
to focus on uncertain insects

ii)

The florists' stall
of Mousehole,
cockpit for a brawling climate
the car mobbed
by staid pedestrians
like a stagbeetle
in a procession of ants

iii) The Theatre on the Cliff

The land is the backdrop
that baffles the waves.
This stage is reality
struggling to get by
on cliff edges of sheer loneliness
An old woman is
guided fron her gaunt old house
by mindful attendants,
to become the protagonist
in some primitive earth-bound rite.
While from the white-painted
halls, school children
intone Gilbert and Sullivan,
under a fatalising shower

9. Marazion -

i) To Charles Causley

He comes into this tea-house
over-familiar with the locals,
always with a child in tow
who knows he's in for a treat
and has an impish grin.
Yours is the breviary
of the visible, the bread
of the splintered land
shared out among
those with the patience to wait.
While sunlit time
refracts through
the sea-worn window,
a vagrant-light,
beginning to throw
its weight about,
knowing his luck is in.


ii)The Seine Fishers

They were standing waist-deep
in the afternoon tide,
with the silver light
on the scarp of the water.
as they pulled, a perfec
ellipse rose to the
a black line baffling the waves
and shrinking, weighted,
to the land,
where a crowd
stood like extras
in a Gospel film.
As the living pool
reached the shore
the men threw back,
larger saithe and then l
seemed to show.
no further interest
in the Whitebait, Sand Eels
Gobi Weavers and Ribbon Fish
that lay gasping
and pouting under
the drowning air.
The people on the beach
stood dumbfounded
then began to throw
the fishes back,
some were too late,
The men had elaborately
folded up their net
and gone away, unseen
and witnessing adults
never knew why so much life
should be wasted
to find the unknown

10. Tintagel

It is far from anywhere
you might hold dear
yet as Calcium to the bone
its stone is closer
to what you have near

11. Land’s End

The car full of the children's crisps,
the Oasis tapes ranting through the speakers
and windscreens misting
as we headed for Penwith
in a sudden downpour,
assing a gaunt Methodist chapel
the brick chumney stacks
of disused tin mines
and placards advertising
potatoes, Cornish palms and fuchsia.
The road becomes a stalk
stretching towards
the leaf-mountain chaim
which moisten limp
under the driving hailstones,
We turn into the hills
and the sun gleams
with a horn-blare of
circular light
over the whispering heathers
This is a customs house
to a naked void,
a blue emptiness
that everything tumbles towards.
The two toughs with beer cans,
downing then in one
above a sheer drop,
children, women, men, dogs
jackdows even shrews
scrambling about
over a self-destructive
edge edited in
metamorphic schists.
edged with hyperactive waves
Two coasts that elsewhere
could seperate religions
or whole civilizations
now join in rocky,
crumbling landscape
of scheming cliff tops
and beguiled people
on the holiday of their lives.
 

Burning Statue
 
The Retreat, Girl Meditating

The Hampstead daylight
passes through a muslin screen
onto an open carpet.
The room has been made a shrine
to its own spaciousness
an Edwardian toybox
larger than a Waites house
where a girl sits wearing
white jeans and a jacket
upright against the wall,
her head below the dado rail.
Staring ahead of her,
I see she is beautiful
and wants to be noticed,
a self-conscious picture,
more a donor than a saint..
She is with others
who enforcedly meditate
while a tape plays a trite,
self-satisfied keyboard tune
This May which is quiet,
promising sunshine
through time's meniscus
on the brink of belief.
If you want to be. I will let you be
the mystic of your growing loveliness,
and pray for a calling of the heart.


 
Motet for Our Lady of Caversham

Cantus

All night long, the trickle of Saxon water
bled through chalk, rusting the last crumbsA
of an eorl’s reliquary, russet as the tongue
of a dragon on a parchment margin.
Robertus, Dux Normandiae
splits the codex with a short sword
and throws his portion
onto a covered cart.
You brush such dust and drops away
from the universe of your veil,
wound over a face of invisible beauty,
so breathtaking, the river is stilled at the world’s lips.
and the heart’s field is cleared
of the long, heavy dream of power-lines,
sewage pipes and staid Victorian villas.
Father O’Malley opens John London’s chest,
which gouts with mud as the drowned
men of Rochester, climb out,
carrying the wooden statue
and wipe away five hundred years
of the commissioner’s locked soul
and a lighted lamp, one of hundreds
still burning under the waters
in gudgeon-flecked gravels.

 
Organum

Water bled through chalk,
a reliquary. Hearne ,the antiquary
doffs his tricorn to sift the papers.
with an impatient hand.
My Lord of Caversham,
Walter Gifford, of the heart’s field, gules,
his founding hands
glow through the soil of the suburbs
from shadow into shadow.

Discant

They glow, as gas-lamps blazed
in the cause of the wick:
Eve,a visibility,
and Margaret,
daughter of William the Lion,
tenor of Scotland.
whose fingernails light
the staid neighbourhoods
of the city in civil twilight.
as Fr Ilsley watches the Gospels dance.

Trope

Civil applause, an unheard thunder,
you stand there now
your immortal body more
indiscernable than muons,
in which you wrap
our awaiting dead
and my gladdened Earl of Pembroke,
Lord of the Manor
and hold saints.
Expected , a face or two
begins to smile.
“At last can someone help?”
Flesh of his flesh, Mary
flesh of her flesh, her Son.
you wonder what
the visiting angel is doing here.
and walk along with him,
hoping it will help you
understand
why he wants your want,
It is concern
that lights your face,
the torch touched to
the midden of time
to incinerate mortality
bound back from
the dry legacy of disgrace.
by the conceiving Hand.

Gradus

Unwritten, unheard,
the provisions of Oxford,
Mother of Justice,
but sung to the eye
in living melody,
a girl holding her mother’s hand,
a dancing chain
so fearless before that holy place
in polyphony
with the perfect ecstasy
of everything imperceptible
in place of the places
of the dead:
love born on one voice
to be carried to another:
a mother reborn in her child.


Clausula

The child reborn in her child,
was more real than
she could have guessed.
South’s pen scratches on,
“The difficulty and strangeness…”
The rubrics of Father Haskew’s
overdraft redden with love.

What is this place
once my home,
of anger,unpraised toil
and guilt?

It is the poor mission of the body.

You are pregnant by the Holy Spirit
that hovered the depths of entity.
As you are to the stars outside you,
He is to you, yet within .

 
Triplum

From the depths,
the women have climbed
the mountain.
The order of The Visitation
opens a new school of faith.
She is all joy,
singing until the gloss
of happiness shines
from her skin.
the other is full of strong homage
and will not let her walk
any longer until she rested.
Isabella Beachamp
wife and mother to be
of the political slain.
and her servants unload
twenty pounds of gold
from the barge on the Thames
in chains and bracelets,
dropping a brooch
into the water from which
the trout flick away.

The King of