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

/> against consoling wind

and crushing all finality,
the sea’s slow thunder breaks
until the sun fail:
conscience, passion, truth
each cuts an invisible creek
that God’s silence has hidden
among the stars and sand.


Las Salinas

A fluttering ghost,
the wing’s white shock of guilt
cracks open the framing dark.

Night’s eye is burning
behind the forehead of the trees.

The moon has split its skull,
a flame across the salt lakes,
which glisten like children’s voices,
fading into futures.


Las Virgen De Las Nievas

Each day you leave
your parents' farm
as dawn catches fire.

Black - shawled women
enter the shadowed church
from shore-lined cottages.

You ride past them
with sparkling wheels
spinning on the sand.

You turn your eyes away
from the white-washed
graveyard on the hill.

Your tight shorts submit
unclad legs, an exposed freedom,
to the snow-ghosts on high.


Es Vedra.

Rigid in flint psychosis,
the numb eye of rock
stares out in random blindness
at the sky's pale nakedness of blue,
dying to far wisps of meridian white.

The still, warm air
observes the magma's
burnt out silence,
sustains the tawny rubble of the shore,
concealing within mists
the grey fist of mountain.

Vast with rupture ,
it threatens with featureless hate.
Frail, upon the shore, we stand alone,
treading the igneous armour beneath the surf
the bone rock of forgotten ancestry.

And savage with thrusting force,
the gannets' screeching verticils
invade the timid balance of the mind,
a manic sybil echoing to other shores of madness


Things of Ignorance
 


To Those Who Live After Us

(Francois Montcorbier to Posterity)

God has the crudest wit.
The armourer’s maid
has gone after that priest
while I roll in the gutter
and smell of my sweat.

I do not like her man.
He has a big, ugly face.
A dying heifer could improve
the grit of his accent.

His hands were made to till soil
You’d better not come near me.
Monseigneur, or I’ll put you in
the only trough you could not
be called upon to grovel in.


Christmas 1968.


At Middlesbrough

Middlesbrough was always wet and February.
You got soaked when you had to cross
the puddle eyed, asphalt playground
to the Junior latrines, out of bounds to me;
and the teacher never thought I’d dare.

Yet it was worth it, making a call
just after playtime was best of all.
To be on your own in a place
where bigger boys made me fall.

Once I ran there to find the bullies
had truanted too. I felt their fists
but blurted out I was seven please
and they were generous for once.
over exact and tribal differences.

As they trooped out seditiously;
the moment thrilled me; those years
were mine; no-one else could be me.
I never lived myself like that again;
the fact remembered, but the joy unfelt.


The Duck’s Egg

The mallard’s were nesting under
the willow trees that year.
They could see them as the summer sun
shone on the embankment stream.

They could see the duck’s eggs
over the steel-grey rails.
One day they climbed over
the bridge of red bricks,
the victors, with their sandals
soused in the squelching reeds.

They were the centre of a universe
that year and its life, their plunder
its mystery, their quest.

The eggs were warm
against their thighs,
as they lied to the railway guard
and ran off down the road.

He read in his books
about the planet called life,
suspended in a sea of white,
punctured its ends
with a pin of grey steel
and blew the wet innards
out of its marble belly.

The yolk dried up
under the sun.
He never told them
the smooth egg
became a skeleton,
crushed to nothingness,
despite his care.

Palmarsh

Here I knew the house was living.
Here I could stand on roofs of sight,
holding ungrown hands to the sky.
Now each day a gentle donkey
came down the path beside the house.
As if to bear the sun from faraway hills
a lamp for the sea between his ears.

The magpies conspired above the snows
and down the path to the sea
the sun’s pointed rays lit up
my way to the waves.
Gunshots from the firing ranges
did not trouble my sheltered games.
I had no need for further rules
as we played in our boundaried world

No, we did not walk past those stones;
my father, my brother and I,
did not touch on the point of bullets,
had not heard of sea defences
to shore up against a seeping doubt.

We practiced our writing,
when the cold froze the garden.
We stood on the table by the wireless
making empty speeches.
Then faceless voices brought
grey men out of the snow
who carried toy tanks
through doorways of pain’

A people from an unknown country
were sitting still in their history.
And we followed the sun no more
towards the sands, the sound of gunshot
between the houses and the sea.


The Lake

Rinsed with the soft
attentions of the midday sun,
the wood absorbed our trudge
on brown, dull bracken
and the breath of torpor
as we walked.

We could not find the lake
and were climbing trees,
but could not penetrate
the gathering dark of the tops

Suddenly one of us
took a strange path
and the lake lay before us,
stumbled upon, unplanned.

Trying to steal a part of never,
is part of never finding it again.

The Children’s Crusade

There were no soldier ghosts to rise within
that hall, so safe in anti-academic mouths;
no visions of De Toqueville, Camus or Koestler.
No doubt, the books and the ideals nestled
on shelves, in minds, in other worlds of care,
though speeches continued and postures sprawled;
we couldn’t mention Dubcek as the CP had the vote.

It was a sudden midnight whim.
After the tedium of card vote debate
none wished to return to bare hostel rooms.
We were too many blokes, but with beer enough.
Not knowing the way, Barney, at the wheel,
did his lurching turn at the roundabout,
leaving the sterile white wonder of halls
far behind us in the night, heading first
for the bleakness of the moors , then
someone decided for the sea.

The beach was black and cold, a bare expanse
of mud and protoplasm, rancid with weed.
On the sea front hotels were silently
hidden in the albumen of neon lights.
It ran to blurs and unseen Irish waves.
A jetty sank down to estuary flats,
brooded on by rotten, wind-swept shelters
We stood there feeling perspicuous, joking.
There was no further we could go

The cry was heard against the charred sky-line
Someone had slipped. All I could remember
was the sudden sight, a girl spread-eagled
in the mud. It was the merest fall,
but no-one wanted to touch her,
no-one wanted the contagion
of her mud on the few clothes
they had brought with them.
From head to foot she was black
with stinking sand and oil. She went
from one to the other in her sodden dress.
Feeling wooden, I never knew how
she cleaned herself up, how love ever thrived.


Diaphany

The sun’s fire flashes
from the crow’s trailing wing,
dragging in the surf
of April soils,
raked to ochre distances.

The larches rush down
to the river,
where grey pelts of cloud
collect a burning wall,
split by far, blue fissures.

We have such unsure grasp
and only breathed immanence
holds these houses together.
A bough, like a gibbet,
suspends His pain
to the witnessing estate,
which fades to the sound
of musty trumpets,
battered by the crowd
and the flight
from the curse, our decay.


Epiclesis

Scorch, black ripper wind,
scorch the exiled rock
beneath the gentle
fraud of the snowdrifts
and fill the chatter
of the spaces with
a psychopath’s howl
of frenzied fearing.

Our world’s flesh is scarred,
pitted with conflict.
the tendon’s failure
breaks the personal
flame to sinking dust.
The eyes, the eyes’ fire
fails against memory’s
curse of dying strength.

As deep as God’s skull
lies the strangled warmth
in the heart of cities.
Within, the silence
of torpid corridors
and the warm air
crush release.

My clouds are poor,
yet witness hope,
like hunched prisoners.
whose houses invite their ghosts,
exciting tremors,
a soliciting of the moon.
Take flight, bird of wonder
the white brush of wings
takes flight, strikes
the palpitating air.

Take flight to the frames
The timbers of my house
stand on guilty foundations
No window’s light falls
without the form
of broken selves,
ambivalent cross,
the ironc flesh
spreads out a shadow
on the sounding floor.

At Mattishall

The sun burns slowly through husks of cloud
dispersing night as tide thins eel-mud in tributary channels
before the wash of light delineating cirrhus heights
skinned with high flames of dawn.

The ground lies unused. The still soil broken
by clusters of dock-weed and scrub. A line of elms
ends before my window at the shadow of a brick-pile,
unused and still on the building-site next door.

A shrike flits from a bough with a grimy slug.
The house was once an inn for pilgrims and revellers.
fearing Tudor wealth and the power of the witch.
From this window the road leads to Walsingham.

They concern me now, the dead, in tapestry
of story from which the red bird flew.
Within the house a girl and her mother sleep.
Their guest, I stay here, a defender of the moment

The sure sun trumpets at last from the clouds
to stir the stream of day. Brief light
is for huntsmen or recusants already gone.
While sparrows chatter on the soft edge of a breeze.

Think well of those who stayed here.
Sleepers, watchers and travellers,
guarding their fears before going on
to seek indulgences and cross wide estuaries.


Dystopia
1.
In a disenchanted hour,
I saw myself in waters of stillness
and saw that I was dead.

They will never understand.

They had woken me during the night
coming with cries of hysteria,
walking like rag-cloth dolls,
the ghosts of suicides.
I could not hear what their voices said.
They had gone by morning,
had left the roads and the gardens desolate.
There were no candles to snuff,
no lights to turn off.
and the rain sank down
by