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

the sodden pink of the roses
creeping by the window latch.

They will never understand.

My family’s piano is silent
and the sunlit dust
settles invisibly on the floor.

The words are debased,
mere sounds through the dead air.
The old assurances are effete.
Others live here now.
They will never learn.
2.
In the burnt season,
I dreamt a landscape of rain.
there a ravaged garden
of eucalyptus, acanthus
and giant ferns lay
bloated and tangled.
It was an acidic dawn,
its atmosphere coloured
with bitter hues.
The innocent had taken
to the predatory life
while those who knew
they murdered hid
in the shade of the bushes.


Warmetod

The gigacenturies stretch out their
boredom to chiliastic bathos.
Glowing clouds of gas and stars
collide, crack and mourn
the solar system’s plasmic hyperdeath.

Here the undertow of consciousness
evades its progeny. Chronos vainly
reaches for the Alka-Seltzer
(He suffers from earthquakes now and then)
and ice packs uncover Islington
that aged women might die there.

Tethys has come up in the world
that Hilary and Tensing should approach.
ours was an undistinguished birth
until we tired of stone,
no lasting membrane of creation.

We, the most absurd of pilgrims
coming from a frozen millennium
and travelling to ecocide,
seeking directions from bored,
urbane abstractions, the good,
perfection, wickedness or mind,
seated on immortal, academic lawns
in absolute, immutable deckchairs.

The angles have tired of the Judgement
They read over the lists and slouch,
exhausted on the bronze-bound tomes.
The rusting trumpets are stacked
against the earth’s corners.
Putti play dice and conduct
the visitors from Limbo
round the full eschatologies.

Metaphysical travellers
on a brief escape from being,
discrete, we hold our breath
to check for an ulcer in the Milky Way
white barium stretching
in a stomach of silences


In Kew Gardens.

The dark, red light
of the holm-oak's shade
gives pity to the shoots beneath.

They do not know
of leaves that mitigate
the summer's scorching rays.

My delight is that, speechless,
I should mirror to the silences
the syntax of my seeing.

My being here transmuted
by the limits of saying,
to a pantomime

of impossible hope.
The magic lantern shines
images of fulfillment

to the eyes of childhood
within the wood of logic.


15/4/71


Motets


Motets

1.
If only this living could become
something realer;
like sudden fires of change,
or shouted anger in the streets;
this tearing and stretching
on the tendons of feeling
without the flex of response;
the search behind tired, bored smiles
for a movement,
not like the dead wing-beat
of our birds, travelling the mapped-out line,
rooted in the rock-cloud’s law.

More a communing
to touch the flesh-shrug of newness,
seeing the stair turn,
or the window’s light
as growth in plant strands
of the mind’s awakening.

or the book floating somewhere
at the edge of vision.

2.
I see myself reflected
in the great night beyond my window.

All is dark and the sound
of falling rain is filling the silence.
Somewhere a girl is singing,
soft sounds vibrating
through her body
become this building.

No.
Now she has stopped
and the rain is alone in its patter.

I cannot enter
the darkness of others thoughts.
cannot trust the imagined motive,
or think in harmony
with presumed desires.

I am alone without calculation
before the night. 


3.
I do not know.
I drift.
Yes, pretend the pattern works,
yet lack the sense of trying;
the skill of trust.

I would waste,
rather than give in
to mediocrity,
or the darkness
without the toys
of sureness by me.

A thrush peers forward
from an unsure bough.
I would leave
the white walls
of this house.
I stay behind,
yet not for lack of a road.


4.
I fill your ash-tray
with the burnt ends
of my cigarettes
and your mind
with the stubbed ends
of my words.
The tray can be
cleaned; no ash remaining,
but my words,
where are they now?
Down in the darkness perhaps,
but not lost.
Even though I might
be lost with my ashes
in the chaos of our
random access world.

5. Four Thirty, The Silence.

The children’s voices sear the ground,
splinter with shard iron.
The house my eyes are building
out of the silence

My times are empty
and the spaces
are in flight
from the brutal flame
that grows,
a sapling curiosity
rising from your curving eye.

6.
(To Renata Stombrowska)

The room grows smaller
and the light burns perspicuously.

I imagine this is the last,
fear-stricken outpost
against the insurrection
of the night.

Here we seem to rock
in the cradle of our loneliness,
not knowing our end,
we try to share our joys

and find
the things of ignorance intrude
and love, are you not our light?
If the tungsten element
cannot bear it,
so much less our flesh.


7.
In a room
a poem
is quietly
reading itself.

In a room
a poem
is scooping out
the space from a box

on which it rests
signifying an intention
which can never be understood.

perhaps the box
is emptier than before.
In a poem
the box breathes its last
to a stupefied room.

8.
Consider this sphere.
No matter the inexhaustible silence.

No matter,
the black cells of conscience creep,
like a great steel angel’s tread,
pushing deep at the air.
which buries me.
The law of its beak scars the sky.
and pylons, ganglions
from Tycho Brahe’ s machine
have snared the houses,
have cut deep
the clay air I breathe.

9.
Study in Mid Life.

Hair dark, hemmed in,
swept back by absolutist combs
against Capability’s saws.
Flesh, Meissen,
certifying isolation
against Wedgewood’s advice.
Words, an autocrat’s repertoire,
against Dr Johnson’s definitions.
Smiles,
those of a poor clown
against Grimaldi’s tips.
Skin,
shadows painted out
with Sistine, Papal care,
against Reynold’s adages.
Eyes, full of rage,
dark and silent,
with Blake’s consent.

10.
Girl with a puzzle

She sits detached
from a circle of friends.
Unfinished sketches
of afternoon light
feature the crumpled coat
she wears.

To direct a troubled brow
at this unassertive toy
compasses her world,
struggling to set a silver bead
in a plastic mandala;

to set a stubborn self
on dry land,
from a sea of rival certainties.


11.
She wore a ring indicating nothing.
It sparkled in the sunlight,
blue for her depthless heart
and surrounded with white pearls,
like crowding worshippers.
One of them has been dislodged
Is it wise to join their religion?


12.
Summer Bonfire

Affective shore,
breathe your primal air of life.
The order of the flesh
acknowledges these lines of origin;
sun of the waves,
surge your spitting points of fire.
People, dogs and voices
burn upon the air.
Night falls among the pines.
The burrows grow dark.
Warm mists procreate their screens
before dull shadows of granite
on the glistening wetness of the sands;
a russet flame caught
in the dry fern’s verve.


13.

The Auburn Days.

The grey clouds haunt
the myth of the loved one.
At times the sun
has shone in fullness
on the land of our hopes,
has plucked threads of light
from our spaces.

But the clouds still haunt.
the great clouds hide
the coming days.
When will the rain
fill our lake of cracking earth?
and the fires of release bring laughter
to the swirl of events
that buries our breath
in man-made mountains
of seeping fear.

The flight of the auburn-haired girl
is hidden from the watch of day,
yet the night might whisper its joy
and we wait in unsure expectation
of the falcon’s stirring cry,
revealing the dawn
above the crowding firs.

14.
Enueg

Desireless. I feel the loss
of the mud-swamped grasses,
glutted with sustenance; no growth
can sprout from excess.
And so no cutting wind
can bring fresh insight
to the fading irony
of being two.
as we stand together
on a mapped, unnoticed hill.
The eye is sated
from a midden of seeing
and the living flood
ungently carries uprooted failure
to the time of drowning.

15.
The winter light picks out,
the cold serenity, reserved and silent
of the withered grass.

And how gently the beeches raise
bare arms to the sun returning.

The light is sparse
and lies as dormant as the shoots,
hiding in last summer’s
charred growth.

We walk across the mud,
as starlings fly
behind the columns of the larches
and into the dawn’s unknowable fire.

It is another you live for.
A flock of redwing
fly upwards from the copse
and you gaze in wonder on the dawning love,
yet turn away, not hearing the muted horn,
the first brief thunder
of the spring’s life conflagration.


16.

Back, hold now back
your troubled rush.
Here the soft eyes
are timid, dark
and as fresh, the round,
frost whiteness
of her rich limbs
to compare.

But this is no
sure growth.
Impatiently
your spring has struck
the frozen ground.
The frightened shoots
fear and wildly fly
the sun’s rage
of water, melting ice
and flooding fear.

Relinquish then,
the unwise flame
and let her go.
Her you have invaded
and her scared heart
is grown ungentle
in your shadow.
This pressing dawn,
the insight goaded.

17.
And yet again the sun has come,
has come to warm
this loving eye of life,
the spinning ball of nature’s other face.
The seed has died.
The rains have wept
into the soil
And here where once
the earth lay still,
wrapped in the blindness
of cold tarpaulin,
everywhere the leaves
show venerance.
life hurtled, sun humbled
and the years of summer
dance onwards
into the dying nebulas of freedom.
18.
How I love your blazing pride
the white-heat shimmer
of a mind gone searching
for the world’s fullest day.

The unbalanced cry in your eyes
is a blast of passion,
making a strength within me, which I cannot mask,
nor dare retreat to shadows
to the dead crevasses of silence,
or vestigial smiles.

And I would know the universe
you come to tell me of.
the rush of voices like the storm
implodes my spirit’s vacuole.


19.Vacuum
20/10/72

There is no air.
I breathe my silences,
Here there is no pressure;
nothing intrudes.
The heavy I oppresses me.
All is dry;
the fluid in the nerve
has died.
I touch my nothingness.
All is dead
in a random access world.
The molecules cannot touch
across the distances.
I confront a certainty of one.

Light one;
you are heavy.
Approaching one,
you part the fusion
of my world
Burning one,
you split my elements.
The opposites fly
within me.

And yet
a drop condenses
on the glass.
Will it ,
shivering,
stay?

20. 17/10/72
I Fear You

I fear you,
I hate you,
Dry sun of flesh.
My mouth
is dry