9.Map of Storms by Duncan McGibbon (classic books for 12 year olds TXT) 📕

shaft of a creaking bow
thuds into the aortal root of the rose tree.
Loveless woman, you pray by altars of chique.
You look into my eyes while I feign the idiot
and smile at this sleep-worn man.
Out of a thousand, out of the crowd of fakes,
I place my hand against your stony ice
to segregate this purblind loveliness
this was the heart that gave out blood
Who can wound iron valves?
and yet it enters there to dissent in the
office of distainfulness.
A tender girl inexperienced in the heart's betrayal
would not suffer a love so great.
and so you turn, tied to a wound
that melts your honey from
from your baring, back to your birth, the
ties that hold you are your own instincts
a thousand knots wound about your past.

12. The Swoon: Sarabande

Caught in love, my instintictual
arm and wrist rising to the
stimulus of a mobile force.
Hand speaks to eye as its skin
touches your shoulder.
You are clothed, as your perfume
edges the air.
I render your nakedness figurative,
an abstract created from your closeness
as silence closes on silence and water
moulds with water. You are personhood
all relation, no creature apart.


13. The Return to the Chamber, Chorus

Reachable, I kiss you to feel that saline
taste of tears, your face full of humour
and that self-conscious half pout on your lips.
It is your willed arousal that summons ecstasy.
The tread of a dancer in sensuous virtue,
or the tap of a wooden stick against
a stern drum head, that swelling
resonance so capable, so dangerous.

14. The Beast’s Kiss: Toccata

Why am I here a maker of sounds?
I lift you from fabric as the first harp
laid aside to give birth to the virginal.
Pliancy, now plucked and accurate,
shapes a toccata. We discover instinct
is sharper than reason.

15. The First Conversation at Dinner: Duet

Dialogue becomes an argument,
a clavichord and the silence
become hispid with our breath,
as the darkness claims the snow.
Now on the frost sheets,
my figured bass still reaches for precision
as a mass of riotous hair in your frontage
can still be shaped precisely.


16. The First Request to Return: Fanfare

That summoning view of the
merchant ship under slow sail
in the harbour:old
prints of esturary towns,
low countries Hanseatic.
I know you will not return.

17. The Evening Visits: Nachtlied

Warehouses foreshadow exploitation.
yet it is the pilot boat that guides us.
Your pleasure anticipates the river
bore as a boat keeps abreast of its waves.
this we have parlayed and yet
the empowerment is still in the
assertion of a need I howled for first.

When you come into my castle
I expect you to be haunted
only by my ghost.

18. The Questions at Night: Chaconne

We are exposed, a felonous,
barebacked complicity.
What is nudity ?A word reserved
for danger and.exposure.
You a culprit to my colonial
dominance, confronting need.
We arrive at love’s Botany Bay ,
exploiting its disclaim our figures shared
in darkness, pretending it is home.

19. The Quest in the Corridors: Voluntary

My forcefulness grows unsure,
an idiot thumping on the keys of a
Bechstein drawing a tense tremour
in your viol space. Strung with sinews,
we twist, unsure, concealing preferences.
You lift your frame to counter my
heaviness of inherited weight.
Unsure, you cover yourself against a
ghostly cold, an imagined climate.
Beauty revealed in servility is like love
stolen, with only the case,
left for the first person,
“s” hisses away, the fabled snake,
already lost.

20. The farewell with Smoking Hands: Nocturne.

That tutting with your quick movement of the nape.
I settle for secrecy. A hidden naturalist,
waiting to best observe love’s calm ecology.
Only the burning can expose me.
When love’s contours are wide apart,
the gradient is slight. I will let you go
to re-inhabit my lonely mind.

21. The Beast Inquires of the Mirror ,Toccata

You cannot be undiscovered
at every expedition.
Our world has rounded on its self
and all projections read the same surface.
Desire speaks as a vulnerable hand
reaching for the thread in the labyrinth
of our pleasure-making,
leading Orpheus from the rear.
And yet we berth here.
Again so familiar,
now in this landscape.
Femality,
the formal assertion
of your sex, does not mimic
the patriarchy of the beasts.


22. The Guiltiness of the Beasts’ Burden: Bourrée

Soon the tide will turn
and we will drift apart
the packet boat lost to
the harbour in a printed storm .
You stand trim and alert by the
trammels of vacuous violence;
like the slave rings
you showed me once on
the harbour front at Liverpool,
or moody on the Riva dei Schiavi in Venice,
or dusty, dessicated
woodwork screens
in the Topkapi harem
were we walked
looking for a place
to be alone from our guide.

Somewhere
on the shelves of memory
a broken touch tokens
a ritornello.

23. The Sickness of the Beast: Andante.

You guide the prow towards
that delicate seafront and the
clumsy dreadnought
glides into the lock to rise
with your encircling power.
Our fire, our transportation
become virtuoso
flight a above the storms
so equal in time.
Our wings burn in duple measure,
where the time cannot be divided,
written on the bar.
We cry, as if in fear of grief.
New creatures in concert with our joy.


24. Beauty’s Return: In nomine

I love you as the empty flute
thrills to a silent breath.
I love as precious metal flows
firey from the smelting works
to the mould.
A case of brittle steel
broken open to reveal
the fixed form of cherishing
persuasive personhood.
To seek you is to understand
I have found you.
To find you, know
I hold nothing here
that breathing moist
with sweat and folly
does not already assert.
Its distance, its equal dignity
re-invents a partnership
of pleasure each time.
I love you in the
name of a theorist
unfolding a discovery,
or a homecomer
extinguishing the light
that led him to his door.


25. In the Bedroom: Serenade, idee fixe:

Outside hoar-misted windows,
the children search what they can
from winter's codicil snows
to make a remnant snowman.

Once a harvest of cold grain,
missiles, heedless of hurt, and slides
had spoiled that pure damask.
Now in shredded lace, age hides.

We lie within, ill at ease
to love's hazard offerings.
The children guard what they've seized
from daylight's threat returning.
I touch your thigh. Re-gatherers of taste,
why should not new tenderness make haste?

26. Discourse on the Terrace :Gigue

Beauty is always of the body.
Pythagoreans divide your time
and teach you day and night
divide your pitch
into shadow and light
that doubles and distances
the harmony.
To ascend into your high glare
of sound is always tense.
Strength, force and weight
divide from your shape
and silence is broken
by distant, whispered chaos. .
The sophists counter your skin
and dress you in the body’s rhetoric,
of personal hours.
Plato withdraws your perfect body
from the crowd, led by blind Eros.
You are Kalos, “of whom all men
seek the reality"

To show you in the Western theatres
Plotinust the ringmaster sets up
his shadowplay of minutes.
While bound, bent Aristotle
follows on in the triumph of love.
and curses the seconds
of the Golden Mean, that tragedy
depend on our character.


27. The Beasts’Flocks Come to Drink

Once a monster of man and mind
of anima and animosity
had ravaged our pure domain.
Now the border’s open .
that fearful exiles might drink
again from their home trough.

28. Beauty Hides as a Statue. Folk Dance.

On the measured wall, a broad-shouldered
girl, never before so naked, live, inward,
in the light erasure of a pencil sketch.
A charcoal line of dancers sways to stretch
sardanas on the paper afternoon.

Outside, a square is laid out, opportune,
with wooden benches, coloured paper flags,
crepe, poster-paint scenery and circus-tags.
Now the driving rain charges the gutters.
Little grey lizards skulk under shutters.
My children witness the unmasking of clowns,
swollen sawdust and rain-torn, cardboard crowns.
The acrobats have run to save their uniforms.
Only the war memorial conforms,
a young wife fused to a granite plinth.
Greasepaint runs red from the make-up lint,
yet, as we watch, the rain keeps spinning
a mist of lace on the widow's fixed mourning,
splashing white and crystal upon bygones
throwing from all sides of her robe of bronze,
a lithe, scudding bridal veil of water
Though caravans are shut, rain will not leave her.
The last paint souses through the drain's choaked grid,
yet sequins of pure gauze flare,so lively, so vibrant, liquid
jugglers that swerve and stagger about the death-girl.
My children dance around her drenching swirl,
duck her showery life and shriek with joy
She misleads them like a wilful tomboy

Then we remember the young statue's face
and return to the Art Gallery,
and to the sketch, to that inside place.

29. In the Temple: Adagio


In the museé, space has shelved time.
Those framed dreams by Maillol,
have given nothing to chance
and make beauty in her own universe,
her matronal privacy recreated,
elsewhere in the sharp light
of a pencil sketch,
the arrow of love’s delight

30.The Sisters Expose the Prince as a False Magician; polka:

This seedy magician comes on stage.
Beside him you curtsey in lithe homage.
You flash those gilded, sequinned tights
that radiate allure before the lights.
Spots halo your lamé charm so brilliant;
the conjuror's suited assistant.
The youngest of a cell of nine,
show-biz people from an exiled line
Expelled from your convent for kissing at Mass,
you lived on the streets of Montparnasse.
The audience, we fix on your donain,
losing hold of what we held mundane.
Carnations and flappign love-birds
burst from screwn paper and words.
Then you stand concealed to copy down
some random text from critics of renown
to palm it into a secret, sugered well
for him to steal, inspired, and to fortell.
Grace's destined urn is naturally switched
to force a trick on the profane bewitched.
Those knots of reason fall away for art.
The trick is measured, part for part.
Beast’s moral style and universla law
put you beneath his transcendental saw.
The master sweats and stamps and twirls his wand.
Yet all eyes turn to you, the sight beyond.
His poem is the set -up, not the trick.
You vanish in his hollow box so slick.
A viewless, doorless versifier , a penetralia
which you have made your place, Thalia.
You bare your heart