Well, if I haven’t exactly got on top of the work, it’s no longer on top of me. I can emerge briefly, blinking in the sunlight, until the next deluge arrives & I have to clamber back in again. Coursework, coursework… A great stew of mangled language, fractured punctuation, half-digested, half-regurgitated concepts, dimly apprehended ideas, solemn howlers – all made tolerable by the odd passage of crystalline prose, wise & witty, cogent & clear. Bless such students – summa cum laude. Let us have them stuffed for posterity…
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Merrie England, Vol. II. For Easter, Emma, Reuben & I went to stay in The Rectory with Emma’s parents in the almost achingly English village of Headley in deepest Hampshire. If Steyning High Street (see previous posts) resonates daily to the quacking & braying of whippet-thin blonde mums in designer denims clambering into 4x4s, Headley booms to the sound of accents heard now only in grainy monochrome films from the ‘40s or within the high walls of Buck House. In Headley Tony Blair is seen as a child-eating, nun-raping Red who has come for your daughters. Flying triumphant from the tower of All Saints’ Church (Norman with Saxon foundations) is the cross of St George. Which is odd because Emma’s father, who is the Vicar, is a Labour-voting, ecumenical Anglican liberal. But the stouthearted yeoman of England has always tolerated – even encouraged – madness in the clergy so the pews of All Saints are packed every Sunday.
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A short while back, just for the exercise, I decided to return to the formalism of rhyme & metre so I dug out an old poem & took the spanner to it. The rhyme – simple A-B-A-B – just about hangs together. The rhythm, however, really puts the nuts & bolts under strain. I’ve got a couple more in the pipeline & all the work on them will have to be done down in the engine room.
When I started to write poetry in my teens, I emulated the Beats. Intoxicated by their cataracts of language & their obsession with flash & filigree, I produced reams of frothy nonsense, not even competent enough to qualify as parody. My English teacher, the distinguished poet Brian Merrikin Hill, was kind & tolerant to a fault. The closest he ever got to criticism was once when returning the latest tonnage to me he murmured, “When breaking the rules of form & structure, you really need to know empirically how they work”. Standing as I was on the threshold of greatness, I nodded curtly & carried on as before…
AFTER THE FUNERAL
The funeral is over. In a cloud of friends
and family you walk the sunlit path.
The hearses croon and glide away; the afternoon unbends
like a slow river. Pausing, he draws a breath,
this mourner, bolder than the rest,
touches your elbow as you mount the step.
They see you through a gauze of grief, obsessed
with the processes of loss – the map
destroyed, the compass spinning, spinning
and, shadowless, you, impeccably alone,
pale and beautiful with pain at the beginning
of this passage taken on your own.
Thus you pass through doorways, sit in chairs,
sip tea. And all the time they watch, they listen,
waiting for the cataract . You climb the stairs;
they breathe as one; tears glisten
as they speculate your progress
from the landing to his bedroom door.
But, wrapped in their vicarious distress,
they miss your swift return, along the corridor,
into the garden, down the path. And there you hesitate
where zebra sunlight stripes the rowan tree,
where as a child you hid away to incubate
your dreams; where, if you closed your eyes, they couldn’t see.
Inside the circle of your desolation, time
consumes itself; your foetal self-embrace
circulates memory like a nursery rhyme:
the pulse-familiar patterns of his face,
his voice, his hair, his body’s warmth. But light
endures and into your vacuum dark
its blade intrudes, wounds you awake. And sight
restored, you drown in your senses: stark
leaves on a flickering sky, the sea-green
scent of weeds, crow-call, the lark that outsails
her shadow, bloody fuscias in the shade. Between
the bud and the burial, there the flower prevails.
