Dick Jones' Patteran Pages

Back after a brief sojourn to contemplate some important issues. Now done for the time being.

:::

This is a substantial re-drafting of a fairly recent poem.

AMORE SUSCRESCENTE

Amore suscrescente
pariter e medio
avulso procul tedio,
fit ludus ineffabilis
membris, lacertis, labii.

Another day high on promise: prima
vere, the green virus that blows in the
temperate air from anther to carpel:

ferns curled like naked sleepers;
the purple sprout and stand of crocus,
the white flash of sprung snowdrop. 

And you and I charged as one, the circuit
crackling where we pass like a current
unsheathed. We two in grave danger of

fusing the thin filament that carries
the old dreams: blurred tales and easy
narratives, fetched from the rummage

of our songs - like cloud kissing cloud,
like the way in which water finds water;
you and I caught in a limbless dance,

muscle-free, trapped on a skidpan of
ancient music. Then that dream’s done
and love turns into a plume of steam.

And suddenly it’s circumstance that
shuts the doors, turns out the lights
and shivers the dark around us so that

for a drugged minute our fingers walk
the gap between us then link and grip
and twist, febrile and purposeless, and

our faces swing inwards like wind-borne
lanterns, light smudged into heat.
We breath the last three seconds of

our solitary breath and crash like
panicking birds in a collision of wings
and claws. Et fit ludus ineffabilis.

:::

The poem out loud.

AMOR SUCRESCENTE

I'm going to take a bit of a break. Thanks to all for the support for and comments about the book. Hope to be back before too long. 

Well, it's finally off the presses, in between covers and packed into boxes in some vast Amazon warehouse. I'm absolutely delighted with the production of the book and grateful  beyond measure to Beth for bringing it all about from twinkle in eye to palpable form. And that form is available in hardback, paperback and Kindle. Right here is where you can make your choice! 

:::

This publication is the culmination of a long-held ambition. But I'm still not entirely sure why having my own slim volume became so important to me so early and remained so firmly in place beyond the normal span of vain ambition. My writing has always been driven at source by the need to externalise restless currents and patterns active within. And whilst there has always been the attendant desire to communicate the results, in the absence of any medium through which to achieve it, I would still write, as it were, in the darkness. So for all the benefits, egotistical and technical, that might come with public response, the telling rather than the showing has been the prime motivation. Thus my bemusement at the persistence of the desire to have a collection of my poems printed onto paper and bound within covers. 

I can only suppose that I am no less vulnerable to the worm of existential uncertainty gnawing from within than anyone else. When I believe that a poem has at least gone some way towards apprehending and then shaping through words the charge from deep within that has sought some outward expression, I feel fulfilled. But not for long. There is always too powerful a sense of uncompleted business; too dominating a sense of an undertow of unaddressed associated issues. If what we aim for through creative acts is some attempt at an integration of the dislocated self then this unease is a constant goad and the creator is Sisyphus! Hence, in practical terms, the continuous re-drafting that follows, sometimes over years. 

So maybe I seek a kind of ratification for the validity of those scraps and tatters that do emerge. I canvas for some response from the reader that confirms and validates through shared recognition both the experience recorded and the perspective on it that the poem presents. Thus the gathering of a great body of those scraps and tatters together in one place might represent a consolidation of that confirmation and validation. And with this there comes satisfaction of the rarest kind - a reintegration of one's deepest sense of self. 

 

MUTES

So foul and fair a day I have not seen… Scything rain kicked along by a blustery wind all night and most of the day. Now in the afternoon, bright sun but with huge bruised clouds rolling up behind. One of my fellow playground mums tells me that the family is going camping in Gloucestershire at the weekend. At least I’m promised a little schadenfreude in the warmth of my sitting room, then.

:::

Ancient Lights is nearly ready. Beth’s received the first hardback. Now the paperbacks are being printed and we hope to be able to declare publication for May 1^st. Exciting and rewarding after years of flocks of offerings coming home to roost. But I must embroider onto my inner sampler the words of archy and mehitabel author Don Marquis: ‘Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo’.

:::

I wrote recently of my continued blogging; of the way in which momentum alone seems to maintain the process long after the peak of writer commitment and reader response has passed. I note with some surprise that there’s a 13-day gap between the previous post and this one where once I was posting every day, which is a little sad. I regret too that the blog has become little more than a forum for the road testing of poems rather than presenting an alternation of prose and verse, as used to be the case.

But all is change. These hefty ocean-going blogs continue to give way to the smaller, swifter craft. Although the microblog and Twitter hold little appeal for me, I seem to spend much more time chatting on Facebook than I do hauling sail over here so I guess I’m evolving (albeit sluggishly) along with the general trends in social media. That having been said, I’ve dumped my short-lived Tumblr blog. I couldn’t get it to format as I wanted and hand washing on the part of the Tumblr techies and my primitive coding savvy took away most of the charm and all of the functionality.

 :::

MAISIE AND EMMA

Beth's just sent me pictures of the hardback edition of Ancient Lights. Full publication date with both hardback and paperback editions available on Amazon is likely to be around May 1st. But you can pre-order now with a 10% discount until the end of the month (next week!)

When all's ready to go, I'll be blowing whistles and whirling football rattles. Dignity and restraint until then.

 

A near miss (I'm told) in a recent submission to my favourite poetry journal, Magma. Shared with Poets United.

JAZZ CLUB: TUBBY HAYES AT THE FLAMINGO

The chunter of the bass,
a ruminant, chewing the
syllables over the heft
and shuffle of the drums.
A hi-hat sneeze, a pebble-
dash across the snare.
Eyes closed, strap-hanging
in rhythm like a passenger,
he nurses the tenor, cheek
nuzzled against the curve
of mouthpiece, waiting.

We huddle round the table,
heads swinging, on the nod
inside blue fumes. I see us
across the room – two
impasto vagabonds, skinny
chancers, callow, untried,
painted by Soutine, in blues
and blacks; two grotesques
trapped in a box of shadows.

And then there’s voltage.
First it’s the shock of a
clicking relay: a press-roll,
a rim-shot, a four-bar hiatus.
And then he’s bucking like
a great bull waking out of
a dream, his horn fighting
the thick air, spilling a
tumbling mess of wisdom,
blown out of light and
into the dark on a long
unfurling breath,  the tale
of a messenger with
too much to tell
and too little time.

And like a dreamer waking,
here in my small piece
of the real world, I’m up
on my feet. Not to dance
or to worship or to scat
my own shower of notes
back at him, but just to
wake up for the first time
to the sound of surprise and
to stay standing while my heart
shifts a beat and my blood
is drawn by a new mad moon
for the first time. 

I'm experimenting with a Tumblr blog. I've just installed comments via Disqus (there's no on-board facility) and I'm checking out blogroll installation too. Typepad is expensive and my usage of it these days doesn't really justify the expense. If I can tweak the Tumblr blog a little further, I may migrate at some point. It's called 'Boskengro' and it's here.

A new poem in a first draft. Shared on Poets United.



DOORS

Every door has its voice and every voice
its moment in the singing bowl fashioned
from the year, the month, the minute.

Hear now that spring-loaded tongue kissing
the word ‘closed’ into a brass mouth. And
hear too the voice that calls, “I’m home!” and
the voice that answers, “We’re in the kitchen!”.

Ah, light that falls in bars, the smell of honeysuckle.
So hear too the voice that gasps its severance
from enclosure, mouth sucked open, jaw ajar,
and the voice that doesn’t call “Goodbye”.

A re-draft for The Mag.

 

NAMES OF THE MOON

Busted egg:
bone cup skin thin, porous as
white air. This uncornered house
that carries light inside
the clouds then spills silver.

Sucked pebble:
tongued smooth by black sand.
Star-flecks on a sable field,
sour white, bleached as night,
juice dried, a flat splash.

Old coin:
dun metal edged like a
flint shard, spent, effaced,
the ghost profile watching
west, the setting point.

Bleached horns:
hook hanging, depending nothing
but planet-wrack,
clipped strings of light,
the dead hair of comets.

Broken button:
tugged and twined, frayed against
the cape and cowl, shrugged high
and loose in ice-heart
marrowbone dark.

Flat cataract:
milk or smoke or silica,
obscuring the macula, watching
only what she remembers
of red shift, of spectrum drift.

Abalone pearl:
infected by a flushed horizon
thus pink and purple,
elliptical meniscus,
frozen albumen.

Eyes in the night:
tsuki, menes,
chand, spogmay,
he’ni, loar,
namwaikaina.

Another first draft. This has its origins in an overheard train conversation so poignant that I took notes. Shared with Poets United and dVers.

IN THE DAUBIGNY CHAPEL

Mice are in the organ loft. I can hear
their scratch and scatter, tiny scraps
of moss on the move across the bones
of their ancestors. July sun shimmers
the riches of the windows. And down
on the south aisle floor, sprawling like
a scrubbing penitent, your golden hair
across your face, you lift the brass
up through the paper, inch by inch.

We are in the blissful moment, you
and I. Light and time reiterate
and the motes of dust stand still.
You look so young, so beautiful that
I barely hear the voice that says,
small but clear, ‘You want. Not need
but want. Know this now and then
down the long noise of the years".

A first draft, shared with dVerse.

THE DIBBER

Love can be a blunt instrument, functional
and artless, like a well-used gardening tool.
The gracious, the febrile, the decorous,
the abandoned – all of these of love’s
assorted protocols and more may slip
behind the smoke of years. But earth
ennobles as it grounds and the green
still draws keen and tart through the wood.

MUTES 2

I’ve got into a pistols-at-dawn going with a Facebook friend over the top five greatest love songs ever. A classic change-your-mind-a-minute-later situation, of course, but here’s where I am (now was) at 08.:09 on Friday morning:

HEY, THAT'S NO WAY TO SAY GOODBYE. / Leonard Cohen

THE DARK-EYED SAILOR / Steeleye Span

CAN'T HELP FALLING IN LOVE / Elvis Presley

THE WAY YOU LOOK TONIGHT / Fred Astaire or Tony Bennett

THE WESTERN WIND / Traditional poem, set to music in the 15^th century. Only four lines:

Western wind, when wilt thou blow

That the small rain down can rain?

Christ, that my love were in my arms

And I in my bed again.

Westron Wind

:::

My mate Geoff – an Englishman happily marooned in British Columbia – sent me this small but perfectly formed little story about broadcast journalist Barbara Walters.  Stop me if you’ve heard it before…

Barbara Walters did a story on gender roles in Kabul several years before the Afghan conflict.  She noted that women customarily walked about ten paces behind their husbands. She returned to Kabul recently and observed that the men now walk several paces behind their wives. Ms. Walters approached one of the Afghani women and said, "This is marvelous. Can you tell the free world just what enabled women to achieve this reversal of roles?"

"Land mines," said the woman.

:::

David Armand is an actor and mime artist who’s pretty much cornered the field in what, for so florid a performance medium, is rather stiffly termed ‘interpretative dance’. He has a regular spot on the BBC TV comedy impro show, Fast and Loose in which he mimes the lyric of a well-known song to a pair of contestants wearing sound-blocking headphones.

 

:::

The book’s out very soon now. Expect aggressive marketing.

A first draft, shared with dVerse.



BECOMING

How we never stop becoming. Early morning,
the time when once I would bloom into waking,
root and branch as one, now finds me cautious

like a man in a foxhole, bruised out of dreaming
by a persistence of gunfire. Now I lie on my back,
all heft and torpor, checking through a spasm

of cramps for pain or paralysis. All I need is light,
I know this, the light that rises like bright bread.
Whether crusted with cloud or white as flour,

half-blind with late sleeping, I rise towards it,
phototropic, thirsty for this new quenching, this
drenching, this latest, this freshest becoming.

pic: http://www.rossphotography.co.uk/tag/lone-tree/

DOUG MACGOWAN / BILL BOAZMAN / DICK JONES

Played a great gig last Friday at Kontra Roots Club at Finedon, north of Bedford. Bill, Doug and I presenting a 15-number set that emerged from a one-off rehearsal that stretched through most of the day preceding the evening’s performance.

Bill and I have been playing together on and off for 30 years. I’ve written of Sonny Black’s Blues Band before and I won’t reiterate subsequent reiterations here. I’d just add that when we were playing regularly I was Head of Drama at the progressive school Frensham Heights and several of my older pupils – three in particular – would accompany me to gigs. Keenest was Doug MacGowan (then Smith), whose choice-of-career struggle between replacing Björn Borg or Kenneth Branagh had just been abruptly supplemented by Mark Knopfler. Tempering this latter ambition slightly, Doug would watch Bill’s fingers intently throughout each number, trying out the memorised runs and shapes on his guitar when he got home.

Perseverance paid off long after Borg and Branagh were allowed to reign unchallenged and the years claimed Sonny Black’s Blues Band. Doug’s natural musical ability ensured phenomenal results by his 20s. Professional acting occupied ten years and then, sadly, a subsequent musical career (including two CDs) was disrupted by injury and a five-year sojourn in Ireland. But within those two decades Doug and I would play together whenever we could, putting together arrangements that only occasionally got gigged. And we would recall frequently the evenings in smoky pubs when he would scrutinise Bill’s fretwork for homework later.

So when a duo gig came up for Bill and I, it seemed, after all these years, the ideal opportunity to pair up the guitarists. A day’s work was done, the results were launched at the Kontra Club and it seemed as if somehow a circle was completed.

A second draft, shared with The Mag.



LOSS

It’s like she’s lost
a limb. One-winged
she turns in circles,

tilted, out of kilter,
leans in doorways
left behind.

Lopsided, drowned
in a crowd, she stares
at walls for hours,

following the logic
of the brickwork,
but the sums

make no sense:
two minus one becomes
none; she disappears.

Then again, loss
means increase:
enormously alone,

she fills rooms. Stuffed
with solitude, she’s
trapped in small spaces.

Or landlocked,
she is a continent
without roads, without cities.

Maps are redundant:
all directions lead
to polar north.

Loss is totality:
bells shake out
no sound;

water runs dry
from the tap;
lanterns cast

no light;
she hangs in space,
a dark star,

all substance compressed
into a single voice,
tongueless, empty breath,

a sonar probe
reaching for
first words.

Words come like
broken glass. Light
returns, blinding white.

Grief squalls, uncoiling,
ex corde vita, bright
and red with blood.