Dick Jones' Patteran Pages

The following is a re-jigging of a poem I wrote four years ago. Interested in breaking free from the constraints of relatively conventional form, I sprung out of cover an alter ego called Jago Flood and had him write a series of poems concerned more with sounds and visions than narrative and literality.

The challenge was to try to write directly from the raw impulse, the point at which the irresistible drive to write begins but has as yet to select and marshal language into form and shape.  What I found was that even at that inchoate growth point a monitoring process takes place and a discipline kicks in. At the moment the first word emerges to frame a sense impression, the next word is in the breech.

NAMES OF THE MOON

Sucked pebble:
tongued smooth by black sand.
Starflecks 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.

TEENAGE SEX – THE NAKED TRUTH!

For all the heady freedoms that, supposedly, came cascading down through the decades following the swinging ‘60s, there remain in this country pockets of deep and abiding prurience concerning issues of sexuality.  Whilst every self-respecting soap and reality show will ensure the bold representation of same-sex relationships, many amongst their hardcore aficionados will continue to judge and censure when encountering them away from the TV screen.  By and large, theory seems to have been accommodated.  Campness - preferably extravagant to the point of crass stereotype - is simply one more comic gambit in the presenter’s behavioural vocabulary.  A British audience likes nothing more than clunky gags and sniggering puns that allude to his gender preferences, particularly if directed at some hapless contestant plucked from the front row.  Practice, however, remains beyond the pale and careers have, at best, faltered when media revelations about an individual’s actual sexual activity out there in the real world have broken.

Forty years ago, of course, one would have expected nothing else.  My secondary schooling ran …between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles' first LP, during which time, Philip Larkin tells us, more with cultural than evolutionary accuracy, sexual intercourse began.

In my case he was actually on the nail.  But what casually held and shamelessly expressed prejudices preceded my own journey towards more empirical enlightenment concerning the realities of sexuality.  I attended a mixed boarding and day school established and run by a Quaker couple, Kenneth and Frances Barnes, with very advanced views on teenage sexual development.  Eschewing the standard form whereby sexual awareness had the currency of witchcraft, only to be hinted at darkly through veiled references to beastliness and sensuality, the Barnes’ employed a tactic of direct confrontation.  We would gather somewhat formally of an evening in their well-appointed sitting room, with its views across the Yorkshire farmland that surrounded the school on all sides.  Then, once we were distributed across sofa, chairs and floor – the favoured few grouped around Kenneth’s armchair, arms clasped around knees somewhat in the manner of the painting The Boyhood of Raleigh - the session would begin.

It was basically a question and answer process, resembling more a philosophy tutorial than an open discussion. There was no censorship of topics; anything could be asked. But the expectation was that any answer provided would be accepted as incontrovertible fact. In this way we learned, first and foremost, that sexual yearnings are natural and that no shame should be felt when they occurred.

However (and here the fatal caveats began), sexual energy was volatile and thus dangerous and the inchoate and primitive yearnings to which all adolescents are prone must be kept in check.  And, of course, the physical expression of such yearnings was appropriate only for adults within a properly sanctified marriage.

As for same-sex relationships, the possibility simply never arose. For the Barnes’, homosexuality was deviant.  However, a compassionate and enlightened view was proposed: in the first instance, those afflicted needed guidance back towards the properly ordained orientation. If gentle but firm leadership didn’t work then clearly medical intervention might be necessary.

So all relationships were made subject to intense scrutiny by the Barnes’.  Physical contact was proscribed: no hand-holding, no ‘canoodling’. Instead, a vigorous, wholesome, hearty companionship was demanded.  If it was suspected that anything other than brisk walks across the fields, solemn discussion of current affairs or brow-furrowing sessions around the record player listening to classical music were going on, the boy and girl in question would be summoned to the sitting room for a grilling and a private lecture.

Had the Barnes’ touch been lighter – had they injected into their earnest, worthy dedication to the cause of authentic sexual enlightenment a little humour, a little personal circumspection - then maybe a small revolution in that corner of West Yorkshire might have anticipated by four or five years the cataclysm that reordered completely the socio-cultural landscape across the Western world.

But their minute observation of our behaviour was informed by a frequently articulated belief that the teenager was a hapless victim of his or her hormones.  Adolescence was seen by Kenneth and Frances as too frequently an ugly, inarticulate condition in which order had constantly to be wrested from chaos.  Metaphorical buckets of water needed to be positioned strategically so as to be available when we all went into rut.  Pop music was discouraged to the point of being banned. Kenneth lumped all of it – rock’n’roll, which was then in decline, the anodyne pap that trailed it, the Dixieland and cool school sounds that the French teacher shared with us – under the heading of jazz. It was jungle music whose sole purpose was to inflame the carnal appetites.  And the street fashions that were burgeoning at the time were viewed with palpable disgust. “You look like common prostitutes!” Frances exploded one dance night when a couple of girls turned up in skirts fashionably flounced up like lampshades under layers of stiffened petticoats.

And the consequence was, of course, that, in this febrile atmosphere we obliged readily and rose to the challenge.  Getting away with at least a morsel of the rank feast from which the Barnes’ tried to keep us became an obligation.  G. and I would discuss ceaselessly with all the zeal of brigands planning a skirmish who we would entice to our den in the school woods and how.  We were hazier about what would actually transpire once there, but G. made it his personal quest to acquaint himself intimately with brassiere fastening technology so that business might be swiftly initiated.  And night after night in the Summer Term expeditions would take us down the fire escape and onto the flat roof of the staff room so that we could slip through the window of the girls’ dorm that overlooked it. Once in there nothing of great consequence would ever take place.  Bodies might lie stiffly side-by-side in a 3' wide bed and a little tight-lipped oscular action might take place, but after an hour or two we would climb back up the fire escape in some relief and then spend the remainder of the night marking our performances out of ten.

All of this absorbing preoccupation was, of course, heterosexual. With the clarity of hindsight, I can now identify with some certainty two of our number as gay.  At the time nobody queried the nature of their friendship.  That they spent nearly all their time together, frequently shunning the company of others, didn’t strike us as odd. G. and I were pretty much inseparable and it never occurred to us that others might see in this anything to be questioned.  And the two friends joined in the tale-telling and played their part readily in the nocturnal expeditions. Had we even suspected that they might be more interested in each other than in five-out-of-ten (hand under sweater and onto outside of bra), we would have been horrified. For all the proliferation in showers and at bath time of ‘bum-chum’ and ‘arse-bandit’ terminology and the covet glances given to each other’s evolving equipment, the notion of relationship would have been unthinkable in its perversity. And such was our feverish consciousness of our own sexuality and its uncertain nature, focus and degree, it’s likely that we would have been systematic and merciless in our persecution.

One early Monday morning in winter, as we sat peeling potatoes in the unheated kitchen, A. - normally exploring an image spectrum somewhere between languid Oscar Wilde and noisy D.H. Lawrence - was unusually quiet.  The others briefly distracted, he leaned towards me and told me that, the afternoon before, he and his girlfriend had ‘crossed the threshold’ (his uncharacteristically coy phrase) in the snow down in the pine woods. Something in the sobriety of the announcement – a certain tone of wonder, maybe – convinced me that it was his first time.  From then on, A. took no further part in the fevered discussions of what we had done and to whom in the holidays and what we planned to achieve this term.

Not long after that, early in the spring and much to our mutual surprise and delight, my new girlfriend and I also crossed the threshold.  And I too lost interest in the after hours dorm talks, my energies now engaged in the dual preoccupations of coping with a fully-fledged relationship and ducking below the Barnes’ well-tuned radar.

For all the delightful intensity of first-time love, it was in many ways a difficult and draining relationship.  But all these many years later I surprise myself by being glad of it.  From the dynamic of constant discovery, from the exhilaration of all that emotion in process, I learned my first lessons about mutuality.

I was 16 at the time and my prejudices remained intact for some while to come.  I would have had real difficulty in projecting my own pleasures and pains into any perception of a same-sex relationship conducted by two of my peers, male or female. And even if some process of reflection arising from my voracious reading at the time had provoked a little enlightenment, the febrile atmosphere that prevailed at school, emanating from the Barnes’ obsessive and prescriptive concern for our psycho-sexual health would have stifled it.

But after a busy year in the world following graduation, it was my reading (notably James Baldwin’s Another Country) and the longer view available outside the hothouse of boarding school that provided the broader perspective. By the time I went to college at 19 and encountered for the first time open (if discreet) gay relationships within my social circle, some tolerance was in place and I accepted – not without a degree of prurient curiosity – their authenticity.

I would stop short of prescribing full sexual relationships for adolescents, gay or straight, within school as a crucial component in their emotional education! Whatever revolutionary changes ought to take place in curricular organisation, I don’t really see a place for timetabled intimacy.  But I know that what minute quantity of empirical wisdom I managed to acquire at that most callow of times drew some of its substance from my conducting the very kind of relationship that Kenneth and Frances Barnes worked so hard to stifle.  I would state again: there is no universal lesson to be extrapolated from my personal experience.  But the need for informed, compassionate, non-judgemental and wise perceptions on the part of the educators in our schools is clearly paramount. It’s sad that our journey towards it remains so slow.

An earlier version of this post appeared in 2006.

...

TEENAGE SEX

Is sex better
than smoking with friends
under dripping trees?

Does it beat
late-night vodka
from the bottle?

And how does it compare
to a one-hand catch
just before the boundary?

Since the sarcoidosis, my relationship with hospitals has altered subtly but distinctly. Now hospital is where I leave my blood and then come back for breezy consultations about it, me in torments, expecting the worst, TW reassuring but implacably vague.

When my dad was admitted at the age of 84 for a perforated ulcer, hospital was strange territory, an abode of the halt and the lame...

FRONTIERS

No one likes a hospital. Mortality
accommodated, pain as price or penalty.
Heartbreak hotels, all jangling traffic,

white antibodies pushing trollies
through  flapping rubber doors like valves,
knackered doctors, heads on desks.

So when, this Christmas, it's my dad
I'm visiting, I step into the antiseptic fug
with more than usual trepidation.

Spat out by a peristaltic lift, I shuffle,
fruitless, flowerless, down the bed-line.
Jones, J.C. (k.a. 'Jack'), the scribbled notice says. 

But in his place there lies half-
submerged beneath a glacial sheet,
an ice-warrior. Some arctic wind

has drifted snow against his bones
and now  ghost-whispers come down time
within his slight breathing.  December

in his veins, and in the evening sky
against the windows.  I’m at the bedhead,
watching the reptile pulse in throat

and eyelid, the icicle drips of glucose
ticking silently.  I am a stranger
in your world of white light, filaments

and dials.  I am invisible: its customs
disregard my useless love. Its ministers,
purposeful and sure of their ground,

occupy the space between us, lifting
and settling like nesting birds.  You hibernate,
safe within your cage of branches.

Electronic doors discharge me, unprepared
for these old lands made strange. Raw

wind pulls rain across the car park;

hope shreds, like the clouds.  I drive through limbo.
Blurred, dissolving in my rear-view mirror,
the hospital tips and sinks like a ship of lights.

IT’S A MIGHTY LONG WAY DOWN ROCK’N’ROLL

Glastonbury 2009. I watch the festival coverage on TV every year and, as I push back into the clamshell comfort of the sofa, two powerful reflections come onstream simultaneously.  In no order of priority they are:

1. I am so very glad of the onward march from primeval domestic technology that means that I have a choice as to whether to thrash around under canvas in the rain or nurse a glass of Mouton Cadet inside a house made of bricks.
2. I am so very glad that at an age that might be four times that of any randomly selected member of the mosh pit in front of the Pyramid Stage, I can still be just as excited as ever by bands and singers new to me.

No exception this year. So far it’s been Friendly Fires, The Maccabees and VV Brown. Electrifying, all three, with roots buried deep but new shoots flowering in abundance. Bill toppers for Friday, however, were the reformed Specials. Ska-powered, punk-edged political pop from the early ‘80s, newly relevant as, once again, the racists are in our streets and at our hustings and democracy is getting a kicking, not from the electorate but from the elected.

Later tonight and headlining tomorrow, past and present coalesce with performances from, respectively, Neil Young, Crosby, Stills and Nash and Bruce Springsteen. Past because of the portfolio of anthems that all have contributed to the overall rock-and-roll canon; present because unflagging creative momentum has carried them through, untouched by the fidgety shifts in the surface patterns of popular music but constantly present within the authentic developments that urge the music forward.

...

Consider further. For so many of us, music acts as a sort of soundtrack to life and we are all very covetous of those sounds that mean most to us.  Maybe it’s simply a matter of a piece of music providing a current back to a key moment in life contemporaneous to the music so that when it’s heard the essence of that moment is relived.  Or maybe the music carries some deep personal significance: the revelation that a well-turned lyric can have all the force of poetry, or the realisation that great political truths can be encapsulated in a simple song. 

The crucial factor is that the last three generations since the War share a largely unreflecting, maybe even a largely unconscious sense of music as a phenomenon of cultural unification.  Boundaries of class, age, nationality, intellect, personality are breached by popular song and dance.  Like a net, that commonality of musical perception and experience binds us together as was never the case within and before the first half of the last century.  Whether one sees the emergence of The Beatles as symptom or cause in all this is largely irrelevant. The fact remains that by the mid-1960s young people across the Western world were united across barriers that hitherto had served as cultural absolutes, containing them securely within their own zones of social and cultural functioning. 

And it was whilst in the midst of this set of rather arid socio-cultural ponderings that I had my little eureka moment - the realisation of one fundamentally important aspect of being the age I am that is of unique value.  It’s simple and undramatic: I was there at the beginning of the voyage, have travelled the journey uninterrupted ever since and anticipate its rich and fulfilling continuation for many years yet. More specifically and personally, I can recall with absolute clarity that brief but revolutionary time within which the world dissolved from musical black and white into glorious, garish Technicolor.  For me it happened thus…

In the mid-‘50s I was a timid, hypersensitive child of eight, plucked by my parents from an entirely ordinary state primary school whose standard red brick walls, linoleum corridors, white-tiled cloakrooms and asphalt playground filled me with fear and loathing.  In despair, they sent me to a tiny progressive school some 15 miles from suburban Kingston-upon-Thames and there, in happy rough-and-tumble chaos, I boarded for 5 years.  Freedom for we kids was pretty much total, but, kids being naturally conservative, we imposed order on our days, evenings and nights and we led relatively conventional lives.  One staple of the evenings – unusual in Britain at that time – was an hour or so in front of the television.  We watched more or less indiscriminately – documentaries, news broadcasts, quiz shows, nature programmes, whatever was on offer in those days of only two channels. 

However, I remember with particular clarity what passed for musical entertainment on the box in those monochrome times – big bands led by beaming men under patent leather comb-overs and wearing white tuxedos, fronted by female singers with vertical hairdos and flared skirts like lampshades.  The brass section would rise like artillery and fire off a salvo, followed by the saxes, and behind, pumping away on a Guild Savoy or a Hofner President, would be a seated guitarist with a Clark Gable moustache.  From time to time a vocal group – four finger-clicking men in under-the-collar bow ties – would chip in with a syncopated standard before we were returned to the unctuous grin of the baton-wielding bandleader.  Sweeping around the floor and past the static camera, catatonic couples, brylcreemed and lacquered, quickstepped joylessly.  The entire process generated as much excitement and had as much meaning for our small group of teens and pre-teens as the 6.00 PM TV news.

And then in 1956 the world changed utterly.  I have a series of fragmentary but vivid memories now: news items about riots in cinemas – seats slashed by young men in drape jackets to the harsh, honking strains of Bill Haley and The Comets; wild-eyed, plaid-shirted adolescents thrashing guitars in cellar clubs in Soho; an hysterical girl sobbing over and over to a baffled middle-aged interviewer the unlikely name ‘Elvis Presley’.  Then it was all of us in a bedroom gathered around a tiny Dansette record player watching shellac discs the size of dinner plates flopping onto the turntable, crackling briefly & then releasing messages from the other side of the universe.  The Everley Brothers, Fats Domino, Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, Tommy Steele, Lonnie Donegan… We looked at each other in mingled fear and fascination.  Even at that tender age we knew that nothing would ever be quite the same again.

Between that time of cultural revolution and now, it’s all snapshots – brief, bright moments frozen in time, each somehow defined by its musical soundtrack…

•    Aged 12, Paddy Neustatter and I climbing the beech tree in his enormous garden,  me asking him whether he loved Lindy Rutter and hoping that he’d say no because I did, with a passion. And the jangling of Buddy Holly’s ‘Words of Love’ floating down the garden from Paddy’s sister’s bedroom…
•    Staying for a summer fortnight in the Branch’s tiny cottage in the Malvern Hills and the thick, fat Louisiana sounds of Fats Domino’s ‘Blueberry Hill’ on a wind-up gramophone,  incongruous amongst rural English hollyhocks and roses round the door…
•    Aged 14, at another boarding school on a cold Yorkshire night, the end-of-term Christmas Dance and me outside in the snow, heartbroken again, staring through the Ballroom window at Pat Waters slow-dancing with Peter Kirkup to Elvis singing ‘Don’t’…
•     Aged 15, four of us sitting side-by-side on French teacher Roger’s sofa, listening to Leadbelly singing ‘Midnight Special, and new doors opening and new lights shining in…
•    Aged 16, listening to Jimmy Saville on Radio Luxembourg late at night under my bedclothes, willing him to play’ I’m Going Home’ by Gene Vincent, the only piece of vintage rock’n’roll in a desert of anodyne early ‘60s ballads…
•    Aged 16, losing my cherry in the dark and clammy tack room to which only Geoff and I had access (it having been seized by us for just this purpose) while Big Bill Broonzy sung about ‘The Glory of Love’ …
•    Aged 18, trying to keep my cigarette alight under the dripping rhododendrons in the pouring rain, 10 of us listening to Saturday Club on Tim’s portable transistor radio - ‘Love Me Do’ with Lennon’s harmonica sounding to me just like Delbert McClinton’s on Bruce Channel’s ‘Hey, Baby’ the year before…
•    Aged 18, sitting on the back door step at school in the early sun just before breakfast, having collected the morning papers from the village on my bike, with a copy of New Musical Express open on my lap, gazing disbelievingly at a grainy photo of five ugly, piratical youths with outrageously long hair sneering towards the camera. I sensed danger, ‘revolution in the air’…
•    Aged 18, at home, strung between school and whatever next (like I really cared), staring moodily at the TV and suddenly thunderstruck by sight of a skinny, shock-haired, boy-hobo sitting on a bottom stair hacking away at an acoustic guitar and singing about a swan on a river gliding by – Bob Dylan’s fleeting appearance in a long-forgotten TV play during his few weeks in London.  Instantly and fanatically, I wanted to become him.  I’m waiting still…
•    Aged 19, a jam-packed Sunday night at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond, a foot away from Clapton and the rest of The Yardbirds steaming their way through Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Smokestack Lightning’, and and mods in tonic suits hanging and swinging from the roofbeams like sloths gone crazy…
•    Aged 20 and handing out leaflets in Carnaby Street for my ‘new age jug and skiffle’ band’s first gig and seeing The Who hustling out of the Granny Takes A Trip boutique into their Austin Mini jeep, all targets, union jacks and sharp to die for suits.  After the gig that night we dropped the banjo, kazoos and acoustic guitar and went electric…
•    Aged 22, cowering in the corner of the vast dressing room at Alexandra Palace, venue of the legendary ’24 Hour Technicolor Dream’, my band (The Nervous System) lowest on the bill, watching a tripped out and terminally catatonic Syd Barrett being lifted bodily from the dressing room and onto the stage to play just about his last gig with Pink Floyd…
•     Aged 22, leaning over the squalid little bath in my cold-water flat in South-East London, washing my hair in coal-tar soap because I couldn’t afford shampoo and suddenly straightening up in delirious shock (and banging my head on the shower attachment) as I heard Hendrix on the radio blitzing his way into ‘Hey, Joe’ for the first time…
•    Aged 23, drifting into stoned slumber at 3.00 AM in our reeking squat after a gig in the West Country, with just-purchased ‘Sergeant Pepper’ playing over and over and into our hallucinogenic dreams with the record player on repeat mode…
•    Aged 23, swinging into One Stop Records in South Moulton Street, off Oxford Street, with a pair of £5.00 notes from a gig the night before, in search of the latest Stateside imports.  Leaving in a state close to spiritual ecstasy with Love’s ‘Forever Changes’, Captain Beefheart’s ‘Safe as Milk’, Kaleidoscope’s ‘Side Trips’ and The Byrds’ ‘The Notorious Byrd Brothers’ under my arm.  I have them all still…
•    Aged 25, a humid summer night, me alone in the tiny suburban flat in which my new wife (as of tomorrow’s wedding) and I would live, listening to Crosby, Still and Nash singing, ‘Wooden Ships’ and preparing myself for the Real World, the one through which my parents glided with such ease and for which – love notwithstanding – I was so unprepared...

When I was three we moved from the chequerboard Victorian streets of South-West London with their terraced houses and red-brick villas. Home was now a large detached corner house on a suburban avenue in Norbiton, Surrey.

When King George VI died in 1952, we were a solid, respectable (if, behind our high privet hedges, a slightly raffish) middle-middle class family, ready for the New Elizabethan era that was shortly to commence.

[4.]  1952 NORBITON AVENUE

The day they told us
that the king had died
the church bells at St John’s
were inconsolable.  The wireless news
came wrapped in Handel
and my mother, ironing in the kitchen
froze, the bright hoof hovering above
creased sheets.  On the trolleybus
to school, passengers stared
at their hands.  The conductor haunted
the stairs in black.  We crooned,
adrift through empty streets.

                           ...


[5.]  1952 LATCHMERE ROAD SCHOOL

In the Assembly Hall shoes barked
across the blockboard floor as we jolted
into fishbone lines. A monstrous silence
bound us; we forgot to speak.  My eyes
slid, panic-stricken, across scraped heads
and blazer backs to the black bands
on the teachers’ folded arms, to the melting
ice-cream colours of the Union Jack,
loose-furled beneath the portrait of the king,
to the glaucous sea-green light
that pressed against high windows. 
When the hymn broke like the first wave,
least expected, I was caught broadside:
brute music from the baby grand, slammed
hard; the ragged engine of four hundred voices
grinding against the tide.  Seized
by a greater grief than my own (motiveless,
unfocussed – who was this king
who had died in bed, not by the sword
in battle?), I sobbed.  What did I hear
unlocked inside those throats?  What broke,
shook loose and rattled down the centuries
before my birth? That calling out to an old god,
so far from song, an ululation thickening
the air and silting up my breathing.
Gathered up into a lavender bosom,
I was hustled into daylight and a thin
persistent rain.  Faceless, my guardian,
she rocked me, rocked me, the two of us
riding at anchor on a dim swell of voices,
storm-broken, soughing like an old wind.

A brief interruption to the scheduled programme for a newsflash from my friend Dana at Doctor Omed 's. Extraordinary stuff, both visual and documentary.

My maternal grandparents lived in an end-of-terrace tied cottage on the edge of the McNair-Vinson farming estate in eastern Kent. Across the lane were fields, arable and grazing, and behind the cottages there lay acres of apple orchards.

I remember, even as an infant not much past toddler stage, noting the difference between the sounds of the streets of Balham, diurnal and nocturnal, and the corresponding sounds in the hamlet of Swanley.

I was at my happiest as a child in the tiny house, the garden and beyond.

 

[3.] 1948: HOCKENDEN LANE

Lavender air.
Those sheets, ice fields.
The counterpane, a tide
of down. The clock’s tongue
tucking in the hours.

Nights, slow moving
tableaux, their music
the click/scrape percussion
of the stairs unbending. Soft
bodies bumping in the pipes
and fires murmuring
their coals asleep below.

The house implodes,
self-consuming in
the dark. I mumble catechisms,
self-preserving charms
inside the slow storm
of soft masonry
and feathers. Sleep
rises like a chorus.

Morning shoots light
through motes and cobwebs.
I stare at the ceiling,
wearing new eyes.
Crows call from the beeches.

                       ...

Motionless, alone, midsummer afternoon.
At face-level, fat leaves, spatulate,
grey-green and velvet, soft
as dog's ears.  Beyond is Grandad's
strawberry patch and the great red
seeded buboes, half seen through stems,
like rumours of some new disease
amongst us.  Twisted netting hangs
from sticks, a shredded tent
against the crows.  A July breeze
sidles round the cottage corner,
shivering the tin-lids, bottle-tops
and scraps of silver foil that hang
like fetishes to scare the birds away. 
Their scintillation catches late sunlight,
the faint brittle voices, polyrhythmic,
like thin ice breaking.  Shadows
find me still standing,
my face in leaves, listening.

ANCIENT LIGHTS

The following poems are part of an autobiographical sequence.under the general heading of Ancient Lights I’ve been nudging them through drafts, versions and re-writes for some years now. They last appeared here in a second draft a couple of years ago.

They begin with a poem called Stille Nacht, which describes the circumstances, domestic and global, that prevailed at my birth. I posted the latest version of the poem in December 2008.

The next two in the sequence concern a mixture of earliest personal memories blended with contemporaneous material drawn from anecdotes from the first two years of my life, which were spent in Balham, South-West London.

I shall post them in sequence over the next few days.

[2.] 1945:  EMANNUEL ROAD

Banded light, I should remember first,
from the bottle-green, ruby-red window.
Soused in colour, wordless,
I kick air, anticipating dance;
beat palmless hands together,
finding rhythm.  From another room,
through formless darkness, shellac hisses
introducing flaring danceband brass:
Carrol Gibbons, Henry Hall.
My parents foxtrot through my light, in love.
I sing the blues.

                         ...

Dad and Monty had a decent war,
home-guarding Clapham Common,
listening for the 'cello hum
of bombers. First, the 20-bar rest
and then the woodwind of incendiaries.
Crouching in the doorway
of the burned-out Coach and Horses,
tipping hipflasks, they evaluate
the midnight orchestras, mark them
out of ten, emerge, pissed and applauding,
to the siren's lone soprano.

Back soon. Sarcoidosis blood test season and a few anomalies to be sorted out.

On June 12th the total number of recorded swine ‘flu cases in the UK was 921. It’s proliferating faster in the UK than in any other European country.

I’m booking my old crock’s pneumonia jab first thing on Monday morning.

              INVOCATION

Dream, fable, first light, the dark
you must fear, the basket of love
that binds you – may they prevail.
There’s nothing so precious here
where we, the gruff and lofty ones
consort, that you should crave before
its time. So may the water run
unchannelled, the diamond remain uncut.

The following came to me via a circuitous route so the provenance claimed for it – a paleontology student putting in some summer break tea-making and sandwich-shopping for researchers at the Smithsonian – may be dubious. But who cares..?

Paleoanthropology Division 
Smithsonian Institute 
207 Pennsylvania Avenue  
Washington, DC  20078  

Dear Sir

Thank you for your latest submission to the Institute, labeled "211-D, layer seven, next to the clothesline post.  Hominid skull." We have given this specimen a careful and detailed examination, and regret to inform you that we disagree with your theory that it represents "conclusive proof of the presence of Early Man in Charleston County two million years ago." Rather, it appears that what you have found is the head of a Barbie doll, of the variety one of our staff, who has small children, believes to be the  "Malibu Barbie".  It is evident that you have given a great deal of thought to the analysis of this specimen, and you may be quite certain that those of us who are familiar with your prior work in the field were loathe to come to contradiction with your findings. However, we do feel that there are a number of physical attributes of the specimen, which might have tipped you off to its modern origin:  

1.  The material is molded plastic.  Ancient hominid remains are typically fossilized bone.  

2.  The cranial capacity of the specimen is approximately 9 cubic centimeters, well below the threshold of even the earliest identified proto-hominids.

3.  The dentition pattern evident on the  "skull" is more consistent with the common domesticated dog than it is with the "ravenous man-eating Pliocene clams" you speculate roamed the wetlands during that time. 

This latter finding is certainly one of the most intriguing hypotheses you have submitted in your history with this institution, but the evidence seems to weigh rather heavily against it.  Without going into too much detail, let us say that: 
 
A. The specimen looks like the head of a Barbie doll that a dog has chewed on.      

B. Clams don't have teeth.       

It is with feelings tinged with melancholy that we must deny your request to have the specimen carbon-dated.  This is partially due to the heavy load our lab must bear in its normal operation, and partly due to carbon dating's notorious inaccuracy in fossils of recent geologic record.  To the best of our knowledge, no Barbie dolls were produced prior to 1956 AD, and carbon dating is likely to produce wildly inaccurate results.  

Sadly, we must also deny your request that we approach the National Science Foundation's Phylogeny Department with the concept of assigning your specimen the scientific name  "Australopithecus spiff-arino." Speaking personally, I, for one, fought tenaciously for the acceptance of your proposed taxonomy, but was ultimately voted down because the species name you selected was hyphenated, and didn't really sound like it might be Latin.  

However, we gladly accept your generous donation of this fascinating specimen to the museum.  While it is undoubtedly not a hominid fossil, it is, nonetheless, yet another riveting example of the great body of work you seem to accumulate here so effortlessly.  You should know that our Director has reserved a special shelf in his own office for the display of the specimens you have previously submitted to the Institution, and the entire staff speculates daily on what you will happen upon next in your digs at the site you have discovered in your back yard.  

We eagerly anticipate your trip to our nation's capital that you proposed in your last letter, and several of us are pressing the Director to pay for it.  We are particularly interested in hearing you expand on your theories surrounding the  "trans-positating fillifitation of ferrous ions in a structural matrix” that makes the excellent juvenile Tyrannosaurus Rex femur you recently discovered take on the deceptive appearance of a rusty 9-mm Sears Craftsman automotive wrench.  

Yours in Science,  

Harvey Rowe, Curator of Antiquities         

CONSEQUENCES 2.

This is the second post in an ongoing online game of Consequences. Each successive entry begins with the closing lines of its predecessor. The opening entry is to be found on Hydragenic and the series continues on Porous Borders.

Entire of Itself

“If you're in danger of losing yourself, you've simply joined the wrong group of people”.
 
He steepled his fingers and, leaning back in his chair, tapped them gently against the superior smile that had provoked me from the start of our consultations. If my resolution had wavered before, now it was firm.

 “But you put me in that group, doctor. Self-Actualisation for the Borderline Sociopath. You felt that the sessions might stabilise me”.

He pursed his lips and frowned.

“So what happened?”

“It was bedlam. Everyone shouting the odds. Chairs turned over. A window was broken. No-one in charge. I felt like I was drowning...”

He smiled wryly.

“It’s as well the session was held in the garden studio, then. A space in which no-one can hear you scream.”

He looked away and typed a few words onto his laptop. The room was silent save for the clicking of the keys. I eased the flap of my briefcase open.

He looked up, this time smiling brilliantly.

“I’m going to give you some tablets. Just to calm things down a little. Give you time to get to grips with the feelings of alienation”.

He pulled a pad across the desk and tore off a page. Clicking a gold Parker into action, he began to scribble rapidly.

“What tablets?” I asked.

He glanced up as if assessing my clearance status for classified information.

“They’re called nitrazepam. One of the benzodiazepine group. They’ll sort out this ‘no-man-is-an-island-entire-of-itself’ preoccupation of yours. Get you back on track”.

“I am an island, entire of itself”, I corrected him patiently, reaching into my briefcase. “Or I shall be in a moment”.

He steepled his fingers and, leaning back in his chair, tapped them gently against the superior smile that had provoked me from the start of our consultations. I stood up with the knife in my right hand.

...

FALSE DAWN

Through half-parted curtains,
the early sun is trapped
between two lips of cloud.

I look back at you
still sleeping
in a private night.

A line of hair
lifts against your breath
and settles, lifts again.

The cloud-mouth closes,
drinking the last light
and thin rain

crosses the rooftops
towards us.  I look back
at you, still sleeping.

False dawn - light dies
at inception; you live alone
in a dark land.

POETRY PINBALL

I’m currently getting responses to the batches of poems sent out in February and March. One strike out of four so far. Inisfree and Blood Orange said no without accompanying comment. Shampoo said no but encouraged further submissions. Brittle Star, an established British print mag featuring poetry alongside prose and criticism, accepted  The Ties That Bind and invited me to the Issue 23 launch later this month.

When all’s said and done, Il faut croire Sisyphe heureux.

...

FRYING TONIGHT

A band rehearsal tonight. The slow, slow process of reconvening Fishing For Eels and trying for some work continues. We’re essentially an instrumental ceilidh band, playing for dances, but this time around we’re aiming for some straightforward performance gigs, fronted by our singer.

I’ve been listening to Sting’s version of  Sisters Of Mercy. He recorded it with The Chieftains and, somewhat implausibly, after four sung verses the swing and sway of the 3/4 timing of the song suddenly breaks into a pounding jig instrumental before slipping, equally suddenly, back into its waltz-time lilt. Perfect for us so I’ll try it on the band tonight.

...

EAR WARMERS

Installing Spotify has provided me with constant soundtrack accompaniment to the composing of posts. I have a stack of Arvo Pärt pieces through which I’ve been trawling. Current favourite is the violin and piano version of Spiegel Im Spiegel. Nine minutes thirteen seconds of cool, precise dialogue, at once uplifting and infinitely sad.

On the iPod is Eric Whitacre’s Cloudburst. Ideal soundtrack accompaniment to walking along the Chiltern Way footpath, which starts just across the road from the Red Lion and trails across fields and by copses, leaving the 21st century way behind.

In the car, I’ve been racing through the lanes to the rattle and hum of Irish band The Divine Comedy and Neil Hannon’s travelogue of the skyway, Tonight We Fly.

...