Dick Jones' Patteran Pages

Reflections on language - who owns it, how it grows. A first draft, shared with Imaginary Gardens...

PALIMPSEST

Words were licked
into life by tongues
stirring in their
bone and water beds.

Ullulation into utterance,
one day, one night
when sudden light
or no light at all

twisted noise into
a loop of syllables;
or something was born
by breath in the heat

of loving after the fire
had died; or something
out of grief or joy
congregated in a mouth

a drift of stones that
rattled into meaning and
spat sense that all could
speak again and again.

Then the scribes tugged
our pictograms from walls
and with those tongues
pushing out a bottom lip,

they penned them slowly,
rush-lit night and day,
across the calfskin, line
upon line. Golden ciphers,

language wrapped in
arabesques, concealed in
foliate compartments,
locked into floral curlicues

and stalked by beasts
fantastical across the vellum.
All our words licked now
by gall and gum, by

iron salts and lampblack –
a cultivation so sublime
that each word sits
in the mouth like a fig

plucked from the highest
branch. Princes and priests
turn the juices on
their tongues and tell

the kneeling penitents
how good they taste. O believe,
have faith. You only need
to hear our words rolling

under a vaulted ceiling
and transaction, intercession
are assured. Your hollow
syllables turned into

a fall of bells, all your
raw vernacular stacked
like bricks inside
the architecture of a hymn.
 

A first draft, shared with Imaginary Gardens...

PETANQUE ET LA JEU DE LA VIE

There are two men,
this square of ground,
the sun, the cypress tree.
The men unpack
their boules. The man
in the blue shirt
clacks a pair together.
The man in the
red shirt arcs
the coche into
the dust, steps back
and lights a cigarette.
The blue shirt
throws his three.
One hugs the coche
and two lie close.
The red shirt bowls.
His final boule
scatters the group.
The two advance.
They contemplate
the spread of boules
and coche, the disposition
of them all, then stoop
to gather and cast
the coche, the boules
again. Inside the
cypress shade the
blue shirt cups
his boule and lifts
it high. At the point
of release his fingers
tip it back, reverse
its spin. At the point
of its contact with
the coche he says:
“Your sister. Is
she well?” The red
shirt draws deep on
his cigarette.
“Quite well”, he says.
“She’s been home
three weeks now.
She’s walking. She
can cook. She walks
the dogs down by
the canal. She manages”.
The blue shirt listens,
two boules held
between his fingers.
The red shirt drops
his cigarette, grinds
it into the dust.
“Go on”, he says,
nodding to the splay
of boules and coche..
And from out of
the shade of
the cypress, the blue
shirt drops each boule
behind the coche,
completing a triangular
wall. “Once”, he says,
still stooping, his hands
on his knees. “There was
a time once”. The red
shirt lights a second
cigarette, shakes out
the match, steps up
to throw. “There’s always
a time once”, he says
and he looses a boule.
The blue shirt watches
the arc and fall, the
puff of dust where
it lands behind the
triangle. “Celine and I”,
he says. “On the beach
at St Enogart. Down
by the rocks”. The
red shirt straightens.
“Enough”, he says.
“And then”, the
blue shirt says,
“you and I, we might
have been brothers”.
The red shirt works
the cigarette to the
corner of his mouth.
“Brothers enough without”,
he says.