Authors: Michael Tolkien
‘Anything you need, Molly?’ ‘Larder’s stuffed,’
her stock answer, waiting for me to leave
before she lurched off with giant strides,
jaw and stick thrust out, for odds and ends
or bargain Scotch for Eddie’s safe return,
her silvered head with its skull-tight skin
so frail and intent, her frame that yawed
like a rudderless yacht, and left me helpless,
watching and praying from a distant shore.
UNSUNG
First met Bill delivering by van and bike
for a greengrocer. Needed to keep busy.
Newly retired from top management
in a firm tied up with North Sea Oil.
But why the collared neck? ‘Cricked on the fairway,’
he said. Rumour was he’d mucked in
on the factory floor to dispatch a contract.
He’d nursed his wife into Alzheimer’s,
resolved to keep her home at all costs.
When they caravanned in places coloured
with best memories, she’d wander off.
Police returned her wrapped in a blanket over
muddy pyjamas she’d fought to keep on
with snarls, bared teeth and clawing hands.
‘Day Beth was taken in we’d been married
53 years. She scored 2 from a 30
aggregate of memory and response.’
Straight talk in a street encounter
while he looked beyond me as if to say
the broader picture must be seen, and added:
‘Sense of humour’s seen me through the worst.’
He’s just over a heart valve transplant
and a ward infection that walled him in
for two months. Twice weekly he tees off
at 8 a.m. on the toughest local course.
And he’s bought a compact caravan
to tour the coast of Scotland solo:
Stranraer, Durness, John O’Groats, Berwick.
I’m in open fields to lift the spirit
above self-created fret, and there he is,
striding out like a prospector,
his wilful little Scottie on a long leash.
Always one to seize the moment, this is
his bird day, delighting in rare flickers
of pairs and flocks in their spring passage.
VILLAGE BLACK SPOT
Double Z and nearly home, loaded
with seasonal gifts and looking forward.
Blind juggernaut like a crazed rhino
slews across and dumps its concrete pipes
on your one life in its egg-box shell.
What made you whole and loveable
cannot be prised from lacerated steel.
They couldn’t even move you into
the sun like Owen’s soldier with thoughts
of how its gentle touch once woke you.
Front page news between white on black
tributes to performance tires we need at speed,
your smile shy and modest above a catalogue
of family troubles that leave us at a loss.
Who were you? What lit up your days?
Then, full-spread, buckled, upended vehicles
as if some convoy had suffered a direct hit.
No hint of what is permanently shattered
and cannot be grassed over like bad bends
by-passed with three-lane dodgems.
NOTE: Wilfred Owen’s poem
Futility
mourns a young soldier felled by a bullet but apparently intact and unscathed:
‘Move him into the sun-/Gently its touch awoke him once...’
HARDENED
Pine: young head
on bleached, spindly torso,
bending up from burned-out,
greening slope, your feet stood
firm and defied the flames.
Now you split my wide
sky and, like it or not, unzip
my acquisitive camera.
So what will you do beside
this washed-out track?
Mark a lurking hunter’s path
that scurries into thorny scrub?
Let the odd passer-by pin
recurring hopes and fears
on your stooping trunk?
Look at me squinting up
at you, almost prayerfully,
my miniscule lens
capturing nothing much,
asking you to lose
no more plumage,
keep something back for
the next wave of lunatic fires.
FUSCHIAS
I fell for exotics like ‘Mrs Popple’
who drapes her puce pagoda over
purple belly through which she hangs
her luminous fluted stamens.
Then I heard Norwegian Saeverud
paint her diverse tribe in piano notes.
His ‘Drops of Christ-Blood’ dripped
coral fire, aery pendants, fallen heads.
Now even Popple’s plainer sisters
make me flirt. They’re inverted,
shrunk crocuses, violently pink;
ruminating bells rung by
monologues of serious bees;
seamstress heads poised over
delicate stitches, at one
with their needles, at ease
with every cut-throat breeze.
Below their dancing show
springs a girth that thickens
into hedge. They bud relentlessly,
bear berries hard as ebony.
SACRILEGE AT THÉATRE DES CHAMPS ELYSÉES
Paris, Spring 1913
The Rite of Spring rouses berserk rival
ballet whose cultivated sneers, fistfuls of loathing,
Gadarene rush for exits, leave Stravinski
fuming over empty stalls. A thwarted god
ready to turn these deaf and blinkered
imbeciles to a herd of rooting swine.
Fine tuning and experimental sweat
have fashioned the clay’s true guise
till nothing jars or niggles. Patterns
he wove to make the untuned hear
and taste the living earth, they tear
to shreds, piece by hated piece, shy
away from freaks and jackanapeses
writhing in mottled tights, birdsong
that scrapes like a rusty winch, cruel
thudding drum, jungle of fissured
string-play stampeding from the pit..
STASIS
Guitar held against long, white dress
you thread reluctant womanhood through
chords that waver in a question.
When time and tiredness beat you down
play back this moment. Listen for
Song
that lives inside you.
Across your few furnishings and comforts
July sun throngs its last. Skylights brim
blue eyes wide. Your very breath’s alert.
Fingers absently on strings whisper
over birdsong, flower, maze, water-
fall, ghosting in mind’s own garden.
A zone of innocence swathes you,
holds this instant pressed in leaves
of sunlight, fading into attic beams.
Up here clock and weariness will
beat you down. Turn aside,
let
Woman
in you sing.
MRS PRIMLEY’S LITERARY YOUNG MEN
(...
Comfortable accommodation for male students in the Arts Faculty
...)
Trunk and bags look lonely squeezed between
outsized bed and coffee-tinted wall
matched by threadbare floral counterpane,
starched and stiffened to withstand a fall.
Ladies in the bedroom not permitted!
insists Mrs P through pert and proper grin.
A nearly bald geranium in pitted
pot nods with dry dissent from sin.
O first-year hopefuls who unlock
cloudy-mirrored wardrobe doors, prize
open shallow mock-teak drawers, unpack
your dreams! Will this lumpy chair capsize
as you crouch to savour metered gas?
Can you feel the rug’s biscuit patchwork
prick through thin socks after lonely traipse
back to pristine texts and dim-lit hack-work?
Don’t miss High Tea at six
seasoned with Mrs P’s prying talk:
egg on toast, shiny ham, lurid cakes.
Then how to bow out cheerily, stalk
away from deadlines on Damoclean strings,
and out towards hallowed lamp-lit recess
where Flavia the Fair in gown and kinky stockings
might come flowing from her bow-front fortress.
NOTE Damocles praised Dionysius of Syracuse for his power and riches. During a feast the tyrant suspended a sword from a thread over his guest’s head to
suggest the instability of wealth and status and the imminence of disaster.
MR BUSY AND MRS: AN IDYLL
Mr Busy, oh so busy, up and down your drive,
past spruces well-spaced, tightly lopped and layered,
serene spires in glistening gravel...
off and back you drive, just for a little something...
(Busy are you, Mr Busy?
Lawn wants a trim, garage door’s peeling,
leaves are going to clog the drain...)
Mr Busy’s a mechanical man.
His paintbrush makes me dizzy.
So particular, so fussy:
Mr Busy’s a busy mover.
‘ `morning Mr B_____! Nice day. Almost summery...’
{{
Look! The morn in russet mantle clad...
How bloodily the sun begins to peer
...}}
‘Keeping busy then? Just the day for jobs.
Sorting the compost heap, I see. Plenty of tealeaves?
Off again now!’
(Smoothly does it in your shiny Roverette!)
{{...
charioted by Bacchus and his pards
...}}
‘Prescriptions. It’s the wife, you see.’
‘Oh dear! Well...if there’s anything we can do...’
Mr Busy and his bungalow!
{{...
one of the low on whom assurance sits
as
a screw-top on a can of turpentine. }}
Busy bee keeping busy, making sure
the honeycomb’s rich and snug
about his central-heated queen.
And there she is! Pink butterfly specs.
(Nice and comfy, are you?)
Looks through conservatory triple glaze
on to shorn lawn, past Eight by Ten tool-shed,
over rolling fields ripe for sileage...and smiles.
‘Mr Busy’s mower’s his life-support machine!’
(Well that’s funny, Mrs Busy.
Better check what Prudence brought
through the puss-flap.)
Mr Busy’s snapdragons are well and truly visited by bees:
crimson, lemon, crimson, lemon, crimson, lem...
Everybody’s busy these days,
minding their own business...
THAT YOU GEORGE?
Too much it was,
George,
what with rippled footprints,
crushed lilies,
buckled larger cans,
and those glittery fragments
catching dawn under the east window.
Then the shattered stone,
shale... slivers of shale,
George,
bits of
Beloveds, Sons, Nieces,
tips of seraph wings,
vases full of shiny wrappers,
starlings raking through,
sparrows having a damn good chuckle.
As for the lytch gate,
George,
blooded all over with spray paint
and paving sledged apart...
Look on the bright side,
Eh George!
Friday night ringers at it again.
Hear that tun-up kid
taking a shortcut to hell,
thrush on his steeple tree
singing as if all were well.
And all that stone lying there,
like the stony dead:
think of that, George!
CLOISTER AND PROMENADE
Under sun canopy among
emptying tables, he reads and reads,
hunched over heavy A4 paperback,
cup, saucer and plate long forgotten.
Close-cropped, skeletal, hirsute,
all animation distilled into
his flickering, light-reactor
rimless spectacles. Enviably detached
from afternoon-long lunch party
in the teak-diner sanctum behind him,
aviary of jabbered opinions ignored
or gestured aside with ever-louder guffaws.
If he looked up would he notice
two little girls with no words in common,
sit side by side, strangership dissolved
in a shared pack of chip potatoes?
Or wonder if they might be sisters,
whose same brown, beady riveting eyes
and sticky fingers scour every inch and corner
where they happen to be this hot, sea-struck day?
Would he spot that silver-quiffed old gent left
by his burnished 50-something daughter
with a pick-me-up glass of white,
watch him cajole those heedless little darlings
with smiling, half-articulated warnings
that sound like final priestly blessings?
HALLOWED GROUND
If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels but have not love
I am become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal
(I Corinthians, 13, 1)
1
. ON YOUR HIGH HORSE
Chapel’s celebrating four hundred years
of scripture translated. Committee so much
wants you to take part. Well-known piece,
please, and any version you like.
Delighted !
How could you refuse?
Parted tongues of fire light your way
to Pentecost. ACTS, Chapter Two.
Might even fill them with Holy Spirit,
to find there’s no foreign speech,
all words God’s from time immemorial.
Must be the
King James
mustn’t it?
Took unnumbered scholars eleven years,
rhetoric that rings with spoken sinew,
a voice for ever crying in the wilderness
to make straight the way of the Lord.
You’ll stroll from pew to brass Eagle wings
where rests heavy tome sanctified
by years of blackening thumbs and fingers.
Find the place with reverence while noses blow
throats clear and shuffling feet fall still.
2
. DAY OF RECKONING
Airy shibboleths must give way
to what to wear and whether to tuck