Refuge (4 page)

Even to this day he can’t recall what she wore:

probably something pleated that bellied out

in the first blasts of upper air as he turned round

to warn her about snags in the cave floor...

And then the automatic doors closed

and he watched her looking for a seat,

shaking dust and damp wind out of her hair...

3.
CHAT AND CIAO

A poem’s like a boiling. Lid off too soon

or simmer too long, and it’s fit for the bin.

A poet’s Tweedledum self-communing under

an umbrella open for a theoretical shower.

Thanks for listening in...

NOTES PROVIDED FOR THE BROADCAST

1.) One of many tales about the legendary Thracian king, Orpheus is how he lost his young wife, Eurydice, to a snake who bit her as she ran from a man intent on
raping her. Orpheus, a spell-binding musician, descended to the Underworld, charmed its fearful monsters and got permission from its king, Hades, to take his wife back to the upper air, provided
that he did not look back at her before they returned to the light.

2.) In
Through the Looking Glass
when Alice asks Tweedledum if it’s going to rain, he opens an umbrella over him and his brother (Tweedledee) and
declares it won’t be raining under their cover. Carroll suggests that their world is subjective, a matter of playing with ideas. Tangible facts are of no concern.

DIVINITY THAT SHAPES

Commod
it
a
s quaevis sua fert incommoda secum.

Qunitillian

No wonder there was turmoil in Olympus

and the gods decided to nail Prometheus

for the theft of fire. By wielding fire

we flicker for a moment into gods.

Land, water, trade seem so much clutter

if history’s a squabble for a share of fire.

Eating out our hearts for fire,

we’ve suffered the Titan’s endless torture.

Now so few hoard such quantities of fire

the gods seem amateurs, and we who shivered

in caves cower from holocausts of fire,

naked to the bolts of nameless gods.

NOTE

Epigraph:
Every advantage has its drawbacks.

Prometheus
(of the giant race of
Titans
) was chained to a rock for ever. An eagle devoured his liver each day after it had grown back
overnight.

A LEVEL
FANTASY

‘...tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here...’

Alice in Wonderland

She’d been one to peck up every fact,

and he’d encouraged her in measured doses,

ticked margins and given way to
Good!

Life-lines thrown out before she joined

the long roll of faceless names and numbers.

He’d fixed a grin to unwrap her gift:

Tenniel’s
Cheshire Cat
framed and inscribed

It’s been great!
Nailing it up he feels

one grafter’s respect for another.

She knew her
Alice
inside out.

Then after results a card of Alice

amazed by her golden crown, and thanks

that raised him to the angels. He replied

like some uncle puffing advice through pipe-smoke,

unseating every icon so she’d call it quits.

His reward was seven sides, close-written.

An essay he hadn’t set... and so heartfelt.

TECHNODOC

O doctor, was there ever a time before

your trim cumulus curls massed daily

in menace over indigo-grey stripy tie

locked behind perennial hazy herringbone?

Countless formulae are noted, experiments

written up under your stony glint, distaste

honed on it, your barbed comments brushed off,

your nit-picking mimicked to a tee:

no buttons undone, no chewing, no yawns.

If you know what’s best for you, don’t gawp

or giggle, and learn to wipe that grin off your face.

Ginger, you’re programmed with textbook cheek...

The only kids you’ll father sneer behind your back,

plot to make boffin supreme blow a fuse,

while you engender gadgets and gismos,

checking dials and gauges with loving care.

All that laughter in eyes, brimming pools

truculently bright, eyes so ready

to sparkle, go cold in censure. Caught

in such precision sites, don’t you cower?

Years clocking up hours and misdemeanours

with bitter smile over licensed after-duty moan,

a lemonade but
No crisps, thanks. Must go!

Exit on cue to show we’re lazy bums.

*

When you retire to fine-tune trouble-free engines,

sit behind
New Scientist
and net curtains,

won’t the years’ undercurrents ache back

like a lost pulse? They say you used to bend

iron bars like plastic cable. Hollow cheeks, doc !

Won’t the years begin to bend you?

CARING PROFESSION

1.
MENTORS

To you we’re objects of fun or hate,

makers of pointless rules

who wield blades of sarcasm

at your defenceless ears,

fob you off with reasons

clean as forged notes.

You sense a hoax beneath the gloss,

an odour you can’t define, and yet

your censure scatters like spread-shot.

Should we marvel at your deference?

It’s the perfectly acceptable face

of the product we’re paid to produce.

What eludes us is indifference

hardening like bone below the surface.

2.
NUDGE FROM HESSE

Late October sun hallows heads

bent over books.

Don’t be taken in.

This is not Castalia,

and you’re not Joseph Knecht.

Nothing they read or write

touches their marrows

more than tomorrow’s

foggy breath.

You dream of a
Glass Bead Game

and this is just a gamble.

Odds on for grades or passes.

Come July, year in year out,

you’ll pack away dice and cards

to clear the tables for another game.

NOTE In Hesse’s futuristic novel,
The Glass Bead Game
(1943) Castalian society disintegrates while an elite intelligentsia play an esoteric game in
a quest for perfection. When Knecht is appointed
Master of the Game
he tries and fails to redirect his country’s dwindling energies to practical questions and applications.

3.
RETREAT

Late sleep. Shallow dreams

smother me in
Welcome Back!

A gaunt-faced adolescent, one

in a hundred ( boy or girl?)

agonises with dog-like faith

over the bones of an epic plot.

I shuffle through needs and queries

in files of scribbled notes (mine or theirs?)

stagger below them on familiar stairs.

But my bag of tricks is upside-down,

its jumbled conflicts strewn about,

churning round a river in spate.

I wade out, wrestle with the current

and wake up on the other bank.

No flattery will drag me back.

Let neglect howl over the waters

like famine. My flag is furled.

SOUNDS FROM A SHELL

White horsemen ride innocently

over the green sea.

What if you try to disobey?

Only men like you

drown innocently.

White horsemen ride

over the innocent green sea.

What if they decide

to dismount?

Only such men drown innocently.

ENLIGHTENMENT

1.
FUSION

Rag
e
, rage against the dying of the light
... Dylan Thomas

Reading yet more print

into my bone-head to the near tick

of wooden clock

and dark roar of heavy jet

lumbering to defy gravity, lamplight

trembling in its filter, I burn

ever lower life’s wick

vainly to ransack,

defying ignorance, others’ worn

words from bone-heads that yearn

to bridge air’s void with wooden

phrase or roar of ticking rhetoric

trumped up from trick

in brain’s dark burden

burning to be said and heard in sudden

answer to clock and profane

roar of doom from pilot’s stick,

defying fitful crack

of light rubbed up by bone on brain,

my dynamo dying as I strain

to read yet more print, defiant,

feeling heavy jet

smash the air, and set

my hand to trim the wick and hold my light.

2.
GLIMPSES

Som
eti
m
e
s a lantern moves along the night

Tha
t interests our eyes
...G.M. Hopkins

A light flickers

near or distant,

beckons towards a meaning:

someone taken away;

a lone window swept

No end to ruminations

on lights that flash persuasions,

threats, welcome; and then the stars

hoisting us up on chill, clear nights.

And, out of the blue, streetwise squibs

or inadvertent mirrors open cracks

that slap us where it hurts.

At full beam lights

bore in like blaring brass fanfare right

down the spine.

Nerve yourself along that frail

knife-edge path with a pale

torch that whimpers out..

But there are always lights

near or far, refracting out the chance

3.
FESTIVAL

Something white that glitters,

prismatically tinted,

littered with greetings, the odd

star, spire or holly leaf stuck

to its wadded mystique

A sentiment that rushes out

for the last one

six weeks before, then droops

penuriously gorged

when the avalanche stops

and goes grey.

4.
BEYOND

Th
e
y are all gone into a world of light...
Henry Vaughan

It’s not the closing down,

or fabled darkness and its worms,

insistent no-mores and last times

that make me ache and palpitate.

It’s being the one to snap strings that tie,

and others left to pick up snagged threads

dangling in a heedless wind.

Now fading sight blurs what’s beyond reach,

I savour at last the little within my clutch.

Yet new fissures

hint at worlds of light

nothing or no-one assures

me shine beyond sight.

OSLO TO BERGEN EXPRESS

Torrents recede to a faint hiss,

clinging birches mutter crisply,

a trapped gnat whinges in my beard

as I scramble up splintered rock

to a ballasted shelf hung

between rough-hewn cavern mouths.

Strung pylons crouch like alert reptiles

over sleek uncoiling tracks. Steely silence

defies breathing, makes the ears sing.

A beam’s trace searches one tunnel wall,

bursts into a white eye blasting light

from aloof streamlined face that bears down,

screams by, antenna snapping blue flashes.

Skirl of steel biting steel curve, sucking draught

and sighing music of carriage after carriage,

rows of lights and heads, one surprised stare,

the last vehicle almost holding back before

the far portal swallows its red lamp.

Was this all I’d sweated here to see?

Or does watching an assured passage

that links lives with lives free me

from just letting another remote day

sink into dense tent-flapping night?

TAKING A CUT

New Year should mark a kind of survival.

It’s just another day on this sodden pasture

creased with rounded strips. Stagnant pools

and mantled sludge fill the troughs between.

Ewes nose and fret among tarpaulined hay.

Spring will shoot wiry and tousled like the heifers-

in-calf and white-faced bullocks put out to browse.

Brothers hold the lease but seldom work in tandem.

On a bleak crown put to plough I watch Ivor

hitch shares and turn from three-furrow plod.

He’s welded to his open-top, orange Nuffield

under torn cap and gaberdine so greased

they’re wind-and-water-proof. Ready to chat

he notches back the throttle and scans ripples

he’s sliced from this mat of bristling stubble. “Dry

underneath, just like powder. Look at it!

All that rain overnight! Where’d it go, eh?”

Scouring the ground with yardstick glance

he makes the cussed way of things worth a thought.

“Glad you’re holding on to all your hedges,” I say.

“We’re stockmen. Beeves and ewes like a storm break.”

I meet brown eyes used to sizing up beasts.

“Big farmer, Glooston way, ripped the lot out.

Gales scattered his top-soil after a March drought.

Harrow and drill again? Not likely. Too late!

Laid that hedge myself ten years back.

See how it’s come on, except where my brother

made holes in it burning straw and stubble.”