WITHOUT THE WHEREWITHALL

Dear Thushie, the six months you spent with us

Will never be forgotten, the long days you laboured

In the care home, your care-worn comings home

To sit with Brenda Williams, poète maudit sang pur,

Labouring together to bring to light poems buried alive

And turn them into a book, the living text

Proof enough of your divine gift as muse

And enchantress of both word and screen.

 

Now in far Indonesia you strive to strike a bargain

With an uncaring world, webmaster with magic fingertips

You engrave the words of us, careworn poets of our age,

In blue and scarlet on a canvas alabaster page.

 

Simulacrum more real than reality itself,

Should reality exist in cyberspace.

My Prévert, my Nerval, I never thought to see

So handsomely orthographed, like Li Po scrolled

In Chinese water by a blue pagoda.

Indeed if anyone could write in troubled water

It would be you, my dearest daughter.

 

Whether this world will grant you a living

Only time’s indifference and your subtle craft will tell,

Artists like poets live on other’s bounty, as you know so well.

THE FIRST MONTH OF THE YEAR

A page of the ‘Kelmscott’ Chaucer

Seen through out cottage window

When the Pennines were blind with snow

Flurrying round the stones.

The fire was low when I began to blow

That single flicker to a flame,

Was I too late, I wondered, the ‘poet in name’

Whose mind runs endlessly

As fingers through an old man’s hair?

(Either way I thought of you and your being there)

 

A portrait by Velasquez

Seen through the months of silence, vivid

As the door I painted scarlet for our love

When the wind joined us walking the moors;

The sculpture of Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse

Seen against  the sadness is more eloquent

Than the sun: there is something I would waken

Other than that ageless sleeper, if I dare,

(The way I dream of you and our being there)

A HOPE FOR POETRY:

REMEMBERING THE SIXTIES

There was a hope for poetry in the sixties

And for education and society, teachers free

To do as they wanted: I could and did teach

Poetry and art all day and little else -

That was my way.

 

I threw rainbows against the classroom walls,

Gold and silver dragons in the corridors and

Halls; the children’s eyes were full of stars;

I taught the alphabet in Greek and spoke of

Peace and war in Vietnam, of birth and sex and

Death and immortality - the essences of lyric poetry;

Richards and Ogden on ‘The Meaning of Meaning’,

Schopenhauer on sadness, Nietzsche and Lawrence on

Civilisation and Plato on the Theory of Forms;

I read aloud ‘The Rainbow’ and the children drew

The waterfall with Gudrun bathing, I showed

Them Gauguin and Fra Angelico in gold and a film

On painting from life, and the nude girls

Bothered no-one.

 

It was the Sixties -

Art was life and life was art and in the

Staff-room we talked of poetry  and politics

And passionately I argued with John. a clinical

Psychologist, on Freud and Jung; Anne, at forty

One, wanted to be sterilised and amazingly asked

My advice but that was how it was then: Dianne

Went off to join weekly rep at Brighton, Dave

Clark had given up law to teach a ‘D’ stream in the

Inner city. I was more lucky and had the brightest

Children - Sheila Pritchard my genius child-poet with

Her roguish eye and high bright voice, drawing skulls

In Avernus and burning white chrysanthemums, teasing me

With her long legs and gold salmon-flecked eyes.

 

It was a surprise when I made it into Penguin Books;

Michael Horovitz busy then as now and madly idealistic

As me; getting ready for the Albert Hall jamboree,

The rainbow bomb of peace and poetry.

Leeds 2002

What ghosts haunt

These streets of perpetual night?

 

Riverbanks fractured with splinters of glass condominiums

For nouveam riche merchant bankers

Black-tied bouncers man clubland glitz casinos

Novotel, Valley Park Motel, the Hilton:

Hot tubs, saunas, swim spas, en suite

Satellite TV, conference rooms, disco dinners.

 

I knew Len, the tubby taxi man

With his retirement dreams of visiting

The world’s great galleries:

                        ‘Titian, Leonardo, Goya,

I’ve lived all my life in the house I was born in

All my life I’ve saved for this trip’    

The same house he was done to death in

Tortured by three fourteen year olds,

Made headlines for one night, another

Murder to add to Beeston’s five this year. 

 

Yorkshire Forward advertises nation-wide

The north’s attractions for business expansion

 

Nothing fits together any more

Addicts in doorways trying to score

The new Porsches and the new poor

Air-conditioned thirty-foot limos, fibre-optic lit,

Uniformed chauffeurs fully trained in close protection

And anti-hijack techniques, simply the best –

See for yourself in mirrored ceilings.

 

See for yourself the screaming  youth

Soaring psychotic one  Sunday afternoon

Staggering round the new coach station

“I’ll beat him to death the day I see him next”

 

Fifty yards away Millgarth police station’s

Fifty foot banner proclaims ‘ Let’s fight crime together’

 

I am no poet for this age

I cannot drain nostalgia from my blood

THE PHILOSOPHERS

Lavender musk rose from the volume I was reading through,

The college crest impressed in gold, tooled gold lettering on the spine.

It was not mine but my son’s, jammed in the corner of a cardboard box

With dozens more; just one box of a score, stored in a heap

Across my ex-wife’s floor, our son gone far, as far as Samarkand and Ind

To where his strange imaginings had led, to heat and dust, some lust

To know Bengali, to translate Tagore, or just, for all we know,

Stroll round those sordid alleys and bazaars and ask for toddy

If it’s still the same and say it in a tongue they know.

 

The Classics books lay everywhere around the flat, so many that my mind

Grew numb. Heavy, dusty dictionaries of Mandarin and Greek,

Crumbling Victorian commentaries where every men and de was weighed

And weighed again, and then, through a scholar’s gloss on Aristotle,

That single sentence glowed, ‘And thus we see nobility of soul

Comes only with the conquering of loss’; meaning shimmered in that empty space

Where we believed there was no way to resurrect two sons we’d watched grow up,

One lost to oriental heat and dust, the other to a fate of wards.

It seemed that rainy April Sunday in the musty book-lined rooms

Of Brenda’s flat, mourning the death of Beethoven, her favourite cat,

Watching Mozart’s ginger fur, his plaintive tone of loss, whether

Some miscreant albatross was laid across our deck, or bound around

The ship, or tangled about whatever destiny we moved towards

Across that frozen sea of dark extremity; fatigued as if our barque

Had hardly stirred for all those years of strife, for all the times

We’d set the compass right, sorted through those heaped up charts

And with fingers weary and bleary-eyed retraced our course.

The books, a thousand books that lined the walls:

Plato’s chariot racing across the empty  sky,

Sartre’s waiters dancing like angels on the heads of pins,

And Wittgenstein, nodding in his smoke-filled Cambridge den,

Dreaming of a school room  in the Austrian hills and walks

In mountain air, wondering why he wasn’t there.

We wondered, too, at what, if anything we knew, trying to sift some

Single fact that might elicit hope from loss, enough to get us through

Another year with other griefs to come, we knew. Some, by a little,

Through God’s grace or chance or simple will, we might  delay.

More likely we would have no say. By words or actions who can stay

The rolling balls across the table’s baize, the click of ball on ball,

The line of bottles in the hall?

 

We heard the ticking of the Roman -figured clock

My mother made us take when all was lost,

Together until the last breath had flown

Into the blue empyrean with her soul.

TO BRENDA WILLIAMS ‘WRITING AGAINST THE GRAIN’

It was Karl Shapiro who wrote in his ‘Defence of Ignorance’ how many poets

Go mad or seem to be so and the majority think we should all be in jail

Or mental hospital and you have ended up in both places - fragile as bone china,

Your pale skin taut, your fingers clasped tight round a cup, sitting in a pool

Of midnight light, your cats stretched flat on your desk top’s scatter

Under the laughing eyes of Sexton and Lowell beneath Rollie McKenna’s seamless shutter.

 

Other nights you hunch in your rocking chair, spilling rhythms

Silently as a bat weaves through midnight’s jade waves

Your sibylline tongue tapping every twist or the syllable count

Deftly as Whistler mixed tints for Nocturnes’ nuances or shade

Or Hokusai tipped every wave crest.

 

You pause when down the hall a cat snatches at a forbidden plant,

“Schubert, Schubert”, you whisper urgently for it is night and there are neighbours.

The whistle of the forgotten kettle shrills: you turn down the gas

And scurry back to your poem as you would to a sick child

And ease the pain of disordered lines.

The face of your mother smiles like a Madonna bereft

And the faces of our children are always somewhere

As you focus your midnight eyes soft with tears.

 

You create to survive, a Balzac writing against the clock

A Baudelaire writing against the bailiff’s knock

A Valéry in the throes of ‘Narcisse Parle’.

 

When a far clock chimes you sigh and set aside the page:

There is no telephone to ring or call: I am distant and sick,

Frail as an old stick

Our spirits rise and fall like the barometer’s needle

Jerk at a finger tapping on glass

Flashbacks or inspiration cry out at memory loss.

You peer through a magnifying glass at the typeface

Your knuckles white with pain as the sonnet starts to strain

Like a child coming to birth, the third you never bore.

 

All births, all babies, all poems are the same in coming

The spark of inspiration or spurt of semen,

The silent months of gestation, the waiting and worrying

Until the final agony of creation: for our first son’s

Birth at Oakes we had only a drawer for a crib.

Memories blur: all I know is that it was night

And at home as you always insisted, against all advice

But mine. I remember feebly holding the mask in place

As the Indian woman doctor brutally stitched you without an anaesthetic

And the silence like no other when even the midwives

Had left: the child slept and we crept round his make-shift cradle.

 

At Brudenell Road again it was night in the cold house

With bare walls and plug-in fires: Bob, the real father

Paced the front, deep in symphonic thought:

Isaiah slept: I waited and watched - an undiagnosed breech

The doctor’s last minute discovery - made us rush

And scatter to have you admitted.

 

I fell asleep in the silent house and woke to a chaos

Of blood and towels and discarded dressings and a bemused five year old.

We brought you armsful of daffodils, Easter’s remainders.

“Happy Easter, are the father?” Staff beamed

As we sat by the bedside, Bob, myself and John MacKendrick,

Brecht and Rilke’s best translator

Soon to die by his own hand.

Poetry is born in the breech position

Poems beget poems.

UPON BEING ASKED WHY I AM NOT WRITING

Too much gone wrong –

No Muse, no song.