Death and the Maiden

	DEATH AND THE MAIDEN PAGE ONE (PAGE TWO)
		I leave behind a poetry from life Words and their waiting, words for day and night And I have been a mother and a wife And darkness flaunting seen from depths of light When dawn's reflection turns the earth below The lasting rise of night trees plunged to snow. Beethoven mapped time a territory fit For sojourn of the diffident spirit And Schubert a lyric for love's folly Yet love is enough to outlast return Enough also for love's celibacy Love is the spirit and its end alone, I hardly noticed but a love divine That when Bach spoke at last was lodged with mine. "YOU MIGHT HAVE LEFT THE WEINGREEN" from these marshlands dead wood roots in the shallows and is not dead I am come from the North my glazed eye can see against an unfamiliar sky but the surface the dead reflected tree to dare to walk in the length of Queen's for two hours I walked until my rage was spent "and none of you not one at you will come through these doors again" and what can I say to my son whose future you hold as ransom after twelve years on the Social my father dared to take me to Rome twice you turned him away and further said that hands would be laid on us and that force would be used to throw us out of the door but I'm nor going anywhere any way any more and the police here are a lot more human than you in vain after fifteen years 1 look for Lowell through All Souls and Magdalen I'm living with the dying living with you when February dosed the toilets at the Plain it went against the grain to use yours but my possessions safe enough in St.John's Quad were gone and though I weather you and that from your own mouth I had crashed the civilisation of the South *for the big boys at the gates of Magdalen* Ginsberg have you tried to carry that red and gold volume around midway with a chair up bus steps !'ve cursed you yet hard as the loosened sound inside bricks turning on hardened cement or the outerside pounded LA. Albuquerqe Wichita Vortex Bayonne iron Horse Apollinaire My Sad Self you are one of the greats I was twenty years coming to Howl and thought Whitman irresponsible why so long why can I read you now in Magdalen "but to know how to speak the right language "but to know how to listen but to know how to know and not to know but to see with a breathing heart and "trees scream and drop bright leaves" this side of folly and I never finished "On the Road" my last day by the railings residual sadness the Mexican episode do we end or begin at all Griffin give them guns I.M. HERBERT HOWELLS (1892-1983) time as oppressor impossible impermanent the heart beat of eternity that never lets go time turns diminishing unreachable reflections its lifehold the distance of kaleidoscope fold Jubilate and Te Deum pull me through but life's own hubris has put such futility into light I cannot hold shadow colour running at the heart nor see in that long perspective of the retina where all existence stalls timeless with reality nemesis the space between threshold and horizon over my evening window worlds of far pathos moving out of light through depths beyond indifference only the mirror knows where its fractured image goes with time inextricable it strikes upon itself 31st December 1983 your Mr Flintoff holds out little hope "I must stress that I have absolute autonomy I give it sixty forty against and do not send the poetry" dishevelled in a seventies studio Grieve was humble and subdued waiting for a question flow that dwindled in the light an ageing man holding words parrying a beat poet Bell lunges still upon a stage uncontained he stands without his book nowhere near the microphone he reads unheard an unknown Geoffrey Hill ropes in chaos and the audience is calling for its money he promises reparation for Ted Hughes missing and for Bell in the corner without his book my father knew a poor devil when he saw one with instinct he sat beside a broken man without knowing why to read from that same unknown or pretend to read for one unknown without knowing why "my brow burns red still which the queen has kissed" and long after you were gone my father lost his mind well I came to Classics through Coriolanus but really it was Penelope more the part about filling Ithaca full of moths for I must know how he made it and I suppose it was the masters words to Gwendolen or Jude in the rain at Christminster for this alone I come with my son from all things past the future alight in dreams I cannot hold fast anymore than the sun dark from which you turn your eyes Out of the untongued stone as day immured I stumbled long after and poetry The end of years from every fear was cured Its harbouring circled me entirely Yet towards and I had journeyed all my Life when the birds round Wellington Square brought Me into their throng an unserried cry Primary through green hewn of air unthought Unfolding leaf leading to a garden Where at last I have put my shadow down, How many the times without hope often Still following and wondering aground Waiting unable to die or to live There is only the time left to forgive. that Descartes had cut the throat of poetry Locke that thought it panacea lived among learned men whom rumors of Chinese analogy of words naming things and Fenollosa said deriving his thinking from Emerson began for the first time in centuries to restore metaphor Aristotle's hallmark of genius from what he saw in the ideogram "some of the fellows have been asking how long is this to go on" gentlemen I'll grow old sitting amongst you all and as for that commemorative ball I wouldn't miss it for the world I'm going as I am Alas for my godmother at the mention of Misogyny got cold feet I'll not run from midnight and The prince and the prince is in his castle waiting From a train over the Thames I saw London for the first Time although I had been before I had not seen Till then from darkness little comes much that is colossal mainly as a library girl I used to read and The Eiders was still fashionable in the sixties and poetry to-day flourishes at St.Hugh's Rachel you can keep your place far I've heard that female dons suffer from misogyny much as men but worse everyone was there permeable green glass a floral garden at the waxworks museum I was unable to distinguish between the live and the dead reflected or not reflected from that threshold and no one looked back no escape from the shadows lengthening before me reality is oblique as railings thrown by the afternoon behind me are oblique and things done cannot be undone things said the present I have known only as the knowledge of good and evil and the heart makes no amends for that to come and the heart permeable as a floral glass garden the set between Heaven and Hell and no one looked back and things held and lost or the fast train on the Palace pier its last threshold crossed stalled running to abyss "the nurse said would I sit up" and one line of scribbled sense is all I have of you and your family at a party while you were hastily admitted as bulbar palsy to a medical ward and you asked to write unable to speak after an hour for several minutes you fought to breathe unable to live "he would have been three months dying" and the morning shift coming to an end when you said "don't leave me "the senior nurse was shouting about routine there was never any choice there was never any time to listen and you with the same name as a Tudor king could not be comforted and the surgery was minor but you haemorrhaged on the table before it began I never got to know Stanley ambulant at first but gradually less able and it was not his brain tumour prevented him from speaking more not having anything to say and the manner of his death was in keeping no one came near he died emaciated on a bed pan arched beneath clean sheets Stanley fearful unprotesting still tide was out the sea too far out to reach wide the mud flats unbreathing the tide is out though hollow sands are hollow surfaces touched by the permanent shadow of sea unbreathing the tide will be out when sunlight's last hold is a thin horizontal below horizon life is convergence discernible as the end as legend seen in the watermark between sandpool and confluence mainly necessity is total some with time and some without some who cannot look at ail mainly necesssity a thin horizontal below horizon and abandoned turned sand abandoned beside a low sea wall alive enough and small enough to find we are confluence submerged the passing flux of mud flats when sunlight's last hold is converged I was a girt when you taught me two years and my mind full of Yeats and Donne you taught me what you knew and that was got from the text Marlowe Chaucer Shakespeare inseparable from you now I was a nurse and a woman when I saw you again they booked you onto the ward as "down and out" and the college had to prosecute in the end they thought you were drunk and that night the second nurse was sister to the prosecution lawyer and that night a doctor spoke about Huntingdon's Chorea and out of the depths once in Pottemewton Park you struggled to write poetry but never got past the first line and you still critical though the text was unfamiliar I read from Troiius and Criseyde mainly as one afraid out the depths once you were mentor to me "a tree is a tree is a tree" sunlight cuts the retina as only Hebrew letters can among pebbles inviolable ages burn impossible on Brighton beach there is no remorse stone white stucco wind blown white stone on the sea front tragedy is not ephemeral as the small hotel as memory once enacted where memory once existed is reality possible at all as moonlight is diffuse light from the Palace pier over water is clear light from a Ferns wheel empty revolved empty of people light revolved nothing is here beyond the apparition of pebbles blown on kerosene nothing is real as the dead unreal the sound of water falling back from pebbles and there is no remorse for the knowledge of good and evil ths asphodel is small enough to hold in both hands small enough to hold in dreams what is left behind is beyond recall the possible always out of reach and Eliot was received into the parish church at Finstock afterwards and disparate among oak trees walked the adjacent ancient forest of Wychwood wearing his bowler hat and thereabouts in June 1927 and the Romans built at Fawler down the road Margaret forever in her ball gown gone to be parlour maid to the honourable Sissons at Wilcote a wilful swan nests beside the closed car Eliot received the Nobel, prize the night I was bom And Margaret in sequins gone as blossoms pall and fall I'll not belong again at Wilcote how little how long Can I remain and Pound got….. From Sappho's rosefingered moon unknown outside Homer Who used it to draw the dawn Pound could not say in 1949 why he used the Aeolic rather Than the Homeric form and did not know that Sappho Unless as Aphrodite had brought him the word Small enough to hold though I look for the hung reflected Tree it fails me Margaret is gone imperturbable Pheasants call from enclosed industrial pine the shipping Magnate's shooting rights are at bay on Palm Sunday When with licorice and water spirits of the well Are worshipped landlord or freemason eviction is tha same or Athenaeum member and the Romans built at Fawler "and the President of Magdalen said" SONNET SEQUENCES FROM ‘THE PAIN CLINIC’ 1 I felt that I had been cut free and no Longer had an anchorage in this world Where the sound of a left over echo Was the rim of sand at the sea's edge hurled Into emptiness and then thrown again Back upon the shore shifting endlessly Between contour lines or uncharted grain Against grain from surface depths of the sea, And there I stood as a shadow turning Into light rooted in the undertow Of the earth yet borne along sand moving Levelling and deliberate below, Through the haze of distance and horizon The sun's dark span was a mirror broken. May and June disappear blurred to a dark Brief unending green seen through the last low Rectangle of a window-pane, the mark Of a mind's echo with nothing to show, There is nothing left over from its long Labour through history and no answer From the silence for its supplicant song My emptiness flows over the paper My life goes before me and I exist Only as memory pulling me down Just to breathe and yet to dream in the list Of perpetual water where I drown. There is no poetry at this extreme Silence is the shadow of things that seem I encountered you first on the night road With my mother and there you were silent And subtle and following in the mode Of shadows fast around us and you leant Towards her veering back from wind and rain As though you were alive and hurrying To keep up with us to the end. In vain I tried to leave you behind burying You in the shallow depths of memory Even as I walked that familiar Route you quietly deliberately Waited until my fear was on a par With you, then at the far edge of distant Time you drew near sure and precipitant. My throat tightens with its own airlessness When I try to remember those first days And the long drawn ricochet of distress That echoes always through a darkened maze Enclosing urban light and starless streets And the far flung random of sodium Glare, night-shadows where fugitive sound meets Reverberating in a vacuum Then and now. The search is impossible, Endless circles that open and widen Close in an origin beyond recall And a language heard and unforgotten Where broken spoken words that will not mend Urge me on a journey right to the end. What was I writing all those years ago, When I awoke something had been cancelled A sense of something more than I could know And yet nearer even than time once held Or memory left behind in a dream Left for me to find but without knowing Where to turn and lost in the space between. What I have known is an endless reaching After, trying to fix the fugitive To a page, an unrealised future To a dream and a last struggle to live. I cannot make anything work, the lure Of fear that effaces as an echo The silence left over in its shadow. Was it for this my mother lived her brief Hour following in the footsteps of her Life, existing alone with a belief That her sacrifice was for the future Of her children, something she would not live To see, something she could not talk about While she raised us with what was left to give And while she left us forever without. Her last echo drives me into silence Only to pull me out of it again, Deaf as a man's words to his brother once While refusing to listen to his pain, And out of the end a poem begins, I am stunned by the emptiness of things. Her last echo, how to make it survive Even a meaningless ordinary Day and where to search yet keeping alive Its source through the void of planetary Space, there remembering how to listen In the way I heard her far approach in The evening of my first years, often An empty room opening could begin A journey nearer to infinity, To vanish forever, to disappear Alongside the knowledge of certainty Leaving not a trace behind, only fear Containing an echo unforgotten And beyond boundary or horizon. I am so tired I do not understand How I can go on simply measuring Out a syllable count and aligning Rhyme and rhythm on the span of my hand. There is no way out, it was meant to be A Journey without an end, sometimes I Do not know what is happening to me, Why can I not be allowed to sleep? Why The hurtling headlong urgency of time Wherein I dwell without purpose or rest, Listening for an answer to the rhyme And my life, tireless, sleepless and oppressed, And yet just writing about my mother In some way makes me feel nearer to her. I do not know where the words will come from But they come from the time where my mother Was there, somehow I no longer belong And I am part of a time after. What am I and what of the time before? I amount to what I can remember Irretrievably lost in the heart's core, Hidden and left behind in another Century. I stand alone on Primrose Hill surrounded by upsurging people I do not know. locked in a life I chose Yet without having any choice at all. And I recognise the writhing trees near Me in their depiction of the new year. This is the hour when imagination Is allowed to breathe for a little while And to roam at random to horizon And back again, opening the locked file Of memory and with an effortless Turning backwards of time upon itself. My mind is clear of the day's detritus And history sits alone on its shelf Above the world with time left on stand-by While words from their silence are disinterred Echoing a vacuum as I try To find the source forgotten and unheard, And 1 have grown accustomed to my own Suffering and to all that I have known. I have turned my life upside down to write And to somehow ease the pressure on my Mind but in so doing I have to fight With the present for the past and to die Piecemeal for its meaning every day. Sometimes 1 am woken from fragmented Sleep if only to write a single line And before a new day has been wasted. Before I am left with nowhere to lay My head. Engulfed the words, agitated The buried words that nothing can confine Or free, driving me from sleep distracted, To see for the first time through the light's heft The fact that there is so little time left. PAGE TWO BACK TO TOP