The Fordwych House Extract

THE FORDWYCH HOUSE EXTRACT

From THE PAIN CLINIC work in progress

Yesterday's sunlight in a corridor

Listlessly drifted downward on people

Gathered haphazard from the day before,

I belonged there and assumed that formal

And almost casual abandon when

Life itself is standing in the doorway

Rehearsing its own history open

And on equal terms with death in a way

Impossible again, and a brief sun

Falling and slanting down on the morning

After your death, through the wane of time won

Back and its replica before drowning.

I wait there unable to stay or go,

Trapped as light lost within an inferno.

A fierce wind had already begun

You heard it rage and turn round outside ward

Nineteen endlessly trying to get in,

Its under-surface as a wave, a sword

Edge whitened plunged into time left over

And the wake of time before, channeling

The currents of existence forever

Diverted and altered, left encircling

And sudden and yet as a memory

Of irretrievable wind where the end

And the panic, your last hour my journey

Away from you while a tired wind opened

Up and closed behind me. I could not breathe

Surrounded on all sides by the wind's heave.

I could think of nothing, there was nothing

Left, nothing but a countdown to the end,

"They said they're going to give her something

We've got to 'phone in an hour at the end."

I have to go away I have to go

Back but there is nowhere anywhere here

Everywhere the wind and its echo

And the end of an hour hurrying near.

Wind torn houses were shadows in a street,

Debris blown over cobble-stone narrow

And confined where pathways of the wind meet

In a night maze as paralysed shadow.

Gable-ends from the back to backs of old

Leeds reared sloped angles of rain to the cold.

Out of the depths of an October storm

Where random gas light flickering alone

Flowing through night's configurated form

And the reflected confluence of stone,

Etching the darkness with a single flame

While its white disseminated halo

Lay broken and turned into wind and rain.

The hazed, driven, diagonal shadow

Smoking over every stone and crevice

In a black elemental honeycomb

Fuelled from within to a moon white surface,

And night contracted as an opened womb

And about to give birth, I took my prize

From the dark where light darts until it dies.

It was not enough I have to go back

The words within can never put it right

Though the rain there is a lasting wind, black

And unstill in crevices filled with light

Opening enclosed round every stone

Every surface moving sheer under

Foot. There night and day converged as wind blown,

Walls high banked holding back the sea, over

Their own horizon broken into massed

Delirium round me reflecting flame

And gas light as though inanimate vast

Time flowed in the carbon rhythm of rain,

Before and after, as an undertow

A surface smoke from a burning shadow.

There was nothing to hold on to, the force

Of night was upon me its raging gale

Engulfing, directing even the course

Of time, at every turn piercing hail

Rolled across cobbles, fragmented, downward,

Slanting into shallows perpetual

Surface where light convulsed under the sword

Edge and colourless impenetrable

Rain encircled on all sides and propelled

By a wind without remorse, its smoke rose

As steam from every stone, a black rain held

Back and veering through a swathe of shadows.

In the ginnel where steam erupts and sighs

I hold your hand there as the moment dies.

I had to go away it was the form

Of things no one was allowed to stay no

One, when I was told outside in the storm,

It was too late to go back, there was no

Where to go back to and nowhere to go

And outside, your parting words that had seemed

Unfamiliar were left in the rain,

Far beyond anything that could be dreamed,

There in the panic and wind they became

Your whole life. This world would remain something

You left behind, this world lay before me

At my feet. Your last hour was hurrying

To its end, pathways of the wind empty

Meet in a maze of paralysed shadow.

There was no way out and no way through and

The only road was the one we had come

By where you were just the span of your hand

Away, how shall I find myself among

These shadows to turn about and go back

Without you or the doors that were to close

Against us when steep stone sides rose up black

Before us. The distance an echo throws

As it hollows in the fugitive space

Behind us, an inconsequential veer

Of sound, a reverberating surface

Along open city streets, its source near

And endless and enough to magnify

A delirium a pursuer's cry.

I wanted to stand still and for the first

Time not feel I had to run against time

As though each night had always been rehearsed,

Every dream awake left as the end rhyme

Or as the lost echo of another.

An empty inaudible arena

Within the monochrome sodium glare

Of a dream's history, shadows in a

Negative that flare into the colour

Of dreams without sunlight, nights without end

When we followed the city streets to where

There was no turning back. On a darkened

Stage the unlit shadows dissolve away

In the auditorium of a day.

Death had always been there on the night road,

A presence as of someone else, a third

Person between us there with no abode

Keeping fast a silence I had not heard,

Sometimes going before then following

After but never as a pursuer,

More as someone in the shadows working

With the quiet manner of a waiter.

But I had been in a sleep-walk all my

Life, awaking to the reality

Of an hour, houses in a street, awry

In the wind, death reticent, uneasy

As though at a banquet with every right

Quietly directing the darkest light.

And with no one else to turn to she turned

To you, because her children were still young

She had to raise us while she slowly learned

Your ways. You were the seated guest among

Her chores and the sojourner at the back

Of all her days, content every day

Just to sit there waiting, you were the black

Pall and the haze that on the surface lay.

It was not so much a slow suicide

As much as the one, sure, absolute way

Out and with no money for food beside

What she earned, the only thing she would say

Was that bread is the staff of life, nothing

Was said about you at her back waiting.

On the cobbled stones of a city night

Where do I begin, left with one last hour

Of her ruin how shall I know what might

Have been or what she would have said in her

Last conversation? She was left alone

To face it on her own as she had done

So many times before and with no one

To turn to but her last companion

And the silence of his hands upon her.

Through a howling wind you came to the door

In the guise of a fugitive like her

Seeking shelter for the journey before

You and a refuge from the storm within

And the door opened and death was let in.

It has taken years just to find my voice,

For the words are buried alive somewhere

Deep and so far away they leave no choice

At times I feel I can hardly breathe there.

And when day and night are in confluence

And the visible world appears to he

Upside down, yet something remembered once,

Something containing -its own certainty

And leaving me with the power to say

What the earth was like then, but I am left

After afraid just to face the new day

Alone, after, abandoned and bereft.

The word have become an impossible

Burden and my back is against the wall.

I no longer grieve that I cannot read

I know it will happen in the future,

Language exists within and with a need

For confluence, the words of another

Are as the company along the way

With voices after that seem to matter

And to communicate a time, a day,

A life, a part of truth to each other,

Something enough to make a difference

Something almost to hold on to or go

Back to and echoing experience

And knowledge from a source I do not know.

How I have missed turning each unknown page

This is a loss that nothing can assuage.

How can I ease the pressure on my mind

Wherein I claw my way up slow and sure

As though out of a lost grave left behind

To the stopped mute silence of the future.

And I am taken over by a need

To breathe and to allow the words to come

As they must but if only they could lead

Me to the dimension that they come from

Unborn yet alive and unstoppable.

I have grown accustomed to my silence

And the confines of an impalpable

Sealed mausoleum where memory once

Enacted delivered me from its womb

And closed me fast within a nameless tomb.

I watch the silence turning into night

And where I am going I do not know,

The tail-light from planes passing out of sight

Beats in a trail in the distance as though

Each is the one way out of the Babel,

The night silence that circulates around

The fixed point of a few stars and the hell

My mind is trapped in, in echoing sound

Unceasing of memory long ago

That vanished from the earth without a trace

Left behind and there is nowhere to go

From here, only tail-light the stars efface

Beating a trail through the distance as though

My heart was following after also.

I cannot imagine my life without

Poetry and the long nights of thinking

Aloud with nothing to go on but doubt

And futility and the words coming

Along in a tardy makeshift fashion

And a will of their own and however

Much I tried, the rhythm and its pattern

Became indissolubly fused after,

Defying everything I believed

In and overturning what I had known

Until casting aside the life I lived,

The words took on a meaning of their own.

Those early poems have outgrown their size,

And wear new clothes I hardly recognise.

Why do I put this pressure on my mind?

If all of it should be an illusion

What then, whatever would be left behind

To save me after from oblivion

For I fear its shadow more than any-

Thing else I know, I grew up with it there

Waiting for my mother over many

Years, an unseen guest, a familiar

Journeyman on the short fugitive night

Walks alone with her, while every year

With memory stretched beyond utmost sight

I watched my mother slowly disappear

I have to go back if only to let

In a time I can begin to forget.

Poetry used to be something quiet

Somewhere I could lose myself for a while,

A space on earth left empty and to let

To words alone, a place where the dial

Hand can stop the world can wait outside

And go on looking casual. I dream

Only of sleep and the rhythms are wide

Open and full of intent and they seem

To want to break themselves on another

Shore as I hurtle into overdrive

Losing the chance for rest for a further

Night and wondering how 1 will survive.

New words for old, yet summoning instead

Somewhere for the spirit to lay its head.

LIMEN

walk close to the wall the wind will not blow cold there

I could not sit in the tradesmans entrance that was not what

I was there for I see again open carved scrolls open

on the locked door of Magdalen and I was reading Conrad

when the police were summoned the first time and for the life

of me could see no reason for moving from that door when

the police were summoned a second time I was guilty

of leaving the tradesmans entrance to read Conrad outside

the locked door of Magdalen and I went down with them to sit

in the tradesmans entrance and no one ridiculed me and

for two hours nothing came near me and something out of this

world remembered not recalled survival the wind upon

a well the Oxford Wall and the only road I came by

white was the wind over the stone of Torre Road Station

and open on the locked door the learning I had come for

BEETHOVEN CAVATINA OPUS 130

life stuns into June gold for these are the fourfold petals

of the marsh marigold unfastened they die withered

In fullness of light caltha palustris or cups of kings you

cannot help me now frail day spirals as hung pine stars

more dark than night they breathe the green truth eternal

stopped sap sings the failed bravura of men

adagio molto light indifferent moves among the moving

trees and days that go from me

quickened sepals pull at life wild defiance at their heart

they trace the path of the young to come through

these dead stems raise a last sublime a morning face

and yellow petals burn Into colours from their time

lost as moments as the asphodel they come to me

no ease from fire and the downbeat heart of man

OXFORD FROM A PRISON CELL

what road did I come by

poetry leads to a locked door and at the last deserts

the body it has used you come to me at the threshold

after seven days and you come as a faithless woman

though the sun coloured iris hurts it breaks towards sunlight

Caltha palustris unearthed closes only to the dark

the body will fight to the death for its own dignity

while the mind more able to imagine a walled up tomb

than a room with a locked door the eternity of one

and the time of the other where the mind free wheeling can

recall only the absurd I sat once with my back to

another door learning Greek for the first time and the last

time learning Greek then you came with cups of kings you cannot

help me now let's go on together turn and turn about

I will make the songs and you shall grind them out

OXFORD

I leave you after two years an affair

Of the heart something resolute I dare

Not resolve; the mind is the spirit's limb

And the search of the sojourner or pilgrim

Towards or from that of saint and martyr

Whether history or now or another,

Grace is the spirit's breath, grace is the heart

"The light of life", as Bede said; but the start

Of a poet that lodging of the end,

Outlasting this world, truth without amend.

Between the tombstones of St. Cuthbert and

St. Bede between destiny and England

The stone sheared for nothing and Cranmer burned

And from your closed city the poet turned.

FOR JOHN HORDER

I watch the day distance itself over

Hampstead Heath and from an open window

Of a psychiatric ward I wonder

With the lost steadfast leaves falling below

Why am I here. Were the nights as a child

With my mother and our endless journey

Through the streets of Leeds, through desperate wild

Rain just to end in vain in a room here?

While November trees hold the listless leaves

Held within the first fold of memory,

How the end of a single leaf retrieves

The meaning I have lost, how childhood's key

Is broken fast within its lock. Leaves late

In their own stillness falter as I wait.

You stand at the terminus of the one

Three nine and the shops of West End Green are

Closing round us over a reflection

From another time somewhere in a far

Place other than this where we are patients

Pausing on our way from a nearby day

Hospital and mourning both for time once

Known and the pain of time to come that lay

As an endless June rain an evening

Settling softly about us. The same age

And yet the same loss experiencing

Itself through knowledge that cannot assuage

The emptiness of unborn children or

Those who have grown and gone from the hearts core.

A SONNET SEQUENCE ON THE THE DEATH OF DOROTHY TEBB

We had become estranged over something

Trivial and we had not spoken for

Almost six years, sometimes echoes lasting

And unfinished abandoned from before

Floated as reflections of a surface

Time over the wide unstill uncharted

Depths until the end became an endless

Sea from a brief trivia that lasted

As suddenly as it began. And there

You foundered in the fathoms of your own

Making, in the long aftermath of where

A ship went down with all hands and no one

Left to tell its tale, a sun's whirling trace

Became the vanished spirit of your face.

Somehow that morning remains as a brief

Low fluctuating sky seen from a coach

Window, surface depths of a last belief

In time itself as I try to approach

Endlessly tirelessly your final end

And the last high caught reluctant cough of

Your whole life, when sequential time widened

Out as a fan in the wind from a love

Closed down and concealed and yet quietly

Opening that the spirit might exist

With the limitless span of moving sea

And a breath so light it was almost missed,

Appearing at the moment of your death

As a new born girl drawing her first breath.

Too weak for tears but for two hours you cried

Through the night sensing that death was drawing

Near leaving you with nowhere left to hide,

The dry sobbing sounds reverberating

Distant as though at the back of a dark

Cave where all the inaudible words were

Scattered and stored and their echoes an arc

Of the unsaid. Restless without answer

An inconsolable sound that just kept

On coming as though out of nowhere or

From far out with an ebb-tide's shallow depth

Surging falling back to another shore.

The tearless sound was reversed and exhaled

As you wept alone for things that had failed.

It is the small things I seem to return

To, everything that went wrong even

At that late hour and even as I learn

To forget you they alone remain when

I try to recall what went wrong between

Us, they are the foreground and horizon,

The vast distance over which time has been

A near yet far prevailing condition

Separating us as much at the end

As at the beginning. I never knew

You and yet the depths between us widened

And deepened opening a last way through,

With time in the wings waiting and until

March wind blowing and sudden in April.

What kept our silence alive for so long

When I saw you eventually for

The last time all your vocal sound had gone

And all you could whisper was my name or

Something approaching a final echo

Of someone you once knew, and a frail smile

Flared from the emaciated shadow

Of your face resolving time before, while

You turned a slow infinitely wasted

Shape in my direction, and your eyes knew

More than we knew of all the time ahead

And the present blurred white within their blue,

When I tried to console you with the force

Of things they were hazed with a far remorse.

At that moment all my words seemed futile

And nothing I could say about the past

Mattered any more, words fell apart while

I tried to keep them together to last

In their meaning just long enough for you

To believe them. Everything faltered

In mid stride as I looked into the blue

Distance of your eyes gazing straight ahead

And yet beyond me to some far off place

Where words no longer mattered and silence

Was again as an echo left to trace.

Within its origin and existence

Your blue wasted gaze was left to my sight

Immeasurable in the heart of light.

What could I tell you that you did not know

Already or had guessed at in the long

Silence of your last years an exile so

Total it seemed almost normal among

The people at the home, and there within

Their throng you sat through every endless

Hour thinking of the moment and the din

Of the day the consoling busyness

Of routine, yet rehearsing in your mind

At night a last night when you knew your end

Would come but without anyone to find

Out who you were through the distant darkened

Window to the unknown neighbouring street

You once knew and the people you would meet.

And you never betrayed it by even

The slightest glance but your disappointment

With the silent and diffident girl when

We met at first must have been evident

Afterwards, and in the shop that August

You would have dismissed it all from your mind

As just chance happening after the crest

Of the mid Sixties to be left behind

In the flux of time with everything

Else that seemed to be changing, yet secure

Within yourself that in midstream nothing

Would last in the full current any more

Than all the years you had left behind you

With hardly a look back to pull you through.

THE FORDWYCH HOUSE EXTRACT

I drew a fire at Fordwych House which burned

From my mind to a pale sky, consuming

In its wake, after and before, and turned

Now into the end a shadow smoking

Dissolving deep within the splintered wall

Of a high, endless, orange, controlling

Flame, overturning, irretrievable

And huge once with youth's unbroken meaning.

I cannot finish what I have begun,

There is no one left to tell me who I

Am, the simple words, what have they become?

And the end as the haze of a pale sky.

I no longer know the poet in me,

Charred words smoke the holes of eternity

My throat is filled with its own emptiness

And a silence cries out from this fire where

The end is endless and flames coalesce

And spark the far evaporated air

Seared within as blue dark over London

The smoking residuum of what I

Am and everything I might have done,

The undone and the day's unanswered why.

Where are the stars in the carbon of my

Burning, the empty sockets gape where they

Have been and what is there left to steer by

But the numberless blue vanishing day,

Breaking pulsing neon orange as a

Smoke drifts upward its low shawled nirvana.

There is no road out of this inferno

Neither backwards nor before, days that meet

In their beginning, beyond tomorrow

Or yesterday encircle with a heat

Impassable, permanent as blue sky

Unchanging or a sun I cannot turn

Away from, black and as the beauty I

Once read and the brightest day. Here I learn

To forget, to remember yet once more

That last reach of language, the spirit's tongue

Its silence and all I am alive for

Levelling above me transfixed among

Fast airless flame, softly falling charcoal

Ignites the unlit levels of my soul.

Time after is no more a part of me

Than far flame melting into a white haze,

All that went before is my destiny

And always an endlessly spreading maze,

The lost directions and inadvertent

Pathways a reverberating echo

From conduits of choice and chance in constant.

Fusion of futility and shadow.

What road did I come by and where do I

Go from here as a planet left behind

Out of this world, an overwhelming why

Every day fans a fire in my mind,

Without the stars I cannot find my way

The empty sockets gape for a new day.

And all my days are tomorrows nothing

Exists in its present tense, how can I

Answer anyone when everything

I have known rests and decays in the why

Or hold of the heart's scaffolding and fast

Locked as rust that cannot be dismantled,

Where the props of half a century last

Longer than slow dissolution untold

Within, where the spirit is bound about

With chains of its own making and the hell

Of experience alone yet cries out

For heaven unheard and impossible,

The rods are clamped over feeling and flame,

Only the words and their knowledge remain.

I had nothing to go on but my own

Fearful heart what use is that to me now?

It was not enough nor for the unknown

Half guessed at or dreamed of and yet somehow

Always there just beyond the fear, outside

My reach and a life that has come apart.

And although there was nowhere left to hide

I failed to find a refuge from the heart

Its first familiar unending why

Rending into sojourn and horizon,

Echoing the spirit left to defy

Just beyond the flame, the answer driven

Fuelled by the wind in mockery after

Even to the heft of its last whisper.

It was not enough nor could it ever

Have been, nothing can apprehend such loss

And the failure of the spirit after

All that remains is to take from the dross

Something worthwhile or just the memory

Of joy, something of a life that might have

Been, yet something left over to tell me

Who 1 am. Everything is fugitive

And spills and runs and is as mercury

To the ground the furrowed field overflows

With ram, my shadow disappears any

Semblance is what the surfacing wind throws

For the fields of home lie under the rain

In dreams and I cannot walk there again.

There is no road out of this inferno,

Here the flames lap at the edge of being

As pages in an open book, the slow

Words curl black a cursive script scorched peeling

Back from language into another tongue.

While the city drifts through smoke in a haze

Anchorless, its topmost heights lean among

Featureless flame, the corners of stunned days

Are sudden blue reflections over sealed

Far windows braced against a trawling grey

Urban light where smoke seared the white concealed

Shadows as darkness on the surface lay,

The indecipherable pages burn

And their wordless shadows in the wind turn.

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