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THE FORDWYCH HOUSE EXTRACT
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The Roof Garden
Autumn, a fugitive guest inhabits The garden, enclosing disconsolate Summer, its folded unquiet limits Deepened far with an opened green mandate Where spring’s torn orb web remains forgotten, Lifeless and loosened, floating tightened wind Over ivy, a dry smoke blown as rain Or something left of life itself, the end Of a garden as high picks break the thread From its mooring, its fast aftermath of Tar. Winter driven, with the seasons dead Before, leaves bringing nothing to behove, Random beneath infinity untold, An orb web’s full anchorage to the world.
I wanted to be nearby, for the end Was my own, day and night lay unravelled Underfoot, here the spirit can attend The outlandish youth of conifer felled And laurel bough in winter leaf awry, Nature is the pathway of the spirit, Can London’s massed and tangled garden die, Piled, banked green, its laurel awaiting yet A grab-loader, Muck and Rubbish Clearance. No one knows how the garden came to be, Forty years of flourishing self-sown since, Or a child’s first snow before poetry, The conifer’s cross-stitch was tapered far As Nature under London’s new laid tar.
I’ll not weep for the garden its laurel Despoiled, subsumed before the thunderous Heartbeat of an empty loader, the pall Of conifer trailing over London’s Roof thrown, yet upward borne, kindling dry leaf, The distant trees turned to smoke disappear, Forsythia remnant bearing beneath, Raising the conifer to a green bier. Time overturned from the black soil receives Soft December rain piled beside cypress Rusting tindered arched towards outstretched leaves And left prone in green imprinted witness. Outlasting the words Nature falls between, The end is no more than a poet’s mien.
Easter 1994
What am I left with now that spring has come And after the moistened leaves unopened, Each day memory walks through my hands, won Away from its own past and a garden, And rain enough to smoke through the empty Air that suddenness of March bark breaking Into April’s light green suggested tree, Night’s nimbus, the outer leaf opening And spreading day’s brief black downward halo. Where are the shadows that struggled to live Yet poetry’s eidolon will not go Away, inviolable, fugitive, While forever through my hands Nature falls Between, life held and lasting, from time stalls.
From the aftermath of their animal Life leftover with unfaltering fear, To my departure, I am unable To see them as I watch them disappear. And Lill was a calm and sunlit sea and Told me gently just to bring them, nothing Remained here but a morning and England Approaching Easter, the hell of trying To protect them without hope and the end That was near. I placed each into a cage, Through a grill I could neither touch nor tend Nor covers closing over could assuage, Condemned when they were forbidden to roam, Blackie, Heathcliff I cannot call you home.
They never came out of their low covered Wire cages, the kind used for transporting Cats, the hours before their end were conferred, Heathcliff was incapable of turning Round, I sensed their last quiet trust before I left as soft shuffling wondering, each Draped face crouching abandoned and no more Than waiting to be put down. When I search, Shadows lengthen through the hollow garden Between still reality and surface, Moving their bewildered days now open Towards memory and unenclosed space, Only to roam the garden at their will Where time itself now waits on them until.
In Memoriam: Stephen Spender
I never knew you only the poplar Towering into night air the last ten Years, from Abbey Road it seemed to be far Nearer to you than to me and once when I passed by, it did not occur simply To look up at the poplar, though always Wondering that the streetlight I could see So bleakly in Loudoun Road through the day’s End, and sometimes just sufficiently near, Was also a beacon as I turned by Your corner carrying shopping and fear. I’ll never know what distance from your eye, Casual as the news that you had died, With you the poplar on the other side.
Yet I live and feel nearer than before, Somehow I am able to speak to you Now without time’s usage between us or My own dereliction every day through Which must pass intermittently those who Were truly great. They pass alongside those Who lived inflicting hurt, the hurt a few Disparate voices left behind that chose Never to forget and time as witness. The barriers are down I walk the space Towards you in St John’s Wood years oppress My heart, presentiment I cannot face, The far side of a poplar and a friend Waiting quietly rehearsing the end.
I am accustomed at last to my own Silence and the endlessness around me As a world-weary traveller alone, Surrendering to anonymity, Awaiting the wind’s direction and yet No longer at the helm, knowing only The limits of a poplar leaf to set A course by or that full momentary Cerebral calm over an engulfed shore, Enough to uphold and after survive The spirit shipwrecked, words lost at their core, And unattended breathe again alive. In aligned tradition a decade once, Midway a poplar was the difference.
23 Fitzroy Road
I stand before a house and the blue plaque Of Yeats that drew you without warning or Omen to that last February dark, The incongruity of its closed door And the street leading off into Primrose Hill spanned almost by a tree’s winter girth. All around the streets circle and enclose As I struggle with myself, my life’s worth No more than far trees branching from distance Resolved in a cold without wind or rain, An emptiness distinct as neon once Certain, an existence only to drain Away, while the air heavy with snow’s pall Darkens over the earth and will not fall.
Where the high and adjacent aviary Strands its storm over London, caged birds fly Against the netted turrets endlessly Encircling an illusion of the sky. At times I have known this park nearly out Of my mind with fear, an impossible Pleading with horizon from fear’s redoubt Always to remain imperceptible. I wander like Tsvetayeva bereft Of children and hear in her last tumult The sound of letting go, like a log left Behind, time held back in a catapult, My country has failed to take care of me, And night the colour of the aviary.
And suddenly the Sibyl of Cumae Caged among a throng in the market place To answer to the young ‘I want to die’, Where the spirit is the syntax and case Ending of a poem, death is a shadow Awaiting its hour, what was a question Has now become a reality no Answer could reveal. And from confusion When even the spirit fails to exist, Poetry is time’s equilibrium, Through filaments of light, memory missed Or abandoned, there is a life to come. You alone sustain and your moon’s black hour Lets fall a snow’s indelible shower.
Adele Wolman
I cannot find the right words for someone Who was always there, just a shadow through A window when the evening tasks were done And Abbey Road an interval of new Nearing, of far-found birdsong clamouring Until the day had begun. Have I grown Indifferent lately, an emerging spring Unfolding its manifold green, unknown For the first time, unreal and unnoticed, Late magnolia was almost over Before I could remember something missed Inlaid whiter than sepulchral colour And April’s darkest storm, and apprenticed Beyond time that its echo might exist.
The right word has taken so long to find That its effort hardly seems to have been Worthwhile, something is always left behind Remaining perpetually unseen. What am I when the outlandish restless Day effaces as an ordinary London window yet leaving a redress Within time’s design, the anatomy Of a single line. The way words oppress And to no end with just the physical Word on a page as a silent witness, And the mind’s echo completes a circle And a struggle of labour against time, For the end, for the words no longer mine.
A shadow through a window yet you were Always there, the background of each leaving, My head held high always as the nearer Shadow when I returned. There is nothing Now but an unfamiliar window And we are the shadows on the other Side, the sounds of city traffic that blow Like wind across glass in the distilled air. Nothing is certain anymore and all Around me time’s permanence has begun To fall apart, each day impossible Dreams awaken their own oblivion, Yet through glass unreal in candle-flicker, Time unbroken circled at your Shiva.
Regent’s Park
When art is derived from pain it is worth Nothing, and I can only answer then With my own pain and the time of its birth And final as the knowledge of Eden. I am myself as nothing walking through Regent’s Park, May evening light is oblique, Lake birds preen and remain at their ease few Or simultaneous, nearby the mosque Turns from domed high gold leaf into night grey London distance, I struggle to answer Another’s pain but cannot find my way. To imagine, we must learn to suffer For each other, at the heart of language Beauty is a sword time cannot assuage.
I cannot write about beauty only, Because its truth is not what I have known, Reluctantly and quietly beauty Comes unknowingly and to truth alone. If poetry is merely the sound of Itself yet history within language Unfolding, then is the metre of love An incandescent rhythm as the age I sing of, and without love, of what am I composed when chance and impossible Reckoning are stars beyond depth or span, And pain but a jettisoned syllable And art no more than beauty can attain For a life that after has lived in vain.
The problem of pain, and it will not go Away, it exists beside Keat’s Grecian Urn, with beauty’s truth put aside as though Unreal, beauty is not oblivion But even as a century reaches Its end, the mind’s pain has nothing to hold On to and left alone with fear, searches The spirit’s arsenal for truth untold, Or the way beyond your death in Fitzroy Road where I stand lost and rehearse your end To stay alive. The words are without joy An overgrown garden I cannot tend, Endless, wordless as the leftover pain For a love that after has lived in vain.
The Fordwych House Extract
Part 1
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, where 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 a 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, Their 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, a 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 In 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 leftover to tell me Who I am. Everything is fugitive And spills and runs and is as mercury On the ground, the furrowed field overflows With rain, 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.
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 leftover And the wake of time before, channeling The currents of existence forever Diverted and altered, left encircling And sudden, already a memory An 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 just the wind and its echo And the end of an hour hurrying near. Wind-torn houses were shadows in a street, Debris blown over cobblestone 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 gaslight 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 is 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 around 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 gaslight as though inanimate vast Time flowed in the carbon rhythm of rain, Before and after but 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 and 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 dissolved away In the auditorium of their 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 sleepwalk 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.
Part 2
It began in The Hollies in a home For the children of those suffering from TB and in the hospital alone, As a casual morning face among Friends, my mother lay there and dissembled, Hiding from all her colleagues the cancer At her breast. While she held the assembled Nights of her life and those to come after, The days leftover and their utmost end, The insistent faces of her children Yet weaving round about through a darkened Cavalcade, with time held back and broken As the broken mooring of an orb web Is blown on the current of its own ebb.
My mother wrapped her silence around her With a certainty that would never end, She seemed always just ahead or after And alone on a road as it widened Backwards far into the reflected arc Of life itself. Sometimes stars in the near Far shadows of a mirror in the dark Charred the horizon and curved a last sear From an unrealized unreachable Time, where fifties neon pulsed and flickered, Darkness fragmented indivisible, Trapped as space between its blue, green and red, The lost names blazing and pulsating from And towards in the rain and the rhythm.
We were slanted as road shadows that ran Along the surface of the station’s white Wall darkening with a distant night span Of neon, an impenetrable night Rain blowing against its whitened stucco Was turned into stone and a storm-laden Light in April. On the skyline the low Inscribed factory neon blazed open And enclosed leaving its darkness behind, Only its oscillation had any Meaning, any certainty, and my mind Traced the letters in that transitory Space between, pulsing from their charred ruin The lit extinguished names end and begin.
Why was the white wall a memory I Had of my mother, yet we are walking Beside it and within reach of its high White stone, rain is softer now and blurring Across illuminated names in York Road, and round us from every direction The wind is against us, we do not talk Because of it and I watch the neon Signs palpitating softly through the rain. Each time their light went out and the darkness Was left behind, the letters would remain Visible as shadows of her distress, Walk close to the wall the wind will not blow Cold there and the night was neon’s shadow.
The pattern at night was always the same, This was a walk we had done so many Times before when deserted streets became Unfamiliar yet nearer and we Were as shadows watching and listening And moving as though in another world, Where gaslight approaching and receding Over darkened windows, from glass was hurled Into reflected walls and vacated Rooms, the random force of the betrayer Mingling with the clamouring crowd ahead Or behind protecting her pursuer. A fugitive endlessly fleeing through The city, through the nights my mother knew.
A paralysing fear towards midnight Would then descend on us while we waited For my father to return and what might Happen was the source of her repeated Endlessly drawn out wondering. Nothing Could prepare her for its outcome each night Nothing would halt or prevent the ending, And we never let him out of our sight So that my mother could escape if she Had to and we hung on his every word From the half-open door she had to flee Through when the shouting stopped or went unheard In the silence of his lunge towards her, The stealth of his delirium after.
For as long as I could remember, my Mother walked at night unable to go Home, sometimes she would knock on doors and cry For help, unable to ease her sorrow And all the times she walked in Torre Hill She must have known that nothing would alter, The streets would be the same at night until Her children were grown up. And time after Was not in her thinking, there was only The time before and the time of the hour Of shadows when her spirit fled and she Slowly began to die then to cower From the fact that it made no difference To what he knew of her life’s existence.
For years I used to dream that you were still Alive, that your death was surely something We were told just to survive on until We saw you again, I kept on dreaming The same dream and when they ended you were About to die, I could not understand The years apart and you could not answer Anything, you were going to die, and In a dream and in the end all over Again. You told me how you had to go Away and how you lived your life after, How much I missed the years I did not know Her and all that time she was there and I Kept on asking her and answering why.
You are there with me by the white wall, we Are trying in vain to breathe together In the wind in an early memory, And the quiet city is the colour And the fluctuating neon surface Of reflecting reverberating rain And a wind that sears your tears. So I trace The darkened letters after they remain Because I do not know how to help you, When their light comes back you are still afraid, A vacillating rhythm pumping through The long arterial night, each inlaid Vowel is etched in its own black furrow And momentary repeated shadow.
I walked to the crossroad from the Oakwood Clock almost thirty three years after your Death and our last journey anywhere. Would That it could have been other than before But nothing had changed, it was still the same, I was on the outside walking alone Through the same endless suburban terrain, And somehow I missed the door and its torn Note that you left behind, and while I stood At the crossroad the same panic came back, Every road led nowhere, which one should I take, which wrong turning was the way back, Then as now there was nothing left to say, We were stranded and we had lost our way.
There was no address and you were led there For nothing but you left one half of her Note behind to become something to share With her, a future to remain after You had been. Within days you are leaving Your life behind and you stare for the last Time at my father, your mouth opening On a silent scream echoing a fast Locked silent world where you sit just before Him listening, knowing that the money Will not be there, that the quarrel of your Departure was the fare for your journey. At the crossroad, following the wind’s track, At the last moment you would not look back.
You kept your silence for two years after The Hollies because you had to keep your Job as a nurse at all costs in order To feed your children, and there was no more Money coming in that was not spent on Alcohol and the progressive stages Of my father’s mania. Damage done That could not be undone, that assuages Nothing by virtue of his unknowing, He knew you were dying in pain slowly For two more years and he went on drinking While you cleared tables that the surgery Left you alive for, and your sacrifice Was unerring, nothing else could suffice.
It is not enough how I long to leave It there but the past calls out beseeching Me not to be afraid, how shall I weave The shortened unfinished days tapering In their endless night, out of the lost weft And the unknown anonymous life she Would have had. So many are the nights left Untold, pushed into an ordinary Agony or a day’s fleeting legend In the lives of those who refuse to see, For the darkness is endless and the end Is night’s fugitive passing destiny. Lily Lily I feel out of this worrld, The falling snow caught in his hair and curled.
There was nothing unusual about The quarrel it was like all that had gone Before, my mother found herself without The money for her fare and with no one Else to ask but him. And it was morning And my father had a bad hangover From the night before, he sat there waiting To go to work, waiting just to see her Run away but she remained there before Him as though transfixed in supplication, While time itself was standing at the door And her journey had already begun, And to plead for her fare she spoke as once In profound and lacerating silence.
How much did she know as she sat there in The light of a soft September morning While waiting for her journey to begin, Knowing only that she would be leaving Never to return or to see again The long arena of her suffering. And after, nothing was ever the same, It was not her departure that morning So much as the wild fixed grief of her face, A blackened rain slanting across slow time, A face not of this world, its last grimace As if my mother was no longer mine, As she stared straight ahead at my father It seemed as though time itself was over.
Her fare amounted to nothing, and while He was shouting in the endlessly drawn Out pattern of years, he knew the trial Of words was about to end, almost worn Out as a black groove widens back before The laceration of recorded sound. And his words echoed back through the years or Outward ran as mercury to the ground, Something was broken, nothing would mend, But his words would last as long as they could, Love was never like this, and to the end Of his last syllable, mutely I stood Before her paralysed and listening, I who could have said so much said nothing.
Suddenly there was a knock at the door And slowly out of nowhere a taxi Stopped and beckoned you to get in, before The quarrel had become an unearthly Confusion and the interrupted sound But its own echo. No one seemed able To help you and while we scrambled around For a language that seemed insubstantial, You forgot to care who saw you and for The first time in your life you just went on Quietly weeping for all the world or Simply for yourself, a September sun Lit up the street and the morning’s attack, At the last moment you would not look back.
On the Death of Dorothy Tebb
12th February 1998 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 and 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 anymore, words fell apart while I tried to keep them together, to last In their meaning just long enough for you To believe them, and 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, without anyone there 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 a 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, anymore Than all the years you had left behind you With hardly a look back to pull you through.
The Terminus
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 heart’s core.
June 1998
Royal Free Hampstead
I watch the day distance itself over Hampstead Heath and from an open window Of a psychiatric ward I wonder, With the last 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.
November 1998
Primrose Hill
I do not know where the words will come from But they come from a time when my mother Was there, somehow I no longer belong And yet I am a part of 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 recognize the writhing trees near Me in their depiction of the new year. 31st December, 1999
20th October, 1964
It is thirty-six years since the night you Died and every day of that time I have Tried to forget you, etched, echoing through The silence and darkness since then. I have Lost more than I can remember, yet rain Is falling, resounding through October, Igniting every surface once again With a low sound of distance leftover And a space left behind where I have failed In everything I tried to do, only An arc of silence where the dark stars trailed Too far out to see. In the memory Of the living and still startled I read That there lives on the spirit of the dead.
20th October 2000
I have tried to resurrect you in rhyme And with the vowel sounds of your voice, trace The reality of another time, The wasted lineaments of a face Which I have seen every year disappear. And the syllable count was an order Out of chaos, a blueprint always near At hand for the mute despair left after An unforeseen precipitant ending, A vision of the spirit in a dream Trapped between night and the day’s beginning, Lost among echoes, in shadows that seem, Rhythm came as falling rain, as the pain Then that I would not see her face again.
21st October, 2000
All night I have listened to the far rain, Remembering the anniversary Of your death, so long ago now, the main Drift of its re-enacted history Has gone, there is nothing left but the rain Falling wildly in the wind, the open Wide October night fanning its own flame Backward to the utmost stars of Eden. I seemed to exist only in that hour As though I had to live again for you And to follow in the footsteps of our Night, fugitive and as though pursued through To the end of time, each day an unstill Echo unanswerable saps my will.
21st October, 2000
There was nothing that could be overturned, Yet I was always too afraid to speak Even to think, now as then, I have learned Nothing but how to replicate, to seek For a way out in the way you had done And only by going as far as you, Could I understand what you had begun And enough to turn away in time. Through The long years of illness you hardly spoke About anything oppressing your mind, My life was at an end when I awoke To the fact that you left us all behind, And for years I could not face it this side Of life, the end was your own suicide.
21st October, 2000
Anniversary Song
after Eva Cassidy I have dealt with the day’s residuum And listened yet reluctantly and lost The moment that was right for a poem, I have sacrificed time itself, my most Precious possession, I feel myself pull Away never having found my own kind, However hard I tried, impossible Odds were stacked against me, one step behind, Always too late or unnecessary, Wondering why the talk begins to wane, Listening by way of apology, Sometimes as though I am a girl again Finding comfort from a popular song, I feel I no longer need to belong.
23rd April 2001
West End Green
No one noticed a pool of leftover Rain I had one second as we passed by, How I longed to remain, just to linger There and without anyone asking why And to see clearly a different kind Of reality, a world turned upside Down, infinitesimal blue my mind Could leap into, a new horizon wide Open, an imaginary kingdom Unvisited and yet familiar, Drawing me with its siren song to come, To fall without fear into a far Space, as I stood at the edge of the world Waiting for language, for the words untold.
23rd April 2001
Letter to a Friend
Unable to take memory away, You disappear like a thief in the night Without anything left behind, each day You slowly disassociate what might Have been from time’s familiarity, Leaving but the difference in between And wide with the depths and futility Of it all. What did any of it mean, Did it amount to anything after, The passing moment like a dynamo Faintly flickering through tears and laughter Against a near night sky, I did not know You standing in the darkness at the end, Vanishing there in the guise of a friend.
2nd April 2001
I would like to answer with a reply As sudden and deliberate as your Letter, I no longer know how or why It is but the words won’t come any more. I struggle with an ending on a page And try to sound a rhyme enough to feign Casual involuntary language While I learn how to cope with loss again, How not to trust in the familiar Or in the instinct to communicate Even with those who are most similar To myself, for I have been isolate Always, impelled on a one-way journey With passing illusions for company.
2nd April 2001
There is a shortfall left that will remain Long after the facts have been forgotten, That cannot be joined together again Nor the difference made up. And often I find myself left irretrievably There, remembering you in the garden, Vulnerable, wondering before me Just where you were going in that Eden With your mind ensnared in the origin And the ending of its pain. Sure, fragile, You were destined always to hover in Between and with the road lost sight of, while You followed your compass to horizon Along a pathway without anyone.
2nd April 2001
I refuse to allow such a ruin To remain there between us forever, Through its rhythm, its balance can begin Again, equalling before and after When time was a brief equilibrium, Our mutual suffering the pivot Within us, and the future was the sum Total of a life we brought with us, not Just the waste to remain and left to blame For what went wrong between us. The axis Broke with the weight, disparate was your name As words unfolding and left in stasis, I never noticed the disparity Resolving piecemeal into poetry.
2ndApril 2001
I was too tired to get back to you, I Was always too tired but kept on going, Restless as though the ceaseless day might die Out with the light, dipped down now in passing, Underneath an unremarkable moon. I watched a garden stretching backwards through Time, unable to comprehend, too soon, Everything came to an end. Something new Was with me and from which I had emerged, I was alone and no longer afraid, It seemed that the world itself had converged, Hollow with the echo my own words made, You phoned a last momentary signal But the silence was indissoluble.
3rd April 2001
I have left something of myself behind, A part of me and as a young mother That I cannot relive again, my mind Hurts with the thought of it, for another Memory over the years just began To shut down alongside experience Yet to unfold, and far outside the span Of my knowing. I came from a ward once And the only refuge on the planet Was with a little girl, you could not know It then, but from the time when we first met, Right up to the end with nothing to go On, somehow you made me feel less afraid, Memory suddenly that will not fade.
3rdApril 2001
Dismantling Fordwych House
I am forced to begin a long goodbye, There is nowhere to go with my sorrow, The days are just another reason why Everything that is nurturing must go. It has sustained me and been a bulwark Against the world more so a place to be, Somewhere somehow I was able to work Drawing pathways into my poetry, All this will be lost but the fire I drew Never burnt out, a closed unfolded fan, Yet high enough to reach into the blue Sky still whispering of how it began. There is nowhere else to go to from here, There is nothing I can do with my fear.
I shall be abandoned by everyone, And no one will know what is happening, Left to manage reality alone Without anything to keep me going, Most of the time I exist in complete Despair and hardly able to leave my Home, the world lies before me at my feet, The past is an echo answering why. Trapped between these extremes always, I need To draw, the finished picture is no more Than a poultice to draw out pain, to bleed Into colour again from a far core In the monochrome region of the mind, This will cease, it will all be left behind.
And the end is already as a blue Print now unfolding in its paradigm, There is nothing that anyone can do, The dismantling is a matter of time, And everything I have known will be swept Away like a carbon copy of my Life, fugitive in the garden I kept To, it will not remain however I Try to keep it from fading forever In my mind, from the world that was the Art Room, filtering colours tears and laughter And lost as an echo left in my heart, With new lamps for old, I cannot confine Whatever it was I claimed once as mine.
A resurfacing of a yob culture I thought to have left forever behind, An assembly line is the new structure Based on a working model of a kind, Allowing respite from extremity For a single hour only, everything Else must wait on hold and preferably With no exception outside the building, Casual barbarity that never Should have been allowed through, yet existing Unopposed without regard for danger, A regime permitting no resisting, Either to obey or to go away, Art therapy will not work in this way.
What is on offer as a replacement Is but a smoking room in a drop-in With a pool table, it was never meant To be anything more than a passing Remedy for people to sit around Somehow trying to console each other, Even they will be sold on and the ground Reaped for profit, and accepted after Without a sound for nothing can be done, We are ill and therefore disenfranchised And with nothing to lose or to be won. Is there anyone to have recognised That this is a proposal that will kill The most meek and the most vulnerable?
More than fifty places will be reduced To only fifteen, a day hospital Razed to the ground, uncertainty unloosed Where once there was hope and a new level Of care yet wholly unacceptable Where the most desperately ill may not Be allowed to get through, suicidal Despair may well be turned away with what Could be termed after as not enough proof. For some of us the refuge of a ward Is not possible, for traumatic truth Experienced there, remains as a sword In the heart, while the mind left to cower Each time, is too afraid to remember.
I came to Fordwych House when my own life Had collapsed, left in utmost jeopardy In the past, I lived each day on the knife- Edge of existence with my family Still around me and gone from me, yet always In disarray. I knew panic and fear Again as I had done in the deep maze Of time and I came when no one was near Me, left to a fate of insanity, For me this place was the end of the line. My first day was the anniversary Of a poet’s death, as though it was mine, The place then stood between me and my own Suicide, I felt no longer alone.
The kindness of strangers this was something I was experiencing for the first Time but I could only see the ending Of things, even my shadow was accursed And I was a fugitive from my own History, still unable to fit in Anywhere, yet I belonged there alone As I was and unable to begin. And for weeks paralysed before empty Paper I suddenly began to draw From a dream under fathoms of the sea Great stones were grounded on an ocean floor, Gradually releasing moving free In rhythms surging continuously.
Five years ago, by then discharged as an Outpatient, I was allowed to return For one day a week and slowly began To draw scenes from my childhood and to learn From a different angle what the pain Was like then, the drawings became windows Each with its own view and I saw again As though for the first time. An echo throws A sound that from its first source ricochets Outward from every surface and forces Even the silence to listen, the days After are left without answer, night sees Another way to apprehend a far Sound as it draws around a single star.
Sometimes only art therapy got me Through and for two years after I hardly Left my flat, nothing worked, I was to be Marooned and holed up for nine weeks every Time, leaving mainly out of an utmost Fear that the day could be taken away If I left it any longer, yet lost And bewildered I would go on Thursday For three or more weeks until the same thing Started all over again. I got through In this way and then everything crashed in, Vestiges of the family I knew Were gone for ever and I was alone And left unable to be on my own.
For six months I attended every day A growing and unmanageable fear Encompassed me and nothing could allay Or halt the course of mental nuclear Meltdown, I was unable to live or To die, there was nowhere to go, even Silence such as I had not heard before Had pushed me over right to the end. When I was admitted to a ward I felt That the future was over, time after Had come to a standstill and days were dealt Out to me that hardly seemed to matter Any more, yet at Fordwych House for five More months I fought each day to stay alive.
I tried for twenty months to keep going, An infrequent outpatient once again, I was left outside within a ruin Inexplicable trying to explain Without words but the meaning would not come. I existed in an isolated World yet unable to trust anyone, The life I had known was devastated And not a stone was left to stand or rest Upon another and there was nothing Left within, an empty space that oppressed Me in the dark, a place no scaffolding Could lean on to, a hollow vacuum Empty as the days I was lost among.
There is nothing to salvage from those days, I was on autopilot pretending, Even reality was a black haze A smoke engulfing buildings, covering The sky’s rim with an infinite burnt pall. Each night was a shadow of the unlit Day in dreams full of clamouring people Yet indistinct at the furthest limit Of time, where past and future seem to merge And the mind is trapped in the interval Between, forced to the precipitous verge Of silence and echoes inaudible Reverberating round an arena, Locked in an unreachable amnesia.
Poetry had lost its meaning for me, It had become a weight and a pressure That I could not bear or carry any- More, for my mind was ill and beyond cure. What remained from the years was left behind As something unknown I turned away from Suddenly, without looking back, my mind Was magnified by its own vacuum And drawn towards the fixed point of the end, I was alone and out on a far reach Of time, a one way journey that happened Almost without my knowing, without search Or rescue I was beyond horizon, Turning back was not within my reason.
I could not go back the way I had come And I could not comprehend the reason For the journey into the future, some Remaining knowledge that I was alone With night coming on and the end before Me, inexorably there beckoning, Luring me away from the extinct core Of the day into the light darkening. How I wanted to be done with it all, Just to escape from time coiled around me After like a tightened spring, to free-fall Into the timelessness of memory, An unknown, an inextricable black Shadow from which there was no turning back.
Nothing else mattered and I sat for days At a time yet unable to amend An automatic reflex in the haze Of green and drifting leaf of an early Spring, the words had failed and I could not go On, for my mind was burnt out entirely, A rudimentary black smoke, hollow With the sense of something distant and near With the impact of intangible fear. The unending planning of how to die Kept me alive for a little longer, This was the only certainty and I Could not allow for anything other Than a last endless countdown to the end.
June 2001
September 11 2001
There was nothing more my mind could accept And all the years before were suddenly At an end, it seemed that even time swept Aside the day’s barrier, collapsing Silent darkness into everything known, Resembling reality yet only In a dream, we move as we must alone. Silently instinctively following Along with no direction to go on And no one to call out, the echo Of people with each other has since gone And existence has nowhere else to go, Amounting to what we can remember And to all there is to carry over.
25th October 2001
Such is pain by its own comparison That we cannot seek to find its measure, The sudden nightfall over horizon Created a black hole in the future, In an ordinary unsuspecting September afternoon. Everything fails And still falls short of what was happening, The world is different and the line trails Off into silence and ignominy, There is nothing to draw on anymore, America was once its poetry Not the language and rhetoric of war, They cry out in the crumbling imagery, Brought to life again in our memory.
26th October 2001
What use is it now to add to the store Of whatever is already written And I cannot add one syllable more That would make any difference, and when I consider poetry or in doubt, I remember that rhythm is the breath Of life even when its light has gone out. Our past remains owing at our own death And we have a duty to the future And to the unlived lives of those who would Not see their end, left beyond reach or cure Or anything of this world, something should Be in place forever as a warning, Not this, and the sound of a bell tolling.
26th October 2001
The century is not young anymore It has missed out on its coming of age And is suddenly almost wise before Its years, having acquired a new language, A syntax from war and Armageddon For a world looking away at the end Of time. Verbs that come out of the jargon Possess a life of their own and can bend Time backwards in every conjugation To a space where the future tense should be. The present is a broken horizon Outside the compass of reality, And snow is falling through darkness after, Mimicking Nature, made out of paper.
26th October 2001
Words react in a way we cannot know, And certainly these were never stored in Any dream or ever in an echo Of experience, they had to begin After knowledge and still so unforeseen That it has yet to be given its name. The last scene in a life that might have been, Without end the lens goes back to the frame Just before an unprepared-for ending, Everything rests or stands about until, And the world waits, time alone hurrying Is open for business as usual, And when we turn to another again, Time on rewind is all that will remain.
27th – 28th October 2001
How can any of us describe the way A towering city collapses through The juvenile reach of a busy day, Nothing is enough and there are no new Words, the old are closed now and circulate In their own right, around the arteries Of language and unending night, we wait To see what reality converges On that place left to stand there in its trace, Between now and a future where the past Is another world or something we face In dreams, only memory can outlast Experience lost in a centrifuge, Knowledge without any hope of refuge.
28th – 29th October 2001
If nothing is enough, what do I say To my children whom I brought into a World like this, and yet the way a new day Broke from time left after, no amnesia, In existence alongside memory, Could ever manage to obliterate How the earth turned round and slowly mutely Rose to face itself. No one can relate From the empty unfolding narrative, How a single visible and distant Life perished there helpless in the first give And take, in the unprepared-for descant Of war, casualties they remain, yet A warning to a stunned extinct planet.
10th November 2001
A plane fell out of the sky into New York and again the future was kindled Under high-pitched frenzy and fear, that grew And burned and imperceptibly dwindled In the light, for no one could be sure or Convinced a sudden coincidence was An accident colliding with a war, And suffering seemed to pall before us All, still watching as we were at the edge Of things, and engulfed since by memory Collapsing into autumn and knowledge, Refusing to fade into history, Yet played out re-enacted again, Resurfacing as exposed exhumed pain.
14th – 16th November 2001
Words even now seem to be hanging back As though awaiting an unknown outcome Encamped for a while on a wayside track, Armed with new unearthed vestigial rhythm, To sound an alarm through the gathering Night collapsing amongst fleeing shadow And evening’s lasting rust-coloured haze in A world on hold searching for an echo, Or just a reminder how to keep on Going, while time struts in the masquerade Of maestro between the low dipped unshone And the light on stage, round about are laid The scattered tenses from the jugglery And broken pattern of eternity.
15th – 18th November 2001
They say that snow is on the way and yet These muted colours are incongruous In blue lowering light, a day beset By wind endless startling, while a Christmas Tree burns into colour sheer as distance And the iron-grey rust of approaching Night. The earth waits, arming for the next chance Encounter, with terror still in hiding Standing on a corner at the margin Of things, or an enemy left on tape, Casually discussing the ending Of a world from which there was no escape. The air is heavy with far-off pressure, There paper fell as snow through the future.
14th December 2001
Birthday Poem for Isaiah
Great sycamore leaves are falling around Me, left to rest for a while ungathered, Softening reality with the sound Of their upturned undersurface, outspread Reversed with a pattern of casual Artifice at once random or aligned, Scattered in upheaval and a wind, all Of them left to surrender in their kind, To drift endlessly downward, spiralling Effortlessly turning as though falling Away from the light, continually Facing the ground, to huddle where they lay, Deep-veined downturned and preliminary And each a fan that will not fold away.
21st November 2001
The Bench Sonnets
How shall I justify my presence here Where there is nothing more for me to do, Yet only by surrendering to sheer Unending time could I hope to come through. There is no ready answer that my mind Can seize on to somehow allay the fall, Or memory suddenly left behind With nothing there to hold on to and all The hours and nights in a life unfolding, The airlessness and the nowhere of those Days, helpless in the currents of something I am unable to bring to a close, A future that was mapped out before me And mute with the silence of poetry.
Why am I unable to face my own Silence the mute words will not go away, They assail in dreams in rhythms alone Leftover from an unwritten text, they Light up the darkness of their own shadow As the flickering of fifties neon Off and on, and trapped in the mind’s echo Unanswerable as a signal shone From the endless reach of a last Morse code, There is nothing left to light the way, fear Is foremost and its knowledge my far lode- Star, I hear the words slowly disappear, The line languishes and rhymes beneath my Feet as an unstifled unwritten cry.
Who am I that such a pain permeates The raw opened core of my existence, Somehow evening slowly evacuates As new oblivion from the sequence And unlit permanence of a full sky, Here there is no escape or refuge from The resonating emptiness in my Heart, where I am only myself among Remnants and residual forgotten Starlight, yet have long since ceased to wonder How night breaks into marginal blue, when Stars adhere to reality after As though imperceptibly remaining Below the surface of their vanishing.
Sleepless I have struggled in a protest Unable to manage somehow to make Up the hours and numbers that still oppressed Me in the dark, and only for the sake Of time waiting could I haul myself out And simply lay insomnia aside. My mother’s anniversary without My knowing was suddenly revealed wide Open calmly exposed to existence, The realization of a far time, And where before and after ever since Have converged in inseparable rhyme, In the margins of dreams awake something Sensed beyond then and now keeps me going.
This is not my West Street Jail for I chose To be here and like Lowell I have made My manic statement, unable to close Or shut down something within myself, laid Out in front of me before I was born. A trajectory left there to freewheel From, an open downward slope, I am torn By impact always and its head-on feel Yet cannot prevent an impassable Collision, paralysed besieged by fear The end aligned and ineffaceable. My senses brace for night hurrying near, Where do I go from here only to trawl After shadows my back against the wall.
There occurs in silence and the effort Of thought a place beyond imagining, Somewhere other than this where I am caught In an angled streetlight just beginning, Why has it always got to be this way, Why has there never been any other Choice, somehow darkness on the surface lay And held me fast to its shadow after. And there was no escape from an empty Page seen in dreams and written long before I could begin, while looking back at me From the furthest region of a mirror In the dark was someone I did not know Trapped with the distance of my own echo.
Something hidden within me is trying To break free, lost as I am in a full Blue and oblique afternoon progressing Casually to incalculable Starlight, unsure of how to relinquish Its hold or helplessly retreat before, Left unfalteringly to extinguish Over evening’s darkened neon glare or Magnified just surrender into night. My spirit hesitates somewhere nearby Keeping to the shadows as though in flight, Quietly watching waiting and awry In darkness and distilled disparity, Unwilling even to contend with me.
Like a dream and its journey the poem Unfolds and the rest is beyond control And too far out to reach, only rhythm At its source dictates the ending, the whole Course and beginning being dependent On rhyme and stemming from an undertow, A single premonitory current Formed in the depths with nowhere else to go. Yet so much without sleep, how to retrieve Even a syllable from an echo In the dark, where unquiet vowels weave Through unvisited dreams enough to show How memory recurring and its rhyme Are an inconsolable paradigm.
The first line exists somewhere just below The surface sensed and near and taking me Far out on an endless current, as though The tidal force of an incoming sea Could ever pull me back again, I fail And never come within reach, a far shore With no harbour or mooring, while I trail The horizon seen from an open door. My life is ajar, continually Pushed further than the edge of day and night To a sidewalk in between, silently Deciphering by a darkening light, From volume echoing out of hearing And clamouring beyond understanding.
Against the fulcrum and pull of pressure I force a poem to its furthest hilt, My whole life about resisting the lure, The siren song in a retreat from guilt, In a struggle about time without end And its legacy of oblivion, The inherited years I could not mend Lost in momentum with a commotion Of their own still disturbing the surface, Their echo carries across the distance And the circling ever-widening trace In a pool of rain, yet seen ever since At the marginal reach of night shadow As something still refusing to let go.
I am writing against time winding down And the never-ending pressure to keep Afloat, to search without running aground Trapped in the shallows of life without sleep And the hidden reef of insomnia, Where I am entirely at the mercy Of memory and then its amnesia, The indistinct stars for reality, Flickering casually existing Random as the force of far circumstance And blue vacuity intervening, In ordinary insignificance How time grows into starlight from an arc That burns and throws no shadow in the dark.
A poem is about surrendering Notwithstanding its equivocation, About going all out for a meaning From existence even when there is none. Sometimes the effort and expense of time Seems only to defeat its own purpose And everything ends with a rehearsed mime, A dumb-show that brings the line to a close. And terror is born of uncertainty, The words are buried alive somewhere deep Far-off in an unknown territory, A harvest after left to stand or reap Loosening the inexorable hold Of a life in the shadows left untold.
How do I begin or draw to the end Life now unfolds itself only between These polarities, nor can I amend Or make up for what has already been Weighed in the balance and there remaining Is found to be still wanting, and rather Than instalments on a sum outstanding, Words must take their place forever after. I hardly know myself or the poem Heading out towards while I keep behind At a distance, yet I have known rhythm Its isolated impact on my mind, Its irrevocable apology For a makeshift permanence yet to be.
There is a burden that is too heavy And nowhere for refuge along the way To put it down and rest enough to see How much further there is to go, a day Or another year amount to nothing They hardly seem to matter anymore, An unwritten narrative converging On the end and all that I am here for. Memory’s first rhythm is my compass And the only instrument I possess Locked between before and after it has To align with time and yet coalesce, I walk in darkness with nothing to light The way the end is left within my sight.
When I am tired and can go no further A poem veers off on its own accord Freewheeling without reference after, Sometimes spending what I can ill afford, And as though in a jest of its own kind Conjures a mockery of what is meant, Drawn-out openly from a ransacked mind Waylaid and erring in an argument, About reality and time without End or yet whether meaning can be found To exist at all, interstices out Of which a heart reacting runs aground Or survives as rhythm undiminished, The end is the beginning unfinished.
Words begin to slip and there is nothing More that I can do just to keep them from Fading on a page. My mind is falling Into itself, and imagination Has pulled back now and is beyond control And in lodgings in anonymity, As a jettisoned language takes its toll, An echo coming to nothing, empty In a vacuum of its own making, The lights are on red with nowhere to go, With no room to turn round in listening, Sometimes silence is all there is to know. Memory’s structure widens and deepens, The future blurs and clouds across a lens.
Stranded at the fault-line between night and Day I have yet to find out how to keep Going, with nothing aside or in hand Facing a harvest waiting left to reap Or fail. Forever out of step with my Own kind, always too far out in front or Falling continually behind, I Can never be a part of the longed for Crowd or ever at the ordinary Distance of things, there in the dark alone In far low-watt starlight, and memory A fugitive with nothing to go on, Through the last grey to evening’s watermark Night’s first shadows are fleeing in the dark.
A poem will often go no further If it cannot ignite its beginning Enough to kick-start rhythm and alter Reality searching for an ending. There is nothing to go on and language Sometimes stammering towards a standstill Only exists to founder on a page, With the end coming to nothing until A word or a line gradually takes Hold, and reluctantly out of chaos And infinite vacuity creates Truth from memory and unspoken loss And words which have somehow become derailed, Yet out of such things meaning is assailed.
Sometimes poetry is sabotaged from Within by a metre going nowhere, Memory’s involuntary rhythm Still incarcerated and arraigned there. Increasingly now a new beginning While faltering at the start, its tangent Comes to an end without ever having Reached the heart, devoid of any intent, And languishing under scaffolding in A structure erected and collapsing Into nothing, trapped in its origin Yet hindered and held back by everything That falls short of language, and what I lose Slowly from memory and its purpose.
I would like to quietly disappear Into another world where I am known And able to sleep awhile without fear Not this feeling among a crowd alone, Here, where there is nowhere to turn away From, hours without end when no one is near Except for shadows hurrying as they Lay, unceasingly suddenly to veer As distant fragmented inaudible Voices endlessly heard approaching yet Always falling away, unreachable As memory unable to forget, Effaced and subsumed under siren-wail And aware it is all to no avail.
There is a region called oblivion Via a route in anonymity And its endless knowledge is my reason, A siren-wail forever drawing me Into the lure of another ending, Its origin silently echoing Through interstices at the edge of fear Where I last saw my mother disappear. Drawn into interminable darkness Her life then dismantled and left untold And only seen in dreams at an address That was beyond reach and out of this world, For me this place was left beyond compare And all my life I have tried to get there.
I am standing always at the crossroad Unable to decide which way to go, Remembered still as a last episode, As the only path left open although I could not know, and in the dark alone, Turning around in the deep disarray Of leaves heaped in the rain, you must have known We were left there never to find the way Again, for you were already in your Last year yet drawn-out and precipitate, Hurrying suddenly as from the shore Of a world far behind you, left to wait Without end while searching for an answer Left echoing through the silence after.
Once again I have reached the halfway mark, Left to wonder how to conjure something From nothing, or facing each day the stark Realisation that time is running Out and without anything more to go On, yet so much a part of poetry Still unwritten that I no longer know Myself, pushed towards the extremity Of dreams and language, continually Spiralling downwards. What matters is truth, The undertow beneath reality Surging and receding, offering proof, My heart is a stone thrown into water Rhythmically circular thereafter.
There is no way out except to keep on, I have come too far to think of turning Back but my mind fails me, the horizon Is too far-off to see, resonating Visible only in my memory Where the blind tap-tapping of the numbers Keeps me going, echoing, endlessly Augmenting what the stunned heart remembers Yet waylaying me in the agony Of identity, an empty mirror Where I exist in anonymity, Artificial in a fading light or As a shadow before it is effaced Along an unlit day and left to waste.
For nineteen years I have tried to retrieve The unknown origin and momentum Of my first years using time as a sieve Through which to strain an airless vacuum, And have wandered trapped since in a night maze, The shadows of its many passages, Unable to face the light of lost days And things of the heart nothing assuages, And turned about searching for an exit In mounting panic and delirium, My mind melting down within the unlit Space between reality and a dream, Where words became in the darkness a path, An echo in the silent aftermath.
Silence is the close constraint that holds me Fast whenever I attempt to begin, Unable to navigate the empty Reach where the mute words have their origin. And if I should try to make an approach To sojourn or to moor at anchorage, A storm at sea presents enough to broach Against meaning, and a scuttled language Falls back without having reached an ending. An outcome random as an echo thrown That ricochets in a dream, existing Incognito with a life of its own, Along a premonitory pathway, As a fugitive hiding from the day.
How is it possible to reach the end When I hardly know which way to go, near Yet left behind with time enough to tend A language again alone without fear, Reminding me how it used to be when I first began, when early memory Unravelling was able to open To the light, not as this transitory Skein of shadows thrown continually Entangled, fleeing from its own searing Origin, from the darkened atrophy Of illusory low grey stars, veering On the narrow hollows of the future With the weight of unreachable pressure.
It is another life that is driving Me and yet leaving without letting go, How long can I hang on for listening At unfathomable depths and with no Answer discernible or echoing But my own, then heard as though a sudden And forgotten song illuminating An empty template in a dream, open Wide as a page leaving its trace behind Hidden in silence and lost memory, The banks of an underground stream, to wind Through depths of uncharted territory, Surfacing cursive in a script after Or left unwritten to carry over.
I cannot pull back now, there is no rest Until the end is over, I hardly Seem to know myself anymore, oppressed Obsessed with a long lost identity, Pressurised always by the need to keep On going. How easily my mind fails Me, so many are the days that just seep Through, left in a terminal light that trails Away into nothing at the fault-line Of existence from after and before, Where the unlit night possessed what was mine, Alone there in the space of a mirror In the dark, accompanied, on my own As neon letters flickered off and on.
The Fields of Killingbeck
The unrelenting cold of Christmas Eve Had eased a little, enough to allay The dark, enough to get through, a reprieve Impossible to gauge or even say For sure if snow was on the way. Instead Light rain began to fall through everything, Slowly blown slanting, spreading through coloured Glazed illuminated bulbs still branching Distant creases in a low ungathered Night that prefigured the year’s end as it Crowded upon me, filling the stifled Air, yet mute and far-off as an unlit Star, or as the future stretching around Them, lost with whatever it was I found.
Sometimes it is impossible to breathe, The future weighs so heavily upon Me, how shall I ever manage to weave A narrative with nothing to go on, With so much lost and inaccessible And still only reachable through a door Standing ajar and unapproachable. The entangled years that sought to immure Us, trailing lost threads that could never be Pulled free or traced back to their origin, Exerting a stranglehold, memory Was unable to release or begin To unravel, without language aligned Superimposed on what is left behind.
Language alone manages to steer me Through the hidden straits and open peril Of insomnia, where rhythms to be Are stored unknown and unwritten until Conjured piecemeal into reality, Attended by their lost experience And pierced to the heart by memory Remaining yet fading from existence. While the future crumbles into nothing As though propped upon its own far shadow Under a precarious scaffolding, A replica left empty and hollow Within and mimicking words forgotten, Splintered into time between now and then.
The year is hurrying towards its end And even as I struggle for a way Through, nothing now can lessen or amend Its unending vacuum left to weigh Heavy on my mind. The words do not come On cue, subsumed unrecoverable, Aground alongside memory and from Which there is no escape, an empty hull Forgotten in full unfathomable Seas, lodged fast forever on a last ledge Of time, beyond what is salvageable, Refusing still to release its knowledge, Mute without shadow under sealed pressure At unlit dreamed levels of the future.
How can I make a beginning again From all that has gone before or even Out of the end, however much the pain Recedes it will not go away. Often Now there is nothing to think or to say Destined always to wonder how to go On with language in such a disarray, To wait there left with nowhere else to go, With no refuge at the end of it all And however much I try to rehearse The past it is always beyond recall, Yet I know that only silence is worse, The airless paralysed sound of a mind Trapped forever with what is left behind.
Silence is worse and yet I know full well It is the vacuum necessary For words to come, and as an empty shell Keeps the sound of its own reality, So I am as its hollow left to tell Of how mute imagination was brought To birth by a shadow that fleeing fell Along the day and out of darkness wrought, Echoing through far-falling city rain To iron-grey depths where scuttled empty Starlight foundered full underfoot in vain, Where neon blinking intermittently Signalled unheard words, charred into the sheer And endless silence of the atmosphere.
All there is left to do is to allow Memory to come through and not renege On what took place but openly avow Its truth, still existing with a language Of its own and left in reality At an address unknown somewhere in a Dream, forgotten in anonymity But echoing beneath insomnia From an endless arena in the dark, Confined again, reliving what happened Yet fading unseen as a watermark Between pages turning towards the end, Its proof inscribed as an unlocking key Inserting time into eternity.
The air is heavy with threatening snow But still it does not come, filled with light found In a world turned upside down and as though Reflected already upon the ground. There is nowhere left to start or begin, Following on after as an echo Suddenly reaching an utmost ending, The words are almost more than I can know And I am left as a stranger even To myself for my life is no longer Mine, still waiting there for snow between then And now, yet trying to find another Meaning hidden in the recovery Of time that passed without its history.
It is the feast of the Epiphany And the hoar frost is again receding, Even lightly fallen rain, already Fitful and uneasily loitering, Is left there forgotten at a corner In Hampstead where a tree still rearing lit Stands abandoned beyond notice after. And nothing that is lasting seems to fit, It is the ongoing long-drawn echo That signals an eventual outcome When sometimes at the end of hours hollow Is the yield without anything to come Or fall back from, when in brocaded lace A divested unlit tree leaves its trace.
It is the labour and sometimes seeming To be going nowhere that is the key, Opening like a closed fan unfolding From its origin and extremity, Faltering outward among untold lines, Arched precarious and narrowing in The thin concertina of its confines Collapsing into nothing from within, And knowing I am only following Another, trying to keep up and yet Always falling behind, an existing Mislaid shadow unable to forget, Left without anything to come or fall Back from, in silence unanswerable.
There is a floor that is interstitial, Palpable between the polarities Of a dream, stretching into terminal Darkness and left to plunge precipitous Towards its own infinity below. Silence, that I am always on the edge Of, pushed so far there is nowhere to go To except insomnia, the last ledge To which I cling veering on the abyss, Slowly crumbling within a vacuum While I rehearse a last night in stasis Alone. Out of the chaos the words come In their fashion and of their own accord, Costing almost more than I can afford.
In the dream I was climbing a ladder In a photograph and more than half-way Trying to follow my children further Up, and about to remark on the way That climbing there without fear, suddenly I could no longer breathe, even awake I was still without air in full panic, My throat paralysed, my mind still frantic For a way out and the means just to take In air and establish reality Again and end the nightmare rehearsal For the end, nothing else seemed to matter, Yet nothing could help me in the struggle With myself or the empty words left there.
I was born in nineteen forty-eight in The early hours of the morning, during A sudden December night, when the din Of late revellers outside in passing Had quietened down and Coburg Street was Left to nurse its silence under gaslight Flickering. My mother was tired because She had prepared all evening for the sight Of her sisters due to arrive from Ireland, Hoping to be there during the labour Of her first child, but they did not come and I was born unattended when her hour Was at hand, its aftermath was the span Of a countdown from when her life began.
I knew nothing of what had gone before And you gave us so little to go on, It was hardly mentioned or left obscure As though it had never happened, your own History was then as a vacant space, A few sentences gathered together Preserved by word of mouth without a trace Of the day passing or what happened there. For your origin like your life had been Wholly plundered and left in disarray, Only things you carried away could mean Anything and there was nothing to say In passing, I remember your silence And the way you spoke in the present tense.
I can only imagine what you felt As you held me and gave me my first name, Your move against all the cards that were dealt Before you, a freedom that then became A prison ensuring you would exist Living for each day and yet ignoring An open door and an exit you missed In the confines of a fan unfolding. The way through was always on the other Side, forever in front of you always Behind, in all the noise there was nowhere To lay your head, the lost unquiet days Never burned out, even to horizon The future was not within your reason.
How can I ever be worthy of my Task, nights like this I just want to forget It all, to sleep awhile or yet defy My destiny by refusing to let It go. Often my mind is in tailspin Falling without end through reality, And the end unfinished and left within As a ruin in its totality, In the space between waking and dreaming And where I am lost trying to follow Another, someone once known and hearing My own voice answering as an echo Ricocheted through an immutable night, There is no choice, I have to get it right.
Silence recurring was left as silence After, destined never to come to an End but not the same as it had been once Before and when memory first began To take shape, this was wholly different, Nothing was left to remind us that you Had ever been there, nothing that was meant To last for very long, but we all knew This was the end, time would not come again But remain as though something had happened, Familiarity was to remain The inexorable feel of the end, Time once was a cavernous vacuum Filled with the emptiness of days to come.
Only silence was left to tell of you And its drawn out presence endlessly wound About us, all you had amounted to, The lost days and remembered nights were drowned Out always, still just beneath the surface, Hurtling downward and beyond retrieval With words once that vanished without a trace Into the delirium of it all. Silence is where I must start from, it is All there is and all there is left to go On, the times I awake thinking to miss Something I could not mislay, a shadow That fell in the night alongside my own With the certainty of a day to come.
How shall I address your silence when I Cannot confront my own left there to trail Into the distance as though on stand by And as though it is all to no avail. What remains is a mute reality Falling backwards with nowhere else to go, An ebb tide’s diminishing entity Yet leaving me no choice but to follow Or to stay where I am on an empty Shore an interval existing before, Incising the sea’s glass infinity With an open splintered fallen sun, raw Levelling in the dark, in a mind’s hold, Lost to the world, locked into the untold.
To confront silence I have to go back To a dream recurring and coming out Of nowhere, suddenly taking the lack Of all the years alone and spent without You and drawing them into a question Which you being alive cannot answer. I try to focus on an illusion That was to propagate your death after And leave us in the dark just believing In what we were told, yet I am distraught By the truth and continue entreating You to explain a lie that left us caught In a time warp with you alive, unknown To us, and living out your life alone.
It was more real than life itself, a dream Somehow in which I could believe again In the time that was left, enough to mean Something at the end of the years in vain, Trying to remember you in falling Rain whenever its ripples spread along The ground, softly issuing spiralling Into the light and left there to belong As they narrowed in the dark to a core Again. And yet you claimed it was a way Out to protect us then from an unsure Future, from knowing that you went away To live at an address we could not find, To live just by leaving us all behind.
Whenever I saw you in a dream you Would always appear as I remembered You and recovered from your illness through The years since then, while saying how you led Us to believe you were dead in order To be able to leave and to survive. And I cry we could have known each other And with the knowledge you were still alive, And I try to tell you how I have missed All the life we should have had in between, The joy remains even when you insist Things were for the best, nothing seems to mean What it is and I am left with my grief And the wonder of it in disbelief.
And the dreams were repeated in this way Until they finally came to an end, I found it was impossible to say Anything that would last enough to mend The endless distance of the years between That kept us apart in the same city, With the miracle of your life unseen Existing without us and suddenly Quietly about to come to an end. For you were going to die all over Again, there was no time left to depend On, no chance to put it right or alter Reality, I kept on asking why Was there not enough time to say goodbye.
My disbelief was only the wonder Of it all, the fact of the narrative Was the only explanation after That you did not die but went on to live Instead, and this was more acceptable Than the reality of what happened And what we were left with after, until The lie on which we had come to depend Was overturned by a dream. Yet even They would fail to protect us in the end And in the last one we only met when You were about to die, this was the end Of a dream and they never once returned, Years passed before I faced what I had learned.
It was too late when we met to have known Each other even in the make believe Years of a dream, and in this one alone You were now dying and about to leave Me to wonder at the waste of it all. I kept on saying that you were so near Why could we not have been told, all the while Thinking you were dead, living with the fear That we would never see your face again. You kept your silence and now there was no Time left and all the words were just in vain, What was before us was all we could know, I learned more about your life from your death For you seemed to live beyond your last breath.
You were never seen again, you were gone And the dream disappeared into my mind, What had once occurred was in some way won Back from time and became somehow aligned With the future, events that were able To mirror each other when turned about Were lodged forever in a cat’s cradle Where meaning itself was turned inside out, A dream superseding reality Because its existence could not be faced Until the end of years of atrophy When a dream’s last origin could be traced. The silence of your death was in question, The silence in a dream was my reason.
The sequence of the dreams became a part Of my existence, a vital refuge Like softly falling rain, a place to start From, an anchorage in a centrifuge Blurring that would never cease to revolve And yet somewhere I could find you again. Years melted in the way ripples dissolve Spiralling back into their core in vain, In surface currents before and after Circled outward in a far unbroken Pattern forcing time into an answer In the dark, to the locked silence since then. You told no one and could not reason why You kept a silence long enough to die.
I must empty my mind of everything And exist as an open vacuum With silence slowly filling echoing Unheard, channelling in an outward rim From a radial arc of falling rain, Aligning with the dark, centrifugal With light, random in rhythm and in vain. Endlessly encompassing a still pool Narrowing levelling into its core, A thin unravelling film, a surface Involuntary, a tidal structure Vanishing as memory without trace, As silence hidden volcanic within An endless compass softly issuing.
In the summer of my eleventh year We were all suddenly sent into care, It was then that what was to become clear Was silence, not its echo everywhere Resounding as an aftermath only Of the night before, but silence that went Back through the years, a shadow behind me Of the unsaid between words never meant To be heard and yet left behind instead. And from that summer nothing would ever Be the same, the secret of the unsaid Was to follow you forever after, I turned towards an imaginary World where my own silence lay before me.
Silence had always been there for as long As I could remember, somehow always About in the foreground of things, among Events and sudden happenings when days Turned into nights and hours then forgotten As just another day breaking into Silence. No one spoke about the nights when Time seemed to explode and as though it knew Far too much for its own understanding, A day would become another layer Put behind us then but never settling, And yet nothing could be done to alter Anything, we were to become immune While silence spun an unending cocoon.
While you lay in a hospital during The dark unending summer of nineteen Sixty, still too ill to be wondering How we were, or what existed between The days and nights of the ongoing ward Routine, you must have looked at a future Like a shadow before you, a backward Look at what lay behind in the structure Crumbling around you from which there was no Escape. Still young and left without any Hope of refuge or rescue, an echo From your girlhood with its infinity, Filling you with regret, yet with no one To guess at the secret you kept your own.
Whatever would you have said at that stage If someone could have shown you a way through, The door was ajar, nothing can assuage Your silence as the secret cancer grew Unknown to anyone, as two vital Years were lost, yet suddenly that summer You simply backed away from a crucial Chance to speak and break your silence after. What was it that forced you to hold your tongue, Was it the habit you had of never Having time for yourself, struggling among Your colleagues and friends for privacy there For your secret and its presence that went Unnoticed while you lay as a patient.
And so your well known diffidence saved you From detection or so the story went, You were to remain as steadfast for two Years almost until a sudden event Outside your silence prompted you to speak. But by that summer you must have known how Much time you were left with, enough to break Into the years you would have to allow For your children growing up. What drove you Towards a relentless last choice that lay Beyond even the reach of speech and too Far out for all the things you could not say, When language failed, it was then already Too late to alter its reality.
We were in The Hollies separated From you for the first time, there was no one With a familiar face related To us who wanted us, left on our own And as though just abandoned in that place, And unable to find a way back to A life that each day began to efface The distance that lay between us and you. The children’s home was only for TB Patients and you yourself had become ill While working as an auxiliary Nurse, keeping your silence, working until The signs then became unmistakable And lodged with an illness that was to kill.
At the end of that summer holiday You had to leave the hospital early, Before we left, The Hollies were to say That we had bought her into jeopardy Interrupting her treatment, our mother Had thus to be discharged early because Of us and our disruptive behaviour, She was going home but we were the cause And if she remained ill it was our fault, And darkness lay on the young unfolding Day left there forever as an assault On her frailty, while uncomplaining You watched my father make his old excuse For a drink, unable to be of use.
What was it that made you hold your silence For so long, knowing that it would be too Late when you finally told, your defence Could only be that you had to get through In order to feed your children until They were almost grown up, you used say How glad you would be if this could fulfil Your dreams, you would not live to see that day. Could this resolve have kept you going for Longer then even when your energy Had already gone, something there for sure To cling on to with a reality Of your own making, even as the day Breaking with everything you could not say.
Sometimes you would say that there was something Wrong but I never knew how to answer And almost two years passed and with nothing Following the simple statement after. The words would not come, neither yours nor mine, Language itself which by then had broken Down faltered in its momentum and time, Left in waiting behind things unspoken. Then you would tell me how there was no one Who knew but I seldom could answer why, Something that you had not told anyone Yet you never expected a reply, Being your secret it was more about Being able to let the pressure out.
The facts do not hold up to scrutiny, Seemingly then, only I alone knew Anything at all in reality, But I was too young and able to do Nothing, so I simply put it all out Of my mind because it was as a thing Overwhelming, and it left me without Anywhere to go, yet understanding That time in passing was just standing still, As though remembering something somehow Mislaid and then forgotten and until That moment beyond recall, even now The recollection of permanent fear From so long ago breaks sudden and sheer.
What is there to say about those years when I cannot bear to summon them to my Mind, what I am left with is your joy when We met each morning, whenever I try To remember you it is then that I Come back to, the expression on your face Was the look of someone waiting to die, A still reflection nothing can efface As though you had entered another plane Of being, something you had to go through With just to combat the silence of pain, Of never looking back again, and you Far out in front walking over water, Mute with my destiny as your daughter.
Such a look it was, as of another World, its rapture a gaze I had not seen Before, returning from duty after The night shift you merged unnoticed between The people you worked with on your way home While quietly approaching your children As we briefly passed by, someone alone, You were isolate among the women Returning, hiding another life from Them and a death they could not imagine. There was nowhere to lay your head and some Nights you walked the streets in order to win A fugitive verged sleep before morning Broke the nightmare of your waking dreaming.
Why does my mind return as though by chance To those early mornings which when weighed in The balance across the endless distance Of the years amount to almost nothing, Something seen in passing or imagined With the hindsight of silence left on hold, Silence that would never have jettisoned Its reality and yet trapped untold With nothing left to say, an immanence Slowly imperceptibly just ebbing Away, ferrying you from a last chance Mutely and inaudibly receding, From a world left to guess or apprehend, From silence destined to come to an end.
When I confront the void of existence It is always then that I seem to go Back to, an inexorable silence Pervading everything, only to grow The more profound sojourning alongside Another language from experience, Aligned over darkness opening wide A door to the outside within a sense Of being. A space where the fugitive Is destined to run forever without Rest in a world left without time to live, While pursued through the shadows round about, Yet listening in vain for the echo Of silence a night can summon or throw.
Each passing morning left you more afraid As your secret became impossible To sustain, echoing and overlaid, Held back by a day’s impenetrable Lasting necessity, as the simple Steadfast urgent need to feed your children Became ever more inexorable. There was never any refuge and when The whole thing broke, it was already too Late and nothing could prevent the ending, Unerringly you had found the way through To a future left without anything To go back to, while silence broke into Its last days unfathomable and few.
I can only think intermittently Of those days where they remain forever Shuttered, installed in their futility Or oblique and blurred across a mirror In the dark, seen in dreams without a star To steer by, without a shadow left to Lean upon. The vacuum of a far Time layered and loosening as sand through An hourglass, or as silence emptying Endlessly recurring, left mute with fate On stand-by and with a last existing Chance to speak, but it was always too late, You knew you would not live to see us grown Up, silence without end was your reason.
And yet there had never been any kind Of choice, a trapped unimaginable Existence was all that was left behind While you reckoned up the darkness until The end, its countdown and the sacrifice Of your whole life, weighing its summation Against a single day held in the vice Of knowledge and experience, random In a reality from which there was No escape. Even your home was a door Open to the dark, an exit that does Not close, just left to stand ajar, unsure Within shadows and light from the inside, Your nights spent in a doorway open wide.
In Memoriam Christine Blake
Christine died in her home in Fordwych Road a few doors away from the West Hampstead Day Hospital. Christine had been denied this refuge. (June 1945 – April 2002)
When I summon together all the chance Encounters that have existed between Us, trying to weigh them with the distance Of things unsaid, the unlit future seen By you alone, there was so little to Go on. You seemed to be living only In the interval of time left to you, Slowly foundering, clinging to any- One who would listen, but we could not hear Or see as you were swept by a current Too far out to reach. Something beyond fear Failed to prevent what you finally meant, Left to mutely disappear without trace, Suspended from a life you could not face.
7th – 11th April 2002
Alone on Tuesday morning just thirteen Weeks into the year, the first day after Easter, you put an end to what had been An unmanageable existence, where Another afternoon another night Was not within your reason or the span Of things, whatever intercession might Have happened, it was too late. As a fan Too widely opened you could not get back, The separate panels of your life were Locked into place, a surface on the rack Of being that yet could go no further While the arc that held it all suddenly Gave way to the last trace of its story.
11th – 12th April 2002
Even your death was as though for a crime You did not commit, then left to hang there Already too late, without enough time Leftover between before and after, Just to turn about and run the distance Of your own road to the day hospital Only yards from your own door, beyond chance And equilibrium left unequal To the task. It would remain a journey You would never make, even the words failed Leaving you unable to ask or see The day outside where darkness within trailed, Something beyond fear was all you could hear And the silence of it hurrying near.
11th April 2002
Our Lady’s Candles were still emerging, Chestnut leaves unspread, recently broken Under hazed green smoke, were slowly drifting Upward through the grey pall of winter when You suddenly turned away from it all. A single candle in the space behind You at the last lap of your funeral Burned through the terminal silence, your mind A plan, a last mechanical journey Into an inferno that would enfold You with intangible reality As you passed before us into the hold Of time, where sunlight and material Darkness broke from the cordon of April.
14th April 2002
Even meaning somehow seems to fall short, Words that refuse to adhere to a page Fear to bear the weight of the way you fought To live or the uncomprehending rage For the way you would die. All the panic That happened which the years could not amend And night and morning broken by the tick And sound of a countdown right to the end, When you could then reckon on your fingers On one hand all the people still installed In your day. A collective guilt lingers And it will not go away, your life stalled, Reduced to fashioning an open noose, Oblivion from which you were cut loose.
25th – 26th April 2002
It was all over by the time they broke Through the door and final as a cry for Help that came too late, helpless in the spoke Of light mutely entering the heart’s core As someone began to knock on your door. The only barricade against a world You simply could not cope with anymore Left to its silence with the end untold And left for others to find or fathom, To sound the days you could barely get through As one by one all the things you had come To depend on were kicked away from you, Too weak to fight you tried to surrender, To ransom what you could not remember.
27th – 28th April 2002
Only thirty days ago was the last Day of Easter and the long awaited Opening impact of April, a mask Beneath which you struggled unabated As you went for a walk for the final Time in Regent’s Park, and where even while Accompanied as on a casual Outing your mind was trapped in a trial For your life on your last full afternoon. Who judged you that you should die by your own Hand or ordered that your death come so soon, Was there no defence as you stood alone No one to witness your execution, With no last reprieve after hope had gone.
1st – 2nd May 2002
Who will pay Charon now for your spirit Taken before its time without tender Or absolution from a place unlit, A closed unvisited ruin, a world Where hidden beneath unshifting bending Girders exists a brief reality, There the bewildered heart can find no rest Or refuge, a surface without any Vestigial foothold or anything To cling to, yet an interval after With no origin, recurring untold Without end as the spirit unrehearsed Is left to its first silence, left to the Shadows that lodge on the banks of Lethe.
1st – 8th May 2002
No Last Reprieve
You became just another unmentioned Casualty of the drawn-out chaos Resounding around you, pursuing you Even to the mouth of the far harbour Where you sought for refuge from a breaking Storm gathering endlessly before you. Found to be wanting, you were judged to be Guilty, accused of ‘using too many Resources’, the therapeutic structure That had been keeping you afloat, keeping You from slowly drifting too far out, was Suddenly taken away from you, shunned And left to an inexorable fate, Left there to wait until it was too late.
21st June 2002
Instinctively we kept to the distance Left between us, too afraid of being A burden to each other but you were Force which seemed to ebb and flow around you Whenever you were there. I remember An ordinary afternoon and you Were talking about Art and Augie March And seemed almost beside yourself with an Overflowing feeling for everything That day, you were so relieved to be there It was as though you had been rescued from Something left unmanageable, I see You still in a crowd ineffaceable.
11th February 2003
Homage to Tsvetayeva after Elaine Feinstein’s translation of Homesickness by Marina Tsvetayeva
I am a fugitive in the winter Light and there is no refuge anywhere, I am as a log left behind after Falling forever through the empty air. Tsvetayeva’s avenue of trees draws Me towards its ineffaceable space, There, where I am lost in a limitless Landscape of starless dreams I cannot face Or turn away from, paralysed useless, The random days flicker as distant Morse Code, their echo refuses to let go, The mute sound of a shell closed and hollow, Its sea receding endlessly breaking The remembered map of my own making.
18th – 19th December 2002
Countertransference
Why am I asked to justify my fear When interminable memory weighs Heavy on my mind, my refuge is here, Where I am forced to contend and always With my back against the wall. Everything I have known has gone, the familiar Disappeared long before its echoing After, in vain I search for the lodestar Of my being but there is nothing near Enough to show me where to go, no one But insubstantial shadows as they veer Away from me, a collaboration That would end even as it had begun With an illusion left to lean upon.
Why can I not be made to feel welcome Or allowed to come in from the outside Just to rest awhile as a refuge from A world where there is nowhere left to hide. I am a nameless fugitive and mute With a language known from another time, Standing my ground with nothing to refute And rudely pushed away from what is mine, And yet the pain is something I must bear Until there is a time to put it down, Memory loosens its hold and I dare Not cannot let it go for I shall drown. There is nothing to bring to ferry me To the future except disparity.
How casually transference is thrown Away as though it is of no accord, Something unfinished with everything known And left outstanding severed by a sword, An open wound that will not close again. There is all the terror of betrayal Uncoiling like a tightened spring, in vain The memory and momentum of it all, Something broken and left in disarray Even as a far-reaching unending Amnesia now beginning to set in, Only the vestiges still remaining Will last but nothing will ever begin, Just a feeling of nothing left to say.
How impossible it is from the stand Point of a patient even to be heard, Everything gets turned round on the one hand And on the other not a single word Of criticism is allowed except At the cost of a huge emotional Affray. Countertransference is adept, Hiding itself behind a colossal Smokescreen, a casual play of shadows Slanting the day, as a deliberate Subterfuge mimicking loyalty grows In between the hours, random and innate, A sense of betrayal the only proof, The mute fact of feeling, the simple truth.
When I turned around you had disappeared Before I was aware of your absence, Something suddenly reached the end and veered Off leaving without a trace, with a forlorn sense Of meaning that somehow came to nothing. My mind hurts with the lasting illusion Of it all, nothing that is existing Has any permanence even from one Day to another, and bound together By a mute ineffaceable darkness Woven in between before and after, As memory begins to coalesce. In silence since exists the certainty That you were supposed to be there for me.
It was a belief in you that kept things Going though frequently I had to face That nothing was in place, an echo rings In my ears beneath the passing surface Of the years, that this had happened many Times before. Yet somehow I was always To mislay my fears, managing any Leftover doubts, and subsumed in the days After as something stemming from my own Sensibility, left there sometimes raw And over exposed, a figure alone In a negative aligned in the core Of light, erasing everything before In the white haze left there after a war.
It was as if the words had been written Before, as though they had always been there Waiting to be heard or summoned. Often I saw them in dreams, a shadow after And seen suddenly in between the haze Of another world, silent with their own Time, trapped in their history in a maze Of meaning, an interval unheard shown In the darkness before it had occurred. What caused them to align with a sudden Experience, the mute path hurt and lured Me back, struggling with something forgotten And yet awake and using poetry To sound and encompass reality.
And all the years I had known in the art Room were overturned and dismantled round Me, there among the ruins how my heart Ached for this loss and for time left aground. The locked unfinished pictures lay before Me trapped forever in their origin, Left without any means of rescue or Release, as something I could imagine No more. How my senses longed for colour Even as it began to drain away, Flowing from the present and the future, The monochrome of a forgotten day, With nothing leftover to remember Me by, to show I had ever been there.
Somewhere along the line the pictures fused With the poems and I could not explain How this had occurred or why feeling bruised The more that memory began to wane, Until my mind had become an open Wound, a narrow fissure on the surface Of a timeless vacuum that often Seemed about to explode under the trace Of something existing and beforehand, With nothing in place to ease the pressure, Enough to be able to understand The far monochrome region at the core Of being, the sunless light in a dream, And the starless darkness of things that seem.
Even the pictures were seen before they Were drawn, locked somewhere fast where I could not Reach them, yet existing so far away That only in the finished picture what I had seen then became perceptible, Triggering memory from long ago, An experience lodged in the shortfall Of time, there leaning on its own shadow, A sense of something waiting to happen, As though the end itself was left on hold And waiting for me to catch up, often Allowing me to hold something untold And unrealised, balancing its load, With destiny left in the stand-by mode.
All the years just came to a standstill There in the art room where the atmosphere Without warning was unmanageable, Nothing then was allowed to interfere With the headlong momentum of something Beneath the surface closing the foreground, The sound of confrontation echoing Without end, a reality that wound Itself around me until I was bound About in its inexorable hold, There waylaid even as I ran aground By language alone and what the words told, And seven years were as though they never Existed, either before or after.
The confrontation when it came about Was final and sudden and everything Was left resounding in its wake without Recourse to reason, any suffering Was ignored then and there, for it could all Be put down to an overreaction, But what was lost was irretrievable. An overriding faith in someone known Was gone, and my mind had been pushed too far And the years collapsed and came to an end, Abandoned and now unfamiliar And then as a future I could depend On no more, a structure insubstantial, No more than an interval left to stall.
This was a rerun of two months before And now I was trying to repair it Again, but this time there was nothing more To be done, the wound was a direct hit And there was no way out, I could not go On pretending I was wanted any More. In vain I tried to say there was no Way I could speak about my pain, many Times people were allowed to pressurise Me in the groups, it seemed they were going In for the kill, I could not recognise The art therapist who kept insisting On a reply as though I must answer For my pain beyond before or after.
It was open season, people could say What they wanted but I was not allowed To remain silent or in any way Prevent it happening, there in the crowd It seemed that the only thing to be done Was to flee in tears distraught from the art Room. So many were the times lost among The years I had left there coming apart, Only to return again with self blame Knowing well that nothing could be explained, This time nothing would ever be the same, The door was to close as the future waned In the distance, as I was turned away For remaining there with nothing to say.
It took seven years to get rid of me So strong was my capacity to cling On for the sake of the pictures, and only By turning a blind eye could anything Be accomplished there. Yet art therapy Was the one way out of an endless maze, Colour that veered off into poetry Was left to drain away through those last days Until all that was left was a black space, A burnt out uncontrollable feeling That the void I would leave on the surface Of the paper was the heart of being, The extinct core seen in a dream, as though In the light I became my own shadow.
Colour drained away in much the same way Almost two years before when as a last Resort to try to save the art room, day By day I went without food in a fast That was to last for three months, at the end Of which Fordwych House was allowed to stay As it was. But the joy could not amend The weeks of pain that would not go away, That flowed into the protest that followed In the nine months after, hunger reduced Colour to a hollow spectrum, a mode Of darkness encompassed by a sealed fused Light, leaving me with no way out and like The monochrome hours of a hunger strike.
April 2003
Four Months for Dr Christine Van Duren
You say that you’re concerned about my pain More so the level of anxiety And however hard I try to explain, Trust has just been eroded within me. No one should try to cure too readily For this is a pressure impossible To contend with, how many before me Were never to be given the choice, still Less a voice with which they could answer no. The terror that can circulate around A room, constricting and then letting go As idealization runs aground, As though I have mislaid my own shadow, The closed door is the only place I know.
Yet I do not know where to go with my Sorrow, there is nowhere here that is near, There is no answer to my question, why The echo of fear is all I can hear. I end up thinking that life itself is A slow unfolding feeling of being Beaten up and every time the crisis Feels worse. I never get beyond seeing That people are there to be believed in, To the last reach blind to their betrayal, And I don’t know how to end or begin, I experience time as a trial Of words or the language of the spirit Taking itself to its furthest limit.
Snow is faintly falling through a crisis, Blowing against the foreground left behind, With my back against the wall the premise That there was nowhere I could fall, aligned In my mind as a gravitational Force stemming from a fulcrum of its own, Where meaning has no cohesion at all Except through time unravelling alone And snow falling far through the universe Reflecting into darkness all around, An unlit interval where I rehearse A life that only I can hear the sound Of, before a window this side of snow Blurring on the horizon long ago.
Poetry is still able to console Even as another day takes its leave And the headlong dark is out of control, Already distant when I start to weave A life endlessly through the residue Of the nights lost and the length of the days To come, where they stall as though late or due Before their time, lodged in a listless haze. The poems will make it to the future And yet somehow out of nothing they come Entirely as they are and beyond cure And its reach and with no one to summon Them here towards a precipitate end Among the broken things I could not mend.
It is difficult to negotiate The unfolding precipitous footpath Of the talking cure, too soon or too late And there is nothing but the aftermath Of a wrong turning, the circuitous Forgotten route back to the beginning Again, lost among the coterminous Echoes of life alongside, existing Within the past tense of the verb to be. The future is seen as if in a dream Already there, not the reality Of falling through the air to things that seem, Experience is unalterable, Bewildering the battle of it all.
My feelings have been found to be extreme, Summed up measured and found to be wanting They are not acceptable to the team Any more than a poem’s existing, And let us be honest it is language In its own right that is really on trial Here, as something that nothing can assuage, As the only fact beyond denial And the life they can only abandon. A force can be harnessed from the empty Air and left there when everything has gone, Feeling resounding through vacuity Beyond the reach of the ordinary, Outside the compass of reality.
I have passed through such a time in despair Completely unable to understand That I am alone and lost in the air I breathe, without anyone near at hand To help me on the journey to shoulder An unbearable unmanageable Weight, its pressure on my mind the after Sound registering on an endless scale, Veering somewhere into infinity. There is nothing that can keep it confined Or within the reach of humanity, Only my shadow tearing at its mind, The end an illusion from empty air, Without the tender, there is no one there.
Why has this pressure been put on my mind The only offence I gave was to be Ill, it was exerted by a combined Team pushing me towards extremity. It seemed as though my spirit was up for Grabs, the vestiges of a life for sale, My innermost thoughts were spread out before Me, open tattered pages left to trail An abandoned debris along the ground, My sensibility bound and censured Was made to bow and scrape without a sound, A captive held there somehow to be lured To a false and final diagnosis, The slipped unnoticed noose of psychosis.
For months I hardly dared to lift my head Higher than the level of floors or shoes, Doing everything by the book, instead An offer was made that I couldn’t choose To ignore, either to give in or go Back to a flat I could not exist in. I remained there unresisting although Restless questioning began to set in, Therapy became a slow coercion To an agenda entirely of their Own, seeking to impose medication Against a background of acute despair, Sometimes isolate pictures got me through Or poetry from everything I knew.
And I was made to sit before you all For making a complaint, nothing was real It was as though on some impossible Whim everyone was gathered to appeal To my reason and nothing remained there Of the place that I knew before, only A memory of who I was after Was to come away with me. And every Lasting thing that yet had contributed To my suffering was either denied Or simply lied about, nothing mattered, I was just effaced even as I tried To stand my ground, fading as a shadow Before them into everything I know.
And then you came to justify your care, But by then I was wholly indifferent, I was losing nothing, I could not fare Any worse, at the end we were not meant To meet anymore. I wanted to run From you and run from the day hospital, How I longed never to have to return Again, existing and my life in thrall Or as an overrun territory Wide open to a marauding army And with no way out, left there with my back Against the wall and open to attack, Helpless without any defence in place Against an enemy I could not face.
None of you were there when I needed you And it seemed that you all just slowly turned Away, everything I was going through Was marginalised or ignored, I learned From this side of therapy that nothing Really mattered to anyone at all. Not the past years, their locked continuing Impact, an endless shadow left to fall Along every morning when I awoke, Until the whole of my life was open Wide with a mute pain as the new day broke Into an aching irreversible Silence, a future unattainable.
My punishment for not being able To cope with the death of my mother all Those years ago, was irrevocable, At every level I was told to pull Myself together, to face the future, To simply put the life of another Behind me, and this was to be the cure For everything in my childhood after It came to its precipitate ending. And I was urged then to confront my pain And to justify its continuing, As though being judged again and again, A guilty verdict not negotiable, For a pain that was impenetrable.
You hijacked the therapy in order To coerce me into medication, And confronted by despair you never Listened but chose instead in each session To bend me unresisting to your will, I who simply needed you to be there Was silent with an unmanageable Hidden fear, while you were forced to repair Week by week the damage you inflicted Casually and deliberately And without remorse. There a mounting dread Accompanied me, as anxiety Was seized upon as something you could fix With the worst of the anti-psychotics.
I am expected to release my pain As though it was some long imprisoned thing Allowing me to visit it again And again, going through its suffering, While pacing the floor of its containment Inextricable behind a sealed door, In a low artificial permanent Light unceasingly entering the core Of a mind porous to the clamouring Echoing all around. A fixed sentence That no one can overturn for something Beyond understanding that happened once In another time, just to let it go I must walk away from my own shadow.
And only in psychoanalysis Am I free from the unmanageable Burden of necessity, a crisis Of conscience inherent that is able To mimic the inimical in me, Drawn to that unfathomable pitfall Where I must, as though in reality, Try to pull myself together. The pall Of a far haze stretches out before me Whenever I remember those first days, Unfolding gathering infinity Left encircled, enclosed within a maze Where I turn about searching near and far For the lost name of the familiar.
April 2003
You never let on when I spoke to you But it was your hand that rejected me When I reached out for recognition, too Mute while I was outside the Royal Free Hospital, sat there on a bench writing Poetry from a protest that lasted For nine months, against the continuing Dwindling of mental health beds. You who said So little at that time, then said nothing At all, not wanting a debate and you Allowed to refute me for complaining, I salute you, a liar through and through, You, who left me to anonymity, Are tarred with literary infamy |