Thomastown

In the black yards of Thomastown, where the barber-shops and pot-scrub sellers open up, there the brine of long sea-days whitens all the window-panes. Down the end-on streets, the ships are bigger than the brick wall houses, huge towers in metal liveries.

The chimneys, the house-funnels, smoke and make a cloud on the rooftops. Lower than the high stratus, lower than the steamboat haze, the shilbottle reek falls in its occlusion as near the ground as air permits.

It falls like a fog upon the people, brazen, historic people, brought out of retirement or memory for us to revitalise in what now has made of us; more like a dream where interiors hold us in, familiar interiors which we could never describe in a waking word.

The director calls ‘Cut!’

Spatial

All the rooms in the world,
The spaces we occupy
Come to this.

Streets are quiet
And the frozen clouds of dawn
Cannot move.
Air resistance holds them.

The sun keeps on rising,
Throws highlights on the undersides.

The earth steams with tomorrow
As time’s momentous arrival
Reveals the instant we call now.

In the sea towns along our coast
Dawn is born in water.
Into its sleepless brightening, small craft
Push purposefully toward it,
As if silver fishes were themselves
Flakes of light,
Scales of the sun’s skin
Scattered below the wavelets
For our nets to harvest.

In the onshore lanes and alleyways
Behind fish-houses and yards
Where the hulls lie hulked,
Masts and rigs
Hatch the skyline in a mass of lines.
Halyards, hawsers and stanchions,
Posts, poles and wires
Fill the openings between sheds and walls.

In the sky, as the sun shines from the sea
Each becomes a haloed stroke.
Shadows cast themselves upwards
Into the retreating night,
Into the sky where the long clouds roll
Turned red, upon themselves,
Insubstantial in their passing
As volatile as the stars.

For every day has its distance,
And every hour, its space between:
Each second so far from the next
We cannot dare to cross.

We sail impossible ships
On an unimaginable ocean
To find what fortune has left there
For our meagre hands.

© BH2013

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Another instalment in the Initialising cycle. Begun with the title, which led me into my stock of fisher-town memories. Laced with time. As memories so often are.

As before, the cycle is here: http://writer.filmdesign.org.uk/bh/initialising.html

Nihilistic

There is nothing left you can rage against.

Rail against the night, the day,

Whatever blue the sky is

Above your heart that thunders:

A cloud gone beyond grey
To colour, filtered pigmentation,
Like blood beneath skin.

We choose not to see
How far light has come
To meet us here.

This is the fading moment,
When all the things that drift from heaven
Come to us as dust
Specks on the remaining wind
Grace, salvation, the blessings
Of some imagined God
Eroded by distance or time,
All but invisible in our eyes.

There is nothing left to bruise your anger on.

In the backlit halo
Of your disappointment,
In memory or misunderstanding,
The descending starshine
Shaved an atom’s width
Of paradise to lay it
Unrecognisable at your feet.

This is what years become,
What hope amounts to:
Falsehood projected on naked tomorrow,
Heaven, not as we divine it,
But heartless and indifferent.

There is nothing left when everything is put away,
When we remember the places built to conceal
The things we could not bear.

By our hands we understand,
With them, we sign and shape,
Frame distance in the grid of our fingers
And the labouring of our hearts.

Here and now, and not hereafter,
Time and space are structured.
Should we dare to act in them,
We reinvent tomorrow,
Reconstruct from so much dust
Paradise from its scattered pieces.

There is nothing else.

© BH 2013

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I heard Gillian Clarke, National Poet of Wales, on Desert Island Disks today. There was a brief comment on writing poems starting with a title. She does this apparently but it may not be entirely poetically normal.

This one of mine came that way. I have an alphabet of them in my Initialising cycle, started in 1996, where each line is a word in an acrostic sequence. I'm half way through having begun in 1996. Time I got it finished, eh?

Check the cycle here: http://writer.filmdesign.org.uk/bh/initialising.html This poem is here.

Interleaved

Where the shapes
Of land and sea
Lay down their arguments,
Moving boundaries
Throw stones in the deep,
Hollow caves into the earth.

Now In Retrospect