Meaning

Dismas (to be precise St Dismas) is the good thief upon the cross to whom the Lord said, "Amen, I say to thee, this day thou shalt be with me in paradise." (Luke 23: 43.)

   I thought this poem had a resemblance to one of my earlier poems, "Spring and Meaning," (posted on 21 November 2016) but on examination it doesn't. Here's a link anyway.

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“I’ve never been troubled with dyspepsia,” Gerald drawled untruthfully. Professor Clun looked at him sharply. “No?” he said, “I’m inclined in general to regard it as the inevitable malady of any serious or lengthy application to study.” (Angus Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes)

He sits in strife, the literary man,
Welted with sins, with squabbles, with amours,
His desk a battle with a half-felt plan
To seize tracts of meaning with press-ganged words;
His helps to craft, his pills and good luck paws,
Jostle his laptop with its tenth-thought drafts;
Despondent in wrestle, his bowels in curds,
His taut back sears him like infected grafts.

But having mastered, his agent’s plaudits won,
Why the self-seething in a whisky glass?
His words, breathless at the market’s starting gun,
Shun knowledge that skilled scribbling’s a fake reward
Except it glow with beauty of the vase
Flower-aflame in spring, self-bodying
Being’s fact and by its otherness awed;
Piecework redeemed by art, a shouldering.

Adequacy to truth, that’s to be saved;
So Yeats was bludgeoned by his whiplash nerves,
And Conrad jack-knifed whilst his headaches raved.
And Darwin, icon-slayer though a drudge,
Spatchcocked landlub tortoise, worms in turves,
And wrenched by painings, tempted since his youth,
Laid bare with the forensics of a judge
The beauty and efficiency of truth.

All art, all men, like Dismas on the cross,
Pinioned in pain and deadweight of their faults,
Turn gasping to the emblem of their loss
Craving its standfast meaning which alone
Balms treacheries and self-hate’s bitter salts,
Those lifelong, squalid hours upon the tree:
Each poem or mind-work on which truth has blown,
Did it but know, cries, “Lord, remember me.”

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© April 2016

The End is Nigh

The stanzas are linked by the common rhyme in each line six. For the use of the legal term "tort" in the second stanza I appeal to Spenser: "For no wild beasts should do them any torte."

   The final stanza recalls an incident when as a child I unwarily stood on a weed-covered step and the next moment found myself waist deep in the River Thames. Indeed, my father came running to yank me out, and indeed he was dead at an early age a mere ten years later of a heart attack.

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As carping seagulls with a scythe of wings
Will swoop and dodge above some lusted scrap,
So I life-long made turn and flung my cap
At detoured baubles, glib that time’s fresh springs
Would always well with drop-flash chance like spray,
So that at choice I’d know myself and be
That man, that gift, I’d always longed one day.

But now in age the punch-struck fighter in
The ring has foul-guessed himself to the ropes;
Pummelled to ribs he knows his toe-danced tropes
Are helpless, the Reaper thrashing chin to chin;
Fullness of self cannot be seized or thought,
Drained, there’s no future like the spread-armed tree,
There’s only death, an unknown hence, for tort.

Truly, the end is nigh. Those forceful young,
Bustling in splendour of diploma’d craft,
Doctor, optician, professional-laughed,
Treat age with child-talk brusqueness of the tongue,
Shied by its sour-whiff flesh and slow-tread mind;
For them, life’s a dance floor, a strobe light spree:
One day they’ll find what all who die must find.

Slipping, a child sinks, river-drenched, and screams;
Chiding, my father strides and drags me out,
But ten years gone, he sudden died, my shout
Of loss killed self and now I drench in dreams.
Waist-deep in sorrow, let my end be mild;
Raging and blaming forced my loves to flee;
At death’s last lodging be it said I smiled.

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© March 2016

A Farewell

Uncle Giles (final stanza) is the lifelong ne'er do well in Anthony Powell's 'A Dance to the Music of Time,'  living in boarding houses and low cost hotels.

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The heart is perverse above all things, and unsearchable, who can know it?
(Jeremias xvii, 9)

That child you loved and lost is gone; let go!
A woman grown and fifteen years
Adrift, her teen-formed status quo,
Life-fashioned in my lack, if met would be
Inscrutable, like runes without a key;
More so, for loss-hurt with an ice-crabbed soul
Through years of exile, craving signs,
I soured like late-frost vines
And loves and friendships with a glare made foul,
And now in age, hugging my broken spears,
I creep a bankrupt, rich in tears.

And should we meet, with pre-judged frowns, we’d find
That even hot-veined blood, gone crank,
No longer linked, that we, once kind,
Now, truth to tell, were dead, each prey to each;
For all that’s felt decays, this pith to teach,
That love’s icon is but a thing of straw,
Mere memory which frays to chaff,
Till lost in baffled wrath
There’s no recall of what she said or wore,
Only self-scorn that, lulled, I stooped and drank
And thus exposed a soft-flesh flank.

Well, folk but decades past knew all of loss,
Of childhood deaths and fever’s fire,
Or sent their children, still in gloss,
To trade or service come eleven years;
And so for me: that child may give me heirs
But I’d not want to hear she’s court and wed
As afterthought once all was done,
For families I shun –
Their close talk, cohort-cleave and common bread:
Like Uncle Giles in rooms and shab attire
I’ll bide my days and stack my pyre.

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© March 2016