The Going

The first part is written in syllabics, the syllable count is obvious. After writing the previous post, "On the Shelf," I reread Daniel Farson's enjoyable but salutary "Soho in the Fifties" - so much booze, so much human wreckage! Muriel Belcher's Colony Room plays a large part and Francis Bacon and the photographer John Deakin were practically fixtures. Both died lamentable deaths - Bacon with his millions, Deakin penniless. There is a sly nod to the fearsome Muriel in the third stanza of the first part.

   Long ago in the 1970s I was a frequent visitor to the low drinking pub the Fifth Hants Volunteer Arms (now a more up market affair, looking at the web) in Portsmouth. Folk would gather to watch "Kojak" on the television shelved above the bar. The poem is a portrait of one particular drinker who probably drank himself to death many years ago. I wrote it sometime in 1973-6 and posted it here on 6 December 2013.

---------------

i.
Hid behind booze-stink, screaming
Chatter, smoke as dense
As a Thames night-mist;
Sunk in the outraged back stabs,
Tears that the betrayed
Had betrayed even
Whilst being betrayed; blanked by
Stuporous drunks, glazed
On the bar stools, lies
The goal which lights the going.

Bacon, soused and gay-boy thumped,
Extruding human
Faces, sought the facts
Of sorrow, flesh’s trapment
In world’s vehemence:
But contortion’s not
Meaning, not art; proportion’s
Truth and an awed gaze
At what is, must find
The goal which lights the going.

Such shrivelled ends: Deakin’s death
On a hired bed, art
Pimped for drinks and smokes –
The world belched and forgot him.
What’s prior remains:
The glass before drink,
The cigarette pack unfilled –
The glass fresh, card clean:
Somehow implete, is
The goal which lights the going.

ii.
The goal which lights the going
Throws a shadow on the ground,
And who would go straightforwardly
Instead goes round and round.

The finding’s in the losing,
Sing the harlots and the clowns,
You pays your whack for something back,
There’s ups and then there’s downs.

But how then to see clearly,
Seeking peace, if peace there be,
Humming – does it? – among the leaves,
Or drifting on the sea?

The sage who rises early,
Crooning mantras to the sun,
Convinced he pleases all the gods,
Might find he’s pleasing none.

Those whores and jobbing jokesters,
Cluttered in their two-time lives,
Know best to question then to hush,
Paying the All its tithes.

====================
© June 2023

On the Shelf

Having met Maria who could forget her? It still seems extraordinary to me that she left this mortal coil so soon and so long ago. Mind you, it also seems astonishing that the Gay Hussar restaurant and the Colony Room drinking den (often known as Muriel's - she owned it) are no more. What is there left of Soho? I worked with Maria at the Poetry Society's old headquarters in Earls Court Square in the 1980s. We stayed friends when she moved to "Time Out" magazine; she put much reviewing work my way: most welcome! She was a Welsh beauty from Cardiff (I think) and a lapsed (very) Catholic; this occasioned  the reference to Our Lady of Lourdes in the fifth stanza.

   I wrote separately the little lyric, "Fine is the bloom..." and thought it might work interleaved between the stanzas of "On the Shelf."  The two tankas are self-explanatory.

   A much earlier poem about a more commonplace parting of ways, written circa 1973-6, is "Parting Ways," posted on 23 July 2013 and linked here.

----------------

In Remembrance Maria Lexton, d. 2004

   “I’m on the shelf,” she said:
How so? A “nature’s beauty,” bold and sleek,
With looks and shape to turn men’s gaze unforced:
Welsh-lilted, forty, with a canny head,
   Her world the London arts bazaar
Of high-strung narcissists, half-noused, half-freak –
Writers and ad-men, journos, paunched and sauced
By well-wined lunches at the Gay Hussar –
   Surely she was at her peak?

   Fine is the bloom and sweet the scent,
   But still the flower falls,

   Able to hold her drink,
Her cigarettes to hand, that fatal flaw,
But shunned by wives distrustful of their men,
(For one had delved, his name masked by a blink,
   Who now paid lushly for his child’s
Ménage); ill-lucked, drawn fatefully to raw
Abusive couplings, louche, her woman’s yen
To settle was upturned by door-slammed wilds,
   Love left trashed like trampled straw.

   For hidden in its flare and curl
   There’s a worm which crawls:

   And so I played my part.
A paddler in that 1980s pool
Of “Time Out” parties, Chelsea Arts Club ball
And Muriel’s (that hell!); tricked-up, chic-smart,
   I’d sire her through an evening’s routs
Then later in her flat we’d play by rule
Of drinks and talk before a taxi call
To take me to my digs: I had no doubts
   Wish and blood should keep their cool.

   Who would not ache to brush that bloom
   Against his longing cheek?

   For both knew that she lived
In torsions like to wreck the Prufrock-type:
Cheek kisses, hugs, were limits; twilight lands
Lay hid beyond where chancers, brags, were sieved
   And wounds and heart-grief shrank the soul.
At last, revulsed by London’s bonhomme hype,
I upsticked west to Cornwall’s winds and sands:
Years passed, then news came like an evil dole,
   Death had seized her with a finalled swipe.

   Though soon, so soon, its petalled flesh
   Is mottled with a streak:

   It seemed absurdity
Her warm if hazard beauty should be gone:
But twenty years have hightailed: we now left
Quail in the chill of death’s immensity:
   In evening thoughts I sometimes grasp
Some glimpse of purpose in the path we’re on;
Will it one day, like a Madonna in a cleft,
Reveal that smile, that lilt, her friendly clasp,
   Crowned with hay-scent hair which shone?

   Now mulched in earth that flower lies,
   The wind blowing round,

   And what was tough though fragrant-soft
   Sleeps without sound.

-------------

Tanka for Maria

Known for her shoe hoard
She’d helplessly groan, “I need
New shoes.” “No mother,”
Came her daughter’s tart rebuke,
“You don’t need, you want new shoes!”

Double Tanka for Maria

Came a night she wore
A tight open-sided dress
Which glimpsed her breast curves,
Her flanks honey-coloured, firm.
Entering the Groucho’s bar,

Men’s eyes homed like bees
To nectar (and women’s too
More circumspectly).
I was by her side all night:
My, my, those envious looks!

====================
Everything © June 2023