Truths

Here are links to three other ballads of mine: "The Lilies of the Valley" written in 1979 and posted here on 1 March 2012; "Mr Longley's Dream" written in 1980 and posted here on 9 May 2013; and "A Penzance Ballad" written in 2013 and posted here on 2 March 2015. 

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

Hist! It’s a night of oil-black cloud,
   And the wind it screeched like stoats,
The rain it dug my face with nails
   And streamed on my flapping coats.

The ways and alleys of Penzance town
   Were dark as a deep-shaft mine,
Aflash of an instant with a wind-shook lamp
   Then thick like a cloudy wine.

In a granite arch where echoes groaned
   And shadows boiled like broth,
I met a man with ice-hard eyes
   And a grin like the devil’s wrath.

He’s gaunt and fissured like a sea-soused log
   Thrown up on the grey sand beach,
He’s hung in black and hugs a text
   As if with truths to teach.

“I know a man,” says he, sneers he,
   “A lickspittle all his years,
“Battened a louse on dame and wife,
   “On child, and drank their tears.

“Oh, he strutted it, his hand to th’pump,
   “Squire, tenant and field hand in one,
“Staff to all, as fat meat on bread,
   “Or the corn-stirring heat of the sun.

“But he’s runt within, a lacklust cur,
   “Fawning, wet-chopped, plead-eyed,
“Clawing for petting, for morsels, for thanks,
   “And, short-changed, quick to chide.

“Like plague-hagged fleas he jumped his berths,
   “Mad-hurt by word or look,
“And gorged in the warmth of his new love’s shift
   “Forgot the loves he forsook.

“Now he’s old and rejected, crabbed by loss,
   “And shambles by day or night
“The cobbles and flags of Penzance town,
   “Damning others’ wrongs with his right.”

I snubbed that shadowed man’s hoarse words
   And shouldered on my way,
The rain it clattered in gutters and spouts
   And the gulls groaned in the spray.

Later, in thought, I ate my bit
   And, peevish, drank my draught:
Oh, what is that whisper in the wind-cold hall
   As if a demon laughed?

Then, climbing the stairs to rest, I passed
   A mirror and screamed to see,
Faint in the dark with his fissured face,
   That fatal man: it was me.

====================
© May 2016

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.

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

“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.”

====================
© 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.

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

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.

====================
© 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.

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

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.

====================
© March 2016

Lichened Pavements

This is trochaic apart from line 8. It seems often the case that a strand of thought in trochaics ends up naturally in an iambic line.

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

Lichened pavements in the winter sun,
Emerald-yellow, dewdrop bright,
Glow like gauze which the spiders spun,
Flashed by the sun’s cold morning light.

Orange-startling like a bloodshot eye,
Flinging shadow from its horizon’s poise,
Warmth exuding in the icy sky,
The sun’s silence is a sort of noise.

Finger-shadows stroke the ground,
Green-gleam lichen swells and spreads;
Kneeling, I studied each rift and mound,
Worlds in tiny on kerbs and treads:

Grass-stained sawdust with stems and fronds,
3-D bulk with mites a’run,
Forest-dense – all boughs and wands,
Flecked with grey, flame-red and dun.

Living, thickening, by years undaunt,
Sponge-piling pavements each season passed,
Glint with frost-melt, this lichen will flaunt,
Thriving still when my grave is grassed.

====================
© March 2016

The Old Man

The entire poem should have been written in February 2015 but flu intervened; by the time I had the energy to continue it was May and it seemed silly writing about deep winter in the burgeoning Spring. Therefore I waited to February 2016 to write the second part. Of course, the person writing and the theme had changed a bit since 2015; perhaps the different emphases can be felt in the second part.

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

A ghost in life is passing by
Ignored in presence like a sigh.
Drag-footed, dusty, freight with years,
Sag-skinned, fog-eyed, with clothes in smears,
I shambled pavements frosted grey
One February freezing day
As mothers with their bawling young
Raced buggies with their shopping hung,
Anxious to reach the warmth of home
And wipe those faces’ grime and rheum.
To those young women, task-befraught,
I was an eye-edge, old-clothed nought,
Of no concern to dashing, feeding,
Early playgroups, early reading;
Street clutter that as well might be
The bare trunk of a winter tree.
Of parenthood, the joys, the sorrow,
Have sidestepped me like last year’s morrow:
The very children, buggy-couched,
In blankets, hats and mittens pouched,
Dismissed me with a through-see eye
Like chub-faced satraps sweeping by.
Just one or two their self-love ceased,
Their mewling paused, their fat eyes creased,
Struck by my one substantial note,
A bulbous beard from lip to throat
Billowing white like old Saint Nick’s,
Which summoned up a few faint flicks
Of memory that recently,
So parents said, one such as I
Had slithered roofs and ice-hard drifts
To creep through rooms and bring forth gifts.

But on the instant, eye-light dulled
And Buddha-like uninterest nulled
The quick glance between them and I;
Their buggies sped past on the fly
As mothers rushed, and naught was left
But waning backs: it felt like theft.

Genealogy

This is a 'genealogy' of those parts of Western (and hence the world's most important) thought which seem crucial to me. There is no place for Marx (a minor dead-end derivative of Hegel) or Freud (a mere artist rather than a philosopher/enquirer) - and certainly none for post- and post-post-modernists. Incidentally, I too am a mere artist; I do not have a great opinion of the breed.

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

   A man is many-minded
And so the first philosopher:
   To start, in myths was blinded,
A butter-tongued récitateur.

   Democritus set atoms
A’flinging like the abacus,
   From this came self-hug patterns
Which spun themselves in knots to us.

   And Heraclitus, grim,
Proclaimed knee-deep in matter’s river
   That all was flux; for him
Life was a fugue upon the zither.

   Parmenides dismissed
Such airs convinced that nothing changed;
   What was was one, a cyst
Of being, unmotioned, unimpinged.

   Then Plato’s pandect thought
Put men in caves and Forms above;
   The sooth-eyed few, he taught,
Should the Republic’s herd betruth.

   But Aristotle knelt,
Stared starkly at the gist of things,
   Pondered why sweet herbs smelt
And why ground-running birds had wings.

   Elsewhere rough Moses marched
His tribes to swell in Nebo’s view;
   Milk, honey for the parched,
But also Law, thorn of the True.

   Christ brought to crux all this,
Stretched-armed seizer of times and place,
   Purified the world’s kiss,
Its what and why in His bruised face.

   Later, Aquinas wove
Tart Gospels and philosophy
   To show the struts of Love
Which pinned Creation’s jewel and sty.

   At length, Descartes’ “I am”
Proclaimed the individual,
   That thought machine whose frame
Was mind-geared through the pineal.

   And Newton turned the planets
And the dropped apple in his mind,
   Quantified all their habits
And mass to clockwork laws consigned.

   Came Hegel, dour like snow,
Convinced the world’s work had a goal,
   That man and thought must grow
To the self-knowing of world soul.

   Darwin exploded all;
His finches, flags of fecund chance,
   Self-grew through push and pull
Of parlous food and hot-flesh wants.

   So Nietzsche screamed that God
And man’s mere rational thought are dead,
   And Zarathustra trod
With Will on good and evil’s head.

   Then Einstein, placid-eyed,
Equation-led, made relative
   Space-time, and cosmos-wide
Linked each to all with light-speed’s weave.

   Heidegger rescued Being,
Enworlded and defined by death;
   Through truth-told self-descrying
Its thrown work is both wreath and sheaf.

   But Bohr in deep-root physics
Found quanta, waves, shape-shifting states;
   The probable had fidgets
And dodged when probed by lab-men’s lights.

   Last, Monod made summation
That man is thinking chemistry,
   A freak absurd mutation
Lacking all point or destiny.

   So, in a thrash of atoms
Torn by unchanging ruthless flux,
   Man wrestles in the fathoms
Seeking a handhold on the rocks.

   Among the dunes a cave,
Inside, a shelf with Cross and rose:
   What makes the world behave,
Blind force or Mind? The hermit chose.

====================
© February 2016