Underneath the Weeping Willow

Underneath the weeping willow
   Lover weep no more,
Only death and tax are certain,
   Love is either/or.

Yesterday’s hot shout of joy,
   Lips to lips engaged,
Will tomorrow shrink to scorn,
   Words become unpaged.

Heart-struck loss but burns the stubble,
   Lifestyle gurus hint,
Fallow land fresh shoots will throw,
   Sun on furrows glint.

Facebook page and LinkedIn profile,
   Speed dates and the like,
Soon make lovers, (or for poets,
   A workshop's "open mic").

Sexting, smutty mobile chats –
   Modern love is crass –
Capture hearts as yesteryear
   Flowers for the lass.

None are modest, none might blush,
   Words entwist like snakes,
Mirrored images we are,
   Then the mirror breaks.

Underneath the weeping willow
   Lover weep no more,
Deep as oceans, pure as air,
   Love is neither/nor.

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© September 2016

For those who prefer more contemporary images I can offer, for the penultimate stanza, the following:

None are modest, none might blush,
   Texted words are snakes,
Flat screen, one-shot stars we are,
   Then the flat screen breaks.

"There is Nothing More Louche..."

Kant and Sophocles speak for themselves. Bernard Häring was a moral theologian who advocated a personalist approach to moral situations which inevitably tended towards subjectivism and relativism (not to my taste, thank you); John Rawles' famous book 'A Theory of Justice' contained his equally famous thought experiment of the 'Veil of Ignorance.'

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There is nothing more louche than the passing of years
   – Ho! for the blood tests, the grudged faecal smears,
Then it’s drooping of flesh and thin rheumy leers,

The hospital beds, care home chairs, and then biers.

All that work-place role play and promotion in tiers
   – Ho! for the politics, the sales meeting jeers;
The marriages, maintenance and children’s hot fears
Collapsing in hatred and screeched primal sneers.

Might Kant in his wig chart a way through these meres?
   – Ho! for imperatives and love for one’s peers;
Or Häring or Rawles with two cautious cheers
Anaesthetize tragedy with a fondling of ears?

Oh, age-spare Sophocles like a mist which clears
   – Ho! for those cold-eyed ones, truth-shaken seers,
Saw grimly that men with their loves and their spears
Are flung from their feet and swept over time’s weirs.

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© August 2016

John Davidson and I

Famously, the poet John Davidson decamped to Penzance in the far west, depressed at his poverty and lack of success. On 23 March 1909 he went into the Star Inn (still there) on Market Jew Street and bought a final whisky and cigar. Then he walked off towards the promenade (the only Victorian prom in Cornwall) and was never seen alive again. Some months later his badly decomposed body was found in Mounts Bay by local fishermen.

   He is often thought of now as the epitome of a bad failed poet but he was no such thing. I was greatly delighted years ago to discover his ballads and lyrics which are the work of a very skilled writer. Perhaps his later epics are more of an acquired taste.

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So, John Davidson, it’s you and I,
   Failing, disabused and ill,
Grey, in tatters like the April sky,
   Rarely joyful, always chill.

Mounts Bay rackets with a full spring tide
   Leaping in the spray-wet air,
Beached, the grey-blanched stones are soaked then dried,
   Fissured by their salt-sharp wear.

Life and love in ballast drove me west,
   Here to wallow like a wreck,
Rather, money’s pinch and critics’ jest
   Forced you to this wind-struck beck:

Wayward tracks like ropes of circumstance
   Bundling travellers to their knees;
Cowed at meaning’s threshold, chance on chance,
   Each was robbed of all self-ease;

Worse for you, possessing self in power,
   Who like Nietzsche, tensed in thought,
Bloomed in corners like a thistle flower
   Starved of that acclaim you sought.

Matter, sole in being, tricked out man,
   Death, you thought, was thus release;
I, in quanta, mind, a theophan,
   Reason found, and not caprice.

Soul-sore, evening dark, you quit the “Star,”
   Whisky-vigoured for the prom,
Full tide set the thrashing waves to war,
   Screaming, they became your tomb.

Months were shriven; your body found horizoned,
   Sunk was given rest; that mesh
Strung of bones and cloth, gone melt and wizened,
   Mocked your creed with stinking flesh.

I, like you, in solitary end
   Longed to quiz the brute-faced waves;
Carnal trust, though bodies age and bend,
   Paused me, whilst the world behaves.

But at last, past death’s breath-frantic sweat,
   Being’s time-shed Present will
Knowledge proffer and its bliss abet,
   Stifling sorrow’s broil to nil.

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© June 2016

Murphy in His Rocking Chair

I wrote the first part and the first four couplets of the second part in May 2016; the last ten couplets were written in July 2017.

   Murphy is the eponymous hero of Samuel Beckett's early novel. Being typically Beckett it is funny and very strange. Murphy spends his days naked and strapped in a rocking chair trying to achieve a state of non-being.

   In a previous recent poem, "Genealogy," posted on 12 April 2021 (here) I had tried to encapsulate the thought of a range of thinkers (including Jesus Christ who is much more than that) in the Western tradition in quatrains. I wanted to try doing the same again but in couplets using alexandrines, and used Murphy on which to hang them.

   Decades ago in February 1980 I had written "Descartes at Dinner Darkly Said" which handled similar material but concentrated on Descartes, Berkeley, Russell and Spinoza. I posted it on 27 August 2012; it is linked here.

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I.

Ah, the sun’s heat sizzles the pane,
And I must seek my Phase again,
Strapped upon this frame:
Naked to the searing air,
How stiff my flesh, how loath my name,
   Said Murphy in his rocking chair.

Come death, its foul or glib mishap,
Embroiled, I’ll deliquesce to sap,
Puddling in these bands;
Dried by months which pass like prayer,
That dust will strew to cornered sands,
   Said Murphy in his rocking chair.

Swept out by landlords quick to let,
My dust will roll in the wind’s jet,
Settling like a frost,
Earth-inhumed with bone and hair
In gardens that the self be lost,
   Said Murphy in his rocking chair.

Then molecules once mine, or not,
Will mesh with others to a clot
Moulding beans or fruit;
Fed to one below the stair
He’ll spring an agon boy, though mute,
   Said Murphy in his rocking chair.

And grown, fast-roped within the arms
Of some new chair, refusing psalms,
Treadmill-like he’ll rock,
Laved in sweat, his glassy stare
Outdistancing the ticking clock,
   Said Murphy in his rocking chair.

II.

Heraclitus grabbed the water with his hand,
Untameable, it spilled in dancings to the sand.

Parmenides at goddess-call approached her cell,
He stumbled but surmised he neither stepped nor fell,

      Sang Murphy in his rocking chair.

Plato, despairing, slapped and shook a thousand chairs
Then found in heaven a Form which purified his prayers.

Aristotle crawled in dust around his yard,
He prodded ants and droppings, looking very hard,

      Sang Murphy in his rocking chair.

Moses, sun-parched in the desert, rasped the Law,
His tough-skinned tribes closed ranks, a bone for God to gnaw.

Christ, cross-hung, cauterized the world, and from His grave
Rose to insist that blood-and-hormone men behave,

      Sang Murphy in his rocking chair.

Descartes distilled the soul’s free airs and strained them through
A gland to oil the body’s crankshafts like a dew.

Newton grinding lenses, plotted planets’ tracks,
Equationed clockwork symmetry, though there were cracks,

      Sang Murphy in his rocking chair.

Darwin plucked a toe-spread lizard from a stone,
And complex man stood up and thought, but with a groan.

Einstein tugged space-time like a thick sheet of dough,
Made matter somersault and time go fast or slow,

      Sang Murphy in his rocking chair.

Bohr pierced the atom’s darkest ooze to draw a chart – 
The quanta dodged like three-card tricksters at a mart.

Monod watched his fusing chemicals collide,
He crooned for spirits though might just as well have cried,

      Sang Murphy in his rocking chair.

Truth is glimpsed in a half smile and broken bread,
It’s in the throb which binds, the sun’s at-gloaming red:

Petri dish and cursor woo the “how?” and gone,
But “why?” which wrings the desert men, goes ever on,

      Sang Murphy in his rocking chair.

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© May 2016 - July 2017

Song

It’s ancient loves that ache the hardest,
It’s long-lost loves that throb the most,
The young in self-woe quite the proudest
Soon perk and chase another boast.

But age which glims like some faint ghost
Only recalls those years the saddest
When time by some girl’s face engrossed
Was endless and its joy was loudest.

Now tears and sickness, all that’s rudest,
Batter your ebb sands like a coast,
Those loves bestrew your grave the widest
Which gapes to be their death-deep host.

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© May 2016

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. 

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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.

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© 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.

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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