What is there to say about forty-three years?
Flickering moments, peepshow flutter, here and gone
Memory mountain, solid bulwark, built of love and life
Breadth of a wide field, morning-jewelled with tears
Cobweb of crowsfeet patching what’s worn and torn
The patina of give-and-take beneath the labels, husband, wife
One word’s enough for jokes: quarrels run out of noise.
I let you rant: you leave me to my fears
We see the belly’s sag beneath the poise
Muscle grown thin and grey that once was strong,
Your footstep slow on the stairs.
On the right of the picture, St. Zenobius, flanked by his holy followers, prays over the blood-spattered body of a child. Above the child, his mother’s mouth is open in a scream, soundless in the quiet spaces of the gallery. Behind her, a group of women, faces showing sympathy, concern, or greedy interest: none of them are screaming.
I’ve walked past that picture, many times, averting my face. It’s small and easy to pass by. But today, a group of men are gathered round it, talking about perspective, converging lines, vanishing points, techniques for reconstructing those long ago buildings and the complex thought behind the artist’s work, the narrow street widened to give the drama space, one point of view superimposed upon another, drapery painted in curves for the eye to follow, black and red blotting out hope-filled sky-blue.
I can only see how the mother’s scream, like a tornado lifts the folds of her veil, blows them out behind her how the whole of that wide space is not big enough to contain her grief, how her out-stretched hands may not even lift the little corpse, her limbs caught in tragedy’s converging lines: hope, unbelief, denial diminishing all the way to vanishing point. She knows there are no miracles. Only a chaotic jumble of buildings under a cruel sky.
Soul sister, is your grief easier to bear framed in the caught moment of the picture? The way my poem holds an afternoon’s small sadness.
Infant leaf, fallen from the sky-filled branches of the horse chestnut tree lies on my hand, newly dead; veins, sun-shadowed, perfect, slowly lose focus, soften into limp shadows of lost hope.
Wind swirls my coat tails, blows
breath into my lungs
takes me swooping above the
sea of tossing branches.
Houses, churches, lampposts shiver
under the weight of its elation.
I want to balance on the energy
of this moment
tethered to earth only
by the tug of a single string
to imagine that there is no such thing
as a wind of change.
It’s tiring stamping across giant acres an axe across his shoulder fighting off tiny heroes hiding and re-hiding the egg that contains his heart.
In the evenings the giant relaxes with embroidery. Glasses the size of two great tractor wheels perched on his church-steeple nose, with finger and thumb he plucks another tablecloth from the pile and, frowning in the candle-light, tries to force the hawser through the tricksy eye of his needle, fashioned from the spear of a long-gone knight.
Spread around him, previous attempts, scrunched with ragged cross-stich and stippled with brown splashes of giant blood.
Turn off your zoom screen. Especially self view. It does not matter if your face is not in frame or if the tip of your nose shines in the light.
Snoop. Skulk. Lurk and look.
Be the thing you see: the bursting tip of the blackthorn branch, the greasy button on the cash till in the corner store. Hang in the wail of ambulance and seagull, the smells of wild garlic and kebab wrapper.
Look through the magic ring that peels away all illusions of love, fear and magic.
Wrap the illusions in tissue paper for later use.
With your invisible gaze, slip past defences, manipulate and order how you want.
Choose the path that opens up before you.
Slip down its twists and turns.
Lie in wait
When you are ready,
Pounce.
And this you can see is the bolt. We can slide it Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers: They call it easing the spring.
Henry Read, Naming of Parts
Five minutes after the sun has touched the grass,
it turns to wet emeralds
except where frost leaves her grey shadows in the lea of the picnic bench.
Out the back door with my shopping bag I notice
among the wild garlic and primroses that swarm
across the gravel driveway, neon invaders,
the geranium pots I left out by mistake, their soft leaves
scorched away to nothing by the cold,
hanging limp, like gamekeepers’ prey hung from a gibbet,
as if to teach the lesson of the turning year:
The purpose of this is to open the breech
between the two realities of spring: the perfect postcard view
across the river, the green in April sunshine,
striped with the morning shadows of the trees,
the early morning city street, blossom-clad, bare of cars;
and the revving of the motorbike behind me,
petrol fumes burning off the morning chill,
calling out ‘fast fast fast, fast food fast clothes fast travel,
My father, too, was caught in an army training room between
the illusory perfect spring and the invisible reality of war,
flipping between one and the other
we can slide it rapidly backwards and forwards
sunlight on safe suburban plants, Forsythia, Japonica, almond:
a wedding ring golden on a blackened hand outflung,
how can these two sights exist on the same eyeballs?
Between us, my father and me, we span
a century, two big wars and countless small,
and yet we’ve lived our lifetimes of spring gardens,
where we know frost shadows vanish
and the only violence, as the sun gains warmth
are the tiny everyday invasions at our feet where
the early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers
And I’m thinking of those young boys
in military classrooms that look out over
their own back gardens
chafing under the military jargon
longing to be out there, their uniforms
crowding the nightclubs thronging the stations
in hiking gear, with rucksack and sleeping bag
lining up for glory at the bus stop
fingering the bolts of their army-issue rifles.
They call it easing the spring.
From a Napowrimo prompt to riff on a quatrain from a favourite poem.
Walking the Cam river 