13. At Puyloubier, Duncan McGibbon [novel24 txt] 📗

At Puyloubier.

1.
At noon, outside, the centred shadows
of cypress trees on the sun-singed lawn,
a set of draughts drawn up before the game
under the mastering Augustan sky:
the garden was pregnant with light bees.
Hoverflies, grasshoppers and scorpions
ruled sectors of the irrigation rills,
in the yard of our Maas of golden stone.
Geckos, those silent comedians,
feigned death behind the window shutters,
while lizards flicked their instant flight
across the rose-beds' unmown, brittle scrub.
Crickets spat from brown blade to grass blade.
The dessicated leaves of past autumns;
nettle tree, fig, sweet chestnut, olive
and vine had been rustled up into ghosts
by the South wind up from Trets, as if they
had a purpose of their own.The rhythm
of cicadas was insistent, urgent.
They burred the sunlight with a throat of rich,
instinctual energy.The iron church bell
sounded the centuries, visible in
its hundred-year, barred belfry, allowing
the Mistral to blow through its lattice cage.
It chimed the hour twice, once for those in
the mountain, or the hills, once for the town ;
a sound for arriving and departing
with the hour. Like the bell and cicadas ;
we have not said the final word. All day,
you appeared and disappeared before me,
in this garden crowded with unknown trees.

Now, the scent of shrub tobacco and roses
seethes in the heavy air. You lie alone
and asleep, brooding, like the strange locked room
in this house we have rented. I turn off
piano music on France Trois to go out
into the still night and look at the mountain,
which frames the Maas and the cypresses,
wondering how it came to remain
when so much has worn to oblivion.
People once made gods of mountains like these,
as if we had a need to make a shelf
on which to store the verb "to be" for use.
Yet a tectonic skew of a few angles
could have shifted these rocks away,
before Hercules, a local, was even fable.
The whole planet slowly turns, blanketed
so insecurely, under poised atmospheres.
It , too, can have no 'is' to call its own.
A few years ago, a sudden fire
destroyed the maquis on the mountain,
melting brush to the living rock,
losing the landscape of Cezanne and Pagnol
for ever. Our fragile skin of plants
and living creatures could be scorched to ash
and no change take place in the tetany
of silences and the frigid zones of space.
A few light years out and the solar system
would have burnt to nothing, save a cold star,
before there could be a D.N.A.;
a billion years further no cosmos, too.
The universe could have rotted to nothing
in its huge, inconceivable age
and everything in nature ceased to be
unless, elswhere, there is being beyond.
Something that sustains our living strength.


2.
Aren't our lives, in turn, as aimless
as these leaves? This eerie, burning wind
that swirls the generations of dross
as if they were dealers on the floor
of an exchange, pretending will-power,
yet only a part with the shaping trend.
Insistently, the cooler air gusts in
to increase the leaves' futility,
for they seem so urgent.They do not have
the casualness of human work,or play.
Though we risk joining the futile urgency,
the purposelessness of making saves us.
My verse will never be a craft, never
the Daedalus mask ; always the sweat
of uncunning pain, seeping through greasepaint
and suburban pallor. An addiction
to creativity seems always
elsewhere from the world; loyal to the moment,
yet disloyal to the hour, a deceitful
fidelity . My trite leaf-dance of words
will never move within the sway of this
retarding sphere. A career in dreaming
has only one life to live and will not waste
its efforts with music merely visible,
when it can be still with the pure ecstasy
of His elsewhere, that endless actuality.
Here I am alone with the balance
of the days; my career, my family,
my friends, my relaxation, weighed against
this patter of syllabic discourse.Who can say
it is not a denial of the real ?
Who can say it is not a self-deception,
the great ego-defence against
the ruin of failure, broken relationships
and simple, sad incompetence ?
Why do I know to write is to do good.
There is no true creation except outside time.
Only existence itself can create it
and what has been created can be imitated
which sustains the moral right to imagine.
That is why poets have an affair with stars
in the main sequence ; to make light from
burning unstable elements .They have no now.
Their past alone is visible at unknown futurity
and later at nightfall, we will be under Orion,
which splits the dark, a gorge in the darkness.
It upturns minds in its casual hugeness.
The sky is a child's unsure geometry,
thrown into luminous reverse relief.
Each uncertain point, a scattered fire,
through which flows a million silent flares.
It is not the cross we are used to,
no safe piece of Anglican plate,
but an awesome form, scarring the sky.
We have so few words not of our making
and yet we have no words for love except
those He gave us, when His beloved came
down this road and passed on to oblivion.
The love of that man is not some summary
of ourselves, projected onto old stones,
or onto a therapist's furry toy.
An ecstasy so distant cannot be
brought to touch us at any price, even death.


3.

Eyes meant to love do not not see their love
in this night of moths and dizzying flies.
The understanding intellect is blind
to its own sight ; the seen not the seer.
I walk in the terraces, holding love
to be as incomprehensible
as the locked room, full of books and pictures.
I wonder if my love will survive
our hard, mutual sincerity.
Must I , holding your pliant, resisting
shoulders, kissing those feathery lips,
embrace you, wanting to feel everywhere,
knowing it hurts to touch as you have
become insubstantial, knowing I
have turned back in my outward journey from
Cocteau’s bomb-site hell to answer the cry
that is the last of love at the brink of its re-birth?
It 's easy to make a knowledge of love.
Living and not losing, gives the lie to sex.
Experience outwits youth; no heart stays sharp
which is why it has youth to protect it
and is let down by the calculating
who have learned their passion.
We are a knowing people, clumsily
twisting the natural into duplicity
with the trite.Sexual pleasure
always seeks itself, which is why we are
made in His image, to love each other
in ourselves and Him in us, conceived
and present. Or are we doomed lovers
in the staged Verona of our legacy,
Romeos and Juliets, each rising
tired from the tomb of contractual
exhaustion? The charnel-house at dawn.
Enter the lover to find her cold.
While later she wakes to find him snoring
in a lethargy.She sleeps.He rises.
She sleeps.You lie. I pace, wishing to rise,
fateless, unburdened, without progeny,
without the weight of age, like the star shape,
freedom cuts, pure and lactic, through
the friable night, like cluttered knowledge
and it seems so high, so abstractly cold,
because our world prefers to leave it
unrehearsed. Jesus takes on death because
it is the only way to fall into
that crevice and live in God's light.
Our words cannot conjure
perfection before a death;
no rising into life before we die.
We have spent our hours living
and rising , unknown in him,
without a thought of dying.Yet he hangs
here, dying a death so strong, it makes
our suffering a firefly parsec.
Who would not smell these musk-dank roses?
Who would not thrill to this place,
drunk with its dusky wines, its sinuous charm?
It lights us with its own light.That great sign
above us, pouring an uncreated
fire into its fissure of flames. My answer
to you dear one, as the Saxons would have it
leof is that our very rows have
their centre in our hearts, a Lord contest.


4.

We have woken in a world where women
cannot live, as their instincts counsel them.
Those beautiful faces gone with Him
into nothingness, with nothing left
to wear but treasured white, no longer
worn for love . Women are no longer
in this world . They have followed the children
into the genetic mountain where the
travestied androids of D'Annunzio,
Wilde, Moreau, Flaubert and Debussy thrive
and plot mission controls with androgyne hands.
The voices of children lessen on
the playing fields, while priests and poets
kill themselves in the restless silence.
What place is there for Christ
in a world that cannot find room for fools
that sees humility as an ineptness ?
To be disinterested is an obsolete word,
to be purposeless, unspiritual.
Christianity seems a cliche,
because it was not forseen.
It was not intuited, not anticipated
in some gradual law.
Nothing struggled to be born
Like death itself it came from outside.
To deny its affirmation,
there can be no submission to
the reality of the moment,
as ecstasy is only real infor ever.
Maurice Blondel, a spirit of these places
who lies buried in this mountain
at LeTholonet with his confessor,
Dechamps, made a forgotten man
of himself in Aix, because of his
belief that no absolute could be found
in nature.There is no purchase on God,
just because we know of the creation.
We will find nothing of light
in these stars.He held that the stars
were enlarged on the horizon
because God wanted us to see the closeness
of these distant lights and the distance
of their neighbourhood; that yielding
of known desire to the unknown’
This is why these blurred stars hold such thrall
because together they sum up a
brokenness, a vulnerability
a capacity to be breached by nature,
yet not vile, but a weakness for wholeness.
This abyss of mysterious light
burns silent and pale, above my children
sleeping in their fairy-tale rooms
and you, the woman whom I love
who sleeps in silent anger
at my incompetent and unfirm will,
burn the purest flame that habit cannot end.


5.

An unheard music would be truer
said of death. It shows how far away we are
to death in living how close to life in dying.
How little the stratagems of delight
take it into their account and how
telling that they do not, we look
for an incomprehensible comfort.
with brain cells enough for a thousand years,
calculations and seed for a thousand,
thousand generations. I have made a law
out of this starry waste and used it
to justify a cowardice of faith, to judge Him
in my own Sanhedrin.of fear.

The cypress still rears massive,
behind the log pile. Sweet chestnut,
figs and cherries and the vines are huddled
in the dark. Floodlit car parks and
street lights glow from Trets,
to the haunting percussion of the cicadas.
The church bell clangs. Have we