9.Map of Storms, Duncan McGibbon [free novel 24 .txt] 📗

Contents

1.Isoline 1:Words for A Creation : Plazer

2.Isobar: Three Breton Homages

Homage to Tristan Corbiere.

Homage to Max Jacob

Homage to Saint Pol-Roux

3.Isobar: Witnessed Earth.

Gesualdo at Gesu Nuovo.

Milarepa at Mapang

Ossuna at Salcedo

Sibelius at Japrvenpaa

Lakhsmi Bai and Virangani Jhalkari At Jhansi

4. Decibar: Achaens

The Death of Helen

Iphigenia

5. Isobar: A Map of Storms

Massebiel

The Oyster- Beds, Cancale

At Saint-Seine sur Vingeanne

At Semur en Auxois

6. Isobar: The Tendering

At Castle Fogarty

At Walditch

At Wells Next the Sea

At Walsingham

At Olney

7. Isobar: Tallow Testaments

Winter Prayer, Pantasaph

Earine’s Oak

A Devonshire House Idyll.

Home Park.

8. Isobar: The House on the Island.

The House on the Island.1- 9

9. Isoline 2: Sure Tremors

Sanctuary

10. Decibar: At The Heart of the Eye

A Treatise of Light 1-15

Music for Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast 1- 40

Isobar : Charred Voices

Music for Schools

The Raising

A Middlesborough Qincunx

The Museum in the Snow

Revisiting

11. Isobar: Working Back

In the Avici Hells

Adam’s Prayer

Aisling’s Dolls

Working Back

12. Centobar: Pastoral Landscapes after a Storm.

On The Ox’s Back

The White Crane

13. Isoline 3: Irreplaceable Stem

Lines Written after Stendhal

14. Isobar: Taken as Read

Counterfeit

Legend

On the District Line

15. Isobar: Against the Martyrs

Against the Martyrs 1-8

16.Isobar : Movie

Transcript 1-6

Stills 1-3

17. Vigintibar: Closedown

Nunc Dimittis

Closedown


Isoline 1:

Words for a Creation


Plazer

David, why not Chris and I and Hugh,
be thrilled and breeze-bent navigators,
across all seas, the season’s regulators,
weather bosses of all before our view?

We need a good sorcerer to grant us
our women too, Jude, Katie and Clare
Elizabeth and Leona, should we dare,
to get aboard a barge that’s amorous,

then we could talk about, well...love.
That might get the girls to listen.
How happy just to sail and rove

at last, but happier to let love glisten,
and in loving, let loose the dove,
that, for once, the Thames will christen.


Isobar

Three Breton Homages


1.Homage To Tristan Corbière.

In the shape of a boat,
wooden walls worship Him;
Our Lord, the fisherman,
who matured in the pith
of the apple tree's nave.
You were His gall, a sorb
outside the wrinkled bark.
A sponge of bitter words
put to the mouth of the
dead one, its rank moisture
seething from resigned mud.
Helplessly, He swirled it
foul, round a timber tongue.
A pained, matronal smile
splits the face of Saint Anne,
mother of motherhood,
dug out from the dark that
fermented amber light.

Words burn at the brogue mouth
of this slow beacon - land.
Candles mourn tallow saints.
Pale flames mirrored,
in gold reliquaries
burn for a creation,
or are snuffed in slow draughts.
Sparrows nest in coppice arks,
under a leaden sky.
A yawl bobs on the Rance
among the masts of yachts,
a basket in the reeds.
Sponges breathe the dry air.
Bread-crumb pale, or blood-red,
they suckle coastal stones.
A low mass at dawn and
witnessed on the shore by
the fishing-boats returned
and He has quenched
the dust in our words:
your thirst, forgetting,
my thirst, remembering:
both slaked in His Word.


2.Homage To Max Jacob

Sightseers, we cross the river.
Yet, here, we find
no memory, deprived of light
by your whitened page;

but your roses were red
that surged in the breeze.

For we are not
the crew of Ulysses.
Instead we are enthralled
by siren windsurf-girls
set to capsize in brochured seas.

On shore-bound graves,
white roses tremble.

Your red-lipped
acrobats whose cold
tightroped glances,
left you bereft,
have kept their lissom balances,
white legs misted under feather tulle.

Now, where you played among brats home from school,
we come to pick sunlight from the stories of your city.

Peevishly, our children follow.
Toy horses nuzzle my daughters lips.
They amble
where my son lets loose
the race
of plastic beasts he musters.

Yet in the bright market where traders laze,
white lilies of the valley lie bound in bundles.

You were not there to meet us,
where your foster-faith assembles.
It is you we follow over Jordan,
that floods in ash-muddied streams,
while an empty train lumbers
with tearful windows to Drancy.
You are the heresiarch of love, yet
we have the comfort of your dreams no more.

White rose, red rose, it is not as it seems.
Both draw song-books of the dead into their scope.

You are the great
baboon of hope,
whose empty cage
is watched by a tearful child
who gave his last bread for you
to come out with your terrible lope.


3. Homage To St. Pol Roux

Blood smudges my son's knee,
cut on a shoreline rock.

Dry milk from my daughter's
empty bottle smears her cheek.

My children are hungry.
I pretend we can eat the land.

As a chord of blazed wheat,
with bees, tipsy with energy,

that let each flaxen mouthful spill over us
and onto the trumpeting flowers.

Already past, coeval-browned,
we walk below the Breton sun.

A child in both hands,
I hear the bell of rusted prayer

faith still summons me to.
We are as passive

as the blue convolvulus:
like pupils blinking through the day.

Sheep munch casually
at the thin grass, like tourists

among ancient stones.
Yet whom did the flowers' forbears see?

This place was once the hour-garden
of a poet’s slaughter.

The sun shone then as now
over drunken Stormtroopers

who held smoking machine-guns
and shone on a white-haired, old dreamer

stretched on the ground
by the home he defended,

vivid with a youth of blood,
while his daughter looked on,

in the horror of wet time,
drying into local piety;

dreamers, we still defend the rights
of this place, on a walk before breakfast.

I can take my children home,
while blood of the murdered,

and the milk of his music
dry in his silent grave.


Isobar

Witnessed Earth


Gesualdo At Gesu' Nuovo
Naples; 1611.Good
Friday Nocturnes.

Maria's eyes harden and I am left
mortal, betrayed by deathless memory.
My lackey's listen, until shadows lift
while those I love, ponder my butchery.

Left alone to drink an acid sorrow
which hastens untimely rheums, not death,
I am patterned only in tomorrow
sounding the diapason of my debt.

Sorrow's double damask was rent to tassels.
Love's larcenists, they clasped fear at my steps.
Lord grant me the stupor of my vassals;
my royalty torn apart by its adepts.

Tasselled, my stone sweats blood within.
Caraffa leaps for my throat.
He grips me with guilt, choaks me with sin.
On beauty's dead pelt he cracks his red joke.

Within, my discordant voices whine.
They sing out of sour notoriety.
I am beaten down, a shriven vine,
The saved are loud with felicity.

Mock, I pray you. Banish my iniquity.
Staves of vengeance are made my relicts.
Guilt is an insecure tonality.
Each day its scales descant new edicts.

Iniquity lures her last joy to my sense
My wife lies hidden at my accord.
They drank shallow here and I sent them hence
that their wishes should sound as voiceless chords

Senseless, my keys tell where they hide.
Yet I cling on you, not mine, yet lost. Before
I flensed you clean of treachery my brides,
my false note plucked you still. Maria...Leonore...


Milarepa At Lake Mapang
I yield to them, my lordly teachers,
I ask that they bring peace to seekers.
Look at this man, such idleness:
Yet see within, much restlessnes
If, on endless uncreated sites,
in pure elation, I build heights,
have I the time to build a home?

Since in reality's twilight zone,
I cut loose pain's feral thongs,
I have no time to plough furlongs.

Since at the gate of high wholeness
I wrestle with devils of selfishness
what time have I to strike an enemy?

If out of reach from earth's ambiguity
I crave a beatific wedding-night
what time have I for carnal sight?

If in the ruling of my body,
I raise up widsom as my baby,
have I the time to take in kids?

Since under joy-shaped, human lids
I store priceless wisdom and the real
what time have I to save for a meal?

Since on the scarps of endless truth.
I rear the wild horse of self-reproof
what time have I to tend poor sheep?

If out of the flesh and bone heap
I mould the sacred reliquary,
Have I the time for holy imagery?

If on the peak of my triple heart
I kindle the ghee-flame to impart

chaste light, have I the time to offer fire?

Since, in the shrine of joy's changeless mire
I bring ceaseless offering to the icon of calm mind.
I have no time for prayer of formal kind.

If on the page of distilled intellect
I trace letters desire would reject,
I have no time for holy pictures.

Since in the brain-bowl that the world perjures
I crush the opium of passion's clutter,
have I the time to churn my butter?

Since in the close retreat that seeks good ends,
I welcome thirsting ghosts and gods and titans as my friends
animals and men and all inhabitants of hell.

What time havae I to welcome relatives as well?
If, with old guides and teachers, I take on the poundage
of their thoughts I have no time for toiling age.

If in the mountain hut's isolation.
I achieve my goal which is illumination,
what time