7.Feasts of November, Duncan McGibbon [early reader chapter books .TXT] 📗

Feasts of November

Contents

1. Twelve Hours from a Secular Year


2. Feasts of November


3. Planctus


4. The Deploration.


5. At Collioure: Cantus Firmus for David


Twelve Hours From A Secular Year


Twelve Hours From A Secular Year
1. Epiphany
When I reached that date, its doorway was already broached
by a term of snowfall, boredom and unread books.
Elsewhere, I later read, newsmen and “grunts” were leaving
their Mekong bunkers to watch Forty Sevens
fire tracers into the Twelfth Night.
News waited for me in the high, angry heavens.
For Four Corps, at least, that night there was breath on their lips.
The past, intactile, even to Unesco gifts, was the Cimabue Christ
oil-scarred, so alone under skies of ice, in the urgency of new birth.
The past grew grey-skinned with a hue of lunar dust
and Surveyor Seven was only one of the old year’s
bright shots which eddied about.
In the Serengeti, miles were enclosed
to make a zoo of migrations.
The Longleat Lions basked in the thin sunlight,
watched by motorists’ wives in animal skins.
According to St James, the persecuted Elder,
I could, perhaps, have met at the church of Smyrna,
in Suberewhon, the old Canon Simeon Masefield,
plodding to the pulpit, his arm clutching for the light
to focus on Your perinatal Word.
Elsewhere it seems, the Coleman lantern burned minimum light.
For me it came from the alarm clock’s silent dial.
We had all reached the feast at the worst time
for leaving inadvertent offerings, Rhodesian Players’ Gold,
Haight-Ashbury joss sticks and my ointment
for staphyloccocus in the bathroom, foretelling fiascoes.
From Hué, a disc jockey might have cradled
his gifts over the still air. Grey figures on a censored screen.
Whatever the discs were, Bobby Gentry or Sandy Shaw
would have crackled, sounded the same
as my thirty threes or forty fives.
The age bellowed seismic havoc through Sicilian sirens.
In my Aunt’s Missal, the woman gathered up her child to run,
lighter, to the landfills.
While I poured out cornflakes and missed the bus to school.


2. Presentation.

Alone, the year-woman stayed in wastes
even Joseph Banks had no use for,
while the brute days feigned a pause in its pursuit.
I walked along the footpath to school
and listened to the others sing Down Ampney
while I waited outside assembly.
That morning, I had crossed the Chertsey Road where
a fellow-pupil’s dead hand lay under tarpaulin;
a Moped death, yet the body was deserted.
I had given up Maths and Latin. He had given up life.
I found the prayer to hydra in the Biology lab
too tedious to repeat to each of its heads.
Laws of pressure and the Bunsen burner
were too sure for the natural attention
of the soul to remember.
While on Hill D eight eight one North,
an eighteen year old boy
was the only prisoner reported taken.
The year was on its knees already,
but its fires had mauled Hobart.
In Nelson Road, St Edmund's of Sardis
had risen, renewed, in the village of Boyle and Suckling,
a mission from Vermont shrugged off
by the cavalier National Front.
Not for me the Reverend Sassoon's
eighty years and no tomorrow.

Whatever bloomed in bowls or crept by council snow
dumps was gone too soon to bother with.
The Second Offensive came in the glossy
dispatches of Time Magazine.
I tore out colour photos and painted flares,
and the night in the Art room at lunch time.
While on Fridays or at the Lamb and Flag
poets, academic or sober, clearly intoned
sequences of provincial decay or squeaked
of the High Psyche.
I took the District Line home to Richmond
and, from there, I usually walked; Canon
Simeon Eliot O.M., a hydra of poetry under pressure
from his dissociated heads.

3. Annunciation

The year left it then, to April’s windy Ides in their leporine madness
to whisper in the human child intended for us.
The Queen's mercy was not granted to convicts in Salisbury.
No-one thought of talking about it at the Current Affairs Society.
The year came back in the thunder of wings
from the breaker's yard and the parking lot.
While beasts withered from foot and mouth brought over
by lamb from the Apartheid Cape
and the Financial Times upset itself on the brink
of the dissolving gold pool.
On the screen, at Khe Sanh, came under steady fire
from an M Sixty, then silence. Then the soldiers
came running from the tents like schoolboys, then silence.
Reports said they heard a wailing like a woman's,
the sound, a word they all knew.
"Put that fucker away" rapped a lieutenant
if Michael Herr was right in Esquire.
"Put. That. Fucker. Away, "droned a sergeant.
Then came the orange flare of an M. Seventy Nine, then, silence
"Get some...man did you see that."
Chris was not in the same form as me that year,
but we met and talked in the Sixth Form hut.
He had been reading "The Interpretation of Dreams"
and I wanted to understand Frege, read him hurriedly
and passed on to Jenkins’ biography of Asquith
found it easier to read on the green lawn in Walton.
In the Year-Woman’s bones, the Word child grew,
and this was the feast the world again accepted.
God had planned a woman’s womb with a life beyond this place.
The school was built on fields the Twining family
had once owned. Sometimes it was good just to
stay out under the old trees which bordered
the fence, imagining lawns with Arcadian does
and the wives of tea-makers
in Home County visions, while Kenyan Asians
took the bus from Heathrow to Southhall
and Colonial lions came home to die.


4. Lent
What had I tasted I could renounce? I thought of the Thursday I sat
and watched announcers rasp satellite reports of a death
in Memphis. Why had it happened now, in the month
of the stubby H.B. pencil with its red paint flaked at the edges?
I had done no homework for two years and held a pen
only for slack obscurities in private diction. I scrawled
those thin sheets my father used for reports with dreams
that could not propagate the language of the tribe.
Why had Erymanthine Hobsbaum taken his oscillating biro
to the woman whose poems spoke of someone
who threatened children with a dark well?
"I came to hear a poem, not your hang ups.
What you need is a good lay."
Ruth Pitter’s eyes spoke a reserved frenzy. I muttered
something about beauty, mentioned Sebastian im Traum
and later wondered what I was defending, as the States rioted.
In St Margaret's of Pergamum where I was at Mass,
not the old wooden hall, another Canon, Father Merton
fumbled with the light switch.
"What am I gonna do?"Esquire’s report told me.
"But dig it. Am I gonna turn n'take them guns aroun’
on my own people. Shit. This war gets old."
shouted the black staff sergeant from Alabama

Norman Hidden launched
a competition in memory of King. I wrote
notes in pencil on the back of his notice
on the history of slavery and left it
with application forms from the Anti-university
of London and half-finished translations of Trakl.
beside my bed. Elsewhere Lyushins,
MiGs and Delphins strafed Onitsha, and Whitehall
gagged itself with the purity of its linen.
While dazed liberals were plucked
from the water cannon in Chicago.


5. Easter
Bonhoeffer quotes Huxley on shame;
he had an interest
in the care of shoes.
Shoelaces should be tied
with the ease that one can praise God.
and scuffed uppers
among the wrong people is a paradigm of guilt,
Behold the man. Put that fucker out!
At Nanterre students stuck up photographs
of plain-clothed policemen mingling with faculty members
and defended Cohn Bendit against the riot police.
Text books, desks and shoes were thrown
and the students won. 1,200 of them took over the large
lecture hall.
Two correspondents found an eight-week old corpse
in an American jeep at Languei.
Its skin was drawn
back, stiff as a kipper, its teeth bared.
They brought it
down to Graves Registration.
The helicopter blew off Augean flies
'Look, Jesus, he's got on our uniform'
'That ain't no
American, that's a fucking gook"
You take off your daily shoes.
"Paris? I dunno, son, why not? I mean
they ain't gonna hold them in Hanoi now
are they?”
I left footprints of the hours,
in the smart aisles of St Mary’s College, Thyatira


6. Corpus Christi

Esquire told of GIs who once supported
Robert Kennedy for his youth,
“He was er ..young.”
turning to vote for “Wallace, I guess.”

The sun unwinds a yellow thread across
the Richmond vineyard,
to shine on, past the workers, dead, in Sochaux
and Gilles Tautin, a schoolboy, dead, the day before at
Flins.
I wrote my A level answer on Andromaque,
thinking of the Sixth Form hut where its passion might be applied
and wrote of Othello in Jungian terms; Albedo and Nigredo smoothly
In the afternoon in Room Fifteen I think
I presented the same tropisms for Poetry Appreciation,
Hamburger's Trakl being the only model I had,
Holderlin being unreadable and Stravinsky composed
too much, both Chris and I wanted him to stop.
After the Sixth Form party, to which I returned late
from an interview at Warwick.
I crept up the stairs, each new creak
a betrayal to the parental watch.
In the art room at dinner time I would
scrape out pastel imitation of Arshile Gorky.
Aragon would not cast off the party
which had strapped him up.
and Herbert Read was dead
before he could decide he was a Situationist
and before I had read his first books.
And a voice on a voice unwedged the shouting,
the radio was a blackening, Stymphalian crow.
In a season where all had come alive in a flame,
Only the dead were being prayed for at Laodicea, St Francis de Sales,
while in the Music room, the only boy in the Music Appreciation Club.
I listened to the opus one hundred and eleven,
unaware of Long John Baldry, loping slowly
down to the Eel Pie Island Hotel.


7. Visitation
The city of the Year reaches its suburb
at St Theodore’s, Ephesus.
and in the Woman’s bones was the Word child,
with Ottaviani its lapsed vision.
The crows had
flown back to peck at burnt leaves in the dawn light.
The representatives of Prague’s
Hope; it’s hopeful and its hopeless
Spring were in conference at Cierna,
warning of reactionary forces,
while tanks maneuvred like bulls, on the borders.
Through the post came
invitations to meetings of Slant and the prospectus
of the Anti-University.
In Sheed and Ward's
offices in Maiden land and in the Caledonian Road,
they met
to talk of the May Day manifests, what I spoke of I cannot
remember.
While in Earls Court, Mc Beth and Booth
lamented the death of Peter, the cat.
At home I read about the crowds outside Apple.

The Beatles had almost taken over Twickenham studios.
In Dorking, my brother did not, did not, for once, buy